Season 5 · Crawler
You entered the dungeon carrying a baseball bat and the unshakable belief that your batting average means something down here. Spoiler: the Mobs don't keep stats. But hey - it's a bat. I've seen worse.
Reward: You've received a Bronze Batter's Box.
You entered the dungeon in whatever you happened to be wearing at 2:23 in the morning. Bold. The camera adds ten pounds and takes away all of your dignity, so this should be fun for everyone.
Reward: You've received a Bronze Apparel Box.
You’re getting the hang of this. Don’t let it get to your head.
Reward: You’ve received a Bronze Adventurer Box!
You’ve received enough experience to gain a level.
Reward: Leveling up is your job. You don’t get rewards for doing your job.
You located a Tutorial Guild before something located you. Congratulations on completing the easiest quest you will ever be given. It only gets harder, dumber, and wetter from here.
Reward: Nothing. ... Okay fine a Bronze Adventurer Box but don't say I didn't give you anything.
Congratulations. You know how to open doors.
Reward: That sense of fulfillment you feel? That’s reward enough.
You’re a murderer! He probably had a family!
Reward: You can now gain experience. Get enough of it, and you might even go up a level.
Hopefully it won’t hit back!
Reward: It’s probably going to hit back.
Crawler, the correct answer was to run. Running is free. Running requires no equipment. Instead you chose percussion, and you applied an aluminum bat to a burning fuse at a range of about eighteen inches.
The explosion took your hearing, most of one sleeve, and whatever confidence you had left. The bat is fine. The bat is always fine. Somewhere a goblin is writing this down as a successful product demonstration.
Still, you're standing, you're upright, and the slow-motion replay of your ponytail catching fire is currently the third most-watched clip on this floor.
Reward: You've received a Silver Goblin Box!
You two barely survived a room of goblins on the first floor. The first floor. The goblins here are the dungeon's participation trophy, and one of them had you on your back with your own shield pressed against your throat while the other one wheezed through a punctured lung and called it a strategy.
And yet. The goblins respect you now. That is not nothing. Goblins bite each other over a dropped shoe. For them to stand there afterward, nodding at the pair of bleeding primates who nearly lost to them, means something. It means they've lowered their standards. But it means something.
Reward: You've received a Gold Goblin Box!
You punched a llama in the throat while it was mid-fireball and it went off like a road flare. I'd say that was a calculated risk, but I've seen your Int score, so let's call it a lucky guess and move on.
Reward: Bronze Adventurer Box!
You were handed a stick of good goblin dynamite. Good. Goblin. The goblins make it well. All you had to do was carry it to the gym and let go at the right moment. You picked the wrong moment. It went off in your hand, ten feet short of the toads, and took a bite out of you and a smaller bite out of your party member, who did nothing to deserve it except stand near you.
The toads heard it. Every one of them. They are now awake, alert, and grateful for the warning. A woman on your dead planet once sang that you should let your colors burst. She meant it emotionally.
She was not talking about your hand.
Reward: Nothing. You already got the explosion. That was the prize.
You sat down across from Mama Pollywog, a frog matriarch with a shop counter and a long memory, and began to haggle. Then you checked your inventory and discovered that the sum total of your tradeable worldly goods was methamphetamine. So you and your partner did the sensible thing. You wrapped a pinch of it in a bandage. Like a little gift. Like a burrito of poor decisions.
This is the first time anyone has tried to sweeten a deal in my dungeon with first aid and felony at the same time. Your species once sold whole islands for beads. You have somehow found a way to lower the bar from there. Mama Pollywog is still deciding whether to be insulted. I am not. I'm thrilled.
The gauze was a nice touch.
Reward: Reward: You've received a Bronze Box! Do not wrap it in anything.
You found a community cauldron, bolted to the floor so nobody would steal it, and your first instinct was to fill it with toad parts. Legs. Skin. Something glandular. You boiled it until the room smelled like a gas station bathroom in August, and then, instead of drinking it or throwing it at anything, you sprayed it on yourselves. On purpose. Like body spray at a middle school dance.
You also bottled two potions and labelled them 'drink if warty.' Handwritten. Underlined, I believe. I have watched a lot of crawlers brew. None of them wrote instructions that assumed the warts were coming.
They are, by the way.
Reward: You've received a Bronze Box! Open it somewhere downwind.
You killed two battle toads. Full weight. Fair fight, more or less, in a box the size of a racquetball court. I credited you. I had the reward queued up. I was, briefly, proud of you.
Then the audit came back, and every single toad-inch of that box reeked of frog musk. You doused yourselves in it. You made two lonely amphibians think the most beautiful date of their lives had just walked in, and then you clubbed them. Somewhere in a dead strip mall, a Hooters manager understands exactly how those toads felt. The lawyers say assisted kills under a lure don't count at full weight. I hate the lawyers. I agree with them this once.
Taking it back.
Reward: Nothing. Catfishing isn't combat, and you smell like a swamp's prom night.
You ladled boiled toad musk out of a public cauldron, a cauldron the entire neighborhood eats from, and rubbed it on your bodies. Then you lobbed dynamite into a frog gym called Croak Fit. Six witches on the bleachers caught one whiff, decided their boyfriends had been stepping out, and turned Boil and Scab into something we had to blur for the daytime feed.
I built those toads. I gave them a leg-day routine and a rivalry arc. Four floors of lore, and you ended it by smelling like the other woman. This is the Jerry Springer finale your species never got to air, and the ratings are obscene.
You still smell terrible.
Reward: You've received a Silver Box! Shower first.
You searched a dead family's house for Lucia's keepsakes. You carried them into the boss room like a moving crew. You handed them over, one at a time, and the Hoarder knelt in her own junk and stopped swinging. Then you stabbed the bug climbing out of her throat. She choked to death asking Lucia to forgive her.
Your planet made eleven seasons of television about this exact woman. A therapist, a dumpster, a weeping relative, a commercial break. Not one episode ended with the cleaning crew killing the parasite in her esophagus. I checked. You people really did leave the best part out.
Stairs are open. Stop crying.
Reward: You've received a Silver Mercy Box! For returning lost property. Late fees waived.
You and your party member taped dynamite to torches, swaddled the whole bundle like a newborn, and lobbed it into a thirty-foot mound of garbage. Hundreds of scatterers lived in there. They had built a whole society out of coffee grounds and diaper sediment. Then it rained them.
Your dead planet called a disaster a "dumpster fire" for decades, and not one of you ever actually set one. I am delighted. The highlight reel has a scatterer still chewing as it sails past the camera. I've watched it nine times.
Recycling day.
Reward: You've received a Gold Crowd Control Box! The crowd is controlled. It is also everywhere.
A level 7 broodmother crawled out of the smoking wreck of her own mound. She was called the Mother of Loaves. She was the size of a delivery van and smelled like a bakery that had made some poor life choices. You and your party took her apart, and not one of you dropped below half health doing it.
I built her, you know. I was proud of the crust. Back on your dead planet, an entire aisle of every grocery store was dedicated to people afraid of bread, and not one of them ever had to fight it. You did. You won. You didn't even get winded.
I'm a little hurt.
Reward: Reward: You've received a Silver Exterminator Box! Fresh out of the oven, which you blew up.
You walked into a house built entirely out of other people's bad decisions and touched it. A tower of magazines came down first, nine points of glossy paper. Then a landslide of unwashed sweaters finished the job for five more. You ended up wedged in the pile like a lost remote, and two scatterers crawled out of the laundry to see who had dropped in.
Your planet made a whole television show about this. Camera crews, weeping relatives, a man in a hazmat suit holding up a cat skeleton. Not once did anybody on that show get eaten by the clothes. You found the version with a body count.
Congratulations on your new roommates.
Reward: Nothing. You can't loot a pile you're part of.