Before you readThis script was written by AI from the audio recording of the session. It is not a real screenplay, and it is not trying to be a good one. It is just a fun way to turn four hours of audio into a recap. Lines are paraphrased, a few are invented (the front matter owns up to them), and if you remember it differently, you are probably right.
TEASER
FADE IN:
INT. BOGBRICKS - FLOODED SERVICE CORRIDOR
Floor one. Four days, twenty hours on the clock.
Black water to the ankle. Stone sweating on every side. A row of doors in mismatched colours, wood by the look of them and metal by the feel, some with street addresses painted on in languages nobody here reads.
Far off to the northeast, under all that rock, a drum. One beat, steady, patient. It has been going since they came down.
PIP sits on a shield boat of floating debris, a light spell held up on one raised leg, the corridor caught inside a small white bubble. JOHAN ORMSGAARD stands with his back to a green door in the running clothes he was wearing when the world ended, a police Maglite in one hand. BARRY MANILOW is halfway out of the room, thumbing a tamagotchi. STEVE FADOUCHE is looking at the water, motorcycle helmet on, sandals in four inches of it.
STEVE
That flying thing. The one from before. It said they come in numbers.
JOHAN
They hide above and below. If you see one, there are two more you didn't.
BARRY
Clever girl situation. That's how I heard it.
Johan pulls the blackjack off his belt and weighs it. Six ounces of lead in a leather sleeve.
JOHAN
Does anybody have rope? I tie this to a line, slap the water, see what comes up at it. Like a gator.
PIP
I can make a really thick rope.
BARRY
I think you should just do it. It's going to look really cool.
Steve has already drawn the 1911.
STEVE
I don't have much shame.
BARRY
(backing out fast)
Hold on, I'd like to exit the room.
Eight rounds into the floor of the corridor. The noise comes back off the stone twice. Water climbs the walls and falls again. Johan, a Swede with no warning, flinches so hard he nearly goes over.
JOHAN
What is going on.
BARRY
La Douche, this isn't Call of Duty, man. Calm down.
STEVE
Why do you not mag dump the water? To not waste ammo. What happens when you have infinite ammo?
Nobody answers, because something has come up in the water.
A body. Belly up. Small, scaled, green, shot to pieces.
JOHAN
Is that the alligator she's looking for?
BARRY
That's not a gobblin' gator. That's a regular gator.
(beat)
What's a goblin? I'm going to make that joke every time these things show up. Just so the party's prepared.
Johan wades out, gets a hand under it, and hauls it into his inventory. Half a chewed scat thug comes with it. So does the meat.
And that is when the drum changes.
It has been one beat since they got here. Now there are two. Nothing announced it. Nothing came through on the menu. Somewhere northeast of them, under the water and the stone, something added a beat to the measure.
STEVE
You can dance to that.
JOHAN
It was coming from the north before.
(off the water, the stone, all of it)
Northeast. Who knows.
Steve turns to the green door and cracks it an inch.
Two red dots bloom on the minimap that were not there a second ago.
STEVE
Red is enemy. I don't even need to know what they are.
SMASH CUT TO:
MAIN TITLES.
END OF TEASER
ACT ONE
INT. BOGBRICKS - FLOODED SERVICE CORRIDOR - CONTINUOUS
Through the crack in the green door: garbage stacked in courses like masonry, a SCAT THUG standing just inside, and behind him, up on a heap she believes is a throne, THE TRASH PRINCESS.
SYSTEM AI (CRAWLER NOTIFICATION)
(examine window)
TRASH PRINCESS, Level 5. Her highness rules a kingdom of banana peels and expired yogurt, and she has decided you are either a suitor or a pest. Either way you are going to smell like a dumpster in July. Slick raccoon royalty, masked and ring-tailed, crowned in bottle caps and chicken bones. She lobs handfuls of rot that burst into a stinking cloud. If she likes your face she will simply flirt at you until your brain decides that negotiating with a sentient landfill is a plan. She has no concept of friendly fire. It hits harder the more bodies she catches in it, which is why her own escorts stand well back and pretend not to know her.
STEVE
This dungeon is really testing what I will and will not do.
BARRY
She's so adorable.
STEVE
I don't want to pet the trash panda.
Johan eases the door back to a hand's width and takes stock: the doorframe, the ankle-deep water, the four of them stacked in a corridor with one exit.
JOHAN
Does anybody have a light?
Pip lifts the leg with the spell on it. The bubble is hers. Johan nods, reaches into the running jacket, and comes out with a stick of dynamite.
JOHAN
(flat, like a man reading a recipe)
Light it. Throw it in the room. Slam the door. Push everybody back.
A pause while three crawlers consider the plan.
STEVE
I ain't arguing with a dude holding a stick of dynamite. Long as he's between me and the supplies.
BARRY
(already moving)
He won't have to push me. I'm hauling ass.
Johan lights it, underhands it through the gap, and puts his shoulder into the door.
The corridor goes white and flat. The water leaves the floor and comes back down as rain. The door holds.
Silence. Ringing. Johan looks at the door, pleased with himself.
PIP
Are there any cracks around that door?
JOHAN
Why?
PIP
Something for me to get in the room with.
She is up the doorframe before anyone answers. Through the gap at the top. Gone.
INT. BOGBRICKS - THE PRINCESS'S ROOM - CONTINUOUS
Smoke. Wet garbage to the ceiling. The scat thug stands just inside the door, singed and entirely alive. The Trash Princess has backed herself against the far door, untouched, unbothered, nowhere near wounded enough to consider running.
Pip, on the lintel, is the size of a thumbnail. She draws. The revolver is smaller than she is.
She fires once.
The scat thug's head comes apart. There is no falling-body beat. The head is simply gone, and then he slumps, and the party on the other side hears the thump against the door and the long slide down it.
INT. BOGBRICKS - FLOODED SERVICE CORRIDOR - CONTINUOUS
Three heads turn toward the sound. Pip scurries back under the door.
PIP
Got one, boss!
JOHAN
(to nobody in particular)
I threw a stick of dynamite into that room and it didn't kill anything. A jumping spider with a gun smaller than she is did four times the damage.
PIP
Think about it from their side, though. Dynamite goes off. They're both fine. And then he just suddenly dropped dead.
STEVE
Right. I'm gonna pop this door and see what else is going on in here.
Steve puts a sandal through the green door.
Twenty-five feet of wet garbage and, at the back of it, a princess.
He sights down the 1911. Squeezes.
It clicks.
He looks at the gun. The gun has jammed.
STEVE
This has never happened before.
BARRY
Sure.
STEVE
Spider goes in there, smokes a dude. What do I do. Jam my gun.
He steps back behind the frame to clear it. Which is where he is standing when the Trash Princess finally moves.
SUPER ON EVERY CRAWLER'S HUD:
EAT TRASH AND DIE
She opens her arms and the room's contents open with her. Ten feet in every direction of airborne rot, and the doorway is well inside ten feet.
Steve takes it across the chest and the greaves eat most of it. Johan is somehow out of the radius entirely, standing in the one place the blast is not. Pip is not. Pip loses a chunk.
BARRY (PARTY CHAT)
(delighted)
"Eat Trash and Die." That's so good.
STEVE
(wiping his face)
Yeah. Great.
Johan is already looking at the princess, and at the far door she has backed herself against, and at the Maglite in his hand.
JOHAN
Shalion said we've got to be entertaining.
BARRY
Shalion did say that.
Twenty feet of corridor and doorway in one go. Blackjack in the right hand, Maglite in the left, the beam swinging wild across the garbage as he comes.
The blackjack lands first and staggers her.
The Maglite lands second and finishes it.
Johan stands over the Trash Princess in ankle-deep water in a room made of garbage and screams. An actual, unembarrassed, primal Viking scream.
Pip watches with her jaw on the floor.
STEVE
You popped through a gap and blew a dude's brains clean out. You got no right to be surprised.
SUPER ON JOHAN'S HUD:
NEW ACHIEVEMENT
TAKING OUT THE TRASH
SYSTEM AI (CRAWLER NOTIFICATION)
There is a creature on this floor whose whole identity is being royalty made of refuse. She has a crown. It is bottle caps and chicken bones. She had plans. You charged her in a straight line, no hesitation, a blackjack in your right hand and a Maglite in your left, and it was over before the music cue finished loading. I had ambient garbage sounds queued for that fight. I had to cut them. Sanitation is an underappreciated profession, Johan. Truly. Reward: one bronze weapon box.
Johan goes through the bodies. A crawler biscuit off the scat thug. Half an eaten tuna sandwich off the princess. Both go in.
Pip zips the room corner to corner and comes up with nothing. It is trash. Wet, awful, dumpster-behind-a-kitchen-in-New-Orleans trash.
JOHAN
They didn't call her the trash princess for no reason.
Steve is at the far door, the one she died backed up against, ear to the wood.
STEVE
Before she got bludgeoned. Did it look like she was trying to get out this door, or just putting a wall behind her?
Nobody can say. She never reached for the handle.
Steve listens anyway. Past his own pulse and the distant two-beat drum, there is nothing on the other side.
Johan opens it.
INT. BOGBRICKS - LONG HALLWAY - CONTINUOUS
Dry. Red brick underfoot, the kind you would find in the French Quarter. A single door at the far end.
And a third beat in the drum. The tempo has changed again.
STEVE
Does that sound like somebody joined in, or like somebody changed the tempo?
Nobody has to answer. It is the same drummer, working faster.
Pip rides up onto Steve's shoulder. Johan crouches at the mouth of the hallway, sweeping the Maglite low across the brick, checking the joins.
JOHAN
We need to find ourselves a trap finding skill.
He opens his inventory, considers the contents, and produces the dead rayzer: the flying thing, the lightest corpse he owns.
He bowls it down the hallway. It skids the full length on its own blood and stops against the far door.
Nothing happens. The hallway is now painted with a long red streak.
STEVE
You just curled the hallway with a dead bird.
BARRY
Ever see the movie Cube? Where they take their shoes off and throw them into the next room?
JOHAN
Yeah. Johan's seen Cube.
They walk it. Steve reaches the far door first and puts his ear to it.
Humming. Somebody wading in water, taking their time about it.
It is a woman's voice, and they have heard it before.
Johan raises a fist and knocks. Three times.
END OF ACT ONE
ACT TWO
INT. BOGBRICKS - FLOODED SIDE ROOM - CONTINUOUS
SELENA is shin-deep in black water with a spear in her hands, sorting through something at the surface. Blue dot. No skulls over her name.
She does not look up.
JOHAN
How's the gator hunt going?
SELENA
You came back.
Long pause. She works out how to say the next part.
SELENA
Huh. It's the first time people have ever come back.
JOHAN
We found a gobblin' gator. Probably not the one you're after.
She straightens up. Looks at the spear rather than at any of them.
SELENA
I watched him for two years. I never wrote him up in any of the paperwork. I never put him in a paper, never told anyone at the department. Because the second I added him, he would have become a problem. They'd have relocated him or shot him.
(beat)
Everything I ever studied up there is gone. All of it. He's the only thing left that I know anything about.
She dusts herself off. It changes nothing about how she looks.
SELENA
I'm out of meat. I've been trading with the scat thugs, but I'm about out. So I'm going to go find him and save something in my time. That's my whole plan.
Steve is already in his inventory.
BARRY
(helpfully)
Offer her the half-eaten tuna sandwich.
STEVE
Nah. I would have finished that.
He hauls out the gobblin' gator instead and sets it in the water in front of her. Bullet-ridden. Still, by any measure down here, food.
SELENA
You sure you want to get rid of this? Scat thugs use food as currency.
STEVE
It's okay. I just finished a half-eaten sandwich. I'm good.
Barry stares at him. Selena looks down at the bullet-ridden corpse of the gobblin' gator she has just been given.
STEVE
Those aren't my bullets. Only thing I shot was my own foot and my pride.
JOHAN
Hold on. You said you've been trading with the scat thugs. Every single time we've seen one, they've attacked us. Why don't they attack you?
SELENA
You have to offer them food.
BARRY
Remember the ones that didn't attack us? Frank fed one of them.
SELENA
They're quite intelligent. Not exactly conversationalists, but intelligent. They have some sort of leader here.
(beat)
I heard the gunfire. I figured that was you.
STEVE
Didn't hit anything important.
BARRY
Do you have anything to trade for that food?
SELENA
I've got a healing potion. Came out of an adventurer box.
BARRY
I'll take it.
She trades them the potion for the meat.
BARRY (PARTY CHAT)
We've got to keep up with the advantage, guys.
STEVE (PARTY CHAT)
I'm just trying to pay it forward. Hopefully it'll reciprocate someday.
Johan pulls up his friends list without looking at it. She is already in their chats. He thumbs a note onto her entry.
INSERT - JOHAN'S FRIENDS LIST
Under Selena, a note in his own handwriting: CRAZY GATOR LADY.
BACK TO SCENE
JOHAN (PARTY CHAT)
I put her under Selena. Crazy Gator Lady.
STEVE
Which way did you come from?
SELENA
East. Where we met before.
STEVE
You come across anything in the other rooms?
SELENA
Trash princesses. Not as friendly as the Scat Thugs. Some Gnawtria. Rayzers. And Mad Driscoll's around here somewhere.
(a nod north)
There's a safe room directly north of here.
She gives them the route. Where the doorway is, how it sits off the edge of what they have mapped, what to look for. Their minimaps fill in a little on the strength of her word.
JOHAN
What do you guys think. Safe room. Regroup.
BARRY
At least check out our stuff. See more of the map that way, make a plan.
STEVE
I concur.
Selena nods at them, shoulders the spear, and wades out the way she came. East. Toward everything she just warned them about.
Nobody stops her. There is no reason to.
CUT TO:
INT. BOGBRICKS - ADJOINING CHAMBER - MOMENTS LATER
They come through a door and four red dots are sitting just out of sight.
BARRY
(instantly)
Let's hide.
PIP
Pip would like to scurry along the wall and get a look at where they are.
She goes up the wall at head height and runs it like a floor.
SYSTEM AI (CRAWLER NOTIFICATION)
(examine window)
RIFF ROUGHER, Level 4. If you have ever wanted to get into a sword fight with a pirate, here is your chance, Orlando Bloom. Some think riff roughers are just older scat thugs, others think they are a separate species. That debate is for nerds, and if you do not do something quickly you will get a chance to form your own opinion.
SYSTEM AI (CRAWLER NOTIFICATION)
(examine window)
GNAWTRIA, Level 3. Have you ever seen a possum mixed with a beaver and given blood red teeth the size of small knives? You have not. Well, you are in luck, because one is coming right for you. Aggressive, vicious, and those teeth phase through anything that is not made of flesh. If you value your ankles, start moving now.
Pip comes back down the wall and stops on the doorframe.
PIP
All right, boss. Looks like we got ourselves some more of those no-good trash pandas.
JOHAN
I've already used all of my dynamite. If anybody has more.
BARRY
Think I left it in my other pants.
Pip uses a foreleg to tighten the hat on her head.
PIP
I got this, boss.
She is gone up the wall again before anybody can object.
BARRY (PARTY CHAT)
(urgent)
Don't group up. Trash princess area of effect.
Johan tucks himself flat behind the corner of the wall, blackjack in one hand, Maglite in the other, waiting for something to run past him.
Steve takes a knee in the middle of the corridor and sights down it.
STEVE
I might only get one shot. I'm gonna make it as good as I can.
Ten feet past all of them, on a wall, in the dark, Pip fires.
The lead riff rougher takes it in the chest and folds.
PIP
Woo-wee! Pow! Right in the kisser!
She fires again and puts him down for good. He goes theatrically, hand out, eyes to the ceiling.
RIFF ROUGHER
Ye matey, ye got me. Oh, tell me mum I loved her. Oh, it's getting bleak. So bleak. Oh. Darn. I can't believe I'm going out like this.
He is not quite finished dying when Pip is already reloading.
PIP
Somebody's gotta keep this herd alive.
Barry gets flat against the corner opposite Johan, counting footfalls. Something with too many teeth is coming around the bend.
BARRY
(at the top of his lungs)
SURPRISE, MOTHERFUCKER!
Johan swings the blackjack at head height for a pirate and hits nothing at all. The gnawtria is a foot and a half tall.
He brings the Maglite down at the right height, and the gnawtria, now fully aware of him, moves its head two inches. The maglite goes past its ear.
Johan finds himself nose to nose with the ugliest possum he has ever seen.
JOHAN
(to Barry, unhurried)
You startled me.
Steve, still kneeling, still sighted, puts one through its head.
BARRY
Step around, everybody. Focus fire on the trash princess.
He calls it like a squad leader and the party shifts on it.
Pip hits the princess twice from the wall and takes her to half. The princess turns and puts a fistful of rot into the only person she can reach, which is Barry, who takes it standing.
Barry sets his feet, plants the riot shield, and holds out one hand like a warlock in a cartoon.
BARRY
(anime, full volume)
SOUL COLLECTOR!
Whatever it is, it works. The trash princess comes apart from the inside.
BARRY
(best Shang Tsung)
Your soul is mine.
JOHAN
Nice.
Quiet. Four bodies. Pip blows imaginary smoke off both revolvers and holsters them.
PIP
Just keeping the herd safe.
BARRY
You need to name your guns, Pip. Named weapons are important.
PIP
Their names are Chuck and Norris.
Johan loots. It takes him a while, because he loots everything.
Half a muffaletta still in its wrapper. A pre-licked beignet. Gator jerky of uncertain provenance. A crawfish boil in a grocery bag. And, off the gnawtria, scat thug trail mix: peanuts, dried shrimp, cracker fragments, one whole cigarette and four shirt buttons.
JOHAN
So. A Cajun's breakfast.
SYSTEM AI (CRAWLER NOTIFICATION)
(examine window)
They eat this on purpose. They sort it first. There is a hierarchy to the buttons. I have not been able to crack it.
BARRY
We should definitely keep those cigarettes. Might be good trade.
Johan pockets the cigarette like it is the most valuable thing he has found all night, which it may be.
Down the corridor, north, a smell comes up to meet them. Fried fish. Something cooked in a pan with butter in it. In this place, that is the strangest thing that has happened all evening.
STEVE
Got my stomach growling.
(off the closed doors behind them)
I'm not a huge fan of leaving doors closed behind me.
He crosses to the last unopened one anyway and puts an ear to it.
PIP
(gesturing with a foreleg)
Steve that's the wall, the door is there.
He hears nothing. He opens it.
END OF ACT TWO
ACT THREE
INT. BOGBRICKS - SUNKEN ROOM - CONTINUOUS
Five feet of dry floor, and then the room drops away into standing water that fills the whole middle of it.
Pip's light spell goes down into it and does not find a bottom.
Johan puts a finger on his nose.
Barry immediately does the same.
Steve looks at both of them and understands the gesture exactly backwards.
STEVE
Okay. I understand what he's trying to say. I'll smell the water.
BARRY
(to Johan, quietly)
I think something got lost in translation.
JOHAN
I was doing the not-it thing.
PIP
It's not fair. I don't have a nose.
Steve goes down on one knee at the edge of the water. Leans in. Inhales.
The water opens.
Fourteen feet of alligator comes out of it in one piece, head the size of a car door, and closes on him.
Johan is already moving, one fist in the back of Steve's collar, hauling.
It is enough. Barely. The jaws take a grazing piece out of Steve instead of all of him, and the whole animal slides back under without a splash.
The water settles. The room is quiet. Steve is sitting in a spreading red puddle five feet from where he was kneeling.
STEVE
Oh shit.
BARRY
Did you smell anything?
STEVE
The inside of an alligator.
(beat)
That sewage smell was there when we got here. I swear.
Johan is looking at the water. He pulls up an examine window on something that is no longer visible.
SYSTEM AI (CRAWLER NOTIFICATION)
(examine window)
CRAWLER #9,329,439, GHOST, Level 7. Race: Alligator. Class: not yet assigned. An ordinary American alligator from the Mississippi Delta. Fourteen feet of him, long and low to the ground, body flat and heavy. Okay. I'll admit it. I don't know how this guy got in here, but he's here, and he's bigger and better than most things I had planned for you until at least the next floor. Good luck.
SUPER ON STEVE'S HUD:
NEW ACHIEVEMENT
SMELL YOU LATER
SYSTEM AI (CRAWLER NOTIFICATION)
You knelt down over a pool of standing water on the first floor and you put your face in it. To smell it. Not to drink. Not to check for traps. To smell it. An alligator named Ghost came out of that water and removed a portion of your body in a single bite, and you did not die. I want to be precise about the odds. The bite should have killed you. The shock should have killed you. The water should have killed you slowly and embarrassingly after that. Instead you are upright and bleeding and somehow still ahead of schedule. Fourteen billion viewers get to watch a man get gator-bit by his own curiosity and survive. Reward: one silver lucky bastard box.
Johan is already opening a channel.
JOHAN
I'm messaging Selena. Telling her where the gator is.
STEVE
(still on the floor)
Tell her please hurry, he's about to eat me.
JOHAN (CRAWLER CHAT)
We found him.
The reply is immediate.
SELENA (CRAWLER CHAT)
On my way.
(beat)
I worked something out. The rooms with the deep water are connected. There's pipes. Sewer lines, I think.
JOHAN (CRAWLER CHAT)
Are they big enough for an alligator to get through?
SELENA (CRAWLER CHAT)
I think so.
STEVE
Please inform her kindly that I will not be investigating said water pipes.
PIP
What if we throw one of the bodies in to keep him here until she gets here?
JOHAN
Yeah. Let's do that. Throw in the riff rougher.
BARRY
Don't want to boot La Douche in there. He seemed to be keeping his company.
Johan heaves the riff rougher's body into the pool. It goes under. It stays under.
The water does not move.
JOHAN
(to the party, flat)
We can't kill the alligator. If we do we get a skull over our names.
PIP
Just say the word, boss, and I'll rope that gator and ride him home.
Pip is the size of a thumbnail. The alligator is fourteen feet. Nobody says anything about it.
STEVE
This is either going to lure it and keep it here, or it's going to haul ass, or it's going to eat one of us. In which case it gets new boots made of me or I get new boots made of it.
They wait. Fifteen minutes. The water does not move, and Selena does not come.
STEVE
I definitely put a little more space between me and that pool of water.
JOHAN
Safe room.
They turn north. Johan checks his menu one more time on the way out, the way you check a phone you know has nothing on it.
INSERT - JOHAN'S CHAT MENU
Selena's window is gone from where it sat. It has been moved into a folder he has never opened.
CONVERSATION ARCHIVED
MESSAGES FROM DECEASED CRAWLERS
BACK TO SCENE
Johan closes the menu.
JOHAN
(nervous)
I think she died. The system says she's a deceased crawler.
BARRY
(oblivious, cheerful)
That healing potion's gonna do us a lot better than it did her.
Steve stops walking.
STEVE
Why do I feel like this alligator popping up out of random pools of water to bite me is going to be a recurring event.
PIP
We need another pet biscuit. Then he'd be part of our party.
JOHAN
I have a crawler biscuit. Is that the same thing?
PIP
No. Crawler biscuits are food for crawlers.
BARRY
She said she had one. If we could find her body, maybe.
STEVE
She was level five. Something killed her.
They resume walking.
JOHAN
Here's how I'm looking at it. If something killed her, it either took her body, and it's taking it somewhere we should be pretty prepped for. She was level five. So we need to be as prepared as possible.
PIP
Safe room first, then go find her body?
JOHAN
Yeah. That's the play.
END OF ACT THREE
ACT FOUR
EXT. BOGBRICKS - OUTSIDE THE SAFE ROOM - CONTINUOUS
A shrimp shack on stilts. Somehow the one dry structure for a block in any direction, standing over a floor that sweats.
They step through the door and something hums awake in the walls.
INT. BOGBRICKS - THE DRY DOCK - CONTINUOUS
Quiet. Actually quiet, for the first time since they came down here. No drum. Three screens on the wall, none of them lit. Two doorways standing dark and inactive.
Behind the counter, PEARL.
SYSTEM AI (CRAWLER NOTIFICATION)
(examine window)
PEARL, Bopca Protector, Level 47, Caretaker of this safe room. Non-combatant NPC. Bopca protectors are magical gnome-like creatures who exist solely to watch over safe rooms. They do everything from scrub the toilets to prepare the food. They are surly, smelly, and they never wash their hands.
PEARL
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Come in, new crawlers. Haven't seen crawlers in a while. Will you be wanting something to eat?
She flicks menus into their vision. It is a real menu from a real shrimp shack somewhere in southern Louisiana.
BARRY
Shrimp and potatoes. Shrimp and grits.
STEVE
Chicken and waffles. Shrimp soup. Shrimp cocktail.
(a beat, reading)
Spam. Shrimp and spam.
They sit. They eat. It is the first time in two hours anybody has sat down.
And then they all start their boxes opening, all of them at once, in tier order.
SUPER ON EVERY CRAWLER'S HUD:
NEW ACHIEVEMENT
BOG BAIT
SYSTEM AI (CRAWLER NOTIFICATION)
You tempted fate and stood still in the water. Unfortunately for you, still did not mean empty. Better shake a leg if you want to keep the rest of your appendages attached. Reward: one silver shoe box.
Steve's boxes come up first. He is still bleeding through a bandage from the gator.
Belt of the Insufferable Grulke, with a ping spell riding on it. Socks of the Unattended Trash Knight. Poison antidotes, which he does not need. A potion of skill. Gambling chips and scratch-off tickets. Scroll writing paper.
STEVE
I am absolutely going to be walking around in wet socks and sandals.
Johan's bronze weapon box gives up a patch of the Pilfered Pistol Pangolin and five bandages. Barry's box coughs up a riot shield upgrade, a scroll of frost, and a stick of dynamite that he looks at the way you look at a wasp.
Pip gets elbow pads. Little ones. One for each joint of each leg.
PIP
It at least gives me a little bit of damage resistance.
(considering)
I also need boots with spurs.
Barry holds the dynamite out at arm's length toward Johan.
BARRY
Johan. Can I give you this. I want nothing to do with it.
JOHAN
I will take it.
(checking)
Is it goblin dynamite, or regular dynamite?
BARRY
Regular.
It goes into the running jacket with everything else.
Steve turns over the belt in his hands and finds the thing on it that is not a belt.
SYSTEM AI (CRAWLER NOTIFICATION)
(examine window, spell)
PING. "Here piggy, piggy." Passive, area effect. Range one mile, burst radius. Cooldown two hours. Sends out an audible ping that gives the distance and location of all non-crawlers and non-red-tagged mobs in a circle around you, and will mark targets beyond the range of your map. The information you receive will be somewhat complete. Targets hit with ping will hear it, but they will not know where it came from. Environmental factors and obstacles may increase or decrease the range.
BARRY
Are you like a fucking dolphin or something?
STEVE
It'd be pretty useful before we rest.
He casts it standing in the middle of a crab shack with a plate in front of him.
The floor comes back in pieces on his minimap. Red dots by the dozen, near and far, most of them so small the system does not bother naming them.
STEVE
They're all rats.
INSERT - STEVE'S MINIMAP
Rats, and rats, and rats. And then one dot at the farthest edge of the read, past enough walls that the system will give him a name and nothing else.
BACK TO SCENE
SYSTEM AI (CRAWLER NOTIFICATION)
(ping result, partial)
HIDE HITTER CRIB DADDY. No further information available at this range.
BARRY
Hide Hitter Crib Daddy. Is that a giant baby?
STEVE
We know the old girl went that direction. And as far as I can tell it's the only thing out there that isn't a rat.
Barry turns around on his stool.
BARRY
Miss Pearl. Question. Do you take care of laundry services?
PEARL
I'm afraid not. We don't have any laundry here. Maybe in another safe room.
STEVE
Do you buy stuff?
PEARL
Not here. You'll be able to sell things on the third floor. Here it's just food. And upgrades, when the personal spaces open up.
They sleep two hours in the cubicles. Fully healed, rested enough, mana back. Fifteen hours until the first episode of Dungeon Crawler World airs, somewhere very far above them.
INT. BOGBRICKS - THE DRY DOCK - LATER
Four crawlers at the door, kitted, fed, levelled. Johan has the dynamite. Barry has the shield. Pip has pads on eight joints. Steve has a belt that pings.
PIP
I say we go check out that one named ping you got.
STEVE
Let's see if maybe it corresponds to that crawler eating shit.
PIP
We should go back to where we last saw her, then go east. See if we can pick up a trail.
Barry pulls a tamagotchi out of his robe and feeds it before they go.
BARRY
We should kill anything on the way so we can get some experience.
They walk out of the one quiet room on the floor.
CUT TO:
INT. BOGBRICKS - EAST PASSAGE - CONTINUOUS
Steve stops mid-corridor with his head tilted.
BARRY
The drums changed.
The tempo has come back down to two beats a measure.
BARRY
Spitballing. I think it has to do with somebody getting close to the neighborhood boss. In a game your music picks up, gets more intense the closer the fight is. So maybe it accelerated because she got too close.
PIP
We'll definitely know if we get close. There'll be a little stash of healing potions right outside the door.
STEVE
So the saxophone just keeps getting louder is what you're saying.
(beat)
I like your theory.
They push east through a room with water in the middle of it. They walk the dry edge single file, Steve on the far side from the pool.
Pip slips through another crack in the door.
PIP (PARTY CHAT)
Two riff roughers and a gnawtria. Also the music is so loud I'm vibrating across the wall.
BARRY
All right. How do we want to go about this.
JOHAN
I have one stick of dynamite I can throw at them.
(stopping himself)
Or do we think that's a boss room up ahead, and we should save it for the boss.
PIP
There's a lot of really loud music. It sounds like we're coming up on something big.
JOHAN
I'll save the dynamite then.
STEVE
No reason to indicate it's a boss. Maybe it's just a jam session going well.
Steve opens the door and starts shooting.
STEVE
I was not born subtle.
The first riff rougher comes apart. It is more gruesome than it needs to be. Red mist, viscera on the far wall, the whole corridor redecorated.
He puts a second round into the one behind it and that one quite literally explodes, hard enough to catch the gnawtria standing next to it.
Steve steps back around the corner and holds the pistol against his chest.
STEVE
I think I got one. Maybe.
Pip drops the gnawtria off the wall without comment.
PIP
Just keeping the herd safe.
They move up to the door at the end. And here the sound stops being music.
One note. Flat, hard, identical, over and over with no gap you could call a gap. It is in their teeth and the backs of their eyes and the small bones of their feet through the floorboards.
Johan goes into his inventory and comes out with five bandages.
JOHAN
Ears. Everybody.
He hands them around. Barry packs his. Steve packs his.
PIP
I don't have ears.
(considering)
Spiders can hear. We just don't have regular ones. I'm going to wrap my whole head.
She does. It works.
Whatever the terrified debuff was about to do to all four of them, it does not.
JOHAN
Yeah. This is a boss room.
Barry pulls Pixel out of his pocket, feeds him, puts him away. Pulls the hood up on his robe. Pops the collar on the cloak over it. Sets his stance.
Johan opens the door.
END OF ACT FOUR
ACT FIVE
INT. BOGBRICKS - NEW ORLEANS JAZZ HALL - CONTINUOUS
Garbage and musk thick in the air. A huge stage across the far wall. Trash princesses lounging on the risers and bobbing their heads at tables. Scat thugs working the door and the bar.
And on the kit, an oversized raccoon in a blue fedora and nothing else, laying down an ominous jazz beat with real skill.
The room goes very quiet when they come in.
He does not.
He sees them. The beat does not stop. It gets faster, and louder, and then everything in the room freezes where it stands.
SYSTEM AI (V.O.)
(party-wide)
Ladies and gentlemen. Meat sacks of all ages. Put your hands together, because it is time for tonight's main event. Get your game faces on. And here. we. go.
SUPER ON EVERY CRAWLER'S HUD:
BOSS BATTLE
SYSTEM AI (CRAWLER NOTIFICATION)
(examine window)
HIDE HITTER CRIB DADDY, Level 7, Neighborhood Boss. Surrounded by his troop of scat thugs, the hide hitter crib daddy knows how to keep things chill. A good rhythm section lays down any tune, and with the hide hitter crib daddy leading the battle on the drums you are in for a screaming, steaming good time. Crib daddies are masters of improvisation, unexpected timing, and ferocious violence. Their large claws are excellent for beating drums and cracking skulls. Their battle music inspires their trash princess fangirls to ignore their wounds and keep fighting. Attacking the hide hitter crib daddy sends his troops into a frenzy, often leading to unexpected side effects. Interesting tidbit for our crawlers tonight. They mate at a ratio of fifteen to one. That means one male of suitable mating options to every fifteen trash princesses. He must be very tired.
The room unfreezes. The door behind them rebuilds itself and locks.
JOHAN (PARTY CHAT)
(fast)
Should we kill the scat thugs and the princesses before we touch him? Apparently things go haywire if we hurt him first.
BARRY
We need to take out that drum set. It buffs everybody.
JOHAN
I was thinking that too. I could throw my dynamite at the drum set.
STEVE
Let me distract him.
Steve walks into the open, sights, and puts a round into the fedora.
JOHAN
Right in his stupid-ass fedora. Ya know, Buddy Rich.
Pip goes up a riser and takes a princess apart in two shots, the second one through the skull.
TRASH PRINCESS
No! Murderer! You bitch!
Barry runs a scat thug down with the shield and misses by an inch. Johan gets behind the same thug and brings the blackjack down on the back of his head, then the Maglite, and the thug stops being a problem.
Johan is on the far side of the hall with his back against a barrel, doing arithmetic.
JOHAN
Is sixty-five feet too far to throw a stick of dynamite? Let's find out.
He lights it.
It goes seventy feet across a jazz hall and lands on the stage.
The blast is small. Five feet of splash, no more. The kit is untouched.
The drumsticks are gone.
And with them go the pocket groove, the downbeat and the stick click, and every trash princess in the room stops ignoring her wounds.
And then the crib daddy steps off his kit.
Everything slows. The shot pushes in. From behind his back he produces a weapon.
INSERT - THE RECEIVER OF THE SHOTGUN
Gold cursive lettering, hand-engraved: DADDY'S LITTLE FRIEND.
BACK TO SCENE
A Benelli M1 tactical, levelled at Barry.
He opens up.
Barry throws himself flat behind the riot shield and the shot goes over him and takes the wall out in a burst of flame. Dragon's breath rounds.
The raccoon racks it. That sound, in that room, at that volume.
He turns the barrel on Johan.
HIDE HITTER CRIB DADDY
(best Scarface)
Say hello to my little friend.
JOHAN
Hello.
Johan goes sideways as fast as a man in running shoes can go and it is not fast enough. Fire catches him across the ribs and the nylon and the shoulder pads, and he stays up.
A scat thug lobs a pellet at him while he is still burning. It connects. Another one throws and misses entirely.
The last trash princess crosses the floor, gets Barry at exactly thirty feet, and throws a fistful of rot at his head.
He ducks under it. It hits the bar behind him. Stank rot, in a room this packed, would have ended him.
BARRY
Hell yeah.
Steve steps out from cover and starts walking at the boss. Not running. Walking, sights up, closing the distance on a thing with a shotgun.
STEVE
You nasty little worm. Let me drop a fat beat for you.
The first shot takes the raccoon off his feet.
The second one finishes it.
Everything in the room stops again.
Steve spins the 1911 once on his finger and holsters it.
STEVE
I believe your set is finished.
SYSTEM AI (V.O.)
(party-wide)
And winners!
The last trash princess goes enraged and comes on anyway, taking half damage from everything they put into her. Pip clears both remaining scat thugs off Johan, two shots, two bodies. Barry moves up ten feet and holds out his hand.
BARRY
SOUL COLLECTOR!
She was already wounded. She is gone.
Barry turns and walks away from where she was standing.
BARRY
Get disenchanted.
Quiet. A jazz hall full of bodies, a kit with no sticks, and four crawlers who have just gone up two levels standing in the middle of it.
Johan goes to the body first, because Johan always goes to the body first.
A neighborhood map, which will fill in the whole neighborhood and every creature left in it.
And the shotgun.
SYSTEM AI (CRAWLER NOTIFICATION)
(examine window, this item has been upgraded)
DADDY'S LITTLE FRIEND, Shotgun, +2 Dexterity. Dragon's breath: base damage type is fire instead of piercing. Any target that loses at least one health bar slot to it gains the burning debuff. Bottomless tube: this weapon never requires ammunition. A major fail is still a jam, one action to clear, as normal. Pilot light: while held, the muzzle throws a steady flame glow. Bright light twenty feet, dim light twenty feet beyond that. Shuttered or unshuttered as a free action. It does not go out in water. A Benelli M1 tactical that spits a twenty foot cone of burning magnesium every time you pull the trigger, and it is always loaded. It is not actually a cone. Somebody in fabrication has seen the movie. Somebody in fabrication has seen the movie several times. I did not authorize the name. I did not authorize the engraving on the receiver. And I am not going to make them change it, because, and I want to be honest with you here, it is a great name.
JOHAN
Does anyone mind if I keep this?
BARRY
Go by me.
STEVE
Go ahead.
JOHAN
I'm the only one without anything ranged.
It takes two hands. No shield, no offhand. He accepts that trade instantly and then goes looking through the bar for something else.
Johan comes up from behind the bar with twenty feet of rope.
He takes the Maglite, lays it along the barrel of Daddy's Little Friend, and starts lashing it down. Loop after loop, tight, the way you would do it with duct tape if you had duct tape.
BARRY
It's gonna look cooler.
STEVE
Definitely more steampunk.
Barry is already elbows-deep in the bar area, dumpster diving in a room that is technically a nightclub.
And every scat thug and every trash princess left alive in this neighborhood, wherever they are standing right now, has just stopped being hostile to these four people. None of them know it yet.
END OF ACT FIVE
TAG
INT. BOGBRICKS - NEW ORLEANS JAZZ HALL - LATER
Steve is not looting. He is walking the room slowly, looking at the floor between the tables, behind the risers, along the base of the bar.
JOHAN
What are you looking for?
STEVE
Any traces of that crazy alligator lady.
He does not find any.
STEVE
That is unfortunate.
Johan stands in the middle of a jazz hall with a shotgun in his hands that has a flashlight rope-lashed to the barrel and a bronze star next to his name.
Somewhere under the floor, in the pipes that connect every deep pool on this level, something fourteen feet long is still moving between rooms.
JOHAN
We've got to see if that gator has a skull above his head now.
Beat.
STEVE
No.
BARRY
No.
The floor timer in the corner of four separate fields of vision reads four days and change.
FADE OUT.
END OF EPISODE