1 - Hey, Wanna Buy a Dungeon?
“Hey. You wanna buy a dungeon?” The shady salesman’s eyes warily shifted left and right like some cartoon villain before returning to land on what he seemed to think was a potential customer. Not that he looked much like a door-to-door salesman. He was scruffy and unshaved, his dark eyes were manic, and he wore unwashed peasant clothes and mud-caked boots that needed replacing. His dark brown, mussy hair looked like something an architecturally-challenged bird would best in. He wore a dark blue cloak, the color faded and the edges ratty. He grabbed the center with both hands and opened the cloak in the manner of an exhibitionist, revealing a dozen cubes hanging on the insides. Each was the size of a softball or grapefruit and a mix of stone and metal.
Kai stood in his doorway, holding his door open, and looked up at the man like he was nuts. And by doorway, we mean the opening of a very small and short cave in the side of a small dirt hill in the forest. And by door, we mean a bunch of sticks he’d collected from the surrounding forest and leaned over the opening of the cave to hide it from predators. And by look up, we mean way up because Kai now stood only a half-meter tall, and some of that meter was due to his enormous, spiky ears. Because he was no longer human; he was now an actual gremlin. Just like the ones in those awesome movies.
The salesman waggled his eyebrows and gave Kai a slick smile. “Come on. You know you wanna…”
Kai stared in silent disbelief for a long minute. He was puzzled, which had been a recurring theme the past three days, alongside a boatload of anger. He looked around the forest outside in both directions. “Where the frick did you come from?” Was there a road nearby he hadn’t seen despite all his searching?
The salesman shrugged. “The question isn’t where I come from, it’s where are you going? Where do you see yourself in five years? Still cooped up in a tiny, wet cave, scrounging for grubs and tubers as you scratch out a feral existence in the wilderness? Or maybe out there, somewhere, with arrows in your back and a nice, shiny sword in your smelly guts after being run down by adventurers? Or,” he leaned in and knowingly grinned, “are you gonna be running your very own, top-of-the-line, badass, gold-making dungeon?” He wiggled the cloak he still held open the dangling cubes, his sketchy merchandise, swung and clinked together. A beam of morning sunlight glinted off one, revealing a stone and coppery texture.
Kai stared for another long minute. This guy was certifiably nuts. The very first sentient creature he’d met in this stupid world, and it was a frickin’ travelling door-to-door salesman trying to rip him off with some idiotic scam. Kai was tense. He was frustrated. He was stressed the hell out. He’d had a life on another world and been ripped out of it without warning. Ok, maybe not a great life, but still a life. Sure, he hadn’t had a girlfriend in a few months…years. He muttered to himself, “Wow.” He thought back and did some rapid calculations. Had three years gone by since…? His eyes widened. “No way.”
Honestly, his ‘career’ had been nothing to crow about. He’d been an accountant, kind of a mediocre one because he’d never been one for big firms and office politics and climbing the whole brown-nosing ladder. Also, he wasn’t very good with numbers, which was a pretty awful trait in an accountant, and why he relied really heavily on his calculator. He’d worked in a small office on the edge of the suburbs, doing too many returns at tax time and not enough work the rest of the year. It was kind of hard to maintain any kind of enthusiasm for the future when he’d realized three years into his career that he hated accounting, a feeling that had grown into a hateful passion as the years had gone by, but he’d been unwilling to take a leap of faith and try anything else because it was, at the very least, a stable job.
Or it had been. Until some jerk tech bros had come along and started developing artificial intelligence with zero thought to how it would impact people. Now the writing was on the wall. Layoffs were already happening in the name of efficiency and profitability. Everyone in the industry knew it was only a matter of time before they were replaced by an app on people’s phones and that steady income he’d been relying on vanished. But even knowing that, dread seeping into his daily life as he constantly worried about the future, he still hadn’t been able to leave the career behind for something else because, at that point, what else was there? He felt too old to go back to school, and didn’t have any skills to transfer into another industry, and there was just no telling how AI was going to mess the whole bloody economy up. So for the past couple of years, he’d been frozen in place, miserable and afraid.
Then he’d frickin’ died.
Or, at least, that’s what he’d figured had happened. He didn’t really have the faintest clue what was going on. It’s not like there’d been that mysterious Japanese truck-kun coming out of nowhere like in some light novel. He’d gone home from work on Friday night, played videogames for hours despite being fully aware that he wasted way too much of his life on that crap, stared at half-naked women on Instagram because he was apparently lonely but too pathetic to find a new girlfriend, and then crawled into bed. It was basically the same thing he did every day.
But then Saturday had come. Saturday was the best day of the week, by far. Sunday wasn’t bad, but knowing you had to go to work the next day sucked a lot of the fun out of it. Saturday, however, was always full of hope and promise. To be fair, he spent too much time playing video games and watching crap TV, but at least he felt free.
That Saturday, however, had been something really special. Some guy on the other side of town had opened a new restaurant a while back. It was just a hamburger joint, except it wasn’t just a hamburger joint. Apparently, this chef was some kind of culinary genius, the kind who comes along once in a generation, who had taken the humble burger to new heights.
The foodie in the local paper said he’d taken one bite and wept. A guy from the NY Times had gotten through half a burger and lamented that he’d never be able to review another burger again because they would all be inferior and remind him of this. There were even rumors online that the burger was so delicious that at least six people had orgasmed while eating and it had saved no less than three marriages.
The restaurant had exploded in popularity. It was all over the news and social media. Cooking shows were coming from around the world to film episodes there. It was impossible to get in, with lines around the block the first two months they’d been open. Kai had been on a waiting list to get in for over ten weeks. He loved hamburgers. As far as he was concerned, they were America’s greatest contribution to global culture.
That Saturday, he’d finally arrived at the restaurant. Crammed into a chair in a space that was wall-to-wall people in various stages of awe and delight, he’d received his burger like it was the holy grail. He wasn’t one of those people who took photos of everything and put it online. He wanted to fully immerse himself in the joy of the moment. He just sat and stared at the way the bun had been perfectly toasted and smelled the sensual scents of savoury roasted meat and melted cheese. Delicately taking the hamburger in both hands, mouth watering, he’d slowly brought it to his lips, opened his mouth, and prepared to take a bite out of the greatest food experience of his life.
Before he could, the most searing and unimaginable pain ever had torn through him. He’d felt himself get ripped out of his body, burned alive, then flung screaming and on fire through the cosmos for who knew how long before slamming into darkness. Then he’d woken up, full of ghostly pain from whatever soul-wrenching ordeal he’d gone through.
And he’d discovered that he was now a gremlin.
Yep, just like the old movies, but slightly bigger. Dark green skin? Check. Mouth full of sharp teeth? Yep! He had four fingers on each hand, three toes on each foot, and all of them ended in nasty little claws. The only thing remotely akin to his old body was the fact that he was still humanoid. Sure, the thing hanging between his legs, halfway to his knees, was proportionally gargantuan compared to what he’d been born with as a human, but who the hell cared because he now stood only knee high, and so his cock was the size of a woman’s thumb and even if size didn’t matter, which, in his unfortunate previous experience, it sure as hell did, what kind of woman was going to sleep with him now since he was a frickin’ gremlin!
Worse, his god-tier hamburger was gone!
He’d spent most of the past three days searching in all directions for some sign of civilization, desperate for it and terrified of it at the same time, starving because he didn’t want to eat grubs or beetles or whatever else could be found crawling around the forest floor. There’d been a lot of hours spent screaming up at the sky, demanding whatever entity had brought him here show itself and apologize and take Kai the hell back home! When those cries for help and mercy and rants of furious promises of retribution had gone unanswered, he’d stumbled over this cave and decided to hole up, literally, in the dank space. He hadn’t ventured far since, in large part because an owl-bear — half-owl and half-bear — had come rambling along, and Kai did not want to end up as food.
Now, here he was, staring up at the first human, the first person he’d seen since coming here, and they wanted to sell him some kind of… He squinted at the things under the man’s cloak. “You want me to buy a what now?” To be fair, the shock of this encounter might have slowed his brain down, especially after the soul trauma and ongoing emotional rollercoaster of his arrival.
The man exclaimed, “A dungeon!” He reached under his cloak and pulled free one of the cubes. Bending over a little further because Kai was so short, he held it out before Kai’s eyes like he was displaying a fantastic treasure. “You’re very own, magical, grow-it-yourself dungeon. Trust me, it’s a steal.” He chuckled as if laughing at his own joke.
Kai looked up at the salesman. He looked down at himself. At the salesman. At himself. At the salesman. In a tone that clearly asked, ‘Are you stupid? , he stated, “I’m a gremlin.”
“Good for you, my friend. Self-awareness is key to personal growth.”
“I’m a monster. Standing in a cave the size of a car. Not even a big car, more like one of those mini cars they drive in Europe because the roads are so tiny. A tiny little cave with nothing but air and some dirt in it. Does it look like I have any money to buy anything?”