Chloe was out of bed and looking like herself again by the time I returned, and again she seemed determined to show me what she had found. I took the DSD, laid down on the couch opposite her, put on the Dream Engine, and entered the Dream State menu.
“Alright, what area do we start off in?”
“Heaven Gateways,” Chloe said.
In my blue vision, I focused on the option for Heaven. With a rush of manipulated pixels and the feeling of being sucked through a tube, we appeared on the interconnected bridges of Heaven’s Landing Strip. The landing strip was a wide and treacherous series of bridges with gaps and holes that one could fall through if not careful. Its many bridges hung like a spider web caught in the wind at the very edge of the airborne city, creaking as it leaned out over the drop.
The point of this area was simple. Each bridge led off to one of Heaven’s many dungeons. The simpler dungeons had Gateways closer in. Even now I could see the glowing circles surrounding me, color-coded for the dungeons they would lead to. The harder the dungeon, the harder the Gateway was to get to, so not just any noob could enter them willy-nilly.
The place was absolutely packed; some of the avatars waiting on the bridges were being knocked off its edge. Some even had pets with them, a variety of small creatures from birds to cats that went with the new Niche known as the Tamer. It made sense that they would be used, as this was the Dream State’s newest expansion setting, and it was no wonder so many players wanted to try out the new dungeons after its grand re-opening. After all, no one had found Malcolm’s Ghost in any of the other dungeons, so rumor naturally had it that he was somewhere in Heaven.
A ghost in Heaven. Makes sense, really.
Chloe appeared and automatically rushed toward one of the longest bridges. I knew exactly where we were going now.
I followed after her, the boards groaning underfoot. “So, the Engine Room then?”
I didn’t have very fond memories of that dungeon. I had only entered it once, when I had been tracking down Chloe’s brother, Lucas, during the Screamers’ invasion of Heaven. I had barely made it to the second area before the piercing scream had taken me out of the game. As a result, I had lost my Captain’s Coat and Siena’s rare Color Blade, the Ruby Edge.
“I’ve spent the last week going over each dungeon that Lucas was seen in to find out if he left any messages there,” Chloe said. “I searched them all head to toe to see if there was any text or code that would hint at where he’s being kept.”
I nodded, suddenly realizing why she looked so tired. “So you were up all night searching the Engine Room?” I couldn’t help but grin. “Surviving in there by yourself must have been tricky.”
“I had a few players from the other side of the globe helping me out. After all, you need a pretty big party to fight the Ifrit boss, and even then, you usually win mostly out of sheer luck.”
“You managed to beat it?”
She scoffed. “No, but that wasn’t why I was here, remember? Are you even listening to me?”
I raised my hands. “Yeah, I was just asking.”
The terse demeanor she had possessed when I had first met her seemed to be returning, and I couldn’t help but think her brother had been its original cause. After all, it had been barely a year after that incident that I had met her and she seemed to loosen up with every day that I had spent with her.
I guess I was a distraction from him . . . for a time.
“I did, however, find something that could be a message from him.”
I nodded. “What did it say?”
She shook her head again. “I can’t make heads or tails of it, really. Just let me show you.”
A board broke under my feet and I jumped to the next plank. Chloe smirked at me as she skipped over the gaps one foot at a time like she was playing hopscotch. I shook my head, knowing I was going to lag behind if I didn’t do something.
I used my Key Trigger, a small shortcut menu at the corner of my vision, to summon my Bird’s Eye. A glowing circular platform appeared and I jumped on, nearly losing my balance on the bridge as I did so. I leaned forward onto the platform, causing it to hover over the broken bridge to catch up with her.
“Hey, that’s cheating!” Chloe bellowed.
“Playing around isn’t why we’re here, remember?” I returned, giving her a taste of her own medicine.
She scowled. “You’re no fun.”
Being a Range Niche, the lightest and quickest of the Niches, Chloe simply leaped into a flip and landed next to me on my Bird’s Eye, giving me an unimpressed look. I flew us to where the bridge ended, leading out into thin air. At its end, a rope was tied to the final plank, which hung down over the drop. Here, players would have to swing down and into the circular portal, which radiated a deep red glow beneath the bridge.
I flew down before the Gateway and took a big breath in. “Okay, let’s—”
Chloe didn’t wait for me to finish my deliberation. She leaped from the platform and vanished with a swirl of mist into the red circle. I shook my head and followed suit, taking a two-step run up to counter the weight of my Boiled Leather cloak. One second I was falling toward the sea miles below, and the next I was hitting the steel grated floor and regretting not doing an Onjira dungeon before coming here.
The heat inside was immense and clung to my skin. Steam burst from pipes all around. Chloe ran through a billowing cloud of it, and I chased after her. As I emerged, I saw her blasting away at the Steam Specters with her specialty wind bullets. The Specters looked like the Workers, which were also monsters here. That was one thing I noticed about Heaven in comparison to the other eras in the Dream State, the monsters always appeared to be some corrupt humanoid, devil, angel, or ghost. Even so, with their tool belts and workmen’s helmets, the ghosts were unsettlingly lifelike.
I equipped my Sapphire Edge, and its blue glow lit the dark corridor. However, before I could assist her with a few Shockwaves, Chloe had already cleared the room. She even went so far as to blast one ghost that came out of the wall as soon as it appeared. She strolled casually on to the next area.
“Holy cow, you’re not kidding!” I exclaimed as I caught up with her. “You must have done this dungeon enough times to know it like the back of your hand.”
“Not all of these monsters work on RNG, so they can be easily predicted. For instance, before we reach the end of this next corridor, two or three Workers are going to appear holding massive wrenches.”
I stared ahead, and sure enough, as we made to walk down the next corridor, two lumbering mechanics appeared to block our entrance.
“What’s the best way to beat these guys?” I asked. I hadn’t run into them my first time here.
“Physical combat.”
I grinned and walked forward, raising my Color Blade. “Now we’re talking.”
As Chloe blew back one with a shot, I engaged the second. To put it bluntly—or sharply in this case—Color Blades were the most overpowered weapons in the game, at least to my knowledge. They were powerful, sharp enough to cut through anything, and impervious to damage, which spared their wielders having to go to a forge to repair them.
So I was surprised that the wrench wasn’t simply cut in half when I struck it, as most weapons would have been. This was said to be one of the most difficult dungeons in the Dream State, but I thought that was only because it had the most powerful boss. Dungeons were usually balanced out depending on their strength, and the Ifrit was top tier. It seemed the Engine Room was an exception to this rule.
I forced down the large wrench and then cut off the engineer’s head, ducking just as another wrench was swung at me. I turned to see a third Worker had lumbered out of the shadows of the corner. I ground my teeth in embarrassment that I had missed him. Chloe had told me that it could be three of them. Agitated, I clenched my hand into a fist and moved it in a circular motion while thinking of ice.
My Ice Coffin spell worked immediately, trapping the man. I recovered and began hacking away at the block like I was carving some off to cool my drink. As I finished him off with a Fire Weave, I turned back to see Chloe sprint up and jump, landing with her knees on the first Worker’s shoulders. She fired two shots from her revolvers into his forehead before landing and reloading. The Worker fell to the grating and vanished.
“All done?” she asked.
I nodded, and she moved on. Again, I followed on her tail, and we came out into an open area where a massive rotating gear worked like an escalator to get us down to the second level.
“How many floors does this place go down?” I asked, wiping the sweat that continued to bead on my brow.
“Nine, each one harder than the last.”
“Whoa!” My shout echoed off the walls.
“I think it’s supposed to represent the nine circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno.” She looked around and raised an eyebrow. “But that’s just a theory. The first floor is supposed to represent Limbo and there are ghosts here, but . . .”
I stuck out my bottom lip. “The Christians were pretty harsh on non-believers back in the day. For all we know, this could’ve been what they considered lenient.”
“Anyway, we only have to go to the second floor. It was where you confronted him after you chased him down.”
I looked around and pointed a thumb over my shoulder. “Pretty sure it was just around the corner here.”
She nodded and we moved off again to the area where I had managed to corner Lucas.
Chloe moved to the wall. “I found this when I made a more thorough scan on my way back up. That’s another annoying thing about this dungeon; there’s no Gateway at the bottom, so you have to fight your way back up.”
She pointed to the bottom of the wall, but I didn’t see anything there. I frowned at her, and she gestured again.
“You have all the admin privileges, right?” she asked.
“I think so.”
I didn’t know what tools she was using to do it, but she crouched and somehow began stripping back some of the visual layers of the wall. I didn’t know if I could see it because I was Hero rank, or if I could do this myself, but as the layers of the metal wall continued to be swiped away, I noticed something begin to appear.
It was a single short sentence written over a collection of glowing numbers. It read:
“What does that mean?”
Chloe shook her head. “I can only guess, but look at the way it’s done. There’s a number for each layer.” It seemed like a jumbled mess to me, and if there was a meaning to be found, I wasn’t the one to find it.
“I’m no good at coding, either. We’ll have to run this past Dice.”
She sighed and rose again. “You’re right. Son of a . . . I should have set up a recording before coming back in here. Would’ve been way easier than trying to remember it.”
A sudden idea came to me as I remembered what Windsor had told me during a meeting we’d had a few days ago. “There might be something I can do to help, then.”
I gestured for her to move aside and looked at the area.
She shifted over. “What are you doing?”
“Using some new software Windsor told me about. You know how in order to record gameplay in the Dream State it had to be stored on the Dream Engine and be set up beforehand?”
It was a rhetorical question. Everyone knew how competitive players or streamers could use their engine to transfer first-person video recordings onto the Internet. Chloe rolled her wrists as a signal for me to continue.
“Well, ever since the Dream Engine was invented, people have been insisting that Wona create some software that could record their dreams so they could watch them at a later date. I have a prototype of it, and it allows me to record anything at any time with a word.”
Chloe smiled. “Seriously? Well, that would save me from having to remember the code.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Then, trying to remain as still as possible, I said, “Record.”
In my vision, the area I had been focusing on rose up over itself, shrinking into a smaller copy. It was rather disorientating. I selected to save it, and it vanished from my vision. Being that all the latest versions of the Dream Engines could live stream directly to the Internet, there was a near infinite memory capacity for video, but to prevent it from being hacked into, I saved the photo to the helmet’s memory card, which I could give to Chloe when we got out.
“Alright, done.” I stood up and faced her.
Chloe swayed up to my side and whispered, “My hero.”
I shook my head in amusement at the gentle sarcasm in her voice. “Okay . . . let’s get out of here so we can show it to Dice.”
Before I could go to leave, she pulled me to one corner of the room. There, she found an alcove that was surrounded by thick pipes. I had gotten used to the heat, but as she drew closer to me, I felt my face go red anew. Her skin had a slick sheen from the humidity, and as she looked up at me, I couldn’t help but stare at her avatar’s lips.
“You know . . . we can always do this when we get out again.”
“I know.” She smiled and looked abashed. “But there’s something about making out in a dream that makes it more intense.”
She kissed me, and I could taste the sweat on her lips. She was warm and petite. It felt like we were making out in a sauna, and there was something about it that made my head swim. Without warning, she suddenly pulled out one of her revolvers, aimed it over my shoulder, and fired. I winced at the sound right next to my ear. I thought I might go deaf from the high-pitched ringing in my head.
“Ow! What was that?!”
She smiled guiltily and then laughed. “Sorry, a ghost appeared behind you and I didn’t want it to interrupt us.”
She pulled me in again, and suddenly the pain in my ear no longer mattered.