Archive of Our Own

"There," Ruby said, dabbing the makeup on Mordecai's cheeks with rather more force than necessary. "Now you look beautiful."

The changeling girl thrust Donut's mirror in Mordecai's face, which did nothing because he was a cyclops this level and couldn't see his own reflection. Mordecai smiled anyway. "Pretty!"

"I'm getting better," Ruby said, changing her face to look like one of the Earth actresses from the stash of movies she and the other children had raided. The catalogue from the pre-collapse was extensive and they'd all settled on a bizarre series called Mary-Kate and Ashley. As a result, all the changelings had become obsessed with "twinning" and would mirror anyone else in the room. He'd only had room to hire six attendants but when they were all small and identical they looked like a positive swarm.

Jacobi, who looked like Ruby, and therefore like one of the dastardly Olsen twins, tugged on Mordecai's arm. "Can we go outside now and see the new floor?"

"You don't want to see the new floor," Mordecai assured him. "Don't you want to wait until the 9th floor when you can see the whole gang again?"

"I thought Carl was our gang?" Ruby asked.

Jacobi turned into a miniature Carl, albeit a Carl who was missing an arm from the shoulder down. The compression sickness didn't go away in different forms. "I want to see Carl again!"

Ruby quickly transformed to match Jacobi (if the AI was narrating this scene, Mordecai thought wryly, he'd say something around the lines of just assume that the changelings are always copying each other. The system really had gone primal early this crawl.) "Does Carl not want to see us?"

Mordecai hesitated, mentally clicking on the chat that was always running. He'd muted everything except for his own mentions. After becoming Donut's Manager, it had been thrilling, for the first few floors, to hear the Crawlers throughout the game. Thrilling and terrifying. Of course, now that he could see the light at the top of the branches of his indentureship, of course this is the season where he'd be roped in as Manager, where the AI would go primal early, where his Crawlers would be in the Top 10, the Top 5, the most important Crawlers in the game.

Of course this is the season where he'd start to care.

Once upon a time he'd been a Crawler with a team. Once upon a time he'd been a proud Skyfowl, with status and a flock. And a brother. And he knew how much those things hurt. He saw it in former Crawlers all around the Dungeons, in the bars and Clubs where they were able to gather. The struggle to give a shit about the current season, the endless seasons. Because to give a shit was to be hurt over and over again.

Millions of life forms entered every dungeon and within the first two floors only one in five survived. One in six. One in ten.

You can't beat those odds every year. Not even with a Carl.

But misplaced affection wasn't keeping him from letting the children explore the whole of the saferoom. In the last seven floors (eight floors? Who could count now?) he'd made peace with the fact that he was going to give a damn about the stupid cat and the man boiling over with his own sense of wild injustice. This crawl wasn't the first time Carl understood the world to be unfair. There were too many specials on too many tunnels delving into the man's backstory for Mordecai to believe that Carl had never been wronged before. But the change came over all Crawlers. The urge to save everyone eventually, inevitably, became the inescapable mortal desire to save oneself.

Odette. Chaco. The only innocent ones were the ones who died. What was that line from the Earth movie? Earthlings were obsessed with superheroes with unlimited armories. Mordecai wasn't positive that Batman was planted by the Greys, seeded into the pop culture to help those who got to the Crawl understand the mechanics, but he knew tropes when he saw it. Every seeded planet had tales of people with otherworldly powers, probably because every seeded planet believed in Gods. Anyway, it was one of the many morally gray characters in the Batman universe who said, "You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain."

That's what Mordecai worried about. The wild look in Carl's eyes. Even the flatness of Princess Donut's gaze. As if they were both being pulled under by the invisible tide.

"Let's wait until the next floor," Mordecai suggested, putting Ruby on the ground and forgetting that she'd smeared his face with makeup. "Then you can get to the others."

"On the flying house!"

"You will not be driving a flying house," Mordecai said, waggling a finger at her. He couldn't see his fingers either. He hated being a cyclops.

"Louis will let me!"

"Louis is an idiot."

Ruby's eyes flicked and for an instant Mordecai thought she was bringing up the chat to rat him out to Louis.

His heart hammered. No. Please. No, not again.

But she was looking at his bedroom door. "They're back."

.

Carl sat heavily on the bar stool next to Mordecai. After his father's house, after seeing his little brother, seeing the Changeling children stare unblinkingly at the tear-jerking ending of Coco was almost too much for him. Homesickness hit him like a wave, not like the river inside of him that was always begging to drown the world: this was more the gentle lapping of a lake, the heartache of the end of summer, knowing that it will be a long, long winter before you're able to dip your toes in again. He missed Seattle. Missed empty movie theaters and Pixar movies.

Mordecai passed him a beer. "It's non-alcoholic," the Manager promised. "It just seems like the moment for a beer."

Carl stared at the bottle. "I was in the Coast Guard. I can drink a beer."

"But you don't," Mordecai said. "And you don't like it when I do."

It was true enough, so Carl didn't argue, but it was also true that it was a moment for a beer and so he cracked open the top. Donut was watching Coco too, he noticed. She usually had snide things to say about animated films, enjoying the purer pasttimes of trashy reality television, but she was curled on Mongo's back, watching the screen with huge eyes.

He wanted to stay here. He wanted to pretend there weren't fights to be had outside. Hard topics to be discussed.

With Mordecai he always wanted to put it off until later. The Odette question. The Chaco question. The picture of his brother that was prominently displayed in any room that was created for him. After eight levels of the Dungeon Carl could make some assumptions. But... "The changelings..."

Mordecai the one-eyed monster opened his own beer. "I know the Princess is upset about the expense. I could make some potions that would get the gold—"

"You know I don't care about that. Donut doesn't either, deep down. She has a way of covering up emotions with ranting," Carl shook his head. "I feel like sometimes I'm the only person who remembers that she's only four years old. Cat years, but still a child."

"She's younger than the changelings here," Mordecai acknowledged. "Not by too much. Of course Galactic time runs slightly longer, but Helvetica there is perhaps five. She's the one who looks like an Olsen twin."

"They all look like Olsen twins," Carl said. "But Mordecai, it's not the expense. It's the fact that you felt like you had to keep it from us."

Mordecai snorted. "I've probably consumed more decades of Earth pop culture than you have, boy. I know an 'I'm not angry, I'm disappointed' line when I hear one."

Carl blinked at him. "The only thing that would make me angry is if you thought for a second that I'd rather leave those kids behind. I'd pay all the gold we've got to transport them all out of the dungeon. What do you think I keep meeting with my lawyer about?" A notification flew across his screen and Carl waved it away. "Fuck off! I'm not going to blab to the whole Galaxy about that."

"I wouldn't blame you, son," Mordecai said, taking a sip of his beer and wishing, not for the first time, that he was back in succubus form. Not only did succubi have helpful things like fingers that weren't the size of sausages, but their lack of tolerance made it easy to get absolutely wasted on one of these bottles of cheap beer. As a cyclops he could probably drink everything behind the bobca's bar and still not feel a thing. "You want to look after the Earthlings. Don't go feeling guilty about doing that."

No one could drown in guilt and indecision quite like a Crawler in the thick of the dungeon. Mordecai had seen it for centuries. Some players walked themselves right into boss battles and traps, or sat in bars waiting for the level to collapse on their heads. There were fringe groups out in the wider universe that talked about the sentient brain as being more powerful than any AI, even macro AIs like the one that governed the inner system, but any system under stress ended up cracking. Just look at the AIs themselves, going primal year after year.

"There's something deeper here, isn't there?" Carl said, looking at his untouched beer sweating on the counter. "Not just the politics. The NPCs recycled for centuries. And they're not all dungeon-made, are they?" He glanced at Mordecai, who glanced, automatically, at the ceiling as if waiting for someone to tell him off.

"You don't have to say anything. I'll just talk. Former crawlers mixed into the guards. The NPCs waking up. Everything happening on the accelerated timeline." Carl shook his head. "I have...well, I have some number of crawlers to worry about." He glanced at the spot above the screen that usually flashed the number of crawlers left. Mordecai had disabled it. Whatever number it was only made the wildness descend quicker.

Carl stuck out a hand. Even after all his upgrades and modifications he still looked quite human. Mordecai couldn't see his own hands. Couldn't see it dwarf the still-fleshy palm. Carl tugged on his arm and enfolded Mordecai into a hug. They weren't quite the right sizes, and Carl had his strength and Mordecai his tough skin, but it was a nice gesture all the same. A "bro-hug," Donut would call it, and probably ask Carl what exactly he got up to with all his buddies in the Coast Guard.

"Thanks for looking out for the kids," Carl said, gruffly.

If Mordecai's current body could manage it he would have turned quite pink. "I wasn't trying to hide it from you," he said. "I was just..."

"All these layers." Carl held Mordecai at arm's length. To the human's credit he had always been good at getting over his shock or disgust at the physical appearance of other life forms. He had a habit of glancing at the person's name, hovering over their head, and smiling at that. "Somebody's gotta focus on playing the hero."

"That'll still be you, in the end," Mordecai said. "You've got the outfit for a hero. I'm just the funny guy in the background who messes around in a lab. The necessary exposition." This would be easier with Princess, she always caught his movie tropes. "The exposition always gets killed off before the ending."

Something tugged on his arm. Ruby, undistractable, with her supply of goos and creams. "I need to practice," she demanded, reaching a brush towards his face.

"Of course," Mordecai said, kneeling down so the girl could touch him with the brush, light as a kiss. Carl watched them both with a smile beneath those depthless eyes.