Jay, as usual, was out instantly, sprawled diagonally across his mattress like someone had unplugged him. Danny snored into his pillow with a soft, repetitive whuff. Upstairs some of the guys from Connor’s team had been laughing and playing cards late into the morning, but even they had long since gone to sleep.
Unfortunately Alex couldn’t shut his brain off.
He was both excited and nervous. Talking with Rowan and The Wylde Bunch at the Silver Gate had solidified a plan in his head that would take care of any hesitation he had using the name Side Quest Heroes here, but he was still going to have to pitch it to Valentina at some point.
He stared at the ceiling and started to go over it all again. It was going to have to be perfect if he expected Dungeon Inc. to change. They weren’t just going to do this as a personal favour to some new recruit. It had to make sense for everyone, and Alex really thought it did.
Right now there were already too many teams. Too many teams meant too many arcs and too many storylines for viewers to follow. And it was only going to get worse. The whole thing was collapsing under its own weight and according to Marcus and Rowan, they were feeling more pressure to try and capture viewers than they were to close dungeons. And that was going to get someone hurt eventually.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just math. Attention was finite. Teams were essentially infinite. Eventually the system was going to buckle. He doubted anyone at Dungeon Inc. realized how big their show was going to get when they started.
The better way, for viewers, would be to treat this like a sports league. Sports teams can create strong community bonds, but that breaks down if there are too many. Leagues know this and strictly regulate the number of teams across every sport. So a better system would be to set a finite number of teams, called guilds, and then organize the existing teams as squads under those guild banners. It will organize the fans and bring them together.
Afterwards guilds would vie for and recruit trainees from each new cohort. There would have to be some sort of ranking of players, or adventurers. Some kind of grading system so guilds knew what they were recruiting. The ranking system would also dovetail really well with the fan base who would no doubt argue over every player's ranking.
Alex shifted onto his side and exhaled slowly. His mind began to sort through the information looking for anything he had missed. Everything had to be air tight if he was going to present this to Valentina.
So, problems with the current system:
- One cohort of two classes introduced every six weeks.
- This is at the point of causing viewer overwhelm
- Older teams overshadowed by newcomers because they don’t have the same diversity of classes
- Existing teams are starting to spend more time chasing screentime than worrying about the dangers around them
- Adventurers occasionally leave the show, leaving holes in existing team rosters
- No real method to compare one adventurer to the next
- Very little consistency across what all the various teams are up to
- Not a scalable system and it’s already nearing its limit
Solution:
- Collapse teams into guilds
- Make guilds the anchor identities, functioning like sports teams
- Teams become squads within a guild, but can mix up members every mission
- Rank players individually, which allows guilds to recruit, and fans to get behind power players
- Guilds can draft new recruits based on their power levels or the classes they need
- It simplifies the narrative and adds complexity
- Completely scalable. Guilds can handle a large number of members and if its ever needed more guilds can be added down the road
Alex sat up carefully so he wouldn’t wake Jay or Danny with his squeaky bed frame, summoned his HUD, and brought up the internal corporate wiki. He still hadn’t spent much time exploring the wiki since he learned about it. He’d just been too busy between training and just getting used to this new life he was in.
The wiki appeared before him, automatically shifting into a white font, making it easier to read in the dark room. The front page of the wiki contained links to main categories like Flora, Fauna, Geography and more.
Below that was a large picture showing a herd of strange deer-like animals with unicorn type horns, fleeing across a sandy grassland and chased by a number of blurry shapes the size of small lions. Alex squinted at the image. One of the predators in the back had paused its pursuit and was looking straight at the camera with glowing green eyes. It looked like a large, powerful cat crossed with a lizard. It had scales instead of hair, and a long sweeping tail.
Alex wondered if the photographer had to flee after the picture was taken.
The headline read:
Today in Coastmarch. 30 km from the Asterian Ocean.
Alex had no idea where Coastmarch was. He scrolled to the bottom of the page and found a company info link. He clicked on it and browsed through the little boxes describing each of the departments that existed at Alpha Base. He scrolled down further and found a corporate policies section. Just above that was a corporate mandates link. He clicked that.
The next page was full of salesy type information regarding Dungeon Inc.’s goals on Earth3. The TV show was a feather in their cap, but it was only a way to get more and more bodies into the world and train them to handle themselves. They wanted to carve out a little kingdom here and then start mining for rare resources in the hills and mountains to the north.
Below all that though was their USP and corporate motto type information. Alex stopped to read. Number four caught his eye.
DUNGEON INC — GUIDING PRINCIPLE #04
If you see a better way: share it.
Innovation is everyone’s responsibility.
He paused.
Rowan had said something similar last night at the tavern: “If you spot a problem with how things are done, pitch a better way. Producers eat that up.”
Of course, he was talking about bad uniforms, not reorganizing the entire structure of the show… Alex continued to scroll.
At the bottom of the page another line caught his eye:
We reward ideas, not seniority.
He bookmarked that page. And a few others. And made a mental note to spend time on the wiki to learn more about this sort of stuff.
He checked the time.
2:06 a.m.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Groaning, he drafted a simple meeting request to Valentina before he could second guess himself:
Proposal re: restructuring team-based model to improve narrative cohesion, retention, and long-term scalability.
He reread it twice. Still sounded professional. Probably not drunk and tiredly unhinged. He hoped.
He hit send and rolled over to try and get some sleep. He wanted to go talk to Valentina now, while his brain was swimming in the idea, but he probably wouldn’t get a meeting for days, or more.
Within a minute his HUD flashed, indicating a message had come through. He opened the alert and read.
Approved.
Sunday — 0830
SCRY Executive Floor
— V.
Alex read it again. Okay, maybe not next week after all. 0830 tomorrow was just over 6 hours from now… who needed sleep?
He lay back down, staring at the message glowing faintly above him. He felt short of breath and could feel his heart beat against his ribs.
Don’t be dumb he thought. He could do this.
Hands against his chest he took a deep breath and began practicing his breathing exercise. Instantly the mana in the room appeared to him, floating gently from one side of the room to the other. Usually he had to work at it for a bit before he could see the mana and he was meditating to combat his anxiety. Maybe it was because of his anxiety that he saw the mana in the room so quickly? He didn’t know the answer so pushed the thought away. And just focused on breathing.
After a few minutes the gears in his head shifted again, easing back into place. First, he knew he could make a persuading argument to Valentina. He had been over every angle of the idea and couldn't find any holes in the idea.
Second, Valentina wasn’t someone who wasted time. She was busy and always on her way out the door to the ‘next thing.’ If she accepted his meeting request immediately, it meant she took proposals seriously and was going to hear him out. So no need to be nervous.
Of course, it's not like that thought ever actually reduced anyone's nervousness.
But, practice never hurt, and could only help his nerves. So he rehearsed the pitch silently until the words lined up cleanly in his head
It was a solid plan. He was ready.
Eventually exhaustion tugged him under.
Despite the lack of sleep, Alex woke 10 minutes before his alarm.
For a moment he wasn’t even sure he had slept—he woke up still going over his speech and had difficulty syncing up the time in his head. His body felt heavy but his mind was crisp and focused.
Pale early light slipped through the windows, brushing across the floorboards in thin silver bands.
Around him, the others slept on.
Alex dressed quietly, pulling on a clean set of trainee grays, and strapped on his belt. He checked his HUD again to confirm the meeting time. The little confirmation icon at the corner of his vision had not changed and was apparently not part of a dream.
Approved.
Sunday — 0830
SCRY Executive Floor
— V.
It still didn’t quite feel real.
He crept down the stairs to the main floor and opened the secret door in the wall that led to the staircase down into the tunnels below. Stepping in, the door slid shut behind him. The village was built on a hill with the Silver Gate Inn sitting right near the top at the north end of town. The closer you got the further underground you were and the more steps you had to climb. The Trainee hut was near the southern palisade wall, near the training yards, so the tunnels were closer to the surface. Still, the tunnels were quite a bit below the hut and it was almost 30 steps down before he stepped out into the cool led lights of the undercity.
He made a quick stop by the cafeteria and helped himself to a large paper cup full of coffee and walked towards the SCRY offices while going over his presentation points in his head.
He had spent enough time down here now that he didn’t need help from the HUD, but he saw the option beside the meeting verification and activated it anyway. The yellow dotted line that appeared ahead of him and ran away down the long hall was comforting.
Eventually he turned a corner and saw the simple sign over a bank of sliding glass doors:
SCRY Offices.
The doors opened as he approached, which he took as a good sign, and the dotted line ran down a line of cubicles to an unassuming door near the back. As he walked down the aisle, none of the two dozen staff so much as looked up at him. They were all busy on their computers, most of the ones that Alex could see were watching clips of the Dungeon Inc. show. The walls in the room were a plastic composite material that looked a little like house siding. The air was cooler here than it was out in the tunnels.
This office was the heart of the TV series.
A few hallways branched off the main aisle he was walking down. Each marked with glowing lines on his HUD with a little legend in the bottom corner: blue for Operations, teal for Analytics, purple for Live Edit, Silver for the Data Centre. The gold line for Executive pulsed steadily and led him deeper, his little yellow dotted line ran right down the centre of it.
Alex swallowed, palms suddenly a little damp.
There were a few glass-walled rooms at the back of the main office and he could see technicians at holographic consoles, fingers flying as they edited multi-angle feeds from across Earth3. One room displayed a giant map of the continent with hundreds of tiny lights—teams, hazards, active dungeon sites maybe. Another was like a small conference room and held a handful of producers in oversized headsets debating camera angles and arguing over which cohort needed to be worked in for the narrative of the episode.
It was all motion and story. This was the machinery of the show.
He reached the door and realized it was another stairway, going up this time. A little plaque on the door simply read Executive.
Alex pushed it open and walked up the stairs, which opened up in a small round foyer with a number of unmarked doors.
In the centre of the room sat a young woman with a serious face. She watched Alex with an unblinking stare as he entered the room. It was a big room and he was too far away to make a greeting anything but awkward, so he simply smiled at the woman as he approached.
He closed on the large curved desk, but before he could say anything the woman asked, “Alex Mercer?”
“Yes.” He nodded to her.
“Ms. Cross will see you now, thank you for being prompt.”
“Oh, of course. Thank you.” Alex looked at his minimized HUD, it was only 0817. His meeting wasn’t for another 13 minutes. He was suddenly glad he had shown up early.
He looked around the room at all the doors, then, finally, back at the woman. “Um, which door?”
The woman, who had not shifted her expression at all, turned and gestured at the door behind her. The centre door. Which made sense. He thanked the woman who only slightly nodded in return, and moved around the desk towards Valentina's door. Or Ms. Cross’s door apparently.
It was then that he noticed both the gold line on his HUD and the yellow dotted line from the meeting request both terminated outside her door. He rolled his eyes at his stupidity and, taking a deep breath, knocked on the door.
***
Dungeon Inc. staff at Alpha Base like to say our primary goal on this new world is discovery.
And there is a lot of effort put into discovery. This world is full of wilderness, ruins, monsters, and also enormous kingdoms and empires with trade routes and long history. It’s exciting. We are often mapping out places no one has mapped before. I never really understood humanity’s need to explore the unknown before coming here; but now it’s in my blood.
Valentina has been great. She listens to us and, in her own way, takes care of all the adventurers, making sure we have what we need. It is ultimately self-serving I suppose. She wants to build an entertainment empire. But I think we are lucky that she firmly believes that taking care of all of us is the best way to ensure she gets what she wants. That matters.
Still, she isn’t the one who worries me.
There are others above her. Executives who rarely come to Earth-3 and who only look at this world as a resource engine. Ore veins instead of mountains. Biomes instead of homes. Lumber instead of wilderness. Under the surface of our little medieval village, there is a lot of prep work going into supporting a very different future. A secret foundation being laid for what comes next.
I don’t think most adventurers see it yet. We’re too busy surviving the next run, chasing the next contract, celebrating the wins and enjoying the celebrity back home that comes along with it all.
I love Dungeon Inc. and the show we are facilitating with all our work here. I only wish it could always be like this.
But once the company decides it has everything in place to facilitate resource extraction at the level they are clearly planning… I don’t know how long the show can continue once that all starts.
Personal Journal
Iron Fangs
Elira Renaldi, Ranger
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