Scholarly Entry #V28-473-Df2:
Non-Delvers Residing Within the Underfold
There is, as far as known records go, no evidence that the System has ever forced anyone to become a Delver. Coerced? Arguably. Bamboozled? Frequently. But never forced. The process remains, curiously, a matter of choice.
The prevailing theory (and by “prevailing” we mean “repeated often enough in pubs to become credible”) is that it can’t. Becoming a Delver requires accepting the System’s “gift.” And like all gifts given by unknowable cosmic forces, it comes wrapped in layers of small print so fine you’d need an electron microscope and a philosophy degree to even begin to argue with it.
As such, many perfectly sensible individuals have, upon being presented with this glittering opportunity, chosen to respond with a polite “No thank you,” and moved on with their day. In fact, most people who are not of the Surface Layers or newly integrated worlds tend to choose this option.
For those born in the Underfold, signing the Delver contract is usually about as enticing as ripping one’s own eye out—perhaps entertaining to a particular subset of individuals, but avoided by most.
For while the Delvers—those brave, occasionally unlucky souls who did sign the dotted line (sometimes before noticing it was actually a M?bius strip)—get the fame, fortune, and the sort of endorsement deals usually reserved for talking cartoon animals, most Underfolders—especially those who grew up watching Delvers on reality broadcasts where someone inevitably gets turned into a chair—have become rather adept at skimming the cream without volunteering for the milking.
But that, of course, is a topic for another day.
***
"Where did that blasted brat go?"
Lionel—dignified in the way a man can only be while gasping for breath and covered in mud—pushed his hair out of his face.
Neither the mist-choked road to his left, or the equally disreputable trail to his right, offered anything so civilised as a clue.
The village shouldn’t have been this complicated.
It had all the architectural consistency of a bad dream. Every building he ducked through deposited him back in more of the same. Every twisting path he passed down seemed to lead back onto itself. And even climbing onto the crumbling rooftops hadn’t given him the slightest sense of “out”.
And now, he couldn’t even hear his pursuers anymore.
There was something obvious he was missing. He knew it. The System didn’t do subtlety—it liked blinking quest prompts and glowing arrows and scenarios that smelled faintly of brimstone and performance metrics.
The problem was that, as of that moment, he wasn’t privy to such information.
Lionel exhaled through his teeth. “You want me to sign that contract, is that it?”
The System, of course, said nothing. It didn’t have to. It had known Lionel even before he was born, and it had been there with him every minute since. It knew he would sooner die than become a Delver.
Which left only one conclusion. One horrible, inevitable, deeply unsettling conclusion.
It wanted him to team up with her.
“Of all the Delvers you could’ve sent my way, you chose her?”
Once more, the System said nothing.
“Were you bribed by my family?” he muttered. “A final, passive-aggressive love letter written in vague promises and sweet-sounding deals? Were you paid to do this?”
His Dungeon, painstakingly claimed and legally—more or less—acquired, had imploded spectacularly within minutes of him claiming it. His carefully squirreled-away pocket funds, unreachable by his family, had vanished in a cascade of bribes, fines, and fees, all leading up to said Dungeon.
And now, here he was. Broke. Muddy. And being slowly herded towards cooperating with Entropy herself. Even the most imaginative doom-prophets couldn’t have done a better job writing up his demise.
Lionel pressed a hand to his temple and sighed.
When the System—capital S, as in Systemic, Schematic, and occasionally Sadistic—decided to start arranging things, you had two options: rage against the machine, or admit the machine had better lawyers.
And Fate, he suspected, had a sense of humour shaped entirely by ironic detachment and long-term contracts.
“Well, too bad,” he muttered, glancing around the damp village. “Because I’ve got no clue where that brat—”
CRASH.
In the distance, an entire rooftop had just disappeared from view, accompanied by a rising chorus of hissing, chittering, and furious clicking.
The sound of all the things that had been chasing him, now preoccupied with something else. Or, more likely, someone else.
“…Know what? Fuck you, actually,” Lionel said loudly and with the full emotional weight of a man addressing a vast, uncaring System. “I’m going to find a way out of here on my own, thank you very much.”
He took a decisive right turn—away from whatever was happening over there, away from the angry insect orchestra, and away from the suspiciously dramatic narrative cue that could only point towards one thing: her.
He needed to wrap this up before he became permanently associated with that smug, pink bundle of chaos.
***
Annabell hadn’t planned for the building to fall down. That would’ve required a plan—which generally involved thinking ahead, coordination, and some mild concern for structural integrity. Annabell, by contrast, had simply existed nearby at the precise moment the rickety old shack decided—with absolutely no involvement of her own—to give up on life.
If the shrieking things now trapped underneath it had objections, they could take it up with the building’s architect, its neglectful landlord, or gravity. Preferably in that order, and without making any bold assumptions about causality, proximity, and likely perpetrators.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
With all the innocence of a toddler in a sticky kitchen, she nudged a loose bit of masonry—one that she definitely hadn’t tripped over moments earlier—back into the vague vicinity of where it used to be.
It didn't help, of course. There was no wall left to support. Just a small mountain of rubble, a great deal of mould, and several flailing, slimy limbs attempting to escape their newfound prison.
“You really ought to be careful around here, Wallace,” she said as she reversed her trajectory away from the damning scene. “These buildings are just waiting to fall over. Could happen to anyone. Wouldn’t want you to get—”
Her foot snagged on another piece of rubble, just as a scythe-shaped gout of water introduced itself to the airspace her neck had been occupying mere moments ago.
The blast missed. Her head remained attached.
One of the floppy bunny ears on her already battle-weary sweater did not fare so well. It lolled to the side, nearly severed, hanging on by one heroic thread determined to see this journey through to the bitter end.
“—hurt,” she concluded with a huff, turning toward the source of the rude interruption.
Her glare fell upon a lobster looking creature that had seemingly grown up in all the wrong sort of company. It was wet, crustacean-shaped, and it had very clearly just spat at her. With intent.
“Hey!” Annabell said. “That is rude. Honestly, this why you don’t get invited anywhere. You turn up all crabby and leave behind a trail of shellfish trauma.”
Nudging Wallace with a snicker, she barely had time to dodge out of the way as a second blade of water sliced through the air.
A frothing hiss followed as more figures began emerging from the rubble. Pulling, oozing, and generally making a strong case for property damage being the least of her worries.
Others began to spill over the wreckage from behind.
Across the Underfold, there exist few such direct declarations of war as excessive pun usage. This, naturally, didn’t deter Annabell.
“Way too clammed up, aren’t they?”
Two more gouts of water sliced through the air, but Annabell had already turned around and ran, cackling as she slipped and slid down the rain-washed street—a retinue of irate marine nightmares chasing, clacking, and hissing at her heels.
Life really wasn’t so bad when it just involved bloodthirsty creatures and perilous terrain.
No rude individuals to drag her out of bed.
No one trying to drown her under the pretence of a “bath.”
Just monsters, mud, and the distant possibility of fish-based trauma.
“Oh, how about this one,” she puffed between increasingly frequent gasps, moments before the corner she'd just rounded exploded in a spectacular splashkaboom, sending shards of wood and suspicious-looking bricks everywhere.
Annabell spun, seized a net from the same wall that’d just been turned into mostly decorative mulch, and gave it a firm tug.
It was damp, slimy, and the sort of colour that strongly implied it had last seen use somewhere around the last century.
Behind her, an unholy blend of slippery eel and something that might once have been a person, followed her around the shattered corner.
It lunged, mouth snapping.
“You think you’re fintastic, huh?”
With reckless enthusiasm, she flung the net with what could charitably be described as technique. But a notification had already spun itself into existence at the edge of her vision, and that was all she needed:
Gremlin’s Jury-Rigged Arsenal:
“Snare the Broken Tide”
Type: Control / Debuff
Effect: Throws the net to entangle enemies. Enemies caught in the net suffer reduced movement speed and have a chance to “Trip” if they try to escape forcefully.
WARNING: Net is tattered. 50% chance entanglement will fail.
Synergy: Works best on shipwrecked, drowned, or aquatic enemies (and those with delusions of nautical adequacy).
Given the general wobbliness of her aim and the vintage condition of the net, there was absolutely no reason it should have worked.
Which, naturally, meant it did.
The net unfurled mid-air like a bedraggled opera curtain and caught the deep-sea abomination mid-pounce, wrapping around it with a wet, offended shlorp.
“Stay in your own tank, sweetie,” Annabell said, smugly flicking her nose. “Or should I say: shrimply unimpressive. Or maybe—wait, ehm…—squidn’t even try! Or–”
The universe, unable to tolerate any more seafood puns, intervened.
There was a splintering crash as the rest of the building exploded into an airborne career in lumberjacking, courtesy of a claw roughly the size of karma.
“Oh Cod!” Annabell yelped, performing a cartwheel that operated more on pure instinct and force of habit than conscious thought.
She tumbled across the mud-slick street, narrowly avoiding the snapping appendage that seemed intent on having a word with her spine.
Attached to said claw, currently emerging through the building’s new ventilation, was a creature that looked like the result of an unholy alliance between a slug, a drowned troll, and several regrettable evolutionary decisions.
One of its arms was clearly crab-inspired, overdeveloped to the point it could moonlight as a wrecking ball. The other arm was less showy but equally upsetting, bearing a resemblance to a human hand carved out of spite and forgotten ship parts.
It clenched around a rusted anchor that was already mid-swing, aiming directly for Annabell’s general existence.
“Want to slug it out, huh?” she chirped, throwing herself to the side. Because why merely step aside when you could perform a full-body mud dive that would impress both tacticians and circus clowns?
She paused, flat in the muck, squinting up. “Ah, dang it…‘way too sluggish’ was better, wasn’t it?”
The monster let out a gurgling roar.
The anchor rose for another swing, this one less “cautious threat” and more “annihilation with ambition.”
But Annabell was back on her feet, scrambling across the ground toward the nearest additions to her ever-growing pile of Probably Questionable Armaments.
“Don’t get too chummy, bud!” she declared, flinging the first item her fingers found like a carnival prize gone terribly wrong.
Gremlin’s Jury-Rigged Arsenal:
Chum Bucket – Throwable.
Effect: Guaranteed to attract sea monsters, large predators, and very confused fishermen. Use with caution. Or reckless glee. Your choice.
The bucket spun once, twice, and then exploded mid-air in a grotesque confetti of fish entrails and bad decisions.
“Because I’m not hooked on your personality!” she finished triumphantly, as she swung the next item with the flair of someone who had absolutely not read the label:
Gremlin’s Jury-Rigged Arsenal:
Fisherman’s Dredge – Special Weapon.
A rusted hook attached to the end of a 30-foot rope, made to bring up unforeseen treasures from the bottom of the sea.
Ability: Pulls the target toward the user, or the user toward the target—whichever is of lesser mass.
Warning! Check local gravitational constants before use.
As the chum bucket bounced off the slug-troll’s head in a burst of olfactory betrayal, the dredge’s hook buried itself firmly into the crabby claw of her eldritch pursuer.
All according to plan.
A plan made by someone who shouldn’t make plans.
Even as the slug-troll’s claw flexed violently around the dredge, it never once occurred to Annabell to let go of the rope she was clinging onto.
This, as any observer with an ounce of sense and at least two working eyes would have confirmed, was a mistake.
There was a sound like a yanked carpet, a yelp of pure regret, and a blur of screaming pink motion as Annabell was launched through the air.
One of her boots flew off mid-arc. The boot, it should be noted, did not survive.
On the other end of things, came the swinging claw which intercepted her somewhere around the general region of her everything.
Like a well-received serve, the impact knocked the breath out of her lungs, sent her HP gauge into an existential crisis, and flung her small, flailing frame through the air like a decorative skipping stone.
Her journey ended with a rain-sodden wall, which thoughtfully collapsed in protest. In a most Gremlin fashion, she entered through a door of her own.
Twice she bounced across a floor that smelt of mildew, despair, and things best left unlabelled, before coming to a halt in a position best described as “crumpled heap with accessories.”
Groaning, she lifted her head just enough to wheeze, “How… very shellfish of you, Wallace. You could’ve shared some of that. Or at least—
“Oh, shuck me sideways.”
Standing inside the building, looking precisely as regretful about the sudden turn of events as she felt, was—
Because of course it was.
—Mister Know-It-All, having narrowly stepped aside in time to avoid being flattened by a pink meteor in the shape of a gremlin.
There was a silence.
Lionel stared down at her.
Annabell looked back at him.
Somewhere behind her, the wall groaned awkwardly.
“Well,” she said with her best attempt at a smile, “Fancy seeing you here. Did the scenery lure you in?”
Outside, the slug-troll’s roar echoed across the village.
