Beth watched the total tick upward one item at a time. “I’ll pay you back. I promise.”

  “Stop it,” I replied. “You need all of this for work. You’re not bumming money to go see a movie.”

  To be a hostess, Beth needed two black polos, two black pants, a black belt, and a pair of black non-slip shoes. Having been in a position similar to hers, I knew this kind of purchase was inevitable. No matter what, she would need something to get started at a job, and this all felt pretty standard for a food service gig.

  “Now that we have work stuff out of the way,” I continued, “let’s get you some more casual clothes so you can have a life outside of your job.”

  Neither Beth nor I knew what styles were popular with eighteen-year-old women. Our church wasn’t Amish or anything as extreme, so Beth had a little bit of a fashion sense from what television she was allowed to watch. When my mom took her shopping, they bought simple, modest items. That gave Beth a chance to peek at other racks, making her slightly less clueless than I was.

  When someone Beth’s age who worked there offered to help, I thanked her profusely. Based on what she recommended, I would have most definitely given her all the wrong advice. I got the little sister eye roll a few times when I shared how much I wished certain items had more fabric.

  I was never a particularly protective brother when we were younger. Yet for some reason I felt compelled to suddenly have modesty standards, which applied only to Beth, naturally. I did my best to keep those irrational standards to myself.

  With a successful shopping trip behind us, we stopped for tea and talked a bit.

  “This place has coffee!” Beth said as she brought our cups to the table. “I can’t believe how expensive it is.”

  “A lot of coffee came out of South America before the gates. If that picks up again, the price could come down a bit.”

  “How do you know all this random stuff?” she asked.

  “I spend too much time on the internet,” I answered. “With that surveillance thing, that meant like twenty hours a day of scrolling.”

  “But yesterday was for some place different?”

  “Yeah. Inspecting old houses for the Department of Health. We ran into a nest of goblins, actually.”

  Beth wrinkled her face. “They’re so gross, aren’t they?”

  “Where have you seen a goblin?”

  Beth laughed. “It’s Appalachia. Lots of places for goblins to hide. A few years after you left, it started to get bad enough that we did goblin patrols every morning and evening.”

  “And you saw some?”

  “Enough to get 2 XP,” she said proudly.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yeah. Why would I lie about that?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t think you were lying. The guy I was with yesterday guessed it would take twenty-five goblins or so to earn 1 XP.”

  “That sounds right.”

  “Jesus, Beth. You’ve killed more goblins than I have.”

  Shrugging, she replied, “If a coyote comes for your chickens, you have to do something about it, right?”

  “Helps that you’re a fighter, I bet. What weapon did they have you using?”

  “Most everyone had spears. I didn’t think it was that hard.”

  Beth stared unblinking at the disbelief on my face. A grin finally broke through.

  “I’m just kidding. It was always stressful, but a little bit less so once I got the hang of it. Should I become a crawler like you?”

  “First of all, I’m an intern who has gone on a few crawls. I think a real crawler would stuff me in a garbage can if they heard me calling myself one. Second, I’m starting to worry it was a mistake. Job prospects aren’t great for a person on my path.”

  “The hours?”

  “Those suck, but no,” I answered. “For crawlers, the money is in guilds or crawl teams. Someone like me can get a management position. I won’t get hired to be a crawler. Several people in the business have told me it’s a zero percent chance. Literally zero.”

  “You could become a YouTube crawler.”

  I looked up to see Beth smiling. “Oh, you’re messing with me again.”

  She laughed. “I figured you would hate that. You always ran from cameras when we were kids. Is ditching crawling and doing something else an option for you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I really don’t want to. I didn’t think I would like it much, but seeing my XP and my level go up? I sank a bunch of money into a degree, but it didn’t move any needle in my life. This is the first time my life has gotten measurably better for how hard I worked. It’s only a few stat points, but it’s something, and it feels so damn good, Beth.”

  “You could crash gates. Couldn’t you?”

  “You’re serious. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”

  “What? Why?”

  “You were always petrified to break a rule. Doing something with potential jail time? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Beth smiled. “The church helped there. You see, governments controlling gate access is satan’s strategy for keeping the righteous from leveling. He knows the weaker they are, the longer he’ll rule Earth.”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  In the church, there was always an explanation and a justification for everything, no matter how contradictory or impractical it might seem. Now that I was on the outside of it, the extremes of the mental gymnastics mostly just made me shake my head.

  “So,” Beth continued, “if you really think about it, Jesus wants us to crash gates. That makes it the opposite of a sin.”

  I laughed. “For me, the risks don’t justify the rewards.”

  “Could go home and farm goblins.”

  That made me laugh harder. “Surface grinding is so slow. The effort might be worth it at level 1 or 2, but after that? You would need years of surface goblins to advance.”

  “I knew it was slow, but that sounds…”

  “Here’s the math,” I offered. “The level-up requirement doubles each time, so by the time you get to level 9, you need 25,600 XP to advance to level 10. All of the XP to go from level 1 to 10 comes out to 102,300. If I’m running three gates of the appropriate difficulty each week, I would need a little over four years to get to level 10. One gate per week? That’s 12 years. The math for doing that on the surface was so bad I didn’t bother remembering it. Too painful.”

  Beth frowned. “I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t make the system, and the person I interviewed with at the CDM made it sound like I’d get several gate opportunities a week, but I think that was just to get me to sign the contract. Hence why I feel stuck.”

  “Shouldn’t sign or agree to anything, I’ve heard,” Beth said with a serious, motherly face.

  “Very funny.”

  “Was that too far? That felt like a permadeath scenario after I said it.”

  Chuckling, I said, “No, you’re fine, but thank you. You can assume any advice I give you comes from one of my screw-ups.”

  “Even if I don’t become a crawler, I’d like to see inside of a dungeon someday,” Beth mused.

  “It doesn’t feel that special.”

  “I still want to do it.”

  “I get it,” I admitted. “I would feel the same way in your position, but so far, I don’t recommend you become a crawler. If you want that look inside a dungeon, don’t start a career to get it.”

  The second week following the anti-crash blitz initiative, Leminson had her last day as an intern.

  The day after that, she moved to Harrisburg to work at the CDM office there as an enforcer. It was sad to see Leminson go, but she was optimistic she’d get more opportunities to crawl because of how small that particular office was.

  Our new intern was a man in his late thirties. He had a goatee and a bit of a bald spot.

  Introducing himself as “Glen,” he said nothing else and set to work on his orientation training. I found out later that he got this placement as part of a job retraining program, and that was something I only happened to overhear. Glen kept to himself. I learned barely anything else about him in the five months we would work together.

  Not that we had many opportunities to talk.

  I spent most of my days shadowing enforcers for gate inspections and processing gate inspection reports, which was basically confirming that the data going into the inspection database was properly entered. The work was tedious, but it gave me a better sense of what infractions were most common.

  Maybe this shouldn’t have been surprising, but it was to me: the most common citations for dungeon gate safety issues more or less matched what the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) saw in more typical workplaces: Falls and fall protections, trips, improper or missing PPE, a range of ladder placement and use issues, insufficient or improperly labeled hazards, etcetera.

  Grensmith told me once that fall protections were the biggest issue in workplaces by a huge amount–OSHA had over 5,000 such citations the previous year. Before I started these inspections, I had a hard time imagining fall protections being a consistent problem during gate harvests because so little of that work was vertical. It wasn’t like a harvester was running around on a rooftop or anything like that, after all.

  But after a couple dozen gate inspections, I saw how wrong I was.

  Harvesters were endlessly climbing up and down equipment like forklifts, cranes, and telehandlers. I saw them scramble over monster corpses and piles of raw ore. They might need a ladder to finish securing a load for transport or a bucket lift to raise power and telephone lines a few inches higher to allow a truck to pass beneath.

  The inside of a gate was loosely controlled chaos. All of the dungeons I had run up until that point were single-story affairs. In every case, I could touch the ceiling with little effort, and even the largest boss monsters weren’t much taller than I was, if they were at all. Gates ranked C and above, however, were far more varied.

  Valuable gems and ore might be thirty feet up a mountainous wall or on the other side of a flowing river or surrounded by magma. The terrain was typically uneven, so using a simple ladder safely could be tricky, but then harvesters had to contend with varying degrees of stability for the rock or dirt they dug through.

  In the case of worthwhile monster harvests, sometimes only one piece was valuable, making it unnecessary to drag the entire body out of the dungeon for processing. A cursed aurochs, for example, resembled a typical terrestrial bull and weighed 6,000 lbs or more, but its horns were the only item worth harvesting. The meat and skin were rancid, even when the aurochs was alive and trying to gore you.

  If you didn’t grow up in the boonies like me, you may not know that something like an angus bull is in the range of 2,000 lbs.

  Chainsawing some horns does not sound precarious, but the cursed aurochs was top of mind for me because I was on site when someone impaled themselves on a horn. They were standing on the back of a dead aurochs to get a better cutting angle and slipped. There was a lot of blood and a lot of screaming.

  The time constraints of gate harvesting made it more likely for someone to cut corners. One extra step up the ladder for this quick thing. Unhooking the safety harness for just a second to reach that snag at the bottom of the bucket. Don’t need the hassle of setting up a guardrail on that ledge to grab that one gem.

  And that was just falls.

  If it was a hazard in a normal mine, slaughterhouse, tannery, or construction site, it was even more of a danger in a dungeon.

  Gates were temporary cash cows, so everyone on site was in a perpetual rush to extract all of the profit before they had to be closed. The inconvenience of most gate locations further exacerbated that desire to hurry with complicated and unpredictable staging problems.

  One of the B gates I audited was on a side street in upper Lawrenceville. The gate itself wasn’t in line with the flow of traffic the way a tunnel would be. Instead, it was rotated ninety degrees to face the side of the road. Three cars had to be towed just so the crawl team could get inside, and then the harvest team had to figure out how to work with ten feet of space between the gate entrance and the closest apartment building.

  Grensmith was with me on that call. He told me he once saw a guild purchase three houses to clear enough work area for an A-ranked gate. That sounded absurd to me, but the value of the harvest justified it, apparently.

  I got called into two crawls for the first half of my second month as an intern. The first was another Roach Run, and the second was a vermin dungeon, which was a bunch of monster rats. Neither was pleasant, but they got me up to 183 XP. 17 more and I would be level 3.

  All I needed was one more run to tip me over. Having no control over when that might happen, though, was agony. The rest of the month? Not a single cull.

  I entered the third month of my internship needing 17 XP to get to level 3.

  John Bruce finished his six-month internship and moved departments but stayed in Pittsburgh. His new role was helpline analyst. The CDM helpline was more like a call center, receiving all manner of calls and questions from the public. The majority were non-emergency complaints about blocked roads or loud harvest sites, but a few were whistleblower-style reports of crawler violations.

  Bruce’s job was to mine those calls for trends and to elevate any calls that seemed exceptionally serious.

  A new intern, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Rebeccah Wilson, moved into Bruce’s desk. She had wild curly hair, big glasses, and an impressively dry sense of humor, the kind that feels like it has to be a bit but never lets up. Once we got used to it, she was outright hilarious.

  But damn. I really wanted to be level 3 by now.

  today they start getting new releases as well.

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