Discount Dan

Engraver awl firmly in hand, I oh-so-carefully carved the twisting, hook-shaped rune directly into the white linoleum of the Home Décor aisle. As I finished, the Rune sank into the floor, disappearing to Croc, but remaining semi-visible to me. The fresh sigil was ghostly in appearance and glistened with a watery opal light. I tossed a pillow onto the Rune to see if anything would happen.

Nadda.

Croc went next, placing a tentative paw on the invisible trap, its body ridged and braced for impact. But once again, the sigil was completely inert. When I placed my hand against the rune, however, a subtle tingle passed through my palm and the hairs along the length of my arm stood at attention.

Taking a deep breath, I cast Pharmacist’s Scales, exchanging 10 points of Mana for 10 points of Health. My Mana gauge appeared in the corner of my eye and dipped accordingly as the spell leeched directly into the rune and vanished. Although the sigil stayed invisible to Croc, as the spell took hold, the pattern changed from shifting opalescence to a subtle gold hue.

We tried the pillow trick again, tossing it onto the rune from a safe distance, but ended up with the same result. A whole lot of nothing. When Croc cautiously stepped onto the rune, though, there was a brilliant flash of light and the effect activated, instantly transferring a grand total of five points of health into my four-legged friend.

When Croc stepped away, the rune was gone, no sign it had ever been there at all.

Once I understood the basic mechanic, I tried a wider range of spells. Mental Micromanagement was the first. That time, the sigil glowed with an etheric blue light. Once again, the pillow produced no tangible result but, curiously, when Croc tried, the rune flashed, but promptly fizzled and disappeared without any obvious effect either.

The mimic had felt nothing, which was puzzling at first.

But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.

Mental Micromanagement could only lift things that weighed less than forty-five pounds. And, thanks to the issue with Mana Leakage, the spell effect was further reduced by 50%, meaning it could only lift objects up to twenty-two and a half pounds. Croc weighed substantially more. It was a simple math equation. Even though the trap activated, it didn’t have enough metaphysical umph to get the job done, so nothing had happened.

That discovery had broader implications.

Although I could use spells like Bad Trip, if the target’s Perception score wasn’t lower than mine, chances were high the trap would gutter and die. A complete waste of resources. And I had no idea how the Mana Leakage would factor into the equation.

Spells with guaranteed effects, like Pharmacist’s Scales or Erlenmeyer's Molotov Cocktail, were best.

I’d picked up several Molotov Cocktail Relics from the Pharmacy Techs that had previously called the MediocreMart home, and I’d kept one in my personal stash for emergency situations. The Relic was basically a rudimentary fireball spell—quick, easy, and dirty—that dealt a flat 15 points of damage on contact and 5 points of additional burn damage while within the Area-of-Effect. The spell damage and duration were cut in half, but they worked every single time.

Croc and I tested out a wide variety of different Relics with plenty of elixirs on standby in case things went south. Time and time again, we saw that inanimate objects failed to trigger the runes—although, the rules seemed strange and somewhat arbitrary. I took off my boot and tossed it onto a sigil. Not a damned thing happened. But if there was a foot inside said boot? Boom. The trap worked like a charm.

There were rules to it, I was sure, but I felt too dumb to figure ’em out.

My big takeaway from the initial round of experimentation was that Delvers and Dwellers would trigger the runes every single time they made direct contact. Sure, it was possible that there were exceptions to that rule, but ninety-nine out of a hundred times, when a living object made contact the rune activated. Period. End of story.

But my official and very scientific research didn’t end there.

The Relic description said that I could scrawl the rune onto any “compatible material surface” but it didn’t actually specify what that was. The floor was the most logical choice—I’d seen loads of runic pressure plates embedded into the floors, after all—but the question had to be asked, what other items qualified? This Relic had originally come from Frank, who’d hurled magical barrels at me from a distance. Was it possible that all of those barrels had simply been runic resonances traps, inscribed onto the wooden barrel slats?

With that thought kicking around inside my skull, Croc and I began a second round of experimentation, and we had a whole store worth of items to work with.

We once again started with the throw pillow, then moved on from there. Cereal boxes, notebooks, tools from the hardware section. Hell, I even etched individual slices of bread. We found that almost anything could be engraved with a handful of notable exceptions.

First off, the surface area had to be large enough to accommodate a detailed sigil. The material didn’t matter so much, but the size sure as shit did. Trying to squeeze a rune onto the face of a quarter just wouldn’t work because my awl was too big and clunky for that kind of precision work.

Second, I couldn’t carve Relics, Artifacts, or living creatures.

I managed to etch a sigil onto a slice of ham from the grocery section, which told me it might be possible to carve dead things, which boded well for me since my Taxidermied Horrors weren’t technically living. I conjured Drumbo Rebooted and had no issue carving a sigil right into his belly. That had real, long-term potential. As unsettling as it was, I foresaw Taxidermied suicide bombers in the not-too-distant future.

I couldn’t carve anything with an active pulse, though.

I’d learned that lesson firsthand when I tried to etch a rune into my leg just for pure shits and giggles. Not only did the rune fail to take, but the process hurt like a real son of a bitch. Felt like brushing up against a hot stove burner even though it didn’t leave a mark on my body or drain my Health Bar by even a sliver.

My working theory was that anything that already contained mana of some form—Relics, Artifacts, people—disrupted the stability of the sigil, preventing it from holding the correct spell configuration.

Still, the ability to inscribe damn near anything else opened a whole new world of interesting and murderous possibilities. Although setting a runic trap on the floor had its uses, turning a loaf of bread into a magical hand grenade was way more practical.

And cool.

So that’s exactly what I set out to do next.

The seasonal aisle had a shit ton of bright green tennis balls. Up until now, they hadn’t really served any obvious purpose, but they were perfect for what I had in mind. Lightweight, just the right size, easy to throw, and plentiful.

If not for the secondary Runic EOD Handling ability, this plan never would’ve worked—the traps were just too volatile. Because I could safely touch them without activating the conductor rune, however, it took no time at all to transform the mountain of useless tennis balls into a not-so-useless arsenal of magical munitions. Motion didn’t trigger the runes at all; chucking the things wouldn’t set them off and they wouldn’t explode unless they contacted a living target.

They were the perfect ranged weapon for a spell caster like me, who relied almost entirely on mana-intensive skills and abilities. That was even more true once I realized I could manipulate and move my impromptu magical hand grenades with telekinesis, just like I’d done with Frank’s barrels. The tennis balls went from simple ranged weapons into honest-to-God homing missiles. They also gave me an incredible amount of versatility. The hard truth was that my Spatial Core could only hold ten Relics at any given point, but nothing prevented me from exchanging those Relics at will.

But there was a catch. There was always a catch.

Trying to swap Relics during the middle of a battle was both insane and impractical, but with this, I could store a wide array of additional spell effects and, because the spells were all cast beforehand, they wouldn’t affect my available Mana Pool. I’d need to be proactive, sure, but that was fine. No one would ever accuse me of being the next Albert Einstein but thinking ahead had always been one of my strong suits.

I made my way over to the cosmetics aisle and grabbed three of the basic Delver kits we’d prepared for new arrivals.

Each kit consisted of a backpack, looted from the nearby Style-for-Less department store, crammed full of the bare necessities for survival. Basic toiletries, a first aid kit, and flashlight. Machete or survival knife and rope. Bottles of water and bags of beef jerky and protein bars. Things like that. The backpacks lined the shelves of aisle 4 and every Level 0 Delver who stumbled through the doors got one free of charge.

I couldn’t afford to give away Artifacts and Relics, my resources were too limited for that, but I could afford to give away the Delver kits and I knew they’d already saved dozens of people. Including my two new human employees, Taylor and Stephanie.

I grabbed three backpacks—one red, one purple, one yellow—and dumped the contents; Baby Hands would repack them later.

Bags in hand, I went back to the cordoned off Home Décor aisle. I carefully spread a tarp across the floor, then systemically laid out two dozen tennis balls in a neat four-by-six grid. The last thing I wanted to do was accidentally set one of my friends on fire by mixing up grenade types in the heat of combat. To prevent that, I spray painted all twenty-four of them purple then set to work with my engraver’s awl once the paint was dry.

It took the almost two hours to imbue each of the tennis balls with Health Regen, but it was worth the effort.

I’d maxed out the amount of Mana I could invest in the individual conductor runes, which meant each grenade could heal for twenty-five points of damage. They were almost as good as a lesser healing Elixir and way faster to use on the fly. I put all of those into the purple backpack and then, just to make it idiot proof, I slapped a strip of silver Duct tape across the front of the bag and wrote Health Grenades.

I would’ve loved to craft some Mana Regen Grenades, but my Runic EOD Handler skill worked against me on that front. Thanks to the threshold ability, I couldn’t actively set the runes off even if I wanted to. True, I could make all the Mana Grenades I wanted, but I’d only be able to use them on others and that just seemed like a waste of time and effort.

Instead, I crafted twenty-four more tennis balls then imbued them with the effects from one of my most volatile but powerful relics, Burn Baby Burn. Those I spray painted fire-engine red so they would stand out in sharp contrast with the purple healing grenades. After accounting for the mana leakage, each fuzzy, red IED dealt just shy of 20 points of Flame Damage on contact, and an additional 10 points of Burn Damage for one minute. Individually, that wasn’t overly impressive, but if shit really went sideways, I could use all of them at once.

That was 720 total points worth of damage, plus getting set on fire doubled as one helluva nasty distraction. It was hard to focus on fighting when your skin was burning.

That backpack I labeled Firebombs.

I repeated the process once more, this time spray painting and filling the yellow backpack with tennis balls imbued with the spell effects from Fault Spike.

Fault Spike

Uncommon Relic – Level 1

Range: Line of Sight

Cost: 5 - 50 Mana

Cast Time: 2 Seconds

Duration: Permanent Terrain Alteration

Taking the phrase “get fucked” to a whole new level, Fault Spike summons between 1 and 10 razor-sharp earthen shafts capable of spit-roasting your enemies like a luau pig. Because luau pig is definitely what you were thinking when I said spit roast. Fault spikes are considered permanent terrain alterations and will stay put until the Backrooms decides to undo your handiwork, so don’t place them anywhere you don’t want them long term.

Each spike deals 25 points of piercing damage on contact and the target is afflicted with 1 stack of Uncontrollable Hemorrhaging, dealing 2 points of Bleed Damage for each second they are impaled. Another stack of Uncontrollable Hemorrhaging is applied every five seconds. If five stacks of Uncontrollable Hemorrhaging accumulate, the target suffers Earthbarb and any attempts to remove the spear deals an additional 25 points of Tearing Damage. This Relic enables Mana usage.

In theory, each one of the balls would summon a single razor-sharp javelin of rock from the ground, capable of impaling an enemy. I was particularly excited to see those bad boys in action. Another strip of Duct tape went across the front. I wrote Spikes of Go Fuck Yourself in big blocky letters.

I jammed two tennis balls of each color into the oversized pouch on my toolbelt, then deposited all three backpacks into my Subspace Storage for later. In total, the entire process—experimentation, severing my thumb, learning the ropes, and mass producing the tennis balls grenades—had taken about nine hours. After everything that had happened over the past day, I should’ve been exhausted to the bone. But I wasn’t. I was too keyed up to sleep. All I really wanted to do was head down to the fifth floor and look for something to try my shiny new runic bombs on.

Far as I was concerned, I could sleep when I was dead.

I took a few minutes to splash some water on my face, then I scarfed down a couple of hotdogs from the concession stand, earning myself the coveted Gas Station Hotdog buff in the process. For the next three hours, I was safe from food poisoning and all damage from disease was reduced by 5%. I also took a moment to adjust the Relics in my Spatial Core.

Now that I had an ample number of both healing elixirs and Healing Grenades, I opted to swap my Level 5 Pharmacist’s Scales for Bad Trip—one of the few crowd control abilities in my arsenal—then I double-checked my Active Relics.

Spatial Core - Active

(U) Bad Trip – Level 1

(U) Fault Spike – Level 3

(U) Runic Resonance Trap – Level 5

(R) Unhinged Taxidermist – Level 1

(R) Mental Micromanagement – Level 1

(R) Pressure Washer – Level 5

(R) Sterilization Field – Level 5

(F) Neural Slip Stream – Level 5

(F) StainSlayer Maelstrom – Level 5 (Fully Tempered)

(ME) Compass of the Catacomber (Fully Tempered)

Satisfied with my current load out, the only thing left to do was find Jakob, then make our way to Hotel Hell. I had a magical washing machine to find.