Discount Dan

“Are you sure about this, Dan?” Croc asked, not even attempting to conceal the worry in its voice. “Because me? I have concerns. I told you about Fritz, right? German fella. Very polite. He was also a mite headstrong and overconfident. Wouldn’t listen to me either.” The rubbery blue dog offered me a sidelong glance with its oversized googly eyes. “Might be a few parallels between Fritiz and a certain Delver whose name may or may not rhyme with man.”

“You’re very obviously just talking about me,” I said, never looking away from the kiosk. It sat beside a pair of motionless escalators, which connected to the upper level of the vast shopping mall that comprised the third floor.

“No, I never actually said it was you,” Croc replied with a sniff. “So maybe that’s just your conscience’s way of saying ‘Listen to Croc because he is a good boy and people should really listen to him more, so they don’t die horrifically in easily avoidable accidents.’”

I rolled my eyes.

“Fine, remind me what happened to Fritz? Was he the guy who had his limbs ripped off or the one who got turned into meat slurry? It’s hard to keep track, considering how high your body count is.”

“Hey, that’s not fair, Dan.” The dog, who wasn’t really a dog, sounded genuinely wounded. “You know I didn’t intentionally kill any of those Delvers. And, for the record, maybe they wouldn’t be dead if they’d listened to me. Like Fritz. Who had his face eaten off by sentient hand cream, which then proceeded to crawl into his lungs and lay thousands of eggs inside his torso. Took him weeks to die. Ugly business. I’m telling you, Dan, the kiosks are not to be truffled with. Not unless you fancy your ribcage being transformed into a monster incubator.”

“I’m pretty sure the word is trifled with,” I corrected. “And consider me duly warned. I appreciate your wisdom, oh mighty Croc dog, but I’m guessing ol’ Fritz wasn’t a level twenty-two with enough magical firepower to level a city block with toxic sludge. Besides”—I glanced at the boxy mall kiosk, some thirty feet away, then down at the strange item in my hands—“I’m pretty sure this is right where we’re supposed to be.”

The item in question resembled an ugly wooden plaque with a burnished bronze faceplate that had the words Kiosk Franchise Opportunity engraved into the metal. I’d earned it as a reward for taking down Funtime Frank and cleansing the Jungle Gym Jamboree of the seventh floor from a nasty case of Blight.

I’d seen plenty of Artifacts since noclipping into the Backrooms, but I’d never seen one quite like this.

I focused on the placard and a semi-transparent, mustard-yellow text box appeared in the air for what felt like the hundredth time. The pop-up resembled one of those eight-bit Nintendo Game notifications from the late eighties.

Kiosk Franchise Opportunity

Fabled Artifact

Type: One-Time Use

So, you’re tired of the whole “valiant hero” gig and want a little slice of that tasty, tasty capitalist pie, huh? Can’t say I blame you. Work smarter, not harder, amiright? And if the 21st century has taught us anything, it’s that the real money is in franchising and brand licensing deals. That and real-estate.

This Kiosk Franchise Opportunity is arguably the best and worst parts of both. Nice little plot of land and brand recognition.

Just slay the current “franchisee” of any kiosk connected to the Franchisor Network, then slap this placard on and BOOM, you’re in business faster than you can say transaction fee!

The kiosk location acts as physical interface terminal for a Secure Superspace Mass Storage Facility. Which is a really just a fancy way of saying it’s like a giant Progenitor Monolith, but for all the shit you want to sell.

As the new kiosk franchisee, you’ll be able to store any compatible items within and shoppers will be able to purchase or bid on those items directly through the kiosk terminal. Once the deal is done and the price paid, all purchased items will be instantly deposited into the customer’s Personal Subspace Storage System. No muss, no fuss, no shipping, handling, or waiting! It’s the perfect scheme.

There’s one tiny little catch, however.

All transactions conducted through a Franchise Kiosk are subject to an 85% Franchisor Fee. As the corporate office is wont to say: “You’ll take the crumbs, and you’ll like it, bitch!” Welcome to the fast-paced, cutthroat world of franchising!

I dismissed the prompt with a wave of one hand then glanced back at the kiosk loaded down with bullshit Health and Wellness products no one could possibly want or need. Clunky massage guns and sleek “smart band” fitness trackers. Yoga accessories and essential oil diffusers. Bottles of “Premium Grade” holistic supplements and, yes, skin care creams.

Hopefully, none of those creams were sentient.

There was no one manning the kiosk, but that didn’t mean anything.

Just because I couldn’t currently see anyone, didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone there.

That was Backrooms survival 101.

Hell, the entirety of the third floor looked completely dead. Not a soul in sight. But that was a lie. A lie that could kill if you weren’t careful. All around us were equally empty glass-fronted stores with names like Pandora's Music Box and Neon Nightmares. Sure, some of those places were probably abandoned, while others were miniature, nightmarish fiefdoms, filled with horrors that would be only too happy to gut any Delver idiotic enough to trespass onto their territory. I wasn’t worried about any of them, though.

At this point, most of the monsters here were more afraid of me than I was of them.

“Now just hear me out,” Croc said hopefully. “What if instead of purposely provoking the unholy wraith of whatever nightmare lives inside that kiosk, we went back to the store and ate pizza together? You can drink all the beer you want, and I’ll eat Froyo until I can’t feel my legs. Doesn’t that sound like it would be way more fun?”

“If this goes well, I promise, you can eat froyo until we run out or you contract diabetes, but we need to handle this first.” I grimaced, lips stretching into a thin line. “We’ve got to do something about the Aspirants of the Skinless Court. Those dickweeds are fucking up everything, but this might be a way to fix things. At least temporarily.”

The placard in my hands wasn’t a chance drop from one of the Gashapon loot machines or some random item, harvested from the corpse of a dead Dweller. I’d been purposely given it as a Reward. The Researcher wanted me to have it. The Researcher wanted me to be here. I could feel it.

I wasn’t entirely sure why, though I had a working theory.

It was just a hunch, but my gut told me the Researcher didn’t like the Flayed Monarch any more than I did, and this was his way of offering me a helping hand. Or, at least, his way of pointing me in the right direction without getting too overtly involved. Right now, I was little more than a fly buzzing around the head of a dark and vengeful god, but with a little help and enough time, it was possible I could become strong enough to rival even something as powerful as the Flayed Monarch.

The Researcher knew it and was looking out for me. In small ways, at least.

But the Monarch knew it too, which is exactly why he was dispatching his bootlickers to try to cut me down before I could become a legitimate threat. I was a pawn in a cosmic game of chess and one side was trying to promote me while the other was doing their damnedest to remove me from the board entirely. So far, the Monarch’s thugs hadn’t been able to breach my shop directly, so instead they’d been targeting my customers and attempting to blockade my doors. Laying medieval siege to my shop.

Unfortunately, the tactic was working.

Fewer and fewer customers were getting through the blockade, and moving the doorway anchors was a deadly risk since it meant actively confronting the Aspirants.

But maybe the strange wooden placard could change that. If I could set up an independent Discount Dan Pop-Up Shop, which would serve as an extension to the storefront, maybe I could break the Court’s stranglehold. True, one dinky little kiosk probably wouldn’t be enough to shift the tides of war, but it was a place to start. And it stood to reason that if I could perform a hostile takeover of one kiosk, then maybe there was a way to take over others?

Hell, maybe there was a way to take over all of them.

“We’ve put this off long enough,” I said, tucking the wooden placard back into my storage space. “Let’s just roll up our sleeves and get ’er done.”

“Can we at least wait for Jakob or Temperance?” Croc pleaded.

Both Delvers had left a week ago, bound for Howlers Hold, the safe harbor of the seventh floor. I was hoping to strike up a business partnership with their leader, Wraith, but I’d made a lot of enemies since waking up in the Lobby with the hangover to end all hangovers. Although both Jakob and Temp vouched for the Howlers, I wasn’t going to take any unnecessary chances where other Delvers were concerned.

Maybe I was just being paranoid. But was it actually paranoia if someone really was out to get me? Or was it just being smart?

Either way, better to let them come to me instead.

That’s what my friends were doing—paving the way for our trade alliance. At least, I hoped that’s what they were doing.

“Relax, Croc.” I patted the dog on its blue nose. “Everything’s gonna be alright. This is the third floor, not the thirtieth. Doesn’t matter what we’re dealing with, there’s no way that whatever’s in there is tougher than Funtime Frank or half of the other things we murdered on the seventh floor. Remember Harold the Terror Clown or the Sisters of Silent Shadows? Trust me, we got this. And in the very unlikely event that things go tits up, we can always jump ship.”

I jerked a thumb over one shoulder, toward a glass door with a rectangular plastic plate tacked onto the front that read, Discount Dan’s Backroom Bargains. Once upon a time that door had connected to a boutique video store called the VHS Vault, but thanks to a little interdimensional spatial magic, it now led to my own personal retail empire.

“Besides, we don’t need ’em,” I added. “We already have reinforcements.”

I brought my hands together in a thunderclap and activated one of my newest Relics, Unhinged Taxidermy. Mana poured from my core as two inky-black rifts in space opened, one to my left, another to my right. A single nightmarish abomination shambled out from each portal, flanking me like a pair of Frankenstein bodyguards.

The first resembled a sickly humanoid, cat-like creature with electric blue fur, crisscrossed with toxic-green strips and mangled seams that held her tattered hide together. This thing was all that remained of Synthia Lynx, the former Keytar player for the Jungle Gym Jamboree. Her instrument was missing, and I’d replaced one arm with a coppery limb, taken from Vex Vixen. Her other hand was also gone—chopped off by Temperance—and I’d grafted on a magically powered Artifact chainsaw in its place.

The second minion had the body of a huge animatronic black bear, red muscle and gleaming chrome peeking out from beneath badly butchered fur. Sitting on top of the bear’s stocky body was the head of Drumbo Chumbo, the Pachyderm Percussionist. He had a riot shield strapped to one arm and carried an enormous sledgehammer, designed for punching through masonry, in his free hand. A weapon like that was built to be used with two hands, but Drumbo easily wielded it like a baseball bat.

Both creatures were horrifying beyond words and made my skin crawl.

Turned out, being a pseudo-necromancer was way less cool in real life than it was in books or videogames. There were so many moral conundrums to tackle, to say nothing of the fluids involved or the eye-watering stench that lingered around the abominations like a cloud. A small part of me hated that this was what I’d become, but they say ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ and I sure as shit couldn’t afford the luxury of being choosy. Not with so many threats arrayed against me.

Fact was, both Horrors were Level 12—half of what they’d been in life—and could likely kill anything on this floor without batting an eye. That was too good to pass up, even if it was both morally and physically repugnant on several fronts.

“Oh fiddlesticks. Fine,” the dog finally muttered while side-eyeing my Taxidermied Horrors. “We can attack the kiosk. I still want to go on record and say that I’ve got a bad feeling about this, but I trust your judgment, Dan. If you think this is the right move, then I’m behind you one hundred percent.”

This is the right decision, I silently repeated over and over again, trying to convince myself more than anyone else. Finally, I nodded to the dog, then drew my Vaughn rip claw hammer from the tool belt slung low around my hips. With a thought and a whisper of mana, my demolition screwdriver rose into the air, held aloft by an invisible tether of telekinetic force.

A twisted version of that same power connected me to my Horrors.

The summoned monsters had rudimentary intelligence and could act of their own volition to a limited degree, but neither had any sort of personality. Not like Baby Hands or Princess Ponypuff—the two Cannon Fodder Golems who helped run the shop. No, these things were shuffling, automatons of meat and machine connected to my mind. They were undead weapons, guided by my raw will.

Without needing to speak, I directed them forward and they obeyed instantly.

I padded toward the kiosk with Horrors accompanying me on either side, while Croc brought up the rear. My Spelunker’s Sixth Sense warned me about potential traps, dangers, and pitfalls and the kiosk burned in my vision with a halo of red light. A blazing road flare that screamed Do Not Fuck With Me at the top of its lungs.

I was absolutely gonna fuck with it. As my high school career counselor could confirm, making good life choices was never my strong suit.

I stopped just short of the kiosk, took one more deep breath to calm my nerves, then reached out one hand and plucked a slim “massage wand” from one of the shelves. The wand was obviously meant to double as a personal vibrator, but it was also a surprisingly decent Artifact. It had one open Effect Slot and a primary ability called Good Vibrations, which could be used once a day to “massage” away up to twenty-five points physical damage.

I absently placed it into Subspace Storage while I waited for something bad to happen.

For a long moment nothing did.

I shot a questioning look at Croc, who was already backing up a few paces.

“Something’s coming, Dan,” the dog said. “Trust me, I can feel it.”

As if on cue, the ground began to shake and rumble, and the wooden storage doors encircling the base of the kiosk chattered like teeth. It felt like a small earthquake, or the floor shifts that occasionally happened. There was a deep groan and an odd scraping noise that reminded me of a churning cement mixer. Then the kiosk lurched straight up into the air amidst a whirlwind of dust and flying debris. I danced back a handful of paces as a pair of enormous, multi-segmented legs emerged from a cavernous sink hole in the linoleum-covered floor.

The color drained from my face.

Those alien limbs looked like spider legs, each as thick as my thigh and covered in spiky protrusion. They weren’t black, though, but rather a deep purple at the tips which gradually faded to a vibrant orange. It almost would’ve been pretty if it wasn’t so terrifying.

“What the hell is that?” I yelled at Croc to be heard over the clatter. “I thought you said there were Sales Sirens inside these things?” I waved toward the kiosk, which was now suspended a good twenty feet above the ground. “You never said anything about Sales Spiders.”

More insectoid legs emerged from the dust cloud.

“It’s the Backrooms, Dan! The only ironclad rule is that that everything, everywhere, all the time is both lying to you and trying to murder you. Also, I hate to be that dog, but I told you we shouldn’t mess with these things. Not to be truffled with I said. Had a bad feeling in my tummy, I said. But does anyone listen to Croc? No. And now you’re going to die, and it’ll take me months to get over it.”

As the swirling dust plume began to settle and disperse, we got our first good look at the monstrosity.

Not a spider at all.

Nope. It was a giant fucking hermit crab.

It was also wearing the kiosk on its back like a shell. The creature turned, hateful black eyes locking on us as its scythe-like mandibles opened and closed like a pair of giant scissors.

Well shit. Giant, kiosk-wearing hermit crab had definitely not been on my Bingo card.

A tag flashed above its head, followed in short order by a racial description—courtesy of Researcher’s Codex.

Dweller 0.3328A – Keke the Kiosk Crab [Level 28]

Behold Keke the Kiosk Crab, the current franchisee of this particular kiosk location—not to be confused with its hatchmate Kelsei the Kiosk Krab, who is a racist piece of shit. These things are the reason why the other Dwellers stay out of the main corridors.

Its massive claws can crush concrete and its beady eyes are always on the lookout for its next victim, which, if you’re reading this, is probably you! Although this pile of meat and chitin is as brainless as the kiosk it inhabits, it is fiercely territorial and an apex predator of the third floor. But don’t worry, it probably won’t eat you.

Not at first, anyway.

These things lay like a thousand eggs, and it turns out those eggs need somewhere warm and wet and gooey to incubate. Fun fact, the living human torso works great, so you have that to look forward to. And stay frosty, because even after the babies hatch, many will stay with mama until they’re big enough to branch out and find shells to call their own.

Huh, apparently Croc was right about that whole egg incubator thing.

Maybe, I owed him an apology. Assuming we survived this battle…