Discount Dan

When I climbed out of the truck, I discovered that my eyes were lying to me once again. Instead of a bloody-red sky, a vast field of robin’s egg blue stretched out above us in every direction. There wasn’t a single cloud in sight, and it was the perfect kind of day that only happened once or twice every summer. The sun beat down on us like a hammer, cooking the freshly laid asphalt, but I didn’t mind.

After months stuck under buzzing artificial light, there was something deeply refreshing and satisfying about being outdoors again, even if it was hot as balls. Honestly, if I didn’t know any better, I would’ve sworn we’d noclipped back into reality.

We were smack dab in the middle of an up-and-coming housing development, interspersed with a combination of newly built homes, large plots still awaiting development, and tracts of wide-open green spaces that stretched off into the distance. Far to the east, I could see a dense wall of green, and knew that’s where the cornfields started. From my experience, most small towns in America were like that. Human habitation, just plopped down in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farmland in every direction.

I spun in a slow circle, trying my damnedest to figure out how this was even possible.

The floors I’d visited so far had been vast, but this beat ’em all by a country mile. I knew from personal experience that Backrooms could play tricks with perception and space, but how could something like this even exist? It was impossibly large.

And it all looked so real. Felt so real.

Like I could hop in my pickup, drive for ten minutes, and grab a beer at the local bar or maybe a steak at the nearest Outback. The air was thick and humid. It smelled like a blend of fresh-cut grass and the smoky aroma of a barbecue grilling in the distance. A gentle breeze tugged at the edges of my bathrobe, and I caught a whiff of sunscreen and chlorine.

Jesus, it smelled like being home again.

“Wow, this is beautiful,” Croc said, padding over, then dropping down beside me.

I almost had a heart attack when I got a good look at the mimic. Croc wasn’t blue anymore. The dog’s odd, pock-marked, rubbery skin was gone and so were the ridiculous googly eyes. Even though it beggared the imagination and seemed to defy any sort of rational explanation, Croc now looked exactly like the golden retriever it had always pretended to be.

And the mimic wasn’t alone.

Jakob’s scales and horns had vanished, and though his facial features were more or less the same, he looked… entirely human. Even his clothes had changed. The duster had disappeared, replaced by a douchey-looking knit cardigan, while someone or something had swapped his combat boots for boat shoes. Temperance suffered a similar fate—though she was stuck wearing a yellow sundress and black flats. The glower on her face told me she was none too happy about the changes.

Floor nineteen hadn’t spared me either.

Although I could feel the coarse fibers of my bathrobe rubbing against my arms and the leather suspenders of my tool belt digging into my shoulders and back, I couldn’t see them. I was in a pair of plain khaki shorts with a collared golf shirt, tucked neatly into my waistband. My heavy work boots were still there—I could feel ’em against my toes—but now they looked like a pair of New Balances, complete with calf-high white socks.

“Amazing,” Jakob wondered aloud, examining his own appearance and clothes much the same way I was examining mine. “It must be some sort of massive illusion. One cast over the entirety of the floor. That’s the only way this is possible. It’s no wonder this floor is considered a Cognition Hazard. You cannot even trust your eyes.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Shouldn’t my fancy new Crown of the Burger Baron make me immune to this type of mind-fuckery?”

Jakob shrugged and offered me an apologetic smile. The expression looked genuinely weird on his now-human face.

“Perhaps there is more at play here than we understand. Those potions we drank, in theory, they should fortify Grit by approximately twenty percent for the next thirty-six hours or so.” He spread his human-looking hands in apology. “Yet here we are, mass hallucinating all the same. I cannot explain it yet.”

“They made me wear a dress,” Temperance growled. “I haven’t worn a dress since I noclipped. When I find the person responsible, I’m going to gut them like a pig and fill their insides with ten thousand spiders.”

“That was a very vivid description, Temperance,” Croc said, nodding its head. “You really painted a horrifying image. I appreciate that about you.”

I wasn’t sure what to think or believe, but I wanted to find the next kiosk and I wanted to do it fast. Even though this was the most “normal” floor I’d seen so far, there was something about it that I hated to my core. Despite the sunshine and clear skies, there was something dark and cancerous here, festering like an open wound. As far as I was concerned, the sooner we could put this floor in our rearview mirror, the better.

I cast Unerring Arrow, this time focusing on the kiosk that would eventually teleport us down to the thirty-ninth floor. The blue beam of light exploded outward from my chest, unseen to everyone but me, and disappeared down the street before doglegging sharply to the right a few blocks up.

“We’re going that way,” I said, waving in the general direction the arrow had shown me.

“What about the ice cream truck?” Croc asked, even as I started to trudge across the blistering hot blacktop.

“What about it?” I called back.

“Shouldn’t we try to do something with it?” the dog asked. “Clearly, we can’t drive it around without summoning an army of those hungry kiddos, but I don’t think we should just leave it here.”

“Croc brings up an excellent point,” Jakob added with a nod. “Finding a working vehicle is a rarity, and one that doubles as a mobile access point to the kiosk network? Could be quite valuable and handy, especially if we can find a way to disable the external speaker system.”

I cursed under my breath but conceded that they maybe, probably, kinda had a good point. In the Backrooms, resources could be damned scarce and when you came across something like this, it was never a smart move to let it sit idle. The floors were temperamental and could shift at any moment. Attempting to backtrack to the ice cream truck—even using the kiosk network—could add days or even weeks of time, assuming I could manage it at all.

The problem was, I didn’t really know what to do with the damned thing.

The truck had to weigh two tons, easy, which meant it was too big to fit inside my personal Storage Space. And Croc was right, I didn’t really want to drive the monstrosity around, blaring that ice cream music. The one thing we absolutely didn’t need was a massive bike gang of hangry children following us around, demanding that we sling SoftServe every ten minutes.

In the loosest sense of the word, the vehicle likely qualified as a “structure,” which meant I could probably use my Blanket Fort ability to tack it onto the store just like I’d done with the concession stand from the Jungle Gym Jamboree Arcade. But that left me with a laundry list of questions and concerns, which I didn’t have any answers to.

Like, what would happen if I randomly amputated a piece of the kiosk network?

Or what if this thing was infected with some kind of mind virus?

Or, most importantly of all, would those with access to the kiosk network be able to pop into my store without having to go through the normal screening protocols?

The last thing I wanted was to bring a Trojan Ice Cream Truck into my store, which could be then used by agents of the Flayed Monarch.

I just didn’t know how this would work, but I didn’t want to leave it behind either. Which left me with only one viable option. My Unhinged Taxidermist Relic. Although I couldn’t put this thing into my regular Subspace Storage, maybe I could Frankenstein the son of a bitch. Transform it into a Horror. Then I’d be able to summon and banish it from a unique Subspace Storage area, which—lucky for me—didn’t have any effective weight limit.

It was a bit of a stretch, but was worth a shot, at least.

“Fine,” I finally said, pulling a few key items from my storage space.

Although I’d moved most of the corpse parts to the refrigeration unit back at the store, I still had a few odds and ends lying around. Some spare mimic pieces. A couple of arms and legs I’d plucked off some of the bellhops on floor five.

With parts in hand, I opened up my Taxidermist Overlay and quickly added gangly arms and misshapen legs to truck’s exterior. They jutted off from the sides at odd angles that didn’t really make any logical sense. But that was fine. This was a Pass/Fail assignment and the truck didn’t have to make structural sense. By the time I was done, the exterior was covered in limbs and festooned with mismatched, left over body parts that I didn’t have a better use for.

“Well, that is truly awful, Dan,” Croc noted, appraising my work with totally normal eyes. “That vivid image Temperance painted with words? Yeah, you just did the same thing but with body parts. Honestly, I am as dismayed as I am impressed.”

Croc wasn’t wrong. The truck was…

Gross. Was the kindest word I could come up with.

Disturbing on both a spiritual and phycological level was more accurate. When I finally brought the monstrosity to life, it let out anguished moans through the speaker system. I felt dirty on the inside and quickly banished it back to spatial storage until I had the time and resources to do a more thorough job.

“You wanted me to save the truck,” I said, “I saved the truck. You have no one else to blame for that abomination. Now, if everyone is done complaining, can we please get out asses in gear?” The hair on the back of my neck was standing stiffly at attention. “I’m pretty sure there’s sometime watching us.” I glanced toward the closed blinds of a nearby house and thought I saw a brief flicker of movement. “Maybe a lot of somethings,” I amended as I noticed just how many houses there really were.

“By all means, lead the way,” Temperance said, brandishing what looked to be a cast iron skillet. Except I could tell from the way she swung the weapon that it was really her meat cleaver. Like everything else, it had been cleverly disguised to blend in with the surroundings. “I would very much like to find and murder all of those somethings you mentioned.”

With the truck gone and no new dangers in our immediate vicinity, we set off down the street, following the path Unerring Arrow had laid out for us. As we made our way deeper and deeper into the suburban hellscape all around us, the feeling of unseen eyes only became more intense, until I was sure that we were being watched from almost every house we passed.

For a while, we seemed to be alone, trapped in an unnatural silence with only the unseen watchers for company, but I was fine with that.

As much as we needed to gain experience, there was a part of me that enjoyed the peace, quiet, and relative boredom. If I ignored some of my deeply ingrained paranoia and didn’t focus too closely on anything in particular, I could almost pretend I was back at home. Just walking my normal human dog—who definitely didn’t talk or say weird things about the Twilight books series—with a couple of friends.

Occasionally, we caught glimpses of roving bicycle gangs, just like the one that had accosted at the truck. There were a lot of ’em and as time wore on, I got the sickening feeling that they were trailing us. Keeping tabs on us, maybe. They kept their distance, though, and never got too close for comfort. As the sun carved its way toward the horizon and the blue sky gave way to the bruised purple of evening, we started to see the faint stirrings of life inside the houses we passed.

It was subtle at first. Shades opening. Lights flicking on inside. Automatic garage doors rumbling open in the distance.

Then when twilight was finally and fully upon us, radios in every single house blared to life all at once. There must’ve been external speakers hidden somewhere, because the sound came from everywhere all at once, reverberating off the houses and bleeding from the air itself.

“Good evening, all you Sunnysiders, getting ready to unwind after a long day of work. As always, this is Seth Nickles, the voice of WBSC – Sunnyside Community Radio. For those in Quadrant 13, a friendly reminder that we have out-of-towners visiting. Make sure to keep an eye out for them and please be sure to roll out those welcome mats and show ’em a big ol’ dose of Sunnyside hospitality. Remember what the HOA always says: outsiders are just future neighbors we haven’t converted yet.”

The goosebumps returned and I had to actively suppress a shudder.

Although the announcement confirmed that we were, indeed, being watched, that somehow made me feel worse, not better. Whenever I was wandering through the Backrooms, I just always sort of assumed that there was something out there, watching me. Waiting for me to let my guard down so it could strike—whether that be a mimic, an Aspirant of the court, or some other nameless Dweller looking for an easy meal.

This was different, though. This was organized.

I was sure the things that lived on this floor were Dwellers, regardless of how human they might’ve superficially appeared, and I’d never known Dwellers to be so coordinated. At most, Dwellers might share tiny little fiefdoms with others of their species. For the most part, however, they were violent monsters, just as likely to kill and eat each other as they were to kill and eat you. The Sales Sirens were a perfect illustration of that truth. But an entire floor, where all the Dwellers obeyed a single entity? Worked together as a community?

Yeah, that was truly dangerous.

True, these things had been friendly so far, but if whatever was calling the shots here decided it wanted us dead, it could mobilize every single Dweller and bury us in bodies.

Period. End of story.

“Also be on the lookout for Mr. Edward E. Myrl,” the radio announcer said, “the former Sunnyside maintenance worker. Mr. Myrl is still missing after last month's incident outside of the Sunnyside Little Learners Preschool facility. I repeat, he is still missing. Despite all appearances to the contrary, he is not the same, and has been deemed a contamination risk by the board for thought crimes.

“If you see the man formerly known as Mr. Myrl, do not engage him in conversation. Do not make eye contact. Do not accept anything he offers you. Nod politely, move on as quickly as possible, and report his location immediately. Trust the HOA. Obey the HOA. We are always watching. Always listening. The signal never sleeps.”

The radio signal cut off abruptly and the crunch of white static filled the air for a few seconds before that too fell silent, only to be replaced by a different noise. As a general contractor who’d worked with countless landscaping crews, the sound was unmistakable.

Lawn mowers. A whole army of lawn mowers, all firing up at once.

I watched in mute fascination as a garage door slid open and a man, who could’ve been the poster child for “normal suburban dad,” trotted out with a meticulously pristine lawnmower rolling in front of him. Just like with the kids from the ice cream truck, a tag appeared above the man’s head, though it told me almost nothing of any real value.

Kevin 0.19731B – Normal Human Dad [Level 31]

This is Kevin, just a totally normal human dad. You know Kevin, right? Or was it Steven? Kurt, maybe? Eh, doesn’t really matter. Kevin, Steven, Kurt, Bob, Bill. They might have different names, but these guys are all the same. Just normal dads doing normal human dad stuff. He probably works in IT or maybe he sells insurance.

Doesn’t matter, it’s something boring like that.

Despite living next door to him, you don’t really know Kevin all that well. When you see him out mowing his lawn or hauling the trash cans to the curb, you’re obligated to wave and offer a tightlipped smile while simultaneously praying that he doesn’t try to talk to you. Don’t worry, he won’t. He’s praying just as fervently that you won’t try to talk to him, either.

Kevin nailed the part of normal human dad, right down to a T. He wore khaki shorts, a generic golf shirt almost exactly like mine, and those same eggshell white sneakers with too high white socks. True to the description, Kevin offered us a tight smile and a small wave, then he fired up his mower and was off to the races, cruising along the edges of the yard with expert precision.

We crossed the street on principle, but that didn’t help much.

More Kevins were streaming out of garages all along the block, each pushing their own lawn mowers. Just like the Timmys and Tammys, they were all Kevins. Even though they had the same name, they all looked slightly different from each other. Still, there was a generic “sameness” about the Kevins that made them look like NPCs in a weird Sim City game.

Although lawn mowing seemed to be the most common activity amongst the total normal human dads of floor nineteen, we quickly discovered that other past times included building completely unidentifiable furniture in the garage, painting the house exterior, or cruising around on golf carts with a beer clutched in one hand.

Honestly, cruising around on a golf cart with a cold beer didn’t sound half bad at all.

Ten minutes later—as though the universe were listening to my thoughts—we found an unoccupied golf cart, just sitting in an open lot with a For Sale sign out front. The golf cart wasn’t an Artifact, but it ran like a dream and would sure help us cover ground a lot quicker. Plus, unlike the god-awful ice cream truck, it didn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

Just the opposite, in fact. Turned out, the residents paid us even less attention once we were mounted and cruising through the neighborhood. Almost as if the cart were some sort of suburban camouflage.

As we drove, we got a glimpse of even more of Sunnyside’s residents. The Normal Human Moms were all named Kathy. Most puttered around in small gardens or spent time walking dogs so tiny they barely qualified to be called dogs at all. Sometimes a handful of Kathys congregated together on back patios, which were invariably decorated with string lighting.

There were no kids, though. Not one.

I wasn’t sure where exactly they’d gone, but it seemed the setting sun had driven them away, unleashing their parents on the world instead.

Even though the Kevins and Kathys were just as weird as the Timmys and Tammys, they never got too close for comfort. They just smiled and waved as we cruised past, content to let us roam freely.

At least until I fucked everything up by attempting to do a little guerrilla marketing.

I’d grown so accustomed to tagging hallways and doors, leaving survival tips and directing other lost Delvers to the shop, that I quickly fell into the old rhythm and routine. It was second nature, so I didn’t think twice when I pulled the golf cart over to an unoccupied house, and hastily scrawled a message on the side with bright red spray paint.

Watch out for the Bicycle Gangs — the kids are only out during the day.

— This tip, brought to you by Discount Dan.

Just like I’d done a million times before, I pounded a nail into the exterior wall, then left a few Twinning Rings, even though I had serious doubts that anyone would ever see them. Although this floor was teaming with life, my gut told me that Delvers didn’t put down roots here for a damned good reason.

That, though, was the exact wrong thing to do.

“Dan,” Croc said as I finished hanging the last of the rings on the nail, “I think maybe you should stop doing that.”

“Hold on,” I called back over one shoulder, getting ready to tape up one of the flyers I’d printed out using the old computer I’d picked up in the maintenance corridors.

“I think it might be best if you listen to Croc,” Jakob urged, and there was a note of uncertainty—maybe even fear—lingering beneath the words.

I frowned, flyer still in hand, and turned away from the house.

I froze when I saw the disgruntled Kevin standing about fifteen feet away. He had his lawnmower with him, though he’d let the engine die. The man canted his head to one side and stared at the words scrawled across the side of the house with a look of profound confusion etched into the lines of his face. His eyes skipped frantically from word to word, reading them over and over again as though searching for meaning, but finding none.

His expression slowly morphed from confusion to a mixture of dawning horror and terrible rage.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” the Kevin growled, his hands balling into tight fists. “Red is an unauthorized color. Everyone knows RED IS AN UNAUTHORIZED COLOR. The HOA Board won’t approve of alterations that fall outside the community guidelines. Especially if you don’t have a permit.” He paused, staring at me with a furrowed brow. “Do you have a permit?”

There was something sinister in the words.

“Yes?” I replied, trying to bluff my way out of a potentially deadly confrontation.

Apparently, Kevin knew that I was full of shit, because he absolutely lost is mind a second later.

“Liar!” He screeched, sounding utterly inhuman.

The transformation happened in the span of an eyeblink.

One second, we were standing on an emerald, green lawn beside a boring, but typical two-story subdivision house. The next, the grass beneath our feet was actually a thick carpet of what I could only assume was hair. Human hair. The house, though still technically house-shaped, was a fleshy mass that sprouted from the ground like an enormous, cancerous tumor.

Worst of all—worse than the lawn hair or the house made of meat—was Kevin.

The illusion masking the congenial neighborhood dad had been rudely dispelled.

In his place stood a hulking figure with malformed arms, gangly legs, and pale gray flesh covered in yellow boils that looked like they were on the verge of popping at any moment. Like the kids, Kevin had too many eyes and a fleshy tube for a mouth, ringed by needle-like teeth. And the icing on the cake? Kevin’s torso had been entirely replaced with the lower portion of a lawnmower.

A rusted blade screamed inside the man’s grotesque belly as he charged straight at us.

"Oh Fiddlestick," Croc sighed in resignation.