Discount Dan

“One more on your left,” Jakob called out, his voice lazy. Almost bored.

I pivoted at the hips, raised one hand, and fired off a javelin of stone that skewered the last of the Baggage Handlers who’d been ballsy enough to assault us this go around. This was the fifth or sixth wave that had tried their luck in the past few hours. There were so many of the little shitheads I couldn’t even keep count at this point.

The stone spear punched clean through the Dweller’s chest, killing the creature instantly, and pinning its gangly torso to the wall like an obscene party decoration.

“Hey, Dan?” Croc asked, trotting over from across the ballroom, “you want to keep any of these bodies to play with?”

I grimaced at the choice of words and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Creating Taxidermied Horrors is not the same thing as ‘playing’ with dead bodies, Croc.”

“If you say so, Dan,” the dog replied, shrugging rubbery shoulders, “though it seems like playing to me.”

“Well, it’s not,” I growled, “and to answer your original question, no, I won’t be saving any of these creatures for scientific and totally legitimate reanimating purposes.”

Croc, Jakob, and I had been grinding our way through the fifth floor for the last two days and I officially had more bodies and body-parts than I knew what I do with. I’d spent some time the night before repairing Synthia 2.0 back at the shop, so she was up and running again, but my entire personal Storage Space was now officially full of dead things. Crab limbs, mimic tentacles, Baggage Handler torsos.

Thankfully, the Subspace Storage Space was time-locked, so the corpses would stay fresh until I needed them, but even still—my inventory was turning into a full-blown meat market and I was quickly running out of carrying capacity. Before much longer, I’d either need to find a way to expand my storage space capacity, or I’d need to acquire a walk-in freezer to help… store my goods.

So far, the trip through Hotel Hell had been fruitful, if rather tedious.

I was starting to realize that was par for the course inside the Backrooms. Although there were plenty of monsters willing to rip you a brand-new asshole, the vast majority of this place was just… empty and boring. A yawning, endless cavern devoid of life or resources. Ninety-five percent of the time, wandering through the twisting hallways was about as exciting as watching paint dry, while the other five percent was a chaotic, terror-fueled, life-and-death battle for survival.

It took us another fifteen hours of what felt like aimless wandering until Unerring Arrow eventually led us to a bloody red door, marked Proibido! Apenas para Funcionários do Hotel. I was pretty sure that was Portuguese, not Spanish, and though I wasn’t sure exactly what it said, I got the general gist of the message: Employees Only, Stay the Fuck Out. The door was locked, but my Quantum Skeleton Key let us through and into a series of maintenance corridors.

Unlike the rest of the hotel, with its slick veneer of wealth and opulence, these hallways were spartan in nature, designed for service staff and never meant for the guests to see.

There were no chandeliers. No paintings or crushed velvet sitting chairs.

Just plain gray brick, exposed pipes, and storage rooms filled with bed sheets or cleaning supplies. The maintenance halls were also eerily devoid of life. Not even mimics seemed to inhabit this particular section of the fifth floor, which was rather disconcerting. There were always mimics. In fact, we didn’t see any Dwellers as we made our way through the claustrophobic passageways—though we did find a shit ton of ingeniously hidden traps.

Magical pipe bombs. Pressure plates and trip wires that would impale the unwary with sharpened metal rods or jettison geysers of flesh-melting steam. I marked all the ones we found with spray paint, but I also took a little extra time to examine them in passing.

My Spelunker’s Sixth Sense had always allowed me to spot traps a mile off, but with the Runic Trap Relic in place, I could see far more than before. It was no longer just a pervasive red aura, warning me of the danger. Now, more often than not, I could see the sigils powering the traps. Most had the same basic base pattern—the mana battery component, which held the spell form shape—but there were a bunch of other ruins layered over each other, until they created a mosaic of complicated interlocking lines, shapes, and segments.

I wasn’t sure what each of the added layers did, but I was sure they were commands of some sort, telling the magic stored within the basic rune how to behave.

As far as I could tell, all of the traps relied on runes and sigils of one kind or another, though many worked in a significantly different fashion than the runes engraved on the tennis balls in my tool pouch.

For trip wires, there were actually two separate runes, typically placed across from one another on adjacent surfaces. Sometimes two walls. Sometimes the floor and ceiling. Hell, I even found one strung through a doorway at neck height. One rune served as the transmitter, the other as the receiver, and together they created an invisible mana tether that acted almost like a laser light. The trap wasn’t activated by touching either sigil plate; rather, when something broke the mana tether, both sigils detonated simultaneously, releasing whatever spell was stored in each half.

In some ways, that made the tripwires more powerful than the basic resonance plates, because two spell forms could be stored in a single trap, but it also made them less versatile.

The pitfalls and environmental hazards were the strangest of the lot and operated on an entirely different set of mechanism than the other traps. Those were runes, too, but of a kind I didn’t even remotely recognize. From what I could figure, they didn’t seem to store or release mana at all, but instead manipulated the physical structure of the Backrooms itself. Those left me scratching my head in confusion.

Still, I was making progress.

Superficially, the Backrooms were chaos and madness—a lawless world where things happened without rhyme or reason. Once I finally got a peak beneath the hood, however, it became apparent there was an underlying set of rules that governed this place and if I could understand those rules, then I could start to bend them or even break them in my favor.

We passed by a large industrial kitchen, decked out in tile and stainless steel that had everything anyone would ever need to service a large hotel. Industrial mixers and huge prep tables, alongside commercial range stoves and bulky combination ovens with a whole range of cooking functions. There were deep fryers, lined up against one wall like a squad of soldiers waiting for orders, a hefty meat slicer with gleaming blades, and several stainless-steel sinks capable of holding piles of dishware or dirty pots and pans.

There was no food though. Not a single crumb to be found.

We checked the walk-in fridge—the damn thing was larger than my bedroom back home—but the shelves were covered with nothing more than a thin ream of white frost. The pantry was equally barren. It was a stark reminder that one of the biggest dangers in the Backrooms was not the monsters or the traps, but the sheer lack of survival resources.

Just because there wasn’t anything to eat didn’t mean the place was useless, though.

Hell, I’d just been complaining about all the corpses filling up my Subspace Storage like stacks of cord wood, and here was the answer to my problems. A badass, full-sized refrigeration unit. I could keep a lot of bodies in a space like that—a sentence I never thought I’d utter, and one that one-hundred percent made me sound like a serial killer. Which I wasn’t. At least not strictly speaking since I was pretty sure Dwellers didn’t technically count as people. Not even the humanoid ones.

At level 22, I could use my Corvo’s Blanket Fort ability to claim a total of 55,000 square feet worth of Backrooms real estate—though, I’d already used 15,011 square feet to claim the MediocreMart, the concession stand, my swanky new hotel room, and the single Progenitor Monolith. The freezer itself was a rectangular 10’ x 12’ stainless-steel box with ample storage shelving and even meat hooks hanging from the ceiling. Adding the unit would only cost me one-hundred and twenty square feet worth of floor space, which was nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Not to mention that I’d finally get my personal storage back.

No more catering around disgusting monster parts like some kind of ghoulish, traveling morgue. That alone was worth the price of admission. Before I annexed the space, I took the liberty of looting the kitchen, grabbing anything that wasn’t bolted down to the floor, then shoving it all into the cooler. I didn’t have any plans to open up a restaurant anytime soon—not with the concession stand doing such robust business—but who the hell knew what the future had in store?

Plus, I didn’t just need corpses for my experiments in the taxidermical arts, I needed non-organic parts, too. I could already imagine a Horror with an exposed blender attached to its wrist, or one that was also part deep fryer. There were a lot of interesting and horrific possibilities to work with. Once I’d taken everything of value from the kitchen, I used my finger to select the desired area on my minimap, then activated Blanket Fort and watched in morbid satisfaction as the whole refrigerator rumbled and quivered, before sinking through the floor and disappearing completely.

It left no trace that it had ever been there at all.

The walk-in cooler wasn’t the only awesome thing we found while wandering the Maintenance Corridors in search of the sacred Laundry Mat of Hotel Hell. Nope, turned out the whole place was a treasure trove. In hindsight, it seemed so obvious. This area contained all of the items and materials necessary to service an enormous hotel and in many ways, Discount Dan’s Backroom Bargains, was also a hotel of sorts—even if an unconventional one.

We found a variety of empty management offices with plain, blocky desks cluttered with old phones, fax machines, and computers that had been cutting edge in 1993. They were clunky, ancient things compared to the sleek laptops, tablets, and cellphones everyone had these days, but when I tried one of the computers, it booted right up—though, admittedly, it was a long, long process. I snagged the computer, along with its connecting printer, and tossed both into storage for later.

There were also housekeeping storage rooms with piles of blankets, sheets, and stacks of fluffy pillows. They had several roll-away beds as well, which were quite a bit nicer than the camping cots we’d looted from Open Sky Outfitters. Looked like the store’s sleeping quarters would be getting a few snazzy upgrades in the not-too-distant future.

Additionally, I stumbled upon a large maintenance closet that was overflowing with precious loot. There were enough tools to open up a neighborhood hardware store. Plenty of basic things—hammers and screwdrivers, levels and wrenches—plus a handful of delicious power tools. A few drills, an angle grinder, a Sawzall, and a large air compressor. There was even a cordless nailgun that had my name written all over it. None of the tools were Artifacts, which was disappointing, but a guy like me could never say no to a good angle grinder.

I looted the whole lot along with a mess of baseboard trim, some two-by-fours stacked up in one corner, and a pile of spare hotel room doors.

The real jackpot, however, was a small security office with a bank of monitors and a cardboard box of common-grade Artifact security cameras. The cameras were the blocky rectangular outdoor kind, which were so common at office parks or shopping centers. The cameras could be placed anywhere and would broadcast a grainy black and white picture, though they only worked with the old school CCTV screens filling up the far side of the room. The room wasn’t large. A ten-by-ten cube, which came complete with a desk, rolling chair, and an empty safe.

Neatly lined up on top of the safe were a dozen long-range DeWalt Walkie-Talkies. I’d used ones just like them on damn-near every job site I’d ever worked on, though these were Backrooms specials.

DEWALT Etheric Walkie Talkies

Type: Reusable

Better than a pager but not quite as good as a cellphone, Walkie Talkies truly are the white bread of communication devices: Bland, boring, and plain, but dependable as fuck. And these babies are extra dependable. The battery never runs low, and they work no matter where you are, allowing intrepid Delvers to communicate in between floors.

There are those who say that using them too often allows you hear voices from beyond the Void, slowly eroding your sanity until you’re a husk of a man, offering blowies behind the Wendy’s dumpster in exchange for pocket change, but that’s probably bullshit. Right? I mean, what the fuck do “they” know anyway? I’m sure these are fine and not at all cursed in any way.

I briefly considered trying to scoop up all of the individual items within the room, but I didn’t have the carrying capacity.

In the end, I finally decided to throw caution to the wind and liberate the entire security space just like I’d done with the cooler back in the kitchen. With all the bullshit going down with the Skinless Court and the Black Harbor Syndicate, it was high time I beefed up my security system anyway, and the added benefit of the surveillance equipment would serve me well moving forward.

I burned through another 100 square feet of available space. I’d have a lot of stuff to sort out once we made it back to the storefront, but I wasn’t leaving this level until I had what I came for—the stupid, fucking laundry mat.

We made a short pit stop inside a Maintenance Staff breakroom, taking a few minutes to rest our feet and grab a quick bite to eat. The breakroom had a few plastic tables, some dented metal folding chairs, and a small kitchenette devoid of anything that resembled food or sustenance. Just dusty cupboards and a fridge that smelled like moldy cheese. That was fine though, because we were always prepared.

I fished out an entire pizza for Croc, a plate of nachos for Jakob, and a pair of jumbo hotdogs slathered in ketchup for myself. Thanks to the storage system’s temporal lock, the food was still piping hot. Almost as if it had just come straight from the convenience stand. I desperately tried not to think about the fact that the food had come from the very same storage space where I was currently keeping a dump truck’s worth of dead bodies.

When I couldn’t shake the thought, I decided to add an ice-cold six pack of Budweiser to the mix, since it was never too early for day drinking.

I cracked a can and slid one to Jakob, then popped the top of another and took a long slug. I closed my eyes for a second, then pressed the cool can against my forehead, enjoying the beads of icy condensation that rolled down my skin. If there was one bad thing about these maintenance halls—other than the traps and monsters and lingering existential dread—it was the godawful heat. The AC that kept the Hotel at a balmy 72 degrees didn’t work so well back here, and the temperature was sweltering.

The inside of my jorts were swampy in the worst way and I’d need to use a substantial amount of Baby powder once I got back to the store.

We finished eating and I may or may not have slammed back two or three more beers, then we hit the road, following Unerring Arrow ever deeper into the level. After another couple hours of relentless trudging, we turned into a short corridor which came to an abrupt dead end after about thirty feet or so. Except, on closer inspection, it wasn’t actually a dead end at all.

There, inset into the wall, was a metal access panel that resembled a small door.

Marked above the panel in blocky white letters were the words I’d been waiting to see for days. Laundry Chute.