Monroe

Chapter Three Hundred and Fifty-Seven. Executive decisions.

"Fuck," Bob muttered.

Growing up in Watts, Bob hadn't ever bought into the whole 'California Paradise' idea. It wasn't until he'd gone to UCLA and moved closer to the campus that he'd had any idea how people could ever equate those two words.

Somehow, even though he'd known that hundred foot tall monsters were going to be roaming about, he hadn't made the mental leap to understanding just how much destruction they would cause.

It appeared that no one had deemed the UCLA campus as essential, leaving the ruined buildings in place.

Bob slowly rose into the sky on the unseen wings of his flight spell, allowing him to see more of the city he'd once called home.

Looking around, he could see a pattern. Apartment buildings and houses had been repaired or reconstructed, while most commercial buildings had been left alone. As he turned, he spotted a crowd, hundreds, or even a thousand strong surrounding a short, squat stone building that had a lot more in common with medieval architecture than it did modern.

He considered flying over, but didn't want to draw that much attention to himself. Walking over carried the same problem, as there was no mistaking him for anything besides a tier seven or eight being. It did present him with an opportunity to practice a spell he'd been working on for a while.

Shape change, from the Animal School, was a spell Bob had become quite familiar with, as it allowed him to become a cat, which Monroe absolutely loved. The spell wasn't limited to allowing you to experience a touch of divinity, though.

Bob dropped into his inventory and began to build the pattern for the spell. It was something he'd been meaning to try for a while, but hadn't had the need to do so.

After an hour and four tries, he finally managed to complete the pattern, and he felt the spell take hold.

Looking up at the mirror, he smiled.

Without the System to do the heavy lifting, you had to know exactly what you were shifting into. That was less of a problem when you were turning into your self.

Bob moved through the crowd, head ever so slightly down, eyes up, shoulders hunched. He had perfected the art of moving through groups of people without being noticed while still being aware of likely threats.

There wasn't any apparent organization to the mass of people, but some of them were clearly prepared to be here for a while. Folding camp chairs and coolers were prevalent, with people lounging in them. The atmosphere was one of surprising patience.

In Bob's experience, when a hundred or more people gathered together without any apparent entertainment, it was normally for a protest of some sort. This was different. The people here were gathered in small groups of four to eight, talking to one another, but not interacting with anyone else.

As he drew closer to the stone building, he could tell that there was a perimeter of sorts, an invisible line where the groups were clustered closer together, but didn't move any nearer to the center.

He was surprised when a man wearing a suit and tie while carrying a clipboard approached him.

"Are you looking for a group, or a place on the list?" The man asked.

"What list?" Bob asked carefully.

"The list for LAD7?" The man replied slowly, looking down at his clipboard and then back up at Bob. "You don't have a token," he frowned. "Is this your first time here?"

"It is," Bob admitted, hunching his shoulders a touch more.

"Ah, my apologies," the man said, squaring his shoulders. "My name is Aaron Chastfield, and I'm one of the administrators assigned to Los Angeles Dungeon number Seven. Have you ever been in a Dungeon?"

"I have," Bob said.

"Excellent," Aaron smiled. "We can skip the explanation of what Dungeons are and how they work. Have you ever registered for a Dungeon before?"

"No," Bob shook his head.

"You must be one of the folks who went over to Thayland then," Aaron noted. "So, as you probably know, we have a lot more people than we have Dungeons. There are twelve million people in the Los Angeles Metro area, or there were during the last census. We think there are still about ten million here, but it's difficult to be sure. We're lucky in that we're on the coast, so there are more Dungeons, but we still only have ten of them, which means each Dungeon is serving one million people. If you have a team, you can register with me, and we will schedule your trip into the Dungeon, but please be aware that without any special considerations, you'll be waiting for," he checked his clipboard, which Bob could now see was actually tablet with some sort of flexible overlay. "Forty-six days. Special considerations can accelerate that. If you or a member of your group have the Plant School and are willing to contract to grow food with the Early Harvest ritual, or if you have someone with the Dimension School and the Portal Ritual, and are willing to contract to transport people, we could get you in more quickly and more frequently."

"I'm not in a team," Bob replied.

Aaron winced. "I won't ask, but I'm sorry to hear that. Going it alone is rough. If you're looking for a team, I can check the official requests, but I'll need to see your status."

Bob shook his head.

"I know," Aaron sighed, "it's voluntary, but almost no one wants to do it. You can check the official message boards at lad7.ca.gov, there are always people either looking to fill a slot or form a new group."

"Is everyone here waiting for their turn?" Bob asked.

"No," Aaron shook his head, "they're hoping that a group misses their turn. It happens often enough that we have a separate list for groups waiting at the Dungeon. They get a token and I go down the list, buzzing the token at the top. They have three minutes to get up front before I buzz the next group."

"That makes sense, I suppose," Bob said.

"It's an imperfect world, as the System would say," Aaron said ruefully. "We're all just trying to work in it."

"How many groups go through the Dungeon each day?" Bob asked curiously.

"On average, about ten thousand," Aaron replied. "There's actually a lot of variance, because higher-level people cost the Dungeon more energy. The state instituted a policy that without a special dispensation, you aren't permitted to enter the Dungeon if you're higher than level ten in order to ensure that more people are able to go through it."

Bob frowned. "They aren't even letting people hit the tier cap?"

"Not unless you have a dispensation, which for people like us means not unless you want to apply for law enforcement, and they have more applicants than they could possibly need, so they've become pretty selective," Aaron sighed.

"Honestly, I'd like to get out of here, but part of my deal with the federal government was going where I was told, so I'm stuck," Aaron said. "Anyway, if you have any questions or decide to register, I'm here every day from seven am to seven pm."

"Thanks," Bob nodded as Aaron moved away.

He started making his way back out of the crowd.

Intellectually, he'd known that LA wouldn't have enough Dungeon capacity to handle everyone. Even taking into consideration minors and the elderly, although the elderly wouldn't be elderly for long, given the ability to reincarnate, there were just too many people.

The King's proposal suddenly started to look like it might be more attractive than he'd originally thought.

He was nearly out of the crowd when a hand fell on his shoulder. "Hey, you're leaving, right? Do you think you could give us a hand with my grandpa?"

Bob turned and found himself facing a young man, flanked by an even younger woman. He would be the first to admit he wasn't the greatest judge of people, which was why he used Monroe as a sort of litmus test, but he was pretty sure neither of them were old enough to drink. Or possibly even vote.

An elderly couple were dozing in a pair of cheap camp chairs behind them.

"I can carry one of them, but we can't carry them both, and yesterday someone knocked granddad out of his chair and left him on the ground while we were moving grandma," the man admitted.

"It's not that far, about fifteen blocks," the young woman added hopefully.

"Sure," Bob said, holding back a sigh. It would have been easier to kick a puppy than to tell the kids no, and he had a while before he was due to take Mike to Chicago.

"I'm Alejandro and this is my sister, Maria," the young man introduced himself.

"I'm Bob," he reached out and shook their hands in turn.

"They probably won't wake up," Alejandro said as he carefully lifted his grandmother up and out of her chair, which Maria then folded and slung over her shoulder.

"Yeah, they cycled a couple of minutes ago," Maria added, unable to suppress a giggle as Bob awkwardly lifted the frail old man in a princess carry. If he had to guess, he'd put the man in his eighties, maybe even his nineties, and while he was a large framed man, likely over six feet in his youth, he couldn't have weighted more than a hundred and forty pounds.

"What do you mean, 'cycled?'" Bob asked as Maria packed up the second chair, and Alejandro began leading them away from the crowd.

"Well, when we all came out of stasis, the hospitals were pretty much closed. You can get emergency treatment there, but they ran out of medication really quickly. Grandpa has a heart condition and kidney problems, and grandma has liver disease and emphysema," Maria explained.

"We didn't really want to fight monsters, but when everything costs mana crystals, we didn't have a choice," Alejandro said. "We were just a little too late in figuring everything out," his voice was bitter. "Too late to get enough runs in the Dungeon, too late to realize that if we took druid paths, we'd be able to make enough crystals."

"We didn't know how bad it would get, and we used the crystals we fought for to level up and take the skills we thought we'd need," Maria continued. "It took us four days to finish the Dungeon the first time, and we both got hurt pretty badly. I used my crystals to level up twice and take the Animancy School and Anima blast, so we were able to recover, which ended up helping grandma and grandpa because they started to get worse, but if I pumped enough healing into them it helped."

"I used my two levels to get melee and spears," Alejandro added. "Lot's of trees in the Dungeon, easy to make a spear."

"But we ran out of food, and we had to go into debt to keep ourselves fed," Maria said. "The government runs the food programs, so there wasn't any interest or anything, but it costs one mana crystal per day, per person, and with forty-five days between delves, that means the hundred crystals we each make from the Dungeon are almost all spent on food."

"They kept getting worse, and it took us almost a year to get out of debt," Alejandro explained. "That's when Maria here had the bright idea to bring them into the Dungeon with us."

Bob looked at the unconscious man in his arms.

"Yeah, they were awake more then, but they couldn't really help. But they were part of the group, so they got the quest reward. We showed them how to level up and got them to level two, and they put all their points into endurance, but it wasn't enough," Maria said angrily. "They kept getting worse."

"We were going through our menus, looking for anything that could help," Alejandro said. "But there wasn't anything."

"That's when we heard about a new divine blessing you could get from worshipping some guy's cat," Maria laughed. "I thought it was a joke, some new kind of meme, you know?"

"But it isn't," Alejandro said. "It's called 'Naptime' and it regenerates a lot of health every minute."

"Fifty-eight health every minute," Maria agreed. "Which is amazing, and if I wasn't a healer, we'd both be aiming for it."

"More importantly, if you sleep for seven minutes, it has a regeneration effect that restores you back to however you were when you took the blessing," Alejandro added, shaking his head. "If we could have gotten them leveled up sooner, it would be an even bigger help."

"Anyway, they are usually up for half an hour or so before they need a nap," Maria continued, "but they can't walk very well or very quickly, so we've been carrying them to the Dungeon to get on the wait list."

"Have you gotten into the Dungeon when you were on the wait list?" Bob asked.

"Twice," Alejandro said. "It was before we started bringing them, though."

"We're due for our run in a few weeks," Maria said, as they turned and began walking up to an apartment complex. "I'll take level three and four, and get ritual magic and reincarnation. Then I'll be able to reincarnate them the run after that."

"Just two more months," Alejandro agreed fervently.

Bob looked at the apartment complex as they approached. The sign was an oval, with two pine trees painted on either end, and 'Whispering Pines' written in the middle. Those were the only two pine trees in sight. Beneath the weathered sign, there was a smaller one that said 'Hospice Care.'

"You two live here with them?" Bob asked.

"Yeah," Alejandro said as they entered the complex and headed toward the leftmost of three buildings. "Most of the staff bailed right away, and eventually they all had to. No one was paying them, and they have to live too."

"So we had to move in and take care of them, not that it was a hardship, considering our apartment was destroyed, and we were in the camps," Maria said as she darted up a stairwell.

"Camps?" Bob asked warily.

"The monsters fucked up the city pretty badly, and it costs crystals to rebuild, so a lot of people are homeless," Alejandro said. "World turned to shit on us, you know?"

They navigated four flights of stairs, careful to not bang around their unconscious cargo, before turning down a hallway, where Maria waited by an open door.

"We're in the back," Alejandro said helpfully as he walked down the short entryway that opened up into a kitchen and a living room. The living room had been converted to living space, two sets of bunk beds constructed of rough lumber, making it clear that it wasn't a lounging area.

Bob followed Alejandro past two sets of doors before they turned into the last door on the right.

It probably would have been a cozy room for someone in hospice. It had an attached bathroom, and had probably had a bed with a few chairs back when it had fulfilled its intended purpose. Now, it boasted another pair of bunk beds and a set of shelves, all constructed of untreated lumber.

Alejandro carefully lay his grandmother on the bottom bunk and motioned for Bob to deposit his burden on the bottom bunk on the opposite side of the room.

"Thanks man, I really appreciate it," Alejandro said, offering his hand, which Bob shook.

"We really do," Maria said as she stowed the chairs on the bottom shelf and started tucking a blanket around her grandmother.

Bob looked around the tiny room, and then at the thin, but determined faces of the kids in front of him.

He pulled out his phone and tapped the screen.