Level One God

After what felt like two or three solid minutes of walking downhill, we reached a simple door. My sense of direction was completely thrown off, but I thought we must have passed all the way beneath the street and entered the rocky, underground mountain the city of Thrask was wrapped around.

Grimbo slid a key in the locked door, turned it, and pulled it open.

We walked into a circular room with a huge dimensional box at the center. I guessed this area was a natural cave the grommet had found because the ceiling and walls were too rocky and high to imagine him reaching, even with ladders or scaffolds.

Bench seating had been dug into the ground all over the room. It was like they had turned this place into a huge theater.

I walked inside, then froze when I saw holes in the walls all around the room. Grommets were waddling into the room casually as if gathering for their favorite evening TV show. Some of them slapped hands or stood eye-to-eye, doing the womp womp womp thing as a kind of greeting. I saw some exchanging rocks or clumps of grass, which were quickly tucked beneath their hair, maybe to be saved for later.

“That’s a lot of grommets,” I whispered. At this point, I was ready to just roll with it, so long as I got to claim my beds. Every grommet I inspected was exactly level 1 and Wood, too. Pacifists, maybe?

“Honored guests, wait there, please.” Grimbo pointed to the center of the room. I took a longer look at the dimensional box as we moved closer. It was just like the one in Riverwell, but more embellished. I couldn’t begin to imagine how the grommets had gotten it down here. It was at least five or six times too big to fit in any of the small grommet-sized tunnels I could see.

Maybe these boxes arrived by some kind of magic. But hadn’t Lyria said a naidu has to keep the magic in these things working? I tried to imagine these innocent little hairballs bribing a naidu to keep their tunnels and furniture kink cave secret.

We waited by the machine as grommets continued to gather. I listened to them continually “hey ho” each other, slap hands, and womp womp womp before taking their seats. Before long, hundreds of pairs of those big, googly eyes were watching us without blinking.

“Think this is normal?” I asked softly. “Like, do they make everybody come down to this weird cave to turn in their vouchers?”

“I’m going to go with ‘no,’” Lyria said, “but I’ve also never tried to turn in a legendary voucher.”

“It has become the time!” Grimbo announced. He lifted his hairless pink arms from his wavy brown hair, three fingers on each hand splayed wide like he was a pint-sized priest. He approached me, eyes level with my belly button, as he raised his hands toward me. “The first voucher…” He whispered the words like a prayer.

The room filled with reverent womps.

I produced the epic bed voucher and handed it to Grimbo, who dramatically walked to the machine and stuck his arm inside. He made an unsettling little ooh sound and shivered, then removed his now-empty hand.

The large open end of the box was covered by a curtain, but it started to bulge. This part, at least, was still more or less exactly what I saw in Riverwell. The only real difference was the scene surrounding it. In this case, that meant a crowd of weird, hairy things with bulging eyes who were vibrating and raising little pink arms like they were getting ready for a concert to start soon.

The bed started to slide out from beneath the curtain, wooden legs screeching awkwardly on the stone floor. I saw milk-white fingers gripping one edge of the bed, but they slipped out of view almost as soon as I saw them.

I swallowed down a thousand questions, focusing on the bed instead.

“Stats, stats, stats,” the grommets whispered.

I took a look at the bed. It did look nice and comfortable. It was larger than my rare bed, too. Like the grommets, who were completely freaking out, I was also most interested in the stats.

Grimbo pulled a lens out of his hair, cradled it in both hands and lifted it for me to take. “You will view first. You will cause… happiness if you share. It is the way,” he added in a quavering whisper.

“Alright,” I said, raising the lens before my helmet.

[Epic Bed] Require 50% less sleep.

[Benefits of Full Night Sleep]

Major Level Wounds Healed.

Minor increase to mana recovery for one day.

Immune to headaches.

Sleeping in this bed provides one week of immunity from Restless Leg Syndrome.

I read the stats to the grommets and Lyria aloud. The grommets seemed to really love the stats, especially the part about restless leg syndrome, which had drawn the loudest wave of womps yet.

“Restless leg syndrome?” Lyria asked.

“It’s when your legs feel like they have to be moving constantly,” I said with a shrug. “I’ve never really had it, though.”

“Huh…” she said. “I’m jealous, though. I would kill to only need to sleep half as much. And with how fast you already recover, the increase to your mana recovery will let you go crazy.”

I nodded. I was already imagining what I could do with the benefits, but I was mostly wondering how much better they’d get with the legendary and cursed tiers. So far, the biggest benefit of increasing my bed’s rarity was reducing my need for sleep. I supposed it made sense, as getting rested was the primary function of a bed.

Would that theme carry over to upgrades of other types of furniture? I tried to picture how that would work. Would an epic nightlamp increase your reading speed or knowledge retention, for example? Or would an epic bath simply let you get more clean or clean faster? Maybe an epic desk would increase the effectiveness of work you did while sitting at it.

The possibilities were interesting, but thoughts for another time.

I had to admit I felt a little underwhelmed by the epic bed, though. I secretly hoped the bed would let me shoot fireballs out of my eyes for a few hours every morning or something like that. Chances were, personal space upgrades simply didn’t lead to that kind of thing. I had suspected as much, anyway.

A hush fell over the room as Grimbo approached. He bowed his hairy head, palms up for the next voucher. I produced the legendary bed voucher and grinned as the little creatures lost their minds at the sight of it.

Grimbo’s hands shook as he held it, waddling toward the dimensional box. He walked slowly, carefully stuck the voucher inside the box, and waited.

The epic bed flaked away, vanishing out of view just before a shower of sparks sprayed out of the box’s arm hole.

Grimbo patted his hairs, putting out a few little fires as he smiled with excitement. All the grommets started womping in a low, excited rhythm. More sparks sprayed out of the large garage-sized end of the dimensional box as another shape started to push its way out.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what would happen if I lifted the curtain suddenly. Would I see dimensional beings rolling a bed out of some magic factory?

“Stats, stats, stats,” they chanted. One grommet was so excited he was trying to dig through the stone wall behind him. Another screamed so loud and suddenly that he seemed to faint, tipping over sideways to lay unconscious.

The legendary bed was huge. It was probably big enough for four full-grown adults to lay side by side comfortably. All the fabric and material was cut through with glowing runes that I could vaguely sense. It looked like something Merlin would sleep in.

[Legendary Bed] Require 75% less sleep.

[Benefits of Full Night Sleep]

Recover from any injuries (limbs cannot be regrown, but ears are not limbs. You may regrow ears).

Moderate increase to mana recovery for one day.

Immune to headaches.

Sleeping in this bed once makes you immune to Restless Leg Syndrome for the rest of your life (works for friends, too).

[Legendary Ability] Once every seven days, you may summon a duplicate of this bed to your location and use it for half of its normal benefit (Restless Leg Syndrome benefits will only apply to one leg. Only one ear may be regrown per night). The duplicate will destroy itself after granting [Full Night’s Sleep].

I read through all the details, earning several impressed oohs and ahhs from the assembled grommets. They even clapped when they learned about the one-legged immunity clause.

I hardly watched as they all drifted from their seats to look at and admire the bed. They thought the show was over, and maybe it should be.

I thought about all the benefits carefully. The legendary ability was very interesting. I imagined being able to summon my bed in the heat of an infestation or a dungeon. I could patch myself up if I ever became too badly injured. It didn’t say anything about not letting an ally use it, either, so I could probably let someone else use it to save their life.

Being able to regrow my ears was nice, too, I guessed.

But the part about only summoning it outside my personal space every seven days was tough. Maybe things would slow down for me going forward, but I had already done so much in my short time here on Eros. I would probably find myself constantly wishing I could summon it more often.

I had no way to know what “moderate” meant in terms of my mana regeneration, either. Was it a percentage that would scale with my increasing ability to recover quickly? Or was it a flat rate?

As I thought through the stats, I had to admit I was looking to shoot holes in them. In my gut, I wanted to believe they weren’t life-changing. I wanted to convince myself I could live without them because using my cursed token would mean risking everything in the bed’s description.

I knew the safest choice was probably to wait. There was nobody putting a gun to my head and saying I needed to curse the bed right this second. But I worried I’d get used to the legendary bed and become too scared to curse it if I waited. If I risked it right now and had to delete the bed entirely, I could block the whole thing out from my memory and pretend I hadn’t made a terrible mistake.

No amount of reasoning was going to get me to the conclusion I wanted, though. The simple truth was that logic pointed to an obvious conclusion. Stash the cursed token. Don’t use it.

The problem was my fixation with the note I’d seen from my secret messenger on that first day. They made it sound like the cursed bed was something they’d done strictly for my benefit. It sounded like none of the other prestiged gods would be happy about it, but they thought I would be. Maybe there was something I didn’t know about my divine ability?

I chewed the inside of my lip. I’d thought this through and decided already, but it was harder now that the moment was here and I knew exactly what I was risking.

Damn it.

I could sense Lyria’s focus on me. She knew what I was considering, after all.

“You could wait,” she said.

“I could,” I agreed.

The grommets weren’t paying us attention as they spoke in hushed whispers, touching the bed like a holy relic. It was a sea of glossy hair and little, spaghetti-like pink arms. The womp noise they kept making reminded me of a guinea pig I had as a kid. Although he had only made that sound when he was getting frisky with the two female guinea pigs he lived with.

“But I have to think I got… my ability for a reason,” I said carefully. I didn’t know if I could picture a grommet working as some kind of spy, but there was no reason to be reckless and give myself away. “This bed would help, but I don’t know if it looks like something that will increase the speed of my advancement exponentially. The mana regeneration is nice, but I already know how to get my mana back pretty quickly. The healing is great, obviously, but I don’t intend to go out and try to fight by myself. I can hopefully lean on a healer for that sort of thing. Besides, I’m hoping to have a Heart stone of my own soon,” I added. “The reduced need for sleep would be the most useful. I can’t deny that, but if I’m working with groups, it would at least be slightly less useful. Everyone else will need to sleep, and I’ll still have to wait for them before we can keep pushing forward.”

Lyria took a deep breath. “I would normally try to talk anyone out of what you’re thinking… but if you are who you’re supposed to be, then maybe you should trust your instincts. They apparently served you pretty well one time around, right?”

“I have a feeling I should do this,” I said. “The ability I have is specifically geared for taking this risk. And I could live without the legendary bed, even if I’d obviously rather have it. I have to assume the extra benefits from cursing it would be huge.”

“Right,” she said. “Minus the whole cursing it part?”

I took a few seconds to run through all my arguments one more time, making sure I wanted to do this. In the end, Lyria was right. I needed to learn to trust my instincts. They’d driven me to godhood once, after all, and my instincts were screaming for me to apply the curse and take my chances.

“There’s one more voucher,” I said loudly. A wave of nervous dread rolled through me.

A sudden hush fell over the grommets. They all backed away slightly.

Grimbo, who was kneeling to check out the legs on the bed, bolted upright. He rushed to me. “Angelic? Demonic?”

“Cursed…” I said.

A handful of grommets tipped over sideways and lay motionless like fainting goats. They were carefully carried back to the seats by the grommets with stronger constitutions.

I produced the cursed voucher, watching as black motes of magic drifted away from the ornamented red paper.

“Do it, please,” I said.

Grimbo bowed his head, backing away. “This one cannot. This one feels… terror.”

I nodded, then approached the device as the grommets whispered in hushed voices. I had seen how this was done, and figured it wouldn’t be that hard. I plunged my hand in through the curtain and waited.

Several seconds passed until I thought maybe something was wrong.

Then I jolted in surprise as cold fingers touched my forearm, soft as feathers. The fingers dragged their way up to my wrist, trailing cold in their wake. Something plucked the cursed voucher from my grasp.

I pulled my arm out, shivering.

Red smoke billowed from the hole my arm had just been in, and the legendary bed snapped out of existence.

I swallowed hard, watching as a small shape pushed its way out of the curtain. It looked like a camping bedroll. My stomach sank before I read the description.

[Cursed Bedroll of Restless Days] “Full Night’s Sleep” gained in one hour.

[Benefits of Full Night Sleep]

Retains the benefits of “Legendary Bed,” but now you can’t read them anymore. Yes, that’s part of the curse. You can no longer summon this bedroll to your location once every seven days and it no longer protects you from Restless Leg Syndrome (you should’ve slept in it once before cursing it. May your legs be restless for eternity).

[Cursed Boon 1] It’s portable. Take it with you at all times. Never wish you were closer to town again because you’ll sleep like a king, even out in the wilderness. Then again, kings probably don’t sleep on uncomfortable bed rolls. You can pretend you’re a king, if you like.

[Cursed Boon 2] Cleanses the body of corrupted mana, dark mana, and soul burn. Provides mild resistance to their effects for one full day.

[Curse 1] No sharing. This bedroll is bound to your soul. Any foreign entity who tries to rest within the bed will be aggressively haunted. To death.

[Curse 2] The Cursed Bedroll of Restless Days must feed on mana corruption, dark mana, or soul burn. If not fed, it will grow hungry. This hunger grows in stages. The final stage will fully awaken the Cursed Bedroll of Restless Days. Once fully awoken, the bedroll will evolve into the Cursed Bedroll of Endless Hunger. It will feast on you and any nearby friends or allies and then find the nearest infestation, where it will feed and grow into a [Diamond] level threat.

[Curse 3] You cannot sleep more than one hour each day, even if you want to. Yes, even if you sleep in a regular bed, you’ll still only be able to sleep for one hour.

[Curse 4] The bedroll is infested with bed bugs. No, you cannot remove them by any means, mundane or magical.

Well, shit.