Collide Gamer

John smashed the ‘Yes’ button, and the beams began moving with the sound of sudden depressurization. The central segments began to vanish into their slightly bigger counterparts. Waiting like a speedrunner during an unskippable cutscene, he hopped from one feet to the other. “Let’s hope this gives us what we need,” John said towards Gnome.

“Y-yeah,” the stone elemental agreed. “That would be nice.”

Once the beams had finished retracting, the vault door began to swing inside. John pushed it along to hurry the process, an act of physical prowess that actually succeeded. ‘Praise be onto Strength,’ he thought, then Gnome and Aclysia joined him in the shoving and they made their way inside.

The room behind had the dungeon-typical shape of a cylinder, a very tall one at that. Unlike the rest of the dungeon, however, the walls of this room weren’t glass but simply a perfect light blue material that reminded John of plastic, blending with the surrounding slime. A rather effective camouflage against people that tried to find this room.

John almost stumbled as he stepped onto solid ground, having gotten used to the bounciness of the dungeon. Much like a sailor who had spent days on the sea, but not quite at that intensity, he needed a few moments to readjust himself to the stone floor.

He had expected some sort of entity to greet him, as was often the case with the Secret Rooms. Silence was his only welcoming committee, as no mischievous god or hostile entity revealed itself to him. It was just him and his girls inside the room.

Looking around, he found twelve terminals lining the walls, equal three-step distances between them. They had the look of arcade machines, immense boxes with large screens that flickered in a washed-out colour, red, green, blue or yellow, and a giant control panel that held a small number of buttons.

His eyes went up to find a number of non-hostile Slimegmites spanning from one side of the ceiling to the other. ‘Haven’t seen them hang horizontally before,’ John thought as he walked around. The floor was a simple grey and held no secrets, so that wasn’t it. “Any guesses?” he asked the assembled team while counting the amount of slimes.

There was a dozen of them, the same as the number of terminals, and they were anchored in such a way that their cores overlapped in the dead-centre of the room while the point of rooting described a double-helix between them. From the side, John imagined that it would have looked like a DNA-string that did one complete twist.

Salamander stepped in front of one of the terminals and looked up. “Same colour,” she stated, pointing from the screen to the Slimegmite. A second connection was that the slimes root, well, one of them, was straight above the terminal.

“Alright, so the name is the program,” John thought, remembering that this Secret Room was called Colour Coding. ‘Coding for what though?’ he wondered. Although hesitant to just hit buttons, he had to experiment somehow, so he went ahead and pushed one of the four buttons of one of the terminals. Immediately, the screen switched colours and so did the slime. A second press of a button did nothing, the colour was locked. “Okay, so SOMETHING is going to happen once we lock all the terminals,” he theorized.

“Can I pick the colours?” Sylph asked. “Can I, can I, can I?” Normally he would have went into a decisive no on that one, but as he had not the faintest clue about what any of the colours could mean, he just nodded. “Yay, okay, so here is what we do!” She said we, but in effect it was her flying from one button to the next and hitting green every single time. For pretty obvious reasons. The Gamer didn’t notice immediately, as he was busy checking his phone. It was just Scarlett sending him a nude photo of herself; he had gotten a few of those over the last few days.

While interesting, he didn’t have time for that right now.

John was more annoyed by the end result of Sylph’s action than he would have been if it had been a pure chaotic arrangement of colours, since the one red he had pressed now stuck out like a sore thumb. Luckily, he didn’t have to live through the view for too long, as all the Slimegmites suddenly fell to the floor.

The group reacted as one, everyone getting into battle stance. Weapons and magic at the ready, they watched the mass pull together into a unified shape. A very small, rectangular shape, with a curved lid and a design that made it look like it was supposed to be opened.

“It’s a lootbox generator…” John groaned.

“More like a goop box generator,” Salamander joked, causing everyone else in the room to groan with their master. “WHAT?! You fuckers, that one was super clever.”

Siena looked at her like the endflame elemental hadn’t brushed her teeth in two weeks and was now trying to do so with a nose hair trimmer. “What about that disgraceful pun was clever?” she wanted to know.

“Because goop also means scam and loot boxes are nothing if not that, so it’s a double pun,” Salamander crossed her arms and smiled self-righteously.

Undine shook her head, “What a horrible attempt at humour.”

“I will boil you until you are nothing but a salt elemental!”

Siena giggled, “The salty one right now is most certainly you.”

John ignored that and closed in on the chest with Beatrice and Aclysia. Both of them were pointing their weapons at the chest still, just in case it turned out to be an enemy after all. Carefully, the Gamer raised the lid and was greeted by numbers floating up, informing him he just got 110’000 dollars and a quarter of a Skill Point. He put the latter into Tempest Elemental Summoning, just because he could, and then hummed.

“So green was money and red were Skill Points, huh?” John thought. Seemed like he had a great amount of control over what he could get out of these boxes. Pretty good, but he didn’t feel like he would run this whole dungeon again just to experiment with the rest of the system and see if he could get an SEP. As fun as this ID was, that seemed like a waste of time.

Well, that changed things.

‘I don’t need to check green again, I don’t want money, but the remaining mono-colours could be valuable to get through,’ he theorized that certain combinations would give more than a simple multiple of a base value. Currently, all he knew was that one green Slimegmite gave him ten grand and one red gave a quarter of a Skill Point. It stood to reason that going all green would give him more than 120’000, like an item or something. ‘Looking at all three would leave me with one Symbiotic Riddle. I am pretty sure this is a good deal,’ John thought and then accepted the window’s proposal.

“Okay, people, we are putting everything on red,” he instructed as the Slimegmites above respawned out of thin air. As they were a rather large group, pressing the red button everywhere didn’t take especially long. The reward for the endeavour was a grand slam of 5 Skill Points, one more than the basic multiplication said he should get. So, he was right, but he also didn’t feel great about it since that reward was still pretty underwhelming.

He used the points to max out Tempest Elemental Summoning and the rest went into Nightmare Elemental Summoning. ‘Now I need TWO SEP,’ he sighed and went on with the experiment. All yellow awarded him with a golden goop box, which contained a text that told him he just got an Epic item placed in his inventory.

Pulling it out, John had his hands on what seemed to be a cushion in the shape of a semi-circle. It was a very firm thing, wrapped in leather and clearly with some sort of hard core. On top of the curvature sat an elongated piece of rubber, a bump in the middle of its length, and a wireless remote was magically attached to the flat front of the cushion. The thing seemed to be designed for comfortable kneeling or something like that.

John had the feeling he had seen something like that before, although he couldn’t quite remember where. Interested, he hit a few buttons on the remote. Immediately the buzzing sound caused a flashback to some of the porn he had been watching back when he was single. ‘A sybian!’ John thought, realizing what he was looking at. These beasts were famous for the immense amount of clitoral stimulation their high-frequency motor could put out. In that they were a sex toy that relied exclusively on vibration and could cause orgasms without direct contact with the women’s sex. Although there were supposed to be extensions that allowed penetration as well.

In other words, this was an ideal toy to add to his collection and something he couldn’t wait to see what it would do to Eliza after she was strapped on top of it for ten minutes. ‘How could I forget getting something like this?’ he scolded himself, before going for the last colour, blue.

The result wasn’t the hoped SEP, but instead John was greeted by a completely empty chest. “The hell is this now?” he asked, then closed the baby blue lid again. He was greeted by a couple of cute anime-like eyes looking at him like they were about to cry. “Oh spare me your tears,” he grumbled, having seen enough dumb stuff today to not even have a reaction to that absurdity. Instead, he stabbed his finger at the thing in a fashion that would have made a certain pariah very angry. “Give me my loot!”

“Well, great, I get a freeloader instead,” John grumbled but clicked yes anyway, Nia would be happy about the extra critter in her care. Well, the care of the automatic system that she oversaw to have an excuse to pat everything in her vicinity. Not that the Gamer minded, all the Menagerie cost him was some mana and in return people that visited his island to work in the Mine (or somewhere else) had somewhere to recharge their batteries during their break.

Now John only had two more Revealer of Secrets, and he should have stopped there. However, the evil hand of opening loot boxes didn’t let John go quite that easily, and so he put a question forward. ‘Vote for trying a rainbow combination?’ he asked the assembled harem. The end result was only Undine and Gnome voting against, while everyone, particularly an amused Siena, was in favour.

“Okay, we are going to do this slowly!” John told everybody. “I want this to be three-time repetition of red-blue-yellow-green, not three times red, followed by three times blue, followed by three times yellow, ended by three times green, okay?”

“Why?” Beatrice asked. “That sounds like unnecessary work.”

“Because it’s called Colour Coding and I am absolutely sure that Gaia would do something as trollish as that,” John answered. “Somehow the sequence of colours is going to matter. I feel it in my blood.”

That achievement came in the exact same moment as the rainbow-coloured chest of goop pulled together on the floor. “Yeah, sure, just give me the thing I have wanted for a felt eternity now,” he complained in the grumpy voice of an old man who couldn’t find the right brand of oats in the supermarket he was sure he had bought them in before.

And, of course, a second SEP was inside that chest. John threw his hands into the air. “EVERY TIME!” he shouted at the ceiling. “HOW? HOW DO YOU MAKE ME ANGRY ABOUT SUCCEEDING EVERY – TIME?”

“IMMENSELY!” he let out an exasperated breath and forcefully calmed down. “Forget about Eliza, I am going to put Gaia on that sybian and make her deepthroat my dick while she cums her brains out,” he continued to grumble, knowing that it would only happen if she wanted it to. Gaia seemed to be a switch, so maybe he could get her to do that when she was horny enough to come visit him next time, but there was no question who was really in control in that situation. Hell, there wasn’t even a way to ask that question without looking stupid.

‘They say I am bullshit, but I am calling bullshit on being a supreme deity,’ he thought and then turned to the more important things. “Let’s find the boss and then go about evolving you two,” he said, gesturing at both Sylph and Gnome.