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From the start of it – well, once she started getting runs that didn’t end at the horns of Tango’s Cough and Pumpkin – Pearl’s attention was on a different part of the room just before the dungeon door.
Sure, the leaderboard with all its neat stacks of snow held attention, especially during the Phase beginning ceremonies where Tango read off the new scores and occasionally got his numbers mixed up. And Pearl was a constant attendant to it, when she wasn’t asleep.
But it wasn’t the leaderboard that held her attention. It was the tiny room tucked just off to the side of the Crown Shop.
Unlock the Burning Dark, the sign over the monument proclaimed over the 20 Easter Eggs set on snow.
And that simple sentence burned itself into her mind.
Let the other Hermits fight it out for the leaderboard trophies. Her goal was to see the final level opened. And while other frontrunners found eggs, she found an unexpected companion and rival in Hypno, who also wanted to see the final level opened, and was just as willing to burn dungeon runs to try and locate the eggs.
Hypno got an early lead with a strong card encouraging him to play aggressively, going for high-risk-high-reward plays. Pearl played the slow game, going for defensive cards and building up her deck to give her more time; she got the luck of getting a Bounding Strides card early, and laughed at the jokes of the Australian getting the super-jump card.
The final eggs were located by her in Phase 6 – Cleo behind a cauldron, Scar behind a pillar, both in the Black Mines. The final scores were tallied up, and Pearl took the victory for the Egg Hunt with 8 located and a white rabbit trophy hoisted above her head triumphantly at the Phase 7 ceremony, her grinning rival leading the crowd’s congratulations.
A part of Pearl wanted to sleep afterwards, but after all the work she’d put in, she wanted to see what she had gone to so much effort to unlock. Her exhaustion didn’t stop her from managing to dodge Ravagers and Wardens with ease, scooping up keys and Crowns to fill the pockets of her coveralls.
And when she fell down that final drop, feeling the wind whip through her hair as she landed in a city that felt as alien as her own base, she felt the tiredness that clung to her bones melt away.
Promptly replaced by adrenaline when she landed next to a Warden.
The only reason she didn’t flee at top speed was game-trained instinct and unfamiliarity with her location, which eventually caused her to climb up to the highest perch she could to get a better view. Her boots found new places to take purchase, climbing up higher and higher into the tendrils of sculk that rose up towards the ceiling.
Pearl’s eyes were wide as she took into the details of Tango’s architecture below her. So enthralled, that it took her boots hitting wood to grab her attention again.
A warped wood sign. With Tango’s scribbled words on the face of it, declaring a warning to hide away what the reader saw, and a locked item frame with an ender chest sunken into the flesh of the skulk.
Her secret hunting wasn’t done yet, it seemed.
But unlike with the eggs, there wasn’t an end goal in sight. She needed some insight.
And where better to get it from the Dungeon Master himself?
–
“Do you see the five towers?” Tango whispered, enthralled to her service as Pearl’s lackey and crouching next to her on the landing platform. “When the level door opens, one is randomly selected to drop an item you might find … useful.”
She turned her head slightly to look at her companion, as much as she could in the darkness. No Wardens were near, so they aren’t completely blind, but the only thing she could see of Tango beyond his outline was his glowing blue eyes and the occasional lick of soul flame escaping his hood. “Useful how?”
He sputtered a bit, his desire to keep secrets as the Dungeon Master at war with his current Lackey status encouraging him to give an honest answer.
“You’ll figure it out!” he eventually answered brightly, and while she still can’t see his expression, she knows his tone well enough to know that Tango’s grinning at her. “I can’t give you all the secrets, Pearl.”
Pearl rolled her eyes good-naturedly and kept going, checking the compass in her hands as she leapt over barriers, heading towards the giant lava pool tucked into the corner, paying just enough attention to hear Tango mutter to himself as he tripped over the hems of his coat following her.
She dropped down to the ground, feeling the convection of the lava warm her face before the compass spun to show a place just behind the tower in the corner, and she ducked into the shadow just as Tango dropped down to join her.
“Right here, right here.”
Tango turned around and moved to join her just as Pearl dropped the compass into the ground. The warped ground swallowed it up and spat something black and thin up into her hands.
It was a key. As long as her hand, with Tango’s symbol built into the bow. And with a tag hanging off the bow reading ‘60’.
Pearl clamped her free hand over her mouth to muffle her excited squealing, with Tango – his face finally illuminated by the lava – doing the same, his eyes wide with excitement.
“That’s the highest-level artifact, Pearl!” he hissed through his fingers.
“What does it say, what does it say?” she hissed back, flipping the artifact over in her hand to see what was inscribed on to the back.
Carved into the metal in looping cursive was a single line.
What could it possibly open?
“Starting to think this opens the big door, Tango,” she teased at a whisper, taking her hand off her mouth as she slipped the key into her pocket.
“Maybe, maybe! That’s up to you to figure out!”
–
The clicking of redstone and grumbling of Wardens outside the basalt door filled Pearl’s ears as she crouched in the corner of the tiny room, a pile of Crowns and Frost Embers burning holes in her coveralls.
A shame they couldn’t burn a hole through the regenerated door, too.
Her comm vibrated, set to silent for the game. She tucked herself deeper into the corner before answering, speaking as quietly as she can.
Tango’s voice, rough with sleep, floated out of her device. “The door’s busted?”
“Regenerated already, yeah.”
“Not fun to discover that first thing in the morning. Stand back, Pearl.”
“Stand ba –” She cut herself when a familiar hiss fills the chamber, and as TNT dropped from a hidden dispenser she pressed back against the furthest wall. The blast was contained enough that all it did was mess up her hair, while still destroying the basalt in her way.
“I wouldn’t linger, its gonna regenerate fast until I rework the circuits,” Tango unnecessarily advised over the comms as she scrambled through the gap that was already starting to close up again.
It wasn’t until she had gotten a decent distance away that it occurred to her that she had a pertinent question to ask while the Dungeon Master was still on the line. Tango hadn’t hung up yet, instead mumbling into the speaker as he started diagnosing the problem with the door.
“What’s the Hideout button for?”
“Hmm?”
“That button behind the door, with the Hideout sign. What does that do?”
A sudden glee seized Tango’s voice, like he’d just knocked back three straight shots of expresso; his voice was still heavy-sounding but he’d woken up in an instant.
“I dunno!”
“You don’t know?! Tango!”
The Dungeon Master sounded like he was on the verge of a fit of cackles, and only restraining himself to not mess with her run with extra noise. “You thought you were done? C’mon, now!”
“What!” she hissed, but the comm light blinked red and then went quiet. Tango had hung up, presumably to laugh himself sick at her confusion and maybe fix the door. Pearl put the device away and focused on finding her way through the maze.
(All told, she felt that greatly overstaying her welcome and ruining his attempts to nerf the Hermits’ parkour while investigating the tendrils of skulk were fair payback for that.
Though Tango leaning out of a maintenance hatch to chuck snowballs at her in turn seemed fair for her cheekiness.)
–
It was on an early morning, waking up in the bed she’d stashed in her decorated cubby, that Pearl decided to reexamine the list of items she had found in the tendrils over breakfast. She absentmindedly pushed around the scraps of paper she had written the items down on, and on a whim born from her organizational skills, she started putting them in alphabetical order.
First a dirt block. Then an ender chest. Then an egg.
Pearl’s eye’s slid over the first letters of the items and then bolted upright as she registered that they spelled DEE. She slid another item under the egg – a potato.
DEEP.
In silent excitement she assembled the rest and looked at the results.
Nine items. Nine letters.
What word could it possibly be but Deepfrost?
The all-caps message she sent to Tango was thankfully coherent by the time she sent it. He wouldn’t get to it for a while, she already knew – when he slept, he slept for a while – so she finished her breakfast and headed to the main lobby to prepare for a run.
(“You’re too smart, Pearl,” he said with fond amusement when he caught up to her later that day.
“I’m gonna wring the secrets outta ya like a towel,” she retorted, brandishing another Lackey Coupon at him like a magic wand.)
–
It was hard to tell what felt different about this run, but Pearl could feel the anticipation thrumming through her veins as she tread lightly on a warped fungus path. She had all the pieces in her mind. She just needed all of them to fall into place for her.
To her right, the basalt door exploded from the Bomb. She stayed tucked away so the Wardens would lose interest in the sound and then slipped into the room behind it. By reflex she smacked her fist into the Hideout button, then collected her winnings from the dispenser.
She’d need those if she got another stupid copy of Tango’s mug.
Pearl glanced down at the compass in her hand and then walked towards the bottom-left corner of the plaza, her work boots sinking slightly into the warped nylium that made up the ground.
Not in that corner, but past that wall. She’d need to jump the soulfire in the ground, but after so many runs in the Burning Dark, it wasn’t the jump that worried her, just the landing.
Soulflame could be a quick death, but the pressure plates on the other side of the gap would kill her in a different way if she stumbled.
Loot and Scoot the dungeon boomed above her head as she stuck the landing and moved onward, making tiny side-hops over the pressure pads coating the floor until the compass needle starting spinning in circles.
Pearl released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding as she let the compass fall out of her hand, swallowed up into the floor, and then sharply inhaled as the spindly shape of the black key got launched back out into her fingers. The pad of her index finger rubbed the engraving, the one that had been lingering in her mind since that first Lackey run with Tango had given her that artifact for the first time.
What could it possibly open?
She knew the answer now.
“This is the run,” she whispered to herself and the dungeon, already heading towards the squat circular building. The piston door had already retracted the netherite block, revealing the magma floor.
Bounding Strides, the dungeon called out in Tango’s distorted voice, and it felt poetic that the card the other Hermits had started associating with her was being played now. Even if she couldn’t make use of it now.
A deep breath to brace for the pain, and then she was running, circling inside and rushing for the second piston door that would close if she wasn’t fast enough; pushing through the burning that seeped through her boots until she found the open space and was dropping down into the ice tunnels below, onto refreshing snow, a short crawl to the iron door that had maddened her.
She only briefly hesitated to surrender the 60-Ember Master’s Key to that door, and was rewarded by it finally clicking open.
Pearl stepped inside –
And barely muffled a scream at the Warden in the corner before realizing it was made of wool. It was a giant plushie, just like the one Tango had rigged up for the entry ride.
Darn it, Tango.
The Key fell back into her hand from the ceiling, and as she pocketed it once more, she caught a row of levers on blackstone. All of them had signed labeled with glow ink, and once she read them she couldn’t help but start laughing.
“Etho Mode, Hypno Mode, and Gem Mode!”
“(No keys!)” the cheeky sign for Gem’s lever added.
Beside the Warden plushie, barely visible in the dim light, was a lectern with a thin book placed on top. Carefully, Pearl walked up to it and opened the book.
“High within the skulk veins
Nine items are to be found
Each contributes to an anagram
Present to me, the dungeon master, in private
At the highest part of the Citadel
This word you have deciphered
And the crown shall be yours.”
She read it twice, mouthing the words but not letting them escape her lips. She already knew the word.
She had won.
Getting out alive would just be a bonus, but if she’d won, she wanted to escape in triumph.
There was a barrel beside the lectern, and inside was another stash of Frost Embers, which she scooped out and added to her loot. Distantly she did a count: 90 Embers in total between what she’d picked up and the Artifact. The most that anyone had pulled out.
It was high time to leave.
But not before she flicked all the levers to see if they did anything interesting.
(For all that Grian got warranted flack for his inability to leave a button untouched, the rest of the Hermits weren’t much better.)
–
It was hardly a flawless easy run back to the surface, but it felt … quiet. It took a while for Pearl to realize that her Clank hadn’t raised since she’d left the Burning Dark, despite all her cards being played and all her Clank Block being drained. Hazards had been low too, with a lot of doors that would’ve usually been sealed off long before she got to them being left wide open.
It was eerie, the heartbeat in the background not getting louder or faster.
Had the levers done something to the dungeon’s count of Clank when she’d flicked them? Had opening the final door triggered something in the Dungeon’s redstone to make the escalation freeze up?
Or had the dungeon itself decided to do something on its own?
It was an old discussion the Hermits had run through multiple times, killing time in the waiting room between runs: was Deepfrost Citadel alive? Amongst the Soup Group alone opinions were mixed. Gem tended to waffle between thinking it was (especially when it caused Etho to suffer) and thinking it wasn’t (because blaming Tango for her terrible key luck got funnier results than yelling at a literal brick wall). Impulse was firmly in the opintion that it wasn’t, but that might’ve been shaped by his long-time friendship with Tango.
Pearl had been ambivalent. Tango had called the Vex the spirit of the dungeon, but that felt like it had been for ‘lore’ reasons, since he had no issues scolding them for being slackers when max clank came round and they weren’t killing runners. If there was a dungeon spirit, it felt like Tango himself, with all the work he’d poured into his game.
But as she exited almost entirely unmolested with 90 Embers and 20 Crowns total in tow, she had to wonder if the dungeon itself had chosen to fall silent in recognition of her victory.
–
Tango rarely woke up without a new message or ten on his comms these days. His friends checking in on him, panicked calls about the shuffler eating someone’s card deck again, invites to other games that he wanted to attend but had to back out of when something broke. Beef had mentioned something like this happening to him when the TCG had released, and back in Season 7 a quieter version had happened while he’d run Decked Out 1, with him taking up temporary residence beneath the dungeon so he could restock the dungeon ASAP.
But today he was woken by a … sensation, not a sound or an alarm. Rising from the bed in his storage room, he glanced around, trying to place what exactly he was feeling with the groggy half-wakeness of an under-caffeinated Tango of the Tek variety.
Not helping was the persistent headache he’d obtained from crashing into his redstone buslines for the last 13 months. For all that the other Hermits got on his case for the supposed atrophying flight skills, no one was skilled at flying through the guts of his game, and changing his elytra design from his usual rocket pack to a pair of skulkificated snowy-owl wings to match the aesthetics of Decked Out had not helped.
It wasn’t until he was halfway through his second mug of coffee that he finally placed what, exactly, was niggling in the back of his head.
He could hear the dungeon around him, all the usual bells and whistles going off as somebody ran, but there was a … tightness to it. Like his whole build had taken a deep breath and was holding it in anticipation, and he was feeling it by proxy.
(His friends liked discussing if the Citadel was alive. Tango knew the answer, of course: with all the blood and tears and sweat he’d poured into it, all the redstone wired together like braincells, carrying his hopes and wishes for what his game would become with every placed block and strand of red dust, how could it not be alive? With how much of himself he’d given to it, how could it not exist as its own entity, his brain-child?
Decked Out was alive, its mind comfortably pressed against his own, eagerly anticipating both the Hermits and the time this world opened and new runners set foot inside, and the fact it had inherited his sense of humor was something he was quite pleased by, thank you very much.)
The dungeon lightly nudged at his mind, indicating the comms on his wrist. Tango had a good idea already of what he would find, but the video still made him smile.
He finished his coffee and then reached into his enderchest. The phase winner trophies were mass-produced, but this victory called for something special.
–
It was about two hours after her run that Pearl received the message she’d been waiting for: Tango summoning her to the top of the highest tower of Deepfrost Citadel. It was a final bit of sass that made her grab an unused Lackey Coupon from her shulkers and pop the cowl onto her head before flying out of the Great Hall and beginning to ascend, one hand on top of her head to keep the fabric from flying off from the strong biting winds that buffeted the towers and her own acceleration.
Her moth-themed elytra tended to struggle a bit in cold temperatures, but she always managed.
A final rocket boost and then she was cresting over the tower. Tango stood out hilariously easily in the ankle-deep snow, dark blue coat and wings against a backdrop of white, and that wasn’t even considering his hood was off, letting the soulfire that crackled on his head burn freely.
The Hermits tended to have big easy smiles. Tango smiled with his whole body, and even at a distance as she landed, Pearl could see he was beaming at her.
“Hello, Champion,” he greeted as she approached, joy shining through his Dungeon Master persona. “How are you?”
“I’m the Dungeon Master now,” she replied with a wide grin, and he laughed, letting his mask slip off.
“You deserve to wear the hood today, not me. I’m so proud of you, Pearl!”
The giddiness that had been bubbling in her chest all morning frothed up again, and she bounced on the toes of her boots, too happy to feel cold. “The word is Deepfrost, Tango!”
“You already told me! You don’t need to say it again!”
“I’m following instructions!”
He shook his head, still grinning. “You took on everything I could throw at the dungeon – the puzzles, the Ravagers, the Wardens – and you passed through it all. You’ve mastered my game, and it’s a pleasure to watch you play.”
One of Tango’s hands were hidden behind his back, and as he approached, the hidden hand emerged.
“And for solving the final riddle, Champion, you shall be crowned.”
In the Dungeon Master’s hands is a golden crown, styled to look like a gilded version of the spires of the Citadel towers and much bigger than the funny crown Mumbo’s diamond machine had dispensed for her a few months ago.
Pearl, immediately, decides that this new crown will only come off when she respawns, or if she’s doing a run. If Cub wants it for his museum, he’d have to pry it out of her cold dead hands, one knuckle at a time.
Even with the slight lifts in Tango’s boots, Pearl is still taller than him, so she kneels to let him remove the cowl from her head and set the crown snugly in its place. She finally shivers as her knees touch the snow and cold stone beneath it, but it’s like the crown is imbued with its own internal flame, fitting comfortably on her head like it was made for her to wear.
Knowing Tango, it probably had been.
“Rise up Pearl, the Explorer’s Champion. The competition continues – but the Dungeon has crowned its Queen!”