Backstory · Katia Grim
Katia Grim, Part 2: The Battle Bride
ARCHIVE RESUMING. File 004, continued.
Before we begin, a viewer survey from the original broadcast. Which crawler in this party did you find most memorable?
Bride: 81%. Teenager on a bike: 11%. Man in reflective vest: 7%. “There was a fourth one?”: 1%.
I’m including that last result for completeness. I’m very complete.
The clapping was a crab.
It was the size of a coffee table, and it was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, applauding us with both claws like a dinner-theatre audience that had been promised a magician. When Dana got close, it stopped clapping and went for her throat.
She killed it with a fire extinguisher. She’d got the extinguisher from a loot box about forty seconds earlier. She did it in a wedding dress hacked off at the knee, swearing at the crab in a steady, professional voice, the way I imagine she’d talked a drunk man off a gurney.
“Hold still. Hold still, you son of a bitch, I’m trying to help you.”
She was not trying to help it. But it held still eventually.
When it died, it screamed exactly like a toddler. All four of us agreed never to mention that again, and this is the first time I have.
Achievement Unlocked: Something Borrowed, Something Bludgeoned!
You killed a monster while wearing formal bridal attire! Your viewers have already given you a nickname. You’re the Battle Bride now. I’m sorry. Nicknames are permanent. I don’t make the rules. Well, I make most of the rules. Not that one.
Reward: A Bronze Fan Box! It contains a veil. The veil has no stats. The viewers just really, really wanted you to have a veil.
There were four of us who went down those stairs, and for a while, that was a family.
Dana, in her shortened dress, bodice still pinned at the back because I hadn’t had time to finish it. Toby, the boy on the bike: sixteen, skinny as a rake, out at two in the morning because his friend’s mom didn’t know he was there. Ray, the night attendant from the gas station. About sixty, grey ponytail, laminated name badge, and the unshakable calm of a man who’d been robbed at gunpoint four times and considered it part of the job description.
And me.
If you’d asked any of them on day three who was in the party, I think they’d have said three names and then paused, like you do when you’re sure you’ve left the stove on.
Dana wore the veil. Of course she wore the veil. She bunched it up and tied it into her hair like a bandana, and after that the boxes never stopped. Fan Boxes. Sponsor Boxes. Boxes from viewers whose names were just strings of symbols and, once, a smell. She got three for killing a rat. She got one for sneezing. Toby got a box a day, maybe. Ray got one for eating a sandwich very calmly in a safe room while something with a lot of elbows beat on the door, which he said was the first time in his life anyone had paid him for that.
I got nothing. For a long time, I got nothing at all.
That isn’t a complaint. I’ve never been so relieved about anything in my life.
Notification: Crawler Katia Grim, your sponsorship application has been reviewed.
You did not submit a sponsorship application. Somebody submitted one on your behalf as a prank. It was reviewed anyway. It was declined anyway. We thought you’d want to know.
Here’s what I did on the first two floors.
I fixed things.
My mother’s shears were under forty tons of strip mall, along with the ledger and the steam iron and the three-way mirror. But I had the pincushion and the tape. I had a spool of white thread and a packet of needles in my cardigan pocket, because I always had a spool of white thread and a packet of needles in my cardigan pocket. And the dungeon kept giving us leather.
Nobody tells you this. The loot boxes give you armour. They don’t give you armour that fits.
You’d get a chest piece cut for a torso like a filing cabinet, and it would hang off Toby like a sandwich board. You’d get gauntlets with a slot for a thumb that doesn’t exist on Earth. You’d get a helmet with a crest so tall it caught on every doorway and nearly broke Ray’s neck twice. You’d get a pair of leather trousers with no seat in them at all, which the description called “breathable.”
Whoever designs dungeon armour has never met a hem. I’d stake my life on it. I more or less did.
So every night, in every safe room, I measured them.
Toby’s shoulders, his chest, the long, skinny reach of his arms, which were still growing. Ray’s head, for the helmet, before I cut the crest off, because Ray said, very politely, that he’d sooner die without it. And Dana. I knew her numbers already, but I measured her again every night, because all our bodies were changing. We were walking twenty miles a day and eating rat.
I took everything in. I let everything out. I punched new holes in straps with the point of a crab claw. I lined Toby’s chest piece with strips of the wedding train, eleven satin loops and all, so it wouldn’t rub his collarbones raw.
“You’re like a pit crew,” Toby said once, watching. “Like in NASCAR. Nobody watches the pit crew.”
“Thanks, Toby.”
“No, it’s a compliment. The pit crew’s the reason anybody wins.”
He was sixteen. He meant it kindly. I don’t think he noticed he’d said the other half out loud.
Archive note: The safe-room footage of this party does exist. It is eleven hours long. Viewers skipped an average of ten hours and forty minutes of it. The skipped portions were, almost entirely, a woman sewing. One viewer watched all eleven hours. We have flagged him for a wellness check.
On the second floor, Dana measured me.
We were in a safe room shaped like a train carriage, with brass fittings, seats that didn’t recline, and a bar that served one drink: a fizzy purple thing Ray said tasted like a grape that had just been given bad news. Toby was asleep across three seats. Ray was asleep sitting up, like a horse. Dana was on the floor against the bar, still in the dress, which by now was the colour of a parking lot.
I’d just finished re-stitching her bodice properly, with a hidden lapped seam that wouldn’t pull when she swung the extinguisher.
“Your turn,” she said.
“For what?”
She reached up and unhooked the tape from around my neck. Nobody had taken it off me in twenty-five years. I made a sound, a small one, like I’d been pinched.
“Arms up,” said Dana.
“Dana. No.”
“Katia, you’ve measured me forty times. You’ve had your hands on my hips more than Kev has. Arms up.” She had the nurse voice on. I’d heard her use it on rats. “I’m not going to write it down. I don’t have anything to write it on.”
I don’t know why I let her. I think I was tired. I think it was the purple drink.
I put my arms up. She wrapped the tape around me. She read the number out loud.
It was just a number. I knew roughly what it was, the way you know roughly what’s in a letter from the bank. But nobody had said a number about me out loud since I was fourteen. My mother never needed to. She said it with her face.
And I stood there with my arms up in a fake train carriage at the end of the world, and I cried. I hadn’t cried at the collapse. I hadn’t cried at the toddler crab, or when Toby took a claw through the thigh and I stitched the muscle back together with white thread while Dana sat on him.
Dana didn’t say anything kind. That was the kind thing. She let the tape go slack and waited.
“It’s a number,” she said eventually. “I see a hundred people a night. Every one of them has a number. It’s never once been the most important thing about them. It’s usually about seventh.”
“What’s first?”
“Whether they’re breathing.” She shrugged. “Second’s whether they’re lying to me about how much they drank. After that it gets complicated.”
She didn’t give the tape back. She hung it around her own neck, over the filthy ivory, and struck a pose.
“Look at me,” she said. “I’m a professional.”
Achievement Unlocked: Seventh Most Important Thing!
You were measured by another crawler and you did not die! Body image issues persist in 94% of species that have bodies. The other 6% are gelatinous, and frankly they have it worse. Have you ever tried to buy jeans as a pudding?
Reward: None. This one’s on the house. The bride did all the work anyway. She usually does.
She was still wearing my tape measure two days later, when we found the room full of brides.
Floor Two Special Event: The Gallery of Something Old!
Brought to you by our sponsor, Everlasting Unions, the galaxy’s third-largest provider of arranged marriages and the only one with a no-refund policy on spouses.
Viewers, please take your seats. The bride may now be kissed. By everything.
Ray saw it first. He had a sense for rooms. It was the same sense that had made him lock the gas station’s door forty seconds before the guy with the gun showed up, back in 2011. We came around a corner into a long, high gallery like the inside of a department store: marble floors, gilt mirrors, soft music playing from nowhere. Both walls were lined with dressmaker’s mannequins.
All of them in wedding dresses.
Sixty of them, maybe. Headless, smooth, standing in two neat rows facing the aisle, like guests waiting for someone to walk it. Every dress was different. Some were beautiful. Some looked like the dungeon had read about weddings in a magazine at the dentist and got the wrong end of it entirely. A gown made of chain mail. A gown made of teeth. A mermaid cut in lime-green taffeta with a cathedral train and shoulder pads, which frightened me more than the teeth.
At the far end, the stairwell to the third floor glowed warm and gold, like an altar.
“No,” said Ray. “Absolutely not.”
“It’s the stairs, Ray,” said Toby.
“It’s a set.”
Ray was right. Nobody builds a room like that for a rat. Somewhere, in some production office, somebody had a bride with an 81% approval rating, and the floor was ending, and somebody had an idea.
The timer was nearly out. There wasn’t time to go around.
We went down the aisle.
Toby first, fast, with his spear. Then Ray. Then Dana, with the extinguisher on her shoulder and my tape around her neck. I came last, the way I always came last, with the bag of leather scraps and the thread.
Halfway down, the music changed key.
Every mannequin turned at once, with a sound like a thousand knuckles cracking. Where no faces had been, there were faces now.
Every face was Dana’s.
The freckles. The laugh lines. The vending-machine grin, sixty times over, all of it pointed one way. They didn’t look at Toby. They didn’t look at Ray.
They went for the bride.
I want to tell you I fought.
I had a crab claw in my hand. I’d been using it to punch holes in straps. I could have used it for something else.
What I did was stand still.
I didn’t decide to. My body did it, the way it had done on the fitting-room floor for twenty years. Knees soft. Shoulders down. Face blank. I’m not here. I’m furniture. Don’t mind me.
They came pouring down the aisle from both sides, sixty of them, in chain mail and teeth and lime-green taffeta, all wearing Dana’s face, and they came right past me. One brushed my arm with a satin sleeve. Its head didn’t even turn.
It looked straight through me.
They always did.
Ray dragged Toby the last twenty yards into the stairwell by the collar. Dana swung the extinguisher and shouted in her nurse voice, “Go, go, go, everybody go,” and the white cloud went up around her like a veil.
I lost her in it.
The mannequins closed over the place where she’d been. It sounded like a crowd at a wedding when the cake comes out. Happy. Hungry.
When the cloud settled, they were back in their two neat rows, smooth and headless and facing the aisle, as if nothing had happened at all.
Crawler Dana Pruitt has died.
Cause of death: The Gallery of Something Old, Floor Two’s highest-rated event of the season by a wide margin. Production sends its warmest congratulations. Everlasting Unions sends a fruit basket.
The Battle Bride has received 4,108 posthumous Fan Boxes. These have been returned to the System. Thank you for your contribution!
I walked the rest of the aisle alone, in no hurry. Nothing in that room so much as twitched.
She was at the bottom of the big gilt mirror at the end, near the stairs. There wasn’t much left of her, in the way of a person. But the tape was still around her neck: yellow-grey vinyl, brass tip bent.
I knelt and unwound it. My hands knew what to do.
In the mirror there was a large woman in a filthy cardigan, kneeling, with a pincushion on her wrist and somebody else’s blood to the elbows. I looked at her for exactly one second.
Then I looked away, the way everyone always did.
Out of the corner of my eye, in the glass, she didn’t.
End of Part 2.
Archivist, a correction to the record. I said the mannequins targeted the bride. That isn’t quite right. They targeted the crawler with the highest viewer engagement in the room.
There was a version of this event that targeted everyone. It tested poorly.
As for the mirror: that one wasn’t a mannequin. That one was something else. And it had been waiting a very long time for somebody to finally look at it.
Author’s note: This is a fan backstory. Toby, Ray, Dana Pruitt, the “Battle Bride” nickname, the clapping crab, the train-carriage safe room, Everlasting Unions and the Gallery of Something Old (and its mirror) are all invented for this story. Canon doesn’t tell us who Katia was with on the first two floors, so treat all of it as speculation. All characters and the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl belong to Matt Dinniman.