“There’s a board for that? So people getting split up happens often, then.”

  Freja answers, “That depends on how large the group was. If it’s two people, they won’t get split up. We’ve even found a group of twenty who got summoned together. But when it’s a large disaster, the groups get… messy? When a disaster happens, we frequently get groups of people who don’t know each other.”

  I nod and say, “That might be the case for us. There were maybe four hundred people on our flight.”

  Freja shrugs. “It happens. Everyone here is here because they were in a situation where they would die.”

  I look at her and say, “Really? That’s weird. Monty said a guy we found died about five years before we got here.”

  Freja looks at me, confused. “And how did he know that?”

  “The guy was a murderer. Monty said he heard about his death and his crime on the news,” I tell her. “But if you want to know more about that, you’ll have to ask him. I still have a question for you—are there other groups out there like the Dungeon Rescue Corps? I mean, friendly ones.”

  “Of course there are, but not this early in the dungeon. There are many, like the Fourth Floor Rangers—basically cowboys—or the Freebase Collective. They’re a large group of people who have permanently put their bases close together and built their own city. Even the dungeon had to acknowledge it and made new rules about it and subsystems. They have a special system for government stuff. We could have, too, but we didn’t want it, so the dungeon made another subsystem for military groups. The dungeon might have brought us here for entertainment, but if something worth acknowledging happens, it rewards those who give it a new form of entertainment.”

  “And your group gets along with them?” I ask.

  “Most of the time, yeah. But there are things we don’t see eye to eye on. The Fourth Floor Rangers, for example, have a more ‘frontier justice’ approach in their territory, which is understandable—they have a large bandit problem. We just think even a bandit deserves a proper trial. If they decide death fits the crime, that’s theirs to decide. We just like to be certain we got the right guy, while they’re a lot more willing to throw a rope over a branch and be done with it.” She finishes explaining and then asks me, “Why are you interested in this now?”

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  “We got a blueprint that would let us communicate with allies and settlements, and I just wanted to know about other groups out there. I wanted to see if that was a viable option because if it was only the Dungeon Rescue Corps, it would be a waste to build it. Don’t you think? That would be like building a radio station to talk to only one person,” I tell her.

  She looks at me with a surprised expression—one I haven’t seen before, as if she knows something I don’t but can’t put it into words.

  “You could build a room that would let you communicate with others in the dungeon? Did I understand that right?”

  I nod. “Yes. We can even get a special version if we take four of them. What that would give us, it didn’t say, but it can’t be bad. It would cost us a fortune to build if we had to buy it, but we just need to find it. Easier said than done.”

  “And what then? What would you use it for?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. That really depends on what the special upgrade gives, but even then, from what I understand, there’s no fast communication between settlements, and it’s even worse between floors. So how about this—you teach us about the other groups you know in the dungeon, and we’ll give you a discount on the recycler crafting specs,” I propose.

  She shrugs. “Sure. But some of the groups here in the dungeon are… less than savory.”

  For the rest of the evening, she teaches us about the other groups in the dungeon. There are the friendly ones, like the several homesteads on the fourth and fifth floors and the people of the Tower on the sixth floor. Then there are the less savory ones, like the cults on the fifth floor. They’re relatively peaceful—of course, they defend themselves, but they can be worked with.

  Next are the unsavory groups, like a mafia that is fiercely protective of their property but not unreasonable. They are quite lenient as mafias go. Another notable group is the Brewers, a group on the fifth floor that has taken over a large brewery as their base, and a community has sprouted up around them. The only reason they’re considered unsavory is that they despise the thought of losing their independence so much that they don’t allow large groups of other factions into their territory.

  Then there’s the bad category—large raider groups on several floors. The ones that stand out to me are on the seventh and eighth floors. On the seventh floor, there’s a group of zealots who kill anyone who wanders into their territory. On the eighth, there are the cannibals, who—as expected—eat people.