Crumb's life had done an abrupt one-eighty from fighting for her life in the Dungeons to aiding The Clicker himself.
It wasn't an expected shift. One day, she'd noticed that the factory guards of the 22:00 shift were always late, and that there was a blind spot in the camera system. She'd gathered the girls and tried to escape, but Doe, Lucky, and Chip were caught, forced back into endless grinding servitude.
Somehow, somehow she'd managed to get to The Clicker's lair, past Krumblor the Twice-Baked, the Altered Grannies, and even a Kitten Assistant to the Regional Manager (Cyclius knows how she managed that last one). And when she'd finally had the opportunity to take revenge on the monster who put her and her friends through so much… he kicked her ass. Easily.
It wasn't like it was much of a surprise. She was fighting with an iron sword with cookies baked on it. The Clicker hadn't used iron since his second mouse and had moved on to using freaking Armythril.
But The Clicker hadn't finished her off. It was weird, almost like he was expecting her, and he'd… For some unfathomable reason he'd made her a deal. He would dismantle the Dungeons, and she'd help him come up with new ideas to bake cookies. But if for some reason she displeased him, didn't come up with enough ideas, or had bad ones, he'd send her and her friends back to the Dungeons to be guarded by the G̱͜r̸͉̤̮̰̺̮͝͝a͏͓͞ǹ̛͖̼d͏̩̯̯͎̤m̧̱̗̪̬̤a̡̝t͔̙͎̝͓͔̝̀͠r̘̪̘͉͝͡ḭ̮͖̺͕̻a̯͈͈͢͡r̯͖͖̙̮̞̕͞c͏̰̫̪̭h̡̘̞̪̀ş̘͡, and they'd never escape again.
Crumb's life had done an abrupt one-eighty, but she was still fighting for her and her friends' lives every day. Hold on, girls. I'll end his reign of terror someday…
Crumb flinched as The Clicker paced back and forth, annoyed. She couldn't quite fathom the specific reason why, even with all that she'd learned. Bizarre creations, spells, Krumblor's powers…
Didn't matter. There was only one real reason why The Clicker was ever annoyed.
Inefficiency.
Somewhere in this giant pile of pseudoscience and magic that was his bakery, something was moving too slowly for his liking.
She hated to interrupt his pacing, but she'd learned it would be better if he didn't work himself into a frenzy. "Um… Mister Clicker?"
He stopped abruptly, making her flinch again. Her nerves had honestly been better in the Dungeons with the monsters trying to drink the chocolate from her veins. "What."
"What is… on your mind?" Oh how she hated how meek her voice sounded. Nothing like the tough girl who once shrugged off Crazed Kneaders.
The Clicker stared at her for an alarmingly long while, before pointing up and over, past the screens with their numbers and percentages. Directly over the GREAT HOLY COOKIE with the Wrinklers feeding from it, to a single stalactite. Down this stalactite ran a glowing blue fluid that Crumb couldn't identify, which coalesced into pure sugar lumps, the unmatched power source that had revolutionized cookie-making.
It was also the slowest-ass process ever, yielding about one per day, give or take a few hours. Crumb could only nod. Honestly, it frustrated her too, and she wasn't even obsessed with efficiency like The Clicker was. If she could revolutionize sugar lumps, she'd be indispensable to The Clicker and he'd never bring the Dungeons back… right? "I'm sorry, Mister Clicker, but I haven't-"
But he shook his head at her. "No, it's only part of the issue. I accepted long ago that it'd be an irritating process. The PROBLEM is achievements."
Crumb rubbed one of the growths on her face, an old headache returning yet again. "Achievements," some sort of pseudolaw of metaphysics, had something to do with kittens and milk that was very hard to understand and made almost no sense yet somehow still worked. Crumb couldn't make heads or tails of them, despite them being The Clicker's longest-term goal… apparently.
She really couldn't tell if it was just nonsense. Part of the problem was that new ones suddenly appeared all the time. Sometimes they even disappeared. Apparently three vanished when he'd shut down the Dungeons. Twelve had appeared when he invented Chancemakers, with fifty-eight appearing just before that for no explicable reason.
"What about them?" She couldn't even cower a little bit. That's how badly they confused her.
The Clicker nodded, as if she understood him perfectly. "There are six related to sugar lumps. But in those first few days that they began coalescing, there was a seventh. There was one for a bifurcated lump, one for a meaty lump, and then a blank slot. Blank! Right after those two. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS?!"
She jumped and shook her head violently, and he slipped back into lecture mode. "It means there is a type of lump we have never encountered."
Crumb frowned. "But sir, if the… achievement… vanished, would that mean that the type of lump did too?"
"No!" he barked as he shook with excitement, a state that terrified her. "I believe it means it's become… a shadow achievement."
Oh for the love of Mokalsium.
Crumb nodded, trying to keep her exasperation of her face. "Okay, so you believe there's another type of lump. What does that mean for us?"
He stomped his foot. "I believe it to be exceedingly rare. Very rare. And you know how I've experimented with save-scumming."
"Yes, Mister Clicker." Save-scumming, the process of going back in time to a saved set of temporal coordinates in order to erase events and push things onto a different timeline.
"I've noticed that by travelling back to the moment before a lump is harvested, and then harvesting it, a different type of lump has a chance to form than in the previous timeline. I've used this to change the growth to a bifurcated or meaty lump on occasion. The problem is that it takes forever to do. There's no way to know what kind of lump is growing until twelve hours or so have passed! And then if it's a normal lump I have to start all over again! And that is what was on my mind, by the way."
Crumb only blinked. "So because of an "achievement" that's now gone, you think there's an ultra-rare lump type, and have been abusing the time machines in order to repeat the same twelve hours to try to obtain it through random chance."
"Precisely, young Crumb."
Crumb thought about it. Really thought about it. The entire process had The Clicker's definition of inefficiency stamped all over it. Especially at this point, when he'd slowed down production and increased automation. In his heyday he'd been very active, but now the Golden Switch was never turned off. Something like this, something that required so much of his time and effort for something that might never show up, would be extremely frustrating to him.
Again and again, he'd have to save-scum, for the single, tiniest, barest chance that-
"Why don't you use the Chancemakers?" The words came out of her mouth before she'd realized it.
The Clicker stopped, slowly turned to her, and pointed shakily at her. "Say that again."
"The Chancemakers. Use them to increase your chances. To one-hundred percent."
There was silence, and as it went on, Crumb became more and more worried. Was this a bad idea? Was he going to send her back? Please no, she could handle going back but please spare Lucky, Doe, and-
"Crumb."
"Y-y-yes sir?"
"YOU ABSOLUTE GENIUS!" He lunged forwards and grabbed her in an embrace. The tumorous cookie growths on her shoulder blades were crushed by his arms, and she flailed in pain. Those were sensitive, not that he cared.
He shot away from her. "We must put this into play at once! Bring me a Wizard, that we may Spontaneously Edifice a Chancemaker here!" His mouse shot out, selling his four-hundredth Chancemaker to make room for one more.
Crumb sighed in relief. Safe for another day.
A large ladder got propped up on the stalactite, and to no surprise, it was made Crumb's job to bring the four-leaf clover, the heart of the Chancemaker, into contact with the sugar lump. The Clicker took no risks of his own since unleashing the Grandmatriarchs. "Ready, Crumb?"
She looked straight down at the GREAT HOLY COOKIE below and shuddered. If she fell, the Wrinklers would devour her. On the plus side, she might click the cookie once just by falling on it. If she was going to die, may as well commit sacrilege.
She steadied herself and nodded. "Ready." She touched the lucky charm against the coalescing white orb.
Instantly, it became bifurcated, before becoming normal again. Haunted words ran through her mind and there was a dark chuckle she didn't think she imagined. A series of red-and-green letters that she thought might be hallucinated passed across her eyes: SSBSSSSBSB. They quickly cycled, SSSBSSSSSS, BSBSSSSBSS, and so on…
The lump shifted faster, and faster, and faster as the Wrinklers shrieked below. Suddenly, a blinding flash of light threw her from the ladder, and into the arms of The Clicker.
She took a few moments to catch her breath, until The Clicker pointed. "Look, Crumb, at what we have wrought." She obeyed, and gasped at beauty she had never seen before.
There, on the ceiling, was a lump of pure gold.
