The Disclosure Crawl

Dungeons & Diligence: The Disclosure Crawl
The title of the crawl as it appears on its first page, drawn in text characters
Developer(s)	Molecular Reality Corporation
Publisher(s)	Molecular Reality Corporation
Platform(s)	Web browser
Release	2026
Genre(s)	Text adventure, quiz
Mode(s)	Single-player

The Disclosure Crawl, in full Dungeons & Diligence: The Disclosure Crawl, is a text adventure published by Molecular Reality Corporation as eight linked web pages, in which the player descends through a dungeon and defeats its monsters by answering multiple-choice questions about the company's science and plans. Its guide is the company's felt mascot, Keltar, and its last monster is Irrationalis, Dragon of Excessive Pessimism, who guards a treasure at the bottom.^[1] A correct answer, the tutorial explains, deals "CRITICAL DAMAGE".

The crawl can be played by anyone, without an account. Inside the company's member software, EQBio-OS, it also arrives as a message, and members who finish a level there receive experience points.

The title screen, in green text on black, opens with a block-letter title made of text characters and a summary of the quest: "Crawl through the Dungeons of Disclosure", past "Zombies of Ignorance! Orcs of Objections!" and a third, coarser species of goblin. Keltar greets the newcomer: "Ah, a new Seeker! How DELIGHTFUL! You smell of curiosity and... is that pizza?"^[1] The player then enters a name and picks one of four classes. The Nanopioneer has 100 hit points and the Genomic Ranger 90, the Protein Whisperer 85 and the Signal Sorcerer 95, and each class is promised a bonus of 20 or 25 percent on one kind of challenge; the bonuses are written into the class descriptions and never applied. The new character receives a "Rusty Nanopore Probe" and proceeds to "The Graffiti at the Entrance", a note in praise of the company's handheld device, the MR1: "The MR1? That little box of molecular mojo? Yeah, that's the DAWN of a revolution. Not the noon."

Each level is a set of rooms with a quiz, a puzzle or a fight. In a fight the monster's hit points are shown as a bar, and each question offers four answers. Correct answers deal damage. A wrong one costs the player hit points while the player still deals a little damage in return, and the screen shows the right answer: "Tip: The correct answer was" in the tutorial, "Better answer:" against the dragon. A fight ends when its questions run out, whether or not the monster's hit points have reached zero, and the player's hit points stop at zero without consequence.^[2] No fight can be lost.

The crawl asks 79 questions with four answers each. In 72 of them the correct answer is the second one; it is the first in three, the third in four and never the fourth.^[2] The other answers are written to be refused. Asked what solid-state nanopores are typically made from, the player may choose "Cheese", "Cotton" or "Aluminum Foil"; asked what the MR1's name stands for, "Mister One", "Monkey Robot 1" or "Mega Reactor 1". The most promising remedy for fouling is not "Coating pores with honey", the main source of noise in chips with built-in nanopores is not "Solar flares", and the limit on how fast a single pore captures molecules is not that "The pore is shy". Against the dragon's final attack, "Why should ANYONE believe in this Epic Quest?!", the refused answers include "Belief is optional" and "Because Keltar said so".^[2]

Progress, hit points and an inventory of named items are kept in the browser between visits, and a map shows which levels are open. Each level closes with the stamp "Keltar Approved".

The rooms of the Hall of Visions set out the problems the company says it exists to solve. Four locked doors each hold a monster: the "Access & Cash Chasm of Agony", guarded by "A spectral accountant", the "Curse of Hyper-Specialization", a hydra whose heads each detect one kind of molecule and whose motto is "My Fancy Toaster ONLY Toasts Tuesdays!", the "Data Silo Swamp" and the "Sample Prep Purgatory".^[3]

The Forge of Pores is the most technical level. Its first room compares protein pores, which last hours to a few days, with pores in silicon nitride, which last weeks to months and tolerate a far wider range of acidity, temperature and solvents. Keltar rates each property in a column of his own, "Keltar Rating™", in which the mechanical strength of solid-state pores scores a brick and that of biological pores an egg. The second room asks the player to restore a scrambled timeline of four papers from 1996 to 2005, beginning with the first detection of single DNA molecules passing through the protein pore alpha-hemolysin. In the third, five creatures embody the limitations of a pore of fixed size, among them "The Fouling Fiend", "The Speed Demon" and "The Lonely Pore", whose affliction is diffusion-limited capture, "waiting forever for a molecule to arrive".^[4]

The Laboratory of Destiny has the player match methods of controlling how fast molecules pass through a pore, among them voltage reversal and the company's mechanical nanopore, which Keltar says can "physically SQUEEZE and RELEASE molecules". A question in the Arena of Maxine gives the special property of mechanical nanopores as "Physical actuation to squeeze/release molecules", the principle the company calls sliding occlusion. Keltar's summary of the problem is "Too fast = useless blur. Too slow = no throughput."^[5] The matching cards are introduced by a comment in the code, "Shuffle descriptions", and appear in the same fixed order every time. Its boss, the Goblin Horde, is "The ACTUAL hard problems!", five goblins named for noise, fabrication, fouling, capture and data.

Three lines of the MR1's firmware need repair in the Armory, each to be chosen from three candidates: the device should upload its data to epicquest.bio, not to facebook.com, and its preamplifier should be the LMP7721, not the NE555 timer or the microcontroller of an Arduino. The Arena of Maxine is devoted to Maxine's Quest and the company's character ranks, from Novitiate to Nanocosmic Sage, and ends in a speed round of ten seconds per question. Three traps open the Dragon's Lair, the Pit of Imposter Syndrome, the Fog of Jargon and the Mirror of Self-Doubt, before the dragon himself, whose first words are "SOLID-STATE NANOPORES? DECADES OF FAILURE, REBRANDED!"^[2]

Inside EQBio-OS, the first completion of each level by a member is rewarded with experience points. Rewards decline as the dungeon deepens, from 0.99 for the Entrance Hall through 0.95, 0.90, 0.85, 0.80, 0.75 and 0.70 to 0.65 for the Dragon's Lair, 6.59 points for the whole crawl.^[6] Visitors without an account receive nothing. The largest quest in the same system, "Sequence DNA with an ss-nanopore", is worth 9,900,000.^[6]

The crawl began as a single long page, now kept beside the levels with the file name "rough-beginning". It is headed "Dungeons & Diligence: Campaign Zero" and credited "Module 0.1 (Assembled by Keltar's Intern, May 20, 2025)". Its opening note, addressed to the builder of the company's website, sets out the plan: "Each big number a new room in the dungeon. Preamble's the graffiti at the entrance." It asks for Keltar to sound "Playful, maybe a bit manic", and its description of the dragon adds that he is "minor, sure, but a DRAGON."^[7][a] The draft runs to 612 kilobytes. The eight level pages that replaced it are dated April 15, 2026.^[6]

The crawl was written to be read as well as played. Its victory screen sums up "The Complete Knowledge You've Earned" in eleven lines, from "The Grand Vision" to "Rebuttals: Every cynical criticism answered with facts and vision".^[2]

• Irrationalis, Dragon of Excessive Pessimism
• Maxine's Shadow
• Character classes of Epic Quest Bio
• List of Molecular Reality Corporation games