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I wasn't sure if Iris was unhappy with me or not. But I'm pretty sure I had just dumped too much onto her as she headed off to her room to sit on the edge of her bed with her face in her hands.

First, I had Mandarin give her the note explaining that Alelen had been assigned to her niece since the girl was one of the few people on this world to have a natural ability at magic and would probably get some sort of magic using class when she turned eighteen. And that I wasn't sure how much my wife had been able to communicate with her niece as the girl's guardian.

Then I let her know that her neighbor had seen the kobolds outside of the house.

Iris seemed to be so overwhelmed by all of this she didn't even ask any questions, she just tottered off to her room and closed the door.

What to do, what to do?

To start. A vase made of polished stone filled with flowers duplicated from samples taken from throughout the neighborhood.

After that… Well, she was old. Like I once was, by our age, you learned to take the hits. Life wasn't always kind and you learned to accept that bad things happened and you just had to keep going. That or else you weren't going to last too long.

Molly and the boy arrived soon after that and the healer noticed something wrong with Iris. I think the boy did as well but he didn't ask.

The old woman just declined to answer Molly until they did both of their dungeon runs for the day. Then she shared the information about Hector, and just Hector. They discussed the issue for a bit with the boy being sullen about the possibility of losing everything he had to gain in the dungeon, while Molly wanted to talk to the neighbor.

Ultimately Iris made her call. Since she believed that some guy seeing something would stay quiet for fear of not being believed, or would talk and then not be believed, there was no need to do anything. While talking to him would just confirm for him that he had seen something.

As she put it, “Let sleeping dog lie.” Which seems to mean the same thing as “Don’t kick the cave beast.”

They did also talk about increasing the number of times they hit the dungeon, but the only way to fit it into all of their schedules would be to cut their breaks between runs down to a half hour or so. Molly and Iris managed to bully Eduardo into believing in the importance of breaks and denied him any solo runs.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

The neighbors across the street seemed more confused by the broken lock on their door, having apparently found the money first. The older man who seemed to be the husband returned from a car trip with a heavy bag of parts that let him just replace the whole thing. Lock, and knob.

They had another two days of dungeon runs, and Molly hit third level. She received a spell called Disperse Toxin which excited her a lot since she believed it would not only get rid of poisons but infections of the blood as well. It could also help with overdoses of drugs and alcohol.

She also raised her spirit score to improve how much magic she had available for her.

The next week I replaced the raccoons in the bent combat room with a swarm of three hundred cockroaches to charge out and take wing at the adventurers while the Kobolds three got into position.

“Dam you Tark!”

All three of them were displeased, but Iris was more vocal about it.

The clear panes in the frames they had all taken to wearing were called goggles and kept the bugs out of their eyes. But being covered with crawling bugs made the two women retreat across the drop door back into the other room. While the boy was slapping at the bugs he made sure to wait for the girls to cross over then stopped in the doorway to wait for the Kobold who had begun chasing after the three of them.

Eduardo took several stabs in his leg, but standing on top of the fallen door he didn't have to kill any of the kobolds. All he had to do was swat them sideways off the door bridge to fall into the water filled pit.

Kobolds can't swim.

I had known they were fairly muscular little guys, but they were so solid they just sunk to the bottom and had to scrabble along the bottom to get to the ladder to climb up out of the water to get up high enough to breathe.

The three adventurers were long gone by the time the little lizardmen had finished climbing up to return to the fight.

Upstairs the three of them checked each other's backs and hair for any remaining roaches. Not noticing the dungeon creatures had vanished as they left the reach of the core. Unlike the summonsed monsters they could not exist outside of the dungeon.

Molly was nearly in tears. “Why did he do that? What are we supposed to learn from that?” Iris was just mad. “That he’s a nasty stupid jerk!”

The boy started to speak, then shut his mouth. Smart man. They weren't ready to talk or listen. Let them vent and only after they calm down do you try to help. Don't turn yourself into their target.

After the old woman tossed my flowers into the trash, she broke out a bottle of some liqueur called Tequila. Iris shared out the drink with Molly and after a thoughtful look, Eduardo. Now Iris was ready to think instead of react.

The look on the boy's face as he forced himself to swallow the brew made it worth all of their anger.

I didn’t hear exactly what Iris said at first as I focused on chasing down an errant thought. Tequila…

Right, the research rooms. A copy of the bottle was going into room one as soon as I could have a kobold steal it. While the results from room two had been done for a few days by then, I had to follow it up with an adjuster box that turned out to be needed to make the old television work by picking up the signals from the air that it was supposed to display.

Watching it over the last few days had kept me occupied while I waited for my magic reserve to refill, and I confess often kept me so fascinated that I watched it long after my reserve had refilled.

Such wonders….

Shows about guardsmen, healers, and men who put out fires. War stories from across the ages. Stories from worlds where magic was normal and others where men traveled between the stars or through time.

And all of them were broken up into short parts by entertaining offerings from merchants for products and services. Such offerings were often more entertaining than many of the stories.

There were also reports of world events. And local ones.

It was strange watching Hector talking out in front of Iris's house from behind him while seeing him on the TV from the front.