“Lace,” came the gently laughing voice of her best friend in the whole world. It was a better wake-up call than she’d had recently, but it was still unwelcome. “Lace!” and a hand jiggled her shoulder.

“Fibe more mibutes,” Lacey slurred into her pillow, spitting out a tuft of hair that had worked its way into the side of her drooling mouth.

“You came out into the dungeon and promptly fell asleep?” came Colt’s good-heartedly chiding voice.

“I dibn’t prompty do nuffin,” she rolled over and glared up at his grinning face, wiping her mouth on a mostly clean shirt sleeve. “I’ll have you know that I purposepully, purposefuldy, purpose… yeah whatever. I got up a ton of those stupid bookcases to get here.”

“Uh, huh,” he patted her head.

“I just fibured I’d get a nick quap,” she swatted away his hand and noticed the squad of goblins staring at her around his bulk.

Eve was pushing aside the looky-loos and even nudged at Colt to tsk as she pulled something out of Lacey’s hair. Lacey gave Eve a stink eye, but didn’t stop her.

“I have words in my mouth somewhere,” Lacey snarled out, wiping a hand over her face again to try to rub her mind into working. “I’d have more words if we had coffee.”

“Time to get back to work, Sleeping Beauty,” Colt snickered at her, and it was what her mind needed to jump start straight into totally annoyed. He held out a hand to help her up, but she smacked it away and levered herself to her feet.

“Coffee,” she growled. Colt might be the only person in the world to be able to tease her like this, but he made up for it by putting up with her playful grouching. Maybe only they’d know it was joking, but it helped settle them both to do something normal. “How long have I been out?”

“If I had coffee, I’d truly be a god of the dungeon, but you haven’t given me long enough at the pedestal to try to find it,” Colt sounded far too reasonable. “I was trying to fix what I could manually of those rooms that turned red. The goblins were helping, but I’m not sure how well we did until we can check it on the pedestal. I’d say you’ve probably been asleep more than an hour or two, but less than you need.”

“You want to try your hand at the pedestal, Mr. Smarty Pants?” Lacey waved her hand around in a way that made all but Eve step back from her. “Fine! You go burn your eyes out on that thing while I take a nap and explore the caverns. Whadya wake me up for anyway then?”

“You were blocking the way down,” Colt replied reasonably again, pointing behind her at the furs she’d been sleeping on. It was infuriating.

“Oh,” she moved away from the furs, letting the goblin fighting troop precede Colt down.

“Take a nap, explore, or whatever you want for a while so I can have some screen time, ok?” Colt gave her a salute as he ducked down under the furs and disappeared.

“You’re just lucky I’m so tired or I’d have a scathing reply to that taunt, asshole,” Lacey muttered under her breath, the still-sweeping goblin now wide-eyed and furtively trying to avoid Lacey.

Lacey blew out a breath and squinted around the little room. It was obvious that it was a room that the goblins had dug out of the mountain and not one of her making. The floor wasn’t smooth, for one thing. It was an odd shape for another. It was like the goblins had followed the veins of coal and hollowed out sections that would make big enough caves for living in. The furs weren’t the ones the dungeon made, but more like stitched together bat fur, though if that was bat fur, the bats had grown into things she didn’t want to know about.

There wasn’t a cooking fire in this one, but there seemed to be one cooking fire per level of rooms. The cooking fire was always in the room with the stone bookcase. Not every cave was populated, but there were enough workers to be busting their humps on each level to keep clean or cook at the fire.

Two levels up, Lacey found the painting caves that Colt had mentioned. The mining had hit a wall of what looked like it might be limestone. Onto the porous rock had been scratched hundreds of crude drawings, the first of which might have faded completely if someone hadn’t scratched over it again and again. They’d used the burned coal, primarily, to make the first drawings, but later drawings used colors that might have come from blood and some kind of glowing substance that probably came from the worms or moss that Lacey had given those worms.

Stolen novel; please report.

As Lacey examined the room, she was more impressed with the way the goblins had planted the moss into cracks along the ceiling than any of the artwork they’d created. Once she started to really look, the original torches had been sort of reproduced by someone having stuck a clump of the moss on a stick to make it look like the original torch. These torches were a more yellowish color than the red of fire, but Lacey admonished herself for not noticing earlier.

Lacey climbed up another two levels before she ran into a goblin that explained how they were using the water from the lowest cavern. A single goblin stood on the shoulders of another worker who held up a bucket to the one opening the trap door. A pail of water was passed up and a pail of coal was passed down. Lacey reached to help, but the goblins appeared mortified to have their task taken over by her, so she backed off until they were through.

Lacey didn’t know what drove her to it, but she climbed until she found the entrance room. It was just as Colt had said in that she couldn’t exit the dungeon, but the sight of the sun was worth the climb. What she could see consisted of densely packed trees, but if she lay down on the ground, she could just see the sun poking up over the tops of the nearest trees. It wasn’t one of her best ideas, and honestly she hadn’t thought on it much, but Lacey fell asleep there at the entrance, the warmth of the sun on her cheek.

A stretch and a yawn were followed by a very low groan as Lacey hit her hand on a cave wall and pushed off the hard ground beneath her. If the entrance had been permeable, she’d have fallen out into the forest beyond as she yelped. It was not the best idea to wake up to the face of a grinning goblin looking over a person, but it did manage to wake a person up very quickly.

“Greetings Mistress!” the goblin held out a hand that Lacey tried to scurry away from except that the only way to scurry away was up a wall.

Lacey closed her eyes and counted to ten. “How ya doing, Adam?”

“Adam is protecting Lacey,” Adam stated, clearly proud of his assignment. He and the half dozen goblins behind him were all proudly guarding her idiot ass because she was sitting at the very entrance to the dungeon.

“Good job, Adam,” Lacey gave Adam a thumbs up.

Seven goblins gibbered to each other and fiddled with their hands until they too had a thumbs up to give back to her. Lacey chuckled and made herself stand and turn her back on the view of the darkened forest behind her.

“Too bad we can’t bring in some of that wood, huh Adam?” Lacey stuck a thumb over her shoulder at the entrance behind her.

“Want wood?” Adam asked and then grunted at two of his goblins.

The guard goblins dashed out the entrance while Lacey stood there with her mouth hanging open. They could only gather the wood on the ground, which was relatively rotten, but they dashed back in with armloads of the stuff. Lacey spent the time trying to get out herself, but the entrance was not permeable to her like it was to them. It was yet another assumption she’d made that she shouldn’t have that because she couldn’t go out, neither could their minions.

Did Colt know yet? It changed a lot to have access to wood and she knew that there were axes in the store. If they armed their workers with axes, they could not only gather wood, but other things from the outside. A basket could maybe gather berries. And what would those things unlock on the pedestal? Lacey rubbed her hands together and grinned at Adam, who grinned back making Lacey grin slightly less.

“Okay, Moe and Larry,” Lacey named the two daring goblins who had braved the outside. “Go get me pine needles, as many as you can carry.”

The two dashed back out the door after Adam gibbered at them, likely explaining what the pine needles were.

“And you, Curley and Shemp,” Lacey addressed the next two eager goblins. “Go dig up those bushes and let’s replant them nearer to the entrance here.”

They looked confused, so she explained it to Adam who then gibbered at them excitedly.

“Hide entrance,” Adam nodded, a gleam in his eyes.

“Maybe not well, but it’s something to start with,” Lacey told him.

The final two goblins refused to leave the cave because they couldn’t leave her unguarded, but Lacey rounded up some workers to send out with the goblin fighters guarding them to do her bidding.

“Adam,” Lacey turned to the chief, her mind spinning with possibilities. “Can you go tell Colt that I need axes, baskets, and two dozen worker goblins?”

“Axes, baskets, and workers?” Adam repeated and Lacey nodded, shoving him back into the cave. The problem with that was that goblins couldn’t count higher than 3. Lacey sent him back a few more times until she got all the workers she needed.

Once again, Lacey worked through the night. She taught worker goblins to weave baskets out of pine needles, something Colt’s mother took up one summer and forced all the kids to do. Lacey sent a quick thanks to Colt’s mom, wherever she was. She gave workers axes and sent them with guards to chop down trees, making sure that they cut down ones far enough away to not make a road directly to their dungeon. Once she had wood, she showed workers how to make crude ladders out of long branches.

Colt might have explored, but Lacey was ready to change the dynamics of these adventurer scenarios. Once they had ten baskets for gathering workers to collect nuts, pinecones, and yes, there were berries, Lacey had the workers start to weave mats. Miners dug holes. She named every goblin that did a good job and handed a sword to the ones that were idiots. She had to send down for more workers until Adam came up to tell her that Colt was asleep.

“Fine, whatever,” Lacey was on a roll and her intensity took on new heights. She wasn’t a trap expert for nothing. The most primitive puzzles were traps of one sort or another.