Lacey stood at the end of a tunnel waiting for Hughe to finish examining the first trap with the spikes that he’d fallen into the day before. Hughe gave her a smug look, poked the ground around where the hole was and flipped over the woven mat that had been covering it.
“Not going to catch me this time,” Hughe asserted.
“You’re just too smart for me,” Lacey said sweetly, making Hughe frown as she backed down the corridor. Hughe narrowed his eyes and jumped the measly 5 feet with a grin that disappeared as he slipped and fell into the second hole.
“You lied to me,” Hughe was whining at Lacey from down in another hole. This hole had been dug right after the previous hole.
“I didn’t,” Lacey called down into the pit where Hughe lay with a broken leg. “At least there were no spikes this time.”
“You said there would be treasure!” Hughe pounded the ground next to him. “I never should have trusted a dungeon! They warned me, but no, I thought, surely there would be treasure this time.”
“And there is,” Lacey placated him by tossing down a beetle shell. It wasn’t the best of what they had, but it was a good quality, with no cracks.
“Now you’re pelting me with crap?” Hughe fumed. “Just put me out of my misery. Nothing could convince me to come back to this cursed place. No treasure, no experience, no good, lying…” There was a moment of silence, followed by, “Is this a beetle shell?”
“I could toss the beetle down there with you too, if you’d like,” Lacey offered, her lips quirking at the greed she could hear in his voice.
“You have more like this?” Hughe wheedled. “With that glow?”
“I guess you’ll have to come back tomorrow and see what we’ve done with the first level,” Lacey goaded him. “Just don’t go down to the second level unless you want to run into enough traps to take out you and all your friends.”
“Tomorrow?” Hughe’s eyes bugged out a little. “What about today? You going to help me out of the pit or what?”
“And trust you to leave peacefully?” Lacey asked, acting shocked at the thought.
“Well, yeah,” Hughe gave a nervous laugh. “It would go a long way to keeping our arrangement honorable, right?”
“I could just trap you in here indefinitely,” Lacey reflected as if just coming up with the idea. “Then you couldn’t bring more friends to wipe us out. You couldn’t threaten us anymore at all. We’d just keep you fed….”
“Lacey, right?” Hughe’s voice dipped into what he probably figured was charming, at least to a gal in the nearest pub. “That’s what the goblins call you.”
“Yes, Hughe,” Lacey nearly purred. “That’s correct and how charming of you to remember the name I told you the first day you threatened to kill me and my partner after waking us up with alarms.”
“Lacey, we can be reasonable, right?” Hughe cajoled, and Lacey began to believe that it was possible to trap him indefinitely. It was tempting, but then they wouldn’t get any more experience from killing him and killing him had become very satisfying to Lacey.
“I’m known for my rational negotiations,” Lacey replied in a tone Colt would have understood was very dangerous. “In fact, I was being rational when I asked you to explain things the last time you threatened to kill me.”
“All right, now look, we can both get a little hotheaded, right babe?”
“But seriously, how can you trust me, since I’m a liar,” Lacey’s tone got colder. He really shouldn’t have called her babe. “Dungeons can’t be trusted. I think it’s adventurers who can’t be trusted. You’ve done nothing but threaten us since you found our dungeon.”
“Okay, I was wrong,” Hughe finally heard the nasty snarl Lacey had let show.
“Threats and claims that we were stupid,” Lacey recalled.
“But that was before,” Hughe tried to stand, leaning against one wall to keep from putting weight on his hurt leg. “Before I knew you.”
“That was literally less than a few minutes ago,” Lacey challenged.
“In the interest of future good will, it would be smart to just pull me up and let me go,” Hughe rationalized.
“There you go, calling me stupid again,” Lacey chided the boy, almost feeling guilty for enjoying toying with him.
“Not at all,” Hughe denied it with hands raised and waving in front of him. “You seem like a perfectly rational human being capable of amazing intellect. After all, you trapped me.”
“And you are a prize to catch,” Lacey nodded and backed away from the pit.
“Lacey?” Hughe called. “You aren’t really going to just leave me here, right?”
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
“I could kill you instead,” Lacey called back to him with a laugh.
“Lacey!”
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“That would work?” Colt asked Lacey, shaking his head and poking the coals of the cooking fire in the room just outside the control room. “Just leaving him down there?”
“Probably,” Lacey admitted. “He could always find a way to kill himself, but that would take some balls that that kid doesn’t have. Besides, if he’s still here, we can’t get to the pedestal. We’d have to try to trap him again when at least one of us is in the control room.”
“You aren’t really going to do it, are you?” Colt tilted his head at her. “He certainly wouldn’t trust us to come back alone again now that he knows we could trap him here.”
“He’s threatened and insulted us from the moment we first met him and for the first time we have the upper hand,” Lacey tossed a shell off a rock that was working as a stool around the campfire and took the bowl of stew the goblin girl offered. Lacey was finally ready to actually eat the stuff. The whole thing had made her feel a little bad ass. “We should at least kill him for the experience.”
It had turned out that they could be outside the control room during a dungeon invasion, but they couldn’t go in and out of the room if Hughe was anywhere in the dungeon. They had decided to test the idea that both of them could be outside the control room for this particular encounter, more to see what they could and couldn’t do.
“Whew,” Colt blew out a breath in a low whistle. “How long has it been since you got laid?”
“Low blow,” Lacey pointed her spoon at him, annoyed, then braced herself and took a bite.
“You can get a little bitchy around the edges when it’s been too long is all I’m saying,” Colt shrugged with a sly smile. The stew wasn’t as bad as she’d imagined. She chewed and swallowed. It wasn’t a meat pie, but it didn’t taste like worms.
“Well, that kid isn’t going to do it for me,” Lacey emphasized her statement with stabbing motions with her empty spoon, lowering it to below her eye level when she saw the spoon glowed a bit.
“But he might be a better partner if we don’t kill him for a third morning in a row,” Colt reasoned, as Lacey scooped up another bite in defiance of her mind telling her that it was made of worms.
“Are you sure?” Lacey asked, jabbing the second bite into her mouth before she changed her mind. She turned to face away from Colt for a moment to hide the moment that her stomach rebelled at the stew. She swallowed hard and then swallowed again.
“Come on, Lacey,” Colt chided her, and she could tell that he was walking up behind her.
“We could use the experience,” she insisted, turning to face him as she shoved another bite past teeth that wanted to clamp shut.
“Lace,” Colt said, taking the bowl from her as she ran for the stone stairway and the river cavern below. “I’m letting him out.”
“Fine,” came out in a hurl that covered the stairs. How he ate that stuff, she didn’t know, but when she turned to find him taking a smiling bite, she lost the rest of what was in her stomach. “And you say I’m mean,” she gasped out over his chuckle.
“I’ll make him leave his sword in the pit,” Colt was saying as he strode out toward the dungeon.
“If he’s snarky, take the experience,” Lacey argued and spat.
At least the goblin workers didn’t seem to mind cleaning up after her.
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“Fighter, level 4, damaged, repelled from dungeon,” the system intoned. “Dungeon clear.”
“Huh, guess he lost a level,” Lacey figured, getting up to head back into the now-unlocked control room. “Maybe Colt’s right. He lost a level and we gained one. I suppose it’s a fair trade.”
She made her way back to the pedestal and paused before she ordered up a meat pie. “Ginger Ale,” she said and banged the pedestal. It didn’t work. What did a place like this have for drinking? If she happened onto the screen by using voice commands, she could bypass some of the lockouts, but she’d have to know what to order. They’d tried coffee. That wasn’t in there at all.
“Ale,” she tried again, not sure she really wanted something alcoholic with her stomach already reeling, but at least it would get her to some kind of drink menu.
“Goblin Milk?” she scanned the list and was a little grossed out at what was available. It didn’t have ginger ale, but it had cream soda? It wasn’t like she could buy anything as long as Hughe was in the dungeon, so she was kind of glad that Colt had gone up to let him go. Now that she had options, cream soda was very tempting. “Ugh.”
She tried Ginger and ended up naming their goblin worker girl in the process, something that wasn’t so bad since she was really good at cleaning up and didn’t flinch from Lacey like some of them did. Their credits were getting low, considering that they’d relegated most of the worker goblins into doing chores that didn’t include mining.
“Colt,” Lacey said, and banged the pedestal. A screen opened up showing Colt coming back up from letting Hughe go. She tapped on him.
“Dungeon Master, level 1,” the voice told her.
“He’s more than that,” she told the pedestal.
“Ginger ale?” Ginger handed Lacey a cup of something that wasn’t water.
“Thanks,” Lacey told the girl goblin, who ducked and smiled before going back to her chores.
Lacey took a sniff of the cup and pulled her head back. That was not ginger ale. It was neither gingery nor ale. If she wasn’t mistaken, it was moonshine. Where the heck had the goblins found or figured out how to make moonshine? What did they make it out of? A few other questions flitted across her mind as she stuck her fingers into the stuff and rubbed them together to test consistency. Another more careful sniff made her think of the berries some of them had brought in from the outside.
Lacey tapped her foot, staring at the screen, thoughts whirling in her mind. Two taps and her screen returned to the blue that would allow her to buy things. One thing she knew she could buy cheap was a torch. They didn’t last more than three hours, and they had better, but it was access to fire. Lacey ordered a torch, careful to keep the liquid in the cup away from the flame.
Kneeling on the floor, Lacey poured out a bit of the moonshine and carefully lit it on fire. The flame burned blue with a bit of orange on top and Lacey stomped it out with a maniacal glee. This wasn’t just moonshine. This was high proof moonshine and while it might not explode, it was valuable for more than its flammability. One did not attend Burning Man without learning all about moonshine or drugs. Lacey had endured the lecture on moonshine instead of the drugs. Colt had abstained from all of it because he was a good mama’s boy. That was their story and Lacey stuck to it every time they visited his family.
Moonshine was only illegal to make because it was very dangerous to make. Stills that made moonshine blew up and took whole buildings with them. Lacey knew this firsthand from a man with only one hand to show for it. If she could find out where the goblins were making moonshine and how the hell they had made it so fast, they might have another weapon at their disposal, not that they could use it on the upper levels. The thing was that if a level 5 fighter could give them a whole level on their dungeon, what could a group of level 15 adventurers net them? Maybe it was worth pissing off Hughe to find out, especially if she could pull it off.