“You’ll be pleased to know that I got a beetle nursery set up on level 2, but there has got to be a better way that I’m really hoping you’ll figure out before they bust through to that level,” Colt reported to Lacey as she approached the pedestal to order her morning meat pie. “Before you get all fussy about the nursery being on level 2 and not a lower level, I’ve figured out how to hide the nest so that it’s not apparent to those on the level. I’ve got thirty beetles all fighting it out in that big room on 2 and we’ve got some sluice gates, like the ones set up down in the water cavern, so that newly born beetles aren’t just gobbled up by the big guys.”
“Sounds great,” Lacey said, scrolling through what looked like more options, including breakfast burritos that seemed incongruous to their setting but very welcome to her taste buds.
“What is that?” Colt perked up, his feet hitting the stone floor with a thud.
“Breakfast burrito?” Lacey grinned, swiping the treat out of the air in front of her.
“When did we get those?” Colt lurched for the treat in her hand, but she could only keep it away from him for a moment because he had a lot of practice at this sort of thing from his brothers and sisters.
“Once I’d ordered 10 meat pies, some new options opened up, like breakfast burritos,” Lacey lifted her chin with a smug look. “It seems there’s a good reason to be ordering food off the pedestal after all.”
“How much does it cost?” Colt pretended to protest, but he was doing it around a mouthful of egg, cheese, and sausage wrapped in a handy container. It took about a week of being away from his mom to loosen his normally tight manners. Had it been that long already?
“Same as the meat pies,” Lacey frowned, ordering another one for herself. “But it’s twice as big and it’s cheesy.”
“What else did we get?” Colt asked, but Lacey had already scrolled to more screens. They were getting relatively low on credit. At least she thought they were. Maybe they were breaking even-ish. “We could make it to pizza pretty soon if we stay diligent and eat a lot.” His smirk was an obvious attempt to cheer her up, but it wasn’t working.
“Look it up yourself if you want to know what we have,” Lacey snapped at him and regretted it immediately. “Sorry.”
“You’re wound kind of tight,” Colt frowned. “What was the nightmare?”
“I dunno,” Lacey tried to let it go, but it nagged at her. “Maybe Hughe reminds me of the slimeball or something, but I was dreaming that he’d gotten a level 15 group to come back and wipe the dungeon.”
“Hughe’s a dick,” Colt admitted, blowing on his burrito between bites, “but he’s a predictable one in that he’s too greedy to hand it off to someone else.”
“Maybe not,” Lacey flicked through screens to look at the map, “but he’s stupid enough to go bragging to someone about those shells. Someone who might want to take them from him the easy way by stealing them and where they come from.”
“He said he’s got dibs on the dungeon,” Colt stuffed the last of his burrito in his mouth.
“But what does that mean?” Lacey complained. “What do we really know about anything here? There’s a rulebook in this thing and we can’t even get to it. It’s maddening!”
It took a few moments for Colt to finish chewing, but he gave a big swallow as Lacey nibbled on the edge of her burrito. Hers was a little too hot for her still and she wanted to enjoy it rather than burn her mouth on it. Lacey usually scrolled between levels and rooms with two hands, but with one hand taken up with her burrito, she screwed up a zoom in and accidently moved a room.
“No way!” Lacey could have hit her head on the pedestal.
“What?” Colt got up from the table to come look.
“All that work and we could have done it from here?” Lacey moaned, showing Colt how she’d moved one room from the first level down into the second one by dragging it.
“That’s great!” Colt didn’t share her frustration. As usual, he only saw what this new feature, which was probably there all along, for what it could do in the future. Lacey felt what the lack of it had already done to her aching muscles. “We can move all the beetles up to the top levels.”
“We couldn’t have found that before yesterday?” Lacey whined and she hated it when she whined.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“But now we can really organize things better by moving the bats over here,” Colt took over, as Lacey’s sulk was only slightly pacified by being able to eat her cheesy burrito in peace. “We can move components around too!” Colt gushed.
Lacey ignored him. The burrito wasn’t skimpy on the cheese like the normal stuff they got off the dollar menus back home. It was stuffed with just the right amount of sausage, cheese and egg. At that moment, that burrito was her only friend.
“Oh man,” Colt was still gushing like he’d just gone on a first date. “You can double click to replicate something! Oh wait, that’s too expensive. Is that trap based on my still?”
Lacey sat down at the table and let herself mope. She had woken up for this? At least she’d gotten a breakfast burrito out of it, but if Colt’s current obsession went on as long as Lacey figured it could, she might as well go back to sleep. She had half a mind to go back to sleep, but the memory of her dream dismissed that thought before it even fully formed.
“Stills blow up,” Lacey reminded him, but he didn’t hear her. He was organizational madness. He got it from his mother. She completely reorganized her house every Spring whether it needed it or not. When all the kids lived there, it had needed it. Now that she was an empty nester two years from retirement, it only served to annoy Colt’s dad. The moral of this shaggy dog story was not to let Colt or his mother get obsessed with organizing your closet unless you didn’t want to see them for a couple of days.
“Is it even safe for me to go out there and work on some traps?” Lacey rapped Colt on the forehead to get his attention.
“Uh, yeah,” Colt replied, distracted. “We should try moving a room with you in it. It could be like an elevator.”
“Uh,” Lacey’s eyes got wide, but Colt was already shooing her toward the door. “Wait!”
Lacey ground to a halt her eyes on Ginger, who had frozen in the corner, broom halfway up. Colt followed Lacey’s gaze, then did a double take. “Is she not moving?”
“She’s not moving,” Lacey said as Colt slowly walked up to the little worker goblin with the broom. “Is she alive?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Colt waved his hand in front of Ginger’s face, but the goblin didn’t move. As far as Lacey could see, she wasn’t breathing. “She would have fallen down if she was dead, right?”
Lacey scrambled down the stairs to the water cavern below them and the silence was eerie. They’d gotten used to the low rumble of the water flowing past the cavern under their feet. Lacey had fallen asleep to it for so long that the silence of its cessation was unnerving. In the silence, she could hear Colt thump down on the stone steps behind her. Not only were the goblins still and silent, but so was the water of the river.
Colt bumped into her back as Lacey froze in the doorway, staring at the frozen waterfall that looked more like a picture than actual water. The next second, the falls slowly dribbled back to life, like someone had started the projector in slow motion. In about fifteen quick breaths, the water was roaring again as if nothing had happened, and the goblins were moving around like they hadn’t been statues less than a minute before.
“That was…” Colt started, his breath on the top of her head something that helped Lacey ground herself in the real of the situation.
“Yeah…” she said, her voice so quiet, he probably hadn’t heard it over the water.
Colt bolted back up the stairs with Lacey on his heels. “It had to be the moving stuff, and doesn’t that just make perfect sense?” Colt was saying, but none of it made perfect sense to Lacey.
“No, I’m not getting it,” Lacey barked at him, waving the last of her burrito still in her fist.
“When I moved something,” Colt pointed to Ginger who had been sweeping without a care in the world, until she wasn’t again. “When I move a room, the goblins all freeze in place. And it makes sense because if you’re moving rooms around, you don’t want to accidently cut a minion in two because they were in between the moving rooms. So, they froze, right?”
“Okay,” Lacey shrugged, her mind absorbing this new fact and the beginnings of excitement that it brought to her. She was catching up with possible ramifications. “But for how long?”
“It started back up almost as soon as we both hit the bottom of the stairs,” Colt shrugged. “So maybe that made it start back up.”
Lacey ran down the stairs to test it out, but the water stayed frozen this time. They tested it with several variables to understand how it worked. The end result was that if Colt moved a room, all the moving parts of the dungeon froze in place while he was doing it. There was a message that popped up that reminded them of the “Are you sure?” box in computers. If he hit what ended up being yes in that box, Ginger would start to reanimate in half a minute. If he hit no, the room moved back, and Ginger would move immediately.
If they let the box sit there, everything stayed frozen for at least twenty minutes. If one of them was out of the control room, it didn’t affect it, but if both left the control room, it reanimated everything in about half a minute from the time they left the room. Colt could move a room with Lacey in it, allowing it to work as an elevator short-cut for one of them. It made Lacey’s stomach a little sick, but when Lacey did it for Colt, he thought it felt like a roller coaster and had her do it a dozen times just for fun.
“It doesn’t freeze the whole world out there,” Lacey said to Colt after returning from what they were considering the last test for the day. “But goblins outside during a move did freeze even though the trees were still moving.”
“That makes it not safe for goblins to be outside when we’re moving stuff around,” Colt noted, almost to himself. “They’d be easy prey for anything that could move while they couldn’t.”
“We could resurrect any of the named ones,” Lacey shrugged, but Colt looked at her like she wasn’t human for the thought.
“I like the goblins too much to put them through that just for a test,” Colt protested.
“You think they remember dying?” Lacey considered the problem more than the sentience of the goblins, not that she would want to test it on Ginger, or even Eve or Adam for that matter.
“Hughe did,” Colt reminded her and she winced.