“Dmail went nuts this morning,” Colt rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. They’d been up late training their newest minions. Trap maintenance was now completely run by steampunk dwarven sprites that they’d named Spunks. Rather than give them the stubby fingers of dwarves, Lacey had drawn long nimble fingers. The insect-like wings and addition of gills had made them capable of accessing mechanisms at any height or depth of the dungeon’s dry and wet environments. They’d ended up more cute than devilish when the beards had manifested as soft rabbit fur in pastel colors that changed color with their moods, which so far consisted of a red, pissed off at machinery that wasn’t working, and purple, cheerfulness that bordered on desperate housewife crazy.
“Probably because we reopen this morning,” Lacey viciously twisted a scrunchy into her hair which was frizzy and crazed again, thanks to Spark sleeping on her pillow. Lacey had decided to skip a shower since they were opening in a matter of hours, but she was already regretting it.
“It’s quests,” Colt frowned at the screen of the main pedestal.
“Really?” Lacey forgot about her hair, the lopsided ponytail sticking straight out off of one ears. “Good or bad?”
“The good news is that they have some really great rewards,” Colt moved to the side to let her look at the screen.
“The bad news is that they all have a time limit for acceptance,” Lacey bit her lip.
“The good news is that one of them is for that back area you want to open up,” Colt countered.
“That one has 5 minutes from the time we open the dmail to be accepted,” Lacey worried, her finger poised over it.
“We should look at a less important one first,” Colt reached around her and opened one of the others.
Dungeon Quest: Can You Hear Me Now?
Main Reward: Audio Enabling
Choose from Tiered Difficulty:
1 – You Can Hear Them, but They Can’t Hear You:
Complete 5 dungeon incursions with no adventurer casualties within the next 5 days.
Reward: Single-Direction Audio Enabled for Dungeon Watch System (Internal Only)
2 – Intercom Engaged:
Complete 10 dungeon incursions within the next 5 days.
Reward: Bidirectional Audio Enabled for Dungeon Watch System (Internal Only)
3 – It’s Like You Were There:
Complete 16 dungeon incursions within the next 5 days with no adventurer casualties.
Reward: Stereo Sound System, Like Dolby for Dungeon Watch System (Internal Only)
4 – Use Your Inside Voice Outside:
Complete 25 dungeon incursions within the next 5 days with no adventurer casualties.
Reward: Level 3 rewards plus Sound Barrier Removed between dungeon and outside world.
The clock was ticking. Lacey and Colt were silent as they scanned the rules at the bottom of the dmail. They could only choose one difficulty level and if they blew it, they lost it all. Once they made the choice, that was the only quest. If they chose one too low and achieved something higher, they would only get the reward for the quest they chose. If they chose one too high and didn’t reach the goal, they wouldn’t get anything at all.
“We should go for 4!” Colt nearly quivered with excitement.
“25 incursions in 5 days is a big ask,” Lacey knew he wanted to be able to hear through the dungeon barrier because then he could talk with Kat or whomever else he was dating from out there. It wasn’t the only reason, but it was a big one. Then again, maybe Lacey was being too hard on him. He hadn’t brought Kat up more than once every hour or so the whole week that she’d been gone. Lacey was more itchy to get back out of the dungeon than he was at the moment, even if it did mean seeing Kat.
“Kat said she was bringing a few groups for the grand opening today,” Colt reasoned. “We’ve been talking strategy over dmails.”
“We have 4 dungeon entrances now,” Lacey shook her head. “If we reasonably ran one group a day at each entrance, that’s only 20 incursions and they’d have to ace the dungeon, something we didn’t really calibrate for.”
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“We could pull a few modules out to make the levels faster,” Colt’s brow said he was thinking furiously.
“This quest is almost designed to make us try to nerf our own dungeon,” Lacey put her hands on her hips. “What a crock!”
“We can run two groups per entrance,” Colt crunched the numbers in his head. “Or we can add some entrances.”
“That would depend on Kat and how many groups she’s bringing.”
“She said one per entrance and I told her we’d have 4 entrances,” Colt said. “It isn’t so much of a stretch that they could do a night shift. Do you think she’d bring more groups if we asked her to?”
“How soon could get they get here?” Lacey countered. “That guild took a week just to travel to the dungeon.”
“You’re right,” Colt took the disappointment like a pro. “It might not be worth the risk, but I really think Kat’s on our side. She’ll help.”
“We haven’t had the best luck with folks from the outside,” Lacey grumbled. “And the dungeon is tooled to take some time. We agreed that the time investment would make it all seem more valuable.”
“But the max would be 10 hours no matter how well or badly they did in there,” Colt pointed out. “It shouldn’t be too hard to get just one extra incursion per group.”
“That’s assuming they all succeed,” Lacey chewed the thought around, the timer making it harder. “That said, I think I want 4 as well.”
“You don’t think it’s too hard?” Colt’s nose scrunched up.
“It’s more that I think we can do without all the other ones if we fail, but the outside barrier being sound permeable is worth a try,” Lacey crossed her arms over her chest. “And weren’t we looking at these upgrades anyway? They’re on our list of stuff to buy when we have the budget. Everything but the last one. That one is only available in this quest.”
They chose 4 and moved on to another lesser quest. This one had to do with monster creation, and they chose the highest choice again, noting that the highest level was again the only reward they couldn’t get from working hard for normal upgrades.
Quest Accepted:
4 – Masters of the Hoard:
Create 20 new creatures for your dungeon and summon 100 of each within the next 5 days.
Reward: 1000 free summons plus Early Access to Creature Upgrade Menus
For that one, Lacey would need to be creating and not managing traps, so they were happy they’d gotten their Spunks fully functional. Colt could handle most of the daily maintenance and Lacey was itching to get into Creature Upgrade Menus. Those menus had been locked behind a level barrier that was more than triple their current level.
“Let’s do the big one,” Lacey shook out her hands to wiggle out some nerves. “We don’t want to overcommit to all these and then not know that we just don’t have enough time, credits, or whatever to finish the one we really want.”
“Okay,” Colt’s voice rose on the end, but he brought up the dmail.
Dungeon Quest: The Back Forty Acres – Part 1
Reward: Forty Acres of Land outside the dungeon. This reward includes the mountainside and part of the valley behind the dungeon, as accessed by the dungeon’s back door. This land will not be part of the dungeon and must only be used for breeding, collecting, resources, or housing. Access to this land will be restricted to those with specific permission from the dungeon masters.
Choose One of the Following Challenges to complete in the next 14 days:
1 – Respawn 100,000 creatures in your domain.
2 – Level Up creatures in your domain a total of 1,000,000 levels.
3 – Have Adventurers level up 10,000 times in your domain.
4 – Level Dungeon to 100.
5 – Kill 100 unique adventurers.
They had 5 minutes to try to do the math and pick the right choice.
“5 is a trap,” Lacey discarded that one right away. “It might look easy, but if we get a rep for killing adventurers, they won’t keep coming.”
“Not to mention that we’d have to violate the terms of the AG agreement to succeed,” Colt agreed. “I’d say the same for 4 as I can’t imagine hitting level 100 in 14 days.”
“Respawn costs a quarter of full price for a new spawn,” Lacey ticked it off on her fingers.
“At 50 credits per respawn, that would be nearly 5 million credits,” Colt did the math the quickest. “Unless it would count respawn from a perfect incursion.”
“I doubt it, since that wouldn’t cost us anything and there are hundreds of beetles dying every few minutes,” Lacey shook her head as she chewed on the skin on her nails. “On top of that, we’d have to trust adventurers to kill that many of our creatures and we aren’t that kind of dungeon. It’s another trap for suckers.”
“We’d need 400 adventurers to each earn 25 levels in our dungeons for 2,” Colt crunched the numbers so fast that Lacey stopped trying to keep up. “Divide that by 14 days and we’d have to completely level 28 adventurers from 1-25 every single day. Groups of 6 brings that to 4-5 groups per day.”
“That’s insane,” Lacey waved her hand around.
“That just leaves 2,” Colt’s hand hovered over the choice. “If we were pessimistic and said that every creature in our dungeons could level up 5 levels every day, which is feasible…”
“Not the goblins,” Lacey fussed at the overgeneralization. “They don’t level during incursions unless they fight. We’d almost need to count on the beetle population. They do most of the leveling. We birth about 100 an hour per arena.”
“If we keep the arenas running full blast and use the menagerie overflow to…”
“Do the math, Colt.”
“I’m trying, but this is a lot of numbers with a lot of ifs and zeros. You’d have to level all the beetles an average of 15 levels,” he hedged. “I think I did the numbers right, but if so, that would be hard. Really hard.”
“But not impossible,” Lacey reasoned. “We’ll have to triple the number of arenas we have because I don’t think beetles do more than 5 levels on average.”
“But it’s more than 33,000 beetles per arena if they birth 100/hour over 14 days,” Colt snapped his fingers. “We have 9 arenas already after we replicated them for the incursions from hell. That’s almost 300,000 beetles that would all have to only average 3-4 levels each?”
“That should work,” Lacey punched the choice.
“Wow,” Colt put a hand to his head and Lacey could tell that he was redoing the numbers in his head. “I think I got the numbers right.”
“If not, we’ll deal with it,” Lacey patted him on the shoulder.
There were a total of 3 countdown timers, two for 5 days, and one for 14. Next to each timer was a value like 0/20 for the creatures to be created and 0/25 for the incursions. The one for leveling was already going up thanks to their arenas. The 21 was great to see, but it sure looked dinky next to 1,000,000. Then again, it had only been a minute or so.