Lacey and Colt recalibrated a few levels so that the Manchester Room took the place of the puzzle room at the end of one of the arenas that was suited to Kat’s level. They slid the Aztec Tomb up toward the higher levels by scaling the monster and trap levels. The newest design, which they had dubbed The Zoo, had been set for one of the level 15-20 entrances. They were still testing it out, but had wanted to key it to where Kat would go next.

“She’s going to wipe on the Manchester Room,” Colt worried, his feet kicking at a trash can that was overflowing with rejected drawings.

“I’ve wasted 2 hours on trying to draw these mini-centaur elves for the back yard,” Lacey muttered, crumpling up another page of paper.

“You’re too hard on yourself,” Colt said, automatically. The crumpled page fell outside the trash can even though Colt tilted it toward Lacey’s throw.

“She might wipe the first time, but then she’ll get it,” Lacey started to scribble out yet another sketch. “I hate drawing humanoids. They turn out cartoonish.”

“You don’t think she’ll be mad about dying in the Manchester Room?” Colt took the trash can out of Ginger’s hand. “It’ll cost her a whole day just to respawn. We should save the Manchester Room for when she finishes the other levels.”

“I guess that would work, but she’s going to be disappointed since we told her we’d put it in the end of this one,” Lacey was far more worried about hitting their quest quotas than what room Kat would get at the end of the arena.

“I’ve been working on a room I could put there,” Colt said, dumping the whole lot of crumpled papers into the main pedestal, just like Ginger would have. “Remember when we were working on the puzzle room for Snow White or Rose Red?”

“Sure, we have a whole slew of fairy tales ones,” Lacey nodded. There had been a time when she and Colt had been fixated on creating a fairy tale themed escape room. They’d made a whole business plan around it but had been rejected by investors.

“I drew out the middle room of that escape, and I think we have all the components,” Colt set the trash can back down nearer to where Lacey was drawing. “Will you look it over before I put it in the pedestal?”

“Sure,” Lacey crumpled up another page. “I’m wasting my time on this anyway.”

“Last night, the goblins dug into a new area and found lodestone, which then opened up magnets for us,” Colt handed the paper to Lacey and pointed at the part of the page that would have used the magnets.

“That’s great and opens up a ton more puzzle locks,” Lacey enthused.

“That’s what I thought,” Colt perked up. “I was thinking we’d put a key at the bottom of the well. Remember how we put the magnet on the bottom of the bucket so that when they brought up a pail of water, they bring up the key?”

“Only if they let the bucket sink to the bottom and then think to look on the bottom of the bucket,” Lacey took pencil to paper and made a few notes. “If you put these notes along the sides, the system puts the mechanism in place for us. This will make it so that the well only has a little water in it, like a foot, so that the bucket almost has to hit the bottom of the well to get any water.”

“If we connect some seaweed or long drippy moss to the key, they’ll be sure to see it,” Colt suggested.

“Better yet,” Lacey grinned and took up her sketch book. “Let’s make a moss monster that attacks them.”

“We couldn’t do that in an escape room,” Colt nodded and took his schematics back.

“It can be stuck to the bottom of the bucket with little projectile blobs,” Lacey muttered.

“Is that wings?” Colt asked, frowning over her shoulder.

“Nope,” Lacey stuck the pencil in her mouth and reached for a colored one to make the background blue. “It’s a lacework of freshwater coral.”

“How do the blobby things fly?” Colt protested. “And wouldn’t the coral be stuck to the bottom of the well and not the bucket?”

“See?” Lacey shook a pencil at him. “That isn’t my problem. The system takes the intention and makes it work. I’d think the coral is sticky and is attracted to the movement of the bucket into its domain. It stiffens up in air to make it more cage-like once it hits the top of the well, with only those sucker blobs that it shoots out like…”

“Snot rockets?” Colt suggested making Lacey cringe.

“Fine,” she curled a lip. “Then we just set that intent and what physics or biology can’t cover, magic does. That’s the trick to these things. You have to let the system do some of the work for us.”

“Just your intent?” Colt made notes on his well trap.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“Yeah,” she replied around the pencil in her mouth.

“That’s almost magic,” Colt chuckled. It wasn’t that Colt didn’t draw, but he didn’t think he did it as well as Lacey, so he left a lot of it to her. “So, if I’m thinking that the well is in a forest setting and just sort of sketch out a couple of trees around the edge. Do they have to be drawn really well?”

“Not really,” Lacey looked up and took the pencil out of her mouth to drop it on her desk. “What happened to my sketches? The ones I threw away?”

“I dumped them into the pedestal,” Colt answered, pointing his pencil briefly at the pedestal. “It’s how Ginger gets rid of trash.”

“Do they manifest for Ginger?” Lacey set her rough sketch down.

“No,” Colt finally looked up at the pedestal which was glowing.

“I figured the pedestal would reject most of the drawings as too basic,” Lacey walked to the pedestal, “but it’s saying the centaur elves were done well enough to produce.”

“Then it wasn’t a waste of 2 hours after all?” Colt shook his pencil at her. “Order one up. How bad could it be?”

“Don’t say that,” Lacey scowled at him, her finger hovering over the button. The shadow image of the pony-sized farmers taunted her. Did she really want 100 of them? The female version had an antler on the left side of her head while the male had it on the right side. They had typical elven ears, a hobbit’s face and chest, and stout hands.

“Order a few and see,” Colt shook his head. “Stop fussing. Just do it. You can’t spend your life afraid of making mistakes.”

“You say that to me all the time and it never makes me feel better about risk,” Lacey complained. “They would be the whole civilization of workers for the back yard. I just thought I could do better, which is why I didn’t submit these folks. They’ll hate me just for giving them rainbow rabbit fur ruffs and hides. I would.”

Colt gave a dramatic sigh. “You can’t use me to push the button all the time.”

“Why not?” and a smile quirked at the edge of her mouth. “You going somewhere else?”

“If I have to get up to push the button,” Colt warned her with a serious look, “then I’m going to order up the full 100 of them right now at level 15, and that’s 60,000 credits that you’ll just blame me for. And you’ll have to figure out a place to house them while we work out the quest…”

Lacey ordered up five of them at a measly level 5, and the first thing her creations saw of their creator was that she was sticking her tongue out at Colt.

“Greetings masters,” the happy colt clopped his hooves and stuck out his tongue, the rest of the creatures following suit.

“Oh, no,” Lacey blew a raspberry through her lips. “It named them Rejects because I’d scrawled reject across the page.”

“The whole race or just the first one?” Colt huffed a chuckle.

“It’s not funny,” Lacey lamented, smacking her forehead with her palm. The Rejects followed the example and smacked their foreheads, maneuvering around the silly horns she’d given them. “It’s a whole race that I just stuck with a complex-inducing name and idiotic mannerisms.”

“You need to order some farming equipment to give them before they get goblin ideas,” Colt warned her.

“You were the one who dumped them into the pedestal!” Lacey tried to shift the blame, but nothing in her was going to believe it. “Why did you do that?”

“I was helping Ginger out,” Colt’s voice slipped into a high pitch.

“Ugh, it took another one of my rejected drawings too,” Lacey scrolled through the pedestal’s updates with a disgusted sigh. “And now it’s counting them as one of the new monsters we have to make hundreds of to complete the quest.”

“It can’t be that bad,” Colt lowered his tone to a more calming pitch.

“What are we going to do with a hundred Velcrabs?”

“What is a Velcrab?” Colt asked.

“A microscopic crab that forms colonies that can shift their colonies’ shapes to mimic other things,” Lacey waved her hands around agitatedly.

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Colt gave her a game smile.

“They’re viral,” Lacey explained, her eyelids dropping to half-mast. “They give you a cold by infiltrating your immune system through kissing.”

“Kissing?” Colt lowered his brows.

“What can I say?” Lacey groused. “I was inspired by the thought of having to watch you and Kat get all kissy-face in the dungeon.”

“What?” Colt’s face twisted in a few expressions that settled on halfway between amused and insulted. “Jealous much?”

“Not a chance,” Lacey glared at Colt. She wanted to date Colt about as much as she wanted to babysit colicky children on the night shift in the orphanage.

“Maybe Kat could bring a date for you,” Colt teased her, his mouth sliding into a grin that stuck there. He’d set his work down at his desk to cross the room to hers.

“No thank you,” Lacey pressed her lips together.

“We could double out in the back yard,” he waved his hand in front of him like he was setting the scene for the movie version of this farce. “I can see it now. A little picnic basket under the stars.”

“Right next to the compost heap,” she muttered, but he wasn’t done.

“A little moonshine under the moon? Just me and Kat with you and …”

“George?” she offered, knowing he wasn’t going to let it go.

“Benny maybe? Or, no, I’ve got it,” Colt grinned like an idiot. “We could set you up with Benny’s kid.”

“You want to set me up on a date with an AI?” Lacey nodded, her lips disappearing with how pressed she had them.

“Don’t be like that,” Colt gave a look of mock-offense. “NPCs should be respected as the growing entities that they are. After all, you wouldn’t want your Rejects here to get the wrong idea about equality, would you?”

“Equality?” one of the Rejects cocked its blank stare on an angle. The new summons were always a bit of a blank slate until they had some experience doing stuff.

“What are we going to do with these guys until the back yard opens up?” Lacey grabbed at the chance to change the subject, her face hot.

“Ginger put to work mucking out Gossowary stables,” Ginger piped up.

“We should probably name them first,” Colt suggested on an aside. “The last goblins she had mucking out the Gossowary nursery ended up recycled.”

“Is good way to recycle unwanted idiots,” Ginger pointed out. It seemed a bit ruthless to Lacey, but did she want to keep this batch of them?

“Unwanted?” the colt gave watery eyes to Lacey.

“Jakob,” Lacey named the colt without another thought. “And that’s Jennie, Jeremy, Julie, and Jake.”

“Still want in Gossowary stable?” Ginger asked.

“No, Ginger,” Lacey snapped a little more forcefully that absolutely necessary. “And you are wanted,” she told the Rejects. “I want you here.”

“Yea!!!!” the 5 new recruits cheered and then cheerfully followed Ginger to their probable doom. She’d only summoned them at a level 5 and the youngest Gossowaries were level 14.

“You old softy,” Colt chuckled into her ear.

“Shut up,” she waved his whisper back away from her ear.

“Start them off in a safer place,” Lacey called out to Ginger as she led the docile Rejects from the room. “Like the worm nursery.”