Kat was cruising through the arena level they’d set aside for her. They had decided to shelve the Manchester Room until Kat was done with most of the rest. They’d replaced it with Colt’s new Snow White and Rose Red Room.
The arenas were simple in concept. The first room contained 3-5 beetles of the appropriate level. Lacey and Colt, without help from the outside, had rated this arena at around level 15. In this case, the beetles were level 13, a level higher than Kat, but Kat wasn’t having any trouble with them. Beetles were dumb enough to attack each other as often as they did adventurers, especially when there were fewer adventurers than beetles. Hughe and his group had been able to get through a similar Arena at level 15, but they weren’t as tricky as Kat.
Kat used every trick she had to ensure she kept ahead of the monsters. Lacey watched on the screen at her desk, taking a break from the creation process to study an example of a peak opponent. Lacey wasn’t drawing anything truly inspired anyway. She thought that maybe if she watched Kat, Lacey could get a feel for something new. Kat twisted out of the way of one pincher in such a way that the beetle behind her got hit instead. Kat could have just hacked at them and been okay, but she never slacked, at least not in the dungeon.
Once the beetles were dead, Kat checked the room for traps and secret doors. When that assessment was done, she turned her attention to the puzzle of the room. Lacey and Colt had replaced all the pickable locks on the doors with doors that only opened upon successful completion of the puzzle. They’d learned from Hughe that if a rogue could cheat a room, they would. Each room had a combination of three locks that had to be undone for the door to open.
This particular room had a mad alchemist theme. The alchemist had 4 urns of liquid, 3 stacks of colored bricks, and a pile of brown sand. To solve it, one had to pour a bit of each liquid into a glass vase. The different viscosities would layer the liquids in colors. The second puzzle was the bricks, which had to be stacked by those colors. The bricks themselves would only stack in a certain pattern or the whole structure would collapse. That pattern was printed on the ceiling.
Kat noticed the ceiling first, something she’d likely learned from the Aztec Tomb’s denizens that liked to attack from both the floor and from above. She found the bricks and the urns but had the wrong idea and smashed one of the clay pots rather than examining the contents. The room pulsed red in a clear sign that the puzzle had been broken, and a time penalty incurred. While that might not be obvious to an adventurer new to their dungeons, it was a recurring theme that people seemed to learn pretty fast. Lacey sat back and pulled out a piece of paper to draw while she waited. The urn would reset in 10 minutes, but until then, Kat wouldn’t be able to unlock the door.
Lacey was just ducking her head to her drawing when Kat broke another urn next to the first one. Lacey should have been drawing, but she found herself still watching instead. Kat ran her fingers through the liquids, mixing them a bit and then sniffing the end of her finger. During the down time, Kat tried all sorts of things that gave Lacey good ideas. She tried pouring out half the contents of one urn and trying to mix different liquids together. When that didn’t work, she tried breaking one of the remaining urns with a brick that was the same color as the liquid inside the urn.
The rooms had to allow for muddle-headed fighters with more muscle than brains to keep trying a puzzle until they could figure it out, so the resets were only time sinks instead of whole level failures. This room was one that frustrated Monty, their previous tormentor. Kat was more patient. She hadn’t stopped exploring once the red light had come on. She’d tried stuff, broken more things, and taken chances just to gather information.
When the green light came on (a result of panels that slid over the top of alcoves along the edges of the ceilings that were filled with different colored moss), Kat put her hands up and reexamined the room with only her eyes this time. Lacey tapped her pencil on her chin. This time, Kat was more careful. She took the vase from the wall nook and carefully poured some of the liquid into the clear container on the middle table. Again, Kat sniffed the liquid. It was actually a yellow-colored oil. Tilting her head to the side, Kat poured a bit from another urn and watched the results carefully. This new liquid was blue-colored moonshine, and at first, the two combined the make a green color.
Kat got a bit excited about that and looked around for anything green. Lacey watched Kat shrug and pour some of the next urn into the container; a red-colored water. The final urn contained a brown liquid that was almost sludgy in consistency. Lacey used to think it was funny, but as Kat turned her nose away from the now-combined brown mess in the clear vase, she figured maybe they should replace the brown semi-liquid with something better.
“Are you watching Kat?” Colt asked.
“What?” Lacey jolted from the notes she was jotting down.
“Kat?” Colt pointed at his own screen. “Are you watching her?”
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“Yeah,” Lacey admitted gruffly. “I’m just looking for inspiration. How she solves stuff gives me ideas.”
“Me too,” Colt pursed his lips. “She’d probably be good at all this, right?”
“Probably,” Lacey let herself grump. She knew it was a graceless thing to do, but it was just Colt, so she didn’t mind admitting her foibles with him. “What isn’t she good at?”
“Taking a hint?” he rolled his eyes.
“True, you haven’t been subtle,” Lacey raised her brows at him. “I doubt we’d be as good at her side of things is what bothers me.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Colt looked down at the screen.
“I had, and I do think about it,” Lacey watched as Kat swirled the contents of the vase that would then take a while to calm down enough to show the pattern. “I just feel like we’re sitting ducks down here unless we learn at least some of what she’s doing.”
“She said it was mostly about skills,” Colt reminded Lacey. “We’re building skills down here even if it doesn’t show up as easily as it does for the adventurers.”
“Oooo, puzzle-building increases by 1,” Lacey wiggled her fingers. “That didn’t help us with wolves, and it wouldn’t help us if someone like Monty got through our defenses again. I just feel like a glass cannon down here. We should be able to defend ourselves.”
“I guess,” Colt flicked a pencil in the air, catching it neatly. “We could always play some dexterity games to increase our stats if you really want to.”
“Or I could finally design the treadmill thing,” Lacey pointed out. “We should be focused on these skills that make Kat so good out there.”
“I don’t think you’re looking at this right, though,” Colt tossed his pencil again. “Sure, we could get our dexterity up, but what good would that do us down here? If someone can get through our defenses up there, we’re not going to be able to deter them with pencil tossing!”
“But that’s my point!” Lacey complained.
“Not really,” Colt shook his head. “Think about it. Our best defense is the dungeon itself, not our own stats. And that dungeon is better armor than anything a fighter can buy.”
“But I feel like a glass cannon!” Lacey stubbornly insisted.
“If you strip a thief of their lockpicks, they can’t pick a lock,” Colt wasn’t ready to let her win, which was annoying. “If you take a fighter’s sword, they’re in trouble. Anyone is vulnerable if you strip them of their defenses.”
“What about magic-users?”
“They run out of mana and they’re dead,” Colt pointed the pencil at her. “Everyone has their weaknesses, and you just may have to accept that this is ours. We’re only as strong as our dungeon. We have hundreds of goblins to do our handiwork. We have over a thousand mobs between us and any danger. Add to that, that we are a rare commodity that people seem to want to protect and nurture and if you ask me, we’re on the OP side of this equation.”
“Then why isn’t she in here doing this instead of out there doing that?” Lacey pointed at the screen where Kat had sat back on her butt to study the swirling liquids as they began to settle.
“Maybe this is something she can’t do as well as we can,” Colt suggested the blasphemy.
“You just said you thought she’d be pretty good at this,” Lacey cocked her head to the side with a glare.
“I was asking it,” Colt denied.
There was a clatter and scuffle as Spark was chased out of Colt’s bedroom with what looked like a dirty sock. Ginger came dashing out after the kitten with a fierce scowl on her face.
“Ginger drop Spark in river to help it learn to swim,” Ginger threatened the beast, but came to a quick stop as it dashed behind Lacey’s heels.
“Ginger will not drop Spark in the river,” Colt admonished the huffing goblin.
“Spark give laundry to Ginger!” Ginger insisted with a stomp of her foot.
“Just use your Clean spell,” Lacey suggested, trying not to laugh.
“Ginger run out of mana,” Ginger crossed her arms over her chest and glared at the kitten. “When Ginger get mana back, Ginger is going to cast big Clean spell at Spark and make white!”
“Ginger,” Colt warned.
“Fine,” Ginger stomped back into Colt’s room. “Colt do own laundry. If laundry in basket, fluffball not steal it out from under bed!”
“I don’t think my mom nagged me this much about my laundry,” Colt gaped at the retreating goblin as she slammed his bedroom door. Spark sat beneath Lacey’s chair grooming herself a good foot away from the offensive smell as if she’d had nothing to do with the entire scene. “I swear she gets more terrifyingly wife-like every day. Like scary wife.”
“I, for one, am grateful that there is someone else to complain about your laundry habits,” Lacey admitted carefully, leaning down to use her pencil to pick up the errant sock. Holding it out at arm’s length, Lacey walked it around her desk and over to his. “If only Ginger cared about your bathroom habits, I’d be in heaven.”
“Maybe next time I won’t stick up for your little furball,” Colt huffed, batting the sock off his desk with his own pencil.
“The whole reason Ginger has a pretty new spell is because she bested both Eve and Adam at getting the chest up out of the river,” Lacey watched Colt squirm at the reminder.
“That got us a whole line of new fishing gear,” Colt changed the subject. “Have you looked at them?”
Ginger had uncovered a whole new line of goblin activities with her use of a net to fish the chest up off the riverbed. Everything from fishing poles to crab traps had been unlocked. This fishing expansion had alluded to a section of pirate treasure including pirate ships that were completely useless in their current setting, except as perhaps window-dressing for a new themed maze Colt was working on. They figured that if they could include the theme in the design, they might unlock the whole section.
Once the liquid settled into layers, Kat made quick work of the rest of the puzzle for that room. Lacey wondered if Kat was out there because she couldn’t do what they did or because there was more fun out there than there was in here. Lacey had always thought it would be a dream to make their own escape rooms, but she hadn’t considered that it might take the shine off of the deal to not be able to still do the rooms as participants. She didn’t want to resent Kat’s exploration, but a part of her resented that she couldn’t do some exploring of her own.