Hughe and his group showed up again the next morning like clockwork. Lacey tapped Colt awake to watch and rubbed her own eyes to stay awake until they were done. The adventurers didn’t flinch at the bat excursion this time, but Hughe did swing at a bat again only to get himself a shoulder of guano for his trouble. There were now three rooms of the easy baby beetles, which they’d figured out how to preserve at baby levels by pausing the room’s growth until the adventurers broke the spell by entering the room. Completing each of the baby beetle rooms provided a small chest of 10 copper coins and the key to the door, but only if the adventurers noticed and did the puzzle next to the door rather than picking the level 1 padlock on it.

Hughe’s group didn’t bother for the first two rooms, but the druid ran her fingers along the raised runes on the doorway as she left the second room. As the two fighters stomped the beetles in the third room, the druid walked straight to the door and motioned the mage over next to her. The runes were a copy of the numbers that the system used for one through four. If pressed in order, a panel opened to reveal the small chest.

The druid pressed the runes, but not in the correct sequence.

“They don’t understand the number system any better than we did when we first saw it,” Lacey said, watching as Colt looked around for his breakfast.

“It’s just one, two, three, four,” Colt argued, frowning at not finding anything. “But now we know that the numbering system isn’t the one used outside of the dungeon. I just don’t get why our pedestal was coded out. There’s no way a guy like Hughe would have been able to work the pedestal the way it is.”

“We’ve got at least another week before our password reset timer runs out,” Lacey groused, letting him chew and swallow before asking her question. “Maybe we should have used morse code instead of the number system.”

“We can change it for next time,” Colt waved away her concern and looked over her shoulder to watch the druid.

“We should have used three different codes,” Lacey muttered, ticking them off on her fingers. “Morse code, roman numerals, and the pedestal code.”

“Next time,” Colt laid a hand on her shoulder and patted gently, not that Lacey noticed. She was in the zone.

“She isn’t even trying,” Lacey complained, waving her hand over the druid in disgust.

“Lace,” Colt said softly. “She’s not you.”

“You can say that again,” Lacey went back to muttering.

The druid still didn’t get the cipher before the thief picked the lock on the door and the group abandoned the room without the treasure, much to Lacey’s frustration. As the group entered the fourth room, they got more challenging beetles. It wasn’t a big challenge, but it was more than stomping bugs. Lacey could only think that it was a good thing beetles procreated so quickly.

“Nobody is you,” Colt chuckled. “You should get some sleep.”

“Not until I see how it plays out,” Lacey shook her head.

The rooms that had been included in the successful first run had been given a few bonus features. First, the rooms could be copied and pasted, which was how they’d quickly duplicated the grinding rooms. More importantly, the room could be kept in a stasis so that once it was set, they could freeze the rooms until the adventurers ventured into them. This allowed them to keep the beetles at a set level instead of just filling the room with beetles and hoping that enough leveled up to provide the right challenge level.

The problem was that they had slightly changed the rooms making it so that they had to manually refill them this round. Lacey was hoping they could set the rooms after this incursion, but was only now realizing that she would need to tweak them again. It would just be little tweaks, but adding the panels had been enough to make it so they couldn’t set the rooms this time around. Maybe she’d keep one panel with the pedestal numbering system just to be able to keep a room. As it was, she was cycling rooms half the night so that as soon as the beetles started to fight, the room became one of the second level grinding rooms. She had several rooms that were probably too high for this group with beetles that were still growing past level 6. The problem with those rooms was that the beetle life cycle wasn’t long enough to keep that growth coming.

They’d lost a level 8 beetle to old age the previous night. Realizing she had too many rooms of beetles that would age out, she put a few of the beetle rooms on the lower levels for the goblin squad to tackle. That had worked for the level 2-3 and 3-4 rooms, but anything more than that caused too many casualties for it to be cost effective. At least Adam and Eve’s elite squads knew to try to puzzles, but the goblins really weren’t smart enough to simulate adventurers. Then again, the goblins had figured out the first few panels when Lacey had put little things like yeast or flour in the treasure chests. Goblins were motivated by different things than adventurers.

“You’re just waiting to see if they manage better on the puzzles this time around,” Colt’s eyes were also glued to the screen on the pedestal.

“They have two more grinding rooms of level 2 and 3 beetles before they get there,” Lacey grumbled impatiently.

Now that the druid was focused on helping her party battle the beetles, she gave up on the puzzles. Lacey knew that eventually they’d figure out one of the panels and then know that the panels hid treasure, but until then, they were bypassing them altogether. She couldn’t have walked through a room of puzzles without having to figure them out, but Colt was right, that was just her obsession.

“You didn’t order me breakfast?” Colt asked, and she could tell that he was trying not to be sulky.

“Sorry,” Lacey hid a secretive smile. “Though there might be something in your small chest.”

“I knew you wouldn’t forget me,” Colt was smiling until he picked up his chest and found it locked. “Lace?”

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“If it’s worth it, you’ll try harder,” Lacey said, pulling her lockpicks out of her back pocket and waving them at Colt. The tiny lock was only a level 1, but Colt had resisted learning the skill for years.

“Dirty pool, Lace,” Colt growled, but he sniffed the chest. “Is that? Do I smell bacon?”

“Maybe,” Lacey raised a brow at him.

“So not fair,” Colt complained, but he took the picks from her hand and sat to work on the chest.

“I just found that the chest keeps the food warm is all,” Lacey’s eyes glittered with smugness.

“Let me know when they get to the puzzle room.” Colt bit his lip as he applied the tension tool and chose a double rake as Lacey shook her head.

“I won’t let you miss anything,” Lacey reassured him.

The party was resting between rooms, and while the druid had to have her eyes closed as she regained mana through meditation, the second fighter took the time to examine the panel on the wall. They’d upped the difficulty of the puzzle for the higher-level room. It was a five-button combination instead of the four-button one in the previous rooms. Once the rogue had picked the lock to the next room, he joined the fighter. They ignored Hughe, who looked to be waving his hand at the panel like he couldn’t be bothered.

“What better thing do you have to do, Hughe?” Lacey was back to muttering.

“What?” Colt was distracted from the lockpicking.

“Hughe is just being his normal jerky self,” Lacey commented, waving Colt back to his own puzzle.

The rogue was nimble and impatient enough to just start punching in random combinations. Lacey didn’t blame him. The numbering system without some key code somewhere was almost impossible to decipher. She and Colt had only figured out the basic numbers from the system telling them some numbers when they tapped on them. The first 5 numbers were easy because goblin stats didn’t go over 5, so they had the direct translation for 1-5. They’d gotten 6-9 from the health points mostly. That was why Lacey had put a translation for the first 9 numbers in the rooms, not that anyone had looked…up.

Colt had painstakingly etched a children’s workbook page on the ceiling that none of the party had looked up to find. If one laid on their back, there were the system numbers on one side of the “page” and several different kinds of clues on the other side. It was like a child’s workbook in that lines were etched so that they linked the number to the corresponding answer. Lacey had made it super easy. They still had to look up to find it. Instead, they were inputting random combinations like that ever worked. Lacey felt a little better about having to unlock two drawers to get the clue to look up. No matter how many times you were warned about dark mantles hanging out on the ceiling, a person didn’t tend to look at the ceiling of a room unless they passed out.

“They’re getting to the puzzle room,” Lacey warned Colt, who was still trying to break open the tiny lock. He just wasn’t putting consistent enough pressure on the tension bar, but he wouldn’t appreciate her helping, so she kept it to herself.

“But bacon,” Colt whimpered.

“Fine,” Lacey said and pulled the key out of her back pocket so he could focus on the puzzle room.

“Not this again,” Lacey mimicked Hughe’s stupid voice as he moved his lips on the screen and threw up his hands.

“But it’s the same puzzles,” Colt pitched his voice high for the druid, who was shrugging and pointing at the puzzle she’d solved first last time.

“If I was that rogue, I’d be challenging the druid to a race,” Lacey tapped the screen.

“Puzzle level 10, unsolved,” the system told them.

“Really?” Lacey complained. “It’s just a gif.”

“Lacey, it’s a gif of a donkey’s butt where you have to punch the asshole to get the prize,” Colt chided her dismissal of the puzzle’s depth.

“It’s pin the tail on the donkey,” Lacey denied the lewdness that he was suggesting. “And they could pick up the donkey’s tail and use it to punch the hole instead of using their hand. It’s not obscene. It’s a childhood party game.”

“The donkey tail is a whisk broom,” Colt added, his brows raised halfway up his forehead. “And you hid it under the pile of discarded pots in the corner.”

“It sort of looks like a donkey tail,” Lacey insisted, her nose twitching.

“My whisk broom,” Ginger said under her breath from her corner of the room, where she was using a big broom to scoop floor dust into a small tray she used as a dustpan.

The complaint struck Lacey not because it was untrue, but because she’d never heard the small goblin girl complain about anything. “I’ll get you another one,” Lacey cocked her head to the side at the little goblin, who just frowned back.

“I liked that one,” Ginger sulked. “I’d cut it to be angled just right.”

“Sorry,” Lacey frowned at Ginger. “I’ll bring it back and use something else.”

“What is a donkey anyway?” Ginger asked.

“It’s like a horse,” Colt tried to explain, but Ginger still looked confused.

Lacey tried to ignore them, but the party had just redone the puzzles the druid had gotten before and had the thief start picking the last two locks. “I’ll draw one for you later, but right now I want to see if they can get the other two puzzles,” Lacey interrupted Colt trying to explain what a horse was.

“Fine,” Ginger sniffed, and Lacey thought the little goblin was picking up some bad habits from the way Colt and Lacey talked to each other. Then again, why shouldn’t she? The goblins were like children in how they picked up crafts or chores they were assigned. Why wouldn’t they pick up some of their makers’ mannerisms?

Back in the puzzle room, Lacey could see that the mage had backed away from the wall of cups to go to the last puzzle, which was a ball maze, where one had to drop a set of balls into numbered holes. Lacey had used regular numbers for it, but the three balls had to be put into hole one, then hole two, then hole three in that order. The maze itself was made of wood and had a “start here” spot where the ball should have been placed. If a person touched the ball in any other place on the maze, the maze reset.

Anyone who did escape rooms would have understood all that, but the adventurers kept trying things that broke the rules and making the maze start over. The mage was naturally impatient and kept trying to drop the balls directly into the holes in different combinations. Lacey hadn’t had a plastic sheet to put over the top of the maze, only the magic that would reset the maze if a rule was broken. She had to admit that the idea was probably too sophisticated for the venue.

“They just don’t get that one,” Colt tapped on the screen.

“Puzzle, maze, level 2,” the system told them.

“It might be a low level, but they aren’t even using it right,” Lacey complained. “They haven’t even figured out that the maze moves or that they can use the handles to tilt the maze and move the balls from the starting spot.”

“We’ll think of something else,” Colt took a bite of the newest version of the breakfast burrito that included bacon instead of sausage.

“Puzzle, punch-out, level 4,” the system said, when Lacey hit the cups puzzle with the donkey. She did think it might be a little too pixelated of a graphic to be readily apparent, but if one stepped back far enough, it seemed pretty clear to her. Then again, the monitor showed it from a distance they didn’t really have in the room. There were definitely ways to make her puzzles better. It was admittedly easier for a general thief to pick the locks than figure things out just like it was a lot quicker to get a hint than work the room in a regular escape room.

“Then again, if they remember the puzzles every time, this isn’t going to work,” Colt broke into Lacey’s determined mindset. “They just breezed through the ones from before.”

“We’ll have to figure out how to change it up,” Lacey admitted. “We don’t need the preservation on this room anyway since there aren’t beetles that we’re trying to keep at a consistent level.”

“The graphic can change,” Colt suggested. “That will make it so that they have to guess which ones to punch out each time.”

“I’m not changing the pin the tail on the donkey graphic until Hughe sticks his hand in a few cups of glowing bat guano first,” Lacey insisted, waving her finger in Colt’s face where he was rolling his eyes.