“You’re not even going to allow me to make a case for myself?” Dom glowered at Kat.
“I hate to break this up,” Lacey spoke before Kat got a full breath for a reply. “But we don’t have much time before we have to be back in the dungeon. Our coupons expire in a few minutes.”
“Then we can walk, and I can make my case on the way back to the entrance,” Dom reasoned.
“I’m afraid that I can’t allow that either,” Bernard held a hand out to stop Dom. “This area is for guild members only.”
“She’s not in your guild,” Dom protested again.
“She has special envoy status,” Bernard seemed reluctant to refuse the guy, but he did his duty.
“We really have to go,” Lacey tapped the back of her wrist as if there was an imaginary ticking watch.
“You can revisit this tomorrow when the dungeon masters have some time to meet again,” Bernard suggested.
“We don’t need to revisit anything,” Colt found his voice. “Our answer is no.”
Dom looked baffled at the refusal. “Do both of you feel that way?”
“Absolutely,” Lacey assured him, reaching down to pick up Spark.
“Why?” he asked, even as they turned to go.
“We don’t trust you to follow the rules,” Colt turned back to say. Lacey didn’t bother. Lacey wasn’t sure she hated the guy, but she would back Colt up no matter what. Dom probably wasn’t the bad guy, but he wasn’t to be trusted. He didn’t have their best interests in mind.
“What he said,” Lacey called back over her shoulder.
The gate guards closed ranks behind them, blocking Dom from their view, not that they turned around. Lacey cast a sideways glance at Colt. His chin was set. Lacey pressed her lips together and hustled to keep pace with his longer stride.
“That was great,” Kat dashed to catch up to them, Bernard still back with the guards, probably to keep an eye on Dom.
“You could have warned me,” Colt didn’t break stride, but his tone wiped the grin from Kat’s face.
“Okay,” Kat stepped in front of Colt to stop his forward progress. “I could have handled that better. I see that.”
“You knew it was your dad who had sneaked down into our control room,” Colt stepped around her, then stopped. “And you let us think you were in trouble when you disappeared.”
“Okay,” Kat rocked back on her heels. “I wasn’t thinking all that well. He just gets to me! You have to understand that, right?”
“I can understand and still be mad,” Colt turned back toward the dungeon. It took Kat a moment to follow again.
“You’re mad?” Kat called, then stopped when he turned back to face her.
Colt opened his mouth, then snapped it shut and scooted around a passing adventurer.
“At him or me?” Kat asked once she’d caught up to him again.
Colt kept walking, Lacey at his side. Lacey cast a quick glance behind them to see Kat standing flatfooted in the middle of camp. Lacey winced at the look on her face. She didn’t think even Colt knew who he was angry with. Had he noticed that Kat hadn’t continued to follow them? Lacey looked at him again, and understood that yes, he knew Kat had stopped. There was a glint of hurt behind his anger.
It didn’t happen often, but Colt did have a temper. It wasn’t the type of temper where he’d hurt anybody. Sure, he could put a fist through a wall and barely feel it, but he didn’t. Lacey followed him into the dungeon with barely a minute left on their timers.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he declared on the other side of the barrier. “Much as I’d like to sit and sulk, we have a dungeon to run that requires workaholic hours just to keep up with the quests we have stacked up against us.”
“No problem,” Lacey said. With all the times he’d talked Lacey down off the edge of anger or sadness or hurt, she didn’t often need to do the same for him.
It wasn’t that she didn’t know what to do. He just didn’t need the comedic cajoling out of a funk that Lacey did. Colt needed space and time to be able to think straight again. He hated the feeling of mindlessness that anger instilled in him. He’d be fine once he could think it through.
He brought the temporary pedestal up in the modified bat cave and ordered an elevator back to the control room. Without a word, he dismissed that pedestal by calling one up in the elevator room. He used that pedestal to move them both to the control room.
“Colt and Lacey back!” Ginger enthused, jumping up from Colt’s desk to greet them.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
“Not now, Ginger,” Colt said in a polite tone that might as well have been a slap to anyone who knew him.
“He just means that we need to work, Ginger,” Lacey explained quickly, shooing the goblin to Ginger’s desk.
Ginger wisely sat at her desk without comment, but she watched Colt with a suspicious gaze as he stood and scrolled through some options on the main pedestal. Lacey let Spark down and fished a treat out of a baggie on her own desk. Colt ordered up spicy chicken wings on the pedestal and cracked open a beer from their cooler.
“You want something?” he offered, his voice flat. Lacey tossed the treat to Spark.
“I’ve got it,” she replied rather than explain an order. Instead, she ordered it from her desk. It appeared over the main pedestal and Colt tossed it to Lacey with unerring accuracy.
“I’ve been thinking about those Trugs you made up before lunch,” Colt changed the subject, but Lacey was ready for it. Trugs were a mix of a troll and a bug, specifically a roach.
“What about them?”
Colt didn’t crack a smile or make a joke like he normally would. That was okay. Colt didn’t need to be happy all the time to be Lacey’s best friend. He didn’t even have to be polite. After all, most of the time, he couldn’t even put the toilet seat back down after using the bathroom and she put up with that. Businesslike Colt wasn’t going to break her heart. Friends could be like that.
“Trolls normally regenerate, so these probably should too, don’t you think?” he sucked a gob of spicy sauce off his thumb and took a swig of beer to wash down the sting. Lacey didn’t bother to reply.
She just waited for him to continue, taking a bite of her own overstuffed burrito as they ignored the dungeon turning red. It wasn’t like they had to watch the adventurers every time they ran through the dungeon. Lacey resisted the urge to pull up a screen that could show her if Kat actually did a run this time. There was time for that later.
“I’ve got an idea for a level that will allow that feature to shine, but I need to know how the regeneration will work,” Colt continued, prompting her to fill in the blanks.
“I haven’t dumped that drawing in the system yet, so we can specify a few things in the notes,” she got up from her desk to grab one of her ever-full diet sodas. “What did you have in mind?”
“If we can get them to regenerate fast enough, we can have a very small level that only looks easy,” he explained. “We can repurpose some goblin residential caves, the old primitive ones. By the time the crawlers get to the end of the caves, the Trugs in the first cave will have regenerated.”
They worked on the level together and she was glad because Lacey had been running low on ideas for new monsters. The thought of drawing a giraffe-squirrel had her wanting to pull her hair out. She wouldn’t have believed it just a month before, but the constant pressure to produce quick, new monsters was wearing on her creativity.
They modified the Trugs so that they would not only regenerate, but that the regeneration would occur after the monster’s body part had burrowed itself into the ground. They were hoping for a one-hour or less regeneration time. If they could get that, then the adventurers were in for a rather nasty shock when they walked back out of the level and found even stronger mobs just rising from shallow graves behind them.
Dark Lacey had dealt with the goblin moonshine fiasco, but Dark Colt was another type of scary. The Trug limbs, once severed from the main body, would grow tiny fingers that would dig down into the soft earth of the level’s floor. Once underground, the limb would regenerate a full body. The adventurers might think that the level was clear, but if even one limb was regenerating, they couldn’t get the dungeon’s cleared bonus. The Trugs were vulnerable to fire and acid, like any undead or insect, but they were also ruthless enough to throw themselves at targets so that limbs would be severed and increase their numbers. Even if they didn’t regenerate in time to attack the same group, this quick reproduction would increase the number of Trugs between incursions as well.
“What about making some version of the weeping angels?” Colt suggested, when Lacey admitted she was running out of inspiration for the last five custom monsters on their quest. The last monster she’d made was one she called a Sweeper because it cleaned the bottom of the water areas. Ginger didn’t clean down there because her cleaning spell killed off huge swathes of the fish, so Lacey had made another maintenance mob instead of a new monster.
“We already nearly destroyed the world with replicators, Colt,” Lacey gave him a look. “They already destroyed Stargate, and I should have known better. I’m not compounding that with the scariest thing from Dr. Who.”
“I would argue that the Silence was scarier,” he countered, screwing the cap back on his beer bottle and pushing it away from him.
“Who?”
“Exactly,” he deadpanned, still not having cracked a smile since they’d returned from topside.
“Colt,” she started, but he held up a hand.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he replied. It was a testament to years of friendship that those few words were all either of them needed to say before going back to work. “Let’s hit up some DnD monsters.”
“I can’t replicate a monster that’s already been created somewhere or its just wasted time,” she pointed out.
“So, we combine some of the DnD stuff like you have with the earth animals,” he shrugged.
“Like what?”
“Like a wight and a griffon,” he suggested.
“An undead version of a bird-headed lion?” Lacey shook her head slowly with a whistle. Dark Colt was his own form of cruel. Then again, they needed more mobs like the gossowaries, so she wasn’t complaining. She got a two-headed owlbear with acid breath on one head and fire breathing on the other. It regenerated like a hydra too. They made it the final mob in an Egyptian-themed dungeon where the zombies had crocodile heads.
They didn’t spend hours detailing each idea. Instead, they built up a base of ideas to work from. Colt would be working on the maze and level design for the Egyptian level. Lacey would eventually work up more than a basic pencil sketch of the monsters that Dark Colt was dreaming up.
Her gaze flicked to her screen only when he wasn’t looking. Kat had entered the dungeon late, but she was working through an arena level with her own version of vicious efficiency. It said something to Lacey that Kat hadn’t just curled up in a ball like some fluff-girl. There was hope.
Lacey was pretty sure that there was a lot more than a casual date on the line between Kat and Colt. From how she’d treated her dad, Kat had shown that she too had a temper and that she could hold a grudge. Whatever bad blood existed between Kat and her father, Lacey sympathized, but she was Colt’s best friend first. There was nothing that would change that.
The problem lay in the fact that Colt had set his sights on a person who could crush their dreams with a petulant stomp of her foot. Kat didn’t strike Lacey as the petulant type, at least not with serious stuff, but women had done worse for less cause. Lacey didn’t even think about whether Colt was justified in his feelings. She just supported him in them. Colt had enough pressure on his mind without Lacey adding facts in there; facts like how idiotic it was to chase a girl with the power to crush their dreams.
Lacey flicked her screens off of Kat. It didn’t matter. Lacey was firmly on Colt’s side, no matter what. That was just the reality of things.