“What the hell, Colt?” Lacey hissed out, trying not to wake Ginger. “You knew about Tiers?”
“Yeah,” he answered, lowering his voice as he noticed Lacey’s pointed glance at where Ginger was still snort-snoring on the bunk bed. “I was the one doing all the research on that stuff, so of course I knew about Tiers, but when we cleared the tutorial, we got all those quests in our dmail and the rewards for the quests were more personalized than the goal rewards.”
“I’m not complaining about the Back-40 quest, but it might have been nice to know that we had a path to magic for the dungeon,” Lacey grumped, but she wasn’t too upset. Colt had been the one to do all the research into the dungeon system while she’d been busy scribbling.
“The quests were working, and I kept meaning to catch you up on that stuff, but we were distracted a lot,” Colt blew out a breath. “Besides, new information filters out slowly. If you found something about magic stuff, that was probably masked off when I was doing research on it.”
“That makes sense,” Lacey let him off the hook. “I guess.” Mostly off the hook.
“It was a crap shoot, but the quests have timers and bigger, more personalized rewards,” Colt dragged his chair over to her desk and sat next to her to scroll through a few screens. “If you were to turn off quests now, we’d lose out on the rewards just when we were about to complete them. Once we complete these, we’ll be able to accept most of the rest of the quests. Even if they do have tight time limits, we’re close enough to completing them that it should be easy.”
Lacey looked over the screens he flipped through, but it was like reading tax return instructions. That and he was scrolling too fast for her to get more than half a sentence at a time.
“Oh, hey,” Colt paused on a screen. “We didn’t have access to this before. The system blocks out most of the spoilers for future options, but once you get kind of close to it, the system opens up some sneak peeks.”
“Is that a list of spells?” Lacey perked up.
“Yeah,” Colt answered with the obvious, his eyes skimming over the descriptions. “Invulnerability?”
“Stop scrolling so fast,” Lacey complained, batting at him to back away from her monitor. “Go look at it on your own screens!”
Tier III Spells List (sample preview):
Summon Monster: Use mana to summon a creature from your dungeon’s library (mana cost dependent on monster level).
Summon a Component: Use mana to summon components from as small as a cog for a trap to as large as a whole level from your template library (mana cost dependent on component complexity).
Name a Monster: Use mana to change a summoned monster into a dungeon denizen (dungeon denizens can be resurrected with a resurrection spell).
Resurrect Dungeon Denizen: Use mana to bring a fallen dungeon denizen back to life (mana cost dependent on level of denizen).
Time Warp: Use mana to cause a small portion of your dungeon residential areas to speed up so that they experience time more quickly. Such time warps can greatly decrease the time needed to level up, breed, and age resident populations (mana cost dependent on number of monsters effected by warp).
Limited Personal Invulnerability: Become invulnerable to all magical and non-magical attacks. Time of invulnerability is limited by current number of unique dungeon levels. Spell can only be cast from the control room of the dungeon or within a few feet of the dungeon entrance.
Summon Teleportation Pad: Use mana to create a teleportation portal that can be programmed to allow only certain types of creatures to pass. Two pads are necessary for transport.
There were more, but they were blotted out. The teleportation spell is what had led her to the Tier explanations. Some of the other spells were Magic Contract Creation, and a bunch of imbuing options that didn’t make sense, especially when their descriptions were redacted like they were in a spy movie.
“How does it always seem to show us just what we want next?” Lacey tapped her screen.
“I’m thinking it's monitoring us and using our needs to incentivize the stuff it reveals of what’s coming,” Colt shook his head. “And there are a lot of spells, but nothing that says how we’d earn them or how many we could choose.”
“Maybe opening the third tier is what would allow us to use the spell scrolls that Ginger uses,” Lacey pondered the idea out loud.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Colt looked up. “Pedestal, can you post a chart that shows our progress on the goals for Tier III?”
The system projected a small box onto the wall.
Tier III Requirements: 20/20 Entrances, 10/50 Unique Dungeon Levels, 35/40 Dungeon Progress Level, 49/100 Monster Types, 100/100 Dungeon Incursions Repelled, 5,000/5,000 Dungeon Denizens, and 20/20 Unique Monster Types.
“We only need another 5 levels and 40 more floors of the dungeon,” Colt gave a low whistle, causing Ginger to stir slightly. “That and another 51 monster types.”
“Only?” Lacey felt like it was asking a lot.
“But the monster types don’t have to be unique,” Colt pointed out. “It’s not just counting our weird ones, but also the horse and chicken and stuff. We can do normal mobs too.”
“Colt,” Lacey glared at him, not that he’d made the rules. “We need 40 more floors! That one’s not counting the repeated floors. It wants new stuff.”
“Yeah, but think about it,” Colt went on. “We were already planning distinct versions of the Gauntlet for each of the main classes and it’s counting the Zoo twice. I think that’s because of the modularity of it. We changed out whole sections to make the duplicate levels, so it counts each one as unique.”
Lacey grumbled under her breath, but she was encouraged that they’d far surpassed some of the requirements.
“We’ll focus on floors while the quest finishes for the Back-40,” Colt suggested. “We’ll brainstorm. It’ll be fun.”
“In the morning,” Lacey pushed back from her desk. “I’m beat.”
“Don’t you want to complete the Summoning Quest?” Colt said in a teasing tone.
“You haven’t finished it yet?” Lacey’s eyes got wide. “We didn’t have much time!”
“Relax,” Colt stood, his chair scraping behind him. “I saved one just so that we’d get the chest together!”
“Which one?” Lacey looked at him suspiciously. There were 23 minutes left on the clock for the quest.
“Just a little Ghoffin,” his voice lilted tauntingly on the words. A Ghoffin was a cross between a ghost and a griffon and they’d turned out worse than Lacey had imagined. It was the main reason she didn’t want Colt drawing any more minions.
“I wish you’d never drawn that thing,” Lacey backed away. “And if Ginger finds one of those things in our rooms, she’ll kill you. She might be able to do it now, too.”
Colt wiggled his fingers at her and tapped his screen to do the summoning. He did not summon a Ghoffin. He summoned a Crocorat. They’d turned out so much smaller than Lacey had intended, especially at level one as this one was. It was closer in size to a rat than a crocodile. The one Colt had summoned into his hand gave a large yawn that was more cute than Lacey wanted to admit.
“Masters of the Hoard Quest Complete!” the pedestal announced with a bit of fanfare.
“That was not supposed to be cute,” Lacey almost cooed at the very small crocodile that could both twitch its whiskers and snap off a finger with its toothy snout. The tail was long and ratlike except for the barbs on it.
“Don’t worry,” Colt pet the tiny monster. “This is just a baby, but the bigger ones are about the length of the bunk bed.”
A treasure chest materialized into the middle of their dining table.
“I’m thinking of keeping this guy as a pet,” Colt pretended to consider the idea seriously. At least Lacey hoped he was pretending.
“Spark will eat him,” Lacey warned Colt, who flinched back in mock horror, covering what could have been where the monster’s ears would be.
“Perish the thought,” he scolded at Lacey. She just chuckled at his antics. They both made their way to the chest.
“Wait, does this mean we have access to monster upgrades now?” Lacey turned back to her desk.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Colt grabbed her elbow and steered her to the chest. “The quest is done, the day is done, and you and I have appointments with our beds.”
“You were going to spend another hour looting the chest anyway,” Lacey looked longingly at her desk, even though she wanted to go to bed as badly as he did.
“Not an hour, but we didn’t get a chance to celebrate the other chest,” he complained. “I’m hoping for a pizza or two.”
“Let’s hope the system is listening,” Lacey let herself be pulled to the chest.
“Or hot dogs,” Colt’s stomach growled in agreement. “Dirt Dogs, the American version with the potato chips sprinkled on top.”
“That’s gross, Colt,” Lacey lifted the lid. “The last time you had one of those, you had breath that could be used as a poison cloud down here.”
“We have toothpaste and almost 12 hours for it to wear off before I see Kat again,” Colt wiggled his eyebrows at her.
“12 hours to ferment, you mean,” Lacey shook her finger at him.
The chest held a few stacks of notebooks, lined, grid, and blank pages each in neat rows. It reflected what Lacey and Colt used the most. It was the bag of burgers that Colt snatched up like a kid at Christmas. He stuck his nose into the bag and held it there for a good long sniff.
“Is that White Castle?” Lacey’s lip curled up.
“Yes….” Colt answered in a long, delighted sigh. “Want some?”
“No,” Lacey wasn’t hungry anyway. Instead, she popped the top up on a shoebox that held a pair of high-end sneakers that would have broken the bank in their old life. A bag of dum dum suckers slid off the top as she tilted it.
“There’s another bag,” he said, with a crinkle of a brown paper bag. “Looks like French fries and maybe a chocolate shake.”
“Don’t tease me,” Lacey dropped the lid back on Colt’s new sneakers and grabbed the brown bag like a starving, rabid dog. So much for not being hungry. “Those shoes are yours, for sure.”
“No way,” he stuffed a whole mini-burger in his mouth and wiped his hands on his jeans before ripping off the top of the box. “Oh, those are pretty.”
“They are neon,” Lacey scoffed, flicking the lid of her milkshake off the carboard cup. With a contented sigh, she dipped a warm, salty, crunchy fry deep into the frosty chocolate and put it in her mouth.
“And you called me gross?” Colt pointedly did not watch Lacey take a huge bite of her dinner. He popped the top off of another shoebox to reveal a pair of sneakers her size. They, at least, had the decency to be a solid black and not the blindingly neon color of Colt’s shoes.
An hour later, both Colt and Lacey were adding their own sleep sounds to the ambience of the control room. The trail of wrappers that led to each of their beds said more for their tiredness and less of their disregard for Ginger’s inevitable scolding looks. At the bottom of the stack of notepads had been two paperbacks. The authors were ones that both Colt and Lacey liked, but Lacey hadn’t even gotten to the second chapter before she’d fallen asleep. The book dropped from her hand to the floor, not even Spark stirring from the light thump it made.