Waking up to a kitten batting at her hair was a game changer, especially when that kitten had static electricity going for her. Lacey snagged the little ball of playfulness and shoved her under the covers to snuggle. That resulted in a few snags of claws followed by a purr louder than anything that small should be able to make. The whole effort barely granted Lacey another 2 minutes of half-sleep before Spark was wriggling out from under the covers to chase a toy made by Satan himself, as it had a bell in it, a bell that rang and rang like a freaking alarm clock.
“I’m awake,” Lacey groaned and rolled over, flinging the covers off to pad into the bathroom that she shared with Colt, who had left the toilet seat up again. So much for Mr. Wonderful still being on his game. Spark bounding in after Lacey made putting the seat down less annoying. Looking at her static-infused hair in the mirror woke Lacey up faster than coffee.
“What the?” Colt goggled at Lacey’s hair. Lacey couldn’t blame him for the hair comment, but she sent him a glare in the mirror for having barged into the bathroom. “I didn’t even know your hair was that long.”
“Rude,” Lacey grunted, pushing him back out the door he should have knocked on before entering. The length of her hair stood straight up on the top of her head making her temporarily slightly taller than Colt. “Toilet seat!”
“Sorry,” he shrugged and pushed the hairbrush closer to her. “Did you fall in?”
“No,” she snatched the hairbrush and flinched as she brought it close to the staticky mess that was her hair.
“Then what are you complaining about?” he groused, making a face at her in the mirror.
“I’m telling your mother,” Lacey moved over so that he could use a toothbrush quicker. They worked far too closely together for her to become an excuse for him not to have a chance to brush his teeth.
“Dirty pool,” he pointed the toothbrush at her before piling on half a tube of toothpaste.
“You’re just lucky I was done before you barged in here,” Lacey took the hairbrush to her hair with a wince and a tug.
“I heard you flush,” he responded through a blizzard of mint foam.
Lacey rolled her eyes and headed back to her room to get dressed in real clothes.
“OWW!” Came from the bathroom with a clatter and blur of fur that skidded under Lacey’s bed.
Lacey pressed her lips together and hid her head in her closet, ostensibly looking for clothes. She took her time, ignoring the slap of bare feet on the stone flooring. Colt vaulted over the bed only to find that Spark had reversed direction under the bed.
“When did your cat start throwing off lightning bolts?” Colt demanded from the other side of the bed.
“You think I got this from sleeping on satin sheets?” Lacey pointed at her hair and raised her eyebrows at her partner. “But Colt, this is nothing compared to what sharing a room with a displacer beast is going to be like.”
That made his face pale, and he rocked back on his heels, flatfooted.
“Especially if that cat doesn’t like you,” Lacey took her clothes back into the bathroom, her kitten hot on her heels now that Colt wasn’t about to chase anything. Lacey locked both bathroom doors and took a wonderful shower, hoping shampoo and conditioner would help with her hair.
“The trap mechanism for the entrance is done,” Lacey handed the paper to Colt. “We sit two goblins at the entrance, and they flip this switch here if people give them trouble. The portcullis will open and flood the room with the menagerie overflow.”
“You think maybe we should have a backup switch?” Colt suggested, careful not to wrinkle the page.
“I was thinking that the failsafe would be that if the goblins don’t open the main doors themselves, the menagerie trap would go off,” Lacey pointed at the link to the door mechanism.
“Nice,” Colt nodded. “What’s this part?”
“That’s the flood controls,” Lacey grinned at Colt. “If the menagerie doesn’t get them, the Grand Hall seals at both ends and floods using the water from the wells. It all has to be manually reset upon party wipe, but the flood saves the menagerie.”
“What? No lighting them on fire this time?” Colt teased her.
“I saved that for the Gauntlet,” Lacey shrugged. “I’ve got the fire lizards manning a series of traps set into the pillars in a cascading series of elemental attacks that compliment each other.”
“And all this is scalable?” Colt raised his eyebrows with a frown.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
“Once I get all the mechanisms to work together, it’ll have to be scalable by monster level and trap lethality,” Lacey rubbed the back of her neck. “I’ve needed most of this week just to get the one level to work together and it isn’t seamless yet, which bothers me. We have to train the goblins, and I wanted to specialize more of the monsters.”
“Have you thought of making it modular?” Colt dropped the plans on the main pedestal.
“It’s already a lot,” Lacey huffed out.
“It might make it less work in the long run,” Colt laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Unless you want the dungeon closed an extra week, I don’t see how to work that into these plans,” Lacey complained, waving a hand at the wall map they’d added.
“Let me worry about that, then,” Colt put his hands on his hips and stared at the map. “I’ve been staring at it for hours at a time and I think I can see how to switch out the Gauntlet and the Grand Hall, not to mention the bats and ants. They can be modular.”
“The wells support the flooding mechanism, though,” Lacey tapped the wells on either side of the main hall.
“That’s why I need to do some work on it too,” Colt assured her, turning her by the shoulders toward her desk. “I’m on training the goblins in the new roles and I can do this too.”
“But,” Lacey made a token protest.
“I’ll run any modifications through you,” Colt smiled his promise, turning on the charm.
“As long as you watch how you maneuver the mechanisms,” Lacey pointed a stern finger, immune to the charm. “There’s a symmetry to the bats being by the locked hobbit holes.”
“I know that,” Colt flicked her pointing finger out of his face. “I’m your partner, not some goblin. I also know that the whole section from chest 3 to the U-turn and the wide curve are used to almost automatically reset the bats for another run, but that whole swoop of the dungeon could be traded out with the Ant Farm or Water Run with some minor modifications.”
“Minor?” she took her finger back and tried to see what he meant.
“Like a tunnel here, and a one-way door there,” Colt pointed at the spots on the map and she could see what he meant. “And if the Gauntlet was at the beginning, it could use the Water Run for flooding and the flooding would include some pets that could survive the flood.”
“Oh, nice,” Lacey nodded. “That makes a lot of sense. And it would free me up to make up modules instead of whole levels.”
“I’ll work on the basic framing system,” Colt rubbed his hands together. “But I’m going to need you to train the goblins on the trap mechanism corridors. I’m not fast enough to stop them from misaligning some of them to the point that they end up shooting themselves.”
Lacey laughed. They’d decided to give a few special goblins some Georges, but they had to graduate from trap maintenance and have good dexterity. Most of them flunked the class. The goblins just weren’t suited to mechanical things, and it was tough to give up their limited supply of the unnerfed Georges. Their original Georges could be slapped onto a wall of the dungeon and bypass up to 4 feet of solid stone. The nerfed versions could bypass walls, but only under 6 inches thick and a strong enough fighter could break down the wall with a little determination. To be fair, the new Georges also passed through average doors, the wrong way through one-way doors, and even secret doors if one knew where to put them. Lacey wouldn’t have minded handing those out, but she didn’t have a way to keep adventurers from looting them from the bodies of the dead. Georges, even nerfed ones, would ruin the flow of her dungeon.
“I thought you were going to let Ginger try teaching some classes,” Lacey sat at her desk and picked up a pencil, her mind more on a randomizing mechanism that could automatically remodulate the dungeon than lessons for goblins.
“Ginger,” Colt whispered, looking around for the little goblin girl. Once he was sure that she wasn’t in the room, he continued, “She hasn’t got the patience, to be honest.”
“And I do?” Lacey frowned at her cup of colored pencils. There seemed to be quite a few missing.
“No, but,” Colt gave a wince as he noticed Spark stalking pencils under Lacey’s desk.
“Just kidding,” Lacey waved at him, looking under her desk to find a pesky kitten playing with half her favorite colors. “I’ll do the classes, but don’t blame me if a few more goblins make the no-respawn list.”
“I can reassign them to the warrior team,” Colt took the long way around Lacey’s desk to sit at his own. The cat toys that had come with the drawing were of no interest to Spark, who preferred Lacey’s favorite things, including Colt.
“The problem is that goblins aren’t suited to mechanisms,” Lacey complained, using her desk’s pedestal screen to order another cheap pack of colored pencils.
“You think we could design a humanoid species?” Colt suggested, scooting around pads of paper on his desk.
“Like elves or gnomes?” Lacey mused, her imagination running wild.
“It almost feels a little sacrilegious,” Colt squirmed. “Aren’t elves supposed to be super-smart or wise or something?”
“Dwarves!” Lacey used her pencil to point up toward the ceiling.
“I mean, it was one thing to create the goblins,” Colt reasoned, as Lacey searched her can of pencils for a color that could be skin-toned, her new box of pencils temporarily forgotten in her excitement. Those pencils were all the way over at the pedestal where everything was delivered. “They weren’t ever supposed to be as smart as us.”
“Are you worried about a minion uprising?” Lacey joked, choosing a particular lilac pencil with a deep red for shadows.
“I was worried about the moral implications, but now that you mention it,” Colt’s eyes widened a bit. “Aren’t you even a little worried that the beetles don’t seem to be as docile toward us as they were in the beginning?”
“Are they?” Lacey plucked up a dark violet for the hair and beards. The chubby cheeks and facial hair were jolly purples with deep red shadows, but the eyes were a fierce hazel-green color.
“Yeah!” Colt cocked his head to the side. “And they’ve grown appendages that make them perfect for jousting tournaments that the goblins are throwing.”
“Cool,” Lacey rummaged for an eraser to create highlights on the steampunk goggles perched on top of the stubby guy’s head. If Dopey had a smart evil twin who worked for the Evil Queen, this guy might be that, except he was dressed in overalls stained with machine oil.
“You aren’t listening,” Colt admonished her mildly.
“Beetle jousting sounds fun Colt, but if the beetles are too vicious for us, they won’t make good mounts for the goblins,” Lacey gave Colt a pointed look. “Did you want me to create mounts for the goblins? Because I really thought we’d already decided that it was cheaper to buy some horses from town.”
“Okay, you were listening,” Colt muttered and bent over his own drawing.
“I’m always listening,” Lacey smirked back at him over hers.