Lacey slid behind Colt, not trusting the zealous look in Eve’s eyes any more than Ginger had. The goblin shaman rushed toward them with what looked suspiciously like a straightened spring sharpened into point that looked suspiciously like it had already been used to make a few of the piercings on what Lacey now saw was mostly girl goblins. Eve ran like no one should run with any sharp object and Colt responded by drawing his sword.
“What the hell, Eve?” Colt shouted, putting that sword between Eve and Lacey, who appeared to be Eve’s target for the piercer.
“Initiate Lacey!” Eve held the needle-like instrument in one hand and a feather in the other. “Save her from Moonshine madness!”
“You’re not sticking me with that thing!” Lacey wanted to crawl up Colt to get away from the mad goblin.
“No poking Lacey!” Colt said, firmly, loud enough to be heard in half the dungeon. “What’s gotten into you!”
“Save Lacey!” Eve repeated.
“Drop the needle!” Colt demanded.
“No saving me!” Lacey yelled over Colt’s shoulder. “My tetanus shot isn’t up to date and that thing will kill me!”
“You have a dagger, Lace,” Colt reminded her, rolling his eyes and turning as Eve tried to go around Colt to get to Lacey.
“So does she!” Lacey screamed, keeping Colt firmly between Eve and herself. “And she isn’t trying to poke you.”
“Can’t poke Colt,” Eve shook her head in confusion. “Colt gave Adam firewater! Adam get infected with Moonshine madness. Colt already lost, but Eve save Lacey!”
Colt’s sword dipped as he nearly buckled over laughing. Lacey considered herself lucky he hadn’t dropped it altogether. It would have been hilarious to her too if Eve wasn’t doing it to her.
“This is not funny,” Lacey asserted, drawing her dagger and backing toward the stairwell to avoid being surrounded by the goblin attendants.
“It’s a little funny,” Colt shook with laughter.
“Lacey already have pokes,” Eve paused, confused as she fondled her ears and pointed to Lacey’s. “Lacey’s pokes give Eve idea! Men wear feathers on head after beating up Chicker. Females wear feathers in pokes!”
Colt howled with laughter as Lacey kicked out at the goblins trying to grab her. Sure, Lacey had earrings, but that didn’t mean she wanted holes in any other parts of her body, especially not some of the parts that Eve had poked. There were feathers sticking out of holes in Eve’s pointed ears all the way up to the points, a few in her lip, and more in the skin around her wrists (and there were enough of those that Eve looked like she was wearing bracelets of feathers). That sort of thing was fine for other people, but Lacey had barely wanted her ears pierced the first time and had no interest in expanding her piercings in a wildly unsanitary dungeon any more than she wanted to know if Eve had pierced stuff under her fur clothes.
“Like Lacey,” Eve surged forward.
“No!” Lacey smacked Colt’s shoulder with the hilt of her dagger to get him to focus. “Colt! This isn’t the time. No still means no. Help me or I’ll find a way to poke you with something.”
“I’m trying,” Colt unsuccessfully bit back a chuckle, but he did manage to put himself between Lacey and the goblins again, mostly by taking up the doorway to the stairwell.
“Not hard enough,” Lacey kicked at another goblin hand that snaked past Colt’s guard, not that he was guarding well. “Stop this before I decide I need to unname all these goblins and start this whole fiasco over from scratch!”
“Eve!” Colt shouted, trying to be serious. “Stop this. Stop this right now or Lacey is going to let the adventurer’s kill you all and never resurrect you again.”
“It’d be worth a dungeon wipe just to reset this madness!” Lacey flashed her dagger forward, tired of playing nice, and found that she had a much easier time with the dagger than she had with the old sword they’d taken off of Hughe back in the beginning. “In a hundred years, they didn’t devolve this bad. Why has this happened in just 5?”
“Eve no save Lacey?” Eve practically whimpered, like the world would end if it didn’t happen.
“No!” Colt and Lacey said together, Lacey quite a bit more vehemently than Colt who was still struggling not to laugh.
“Then all is lost,” Eve sat down abruptly, and the move reminded Lacey of a sulky teenager who had been told they couldn’t get their navel pierced until they turned 18.
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“I’ll tell you what’s lost,” Lacey got her nerve back as the goblin attendants backed off now that their leader had given up. “You’ve all lost your minds is what’s lost, you crazy bunch of lunatics! First, we find Adam in a den of filth and now you are all torturing our one summoned creature so that you can stick feathers into holes in your body. As if that’s not enough, you want to kill me with dirty needles?”
“Adam lost,” Eve moaned out. “He drink the firewater and become stupid.”
“I’m pretty sure you all started out that way,” Lacey muttered, staying behind Colt, who sat down on the bottom step.
“What do you mean that Adam is lost, Eve?” Colt asked Eve, his tone more patient than what Lacey could summon.
“Moonshine madness!” Eve threw up her clawed hands. “He lock Eve down in water cave and block all workers from water unless they pay him in moonshine to pass.”
“Why not just dig more tunnels to the water cave?” Lacey asked.
“Adam say if Eve stop workers from paying Adam, he kill all beetles,” Eve shrugged. “That happen before and no crunchies in stew anymore. Bad. Very bad memories.”
“You gave in to Adam for crunchies in the stew?” Lacey squinted at Eve like she’d suddenly gotten too fuzzy to see right.
“No crunchies mean bad magic,” Eve answered. “Glowing beetle crunchies make magic sparkier.”
“Unbelievable,” Lacey sat behind Colt on a higher stair so she could still see over his shoulder.
“It’s not so weird actually,” Colt defended Eve’s simple explanation. “Think about it. Eve can probably only beat Adam in a fight if her magic is at peak power. If the magic got weaker, she would be at the mercy of a tyrant.”
“But why is he a tyrant?” Lacey protested. “Did he do this last time too?”
“No,” Eve shook her head. “Adam worker goblin back then. Not fighter goblin. Not chief. Beetles died out when big ones get greedy and eat eggs. Beetles stupid. Big magic not needed back then. Adam do worker work, not fight for chief.”
“So, he’s the problem,” Lacey raised an eyebrow at Eve.
“Adam not problem,” Eve tried to copy Lacey’s eyebrow, but only managed to look surprised instead of stern. “Moonshine is problem. It make Adam stupid like beetles.”
“This is all stupid,” Lacey finally sheathed her dagger again, so that she wouldn’t poke someone’s eye out with it as she charged back up the steps.
“Lacey!” Colt called out, dashing up behind her. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to sober up that power-mad dolt,” Lacey swore out.
“You were afraid of Eve with the needle and yet you want to confront a drunk and tell him he’s done drinking?” Colt reasoned.
“I don’t have to make sense if nothing else does,” Lacey answered back, charging into their control room and right over to the pedestal. “I mean why didn’t they just bypass the blockade by using our control room. They can obviously come in here to dump stuff in the pedestal, so they could come in anytime to get by Adam’s stupid rules.”
“No one want to wake masters,” Ginger was saying, her broom faster as it tried to sweep up years of dust. “Except Ginger. Ginger supposed to wake masters, but Ginger not know time go by.”
“It’s not your fault, Ginger,” Colt tried to reassure her as Eve and her goblins followed behind him into the room.
“What are you doing?” Colt demanded as Lacey began to swipe through to the map.
“I’m testing the system,” Lacey told him, reading as she went through screens. “If we can move traps, maybe we can move things like the pools of water. In fact,” she scrolled and tapped, “yep, we can move water. I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before.”
“Move water?” Colt asked, his eyes growing large.
“Nothing better to wake up a drunk than to dowse them in lots of water,” Lacey grinned maliciously as a howl and gurgle came from the room next to them. The howls were followed by a sloshing of water into their room before it receded. Ginger frowned fiercely at the mess that managed to come a full 5 feet into her mostly clean room.
“Eve!” came the angry scream from the drunk in question. The holler came from the water cavern.
Rather than have all the extra water bring all that filth into their control room, Lacey had simply moved the pieces of the blockade to the doorway into the control room. Only a small amount of a full 15 by 15 foot cube of rushing river water worked its way through the cracks of the blockade. The rest had flushed the elite goblins and their unwashed surroundings into the water cavern.
Adam and the elites were loud with growling and shouting as they listened to them climb their stairs to their room only to be flushed again. More screeching rivaled all of what Eve had done to torture the poor Chicker. After the third flushing, Lacey moved the rooms around Adam’s room so that Adam found himself rushing into the control room without any of his other elites. His elites were stuck in a room that had no exits at all. Adam came into the control room sputtering and enraged, what was left of his glowing feather headdress hanging half off his head like so much wet wilted lettuce.
“Eve!” Adam shouted, only half aware, in his rage, that the room was the control room or that it held anyone other than his shaman.
“Shut the fuck up, you blowhard son of a bitch!” stopped Adam in his tracks as Lacey stepped between him and Eve.
Colt shook his head, “You hid behind me from Eve, who had a tiny little needle and then charge in front of Eve to stand between her and a goblin with a sword?”
Lacey responded by pulling out her dagger and, without warning, throwing it at the goblin holding the sword. The handle of the dagger bounced off the chief’s armor, but Lacey was undeterred. “If you don’t drop the sword and the attitude, I’m going to pluck every feather off that headdress and then pluck off your balls and feed them to the Chicker while you watch!”
Adam took a wide-eyed step back from the little woman who was only about a head taller than him. The sword clattered to the floor.
“I’m your freaking maker, you drunk muck-maker!” Lacey poked her finger forward as she stalked toward the confused goblin chief. “Who gave you the right to drink my moonshine?”
Adam threw Colt under the bus faster than the water flushed the goblins. One shaking greedy finger rose to point at Colt, who groaned out a sigh and looked up at the ceiling.
“I have days, DAYS!” Lacey’s rant went on, her voice echoing terrifyingly off the control rooms high ceiling, “to prep enough defenses so that a whole bunch of those big wig guildies don’t wipe out this dungeon and cash it out for coppers!! And you spend 5 years destroying it all so you can get drunk with your buddies?”