“Big bads come back?” Eve asked into the silence that followed Lacey’s much longer rant. Lacey managed to call into question Adam’s non-existent parentage and insult each and every one of his predecessors in such a way as to convince all in attendance that he wasn’t the spawn of a system pedestal.
“Yes, Eve,” Colt answered as Lacey panted.
“Uh, oh,” Adam responded to that, his eyes never leaving Lacey.
“You’re just lucky I’ve had some coffee, or I’d pull off every digit of your body that is smaller than your arms and eat them raw!” Lacey finished up, finally leaning back on her back foot with her arms crossed. “Would you care to explain why all my rooms are red?”
“Eve kill moonshine maker,” Adam moved his pointer finger from Colt to Eve.
“I’ll deal with Eve later, but YOU, YOU ruined my dungeon in a fight over moonshine,” Lacey demanded answers with a light in her eyes that had the chief quivering.
“Adam try to rebuild firewater maker, but Eve not charge firewater,” Adam spread his hands like it was only logical.
“I don’t CARE what Eve did,” Lacey lowered her voice to a deadly growl. “Why is my dungeon red, Adam, chief of the clan and responsible for every single thing that happens when we aren’t awake?”
“Adam drink tiny little cup of moonshine with Colt,” Adam tried to explain to Lacey’s thunderous expression. “Then Colt go to sleep. Adam drink tiny bit more moonshine. Celebrate victory over big wig bads.”
When Adam stopped explaining, Lacey stomped forward to grab one of his ears and drag him to the pedestal. “Then why is this empty?”
“Adam try rebuild moonshine maker!!” Adam squealed, his hand grasping toward his ear without touching Lacey’s pinching fingers.
“So you drank the rest of the moonshine?!” Lacey shouted so loud, even Colt flinched.
Having gotten to the map, the first place Lacey had looked had been the moonshine/firewater reservoir only to find it completely empty. A single glance at the trap room where Adam had pulled the plug on the reservoir to kill the last party, and Lacey could see that the still was totally destroyed. She’d known that going into all this.
“Eve blow up moonshine maker!!” Adam insisted, stomping a foot, but still not daring to touch Lacey’s still firm grip on his ear.
“You see this?” Lacey poked Adam in his bloated stomach with her other hand. “This is what happens when a greedy goblin drinks ALL MY MOONSHINE!!! This does not happen in a day with a single tiny cup of moonshine. This takes years of work!”
“Colt share moonshine with Adam,” Adam whined.
“Wrong answer, dude,” Colt shook his head at the chief.
“Celebrate victory?” Adam tried again.
“No!” Lacey yelled at the top of her lungs. She yelled loud and long and when she was done, Adam finally hung his head.
Lacey let go of Adam’s ear and turned to the pedestal to move a few rooms around again.
“Do you know what you’re going to do now, Adam?” Lacey purred, her eyes still glittering like she’d eaten purple moss punch.
Adam shook his head back and forth.
“You,” Lacey turned from the pedestal to point toward the open doorway he’d come out of raging only moments before. “YOU, Mr. Chief of this tribe, are going to get every single goblin in the tribe to turn every single room of this dungeon into bright green, ready rooms.”
“Yes, Masters,” the goblin nodded and started to leave. He was halted by Lacey’s hand snatching the back of his stained leather armor.
“AND,” Lacey put her lips right up next to his ear. “You will do it nicely and respectfully as you ask your tribe to fix how badly you screwed everything up so we don’t all DIE!!!!!”
With that, she kicked the chief in the ass and turned back to the rest of the gob-smacked room full of goblins. Only Colt stood without fear or awe. This was nothing new to him and of all of them, he was the safest so far. He knew how to keep it that way. Eve was distracted by the sight of her foe skittering out the door and into the dungeon where he was already calling to his recently freed elites to round everyone up for a meeting.
“And YOU,” Lacey pounced on Eve, grabbing not the ear, but the feathers poking through both ears of the goblin shaman. “You are going to personally charge up all the firewater I want.”
“Can’t make firewater,” Eve stupidly crossed her arms stubbornly over her chest, obviously lulled by Lacey’s lack of blame in the previous argument. “Adam drink it as soon as I make it.”
“You destroyed my still,” Lacey broke a feather off, pulling it roughly out of the ear as Eve squealed like a stuck pig. “You did that. You took something I paid for, and you turned it into scrap metal. I’m going to rebuild the still and you are going to help me. You and every one of your little helpers.”
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Eve grabbed her bleeding ear and gaped at Lacey. Still, Eve set a stubborn chin and shook her head no. “Adam will only drink everything you make. You see. Eve right.”
“You will make it, or I will drown you in moonshine and your madness will make Adam look like a saint! Then I’ll wall you up in a tiny room with no exit and wait for the worms to eat off your toes.” Lacey whispered in Eve’s ear. The following words dripped with venom and drained all the color from Eve’s face. It took longer to convince Eve, but Lacey did it, finishing with the promise to resurrect Eve only to repeat the process for every time that Eve refused her. She did it all in a whisper that hissed.
Dark Lacey was a trip to the dark side of a black hole transport through hell. Colt poured more coffee and handed it to her when she was done. Lacey only nodded and pulled up dmail to check their notifications. They read them together until the dangerous glitter left her eyes and the world was, for the moment, safe again.
Name: Lacey
Class: Dungeon Manager
Level: 11
Health: 253/253
Mana: 385/385
Intelligence: 26
Will: 9
Strength: 15
Constitution: 8
Charm: 10
Beauty: 10
Perception: 15
Dexterity: 12
Luck: 13
Skills: Climbing (4), Comedy (13), Creating (27), Drawing (25), Hide (3), Intimidation (10), Kick (5), Knife Fighting (2), Lockpicking (1), Management (8), Mischief (9)
Name: Colt
Class: Dungeon Manager
Level: 11
Health: 484/484
Mana: 363/363
Intelligence: 19
Will: 14
Strength: 25
Constitution: 19
Charm: 30
Beauty: 10
Perception: 15
Dexterity: 5
Luck: 6
Skills: Bashing (2), Comedy (15), Drawing (1), Flirting (20), Grapple (6), Kick (1), Management (14), Mischief (8), Patience (9), Persuasion (10)
They’d found their character sheets and the tutorial. For the moment, they were still locked out of most of the pedestal’s functions until they finished a laundry list of quests. Half of the quests were things they’d already done while fumbling around. They’d summoned all their basic creatures in the male and female forms, where possible. They’d moved rooms, contents, and learned that they could move creatures too. They’d done a “short sleep” which was a feature that allowed dungeons to propagate and progress naturally between incursions. The fact that they called it a feature didn’t lessen Lacey’s disdain for it. The ‘feature’ could be set to automatically happen during sleep periods, or it could be manually applied. They switched it to manual.
They'd upgraded things like the worm habitats, but now that they could read the newer upgrades, they upgraded some more. The worms and moss could be colored, but it wasn’t just cosmetic. Different colored moss had different properties that could be infused into creatures that ate the moss, thus also infusing it into the drops off of those creatures. They upgraded the bats and their cave.
While they had enough credits to buy the moonshine they needed, they’d lost the tech tree that made it economically feasible. Things outside a discovered tech tree were up to ten times the cost of things they had earned the hard way. Some tech was limited, and some tech was just denied until they reached certain levels. The drawings were almost a cheat of that system, but while Lacey made two attempts at redrawing the still, they only managed to come up with already created designs. Their fur-covered parts work-around had been nerfed during their sleep. Colt’s coffee pot was more of a fluke than a use of the fur to make it new.
“Hot springs upgrade for the water cavern?” Colt suggested over lunch. “Could get us sulfur to work with on the tech tree.”
“You know the source of hot springs?” Lacey replied distractedly, more intent on new controls and what they revealed.
“No,” Colt realized he didn’t only after she asked.
“Volcanos,” Lacey stated, tapping the screen with her middle finger instead of her index finger. The action opened up new options within windows they already knew. It was like a right-click on a computer. “I’m not all that interested in letting this system complicate our lives with volcanic problems on top of everything else.”
“Dang, all I was thinking of was hot water for showers,” Colt admitted. “And possibly gunpowder.”
“That’s why we make a good team,” Lacey said, using her ring finger to access the help menu for the option she was fiddling with. Her pinky finger broke options down into smaller parts, opening up new minutia for what they could access.
The access to the breakfast burritos was one of the things that broke down into parts, giving them access to things like cheese, eggs, tortillas, sausage, and bacon, but also fry pans and cooking fires that were as simple as what they’d already bought to gas grills that made Colt drool. All of these options were ways to bypass the tutorial’s training wheels, but during the times that Lacey drew, Colt would tick off the quests one by one.
The trickiest part of the system was how it limited purchases beyond their known tech trees. Even if they wanted to buy the moonshine or some other explosive that could replace it, they’d already maxed out the percentage of their income that they could put toward it. They could buy coffee as something in the creature comforts tech tree because they hadn’t used up their allotments of advancements in that tech tree. Lacey’s previous hasty purchase of all that moonshine to fill that cavern had used up the explosives they could afford in that tech tree.
Unfortunately, that meant that they needed to unlock the tech tree for the still to recreate it at this point. While they could buy the parts for the still, putting it together would take some finagling as they struggled not to misuse their percentages. The only reason they hadn’t hit those limits before was that they’d been working from a blank slate and that first 100 year sleep had earned a ton of funds. They had a rudely worded notice that the 100 year sleep was nerfed, as if they’d misused the feature on purpose.
“Maybe it’s better that we aren’t reusing the still explosion as a trap,” Colt suggested as he stood at the pedestal ticking off tutorial quest tasks and Lacey sat at the table drawing what they wanted for dinner. “Those ones who died will surely tell their buddies about it. It couldn’t work twice, could it?”
“That’s going to become a pain over time,” Lacey said, shading the French fries with the new set of colored pencils.