“Are you talking about our Aztec Tomb?” Colt inspected the map Lacey had drawn and torn out of their book.
“Why not?” Lacey bit her lip.
“It’s a maze,” Colt ran his hand over the back of his neck. “Let’s put it in and see what it gives us.”
“Now that we can expand it past 3 rooms, it might as well be a full-sized maze,” Lacey rubbed her hands together as Colt dropped the page.
The diagram disappeared into the pedestal, and they were gifted with more than they’d expected from the drawing. Until that morning, they hadn’t tried using the grid paper. The tutorial had requested a dungeon room design and Lacey had spent the required hour on the drawing, carefully sketching out the detailed maze that held enough traps to choke a party of dolts. She’d gained a few skill points for it too.
(Lacey) Drawing +3
“Aztec Tomb Maze,” the system echoed the name of the design that Lacey had printed neatly at the top of the page. “Design now available. Apply to new room or repurpose an existing room?”
(Lacey) Creating +1
The price for each choice was listed at the side with a hefty discount both for Lacey’s skill level and the fact that they’d just submitted the detailed drawing of a unique item. It turned out that the more detailed the drawing was, the higher the discount was for the implementation. While they couldn’t just add fur to something to get the unique tag anymore, Lacey had enough ingenuity to keep getting these bonuses for truly new ideas.
“That’s not too expensive,” Colt nodded his head and chose to accept the room as a new piece of their dungeon.
“Did that price include the traps I put in there?” Lacey looked around Colt’s meaty hands to scan the room details on the screen.
“It did, but I think a few of them are red,” Colt pointed at one of the red spots.
“Pneumatic system required for spear trap is not available at current tech levels,” the system told them.
“Only 4 are red,” Lacey was happy with the result. She had expected to have to manually set most of the traps. There were 15 other traps that the system had set automatically. “I don’t need pneumatics. I just wondered if it would give it to me. I could try something simpler for the mechanism on that one.”
“We can swap them out with a few of our other traps,” Colt brought up the options with a middle finger click on the traps.
“What about parts?” Lacey stopped him, using a pinky click instead to bring up the components.
“We can afford those parts, but not at our current tech level,” Colt shook his head.
“The tutorial wanted a part design,” Lacey strode back to the table to open the book and bring it back to the pedestal, so she could look at the part in question.
“Parts need schematics on the grid paper with weight and stress factors,” Colt backed up, but watched Lacey try to draw the belt system needed for a tension spring release on the spear chucker that could replace the pneumatics. “We’d need to be engineers for that, and those weren’t classes that agreed with you in college.”
“It isn’t that hard,” Lacey tucked her tongue into her cheek and scratched out the basics. “Dealing with professors who think it’s useless to apply engineering to dungeon designs is the hard part. Counterweights and mph measurements for deployment systems is the fun stuff.”
“If you say so,” Colt raised his hands and backed away so she could work.
“That’s another reason we get along, baby,” Lacey smirked at him, her eyes not leaving her sketch. “What’s the square root of 57.9?”
“Like almost 7 and a half,” Colt answered easily, having taken an online course for mental math that had turned him into a handy calculator.
(Colt) Intelligence +1
“Thanks,” Lacey muttered around the colored pencil in her mouth as she did the calculations at the side of the paper for the tension on the coils.
(Lacey) Intelligence +1
Within the hour, they had a clockwork mechanism that allowed them to wind up the tension via coils to provide the pressure system that could replace the pneumatic one. Now that the goblins had the fear of their makers impressed upon them, their work ethic had greatly improved so that it was almost as good as before the 5-year sleep.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
(Lacey) Management +1
“Let’s replace the tomb springs with a simpler system that they spring themselves,” Colt suggested, wiping away the trap for the final sarcophagus and replacing it with plates to uncover holes that would allow the contents of the sarcophagi to leak out into the channels between the floor tiles.
“Okay,” Lacey rolled her shoulders to work out the stiffness she got from scrunching over the book for too long. “I need a break, though. Do you mind if I head out to check the maze in person?”
“Knock yourself out,” Colt waved her out, replacing her at the pedestal. “I’ve got some reading to do on dungeon wipe protocols to keep me busy as long as you aren’t hogging the pedestal.”
Lacey belted on her daggers over the leather armor and left him to his part of the tasks they’d split. Over the past several days, they’d fallen into a rhythm. Colt was in charge of prioritizing and assigning the tasks on the tutorials to-do list as well as balancing those tasks with the more important efforts at booby-trapping their dungeon for impending adventurers that would be at least twice their level and probably pissed about dying.
Every day that passed had them both more tense about it happening at any moment and more prepared. The rooms Lacey passed on her way to the maze were well-lit and clean, now that they’d assigned Ginger to organizing the worker goblins. Without the worker goblins to boss around, Eve and Adam had returned to their specific jobs of training those in their departments. Eve and Adam also had schedules and task lists every day that kept them too busy to cause trouble. Colt would do surprise inspections at odd times of the day to make sure they kept to the tasks. Those that didn’t ended up on bat guano collecting duty or worm herding. They’d really stopped slacking only when Adam or Eve, whichever was the supervisor of the errant or lazy goblin, was also assigned to shit duty if their subordinates were caught not doing their jobs.
Lacey walked to the maze instead of letting Colt Wonka-vator her directly to the rooms because they didn’t want to be caught with any rooms out of sequence when the big wigs arrived. Colt had suggested creating a small room that could be used entirely as an elevator of sorts, but Lacey nixed the idea. First, she wanted to walk. Too much sedentary life made her feel the confinement of the dungeon worse. Second, a small compartment that could be suddenly caught halfway from here to there with no escape by an adventurer crossing their threshold didn’t sound like a reasonable risk when she had two perfectly good feet to make the trip on.
(Lacey) Strength +1
All but their moonshine trap room had been turned from red to green by the sweat of goblins instead of the shine of coinage. Moss had been planted, instead of stuffed, into limestone crown molding on most of the rooms. It had been a dungeon-wide upgrade, something that had been required by the tutorial. The tutorial was more of a laundry list of chores than a list of teaching moments like they might have intended, but Lacey and Colt were working their way through them. It had actually been that upgrade that had inspired Lacey to design the Aztec tomb, an expansion to the three-room escape experience she and Colt had designed back in the old world.
Approaching the maze, Lacey stepped over the trapped bricks and stood too close to the stone doorway with the Aztec design on it. Any further away would trigger a sinking trap that turned the brick floor into quicksand. Of course, being this close to the door made it difficult to see how the design was used to unlock the door. The safe portion of the floor was the single foot nearest the door, so that your nose was against it. The unsafe portion stretched around a corner of the path to the door. It was actually easier to use magic for traps that unlock the mechanical tech trees necessary for the highest level traps.
Lacey closed her eyes and listened for the clicks as she pressed the correct sequence of protrusions to open the door. They also learned to attach the puzzles to the doors themselves rather than giving a key to a padlock that a thief could just pick with thieves’ tools. Every door had a puzzle on it, and most places had traps. Lacey waved to the Ceiling Sucker she’d named Chuck. He was one of her creations, a menagerie that had increased their number of available mobs from 4 to 37. Chuck and the Sinkhole, a version of a mimic that acted like quicksand but was really a monster. Together they were Chuck and Muck.
Lacey hopped the obvious pit trap and then tiptoed around the edge of Muck. The first branching section of the maze allowed for 3 options. They could go left or right in an obvious way, or they could punch the nose of the giant head and fight a golem to go forward. Lacey poked the golem’s nose playfully and it opened its mouth just tall enough for her to squeeze through and into a secret passage. This tunnel held a dozen different trap mechanisms, but George wouldn’t let anyone into this corridor that wasn’t a denizen of the dungeon. First, George didn’t count as a secret door, so thieves couldn’t just recognize it by skill alone. Second, George didn’t look different from the rest of the walls. His nose was just another brick. Finally, George was a major introvert and hid from people he didn’t know and would retreat behind an actual wall rather than interact with any adventurer. This type of monster was allowed once and then nerfed quickly afterward. They managed to make a dozen Georges before the nerf snapped on. They were all named George 1, George 2 and so on because Lacey wanted to be able to endlessly respawn them. She’d sneaked another three Georges in by putting them in the maze design to hide the maintenance tunnels for the traps.
“You are going to be George 13 and that’s a lucky number for this dungeon,” Lacey told the monster at her back.
Lacey wound some cranks, blew some dust off of a few triggers, and plucked some sinews to test for tautness on others. She viewed the rest of the maze through peepholes here and there, not that the peepholes were visible from the other side of the walls due to the periscope nature of them. Lacey had managed to create mirrors with some silver and glass, but magnets still stumped her. She’d have to wait until they earned a magnet somehow or gained enough credits to open that tech tree’s purchase options back up to get that magnet. It was on a wish list of items that Colt kept close tabs on.
Wasn’t it just her luck that she was in the maze when the dungeon turned red?