“I’m not saying Gods of any kind,” Colt held up his hands with a gentle laugh that calmed Lacey’s nerves in the way that only he could. “That’s a bit too blasphemous for me, but maybe dungeon masters?”

“Like in DnD?” Lacey mused. “Wouldn’t we have to be players first? Wouldn’t there have to be players?”

“We’re not just players,” Colt chided her with a grin, giving a wave to the goblins, who were ignoring them now. Colt took Lacey’s elbow to steer her back out of the goblin’s room of coal. “We’re content creators!”

Lacey recognized this side of Colt. She’d have been content to work fast food and eat junk food forever in their little shitty apartment, but Colt had dreams. He dreamed of owning their own escape rooms. He dreamed of being respected and having a good house and this Colt was like the Pied Piper to Lacey. When Colt had dreams, Lacey couldn’t help but try to follow along and dream big right along with him.

“What if this is our chance to make a world?” He steered her back to the pedestal in the original room and waved a hand over it like it was some magician’s hat. “What’s in that kiosk store you found that could empower our little friends out there to become little minions of industry?”

“You act like this is more than a shared delusion,” Lacey protested weakly, easily navigating to the store screen and then stalling as she wondered what she was doing.

“There’s got to be a way to sell the coal we have,” Colt ignored her comment as he scanned the pedestal for someplace to insert his little lumps of coal. “Order something like a mining pick. They can’t be too expensive. Maybe when one comes out, it’ll take the coal back in.”

It wasn’t like Lacey was going to deny Colt when he was in this mood. She pasted on a wry smile, but underneath she was just as excited. She scrolled around the meager supplies at the store for equipment that did include a simple mining pick. At least this was the easiest screen with all its pictures of the equipment for sale. The mining pick shimmered into existence and hung suspended over the top of the pedestal until Colt reached out to take it. With a quick move, Colt dropped the coal where the mining pick had been.

“Colt!!” she snapped out, lunging for the lump of coal before it hit and somehow broke their little screen. Lacey’s fingers brushed the edge of the coal, but she wasn’t fast enough to stop it from plunging toward the screen. Within two inches of the screen, the coal was swallowed up by something invisible that made her draw her hand back like it too would be eaten by screen.

“You worry too much,” Colt teased her with a clap on her shoulder that was familiar enough to make her shake her head at herself.

“You don’t worry enough,” Lacey swiped the air near his shoulder with a mock anger they both knew was nothing more than a token protest.

That little trick triggered a new screen that accepted the sale of their meager little piece of coal. Lacey accepted the sale, and Colt dropped the other one in too. The coal looked like it was sold by quality and weight. It wasn’t much, but enough coal might earn back their investment in the mining pick.

“We should get a pail too, so we have something to store it in,” Colt suggested, brushing the coal dust off his hands and onto his jeans.

“Great, we can start with a mining operation and be Mini-Gods of the five-room dungeon in no time,” Lacey mumbled with a smirk.

“If the goblins can be miners, I wonder what the other races could do?” Colt left the idea with her as he rushed the new pick and pail to their goblin minions.

Figuring they didn’t have much to lose with the enterprise, Lacey made three more rooms and a pair of each of the remaining minions. She let Colt take the worms, beetles, and bats to their new homes as she looked at room upgrades and decided they could treat their new minions to some comforts for their efforts. For the worms, she chose a glowing moss update. For the bats, she added a roost, and a loam wall for the beetles. She didn’t know what the bats were for, but the worms got busy eating the moss and taking on the glowing characteristic and the beetles dug into the soft wall to create whatever beetles created. As she built the rooms, she tried to get them close enough to each other so that little tunnels connected them in a sort of line that headed toward the surface. What good would it do to have rooms of stuff if they had to come traipsing through the control room to travel between them. She also chose the upgrades for doors on all the rooms, not wanting the beetles to come eat her in her sleep. The goblins had no trouble propping their doors open so they could come and go from the control room at will.

For the goblins, she gave the girl goblin a pile of furs for a bed and a small fire circle that had a small pot over it for cooking, not that Lacey knew what the industrious goblins would cook or eat in this place. That said, she didn’t know what she and Colt would do for that either.

“Eve went crazy over the pile of furs and cooking fire,” Colt came in to tell her, a full bucket of coal in his hand, which only put a tiny dent in the investment they’d made.

Lacey could tell that Colt was just throwing himself into the whole experience and she wondered briefly why until she noted the tension around his eyes. He might be putting on a good front, but he was worried. She knew him well enough to know he wasn’t as go-with-the-flow as he acted when he was nervous. She told herself to be patient. She didn’t like telling herself to be patient, but at least they were in it together, and he made patience easier, especially when he was smiling like a kid at Christmas. Even if that smile was covering the same worries that Lacey was more open about.

“Eve?” Lacey arched an eyebrow at him.

“You named them,” he gave her an innocent look that also somehow blamed her for it. “You said they were our Adam and Eve.”

“Whatever,” she ducked her head to hide her smile.

“Eve is already harassing Adam to carve out some sleeping alcoves for her with that new pick of his,” Colt told Lacey, his tone affectionate.

Back in high school, when Lacey and Colt were the only company each other had most of the time, they’d fallen prey to their hormones and tried to be the couple everyone assumed they were. It hadn’t worked. It hadn’t helped that they’d given each other mono. Colt had been just as turned off as Lacey. They had spent a whole two weeks trying to politely pretend that they liked each other that way and then they both busted out with the truth on some fever-induced, cold-medicine-aided, fit of honesty. All that had been followed by a Twilight Zone marathon, followed by Gilmore Girls and Stranger Things marathons. Gilmore Girls had been his choice and Stranger Things had been hers. They had been half-way through Dr. Who when the doctors cleared them to go back to school. The good thing to come out of it all was that they could be affectionate with each other without any miscommunications or awkwardness, something at least three of his girlfriends had blown up about over the years.

“Four more days of mining and our goblin couple will have paid off the original investment in their mining equipment,” Lacey told Colt as he dumped the pail over the screen.

“I wouldn’t count on that,” Colt warned her with a wince. “They want an air shaft for the fire pit and I’m figuring that’s going to be expensive.”

Lacey scrolled to the optional upgrades for the rooms and nearly groaned at the expense. “Make that two years,” she groused.

“The goblins are expensive, but they’re industrious too,” Colt said, taking his bucket back. “They’ve already expanded their room to almost half again its original size.”

Lacey flicked back to the map screen and pinched/scrolled to the goblins’ room which was bigger than it had been. The requested air shaft took scrolling out a whole lot more than she’d done before. When Lacey was done, their little control room was down at the bottom of the screen as a speck in the center of what looked like it could be a huge mountain. The screen didn’t let her scroll out more and she tried not to think about how deep they were under all that dirt or the fact that if it all collapsed, no one would ever even know they’d been there.

Stolen novel; please report.

“I’m thinking we should make some more of the goblins,” Lacey suggested to get her mind off of it. “They are the only ones who seem to be doing anything industrious.”

“I don’t know,” Colt had pulled back on his original enthusiasm, but he was still trying to lighten the mood. Lacey let him, thinking that he needed it as much as she did. “I think we should keep it small until we know what this will all start to look like tomorrow.”

That threw Lacey for a loop. “Tomorrow,” she sighed out, feeling a bit lightheaded at the thought.

“Is that how deep we are?” Colt did a doubletake at the screen she was stuck on.

“Yeah,” she answered him, a little breathless.

“Where are we?” he squinted at the screen.

Lacey pointed wordlessly and he whistled in reply. There was a moment where they stood there in silence.

“Maybe we do need more goblins,” he rubbed the back of his neck, the empty bucket limp in his other hand.

“I’m thinking so,” she nodded, trying to calculate how many goblins it would take to tunnel out toward what she could see as an edge of the mountain.

“I’m just worried about how we’re going to feed them,” Colt’s words stopped her scrolling, and she gulped.

“How are we going to feed us?” Lacey asked quietly, knowing that Colt’s stomach was something of a bottomless pit and took almost a third of their income to fill at times. It was a good thing his mom still cooked a feast every Sunday as long as they went to church with her. Colt was the only child left who was still doing the tradition and it made her wonder what his mother would think when they didn’t show up. The clench of her stomach wasn’t hunger this time, but it would be before long. When she looked up at Colt, the haunted look in his eyes told her he was thinking along the same lines. He might not have enjoyed the crazy-constant-noise of his huge family, but he did love them.

“Our first priority,” Lacey stated, determined to deflect that look in Colt’s eyes, “is to put together enough goblins to tunnel to the nearest surface, which is…”

She scrolled and Colt watched over her shoulder. She scrolled some more.

“About five levels up and a mile or so in any direction,” Colt answered, his tone having lost the glimmer that the newness of their challenges had birthed. It was a lot.

“So, not soon enough to order take-out for dinner tonight,” Lacey joked, but they hadn’t eaten in a while. They’d planned to go out to either celebrate a win or drown their sorrows on a loss. It might have been a lame joke to anyone else, but it was enough for Colt, who blinked a few times and then pasted his encouraging smile back on. “I guess I’ll just have to order up, maybe a roasted boar or two?”

At that, Colt cocked his head to the side and then shoved in front of her to ogle the food selections she’d stopped the screen on. “A hundred credits for a meat pie?” he exclaimed with comically bugged out eyes. “Highway robbery.”

“It’s like Renn Faire prices,” she chuckled, then worried. “We could eat, but just a couple of meat pies is the same as another goblin. It’s just not sustainable to keep ordering food.”

“Shouldn’t there be a way to make food?” Colt rubbed his stomach.

“It’s like that ventilation thing, Colt,” Lacey complained. “We have a cooking pit with a fire, but nothing to cook on it, no wood to burn…”

“The coal?” Colt suggested watching Eve come in with another bucket full of coal.

“Yeah, but coal makes some nasty smoke and where does it go?” Lacey threw up her hands and backed up so Colt could show Eve how to dump the coal over the screen herself. “And what would we cook anyway? Goblin stew?”

“You think the goblins are going to go hungry too?” Colt worried, casting glances at Eve who was pretending to ignore them. They were both pretending that Lacey had meant stew made by goblins instead of stew made of goblins.

“Not tonight,” Lacey shrugged, keying in some meat pies for all of them. A small, steaming plate with four hand-sized meat pies on it appeared above the pedestal. It wasn’t much, but Colt took it and then looked around their huge empty room.

“It seems wrong not to eat it at a table or something,” Colt wheedled, his mother’s voice probably clear in his mind.

That led her to upgrades for the control room. It would have been so easy to blow through all their funds on upgrades and be left in a tomb and not enough credits to ever reach the surface. Then again, they had never had funds like that prize money, and it was awfully tempting to spend it on something that would make the new place feel less like a foreign world. She bought a rough table and chairs as well as a bunk bed. The purchases opened up more options that were tempting, but expensive. Lacey could buy a wood-burning stove like you might find in a cabin in the woods (if it wasn’t grayed out) or she could buy the ventilation system.

As Lacey’s hand hovered over some creature comforts, she paused. Who knew when they’d be able to make funds again. Selling the coal was offsetting the cost of the equipment they had bought, but it wouldn’t bring in enough to eat meat pies every night. Buying the meat pies had created more options too, like a whole boar for less than half a single meat pie. She had half a mind to order it, just to fill up on something, but with their current population it would likely be a waste.

She found herself scrolling through the meager listings that were available in the store, a half-eaten meat pie in one hand and the other hovering, but afraid to buy the wrong thing. Colt saved her from the decision paralysis by scrolling through the options with her. They didn’t eat at the table they’d bought. For a good hour, they let themselves dwell on the options that would give them a mini-mansion, but in the end they finally settled on something close to their old shitty apartment. It had been good enough for the last four years, it would be good enough here. They upgraded a set of bunk beds with pillow and blanket upgrades and kept it simple on the splinter-infused table and chairs. It almost felt civilized.

Colt made her buy a broom. The girl goblin, Eve, stole it on one of her trips with the little bucket of coal. It made Lacey wonder where they were going to throw things away, and then where they were going to, well, do their business that came from eating. Colt wasn’t the only one to camp the bathroom for the stench monster. Lacey wanted to buy an indoor outhouse of some sort but upgrades like that were grayed out. Sometimes buying something opened up new purchases, but some purchases were still unavailable. There was a sewage system that made her choke on the cost. It almost felt like she was trying to build the infrastructure for a city with the budget for a small house.

Still, the whole thing had to be more like the escape room puzzles than city planning, right? Something had brought them there because they were good at solving puzzles or maybe making puzzles. The key to the escape rooms was knowing that there was always a solution. A person just had to keep looking until they found it. As Lacey searched through the lists of options, she started to get a better feel for it. Most of it was still gibberish, but their limited options were opening up other options. When she’d bought the campfire, she’d gotten the option of the ventilation shaft. When she ordered the meat pies, she’d opened up the option for a roasted boar that was less expensive than the meat pies and would have fed all of them. It was a puzzle. They just had to keep at it to get better at it.

While she was inclined to be miserly with their credits, she also understood the concept that if nothing was invested, nothing would be earned. After a bit of debate between them, Lacey and Colt agreed to spend a little to make a little more. The goblins had really earned their keep, so they made them a little warren of another five rooms with two goblins in each. The girl/boy ratio was more like the flip of a coin, but they ended up with 6 boy goblins and 4 girl goblins. Adam and Eve shuffled their peers out of Lacey’s way and into whatever new rooms they settled into. They equipped them with 8 mining picks, a few hammers, and some buckets.

For the other rooms, they brought the monster totals to 10 each and then dumped a few basic upgrades in there just to see what it might open up. Again, Colt helped by transporting the little critters to their respective rooms. They ended up buying almost everything they could and then hit the wall of grayed out options.

As a final pick, they eyed that ventilation shaft and after a quick scare of a debate where they wondered if they were going to run out of air, they bought it. They needed a few very basic things, for sure, and air had to be considered a priority. That and water. They winced as they bought the ventilation shaft, but it opened up an option for a cavern with a stream running through it which they also bought, placing it just below the control center. They’d built the goblin caves in a line toward the surface, not that it went far enough to make a dent in their path to the outside. The water cavern was so expensive, but they’d figured it was essential.

A snore broke the silence of Lacey’s studies. Colt had crashed out on the bottom bunk. Lacey hadn’t realized that she was tired until she’d heard Colt’s snoring and then she also realized that her eyes were burning a bit. She rubbed them. The dent in their budget looked more like a gaping wound, but Lacey was still scrolling to see if she’d missed anything.

Taking a final rub at her eyes, she backed away from the pedestal and joined her partner, having just enough energy to lever herself up into the top bunk and use the end of the bed to pry off both her socks and shoes. They made plunking sounds that didn’t wake Colt. She was asleep almost before her head hit the pillow, which was very comfortable, but certainly not worth the hundred credits it had cost as an upgrade. The blanket, however, was. At least the bed and bedding was made of some fluffy padding and not straw.