The charitable worker goblins dug around Lacey as she let herself sit there at the new entrance and stare out over the vista. The entrance on this side of the mountain was higher than the one on the other side. It wasn’t so high that the nimble little goblins couldn’t scrambled down the rock face to the forest floor, but it was high enough that Lacey could see over the trees and out into a neat little valley, pristine and empty of people. She, as a very good little introvert, thought it looked like a little piece of heaven. There were no roads, and no smoke from fires and, most importantly, no people for miles in all directions.
The moon shone over the valley, creating dots of sparkling blue on the surface of a river that ran through the valley. Lacey let herself breathe in the night air that could travel through the invisible barrier that she could not. It smelled of pine sap, dirt, and the ever-present odor of goblins that she’d grown used to over the time she’d been there. When one thought of a storybook fairy tale world, this was what came to Lacey’s mind.
“Lacey!” scrolled across the bottom of her vision and then repeated itself several times before she acknowledged it.
“What?”
“Are you done drooling over the outside?”
“No.”
Sigh emoji.
“Fine, what?” Lacey said, but her mind was lost in the possibilities of what she could do with that space behind the mountain. If only she could keep it out of the hands of the voraciously greedy world.
“We completed the tutorial!” Colt announced. “And we got a great big chest of treasure sitting down here in the control room. It’s glowing.”
“Does it have bulletproof glass in it?” Lacey replied, loathe to return to reality. “Because then we could have nice skyrise offices up here and there is the greatest view! We could install it on all the floors and have a clear view of our dungeon empire!”
“Funny girl,” Colt replied, the text deadpan. “I just thought you might want to saunter your butt down those stairs long enough to go kill that fighter so we can close the dungeon for a week for repairs, maybe go home for Sunday dinner at mom’s and open this beautiful golden chest.”
“Wait, really?” Lacey’s attention had been snagged. She took one last glance at the vista and then turned back into the mountain to find that their little crawlspace had been expanded to a walkway that detoured around where she’d been laying.
“Yeah, but I’m not opening the chest without you, and I’m not shutting down the dungeon until you go kill that blowhard that’s been trying to break us.”
“Could you shut it down with him in it?” her curiosity got the best of her.
“It looks like it, but I’d rather have him dead first,” Colt replied. “With our luck, if I closed the dungeon now, he’d get to walk out of this unscathed.”
Lacey checked and the dungeon was still red. The stairs weren’t quite as hard going down as they’d been going up, but her misused muscles protested with a bevy of cramps. She limped and muttered under her breath all the way down. “Can we really truly close the dungeon for repairs?”
“It costs credits, but it’s possible.”
“And we can go home for a break?” Lacey asked again.
“Credits.”
“Like how many credits?” Lacey sat on a step halfway down that was probably only a third of the way down. “Probably a billion credits and we have to choose between the two because one or the other will break the bank.”
“Not quite, but I’m hoping the gem deposits will help.” Colt told her, as she thumped a fist against muscles that just wanted to sit there and shake. “Not enough that we could close the dungeon for good, but enough to get home for dinner. If you could just finish off that fighter so we can turn the dungeon blue, I can see how much those semi-precious stones are going to sell for.”
“You want me to believe that you haven’t coaxed a worker goblin to bring in some of that stuff to see what it’s worth?”
“I didn’t think of that,” he admitted, but she wasn’t sure she believed him. It was easier to fib over text and he was working on motivating her to move. She didn’t begrudge Colt the lapse of judgement either way. She did need motivation, and he was a little preoccupied with providing it.
Something would go wrong. Lacey let the elite goblins help her down the stairs when she couldn’t stop her legs from shaking. She tried to prepare herself for the next horrific crisis that would threaten the dream, her mind swirling on possibilities of the things they’d missed or somehow messed up.
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“Is that bastard still stalling next to the sarcophagus puzzle?” Lacey asked Colt.
“Like his ass is glued to the wall,” Colt replied. “I know what you’re thinking and I’m thinking it too.”
Did he know that her mind was racing through all the ways that they could still be screwed?
“You’re thinking that there’s got to be a catch,” Colt went on.
Of course, he knew. Lacey’s throat got thick with emotion, so she just held a thumbs up to the camera as she crawled through a George-hole to the 3rd Tomb.
“You’re thinking that they’re going to yank all this out from under us.”
Lacey pressed her lips together. No matter how many Hallmark Christmas movies she’d watched, she still didn’t think she could believe in happy endings.
“But you know what they can’t take away from us?”
Lacey blew out a slow breath as she took down the George and headed for the other end of the 3rd Aztec Tomb. Now that her muscles were working out the cramps, she felt like she could pick up the pace. She jogged through the 2nd Tomb, knowing that her paranoia had greatly overestimated this group’s power over Lacey and Colt’s positions as dungeon masters. Still, it was better to have backup and not need it than to get murdered in their control room.
“Killing this guy.”
Lacey could think of a dozen ways that even that could still go wrong. The monitor could be faulty and have frozen on the screen where Monty was hanging out like he owned the place already. He could be playing possum. The goblins could secretly be spying for Monty and his guild. Helluna could have come back and was even now sneaking up behind Lacey for revenge, even though Lacey was tucked safely in the center of 4 elite goblin guards.
Lacey had dealt with this anxiety for as long as she could remember. If there was a way for her wild imagination to summon up bat-shit-crazy scenarios of doom for her and her friends, it did it. It did it over morning cereal. It did it on math tests. It did it on engineering projects. It even did it during senior trip to a local amusement park. While this anxiety taunted her with outlandish possibilities, Lacey found solace in the very fact that the scenarios were so out there. If there was a feasible scenario in the mess of possibilities that her anxiety created, Lacey might give in to the worry and choose caution over foolishness.
Instead, Lacey was mapping out exactly which trap she wanted to set before meeting the guy face-to-face. It was reckless, foolish, crazy. Then again, her anxiety was busy still positing idiocy, so it hadn’t caught up with her recklessness.
“Yo, Monty baby,” Lacey slid into the first maintenance tunnel and set a three-tile trap. “Miss me?”
“You were gone?” Lord Montgomery drawled out. “Out to the lady’s room to powder your nose?”
“I knew I forgot something,” Lacey snapped her fingers and tried to ignore her sudden need to pee. The water wasn’t literally running, but having set the trap, her mind imagining running water made her wish she’d taken care of it. She didn’t dare stop now, though or her anxiety would come up with something feasible to stop her and what fun would that be?
“What new weak and useless taunts do you have to share?” Monty sounded amused.
“Actually, I’ve grown quite fond of these conversations with you,” Lacey called back to him. “So fond of them that I figure we should meet face to face.”
“Really?” he sounded dubious. He should.
“Sure,” Lacey replied, tossing George up on the wall and stepping through. There was a large U-shaped tunnel between her and Monty. “Can’t you hear my voice has changed. I’m closer now. Let’s play tag. You’re it.”
“What is this tag?” Monty’s voice got a tiny bit closer.
“He’s coming, but slowly.” Colt’s text told her. She appreciated that he wasn’t talking her out of this. Colt wouldn’t even try. He did know her.
“It’s simple,” Lacey called, backing up over tiles that quivered under her weight. “Catch me if you can.” If she’d done it right, she didn’t weigh enough to set it off, as small as she was and in her leather armor. He’d already been down this hallway with no harm befalling him.
“And you expect me to believe that you would just let me catch you?” Monty turned the corner and stopped at the sight of her.
“Hi,” she smiled at him, stepping back off the dangerous tiles.
“You are stupid,” he shook his head at her and took a step forward.
“Guess so,” she smiled, taking a step back until her back hit the wall.
“I’ve already been down this hallway,” he told her, his smile growing mean.
“Have you?” she leaned back against the wall, then feigned surprise, looking behind her.
“Oh, I see,” he laughed at her look. “You thought that secret door would save you. Did you miss the trigger for it? If I see you reach for it, I’ll remember and then I’ll be within your walls.”
Lacey narrowed her eyes then looked down the hallway to her left.
No longer worried about a trap, Monty lunged forward and broke through the thin flooring that had been floating carefully over a 30’ deep pool of water. His hands scrabbled at the walls, but the weight of his armor pulled him down so quickly that he didn’t manage to grasp the lip of the pool behind him.
A George appeared on the other side of the water trap, 30’ from where Lacey stood. She’d left them with Adam, not daring to get caught with a George on her. Adam stepped out from the maintenance tunnel, his elites crowding out around him as they gazed into the pool. Bubbles came up and the water churned.
Lacey sat at the edge of the pool and watched like it was a couple of koi in a pond. A gauntlet-free hand thrust up out of the water on the goblin’s side. She’d wondered if he’d chuck off the armor in time. The hand pulled his head up, but lost its grip as Adam poked it with the sword Hughe had probably gotten from Monty. She doubted that Monty would see the irony, but Lacey enjoyed it. To be fair, Adam more than poked it. The water grew murky with the blood, but the hand floated to the top. She put her chin in her hand, her elbow on her knee and legs crossed.
Bubbles surfaced, reminding Lacey of a hot tub. She scooted back a bit to avoid the splash of water on her side of the pool. She’d wondered how she would feel, seeing her tormentor suffer and die. He was a game construct, and he would respawn to torture some new person. Some part of her should have shuddered in disgust at her lack of empathy. It didn’t. She was okay with that. The imagery was hidden underneath the cloudy churning water, but they knew when it was done because the dungeon turned blue.
All she could think was that it didn’t have to be this way, which led her to muse on how it could have been better.