“What do we do first?” Colt asked her. He’d quickly moved the Aztec Tomb into a place right beside the control room so that she could simply cross the hallway to join him. “Open the treasure chest or close the dungeon?”

“Close the dungeon,” Lacey answered him, collapsing on the lower bunk and toeing off her boots.

“But what if there’s a credit or coupon for closing the dungeon in there?” he fretted. Now that it was said and done, he was wired with possibilities.

“Close the dungeon, Colt,” Lacey told him, folding an arm over her eyes. She, on the other hand, was exhausted and just wanted to sleep in a comfortable bed for a few days. Her thighs still throbbed.

“Right,” he said, and within moments, the dungeon turned a new color; yellow. The color was so subtle that it was almost hard to see that there was any color to it at all. “We are now closed for 7 full days and nights. I feel like we just bought a cruise or something.”

“It was that expensive?” Lacey groaned out, moving her arm to squint at Colt.

“A cheapie cruise, but yeah,” Colt waggled his hand. “Then again, if we waited for last minute deals, a goblin cost as much as a really cheap cruise.”

“Not that we’d know,” Lacey levered herself up to a sitting position. Sleep was not in her immediate future with Colt this wired.

“True, but it doesn’t hurt to look,” he temporized.

“You look up cruise prices in your spare time?” Lacey cocked her head at him.

“Maybe,” he muttered, like he was admitting to some sketchy sexual kink to his grandmother. “Anyway. That’s not important, but this baby is definitely important! Look at how big it is!”

The chest that stood in the middle of the room was bigger than their table. It shimmered like someone had dipped it in glow-stick neon gold coloring. It gave Lacey a headache. Good things in her life were oftentimes not so good. She didn’t jump around on Christmas mornings because her dad was sleeping in with whomever he’d brought home from whatever Christmas Eve party he’d attended. Holidays, in general, were times that she was forced to stay home because they were family ordeals, and yet both she and her father resented the time they were forced to spend pretending to be happy to celebrate the holidays together.

It had all gotten a little better once she’d moved out and she and Colt had celebrated with his family, but those childhood memories were more ingrained in her. So much so that she still tended to flinch at supposedly “good” stuff. Colt made up for it by being even more excited. Lacey tried to summon up some surface excitement to cover the dread that settled like a pit in her stomach.

“Open the chest already,” she turned on a smile for him that he pretended to believe.

“Open it with me,” he leapt like a kid to her side to pull her up off the bed and over to the chest.

They each took a corner of the chest, and Lacey finally gave a real smile, charmed by his exuberance. She couldn’t help it, and he knew it. He gave her a wink. Did he know? Of course, he did. With a great heave, they flipped open the top of it and stared like a couple of kids were supposed to be at Christmas.

Streamers and confetti flew from the chest like it had been shot out of a cannon at a festival. There were booms and fanfare music that came from nowhere. The lights dimmed briefly, reminding Lacey of when they’d won the escape room tournament that had started it all. “Congratulations Dungeon Masters” hung and flashed in the air above the chest in bright neon fuchsia.

Lacey laughed. She couldn’t help it. Colt dipped to the floor as the lights in the control room took on the strobing effect of a rave. When he came up, he had a neon party hat and a plastic horn blower. Lacey looked around on the ground and found herself a pair of neon glasses and a noisemaker that squiggled out a paper worm when she blew on it. Inside the chest, right on top, was a pizza box directly from Metro Pizza, their favorite pizzeria in Vegas.

“No way!” Colt dropped to his knees and opened the pizza box. His eyes closed in bliss as he breathed in the aroma of garlic, pepperoni, and fresh roasted tomatoes.

Lacey reached around him to grab a piece, amazed that the stuff was piping hot like they’d just served it to the table. Colt snagged a piece and took a bite with a whimper of joy. There were two bottles of Colt’s favorite beer and a perfectly chilled sixpack of soda in an honest-to-god ice bucket with real live ice in it. If they’d been the champagne types, Lacey was sure that and caviar would have been in the chest. This was their version of champagne and caviar.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Okay, this was worth staying awake for,” Lacey grinned at Colt, who had folded over two pieces of pizza and was prying off the cap of his beer on the side of the chest.

“Hell yeah it was,” he grinned back at her. He tossed her a wad of fabric, then pulled another over his head, stretching it over the leather armor they had yet to take off.

The fabric was a pair of T-shirts that said on them, “My best friend got isekaied to a game world and all I got was this stupid dungeon.”

Lacey shook her head at the t-shirt and took the time to shuck off her armor before putting her t-shirt on.

“Too soon?” Colt teased her, waving a few of the goblins into the room.

“A little,” Lacey admitted, pulling out the box of pizza only to find another one beneath it. She took the box to the table and set it down before going back for another one. When she grabbed 2 boxes, another popped up like it was on a spring.

“There’s more?” Colt said, poking his head over her shoulder to gaze into the chest.

“A lot more,” she answered and slid off another ten pizza boxes.

“No way!” Colt took the boxes from her and held them over his head, shouting, “Pizza party for everybody!!!”

Goblins cheered, even though they couldn’t know what pizza was. Pizza boxes were popped open and sodas passed around. The ice bucket also replenished itself of sodas, though the beer had been limited to the two, Colt snagging the second one before Adam could get it. That was fine with Lacey as she preferred the soda anyway.

“If there’s cake and ice cream at the bottom of that chest, I’ve officially died and gone to heaven,” Lacey swore, laughing at Ginger’s face as she clucked at the expanding mess that was being created by goblins who lived up to their names and gobbled the pizza like they were hobbits who had been denied second breakfast for weeks.

“I’d need there to be Felicia Day jumping out of the cake to think I’d gone to heaven, but I’ll settle for the cake and ice cream,” Colt gave Lacey a wolfish grin complete with a waggle of his eyebrows.

“Is it too late to order up Jensen and Jared?” Lacey smacked her forehead.

“I get dibs on Felicia first,” Colt teased her. “I’ll take the Impala, though.”

Goblins danced. Gossowaries did too, though that one was a little disturbing. Lacey wandered down into the water cavern to find that most of the dungeon residents were partying in some way or another, with only the elites and Ginger doing their celebrating in the control room with Lacey and Colt. There had been enough pizza to have the boxes almost make another flooring for most of the cave, with some of them floating like little cardboard boats down the river. The strobing lights were accompanied by louder music in the larger cave. Having done her business, Lacey made her way past a dozen of her newest creations who were cavorting on the stairs, picking at odd pieces of shining confetti.

The tiny creatures were her newest spies. They had little shrew bodies with tiny black bird wings and the beak of a crow. She had upped their venomous properties by including it in their little claws that held just a tiny bit of blowfish poison. While they were as small as her thumb, they would keep down the increasing insect activity that had infested the caves since the goblins had become a little messy. She had to keep them away from the worms though. Because of their crow-like attributes, they liked to take shiny bits back to their nests, making them perfect for rooting gems out of loose soil or adventurer pockets.

“Lacey!” Colt called out, a dart in one hand and a beer bottle in the other. “I found a dartboard in there. Come play a round.”

“If that’s your second beer, I’ll pass,” Lacey waved him off. Colt got better at darts after his second beer and didn’t get worse until after his fifth.

“Ginger won’t play, and Adam gave up after Eve glared at him,” Colt gave Lacey what was supposed to be a charming smile.

“Ginger not play because Colt try to play while Ginger still trying to hang it up,” Ginger called out tartly over the music. “And Colt drinking something that smell suspiciously like moonshine.”

“I don’t know if it’s my second beer or not, but I’m pretty sure that the bottle keeps refilling itself, but only when I’m holding it,” Colt stared down into an almost full bottle like it was a textbook that needed reading before the midterm in the morning. “You want to try it?”

“No thanks, Colt,” Lacey laughed.

“No, really, look,” and he grinned at her and set the bottle on the ground. “Go ahead and reach for it Adam.”

Adam checked with Eve who gave the bottle stink-eye, but not Adam. As soon as Adam reached for the beer, the bottle was instantly empty. Colt went to pick it up and as soon as it left the ground, it was almost full again. Was it any more amazing than the pizza boxes that made the chest into an ever-full pez dispenser or the ice bucket with the endless soda and ever-frozen ice? To Colt, it probably was, but he’d regret not keeping track of his consumption when morning came.

“Did you get to the bottom of the chest yet?” Lacey tried to distract Colt.

“Is there a bottom to it?” Colt spread his arms wide and laughed.

“There must be, right?” Lacey mused soft enough that Colt couldn’t hear her. She didn’t want to be a wet blanket. The soda was just as much of a balm to her as the beer was to him, but she wasn’t going to have a hangover in the morning.

“Oh, I found this too,” Colt waved a small booklet at her until she took it.

“What is it? A mini-sketch book that tells me to get back to work?” she joked, but the weight that normally resided in her chest was lessened for the night, so it sounded more joke-like than normal Lacey had heard from herself.

“It’s a coupon book,” Colt set his chin on one of her shoulders and draped an arm around her other one.

“This is for a feather bed upgrade,” Lacey leafed through the book with her mouth open. “And a private suite?”

“There are a few in the back for a home visit and three free upgrades,” he said softly, and she turned to stare at him. “Yeah, we get to go home.”

“Home,” she whispered, and her hands shook.

“Not for good, but yeah,” Colt kissed her cheek. “For a person who supposedly didn’t give a shit about home, you sound a little breathless.”