Lacey and Colt were jerked awake to red lights and blaring sounds that felt like they shook the very walls. Colt hit his head on the upper bunk hard enough to jostle Lacey. Lacey, unused to a bunk bed, tumbled off the top bunk and ended up sprawled across Colt in a way that sent him to the floor, barely breaking her fall.

“What the hell?” Colt swore a little, which was abnormal enough to get Lacey to wake up completely enough to remember that they were no longer in their shitty apartment.

Lacey slid on the dusty floor, her bare feet getting grimy as she sprinted for the pedestal in the middle of the room. The calming blue lights had been replaced by a throbbing red. The voice that had been so mellow the day before was yelling, “Breech Imminent! Warning! Dungeon Compromised! Warning! Dungeon Wipe Probable! Warning!” It then repeated itself to the rhythm of a pounding on the door to the control room. Runes blinked on the screen, probably repeating what the voice was saying. That was horribly unhelpful, considering that Lacey needed to get into the system to try to help anything.

“Can’t you shut that thing up?” Colt was complaining, taking the time to put his shoes and socks on.

“It’s not a phone alarm, Colt,” Lacey muttered, but she doubted that Colt could hear her over the noise.

When tapping the screen didn’t help, she hit it a little more forcefully and was surprised to find the map came up first. Not that it could be the correct map. This map had levels and levels of rooms. Most of the rooms pulsed in a grimly dark red color. At least going to the map had stopped the loud sirens and yelling that belonged on the Enterprise during red alert.

“Thank you,” Colt growled out, stomping his kicks on and rising to join her, still rubbing his head.

“I didn’t do anything but get to the map,” Lacey huffed, her brow creased with intense confusion. “But it isn’t our map.”

“Is that pounding my head or is it coming from that door?” Colt cocked his head to the side.

“The door,” Lacey said, quickly trying to scroll away from the map and back to some store. “Maybe the goblins are revolting!”

“What?” Colt was never the first to get clear-headed in the morning. He woke up an hour before her most days to have his little quiet time for his mind to wake up. This disturbance was probably a little more than his morning-fogged brain could process. For that matter, it was more of a disturbance than Lacey wanted to deal with without coffee, but she was quicker than Colt for the moment, so she was the one working the controls.

“We armed the goblins, but we didn’t think to arm ourselves,” Lacey did her own swearing, but that wasn’t as unusual as the swear words coming from Colt.

Colt frowned at the door. Lacey swiped to the store and tried to get to the picks before the door came down, but the store had gone crazy, blinking with the warnings that had been on the first page.

“It’s not even letting me buy a mining pick,” Lacey’s voice rising with panic as the door’s banging started to make a splintering sound.

“Aaaargh!” came the war cry of what was definitely not a goblin.

The tableau seemed to freeze for a second, Colt trying to look looming like he and Lacey were facing another bout of snide bullies at school, and Lacey frantically banging on the pedestal to let her into the store, while some guy in medieval leather armor and a sword half as tall as he was crashed through the doorway and into their new version of the shitty apartment. The guy in the armor looked at them and they stared back at him. Then the guy took a long look around their shitty apartment and curled a lip at what he saw.

“No way! Just my luck!” the guy said, and Lacey and Colt could only blink in reply. Lacey had taken up her standard position of poised behind Colt ready to break her toes on that armor as she kicked out around Colt’s massive form. “Nothing? Really?”

Lacey’s mind clicked forward to something that seemed really important, but then raced back away from it as the guy took off his leather helmet and threw it on the ground.

“You speak English?” Colt asked, and Lacey’s mind realized what she should have figured out right away. Everything was in runes.

“Common,” the guy spat out. “And yeah, we all do, ya idjut.”

“Then you know where we are?” Lacey stuttered, trying to forget that he was the only one with a sword.

“Ah man,” and the guy swore in a way that made Lacey sound like Colt. “Noobs! I get stuck with NOOBS!”

“Yeah, okay,” Colt held out his hands and pitched his voice low and calming. “Total noobs. That’s us, so maybe give us a break and explain a little bit? Cause… noobs.”

Lacey felt her hackles rise at Colt’s easy admission of weakness, but then again, she hadn’t put on her shoes, so her kicks weren’t going to do much against this guy except maybe break her own toes. The guy shook his head at them and gave a huge sigh that would have looked good in a melodrama. Lacey was pretty sure she hated the guy, just on principle.

“I’m Hughe,” he sheathed his sword and walked, like he owned the place, to sit at a chair at Lacey and Colt’s table. “You got ale, at least?”

Hughe looked like he was maybe fifteen and Lacey, who had edged behind Colt as Hughe had walked across the room, scowled at him like she could shame him.

“Nothing here to steal, man,” Colt was saying placatingly, but Lacey was quick to forget that there was a sword in that sheath. “We’ve got maybe a lump of coal between us.”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Coal?” the guy heavy sighed again like it was his favorite thing to do. “Figures.”

“What the hell, asshole?” Lacey stormed around Colt to point a crazy finger at Hughe. “You barge in here to our shitty apartment, wake us up out of a dead sleep, break our door, demand ale or something and you have the nerve to curse your luck?”

“You were sleeping?” that was what the guy got out of that rant.

“Wait, wait,” Colt put a hand on Lacey’s shoulder and still held out his other hand to Hughe. “Let’s just figure stuff out, right?”

“What universe are you guys from that you don’t know shit about anything?” Hughe asked, looking seriously befuddled at their reactions.

“Uh,” Colt searched his brain. It wasn’t like their universe name was something they got asked a lot. “We’re from Earth in the Milky Way Galaxy.”

“You don’t even know the name of your universe?” Hughe gave another sigh. “How did you get this gig? Dungeon masters are normally a little more savvy, you know?”

“No, we don’t know,” Lacey spat at the kid. “We just got here yesterday!”

“Dang!” and the kid laughed in a way that had Lacey lunging at him. Colt grabbed Lacey around the waist in a practiced moved that came from muscle memory. “Sorry. Sorry,” he held up his hands, but he did not sound sorry at all. He was still laughing. A lot. He sounded smug and annoying to a still spitting Lacey. “First, you did not get here yesterday. Your dungeon was huge! The only real problem with it was that it didn’t have any damn treasure!”

“A dozen rooms is huge?” Colt asked, but Lacey remembered the new map. There had been a lot more rooms than that on the huge map Lacey had seen that morning.

“I’ve been clearing out rooms for a week, dude,” Hughe said through a chuckle. “What did you do, set it on automatic?”

“We seem to be speaking the same language, but you aren’t making a lot of sense,” Colt admitted, setting Lacey down, but keeping an arm between her and the new guy. “Let’s start over, shall we? My name is Colt and this is Lacey. We got here yesterday afternoon and used that little pedestal to create a few rooms, filled them with a few goblins and worms and stuff. Then we ate a few meat pies and crashed.”

“The next thing we know, alarms are blaring and you’re busting through our door like you’ve got a right to terrorize anybody just because you have the fancy sword and, and,” Lacey sputtered out.

“Oh, wow,” Hughe looked at the two of them like his girlfriend had just told him she was pregnant on the day he was breaking up with her. “That sucks.”

“That’s it? That sucks? That’s all you have to say to us?” Lacey boggled at him as Colt just gaped a bit open-mouthed.

“Suck less?” the kid offered, and Colt automatically grabbed Lacey again.

“Look,” Hughe waved his palms at them like he hadn’t just insulted them. “I’m just here for the dungeon. I found it, so I own it, more or less, but it’s really useless unless you two can get it together. I don’t know how you turned on the automatic sleep mode, but if I was you, I’d figure it out so it doesn’t happen again. I’m a pretty nice guy, but others would have just killed you both already and cut their losses.”

Lacey’s gut clenched at that, and Colt sent her a look. Hughe could have just killed them. Still could. “So, why haven’t you killed us already?”

“I’m just a shmuck, okay?” Hughe admitted. “When I stumbled on a new dungeon, I thought I’d hit the motherlode. I didn’t realize I was breaking into the control room. I just thought the goblins had to have a treasure room somewhere and when I finally found the secret door to here, I got excited.”

“And broke down our door,” Lacey snarked.

“Well, yeah,” he replied like it was the only obvious thing to do. “I’m an adventurer. That’s what we do. Dungeons are our bread and butter.”

Colt’s stomach growled at the mention of food.

“Law says the dungeon’s mine, so I can set the fees for entry, and I have first run at it when it levels up,” Hughe shrugged. “The challenge was okay, but there’s no treasure. I’d be lucky to get 5 copper for an entry fee and that would only be for adventurers straight out of the recycler to just come in and slaughter for experience. Didn’t you get some kind of tutorial or something?”

“Tutorial?” Lacey scoffed, rolling her eyes to the ceiling and counting to ten.

“All we got was a screen of runes,” Colt admitted, edging himself in front of Lacey and taking a step toward the table. “We didn’t understand it at all. We were lucky to make a few goblins.”

“Whew, that’s rough,” Hughe blew out another breath and seemed to take a moment to think, something that didn’t look like a common occurrence for the boy. “I mean, I could help you out a bit, but it’s not normal. I’m supposed to be your adversary, not helping out.”

“An explanation couldn’t hurt, right?” Colt proffered.

“You got a tutorial, right?” Lacey interrupted, stepping around a cautious Colt to sit down on the table near where Hughe sat. Hughe leaned back, but didn’t look disturbed by Lacey’s looming tactic.

“Of course,” Hughe answered her glibly.

“Then help us through our tutorial and maybe we can find that treasure you thought you’d find,” Lacey smiled at Hughe in a way that made Colt gulp.

“Really?” Hughe leaned forward, rubbing his hands together, oblivious of the predatory look on Lacey’s face. “I hadn’t thought of that. I mean, if you learn how to make treasure, that could make all of this worth it.”

“Sure,” Colt said carefully, nudging Lacey’s sharklike focus off center enough to lessen the threat she didn’t pose to the kid. “I’m sure we could help each other out, right Lacey?”

“Yeah,” Lacey nodded, letting Colt nudge her. “I mean, maybe all the dungeon owning adventurers do it and they just don’t admit it.”

“You think?” Hughe began to look hopeful, and Lacey might have felt guilty if he hadn’t just been casually talking about killing them.

“Oh, yeah,” Colt nodded.

“Huh,” Hughe laughed, standing up and approaching Colt. “And here my mentor said that dungeons could be tricky things to take over. This isn’t so bad. I guess he just hadn’t run into a baby dungeon like yours, right?”

Lacey swallowed back an almost overwhelming urge to smack the kid. There would be time.

“Can you read the runes on the pedestal?” Lacey waved her hand over the pedestal in invitation instead.

“You’re going to let me look at it?” Hughe asked. “Wow. The guys back at the guild will never believe this!”

Lacey contemplated what it might take to steal the guy’s sword and slit his throat with it. That allowed her to smile and nod like the vapid person Hughe acted like she was.

“I wouldn’t tell the guys back at the guild,” Colt warned Hughe, a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “They might want to steal your dungeon.”

“Yeah,” Lacey nodded, trying for a sage look and probably pulling off a snide one. “Let’s get up to full force before we let anyone in on the deal.”

“Oh yeah,” Hughe rubbed his palms together with a leer.

“Can you read it?” Colt nudged the boy to the pedestal.

“What setting do you have the language on anyway?” Hughe frowned. “This isn’t common. I can’t read it, but there should be a language control.”

Lacey rolled her eyes and eyed Hughe’s sword. It just had to be easier to kill the kid themselves than hold his hand through helping them out. As her eyes rolled, they landed back on the splintered door that Hughe had broken through. Was that someone back there? Did Hughe have backup?

“Maybe I can’t read it because I’m not a dungeon master, but that isn’t any language I’ve ever seen before,” Hughe shook his head, his hand going toward his sword as he finally noticed that he’d let his back be exposed to two combatants. “I’m not sure about this. If you can’t even conjure up some treasure…”