There were new screens, but Lacey couldn’t read any of them. She managed to make a few new goblins that she refused to name. They were slightly larger than Eve’s generation had been. Lacey basically just remade all the ones she’d made before. There were differences, of course, and they were ones that Lacey didn’t understand. The map was huge now with rooms that stretched all the way to the surface. The ventilations shaft seemed to be at the center of most of the rooms. Turning all the rooms from a grayish-red to a green that then faded away cost an arm and a leg, but that was the least of their worries.
“I brought home take-out,” Colt announced as he brought a pot of what could only be stew into the control room hours later.
“Good?” Lacey looked at the pot with skepticism.
“Just in case we couldn’t afford a few meat pockets,” Colt told her, pulling a couple of spoons and bowls out of a crude pack that he’d slung over his shoulder. “I tasted it on the way. It isn’t horrible.”
“We’re not broke,” Lacey told him, her stomach urging her to the table to try the cold stew. Colt spooned out equal servings to each of them and she sniffed at it. “I could order up that boar if you want.”
“Really?” Colt looked at her with puppy-dog eyes. “I mean, I noticed that you’d put out a few new goblins and they seem to be cleaning up, so I figured we were broke.”
“I don’t know what happened, but we’ve got more than ten times what we had before,” Lacey admitted.
“I’d love some meat pies, but I feel like I could eat a whole roasted boar on my own,” Colt rubbed his stomach and swept aside the stew to make room on the table.
“I’m starving too,” Lacey darted back to the display and splurged on two whole boars, one of which she had Colt take out to the new goblins.
“This thing is huge!” Colt nearly drooled over the 3’ long and 2’ high roasted boar that took up half the table. “The goblins out there are happy with theirs but I’m glad we’re eating in our own room. Their table manners leave a lot to be desired.”
“I’ll bet,” Lacey chuckled and pulled off a chunk of meat near the belly.
“I have some theories about what happened,” Colt said after swallowing a bite. His mother would have been dismayed at him eating with his hands, but he was conscientious enough to finish his bite of food before talking. “Did you make any other headway with the display?”
“Not a lot,” Lacey said after a good swallow of her own. “No new language settings that I could find, but I managed to restore the dungeon to what we had before we went to sleep.”
“Sleep,” Colt nodded, wiping a bit of fat off his chin. “I think it was a long sleep. Like Rip Van Winkle long.”
“What do you mean?” Lacey asked, a little surprised by how much she wanted to eat.
“There are signs of generations of goblins in those caves,” Colt told her. “I can take you to a cave where they drew on the walls. Eve died out long before our knight errant showed up.”
“Cave paintings?” Lacey marveled. “How long have we been asleep?”
“I couldn’t tell you for sure,” Colt replied, “but there have been at least four new generations of goblins since Eve died. She’s revered as the mother of goblins, and we are also on the cave walls. Turns out Eve gave specific instructions that our cave be kept up or the gods, that’s us,” he paused to point at the two of them, “would come awake and slaughter them all.”
“They didn’t do their jobs all that well,” Lacey waved a hand at the dusty floor.
“Like all societies that survive past the latest godly interference, the goblins got a bit lax, but,” and Colt held up a finger, “they remained faithful to their tithing! Which is why we might have that hefty balance of credits. Everything they dug out while creating their warren was deposited into the pedestal.”
“That might have been expediency more than faithfulness,” Lacey gave a little laugh with her raised eyebrow. “Where else were they going to put it? They didn’t have access to the surface.”
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“That would be incorrect, but I think they only recently broke through to the surface, so you may be right about that,” Colt admitted, tearing off another chunk of meat from a shank of the pig. “In any case, it must have worked out for us since we now have a bunch of credits to rebuild.”
“I used a bunch of credits to turn the rooms we have from throbbing red to green on the map so that they were restored,” Lacey took her own second huge chunk of meat, a little unnerved by how hungry she was. “I’m hungry enough to have been asleep for years.”
“That explains it,” Colt snapped his fingers, fumbling it a bit because his hands were greasy. “I didn’t explore far, but every once in a while, I’d hit a place I couldn’t enter but it would clear later. The water cavern was one of them.”
“It was the most expensive, so I cleared it last to make sure I had enough for the rest first,” Lacey told him. “Speaking of water, this pork is salty enough to have me wanting to take a walk myself.”
“I haven’t been in the water cavern yet,” Colt said. “We should go together. It’s just below the control center, right?”
“Yeah,” Lacey wiped her hands on her pants, which were slightly less soiled with gruesomeness than her shirt was.
“Mom would have made us wash up before,” Colt murmured softly as they stood.
“Oh, Colt,” Lacey patted his shoulder as they walked to a trap door that hadn’t been found by Hughe.
“Do you think she’s still alive?” Colt asked and Lacey could tell that he did it reluctantly, like his heart would break if he didn’t talk about it.
Lacey didn’t have an answer, so she let him talk as they walked down a spiral stairway carved into the stone floor.
“Maybe time runs differently here,” he mused morbidly.
“We don’t know different,” Lacey nodded, following close behind him.
“So, we can pretend that it’s so,” he lifted his chin. It was something they did when life seemed just a bit too bleak for comfort. “I figure time stood still for her too and she’s getting off work and home fixing dinner. What do you think she made?”
“Spaghetti with that meat sauce,” Lacey answered, letting the memory form even though they were just making shit up. “The kind that took all day to simmer.”
“Yeah,” he got into it, as the stairs went down quite a ways. “She started it this morning and it’s filled the whole house with garlic and tomatoes smells. Now that she’s home, she’s started the garlic bread because she knows we’ll want to celebrate the win at the escape room.”
“And there’s a cheesecake in the fridge,” Lacey could practically smell the cheesy bread as she bumped into Colt’s back. “What?”
“That,” Colt said, leaning out of the way so that Lacey could see.
The cavern had grown from the picture on the screen upstairs. It wasn’t a 30’ by 60’ room with a little stream running through it. It had become a monstrous cavern big enough to house the Superbowl, stadium included. The river that ran through it cascaded into the cavern in falls that rushed at a few spots and sprinkled down near the edges. The cavern was split down the center by a river 10’ wide that had two stone bridges that crossed it at convenient spots. Small pools had been added to the sides of the river where sluices had been engineered to allow for water to be diverted into side pools for bathing or cleaning or whatever.
“The goblins did that?” Lacey asked, her voice barely carrying over the roar of the water.
“They can be clever, when motivated,” Colt chuckled.
“I don’t care how it happened,” Lacey pushed past him and darted for the nearest side pool yelling behind her as she ran. “I want to clean up!”
Lacey didn’t even take her clothes off for it as she ran to a pool and played around with the sluices until she and Colt figured them out together. When one side was open, a bit of water (cold water) poured into the pool, filling it so that it was about waist high on Lacey. When both sides were open, water rinsed through, taking all the nasty stuff on their clothing with it. Lacey played in the water, as much to cheer up Colt as a real playfulness.
They were joined by goblins at one point, but Lacey refused to get attached. Colt and Lacey rinsed themselves off the best they could with just water. It might not have been enough for Colt’s mom, but it was enough for them. It would have to be considering their situation.
“There are some new menu items on the screen,” Lacey laid back in the pool of water and tried to imagine that it was a hot tub. “I didn’t want to go into them very far until you were back. We should decide new stuff together. You should know that we now have leather armor, swords, boots, and leather pouches in the store. They aren’t so expensive that we couldn’t arm the goblins, but it would be a chunk of change if we want to repopulate all the way to the levels they were at before Hughe decimated them. I just thought we’d talk it through before I made that kind of decision.”
“Makes sense,” Colt nodded. “How much of our new riches would it take to get us fully armed and armored on just the goblins?”
“Over three fourths of our credits,” Lacey told him, and he flinched. “And that’s just for the goblins. I don’t know about arming the bugs and bats, but they were part of the ecosystem that survived all those years underground. If we want to restore just their numbers, we’re going to be broke again.”
“That’s maybe a hundred years’ worth of mining,” he rubbed at a spot of dark red on his shirt. “We won’t get that back if we get attacked again.”
“That’s why I haven’t done it yet. I don’t think that’s an if,” Lacey twisted her mouth. “I think it’s a when.”
“Agreed,” Colt nodded. “Now that we have access to the surface, the surface has access to us. At least Hughe knows where we are, and we can’t just pick up and leave.”
“Why not?” Lacey stood up straighter, wringing water from her unruly mop and trying to run her fingers through it.
“Maybe it’ll change once dawn comes, but I found the opening to the surface, and it’s sealed up,” Colt told her, heaving himself out of the water to sit on the edge and shake out his own hair.