“Sealed up how?” Lacey asked.

“Same as the rooms you hadn’t turned back on yet,” Colt shrugged, water dripping from his shoulders. “I could look out, but I couldn’t get out.”

Lacey smacked her palm on the surface of the water. Lacey and Colt took turns using the pools to do other necessary things, the sluices being very handy for even private concerns. At least she’d gotten some form of her indoor outhouse. She shook her head as she realized that what had seemed so important yesterday had become eclipsed by today’s issues. Like how to keep a town of adventurers out of their dungeon long enough to recover from Hughe. Considering that Hughe had thought of himself as a nobody in such a town, they needed to be able to build something that was not only self-sustaining, but that could withstand adventurers that were better than Hughe.

“Wait,” Lacey called to where Colt had his back to her for her to do her private stuff. The sluice had already carried away any evidence of their perfectly human bodily functions. “Was it light out?”

“Yeah,” Colt frowned for a moment, but smiled as realization hit, turning to face her. “Yeah! So, we have at least a whole night to prepare. It was bright, really bright, but that could have been because the caves are so dark.”

“At least we have the night though,” Lacey grabbed onto that, still wringing water out of almost clean clothes.

“But is that one night? Or a hundred years of nights?” Colt pondered out loud. “What if the dungeon went into fast forward last night? That could make more sense than the idea that we slept for a hundred years.”

“I don’t think we’d be that lucky again,” Lacey shook her head. “Besides, Hughe said he’d been working to clear the dungeon for a week, and we slept through that.”

“It was worth a thought,” Colt said, as they walked shoulder to shoulder back to the spiral stairs.

“Break time’s over,” Lacey agreed with his unspoken nudge to return to work. They took the stairs with Lacey in front this time. “But if I find a change of clothes that didn’t belong to an adventurer twice my size in that store, I’m buying it.”

“How are you going to know what size it is?” Colt teased her. Hughe’s clothing had been too small for Colt and too large for Lacey.

“I’ll just have to buy some to find out,” she answered, but thought better of it as she was still dripping. “But do you think we could go warm ourselves by one of the goblin fires? I don’t want to know if the tablet here is waterproof.”

“You think they have a fire started?” Colt asked, heading for the door to the goblins.

“I’m hoping,” Lacey said through shivering teeth.

The remade goblins were as industrious as the previous ones, if not a little more so. Not only did they have a fire going, but they’d also hung up some of the extra meat from the boar to smoke. It was such a good idea that Colt went back to fetch what was left of their boar to give to the goblins. They’d been hungry, but the boar had been more than even ten goblins could eat at one sitting. They sat at the fire, Lacey trying to ignore the fact that at least one of the girl goblins reminded her of Eve.

Lacey couldn’t help but think that she and Colt must look pretty pitiful for gods, her shivering and not making eye contact while Colt brooded as he watched the flames. It didn’t take them long to warm up, but in that time, the goblins had put the room to rights and almost paired off in groups to start their mining right back up again, one partner picking away at walls while the other lugged the buckets back and forth to the control room. It made Lacey feel guilty to just sit there while the goblins worked diligently at something that would be almost worthless by morning.

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“Do you think if we gave them swords that they’d do something other than mining?” Colt’s voice broke the silence. Colt hadn’t put the sword down since they’d taken it off of Hughe, but now he stared at it contemplatively.

“I can buy a few more swords at least,” Lacey told him, shrugging toward a goblin. “Give it a shot.”

“Sure,” Colt nodded, but she could see that he didn’t want to give up what he considered his sword now.

“Fine,” Lacey used Colt’s reluctance as an excuse to get up and moving again. “I’m dry enough. Let’s go make some swords.”

“And clothes?” Colt looked hopeful.

“Hopefully ones that can fit us too,” Lacey smiled encouragingly.

They had to buy a dozen sets of clothing to get a size that fit each of them. The rest went to grateful goblins. They did the same with the leather armor and some boots. The swords that came out of the pedestal weren’t the same quality as the one Hughe had dropped, but the goblins didn’t know the difference. Once armed and armored, the goblins changed what they did. Instead of the industrious workers they’d been before, the goblins began to spar with each other, play a game of dice and generally eat more than they did only moments before being armed.

Lacey popped out a dozen extra goblins to take up the chores that the fighting goblins had left behind. This created a hierarchy that annoyed Colt, but even after he took the swords away from the fighter goblins, they were stuck in those roles. It seemed that once they upgraded, the goblins didn’t go back to a lower social status.

“It’s just so frustrating!” Lacey banged her head on the pedestal in frustration, having forgotten her fear of being eaten by the space that took in coal and debris from the worker goblins. “Nothing I do seems to be right.”

“Don’t think of it like that, Lace,” Colt tried to console her while wrestling a sword away from another goblin who had come into the control room to make demands for food. The fighters had gobbled up the food, their stomachs extending out of their previously well-fitting armor. “It’s just that it’s a learning curve is all.”

“I’m not learning fast enough,” she thumped her head over and over. “Every mistake sets us back! We have to be ready for invaders by morning. How did Adam and Eve make all this work?”

“We gave Eve a broom?” Colt shrugged, shooing the now sulking goblin out of the room and placing its sword on the table.

Lacey looked up hopefully.

“That and they grew naturally over a century or so?” he added, which had her slumping dramatically over the pedestal.

“This pedestal is stupid!” Lacey looked down at a screen she hadn’t seen before. There was a picture of a female goblin that looked like an older version of Eve and one of Adam. Beside each was a cost. Lacey had gotten a feel for the money notation system in that she hadn’t figured out exact numbers, but if one of the quadrants of the overall numbers was missing, the price was relatively low with the upper right quadrant being the single digits. The upper left quadrant denoted hundreds of credits. The lower right quadrant denoted thousands and the lower left quadrant denoted tens of thousands. The cost was in what Lacey thought was the low hundreds, so Lacey took a chance and hit Eve’s face.

“Minion resurrected,” the pedestal voice intoned as Eve materialized.

“No way!” Lacey breathed out, running to hug Eve.

“Eve!” Colt rushed to the older goblin to pat her on the back.

“Greetings Masters!” Eve said with a toothy smile.

“Are the rest of them in there too?” Colt asked, rushing back to the pedestal and hitting the picture of Adam, who materialized next to Eve. The two goblins gibbered to each other excitedly, then turned to see a fighter goblin rush into the control room with a surly look on its face. It was one of the girl goblins that Colt had already taken a sword from for being too obnoxious. It was like the female goblins were just a tad more nasty than the male ones that were made into fighters.

“I only saw Adam and Eve,” Lacey called out over the growls that were coming from Eve and the new fighter-type goblin.

“I pushed Adam, and he showed up, but there’s nothing else here,” Colt complained. “We named them. Could that be the difference?”

The fighter girl goblin rushed at Eve. Eve snarled angrily, as did Adam beside her. They might have been smaller, but they weren’t pushovers. Fighter goblin dashed forward, but Eve smacked her across the face with a rake of long nasty nails. Adam kicked out at the new goblin, but she put out an arm into his stomach and he sprawled back by the table, swiping at Eve with her other hand. Eve went skidding backward but stayed on her feet and braced.

“Quick,” Lacey called to Colt, “give Eve a sword!”

“What if she turns into a jerk like the other fighter types?” Colt paused, disastrously.