Eve and the fighter goblin almost disappeared into a snarling whirl of goblin wrestling. Lacey wracked her brain for something to summon from the pedestal that could help Eve, but it was all happening so quickly that she barely managed to navigate to the store before things got worse. Adam grabbed a sword from the table and dove into the fight while Colt stared on in helpless dismay.

“Stop!” Colt yelled, but they didn’t listen. So much for them being gods.

Even as the girl fighter goblin was ripping out Eve’s throat with her teeth, Adam was plunging the sword deep into the girl goblin’s back. What they ended up with was a pile of goblin mess on the floor.

“Eve,” Colt whispered out, then before Lacey could say anything, he was jumping forward and stabbing the corpse of the girl fighter goblin over and over.

Adam was holding a dead Eve in his arms and looking at Lacey with those hopeful eyes that she remembered. Lacey looked down at her display, but the screen was gone. She’d gone back to the store. She had no idea how she’d gotten there to begin with except that she was banging her head on the pedestal and cursing. Lacey, at a loss of what else to do, banged her head on the pedestal and swore every curse she knew. When she looked up, it was still the store.

“Bring her back!” Colt had finally looked back up and was panting. He looked a bit like a madman. The stress of it all had worn through his jovial masks to bubble up to the surface.

“I’m trying, Colt, I swear!” Lacey yelled back, banging her head on the pedestal again. “It’s this useless pedestal! It’s like it hates me, I swear.”

“You got there before!” Colt was ranting, but Lacey didn’t blame him for it.

“You want me to summon a broom, I can do that, but Eve was a fluke,” Lacey yelled back at him, smacking the pedestal as hard as she dared.

The screen flicked to Eve’s face and Lacey smacked the picture so quickly, the thing would have cracked if it had been the least bit delicate. As the dead Eve dissolved, a new Eve took her place in the same place as all the summoned critters materialized. Adam looked down at his empty arms with a whimper until Eve’s voice cut the air.

“Greetings Masters!”

Adam looked up with hopeful beady eyes and rushed to Eve, who happily gibbered at him and patted him on the head.

“You did it,” Colt whispered over them, his temper cooled as quickly as it had lit.

“I got lucky,” Lacey murmured back, but she was staring at a blank screen and trying to figure out how it had worked. Luck wasn’t going to serve them here. She needed something solid and consistent, not capricious like luck could be.

“I’ll take it,” Colt smiled at Eve and Adam, even as he moved himself between them and the door, where other goblins were poking in. Only Colt, with a sword, wearing leather armor, stood between our favorite goblins and the pack behind them. “Anyone touches my buddies and I’m going to lop off heads!” he said to the crowd coming in.

“Language settings,” Lacey called out and smacked the display. A new display appeared, and Lacey held her breath, trying to decipher some of the symbols on the page. She scrolled down, over, and around until she finally found a single line in a language she could read. With a vicious poke, she chose the line that said, “English, common.”

“Language settings updated,” the voice intoned. “Device locked.”

“Locked?” Lacey snarled at it, quickly darting to another page only to find that the screens had not suddenly been switched over to something she could read. They were still in runes. She pounded her fists on the pedestal and screamed at it in frustration, “How are you still locked? Unlock! Unlock before the dungeon gets a full wipe again, you stupid piece of shit!!”

“Unlock requires password,” the voice answered her dispassionately.

“Password?!” Lacey screeched out, her own temper erupting. “How could I have a password if I never set a password to begin with?”

“Would you like to reset your password?” the voice asked.

“Yes!!” Lacey and Colt said together. Colt had herded the other goblins out the door and closed it with a stern look. It turned out he could command the goblins if they weren’t enraged. Luckily, the splintered door had been repaired when Lacey had reset the rooms from that dull red to green. While the reset of the rooms had repaired most of the damage, the colony still had a lot of stuff to clean up from Hughe’s destructive tendencies.

“Password reset sent to your dmail box,” the voice answered.

“What dmail?” Lacey asked, but the voice had gone silent. Lacey deflated, but not because her temper had eased. Her temper tended to last for days and settle in grudges that could last decades. Lacey’s temper was still simmering helplessly swirling a cocktail of mind-numbing chemicals into her brain in a way that made it impossible to think clearly.

“Broom?” Eve asked, tsking at the dust on the floor. Lacey wasn’t sure how long she’d stood there in the chemical storm of her temper, but Eve’s hopeful face had her taking a really deep breath.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Lacey pulled up the store and ordered a broom. Colt took it from where it hovered over the display, but before he could offer it to the little goblin, she snatched it out of his hands and began sweeping the room, Adam chucklingly following her directions as she pointed to a wall and gibbered at him.

“Pick?” Adam asked, his green hand held out patiently.

Colt ordered up the pick and handed it to the goblin who went to a wall and started to chip away at it. All the while, Adam and Eve were gibbering to each other like they had the world to catch up on. Lacey stared too long at them, then glared down at the pedestal.

“You banged on it and asked,” Colt told her, shooing out another couple of nosy goblins who had poked their way in through the stairwell to the river room. “Try that again.”

“Dmail,” Lacey demanded, thinking it an idiotically simplistic version of what she’d done.

Colt rushed to another of their doors to close them as well.

“It worked, but the dmail is also requiring a password,” Lacey banged her head against the screen again, but with less force than before.

“Reset it?” Colt suggested.

Lacey tried. It took a total of 14 resets before the system finally realized that Lacey and Colt were actually authorized to reset and access the system. Dmail required a fingerprint, which didn’t match the records. The fingerprint required the last four digits of her universal ID number, which no one in the dungeon had. The universal ID could be obtained from the system with a DNA sample and proof of dungeon location. The DNA sample could only be reset with authorization from current dungeon master of record of the dungeon, which could only be proved by providing a proof of previous dungeon master’s demise in the form of dead DNA. Without proof of previous dungeon master’s demise, one had to appeal to the court of miseries (not the actual name) for an exception. The court was closed indefinitely due to plague but was available by remote in the case of emergencies. Accessing the emergency screen for court was only available once a person signed into another system access portal, which luckily was accepting new accounts that only had to be proved by following a link in the dmail. That led to an alternate reset option which required the blood samples of two creatures created by the current dungeon master, an act that could only be accomplished by a dungeon master with emergency access to pedestal services upon the death of previous dungeon master. They took the blood from what was left of the fight between Eve and the fighter goblin and gently wrung out a strip of cloth off of the goblin fighter for each of them into the hazy acceptance portal.

“Emergency unlock scheduled two moons from the next dawn or ten business days,” the voice told them.

“Exception requested,” Lacey tried the key word that had gotten them through the last four reset stumbles.

“Exception denied,” the voice replied officiously. “Waiting period not waivable for emergency unlocks under section 14.12.11 due to massive loophole misuse.”

“Lacey, give it up,” Colt begged her, coming back into the control room. “I just checked the surface opening, and it is definitely nighttime. We don’t have time for another 3-hour runaround.”

“Two weeks,” Lacey complained on a full whine that only ridiculous bureaucracy could cause for her. They’d experienced enough of it when Lacey had applied for college financial aid.

“It’s better than never?” Colt tried to assuage her whine.

“We’re going to be dead by morning anyway,” Lacey threw up her hands in defeat and threw herself into one of the chairs at the table.

“Then let’s throw the money at it and arm them all up for Hughe’s return,” Colt suggested with a laugh. “If it took him a week to get through unarmed goblins. It’ll take a lot longer to get through armed ones, right?”

“Or, with our luck,” Lacey continued to whine, “he’ll summon the whole town to come clear it out in record time. Besides, if we arm them all, they’ll as likely kill us as any intruders.”

“It’s not that bad,” Colt sat down next to her and laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. “The goblins can’t hurt us. I don’t think any of our denizens can.”

“What?” Lacey finally looked up at Colt with a sprig of not-defeat.

“I had to push back a half dozen fighter goblins from the door to the control room and they might have growled, but they didn’t attack me,” he offered.

“That’s because you’re the size of a truck,” she blew him off with a shrug, fully engaged with her sulk. Eve and Adam had settled down for the night in a set of furs that Lacey had ordered from the pedestal between requests for resets. “They’d eat me.”

“I don’t think so,” Colt shook his head. “They backed off at the river too. The fighter attacked Eve, not us and I think I understand why.”

“Yeah?” she gave him a tired look.

“It’s a dominance thing,” Colt explained. “Remember how Dougie did all that dog-walking for a while?”

“Yeah.” Dougie was one of Colt’s older brothers and he’d been starting one business after another for all the time that Lacey had known them.

“He would watch these old shows on how to tame crazy dogs like he could be the next dog whisperer, right?”

“Yeah, so?”

“These goblins are a lot like dogs,” Colt shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “We’re still the owners, so we’re out of bounds for the game, but the dogs or goblins in this case, have their own alpha crap going on.”

“And we want Eve to be the alpha, right?”

“Well, yeah, but we can’t do that for her,” Colt explained. “She was the alpha when all they had were workers, probably because she was the bossiest and best at getting things done, but now she’s one of the older goblins and not as strong because I think those goblins out there are a level higher because the dungeon is a level higher, right?”

“And the fighters are more alpha than the workers, which is why they’re out there jostling for position,” Lacey followed his reasoning.

“Right,” Colt spread his hands. “Eventually, they’ll settle down to a point that there’s a chief or something because we introduced the swords, changing the purpose of their society.”

“Oh,” Lacey groaned. “Is it too late to kill them all and start over? It’s not like just the ten of them cost that much and we can still use the swords or recycle them or something.”

“Well, maybe as a last resort,” Colt brushed that thought aside and rushed on. “But I think chosen-by-the-gods might trump strongest-fighter if we shift the societal makeup a little.”

“That’s what got us in this mess, and we only have until morning,” Lacey squawked, more because she was feeling too frustrated and tired for an anthropology lesson. She’d known letting him help her study for college would bite her in the ass someday. “The type of shift you’re talking about takes years.”

“Or godly interference,” Colt gave her a shrewd look.

“You already have some idea,” Lacey pushed her chair back from the table to go back to the pedestal. “Just spit it out already, but I can already tell you that the pedestal is still worthless.”

“Maybe or maybe not,” he hedged, and she groaned.

“I’ve been fighting it for hours and,” her voice trailed off. He knew that already. “Just spit it out and we’ll try it. I’m ready to try anything as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with resetting passwords or accounts.”

“Okay,” he rubbed his hands together as she took her place at the pedestal. “Have you asked it about magic?”