Kobolds From Space 2: Kobold of Shadows

I made my first run for the warp crystal in the middle of the week. I set all my permissions to private, and kept glancing occasionally at Wave’s log until she was otherwise occupied. Then I popped out of the virtual world, and hurried quickly but quietly to the lair’s exit, since time moved so fast in the real world. The labyrinth was a piece of cake – the traps were meant primarily for training, and even the diamond dogs had to go in and out occasionally. I got all the way through with no trouble, and found that the door was shut, and wouldn’t open.

I tugged on the handle anyway, in case it was just stuck, and a screen lit up on the wall next to me, showing Star’s faceplate. “Just a sec, I’ll buzz you – Raven? Shouldn’t you be in class?”

“I just need to go out into the mines for a bit,” I said.

“Sorry,” Star said. “I can’t let you do that.”

“Yes you can!” I said. “I promise I won’t get hurt!”

Their faceplate turned into a spinning star. “Look, Wave and Fire and I talked this over, and you’re not ready to face off with the rebels. I’d like to say that you’ll never be ready, but if they’re still a problem by the time you graduate we really will need a spy.”

“So you locked us all in prison just in case I tried to escape?”

“No,” Star said. “The door’s to keep the rebels out. They’re mostly miners, which means the mines aren’t safe. Our traps would *probably* be enough but we didn’t want to risk it, so we added a door. If they break down the door, all the traps go into lethal mode. So don’t break down the door. One of the traps is *on* the door and since I’m the closest thing we have to a doctor, I’ll be the one who has to sew your bits back together.”

“A door? To stop diamond dogs?” I asked. “Can’t they just dig around?”

Star’s faceplate turned into a very jagged grin. “They can try.”

I slunk back through the maze, and changed all my permissions back in case no one had noticed yet. Unless I wanted to wait until the class got around to teaching lockpicking, this was going to take a little more planning.

We’d all heard the story of how Nightwing used Fire’s logs to figure out how (and that) he’d blown up her airship. So that was my first thought. Unfortunately, I didn’t want to spend a real-time month watching everything that had happened in his life , even assuming that he’d been the one to put in whatever trap was supposed to keep out diamond dog diggers.

I’d had a few more electronic security lectures, though, and one of the things they’d suggested and/or warned about was the logs kept by the fabricator. They were easy enough to get by looking at each machine individually – that was a thing normal, non-spy people did sometimes – but a fabricator had a lot of machines, and one of my homework assignments was to write a script to query them all and flag anomalies.

Most of the anomalies were boring – they were just jobs people had run to print things that were rarely used, or things where someone had ordered an unusually large quantity of something normally printed out in ones or twos. I was just using the default algorithm, which wasn’t the best possible implementation but was probably better than I could do on my own. Our collective was small, at least, so even the full verbose list was useful. Yes, I had to flip through page after page of irrelevant things like the dildo Cat had printed out, but eventually I found a likely culprit – burrowing robots that could lay wires in solid rock without having to dig out a conduit. Star had printed out *hundreds* of them, shortly after I’d been attacked.

Then I went to peek at their logs, to see what they’d done with them. A few minutes later, I downloaded their map of the buried electrocution net, to see if there were any weak points.

“Hey, Steel,” I said.

Steel was busy dueling against a stationary target, frozen in an A-pose. “Raven.”

“You know some diamond dogs, right?”

“A few,” he said, lowering his pistol. “We spar with each other sometimes.”

“What are they like?” I asked. “Do you trust them? Are there any you’d want to take with you on an adventure? I mean, hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not like I’d really bring one with me on an adventure. I’m not even allowed to have adventures.”

“We’re not supposed to care about what we’re allowed to do,” he said, flipping his pistol up and instantly squeezing off a shot. The target survived, but the simulation put up a trace of where the bullet had gone – too high, and a bit to the left.

“And yet, I’m trapped here,” I said. “There’s a door on the labyrinth now. We’re locked in.”

“So you want to find someone to dig around it for you,” he said. “That shouldn’t be hard.”

“it’s a little harder than that,” I said. “I mean, theoretically. Star knows that diamond dogs exist, so they wouldn’t have put up a door if you could just dig out safely. Another reason not to take a diamond dog on an adventure!”

“And hypothetically, a kobold training to be a spy might know how to get around that trap,” Steel said.

“Well, no one knows how deep the garbage pit is, so Star would have had to leave a hole for it,” I said.

“Hypothetically or actually?”

“Um…” I said. Maybe I should have done the social part of the espionage course. “Actually. I found the plans.”

“I’m going with you,” Steel said. He whipped his gun up from his hip, and shot at the target again. This time it somehow managed to go right between its legs.

“I… don’t have any reason to object to that?” I said, uncertainly, because my instincts were telling me it was a bad idea.

“Do you have a way to get through the garbage? It’s not safe to just wade through it.”

“I have a general plan?” I said. “I thought… we could wear hazmat suits, and bring some soap and water to wash off afterwards. Wash us off, in case we get some on us taking off the suits. The suits just get tossed.”

“Can a diamond dog dig with a suit on?” Steel asked.

“Fuck.” I tried to think of a better way. “Portable airlock?”

“No, that was a serious question,” Steel said. “They dig with magic, right?”

Steel’s recommendation for a diamond dog party member was a puppy named Pepper. She was one of the not-uncommon puppies who’d been learning with us from the beginning, and had been born long before we’d been hatched, but was still younger than us because of how acceleration worked for them and because we’d gotten a head-start in the egg.

She was in her real-world phase – the puppies weren’t always in phase with us, because their caretakers preferred to deal with them in shifts – which meant dropping into the real world and going into the puppy part of the lair… and wasting most of our free time that day, but whatever. If we needed to we could skip the next day of class and no one would notice or care… or just delay our real-world phase a bit to finish up the material we’d missed.

Or, if we got the answers we wanted, I’d be able to finally go get the warp crystal, prove that I could control it, switch jobs to warp technician , and never have to study espionage again except maybe as a hobby since some of it was really useful.

The diamond dog section of the lair had started as a giant room for the puppies to zone out in while they learned virtually, but it’d been expanded after Fire started digging out a real labyrinth because the diamond dogs didn’t like dodging traps as much as we did and wanted a comfortable place to stay for a few weeks at a time. That meant a warren of little private nests, and an actual restroom with plumbing that we’d go use sometimes because it was fairly close to the kobold section of the lair and a lot more comfortable than going directly into the matter compressor we used for organic waste. It was only fair – it’s not like diamond dogs had plumbing before they started learning about our tech.

Pepper was in the main room, though. Even if she hadn’t been running the combat tracker, which put a tag with her name and level over her head even in the real world, I would have been able to guess it was her from her salt-and-pepper fur. No mystery how she’d gotten her egg name! She was wearing one of the old-style headsets with a transparent green visor over her eyes; they were a standard pattern from our archives, but some of the puppies had designed a newer version that looked more like their warriors’ traditional helmets.

She was also brooding, alone, in a shadowy corner. That was probably why Steel had picked her.

“Come for a spar?” she asked as we approached. She had quite a few levels on us, although her stats weren’t amazing, aside from Strength. “Think you can take me two on one?”

“Ha ha ha no,” I said. “I barely count. It’d be more like one and a half to one.”

“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Steel said.

“Will it?” I asked, pointedly.

“Oh, right,” he said, then turned back to Pepper and casually asked, “Is no-contact okay? We’ll track near-misses as hits.” I’m pretty sure the last bit was an explanation for my benefit.

Pepper looked suspicious, but shrugged. “Probably for the best, since we’re not virtual.”

“What do we track hits as?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how well I’d be able to avoid touching her; I hadn’t practiced this sort of fighting ever.

“We track them as you screwed up and should apologize,” Pepper said.

“Normally it’s a disqualification,” Steel added. “Try not to actually hit us.”

My ears folded back. “I thought you were on my team?”

“That should make it easier not to hit me,” Steel said. Pepper snickered.

I fumed. I’d show them. I’d show them all!

Don’t laugh. I know it’s ridiculous, but when you laugh at me like that I feel like I should start changing the story to make my part seem more glorious, and if I was going to do that I would have wanted to do it from the start.

Anyway, I showed them just how much of a fighter I was, meaning that I screwed up badly enough that Steel hit *me*. Like, hard, right in the chestplate, and I went stumbling backwards until I tripped over a sleeping puppy and fell on my butt, and then he woke up because apparently they got to set alarms to wake them up when things happened in the real world, and Steel and Pepper were laughing at me, and he smiled apologetically and helped me up and was really nice and then went right back to the virtual world to finish whatever class he’d been in the middle of.

“Again?” Pepper asked.

I grimaced. “Do I have to?”

She shrugged. “Nah. Why did you actually come here?”

“We wanted to know if you can dig with gloves on,” Steel said. “Solid ones, no fingerholes.”

“Sure,” Pepper said. “They have to be really solid though since I’ll be digging with them.”

“Wait a second,” I said, realizing something. “You can use tenses?”

“Diamond dogs can all use tenses,” Steel said. “It’s not like it’s hard.”

“We normally don’t because it sounds weird to us,” Pepper said. “But the teacher AIs had a lot of trouble parsing our questions when we spoke normally, so some of us got in the habit of using tenses. Others complained to the caretakers who complained to Star who complained that they had no idea how to fix it but if some of us took the programming classes that would teach us how, so a couple of them did and now the teachers understand normal talk just fine. But I’d already gotten used to using tenses, so I do it around kobolds just to be polite. I thought you’d appreciate it. ”

“You should talk however you want,” Steel said.

“I do appreciate it!” I said. “But yeah, you should talk however you want.”

She shrugged again. “It’s good practice.” She looked around, to make sure no one nearby was awake. “So where would I be digging that I’d need to wear gloves with no fingerholes?” she asked in a quiet voice. Okay, now she was just showing off. Subjunctive case? Really?

“The garbage pit,” I sent to her in a private message. “We need to break out, and it’s the only place that’s not trapped against digging.”

Diamond dog faces are very expressive, so I quickly added, “So we needed to know if you could dig while wearing a hazmat suit. None of us want to touch that stuff.”

She said, quietly, “You’d have to add digging claws, or I’d tear off the fingers.”

“That should be possible,” Steel said. “I never studied template design, though.”

“I wouldn’t want to trust something I designed to protect me from the garbage,” I said, pouting. I’d played with the interface a little, but never actually printed anything. “Fairy could probably do it, but I don’t know if she’d keep it quiet.”

“There are some dogs…” Pepper started, then shook her head. “I don’t trust them, though. Not with a *secret*.” She grinned.

“Then you’re in? Assuming we can get the rest of it working,” Steel asked.

Pepper shrugged.

Fairy was asleep by the time we logged into the virtual world and tried to contact her, which was convenient because it meant no one would be checking on her.

Pepper joined us – it wasn’t her time to be virtual, but her schedule had about as much security as anything else and could be altered by any adult, which included me and Steel. She wasn’t happy about that.

“There are a lot of adults. Half the ‘puppies’ are adults, and all the kobolds.”

Steel added, “And most of the diamond dogs in the city.”

“And the rebels,” I pointed out, just to be complete. “There’s not a lot of mischief they can pull while you’re here in the lair, but it might be a good idea to take off your headset when you leave.”

Fairy’s location was set private, so I sent her a message asking about the hazmat suits.

Her reply was, “If you wish a boon from the Fairy, you must prove yourselves worthy!” Along with a link to a custom level in the trap simulator.

“She wants us to run through her traps first,” I told the others, sharing the invitation.

Pepper looked annoyed. “Can’t you just tell her it’s important?” Her speech was a bit slow and drowsy-sounding, because diamond dogs couldn’t accelerate quite as much as kobolds.

I shrugged. “I could, but it would be rude? And we’re not in that much of a hurry.”

“And you want to run through the traps,” Steel added.

“Of course I want to run through the traps,” I said. “Fairy usually comes up with some good ones.”

“Kobolds,” Pepper said, shaking her head slowly, but she joined us in the simulation. Which she really didn’t have to do, the trap simulator worked just fine for solo runs.

We appeared in a forest clearing, the ceiling open to the sky with twinkling stars, while light was provided by glowing mushrooms. In the center was a ring of mushrooms surrounding a treasure chest.

“Wow,” Pepper said, looking around.

“Yeah, I love the graphics here,” I said.

Steel nodded. “They went all out on the environment because it’s the most important part for a trap simulation.”

“They also put a lot of love into the death animations, although they’re canned,” I noted. “Like, you always get disemboweled in the same way, they don’t simulate each individual intestine. It looks realistic though.”

“Of course you’d notice that,” Steel said.

I grinned. “Ravens like entrails.”

“Does it hurt?” Pepper asked.

“A little,” I said. “It’s meant for kids.”

Pepper looked down at herself, flexing her limbs. “I suppose that’s also why I’m a kobold? Making less work for the simulation?”

I nodded, she shrugged, and we turned back to examine the environment.

Aside from the obvious trap in the middle of the clearing, the room was full of monsters. Tiny, glowing monsters, easy to see once you realized they were there. Sleeping pixies.

“Don’t wake them up,” I said, although that should have been obvious to anybody.

“Can’t we just squish them?” Pepper asked.

“You can’t fight the monsters,” I said. “Hitting them just gets their attention. You can lead them into traps, but you should probably have a trap in mind first.”

“You can lead them into traps?” Steel asked.

“Yes?” I said. “Lots of labyrinths can’t even be solved without doing that.”

“I always just beat them up until they were stunned, then ran away,” he replied.

I blinked. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“You need a weapon,” he said, “and you don’t start with one, but there’s usually something…” He looked around, and spotted a large tree with low-hanging branches sticking out into the clearing. “There!”

We followed him over, and watched as he grabbed onto one of the branches and yanked on it. “I’ll just break this off…”

The branch didn’t break off. The tree woke up, a pair of knot-holes opening into glowing yellow eyes while a scar on the trunk split vertically into a thorn-filled mouth.

We all screamed and ran for the path, dodging pixies. We kept running once we were out of the clearing, since the tree had uprooted itself and was stalking after us while making a sinister rustling noise. Steel and I jumped over an obvious depression… Pepper stepped on it and broke through into a shallow pit full of glue, toppling and falling on her face. The tree caught up to her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and fed her head-first into its thorny maw… there were grinding and snapping noises as it crunched her bones, and then the bottom half of her body slumped to the ground, organs and viscera spilling into the dirt as her ghost looked on. Satisfied, the tree returned to the clearing.

Pepper’s ghost joined us down the path, where we’d stopped to watch. “For kids, huh ,” she said, in a spooky reverberating voice.

I nodded eagerly. “The gross bits were what really sold me on it.”

We headed down the path. The next few traps were shiny, interesting, and suspicious things located just off the path in the woods, and Steel had to stop me from going to check them out.

“I can be sneaky!” I protested.

“The pixies mean this is a fairy realm,” Steel said. “Stepping off the path is always bad.”

“I can go check them out,” Pepper offered. “It’s not like I can get killed again.”

“Eh…” I said. On the one hand, I was really curious, but... “Go ahead, but don’t tell us about it until we finish. It’d be cheating.”

“I can’t even scout for you? Why even have me float around as a ghost then?” she asked. “Is it just trying to be realistic? Is this what happens to kobolds when you die?”

“What?” I asked.

“Do you float around as ghosts until your body’s fixed?” she asked. “I heard you didn’t really die.”

“No, we really die,” I said. “We’re no different from you – an energy pattern created by our brains. We don’t exist while we’re dead. If your brain is intact and someone restarts it, it brings you back, but you can’t just go floating around with no physical substrate.”

“It doesn’t have to be a brain,” Steel said.

“Sure,” I said, “you can live with a cybernetic brain, but unless your real brain is mostly intact we just sort of have to make a best guess about your pattern based on peoples’ memories of you so I’m not sure what the point is. ”

“Scan your brain before you die?” Pepper asked.

“It’s possible, I guess,” I said. “We don’t usually do it. It’s too easy to make copies, and having a bunch of copies of the same person is a terrible enough idea that we just don’t do the scans in the first place.”

Pepper’s ghost looked very confused. “So to avoid temptation, you just… let yourself stay dead? You could be immortal!”

“Risking a disaster to slightly increase our chances of personal survival would be very selfish,” Steel said.

I nodded. “Total enjoyment is logarithmic with respect to time lived, so being immortal is super, super selfish. You end up wasting lots of resources on people who don’t even enjoy it. It’s better to just have kids and let them live for you.”

“That said,” Steel added, “if I was dying slowly of something predictable but incurable, I’d probably have a brain scan made. We could recycle the machinery afterwards.”

“Something slow and predictable,” Pepper said. “Like old age?”

I laughed. “No kobold has ever died of old age.”

“That we know of,” Steel corrected, “Our records of each system stop when they launch the colonization collective at the new star, and colonization collectives are made up exclusively of young kobolds.”

I batted at his ear. “Sure, just ruin the joke.” He caught my hand and ruined the ear-batting, too.

We headed down the path for a bit, avoiding some slightly-well-hidden pit traps, and Pepper asked, “So why am I a ghost, then?”

“Because kicking you out of the game wouldn’t be social enough,” I said. “They really hate it if we spend too much time playing by ourselves.”

The path dead-ended in a tangle of brambles. It looked like we might be able to squeeze through if we were really careful, but we’d probably get all scratched up and the chances that the brambles weren’t poisoned was approximately zero. I stopped dead and frowned at it for a bit. Steel gave me a look, then started to carefully make his way through.

I waved to him. “Nice knowing you!”

“I don’t see any better option,” he said, gripping a branch gingerly between several of the thorns and holding it aside as he ducked past it, ears flat against his skull to reduce his profile. I watched for a bit as he managed to get about a meter in, his tail still sticking out on to the path, before he stumbled and yanked a bit too hard on one of the branches, and the whole murder-hedge woke up and constricted around him, grinding him to paste.

His ghost floated out of the mess of thorns and blood. “This is not a fair trap.”

“Maybe we’re not supposed to go that way,” I said.

I turned around and headed back the way we’d come, looking for a turn-off we’d missed. There was nothing. I checked the pit traps, triggering them gingerly with my tail. The first was full of spikes, the second was full of sleeping pixies, and the third was actually the mouth of a giant worm creature that leapt up out of the ground and started chasing me. I ran back towards the start, jumped over the glue pit, and glanced back to verify that yes, the glue was enough to trap the worm. Leading monsters into traps was kind of a staple, but not every trap would stop every monster.

“So,” I said to my ghostly attendants. “Any ideas?”

“If we’re starting over anyway, how about you go give the evil tree a big hug so we can all respawn?” Steel suggested.

“I could do that,” I said, smirking, “but then she’d *win*.”

I took another look around. A treasure chest in the first room was an obvious trap, but why the ring of mushrooms? Did they mean something? It kind of reminded me of the buttons in other games, where you’d have to hold them down with something heavy, but the treasure chest was already on it when we started. Maybe if I took it off?

I stood at the edge of the ring, leaned in, and managed to drag it close enough to lift it. Nothing happened. I turned and looked for somewhere to set it down that wasn’t on top of a pixie, but didn’t see anywhere, so I just plopped it on top of one – the treasure chest was a trap, which meant it could squish a monster, right?

Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. What it did do was wake up all the other pixies, who hovered up in the air somewhat drunkenly, and then started slowly drifting towards me. If removing the chest had done anything, I still didn’t see it – damn it all.

Just in case it made a difference, I jumped on the ‘button’ myself, and –

I was in a different clearing, with the victory music playing. Then the level dissolved, and the three of us were back in our normal low-poly avatars, with Fairy there also, waiting for us.

“You made it!” Fairy said. “When I’m done that’ll only be the first level, of course.”

“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Steel asked.

“Shouldn’t you?” she asked right back. “And I was asleep until you woke me up.” She turned back to me, “So what did you need to talk about?”

We were in luck, as it turned out – there was already a pattern for diamond dog hazmat suits with reinforced claws, because a diamond dog wanting to be able to dig while wearing equipment was not an unusual request.

“I can queue them up for printing without setting off any alerts that I know of,” Fairy said. “They’ll show up in the log though.”

“I know how to deal with that,” I said. “Just wait for my signal to start printing.” It was just a matter of setting the clock back, so that the orders got inserted into the log from a couple of years ago. I’d planned ahead that far, and even tested it on something innocuous. The dry run had gone fine.

I’d probably set off alarms if I tried to set the clocks remotely, since Star and Wave were suspicious already, but the machines had manual controls and in fact we usually used the manual controls since you had to be there anyway to feed in materials and pick up the results.

And the fabricator was right above the garbage pit, so it was convenient for our purposes too.

“We’re leaving now?” Pepper asked.

“Waiting is only going to make it more likely we’ll be caught,” I said. “And it’s not like this is some major adventure. I just want to walk to a specific place in the mine and pick up something I dropped, but Wave and Star are making a huge deal out of it.”

“You think the warp crystal is still where you dropped it?” Steel asked. “I thought the rebels had it.”

I shook my head. “They never even knew it was there. I hid it before they attacked me. And yes, I tried to tell people about this but they insisted, ‘oh we searched everywhere and we didn’t find it, the rebels must have gotten it’ and also I was kind of out of it so I might not have been entirely coherent. ”

“You could try explaining it now,” Steel suggested.

I shook my head. “No, now it’s personal. And… I want another try at using it. I’ll never get that if someone else finds it first.” I looked over at him. “You could try too. You never got a shot –“

“I don’t want a shot,” Steel said. “I really don’t want to be a warp technician. I’m hoping they forget to test the rest of us.”

“Aww, come on. You heard the stories, right? About how it made Wave the most deadly fighter in the city with no training?”

“I want to try,” Pepper said.

“And I don’t want to let them get away with confining us like this,” Steel said. “I’m with you, don’t worry.”

My mouth went saw-toothed. “I wasn’t worried until you said that.”

Getting the suits seemed to go smoothly, not that we would have known if something had been noticed unless Star or whoever decided to confront us right away. It took a little while to print them, but then we were huddled around the gel-membrane hatch leading down into the garbage pit, surveying the deadly trap embedded in the walls with our trap overlay.

“Is this accurate?” Pepper asked.

“This is taken directly from the plan,” I said. “It should be accurate.”

“Is there any way to tell if it is without digging near it and getting zapped?”

The answer was ‘kind of’. I could query the bots or at least the place where the bots should have ended up and read their telemetry, assuming I could connect. There were hundreds of bots though and I’d have to query each one, and unlike the plan the telemetry wasn’t meant to be loaded into a trap overlay, at least not with the same methods I knew how to use. “Not really,” I said.

“Could you try reading the telemetry from the extruders?” Steel asked.

“Ugh,” I groaned. “Fine.”

Fifteen minutes later, I managed to connect to what I was pretty sure was one of the extruders, and download some incomprehensible proprioception telemetry. We went into an accelerated simulation and tried to figure out what it meant, because I was getting frustrated and they were getting impatient, and spun our gears for a while until Pepper found the relevant part of the manual and then we tried to figure out what the fuck it was trying to say because it didn’t seem like it was written for anyone to actually use.

Eventually I gave up. “Can’t we just give it like a two meter margin of error? The bot was six centimeters from where it was supposed to be so that should be way more than we need.”

“That means digging through two extra meters of garbage,” Pepper noted.

“That garbage is a lot easier to dig through than *this* garbage,” I snapped, waving a hand at the number salad.

We dropped back into the real world, and because I was tired of waiting, I jumped down through the hole into the garbage pit. Since it was sealed by a gel membrane, this wasn’t as dramatic as it had seemed in my head – it took about three seconds to slurp through the membrane before falling flat on my face. The ground was squishy, so it didn’t hurt, but I was terrified I’d just blinded myself until I sat up and the oozy goop coating my helmet slid off just like it would off a faceplate.

This meant I had a good view as the turrets unfolded from the ceiling and fixed their gun nozzles on me. Steel and Pepper weren’t far behind, and one of them shifted to try to cover both of them.

“What now?” Pepper sent, in a whisper, all three of us frozen as if the turrets weren’t perfectly capable of tracking us if we didn’t move.

“I can try to hack them?” I suggested. “I just need to find out what they’re called on the network…” and hope that no one had enabled even the most basic security features, like the stupid locked door that had kept me from going out the normal way.

Before I could even finish the first part, Star messaged the three of us. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Leaving,” I said. “Can you call off the turrets?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you said you were locking us in to keep us safe. I don’t think shooting us keeps us safe.” I folded my arms and glowered at them, although it was an audio connection so they couldn’t see my expression. It probably came across in my voice.

“Threatening to shoot you so you stay there until I can drag you back inside might.”

“Not if we know it’s an empty threat,” Steel said.

“It’s not empty until I turn off the turrets,” Star replied. “You’re not stupid enough to rely on the good-will of an automated system.”

“You know what?” I said. “I think I am.”

“Don’t!” Pepper shouted, as I turned and started searching through the garbage pile.

I found a big metal rod, and yanked it up out of the pile. The turrets didn’t shoot me. I poked at the turrets with it, but it was about a three-meter drop into the garbage pile and the rod wasn’t three meters long, so I couldn’t reach. They still didn’t shoot me. I threw the rod at a turret and it swatted it away with its barrel, but still didn’t shoot me.

“Start digging,” I said. “They’re not going to shoot us.”

As Pepper started digging, Steel stared at the turrets nervously. “That was the dumbest thing… how did you know they weren’t armed?”

“Star would never trust me to do the smart thing in any situation,” I snapped. “That’s why I’m locked in in the first place.”

It turned out that digging a tunnel through a pile of ooze was not practical, which meant that Pepper had to shift a huge section of the pile from one side of the pit to the other to expose a bit of wall far enough down that there was only a little bit of garbage to squeeze through, because she’d been off by about a meter and wasn’t going to compromise on safety. This took a lot longer than we’d planned, and Star was staring down at us through the membrane halfway through. The suits took a while to print, though, and they didn’t come down after us without one. I found some rusted metal sheets and set them up to block line-of-sight attacks, since Steel was worried they’d get a net gun or something. The only thing Star shot at us were snippy comments.

Star sent, “I can’t believe you’re going to this much trouble just to go wandering around the mines a few months early.”

I sent back, “It’s not just a few months when we spend most of it accelerated!”

They sent, “You know how dangerous it is for kobolds in the mines better than anybody!”

“Then why don’t you trust my judgment on this?” I shot back.

There were a bunch of little exchanges like that. I like to think I won most of them but I’m not exactly an unbiased judge. In any case, they didn’t convince me. Or Steel, or even Pepper. I don’t think that’s even a thing that could have happened, because it wasn’t a real discussion, just us arguing back and forth to make ourselves feel better. Wave would have been ashamed.

So we got away, but it wasn’t as stealthy as we would have liked. It also wasn’t as easy to get out of the hazmat suits without getting garbage-stink all over us as we would have liked, once Pepper had dug a tunnel past all the traps and hollowed out a little cavern to undress in. I’d planned ahead with some cleaning supplies, but they weren’t enough for Pepper’s nose, or for Steel and me to let our faceplates unseal enough to let smells in.

“We need a bath,” Pepper said. “Or I need a mask.”

“We can’t turn back now!” I protested. “We’d have to start all over and they’ll be watching us more.”

Pepper yipped out a quick chuckle. “There are other baths than the ones in your home. Other printers too. It won’t take long to visit the city, and the dogs there won’t attack you.”

“How far out of the way is it?” Steel asked.

“It’s on the way,” I said. “I was running from the arena, so that was my first waypoint.”

Pepper frowned. “Then why don’t you want to go to the city? Are you afraid of baths?”

“I have no problem with going to the city!” I shouted back at her. “Why is everyone always automatically against me!”

“Why are you two arguing when you’re both on the same side?” Steel shouted at the two of us.

The three of us glared at each other, then Pepper turned and started tunneling, with her bare claws this time. “I’m getting dizzy from the stench. We really need a bath.”

We didn’t want to leave an open tunnel leading back to the bottom entrance of our lair, so Pepper popped us out of the wall at the back of a pile of rubble, and we made sure it was piled back up to conceal the tunnel. “It’s going to end up leading to a wall of shit anyway,” she said. “The garbage won’t stay piled up forever.”

“And there are the turrets,” Steel noted.

“I guess that’ll have to do for now,” I admitted reluctantly. I hadn’t thought about this beforehand and the last thing I wanted was for someone to get hurt because I’d compromised our defenses. “What’s the best way to get to the baths?”

“I can dig to the main tunnel,” Pepper said. “Then it’s a short walk to the city.”

“We can’t use the main tunnel!” I said, running around to block her before she started digging. “Everyone will see us!”

“Everyone will see us in the city anyway,” Steel said. “And it’s not like our parents don’t already know we left by now.”

“I set it so we can’t be tracked by our faceplates,” I said. “They don’t know where we are.”

“The baths are public,” Pepper said. “We can dig a secret tunnel to them but it’s against the rules. There’s no digging in the city.”

“And the digging isn’t quiet,” Steel said.

Pepper shook her head. “I can be quiet, but I’m not going to dig holes in the city.”

“Can you dig us as close to the city as you can?” I asked.

“I already dug us pretty close,” Pepper said. “Just through this wall, then a hundred meters down a tunnel, and we can see the city from there.”

I glanced at Steel, but he didn’t seem to share my trepidation. So we used the main tunnel, trying to act natural but standing out like a pair of kobolds and a puppy in a crowd of adult diamond dogs.

Everyone turned to stare at us as we passed. There were two kinds of diamond dog groups – ones wearing the latest headsets and various printed bling, who glanced at us curiously but mostly ignored us, and ones wearing older headsets and more traditional clothing or armor, who glared at us suspiciously but mostly ignored us. I kept a close eye on all of them – if I was a rebel trying to sneak around and do rebel stuff, I’d want to dress up like the first sort just to throw people off. Unless I was a stupid rebel or someone who wasn’t really a rebel but didn’t like kobolds that much.

I’d had enough spy training to know that it was futile to guess how someone better than me would go around incognito. I did have enough spy training to make sure none of them were following us at least.

A hundred meters later, we could indeed see the city – stretching out before us, twenty meters down, the only route a switchback path winding back and forth completely exposed and on display for half the city to gawk.

It was a very impressive view, though.

“Don’t just stand there gawking,” Pepper said, tugging on my hand. “Everyone will stare.”

I saved a picture of the viewpoint and followed her down, Steel at my tail, gawking at the image instead. There was the castle all the way off to the left, unmistakable with its lava moat and crenallated balcony, the bulk of it embedded in the cave wall. Next to it were the forges, still seeing a lot of activity since the dogs had mostly taken to the printers that made things they couldn’t, sticking to their own manual forges for now. And so was the bath?

“Why is the bath in the forge district?”

“Forge dogs get sweaty,” Pepper said. “Also, lava heats the water just like it runs the forges.”

“That means it’s right next to the castle!”

“Are you worried Wave is going to come out and stop us?” Steel asked. “I’ve been tracking all our parents and none of them have moved.”

“She wouldn’t have to move far if we come right to her,” I said. “Let me check on what she’s doing.”

Her logs were still public, of course, so I hooked myself up to the current feed to check in –

I was choking. Choking to death. On a massive cock. Gentle claws stroked my back as my vision started to go dark, most of my body shutting down as I went into low power mode, love and arousal swelling along with the tide of –

I gasped for air as I cut off the log replay. “She’s, um.” I curled my tail around to squeeze it to my chest. “She’s busy.”

Pepper snorted, glancing at my crotch as my sudden erection was taking its own sweet time to subside. “I see. Let’s hurry anyway.”

We almost made it to the baths unmolested. A few of the diamond dogs had looked our way as we came down the switchbacks, but none of them seemed to care enough to stop whatever they were doing. Maybe they gossiped to each other about us, I don’t know.

But we did have to pass *right* by the drawbridge to the castle, and our casual pace wasn’t fast enough to get to the baths before a pair of dragons emerged from the darkness within. I tried pretending not to see them, but Souffle waved at us, and Pancakes sent me a message asking me to wait. It would have been rude to run off after that, and futile besides since he’d be able to see where we were heading.

So the baby dragons caught us.

“Ew,” Pancakes said. “You need a bath.”

“That’s why we’re here,” I said. “Do you want to come with us?” I didn’t want him reporting back to Wave too soon.

“Okay,” he said. “The baths don’t have lava though.”

“I’ll come too,” Souffle said quietly, shuffling behind me as if they were about to gnaw on my tail, then taking a couple of steps back because we smelled *really* bad.

“Where were you going before you saw us?” I asked.

“Dragon-mom said to go find you,” Pancakes said, his faceplate’s eyespots squinting shut from the stench. “She says kobolds shouldn’t wander around without a dragon to protect them.”

I think all of us were a bit skeptical about how much protection a pair of baby dragons were really going to be, but we’d heard the stories about Ash and if Pancakes and Souffle had any of his endurance or fire breath it wasn’t like they’d be a liability. Besides, we weren’t planning on doing anything dangerous, regardless of Star’s paranoia.

The baths were pretty simple – an underground river had been diverted through a large, shallow basin, heated by a pool of lava far enough underneath that it was pleasantly hot. The bath attendants smelled us coming a mile away, and herded us into the downstream end where we wouldn’t get our stink on the other bathers. There was sand and pumice to scrub with, and a printer station where we could get proper soap and solvents. We spent a long time scrubbing and rinsing and working the soap into each others’ fur and tails, and on the third try we managed to pass the sniff test and were allowed into the upstream area to soak.

“I think I’m going to change jobs,” I said, relaxing in the wonderfully warm water with Souffle in my lap, petting their belly as they gnawed on my arm. “From now on I’m going to be a professional bather.”

“I don’t think the attendants get to use the bath as much as you think,” Pepper said. “I haven’t seen any of them set so much as a foot in the water.”

“Not an attendant, I’m just going to stay in the bath forever,” I said.

“That’s not a real job,” Steel said. “Unless you were spying on the people bathing and hearing all their secrets, maybe.”

“That would distract me from relaxing,” I complained.

“The water’s too cold,” Pancakes said, splashing around and trying to amuse himself. “Lava baths are better.”

“We should probably get moving,” Pepper said. “We’re as clean as we’re going to get.”

I let myself sink down under the water, my faceplate switching into water-breathing mode automatically. Unfortunately, the water at this end was clear and calm, and Steel stood over me, glaring down for a few seconds, then reached down to grab me –

I leapt out of the water, the sudden panic fading as quickly as it had hit. Souffle, who I’d unceremoniously dropped in my mad scramble, popped their head up over the side to look at me curiously. Steel looked more apologetic.

“It’s okay,” I said. It wasn’t *his* fault. “Let’s get moving.”

We attracted less attention crossing town to get to the coliseum now that we were clean. Instead of everyone glancing our way and then turning back to what they were doing, most of the dogs didn’t even look up.

The arena itself was closed, though. The doors were closed and locked – chained shut with a massive padlock holding the chain in place – with guards standing watch to make sure no one picked the lock or, I guess, burrowed through the wall. As we approached they brandished their spears in our general direction. “No one passes!”

I stopped beyond their reach and tried to sound confident. “Let us through. I need something on the other side.”

“No one passes,” the dog on the right said. “You go around.”

“My route starts from the middle of the floor,” I said. “I don’t know how to go around.”

“You figure it out,” the dog said, “or you get lost. But no one passes.”

“Okay,” I said, “but what if you let me pass. What would I have to give you –”

Pepper set a paw on my shoulder, interrupting me. “Are you trying to bribe the guards?” she asked.

“What?” I asked. “No! I’m trying to build consensus. We want to go through, they don’t want us to go through, so I need to frame the parameters of the, uh…”

“The decision space,” Steel filled in. “We need to map out what all the options are so that we can search for a mutually acceptable solution.”

“Okay, but none of the options include paying off the guard so that he betrays his duty,” Pepper said. “It sounds like that’s the option you’re offering and that’s very illegal.”

“We can’t just give in to the assertion of authority because someone says so!” I snapped. I turned to the guard, eyespots narrowing and mouth-line all jagged with fangs. “Do you even have a reason for keeping us out or is it just a way to lord your supposed authority over us?”

“No one passes,” the guard growled, jabbing the spear at me, although I still wasn’t in reach and I think he knew that. He was just trying to intimidate me.

Fortunately, the other guard chimed in before it could escalate any further. “Dogs fight to the death in there. No one goes in before the fight to leave traps. Fight is fair.”

I fumed.

“That seems like a good reason,” Steel said. “We should probably just go around.”

I objected, “We’re not going to leave traps! We don’t even know who’s fighting!”

“I’m sure if you could prove that to them they’d agree that it would be harmless to let you in,” Pepper said, “except that they’d still be in trouble for failing their duty.”

“No one passes,” the guard on the right said, pulling his spear back at least now that it looked like my friends were holding me back. “We don’t fail.”

Souffle tugged on my tail. “I think I could eat the lock,” they offered, when I looked down at them.

“Could you eat the guards?” I asked.

He frowned and looked at the ground.

“We’re not allowed to eat people,” Pancakes explained. “Not until we’re old enough to know when we should eat people. We could set them on fire but only if they tried to hurt you.”

I must have looked pensive because Steel said, “Don’t even think about it.” I hadn’t even finished the thought!

At any rate, we went around, and as predicted, we got lost. My only map was a first-person point-of-view route that started in the coliseum and almost immediately transitioned into diamond-dog dug caves, which all looked alike. I had planned to orient myself by the obvious features of the arena and use an overlay built from the logs to know which tunnels to take from there, instead of trying to rely on visual landmarks which mostly didn’t exist, but going around meant we were lost before we even got to the point of trying to figure out which tunnel on the far side of the coliseum matched my log from months and months ago.

Thanks to the mine being in dungeon mode, we had a map of the tunnels, but it hadn’t been updated since the last time Wave had been able to touch her warp crystal, which meant that it bore only a slight relation to the tunnels we were trying to navigate through – and since our trackers were disabled, we didn’t even get a ‘you are here’ dot. Eventually Souffle stopped walking and sat down in the middle of the tunnel.

“I want to go home,” they said.

“Do you think you can find your way back?” I asked.

They shook their head.

“We might as well try to get you back to the city then,” I said. “It’s not like we have any idea where we are or where we’re going.”

We did have our own logs, which let us retrace our steps. Soon enough, we were back at the city’s edge.

“I’ll stay with you,” Pancakes said. “One dragon should be enough.”

Souffle shuffled around, looking at me and then in the direction of the castle.

“Don’t worry,” I said, smiling at them. “We’ll be fine!”

Once they ran off, Steel invited us all to a virtual planning session. We sat down against a wall in a little alcove between two buildings, to be out of the way, and went into the virtual world.

“Trying to find someplace you recognized is obviously not working,” he said. “I think –”

“Is that what we were doing?” Pepper asked.

“Yes?” I said.

“Well, that was never going to work,” she said. “The tunnels would have all grown back by now.”

“Grown back?” I said. “Rock doesn’t grow back. Not unless you pump lava through and let it harden or something, and none of that rock looked especially igneous.”

“We dig with magic,” Pepper said, flexing her claws. “The magic only lets us have so many meters of tunnel at a time. Which is good or else we couldn’t just sit here mining forever. We’d have to move the city.”

“How many meters?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Ten thousand?” she said, not sounding very certain. “I think it varies. But not enough for year-old tunnels to still be around.”

“Anyway,” Steel said, “We have a map.”

“I thought the map wasn’t working,” I said.

“Wave can’t update it, but we don’t need her to,” Steel said, summoning a tiny version of the map into our space. “It’s as out of date as your logs, so all we need to do is put a virtual you in the middle of the virtual arena, and then you can pretend you’re there and follow your logs like you planned. Once we know where we’re headed, we can set a waypoint.”

“Without our trackers on, we’ll be relying on inertial guidance to update the waypoint,” I said. “That’s not very accurate. The error estimate for the traps was a few meters and that was just from the top of our lair to the bottom.”

“It’ll get us closer than wandering at random,” Steel said.

“And I don’t know which direction I headed at first. The reference points I was going to use aren’t on the map.”

“You can just –”

“I can try each door until one matches up, yes,” I said. “I thought of that just after I complained. I’ll do it, okay? It’s not like we’re wasting much time.”

It took three tries, and about half an hour of subjective time, which was basically no time at all. “This is the place,” I said, looking down into the chasm. “I tossed the crystal down there while they were chasing me.”

“How deep is it?” Steel asked. “The map doesn’t say.”

“That’s a natural chasm,” Pepper said.

“Well, it can’t be deeper than a kilometer or so or the crystal would have fallen out the bottom of the field. We’d have noticed that when everything stopped working,” I said.

“That’s a long way…” Steel said.

“The crystal glows. Brightly. We don’t have to get that close.”

“When we find the chasm, we can find this spot even if the waypoint didn’t update correctly,” Pepper continued, speaking slowly because she wasn’t as accelerated as the rest of us, but loudly so that the rest of us had to wait and listen to her, this time. “The chasm is natural, so it doesn’t change.”

I paused a second to parse what she’d said. It was so easy to ignore the puppies when they were speaking so slowly. “Huh,” I said. “I guess this could work. Let’s do it!”

“I thought we already decided to do it,” Steel said.

“Do we really have to argue about when we decided to do the thing we all agree we should do?” I asked, grimacing.

“You’re one to talk,” he snapped back. I glared at him, eliciting a perfunctory, “Sorry.”

“No! No, you’re right,” I said. “I’m a terrible kobold and a horrible person. I ruin everything I touch, and I’ll doubtless be single-handedly responsible for the downfall of our society. ”

“No you won’t,” Pancakes said, grabbing my tail and stopping my arm-waving, foot-stomping circuit of the virtual space.

“Um…” I said, shocked out of my rant by confusion. “Thanks?”

He nodded, and with a serious look on his face, added, “If you try to ruin everything, I’ll stop you. I’ll get in a lot of trouble, but I don’t want society to fall down.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, finding it hard to take Pancakes’ promise seriously. Yes, he was a dragon, but he was also kind of small. “I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble.”

“Souffle could eat you to hide the evidence,” Pepper suggested. “They’ve been practicing.”

“Right,” I said, rolling my eyes and trying not to imagine the even smaller dragon inflated like a balloon after eating an entire adult. “If we’re done here, we should get moving. I’m not going to be ruining anything if we don’t find the warp crystal.”

Pancakes looked down over the edge of the chasm. It was just blank darkness, since the environment was based on the map. “I hope there’s no monsters,” he said.

“We’ve got two fighters and a dragon,” I said. “The monsters had better hope there’s no us.”

He looked confused.

“You know what I mean!” I said. “Come on, let’s go.”