With one final glance up at the sky, I wasted no time opening a portal to Daedalus’ office where Alice had set up her command center. She was there waiting for us with several other Doppels and a small company of her elite Lamia guard.

  The Doppels were wearing their new, flashier clothes with their new hairstyles and glittery makeup. Seeing them all in a group like this, they reminded me of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  “Holy shit,” Kiki said.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “The Lamia are friendly.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just...how do you know so many fucking gorgeous women?” she said, her eyes darting between the attractive Doppelgangers and the Lamia warriors, all of whom were also beautiful women, from the waist up at least.

  “I can’t even,” Tiff said, covering her face with her hand and shaking her head.

  “What is this place?” Grace said, less interested in the room’s inhabitants as she was with the place itself as she gawked around at its assorted treasures with an awestruck expression. The rest of Team Spice were also looking pretty overwhelmed.

  “Priorities, everyone,” I said with a sharp, teachery clap. “Let’s get Anika safe and we can make introductions after.” I turned to Alice. “What’s the situation?”

  Alice fiddled with the dials on the surface of the desk and a few of the floating screens in front of her enlarged. They showed views from various angles inside the room where Overgeared was being kept.

  "Where'd this come from?" Tiff said, studying the desk and the Status-like screens it produced. "Seems a bit anachronistic."

  "That actually came with the place," I said. "Controls the entire labyrinth."

  "I am the dungeon master," Alice said sweetly. "See? Anika's okay."

  The Overgeared holding cell was a large, rectangular room that reminded me of the one where we’d faced the Rat King what seemed like forever ago, with a tall ceiling supported by two rows of large pillars evenly spaced down the length of the room. Anika was bound, gagged, blindfolded, and sitting on her knees in one far corner, but like Alice said, otherwise okay. A trio of Overgeared Players were ostensibly keeping watch over her, but they seemed more concerned with playing dice. (You know my elves manufactured those too, by the way.) The rest of Overgeared were in two groups positioned on either side of the entrance, waiting to ambush anyone or anything that came through the door.

  “How’s Anika?” Tiff demanded. “Have they, you know...touched her?”

  Alice turned in her chair and looked up at Tiff with serious eyes. “I may have messed up by letting them take her, but I would never have allowed anything like that to happen. Ever.”

  Tiff swallowed hard and nodded. “Okay then.”

  “What do you want to do, Tiff?” I said.

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Anika is your teammate. Just tell me what you need.”

  Tiff stared at the screens. “If we can get Anika’s blindfold off so she can see her guards she can put them to sleep.”

  “If Daniel can open one of his doorways next to her, I could use Tama to get the blindfold off,” one of the Spice girls said. Her name was Heather, a quiet teenager with several piercings in her ears, nose, and lip.

  “Whatever you need,” I said again.

  “What about the other Overgeareds?” Grace said.

  “If I can make a suggestion,” Alice said, then she started fiddling with a few more dials and a fresh screen popped up. “We’ve been working on some new traps and I think this might be the perfect time to test this one.”

  We all studied the screen as Alice explained the trap’s function.

  “That’s just insidious,” Kiki said.

  “Thank you,” Alice said.

  “It’s a bit overkill, but that totally works for me,” Tiff said. “What’s the fatality factor here?”

  “Whatever we want it to be. Unless there’s a damn good reason, my dungeons are set to always let the Players and monsters respawn.”

  “You use it for training?” Kiki said.

  “Yeah. Alice here has even played dungeon master and run Maple Leaf through the labyrinth a few times, and the plan is to rent it out for others to play in too. We can also adjust the layout so it’s never the same maze twice.”

  “That’s handy,” Tiff said wistfully. Even I could see how much she wanted one for Team Spice.

  “Tell you what, when all this is over we’ll see about getting Spice and N3m3s1s their own dungeons.”

  Tiff studied me with a complicated look. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Very.”

  “Then I’ll tell you what, when the time comes we won’t be polite and will totally take you up on that.”

  “Uh huh,” Kiki agreed with an enthusiastic nod that sent her pigtails flying. “Totally.”

  “But first, let’s get Anika out of there,” Tiff said.

  We turned our attention back to Alice’s screens. The three Overgeared Players were still playing craps near Anika while a heated argument had revved up near the door. Several of the Players were openly criticizing their Captain and one was suggesting they start cutting off parts of Anika and sending them to me, but before the idea found support another Player was quick to point out that if they had a way to send body parts out they wouldn’t need to because the whole point was that they they were trapped in there.

  “Where’s Heather?” I said.

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  The girl raised a shy hand. “Here?”

  “Ready?”

  She nodded, and a rodent-like creature about the size of a large house cat that looked like a chimeric cross between a weasel, a crocodile, and a vulture appeared on her shoulder. “Ready Tama?” Heather said, and the creature nuzzled her cheek with a toothy beak. “We’re ready.”

  “Alice?”

  “All set, boss,” the glittery Doppel said.

  I opened one end of the portal in front of Heather and the other end appeared a few feet away from Anika inside the holding room.

  “Off you go,” Heather whispered, and Tama leapt off her shoulder and dashed through the portal. Anika tensed when she felt the creature skitter up her arm, but when it started gnawing at her blindfold she seemed to get the idea and stayed still and quiet. Tama’s many sharp teeth made short work of the blindfold and it immediately went down to work on the rope binding her wrists.

  Anika blinked in light for a few moments as she got her bearings, her eyes widening when she looked to the side and saw us looking back through the open portal. Tiff grinned and waved, then pointed at each of the three guards in turn, then put her hands palms together against her cheek and tilted her head, the universal sign of sleep.

  Anika waited for Tama to free her hands, then quickly untied her own legs. I couldn’t tell you whether she made some kind of noise that alerted him or if he just happened to glance back at her, but one of the guards did look back and saw her free of her former bonds. Anika smirked and placed a finger to her lips, then waved at him as she used her power and his eyes drooped closed as he and his two companions toppled over onto the floor, fast asleep.

  That definitely made some noise and caught the attention of some of the Players near the door.

  “Time to go,” Tiff called as she reached through the portal. Anika took her hand and allowed herself to be pulled through as Tama scampered back to its master.

  The moment Anika was safely back with us, I changed the portal connection. I left one end in the holding room, and moved the other end from Daedalus’s office to Alice’s deathtrap.

  The trap was the entire room itself. On casual perusal it looked like a big treasure chamber, a large cube about forty feet along each side. Looking in, you’d see mounds of gold coins and chests and other greed-inducing goodies which were, of course, fake. The hundred million quatlu question was whether or not Team Overgeared would fall for it. It wasn’t actually such a big question, though: of course they would.

  And of course they did.

  Most of them rushed to the back of the room after seeing Anika escape, where they were able to look through the portal and see all that glittering loot. We watched on Alice’s screens as the first of them tentatively stepped through the portal. Pity they didn’t have any rats to send through first, not that it would've helped. When nothing happened and the treasure room appeared safe, the portal became like the main door of a Tallahassee Best Buy at opening time on Black Friday.

  When all the pushing and shoving was done, every conscious member of Team Overgeared had entered the trap. That’s when I shut the portal.

  We watched on the screen showing the view inside the trap as the Overgeared Players started stuffing their bags and pockets with gold and trying to open the chests. There were a lot of laughs in the control room when one of them warned his teammates to be careful in case the chests were Mimics.

  “Shall I trigger the trap?” Alice said.

  “What about the three Anika put to sleep?” Grace said.

  “Gimme a sec,” I said, re-opening the portal into the holding room where those three dozed.

  I went into the room and shut the portal behind me. Then I opened another one back into the trap room. Only this time I didn’t open it at floor level, I made it appear high in the air near the ceiling. Then I picked up one of the sleeping Players by the calf and tossed him through.

  I peeked through the portal to watch him fall forty feet down and land in a pile of gold with a disturbing crunch. It was a good thing he was magically asleep, otherwise that looked like it would've hurt like hell; I was pretty sure his leg wasn't supposed to fold underneath him that way. Needless to say, his arrival like this came as a bit of a shock to the other Overgeareds. By the time they figured out what was happening, the second sleeper had been tossed through and landed directly on top of the first. I had to dodge a firebolt shot from below when I threw down the last one, so my aim was off and he landed a bit off target.

  After that, I looked down at the Overgeareds and waved before pulling my head back and shutting the portal before the next volley of ranged affinity attacks came. Then I returned to rejoin everyone in the command room.

  “Okay Alice,” I said, “now you can trigger the trap.”

  “Excellent,” she said, and flipped a switch on the desk.

  “I wish I had some popcorn,” Tiff said. “This is gonna be good.”

  “Would you accept some potato-ish chips?” I said.

  “Every time,” she said less than a minute later, crunching on a chip, “I promise myself I won’t be surprised by the next thing you do. And every time I fail.”

  “Has Lianna had these yet?” Kiki said, grabbing a handful of chips.

  “Actually,” I said, “we were relaxing in the elf village snacking on some while we watched all you guys start the quest.”

  Kiki scowled.

  “Don’t tell me you’re jealous, Kiki,” Tiff said.

  Kiki scowled even harder.

  “Like you’re not?” Grace said, stealing a chip from Tiff's hand.

  “No comment,” Tiff said, snatching her hand away before tossing the rest of her chips into her mouth.

  “I think something’s starting to happen,” one of the Team Spice girls said. “Look.”

  We all turned our attention back to the screens. Alice had opened a few more inside the trap, allowing us to watch the action from several angles.

  “Is it just me,” one of the Overgeared Players was saying, “or is the room...shrinking?”

  “And why is it raining?” another was saying.

  You know the trash compactor scene in Star Wars? Well, imagine the trash compactor was actually the stomach of a large monster and that’s more or less the gist of Alice’s trap. It was, in effect, a giant, room-sized Mimic.

  The walls were, in fact, contracting. At the same time, a potent digestive acid was being released through all six sides. Meanwhile, the gold coins were also waking up, because of course they were not real gold coins but tiny but ravenous beetle-like monsters who only looked like treasure.

  There was an exit, but it was locked. It was possible to open it, however unlikely it was that anyone would stumble across the way to do it. The only way to open the solitary means of egress was using the key, which was hidden in the one and only chest among the dozens in the room that was a real chest. The other chests were, you guessed it, actual Mimics.

  Alice’s insidious deathtrap was designed to eat anything unlucky enough to venture inside. And it was hungry.

  “Are we seriously going to just stand here and watch this?” Grace said. “Shouldn’t we, you know, get back to the quest? Everyone else must be fighting Invictus and the Droogs by now.”

  Everyone looked at me.

  “Meh,” I said, putting my hand on Alice’s shoulder and leaning forward to watch the screens. “They’ll be fine.”

  “You seem pretty confident about that,” Kiki said. “How can you be sure?”

  “Because your team’s there, and the Ninjas, and the Legionnaires.”

  “Don’t forget Lianna,” Tiff said. “With those guns she’s like a whole team by herself.”

  “She is a whole team,” I said. “My team.”

  “I suppose that should be enough,” Kiki said reluctantly.

  “They’ll be fine,” I said again. Which, of course, triggered a flag, because that’s when my Dick Tracy communicator lit up. This time it was Lianna’s moonstone flashing.

  “Hey there,” I said nonchalantly when her holographic face appeared. Then I saw the look on that face and instantly got chalant. “What’s wrong?”