The Admin worked night and day. Out of habit he pulled iced coffee after iced coffee from his inventory. He never felt tired, didn’t need caffeine to keep him awake, but the cold tannin-filled liquid brought him a small measure of joy.

He’d been watching the players crawl through his dungeon time and again for months now. Enough months to almost be years. As he looked through the list of complaints, he could tell which ones really needed fixing.

Floor 17 was too big. It’s a floor of dinosaurs, it had to be that big. Fixing not required.

Too many goblins on floor 8. It was the first boss floor. Of course there were lots of goblins on it. But just to say he’d fixed it, he took off one of the goblins.

The sirens on floor 23 were pacifists. Yeah, that was an issue. Those mermaids were far more interested in singing than attacking. Sure, their voices were hypnotic, so players would die of starvation listening to them, but that wasn’t fun. He put the homeless gobbo there, turning her into a siren, and took one of the sirens out. For good measure he added in a couple low-level eels, and set their agro area to overlap the siren’s area.

The ant swarms didn’t drop any loot. Their queens dropped more gold than they were worth, so not really an issue.

Marbles are useless. Next cycle he was releasing a slingshot, and marbles gained magical properties based on their color when used as ammo. When cycle 50 came around the slingshots could be upgraded to marble-firing crossbows.

Actually… He set the flying ants to drop one marble each upon death, and reduced the queen to drop +1 slingshots, one per group member. There.

The ghost catgirls are creepy and boring. Yeah, he’d run out of girls for the position of catgirl, and had tried to split one. Didn’t work. But hey, there was now a jobless siren! He took the split catgirl, un-split her, and put her at the inn on floor 60. Then he took the siren, changed race to catgirl, assigned orange color, and put her at the inn on floor 93.

ERROR: Catgirl color [orange] already on this floor. Please assign new color.

Since convincing the system that there wasn’t an orange catgirl on floor 93 any more would take more effort than he wanted to put in, he changed her color to… silver? Sure, silver. Why not.

Please assign name.

He grumbled, fingers hovering over his keyboard. He hated naming people.

Sil… ver… vi… a… sylvia… via… Via. Sure. Via could be a name. He’d named one of the girls on that floor Aya, hadn’t he? So it fit.

Moving right along.

The door on floor 99 was too hard to find. Well that was the point.

The door on floor 79 was impossible to reach without magic. Also the point.

One of the-

Players have entered final floor.

The Admin sat up. No they hadn’t.

He swiped away the notification, bringing up his bird’s eye view of floor 100. The dragon slept near the north edge of the room, covered in gold like Smaug. A maze of trails snaked through piles of gold, most leading to dead ends. If even one coin was touched, the dragon would wake.

Near the entrance, arguing about which trail to take, were five catgirls, a hobgoblin, a kobold, and a handful of flying ants.

The Admin cursed, pulling up the specs for exits and entrances. When players had started choosing less human-like races, some exits hadn’t allowed them to pass. So he’d cheated by lowering the exit barrier, and told them to just go over it. A few NPC’s had figured it out, but the only ones to seriously try going through the floors had been this group. He’d figured they wouldn’t get to the final floor for at least another week.

Sure, the kobold had gotten through a couple days ago, but he’d immediately grabbed a gem. The dragon vaporized him within a minute. How did the group go from a near TPK to all getting through? Eh, not important.

He set the barriers back up to max, keeping an eye on the group as they split up. He reconfigured the exits to check for… Hell. There wasn’t a single trait the players had that wasn’t shared by an NPC. Other than “player”, which the doors were already supposed to be allowing through. He’d just have to give the players keys, and figure out a way to make sure they never lost them.

He got to work configuring a key, typing with more urgency than he’d done in months as the hobgoblin got closer and closer to the button platform. He found a basic old-fashioned key shape, imported it, changed it to… diamond? No, gems were already a thing. What was that thing people did to steel to make it rainbow? The hobgoblin found the platform and started back towards the group, so the name didn’t matter. Rainbow steel it was.

Apply changes, add to inventory of everyone who enters floor 1, accept, change barriers to allow everyone with this key to pass. Apply changes.

Crisis averted.

The group reconvened. After a brief conversation, they carefully followed the hobgoblin down the trail to the button platform. Not a single coin was touched along the way. Soon they were all standing in the middle of the platform, examining the identical buttons.

One by one they turned to the yellow catgirl, who was frowning at the floor.

“Well? Which one is it?”

Ah, so the yellow one was the “spy”.

“I…”

“You have to know.”

“I don’t think we should do this.” She looked around nervously, judging the reactions of her friends.

“Like hell!”

“You should have mentioned that before now.”

“Why not?”

She moved closer to the green one. “I have a bad feeling. We shouldn’t push the button. We aren’t players. It’s not our place.”

The Admin smiled, sitting back. He was glad at least one of them was self-aware. His hand hovered over the key's delete button, waiting for them to leave.

“Ok.”

“Fair,” the kobold said, shrugging.

“Not fair! We worked hard to get here! I’m taking more than bragging rights.”

The hobgoblin moved in front of the yellow one. “Aya. Tell me which button it is, or I will press every single one until I get it right.”

The purple one took his hand. “Same.”

The Admin sighed, dropping his hand. The key would stay.

“No. And I’m not coming down again. We shouldn’t be here.”

“Fine then, stay with the bugs. The four of us can get through on our own. We don’t need you any more.”

“Yeah!”

“Five,” the kobold said, shrugging again. They looked at him. “What, only three can push the button anyway. If it means I get to watch Kim fight a dragon, I’m in.”

“What we’re trying to say is, we’re doing this. No matter what. So you might as well tell us.”

The yellow one sighed, shook her head, and pointed.

The hobgoblin strode over, looked at her defiantly, and pressed the button.

A wave of magic went out, up through the dungeon, alerting all the players that the button had been pushed.

The purple catgirl pushed the button, sending out more magic.

The blue and red catgirls looked at each other, grinned, and ran for the button. They laughed, shoving and pushing as their hands reached for the button. The hobgoblin stepped back as the catgirls launched themselves at the pedestal, the blue one’s longer limbs letting her finger touch the button half a second before her rival.

A third wave of magic went out, resetting everything to their default places.

Cycle 26 has begun.