So Tina stopped. It was pointless getting lost in the bowels of an arena when even getting out of here wasn’t going to help any. How exactly was she going to get back to 21st century Toronto without her soon to be ex-employer. Like it or not, she had to figure out how to stay on Devon’s good side until she could get home. And damn, a part of her didn’t like the idea of running from a match against someone who called themselves freaking ‘Hyperion’s Lioness’. Anyone with that kind of ego needed to be taken down a peg.

Oh crap, she thought to herself. Was she really thinking of taking on a game where people threw fireballs at each other?

Pretty cool, that voice in her head told her. Something you’d damn well want to put on your Instagram page. Wouldn’t that rack up the likes.

How am I going to do that? She thought back. I don’t even have my phone anymore!

“Tina!” Devon shouted again, startlingly close. Oh, there he was. Chugging along after her, looking almost out of breath, face red in the glow of the torches. Good for him. The exercise and some groveling would do him some good. Tina turned away, but actually didn’t try to get away. Again, where exactly was she going to do, or go. Sure she had a pouch full of coins but so what? They weren’t getting her back onto the QEW, were they?

He stopped when he reached her and grabbed her sleeve.

“Stop, please,” he told her. “You have to listen to me. What we are doing here is very important. It does mean a lot.”

“Why do I have to listen to you?” she wanted to know. “It’s not like you gave me any choice in being here. You brought me here to be some sacrificial... broiled lamb for... whatever you want here.”

“Because I have some important things to tell you,” he made out between breaths. “And it wasn’t sacrifice that I had in mind.”

She turned around and looked down at the dwarf.

“How about you explain to me how getting myself killed- burned to a crisp, is part of my job description?” she argued. “Yeah, I play some kind of game that’s sort of like what they’re doing out there. But no one get killed or ends up the star of the burn ward!”

He looked up at her.

“And maybe what exactly is really going on here,” she continued. “I’m not an idiot, Devon. This was planned, wasn’t it? Down to the tiniest detail. Shit, maybe I am an idiot for not seeing this coming. I mean, not the part about time traveling to Byzantine Constantinople, who could see that coming. But, you know, the rest of the stuff. I knew the job was too good to be true back in the mall.”

“Yes, of course it was planned,” he agreed. “Do you think that I would have gone to all this effort without a plan. Do you think I would have made the effort to find the one person in all the worlds who could help me and my clan succeed where all others failed. Who would drag anyone across worlds and a thousand years into the past without a plan? What do you take me for? A gambler?”

“So you do admit you dragged me here against my will,” she stated, pleased with herself that she now was in some way lording the situation over him. “Lied and manipulated your way into all of this!”

She gestured at the torch lit hall around them. Well, not just this, but Tina figured he got the point.

“You could put it that way,” he admitted nodding. “But perhaps there’s something that could be negotiated...”

“You dragged me away from my life, from my friends, family, city,” she told him. “From my cat! God knows what’d going to happen while I’m away. Or if I never return!”

“I did say the compass would…”

“Shut the fuck up with that silly compass,” she told him, and then added something that wasn’t 100% the truth. “There’s only one thing I want.”