As she soared above the world, Monarkea found her attention shifting from her current actions to the man clinging to her back. Vaile was doing well, or at least he was doing much better than any member of the Races would.

He was exposed to the bare winds of the skies while traveling at over Mach 2.4 while armored only in a flowing robe, a bit of high-quality leather armor, a mask, a cape, and a pair of gloves and shoes. Plus, while he was gripping her back with a strength that no normal creature could, he was also gripping his staff/ walking stick in his other hand.

Given that he was using only one hand and a low profile to stay on her back while the wind whipped his attire around and tried to drag him away, Monarkea could not help but wonder exactly how powerful he’d be in certain… other activities.

“Are you well?” she asked, her voice echoing in Vaile’s head due to telepathy.

“Aside from the fact that the air seems intent on sending me to the ground? Fine, how are you?”

She could not help but chuckle at that response.

“Aside from the fact that you are being accosted by the wind to the point that you may fly off and be sent tumbling down? Well, I could be better.”

Vaile could almost be heard tilting his head a bit at that.

“I would have thought that you would be ecstatic that I’m here. Vyviir certainly seems so, at least on the surface.”

“That’s the issue.” Monarkea replied, the concern in her telepathic voice being even more easily noticed than if she had spoken normally. “My father was and is ambitious, greedy, and proud, but while he was the epitome of what every dragon ought to be, he was never this overwhelmingly absurd. The sheer lack of decorum, the utter absence of any semblance of deference to you, and the complete lack of even a modicum of respect shown to you raises questions I never thought would arise. It worries me deeply.”

Vaile nodded and let his mind replay memories from his past encounters. He then looked over at the even more massive dragon to his left, whose size made the titanic Monarkea look like an average early teenage human compared to an average adult man.

He felt a deep sense of uncomfortable familiarity when he looked at Vyviir, and while he could not fully place where and why this sense of unease came from or came about, his previous encounters with, let’s just say, ‘unnatural entities’ gave him an idea that he considered to be the possible worst-case scenario.

“Monarkea, have you heard about the creepy Sand-Elf obelisks over in the Solusand region? Or what about the entity that the giant spider in another place had to fight off?” Vaile asked with even more concern in his mental voice than Monarkea had expressed in her own.

“I have heard of them and their unnatural effects and origins, but you cannot mean to assert that one has replaced my father, can you?”

Vaile said nothing for a while as he looked over the large dragon to his left. Perhaps due to previous close encounters, he had developed a better, more potent gut feeling that he had already possessed. And, while it had made him feel uncomfortable around Vyviir before, now as he looked at the dragon in his true form, he felt even deeper levels of unease, and the unease that he felt almost always coincided with something that could be traced in some respects back to whatever force was bringing those glitchy abominations into reality.

“I’m not sure just yet, but your dad may at least be affected by something like that. I doubt he is fully replaced, but I get the sense that something with his mind just isn’t the way it ought to be. We may want to tour a few hordes and sift through the mountains of stuff in them, just to be sure.”

Monarkea nodded in assent to this course of action. “Father will no doubt be thrilled about you wanting to look through his numerous hordes. If you offer to throw in a few things to add to them, no doubt his new levels of greed will make him forget that he has any dark secrets that may be discovered therein.”

“Then we have a course of action.” Vaile said with determination. “And if we happen to find a corpse that resembles Vyviir under all of that, then we’ll have to improvise on the fly, though I doubt that those glitchy things and whatever made them would be that lax when it comes to hiding their traces. If their previous fumbles have taught them anything, they would have tried to hide a bit better, but maybe not…”

…

“Left, right, left, right, up, down, up, down, B, A, Select, Start.”

As he spoke those words, a brilliant light shone down from the sky, piercing through the cave roof as though it were not even there to begin with.

However, despite his pleas to the Goddess, the puzzle remained unsolved. And so, with even more determination than before, he tried a new solution to the problem.

“Left, right, left, right, up, down, up, down, B, A, Select, Start.”

Light danced around him, but as with the previous eighty-three times, he had used a ‘different’ solution to the ‘puzzle’, the fallen rocks that blocked his path refused to budge.

“Left, right, left, right, up, down, up, down, B, A, Select, Start.”

If anyone was there to see this idiot ‘Hero’ continue to use the same series of words to do nothing, each time assuming they were doing something different, they might have questioned Axis Wode’s sanity, but while Axis was not insane, he was, however, extremely, horrifically, mind-bogglingly dumb.

To say that he saw the world differently would be an understatement of a kind hitherto fore unseen by the likes of mankind, and this was no mere schizophrenia, he legitimately crossed the streams of pure delusion, blind faith, utter idiocy, and hopeless innocence to create something truly remarkable.

“Left, right, left, right, up, down, up, down, B, A, Select, Start.”

As he spoke these words yet again, the cave roof behind and above him collapsed and a bunch of rocks and a few trees fell down, forming a terribly unsafe ramp/ ladder that could be used if one did not care to show an OSHA Inspector that they were using it to move around.

“It’s always the last solution to the puzzle that’s the correct one!” Axis said cheerfully as the air in the isolated cave freshened. Turning around, he walked over to the terribly unsafe ramp and began to climb, seeing not a series of collapses and slips but a quick time event and a rhythm game in its place.