As the flight of dragons reached their destination, Monarkea was forced to deal with a question that she had never gotten the answer for that she desperately needed. She knew fully how to make a normal landing, or even do so while transforming into that lesser, pathetic, human form, but she had never even bothered to consider what she would have to do in order to keep Lord Vaile from faceplanting into the side of the cliff due to the rapid deceleration.

“Will you be fine?” she asked, and Vaile nodded before standing up, almost losing his balance on her still-moving body before leaping off as Monarkea’s claws dug into the ground.

Wondering if Lord Vaile had just broken his legs, and maybe his face and skull, on the mix of solid rock and highly compressed dirt, Monarkea turned a normal skidding stop into a spin and she watched with amazement as Vaile stuck the landing and skidded in a low slide after her.

She could tell that he was in pain, but what he felt was likely much less than he would have been forced to deal with had he kept ahold of her back, only to be rocketed off due to the extreme change in speed. Likewise, he did not seem nearly as damaged as she expected he would be from such a landing, though this amazement turned to shock and horror as her father, a dragon big enough to dwarf her, came into his approach not even a short distance from the two of them.

“ARE YOU MAD?!” she roared as her father came down. She dodged out of the way, but the turbulence caused by her father’s landing sent Lord Vaile spiraling over the edge and down below the cloud line.

As her father straightened himself out and looked dismissively over his shoulder, Monarkea and a few other dragons raced to the edge and looked down.

“He isn’t weak enough to die from that is he?” Vyviir asked with a tinge of expectance that could have been taken as either anticipation of being correct or incorrect.

The dragons did not hear him, nor did they pay attention to him, as their Lord had seemingly vanished, not just below the clouds, but from sight itself.

“Vyviir!” came a voice that snapped all to attention. It was deceptively happy in tone, though that might have been sarcastic joy rather than actual positive feelings. “I might have taken that as an attempt to kill me. That isn’t what it was, right?”

Eyes shifted and locked on to a person who was hanging like a monkey from a chain that adorned what once was an aerial entrance to a great Dwarven stronghold and yet now was home to the new, more violent, and greedy occupants. Though having long since seen better days, the chain still was durable enough to have caught the person swinging from it, and that person dropped down and walked towards Vyviir with his arms outstretched to his sides.

“I dearly hope you haven’t misplaced your mind, or maybe, your body.” Said Vaile as he approached with an open posture that read ‘come at me, bitch’.

“I have misplaced neither, Vaile.” Replied Vyviir, who looked slightly annoyed by the most recent turn of events.

“Not even a ‘Lord’ Vaile? My, my, my, how you’ve changed! And I was planning to drop off a few gifts of various values here and there to show my endless gratitude and appreciation for your works and al that you could achieve in the coming times!”

As he moved towards the massive dragon, Vaile pulled out something that caused all jaws save for his own to drop, even causing the dragon that sent his illusionary copy flying off into the sunset to pause and let the cogs in his mind start whirring.

To Vaile, it wasn’t anything overly special, just a solid chunk of a very pricy material even back during the final expansion of the game. He had, after getting a few certain Tamed Beings under his sway, been able to do what many had considered to be impossible, and had turned what was to most a material that, on the ‘real world market’ could cost as much as a small mansion into something he had literally mountains of just lying around in his Item Box.

If he had wanted, he could have crashed the game’s economy, and based on the looks, this roughly fist-sized chunk of what was likely to be an ‘unobtanium’ in this current world, he probably could crash the New World’s economy just as easily. It was not every day that you saw an end-game item that could only be dropped by the last, ultimate Raid Boss of the final expansion of the final Raid Dungeon of the Final Patch of the game, especially when you needed to jump through a fuckton of hoops in several Raids to even have the chance to have the ‘Tears of Oblivion’ drop.

After getting that thing on his side, Vaile was able to get the final Raid Boss, ‘Terminus Imperator Deus’, to cry him a fucking river at his own discretion, and now Vaile was using that massive amount of wealth, something that Vyvir, possessed, body-swapped, or otherwise altered or not, would not be able to ignore, as his ace, or at least the biggest one of them.

“I mean, this is just one of the things I had that I was going to give you for taking such good care of things. I doubt you had much trouble, though, and I was going to ask you to help me reign in the others who are connected to me, but if you are that hostile then maybe I could turn my attention elsewhere and ask someone else to-.”

Vaile did not get the chance to continue speaking as Vyviir began to apologize, though not profusely, and blame the act that he had attempted to take on a mix of factors that would not have been nearly enough to inconvenience him if he wanted to deal with them by any other means. As he apologized, blaming everyone but himself, Vyviir didn’t notice that Vaile had begun smiling under his mask.

Vaile was getting better at bullshitting people, and he had, without Vyviir being aware, confirmed that something was at the very least tugging at Vyviir’s mind and pulling him around, whether he knew it or not. After all, Vaile had begun to feel something the moment he took that drop out, and that drop, a shard of a being he never wanted to unleash, was literally screaming telepathically at him that a very, very hostile force was nearby, and by ‘nearby’ it meant where Vyviir was, down to the exact coordinates he was occupying in the fabric of existence.

“Cool.” He muttered as he put away the constantly screaming, insignificant shard of the Destroyer of All Things. “I now have a way to find you glitchy bastards.”