The lich’s gem-studded gaze landed on Perry.

He froze.

The whispering darkness in his fist flickered and changed shade to something a bit more tame.

Perry noticed.

“You damned kids have destroyed my castle! A man’s castle is like…his castle! You can’t just walk into a man’s lair and blow everything up! WHY would you!?”

“I was minding my own damn business, scrying on the heroes, getting everything ready for their murder next week, when BOOM!” Norodor flung his skeletal hands apart for emphasis.

“There will be severe consequences for this. I’lll…um…visit such torments on you and your friends that people will speak of them for generations. Y’all better start running because I’m about to start tormentin’.”

“Do you know me?” Perry asked, cutting through the lich’s tirade.

“No!” Norodr said, a bit too loud, in a guilty manner that reminded Perry of when his father was caught tracking mud into the house.

“Kinda sounds like you do, given that you’re not attacking him.” Heather said.

“So it’s a fight you want! En Garde!” Norodor shouted, beams of scintillating light erupting from his fingertips in a spray of death rays.

Perry put his hands on his hips, eyes narrowed.

The death rays bent around him, drilling holes in the rubble around Perry, confirming his suspicions.

“Dad, are you Norodor the Lich?”

“Your grandma’s gonna kill me,” ‘Norodor’ muttered, his shoulders sagging for a moment before he recovered. “Fine, it’s me, Darryl,” he said, crossing his boney arms. “You want a prize or something?”

“Yes. Give us the sword.” Perry said, hand extended.

“Is that any way to ask for something? After destroying my castle?”

“You realize none of this is real, including your castle, because we’re in a false narrative created by a god?” Perry asked. “I mean, you’re a lich, married with a child? Do you realize how ridiculous that is? Gerome has twisted you into something totally alien to your nature to fit his silly narrative.”

“Rrright.” Dad said, his gem-eyes glancing to the side.

“Dad?” Perry asked, frowning.

“I mean, I kinda already knew all that. I’m Norodor the Lich. You think I can’t tell when reality has been altered by powerful entities? It’s just that my view on reality is a bit more nuanced than yours. Let me ask you this:”

Dad held up a finger.

“What entity mucked up our previous reality so badly that this ‘Gerome’ fellow was able to pass through?” dad asked, cocking his head. “And do we even wanna go back? Your mother and I have been taking turns acting as this country’s boogeymen for generations, and in that time, there has been peace.”

“This country has only existed since three days ago!” Perry shouted “It doesn’t even have a name because the self-serving god who made it half-assed the backstory!”

Perry frowned as something dad had said caught up with him. “Also, did you say mom has, too?”

“I mean, who did you think the dark sorceress was?” Norodor asked with a shrug.

Heather leaned close to Perry’s ear and whispered.

“Your family’s a little fucked up.”

“Whatever! I’m sure my family in the other side is normal.” Perry said, shrugging her off.

“Eh,” The lich said, waggling his bony hand. “The god that’s created this reality, your ‘Gerome’ fellow, seems to have a limited capacity to change people’s core nature, so there’s a good chance that your mother and I still enjoy false identities, dramatic fights, intimidating people professionally, and each other. We’re also most likely some of the most powerful people in existence, after your grandmother, who is a raging bitch, and Gram’pykins who is not, in fact, an actual god. I measured. Close, but not quite Ascendant.”

“Great.” Perry said. “Sword, now, please.”

“I don’t have it.” Norodor said with a shrug.

“WHAT!?”

The delegation of undead I sent to retrieve it last week were controlled remotely by a massive relay crystal in the tower.” Dad said, pointing at the fallen structure.

“They’re probably freely roaming the woods halfway between us and the ruins of the old capital, sword discarded like so much trash.”

Norodor clicked his nonexistant tongue. “I wanted that sword, too.”

“I have it on high authority that Natalie made that sword.” Perry said, motioning to the tiny blacksmith. “It’s not yours to steal.”

“High authority? Whose?”

“Brendon.”

“Oh. Yeah, that would do it. That kid’s special.”

“Come on you guys, we’ve gotta find that sword before the ‘players’ do!” Perry shouted, turning towards the busted section of wall.

“You’re just gonna break my stuff and bail!?” Dad demanded. Perry ignored it.

“Actually Perry…” Natalie said with a guilty expression. “I think I’ll stay here.”

“Eh?” that one actually caught Perry off-guard. He turned to give her his full attention.

“I did absolutely nothing on the way in. It was all you and Heather. All I managed to do was hurt myself, hide behind you guys and endanger you.”

“That’s…true,” Perry wanted to argue. Something about having Natalie along felt right, but false reassurances might get her killed. He glanced over at ‘Norodor’. “You’re not gonna…”

“Nooo, I’m not gonna kill your friends,” dad said, his tone exasperated. “I like her better anyway.”

Heather snorted, and met his eye before the two of them caught Anne’s gaze.

“Why don’t you stay back with Nat?” she asked.

“Oh, god, I was hoping you would ask me that. You two are almost impossible to keep up with.” Anne said, her legs buckling.

I’m surprised she did. Anne had some preternatural athletiscism.

“Race you to the sword,” Perry said, glancing over at Heather.

“You’re out of your mind,” Heather said, her legs lengthening. “But I accept.”

“I hoped you would,” Perry said, closing his eyes and concentrating.

Stability 9->1

Attunement 22->30

The world will be my wings, Perry thought as the seams of reality began to fray around him.

Perry retrieved a handful of flour from his pocket, along with the flint and steel.

“No, w-“ Heather’s protests were cut short.

BOOOM!

HP: 3

The explosion sent Perry tumbling high into the air.

Air is a liquid. Liquid can become solid.

The air against Perry’s skin solidified, turning into an invisible tube of sorts, allowing him to slide along the sky, his descent greatly diminished as he began speeding towards the southeast in a controlled fall.

“You bastard!” Heather shouted, leaping up after him, her entire body bunching up beneath her to launch her high into the air before morphing into one enormous wing, seemingly by instinct. The redheaded heiress gave a victorious cackle and began flying after him.

“By the gods, I can fly!” she crowed. “You’re gonna lose, Perry!”

Perry pulled out another handful of flour, wind whipping past the strange air-membrane around him.

“Wait, don’t-“

BOOM

***Natalie***

“I’m doing nothing but slowing those two down,” Natalie muttered, her stomach sinking as they effortlessly dashed through the sky, practically demigods in their sheer power.

“You know why I like you better?” Norodor asked, reminding her that she was in the lair of the legendary lich, and aforementioned lich was Perry’s father…somehow.

“Umm..” Natalie hedged, looking for someone or something to hide behind.

“I like you better because you can challenge Paradox in ways that Heather cannot. You feel as though you are not their equal, when you are in fact, simply operating without the means to demonstrate your value.”

“Come.” The lich crooked a single boney finger before turning. “Let me show you my workshop. Anne, you’re welcome to come along and catch your breath. I wouldn’t be out here with the ghosts past dark if I were you.”

“Umm..” Natalie posed a question that had been plaguing her for a while now. “How can you be Perry’s father and a lich? That doesn’t seem…possible.”

Norodor glanced back at her.

“Because I poured my heart and soul into that Paradox.”

***Reginald***

Reggie and the rest of his crew were loitering outside the tomb of the paladin, Arknath. It was the newest building in the abandoned city, made of pure marble to honor the fallen paladin who’d led the charge to retake the city.

He took a deep drag on his cigar and cocked his head to look up at the massive statue atop the tomb, displaying Arknath pointing forward heroically with a nondescript longsword. The only distinguishing feature of the longsword was that it was at odds with the paladin’s fanciful armor and shield.

Legend had it that Arknath had been buried with Resistance, an artifact of great power that shielded the user from corruption and provided an inexhaustible will to draw from.

Odd traits for a sword to have, but beneficial in any circumstance, Reggie supposed. No looting expedition had ever made it this deep in the ruined capital since Arknath had been buried, as the wild undead had slowly reclaimed it.

Until about half a day ago.

The sword, if it had existed, was obviously stolen. The tomb had been cracked open, and a trail a blind man could follow led off into the distance, the footprints in two by two and obviously skeletal.

The idiots were desperately tossing the tomb hoping that they found the sword or perhaps some clue as to where it was.

Reggie didn’t even have to go in to know where the sword was, and who had it. intelligent undead in command of a retinue of skeletons, whose base was to the northwest.

Hmm…perhaps it’s that giant obsidian castle to the northwest, with the spooky clouds and undead milling around it. Even in his own mind, Reggie’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

Obviously they weren’t paying Reggie enough for that.

The only reason he was still going along with this stupid crusade was because he was beginning to suspect something was deeply wrong with this scenario, it might threaten his home, and these four ‘people’ who weren’t people were somehow in the center of it.

“It’s gone!” ‘Mars’ shouted, sprinting back up the steps. “Something stole the sword!”

No, really? Reggie took a puff of his cigar and watched silently.

“Try your Survival skill!” Jocelyn said, climbing out of the tomb behind him, followed by Clank and Gerome.

“Right!” the humanoid-shaped pile of tentacles rolled a twenty-sided die the size of a man’s eyeball on the marble floor outside the tomb. It was a seventeen.

Off to the side, the tracks leading away from the tomb began to glow.

“Look, tracks! Right where Reggie saddled the horses and got us ready to move out! How lucky is that?” Clank asked.

“Wow, you guys are incredible,” Reggie deadpanned. These creatures posing as adventurers had a poor grasp of sarcasm, and he was exploiting the hell out of it.

How did he know they weren’t human? Even if Jocelyn hadn’t basically spilled the whole thing, Reggie had personally watched her staring straight at Gram’pykins and complain of an odd sensation in her ‘viewing organs’, to which Gerome had said ‘that’s pain, that’s your body telling you to stop.’

Clank’s armor was empty, and Mars was a goddamned pile of tentacles.

Reggie had no idea how they had intended to pass as human, but from his point of view, it didn’t seem like a good idea to allow them to claim the sword.

From the way they treated Reggie and his crew like setpieces, he didn’t imagine they would do much good with an artifact of great power.

“Man, when we get back, I wanna get in trouble with the town guard and see how many of them it takes to kill me.” Clank said as they rode along the trail.

See?

“We’re the good guys, Clank?” Jocelyn said.

“Nuh-uh, my character sheet says Chaotic Neutral.” Clank said.

“That’s the alignment that douchebags choose when they’re not allowed to be evil.” Gerome said, scowling.

“Then you should’ve just let me be evil and given me a solid reason to behave myself.” Clank replied.

“Good note,” Gerome said, a pen and notebook manifesting in his hand, where he jotted down a note before they both vanished a moment later.

That’s not a paladin ability, Reggie thought, mentally ticking Gerome’s power level up further. The ‘paladin’ was either a powerful wizard or a demigod of some sort, having displayed a wealth of abilities he simply shouldn’t have.

He’d already coached his team not to say anything if they saw something strange, allowing the creatures to get comfortable with their ‘scene dressing’. It was amazing how much people let slip when you simply kept your mouth shut.

Now Reggie was simply trying to figure out how he was going to betray these abominations and live to tell the tale.

Jocelyn seemed like a solid choice to become a turncoat. The only reason Reginald hadn’t approached her was for fear that his judgement was impaired by her looks.

Still, this is the best chance I’m ever going to get.

“So, what’s your relationship with Gerome?” Reggie asked as Jocelyn fell behind the rest of her group, out of earshot. A nice safe question to establish where her loyalties might lie.

“Out of character?”

“Yup.”

******

Reggie winced, his head throbbing, nose bleeding onto his saddle.

“Whoops!” Jocelyn murmured, leaning over to dab at his nose with her handkerchief. “A little too much Truth there for you.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I can’t tell you or you’ll get hurt again,” Jocelyn said, frowning for a moment before her face lit up. “But I can talk in euphemisms.”

She reached out and put her fingers on his skull, and he felt his mind flicker for a moment, like someone ruffling through a book’s pages.

“Alright, you know how when you were young, you used to get your friends together and run through other people’s yards and ding-dong-ditch them?”

“Strangely, yes.”

“Okay, and there was that mean old man Henderson who nobody knew what his job was?”

“Yeah.”

“And then one day when he was away, you and some of your friends broke into his house and stole a bunch of his beer and porn mags, wandering through the house until you found his terrarium.”

“Yeah?”

“And it was just the nicest terrarium. The only thing old man Henderson loved. Beautifully curated, self-contained, with vibrant green leaves, and aphids, crickets, spiders, even a little pond with water-striders and tiny fish.”

“I remember,” Reggie said, his stomach sinking from remembered guilt. The fluorescent light bouncing off the leaves had looked like little green gemstones among the drab apartment. There had been a plaque at the bottom denoting the beginning of the terrarium.

Fifteen years the old man had kept it going.

He’d been angry at old man Henderson for some reason. Angry at everyone, maybe. He couldn’t remember anymore, but it couldn’t have mattered that much. Just a stupid teen’s stupid problems.

“And you remember how you dicked with the terrarium to mess with him?”

“I poured a bunch of drain-o in it,” Reggie muttered, his stomach sinking.

“Okay, so in this analogy, Gerome is you, and I’m that foreign exchange girl that Amanda brought with her. That’s a pretty close summary of what’s going on, and our relationship.”

“In your analogy…who am I?” Reggie asked.

Jocelyn critically looked him up and down.

“You’re one of the dozen or two bigger spiders in the terrarium.” She said, ruffling his hair. “Good for you, you apex predator!”

Reggie’s guts froze over. He was going to die. Everyone was going to die because they were at the mercy of a madman who would eventually grow bored and smash the terrarium.

“Jocelyn, would you help me kill Gerome?” Reggie blurted.

“Would the foreign exchange student kill young Reggie over a spider?” she asked.

“Would you?” Reggie countered.

Jocelyn’s lips quirked into a smile. “Sure,” she said with a shrug. “But just killing him isn’t going to do much. He’ll just move a living part of himself into the timestream and continue from there.”

Reggie’s brain started hurting again, but he plowed through.

“Using your analogy, I would very much like my terrarium…Drain-o free. I would like myself and the rest of my terrarium to continue living. How can that happen?”

“Well, you would have to-“

“Hey guys!” Mars called back to them, waving. “The trail just ended!”

“What!?” Gerome called from the middle of the group, spurring his horse to carry him to where Mars was studying the dirt.

Jocelyn winked at Reggie before riding over to Clank and whispering in his ear.

The empty suit of armor gave her a thumb’s up.

“It’s practically a tradition to conspire against the Dungeon Master,” He said, ignoring Reggie entirely.

Who would believe someone was conspiring with an insect?

“Well, Mars, I designed the setting, but the NPCs are capable of making decisions and mistakes, so not everything is going to be perfectly on-script. This is the first example we’ve found.” Gerome said, standing up from the tracks.

“Wow, cool!”

“Something happened with the skeletons that broke their control and allowed them to begin wandering every which way. We may actually find the sword easier than we might’ve otherwise.” Gerome continued. “We should split up and look for the sword.”

“Okay, nice try, Gerome, but there are just some things that are never done, and that includes splitting up the party,” Clank said. “You just wanna launch a surprise attack on us while we’re split up.”

“I didn’t plan this.” Gerome said, motioning to the scattered tracks.

“Even if you didn’t plan it, it could be one of the NPC’s trying to ambush us. You said they’re able to make their own decisions.”

“That is true…the lich may have discovered the nature of this reality again and be trying to kill me…again. I really thought I changed his mind enough this time to not care.”

“In any case, it makes the encounter more interesting!” Gerome said, hopping back onto his horse. “What do you guys wanna do?”

“Let’s follow a spiral search pattern!” Clank said.

“Can I roll to see which skeleton was the heaviest, or had the most steady stride? I think the bearer of the sword would be either heavier or more well put-together. I.E. the leader,” Mars said.

“knock yourself out,” Gerome said.

“Nat twenty!” Mars shouted, thrusting his tentacles up in the air in glee.

A set of tracks lit up, continuing along the path towards the lich’s castle.

“Good a place as any.” Clank said.

“Hey, worst case scenario, we spend a couple decades combing the forest.” Gerome said with a shrug.

“Ooh, that sounds fun,” Jocelyn said. “I would miss people, though.”

BOOM

In the distance, there was a muffled explosion, echoing through the forest.

Gerome frowned. “What in old man henderson’s name was that? Why is everything always going off-script? Is it that Brendon kid again? It’s probably that Brendon kid.”

Reggie’s eye twitched as a spike of pain lodged itself in his head, quickly fading to nothing.

“I don’t think the lich is just going to sit around waiting for us to nab the sword!” Clank said, “let’s go!” He spurred his horse forward, and together they flew down the trail. The other three adventurers hastily followed suit, along with Reggie and his mercenaries.

Only a minute later, Reggie brought his mount to a dirt-spraying halt as the nine of them formed a half-circle around a tattered, dirt-smeared young man standing beside a massive trough in the soft earth of the forest.

His green eyes were a shock against the soot and dirt grime he was covered in. He was standing above a pile of bones, hand wrapped around the hilt of a plain longsword, the only decoration a bit of writing down the center of the blade.

“Hello again, Gerome.” He said, eyes narrowed. “I want you off my planet.”

“Oh come on,” Gerome said, gesturing in front of him. “How many times do I gotta re-wire this kid!?”

“I’m Paradox,” the young man said.

“That doesn’t even…” Gerome said, exasperated. “You know what?”

He raised his fingers and snapped.

Nothing happened, save for the sword taking on a more brilliant sheen as it emitted an inner light.

“Oh. Clever girl,” Gerome murmured an instant before the guard-captain’s son charged them.