Thea

I laughed through the coughing fit as I handed the vaporizer back to La’akea. The dragon was in her human form with dark sun-touched skin, silver hair and faintly glowing eyes the color of aged copper. She had a big body that seemed to be designed specifically to give the perfect hug. I had met her type before. They were the best type.

We were sitting together on a picnic blanket enjoying some sandwiches that she had magic’d together and a couple of beers from my storage. Plus a healthy amount of drugs I had ‘borrowed’ from Sora’s personal collection.

“Thousands of adorable white mice crawling all over his temple and he was fully convinced that each and every one of them was his wife.” She inhaled the vapor deeply before giving it back to me so that she could continue her story. “You should have seen his face when I offered to call an exterminator. It was priceless!”

“You see? This is why Kai doesn’t have very many temples,” I laughed. “Her people keep scaring away all the clerics.”

“Oh, no you don't, little devil,” La’akea smiled. “I’ve heard all about you and the pranks you pulled the last time you were here in Elysia. I mean, at least my god encourages it.”

That all but confirmed my suspicions. I was trapped in Kai’s little corner of Elysia. She was probably pissed about Esme, which made sense because if somebody had killed my daughter I’d throw her into some crazy funhouse dungeon for all of eternity too. Well, I’d probably just kill them, but I wasn’t a trickster goddess.

Although, I was kind of curious about how La’akea had heard about me. Despite what I always claimed, I really wasn’t that big of a deal.

“Now hold on just a moment.” I sat upright, pointing an accusing beer at the dragon. “I can’t be held responsible for those pranks. If you were stuck in dad’s realm, you would have done exactly the same thing! It was crazy boring there.”

La’akea gave a very serious and deliberate nod. “Yes. I would have, which is why I’m here.”

We stared at each other for a single tense moment before we both cracked up in laughter. I handed her back the vaporizer and took another drink from my beer.

“Where did you hear about all my pranks in Elysia?” I asked. “I didn’t think I was that famous.”

La’akea laughed. “Kai spent nearly half a century trying to steal you away from Inim, but he refused to even consider it. Honestly, I’m surprised the birdbrain didn’t mention it to you.”

That was a lot to unpack, and I really wasn’t sure of what to think about it. I obviously didn’t fit in with my siblings, it’s why I left. Assuming Kai’s corner of Elysia was more than just this stupid puzzle labyrinth, then I probably would have enjoyed it here way more.

But I wasn’t sure if gods could actually trade celestials. I had never heard of something like that, and there’s a very real chance that I would have just fallen if dad gave me up like that. Falling because your god actively gave up on you is… well, it’s bad, like really bad. Like a total alignment shift kind of bad.

Dad’s whole thing was telling the truth and healing people. He was basically the biggest goodie-two-shoes god that ever existed. A total alignment shift from that gets super dark, super fast. It was basically straight up evil with no redeeming qualities, I had seen it before.

I’ve never been the greatest person, and falling certainly hadn’t helped, but I didn’t even want to imagine how I would’ve ended up if I'd been abandoned. That thought made me really thankful that dad hadn’t kicked me out.

“Yeah well, dad was never the type to abandon one of his kids,” I drank from my beer with a frown. It was probably the first one I had worn since meeting La’akea, and she seemed to take the hint, because she held her hands up defensively.

“Never said he was,” the dragon explained. “Was just saying that Kai has had her eye on you for a while. I’m not surprised you showed up here.”

That was another thing, and it brought up more than a few questions in regard to Esme finding me in the lower planes. She was supposedly Kai’s daughter, and honestly, I wasn’t sure if I ever believed her. Being pulled to Kai’s realm made that seem pretty likely.

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I was beginning to worry that Esme had become my friend just to get me to convert. It didn’t take me long to dismiss the idea. I knew Esme, and she wouldn’t do that.

But just because she wouldn’t, didn’t mean the same for Kai. I wouldn’t put it past the trickster goddess to do something stupidly clever to get her way, even if it meant using her own daughter to do it. One thing was sure, I needed to get out of here.

“I take you don’t know the way out?” I asked.

La’akea shook her head before finally exhaling a large plume of vaporized drugs. “Nope. I’ve been trapped here for about a century. If I knew a way out, I would have been long gone.”

So much for that idea. If an ancient dragon had been stuck here for a century, then I didn’t think I’d be able to find a way out. Which only really left me with one option.

“Well, fuck.” I leaned back onto my elbows and stared up at the blank white ceiling. “Guess I’ll just hang out here and wait for my girlfriend to rescue me. I think it’s my turn to do the whole distressed damsel thing, anyway.”

“You dating a god or something?” The dragon asked, while sipping at her beer.

“Nah, she’s an elf.” I couldn’t help a smile while I explained. “She’s the real nerdy type, great at magic. Shouldn’t take her long to figure out where I’m at.”

“And once she does, do you think she’ll be able to do anything about it?” La’akea asked. “Overpowering the wards in Elysia would be quite the feat for a mortal.”

That was the question. Calling Bryce powerful for a mortal would be the understatement of the century, but powerful for a mortal didn’t mean she was powerful enough to overpower a god. I didn’t know how she’d stack up against Kai, and as much as I wanted to believe otherwise, gods were just on an entirely different level.

“Yeah, well, if anybody could, it’d be Bryce,” I caught the vaporizer out of the air after La’akea tossed it to me and took a hit from it before continuing. “Besides, I don’t know what other choice we have, and at least we have beer while we wait.”

“That’s fair,” La’akea laughed. “At least we have beer.”

~~~~

Turns out dragons can drink a lot. We ran out of beer in under an hour and moved onto the hard liquor and added in the last of the Slush that I bought back in Bryce’s old colony after we finished Sora’s drugs. The princess was going to have to hurry, because we were quickly running out of ways to entertain ourselves.

I handed the mostly empty bottle of whiskey over to La’akea. It was the last of the stuff Lysc had given me after our dinner together.

“And that’s the last of the whiskey!” I giggled as La’akea finished the bottle. She was looking a bit wobbly, but I wasn’t sure if that was her or my vision. “Vodka next!”

“To the vodka, then!” La’akea was laughing deeply as she smashed the empty whiskey bottle on the ground. She had started doing that after I brought out the Slush. The dragon was a bit of a lightweight.

I pulled the next bottle out of storage and tried to open it, but the damn thing wouldn’t hold still. Concentrating really hard on the bottle, I willed it to not move. It ignored my mental command, but that was okay, because I had a dragon.

“Open this!” I shouted and caused La’akea to jump. “Careful though, I think you might be a bit drunk. So, don’t drink too much of it… because, you know…. Responsibility to be drink or something.”

“I’ll have you know that I’m an ancient dragon,” she spoke in a regal tone that was only slightly undermined by a hiccup as she took the bottle from me. “I take my responsibility to be drink very seriously… Hey, Thea, what is this? I thought you said we were moving onto vodka.”

I nodded. “Yes! Vodka after beer, you know beer before liquor, never,” I paused for a moment to remember the old saying. “Beer before liquor… never don’t do that. Heh, nailed it.”

“Sure, we all know the nursery rhyme,” she responded sagely. “But this isn’t vodka.”

I rolled over onto my stomach to get a better look at the bottle. It was still duplicating and moving about in a way that I wasn’t entirely sure bottles were legally allowed to, but if I squinted really hard, I could just barely make out the color. And the shapely form of a woman emerging from smoke.

“Oh! That’s not vodka at all,” I explained. “It’s a Jenny.”

La’akea took another look at the bottle with furrowed brows. “You named the bottle Jenny?”

I scoffed. There’s no way I would name a bottle Jenny, it was clearly more of a Sarah. “No, its name isn’t Jenny, it is a… Actually hold up, maybe I’m announcing it wrong.”

“I think it’s announced pronounce,” La’akea seemed confused for a moment before helpfully adding. “Or something.”

“What?” I asked. She was clearly not getting it, and I was going to have to figure out a way to explain it to her. “Here, hand me the bottle. I’ll show you.”

La’akea handed it to me, and I pulled out the cork. A pink mist flowed out of the bottle and coalesced into the form of a pale, bald woman. She was wearing a nearly translucent purple robe that flowed in a wonderfully mysterious way.

“Oh! A Djinn!” La’akea shouted. “That makes much more sense.”