The Trading Post, the fortress astir with panic.

A stream of customers and craftsmen were being ushered out through the main gate by uniformed guards, who remained tight-lipped about the cause of the evacuation. The number of Company members moving around the area to occupy defensive positions was multiplying. Some were arriving on horseback; others blinked into existence at the spots where they'd logged off. Outside the perimeter wall, roaming squadrons inspected and shooed away gawkers attracted by the commotion.

In the Trading Post's isolated execution grounds, a group of fourteen, now thirteen, convicts waited without any awareness of the disturbances outside.

"No gulls in sky, no shore to sight," one was singing. "'Gainst the endless blue we sweat and fight. We'll draw the lots when falleth the night, and Cook Zat's blood we drink."

A couple comrades joined in the chorus. "Our ship cuts low through the waters slow, laden by ivory, gems, and gold. While heed begs scrap this cursed haul, the wives screech, 'pay or sink!'"

This smuggler's song hadn't arisen spontaneously from any profound sentiment; the convicts were merely trying to drown out the maddening racket of one amongst them, one whom the approach of death had seemingly stripped of sanity.

"OH, SENIOR DIRECTOR OKAI VAN, MY BROTHER IN CRIME! HOW TRAGICALLY THEY DRAINED YOU DRY UNTIL YOU DIED! THESE VAMPIRIC BLACKGUARDS, IF ONLY THEY POSSESSED HALF THE FERVOR FOR PRODUCING SYSTEMS OF ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT AS THEY HAVE FOR COMMITTING MURDER! WOE BESETS US WHO REMAIN UNDER THEIR SLAVER'S THUMB! WOE AND YEARNING! WE MISS YOU, BROTHER SENIOR DIRECTOR OKAI VAN! WE LONG FOR YOUR DELIGHTFUL LAUGHTER AND YOUR CROOKED SMILE! WE PINE FOR YOUR BEAUTIFUL EYE AND YOUR WIFE'S SOUP!"

"SHUT UP, GA! SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

The azure-haired 'Merchant Ga' slipped a small smile between his lamentations. "OH BROTHER SENIOR DIRECTOR, TELL US HOW FARES THE WEATHER IN THIS DESERT YOU'VE APPARENTLY BEEN BANISHED TO? IS THERE RAIN TO QUENCH YOUR THIRST? IF NOT, THEN, PLEASE, TAKE A LITRE OF THE SORROWFUL TEARS WETTING THESE CHEEKS! WE, WHO HOLD NO GRUDGES AGAINST YOU SIGNING US UP FOR A SIMILAR FATE, MOURN FOR YOUR SEVERED SOUL! WE MOURN FOR THE LACK OF JOB PROSPECTS THAT FORCED US UPON THIS WICKED PATH OF CRIMINALITY!"

"FOR NERIN'S SAKE, MAN, SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!"

Henry, attending his Alchemy equipment, was half-monitoring Karnon's theatrics for serious threats, half-ignoring them to focus on brewing his mass poison.

Factoring out The Trickster God's inevitable interference, the next executions shouldn't have dragged on like the Senior Director's had. Since the smuggling crew were Slumdwellers and foreigners, The Church enforced no rules about the manner in which they had to die. If Henry wanted, he could cave their skulls in with a golf-club, splitting each like a rotten coconut. No one important would complain. In a warped sense, to die as the Senior Director had, in a protracted, ritualised humiliation, had also been a kind of privilege.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: 40% out.

-Percy Maynard Brady: Why are your people so slow?

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: It's The Slums...you try wrangling these people…

They'd been covertly evacuating civilians from the Trading Post. This was standard protocol for whenever Karnon popped up.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Offer him a small, token prank to go away?

-Percy Maynard Brady: I'm not being blackmailed by videogame characters anymore. I'm retired. Once this is finished, I'm logging out and you're on your own.

Taking a bubbling liquid off a fire, Henry filtered it through a pile of porous volcanic rock. The run-off—a lilac suspension with lime-green granules—dripped into a vial resting in a bath of ice. As it cooled down, the particles disintegrated and the solution faded to a pale, translucent sepia.

Solution #1317 complete. -6041 Universal Productivity. 3047787 remaining.

A tray had been prepared of steaming cups of tea, giving off an inviting aroma of fresh dough and citrus. Into each, Henry poured a few mLs of the solution.

He gave the tea a final inspection. The changes to the final colour and scent would be undetectable to anyone but an expert - and only that because he'd intentionally performed several mistakes.

At some point, he'd become quite proficient at this, too.

As often occurred when making this stuff, Henry was suddenly struck by the uncanny sense that the many seemingly separate episodes in his life—studying chemistry as a kid, studying poisons to win duels—had been nothing but steps in the development of this more morbid application.

With a wave, he made the cups take flight. Like animated cutlery in a Disney film, they glided in a majestic train over to the convicts, stopping and levitating in front of each, close enough to be sipped if they leaned forward.

A convict who'd spat on Henry earlier used his chin to knock his cup aside, sending it plummeting from the air, bouncing off the ground, and spilling its deadly contents. "Don't serve me your piss, Company dog."

"This one is quick and painless." Henry sent a replacement. "In two minutes, whoever hasn't made their peace gets a method that's only quick."

The convict knocked the second over. "I've waited long enough. Finish me now, you coward."

Henry didn't take offence, respecting the desire to confront death without false pageantry. "Okay. Any last words?"

"Fuck you."

"KA! RU! NAI!" Henry touched an Spelltome on his chest and fired three shots.

The convict, caught off-guard, reflexively cranked his head aside. This dodging motion caused the first projectile to miss its target, incinerating the upper half of his ear. A second projectile arriving the next instant struck the man in the cheek, opening up a gaping hole through the centre of his brain and out the back of his skull. The third cut through a cloud of lights and fizzled against the metal of the empty execution post.

And then there were twelve.

"Mm…for another mouthful of that, I might have done it all again."

The convicts who'd been watching their comrade's quick demise shifted their gazes to an elderly gentleman who'd just spoken. He was a stranger to everyone else, having shared no words or acknowledgements before this sentence, having drunken without anyone noticing.

The anonymous man leaned back and observed the sky while savouring the flavour. As the effect set in, his eyelids drooped and his head began to tip to the side, the muscles of his neck losing the battle to gravity. The head's fall was never completed, though, the man disintegrating part way.

Eleven.

Henry caught the spent cups returning like homing pigeons. Flicking out any residue, he dropped the soiled dishes in a pot of boiling water.

The second convict to swallow the poison was far less discrete.

"BE BRAVE BROTHERS," wailed the Togavian smuggler, "THIS IS MERELY THE LAST INSULT OF THE COUNTLESS WE'VE ENDURED! O DYSFUNCTIONAL SOCIETY, O INESCAPABLE POVERTY, I RECEIVE YOUR LATEST JUDGEMENT!" With a heroic nod, he leaned forward and gulped down the deadly fluid.

The instant the drink passed his lips, however, his composure failed. "OUCH!" He yelped as though he'd eaten a smouldering ember that was now melting through his tongue. "AHHH! THE APOTHECARY LIES, BROTHERS! PAINLESS? THE LIQUID BURNS! IT'S HOTTER THAN A ROCK LEFT OUT IN THE SUMMER SUN! OUCH!" The screaming convict started to swell; his clothes burst off, and the folds of his engorged body seeped out of the prisoner chains like the meat of a tie-bound roast. "OUCH! MY SKIN! IT'S HOTTER THAN A BLANKET SHARED WITH TWO WOMEN!" His ballooning body—as if doused in oil by a low-budget special effects team—burst unnaturally fast into a raging ball of flame. "OUCH! MY EYEBALLS!" He shrieked at a liquid dribbling from the slits between his swollen cheeks and fattened brow. "THEY'RE HOTTER THAN JUMPING IN A BATH STRAIGHT AFTER WADING THROUGH THE SNOW! OUCH! PLEASE, SOMEONE, END THIS SCORCHING TORTURE! OUCH! WHAT'S THIS?! THE PAIN IS GETTING HOTTER! IT'S RISING FROM INSI—"

Brap.

A little fart mouse-squeaked from the convict's burning buttocks.

"Oh, it was just a spot of gas. Must have been from last night's chilli. Those jailor chefs always make it—AHHHHHH!" The flame, fuelled by the emission, was stoked up to a higher intensity, and all sight of the man burning within disappeared in a pulsating flash of orange-red.

So brightly did he burn that his combustible bits were consumed in seconds.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

What remained afterwards was a crisp, smoking husk of charcoal. With a crackling sound, its left-leg, no longer attached by any sinews or flesh, snapped off at the hip, the limb pivoting around the ankle-chain and clattering off the tiled pavement below.

The other convicts shrank back from their own teacups. They glanced with terrified confusion between the scorched corpse—still somehow intact, somehow alive despite the conflagration—and the fiend who'd brewed this demonic potion.

"Monster!"

"O Nerin, immortal shepherdess, guide your flock from the jungle dark…"

Henry, drying the first cups with a cloth and slotting them into a box for next time, added Karnon's to the boiling pot and adjusted the distance of the levitating remainders so they couldn't be knocked aside. He didn't bother correcting the NPCs, knowing the God would clarify soon enough.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: What the heck? Henry, I think you might need to kill this guy...

-Percy Maynard Brady: It's not happening anytime soon. We—you're stuck with him for a couple months.

A Rangbitan convict paled in horror. "Mother's mercy…"

The mouth of the incinerated body had fallen ajar, revealing a pair of healthy-white teeth that were chattering with a maniacal giggle.

"Hehehehehehe..."

To the clueless convicts' terror, the corpse, its laughter growing louder, began to seize and wriggle against its metal fetters. The struggle caused pieces of its charred body to break off. Its arms, its feet, its thighs, and its torso rained down onto a blackened pile, on top of which landed, finally, the laughing head.

"...HEHEHEHEHEHEHE..."

A leg, drawn by an invisible force, snapped back into its home socket in the pelvis. With other parts reconnecting in a similar manner, the corpse reconstructed itself piece by charred piece. The head, giggling throughout the abominable reconstruction, was last to be reattached, the body kneeling on the ground and using its hands to fumble around before picking it up. When the head was being slotted onto the torso, though, it suddenly rocketed skywards, punted by a second head sprouting from the neck.

This new one, although azure-haired like the original convict's, had a different, more mischievous face, and from its crown grew a massive pair of antlers.

"...HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHOHOHOHOHO!" The giggle deepening, a giant exploded free like a butterfly emerging from the scorched corpse cocoon, spreading his arms exultantly to the stunned audience. "HOHOHO...ho." Karnon gave a dazzling smile. "Indeed, saplings, it was never your comrade Merchant Ga but I, Karnon The Azure, God of Prison Escapes."

A convict, their disgust and surprise vanishing in an instant, recognised a potential chance. "Lord Karnon! Spare us! We were merely saving our homeland from these invaders' dastardly whims!"

"I, Mupemhi of The Third Branch," pleaded an Earthfriend convict, "have also chosen the Path of the beasts. Out of respect for the sacred bond between Pathfellows, I implore you to release us."

"That's a common misconception," replied the God to the second beggar. "I'm not a Fauna Earthfriend. These babies?" He tapped his antlers. "Purely cosmetic. They're actually detachable." He attempted to demonstrate by pulling them off, but the antlers obviously weren't detachable. "Hmm...guess I applied too much adhesive today..."

"Please, Lord Karnon! We did nothing wrong!"

"Stop. He's not going to save us..."

"My Pathfellow, I have gold stored away! I can do pranks! I can do anything!"

Henry spoke flatly over the desperate chorus. "The Togavian must be returned."

Karnon was absorbing the competing appeals like a contestant at a charity date auction. "How cute. You're still pretending to prioritise these little killings. Relax, Executioner T, you'll hit your quota soon enough. Before then, though, I've got a new prank I'm workshopping. Feedback, please."

"No."

The God, despite being a highly-visible giant, tip-toed stealthily over and, giving the screaming audience a wary glance, showed a treasure chest. He cracked open the lid just enough for Henry alone to peek inside.

Henry's eyeballs were molested by a censored array of sex toys, wooden phalluses and rubber muffs.

"Weapon smuggling," whispered the God. "Does that make sense in your language?"

This was an untranslatable pun, the word for weapon and genitals being identical in Togavian.

Henry slammed the lid shut. "Not interested."

Karnon gave a childish snicker, then gestured towards the wailing prisoners. "Can you pardon this noisy lot, already? They've learned their lesson. There's no need to start bloodletting or poisoning over a prank as minor as smuggling. Many of mine have been much more disastrous, well even before their age or yours."

"If I could, I would execute you, too. Then or now."

The God popped open his mouth in shock. "You can't kill minors. That's unethical!"

Henry refrained from pointing out that Karnon had killed hundreds of thousands of children, anticipating the rebuttal that he'd done the same. An argument about the distinctions beyond that would be futile considering the God's demented moral compass.

Karnon laughed victoriously at the argument won before it'd started. "You know, this debate about slaughtering children reminds me of an infamous moral dilemma: if you could travel back in time, would you murder The All-Mother as a baby? Executioner T, what would be your answer? If I like the sound of it, I'll give you a prize."

"Nope." Henry didn't have to ponder for a single moment. "Teach her to grow up into less of a monster; fix whatever shoddy systems are favouring the production of such deranged individuals."

"You'd subject her to etiquette classes? I knew you were an executioner, but a torturer, too? How depraved. No prize."

"Time's up!" Henry shouted at the convicts. "Drink!"

Karnon wagged a finger. "That won't work. Remember the Snake-Urine-Tea prank, the one in which your drink was swapped with serpent piss? I did it again. The classics are always worth revisiting. (Well, technically, I used my human-form pee, so it falls within a different sub-genre of substitution prank, but these minor details are unimportant. As they say, 'a prank is a prank'. (Unless, of course, it's an Anti-Prank prank – which, according to Classic Pranksics, sums up to a non-incident but, in Quantum Pranksics, forms a distinct class of indeterminate…"

Henry, the God rambling crazily away, sighed. His heart grieved at his sincere efforts to give some dignity being made a mockery of. In defeat, he upturned the levitating cups and floated them back into the storage box, not bothering to clean them.

"Hah!" Karnon slapped his knee. "PRANKED! The tea was still lethal. That's what we in the business of pranks call a False Prank into Genuine Prank prank." The God sidled up to his protege and wrapped an arm around his back. "So how's it been lately, Executioner T? Are you okay? What's with all this transferring of responsibilities to your henchmen goons?"

Caramel coughed.

"And henchwomen goons. Listen, Executioner T, I risked my goat and gerbil to slip you a tip for spicing up your prank. I almost got shish-kebabed by a midget! Yet now you're apparently cancelling? This pulling-out better be a False Cancellation of Prank into Resumption of Prank prank, because I'm struggling to find the humour in it otherwise."

Henry, the God's hand on him signing the word 'company', messaged a warning to Caramel.

-Percy Maynard Brady: Signed that we've got listeners. Watch what you say.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Empire or The Church?

-Percy Maynard Brady: Church. Doubt Ramiro has the ability.

(He knew, due to his longer investigation, it was neither organisation.)

"There'll be no 'pranks'." Henry flicked a hissing cockroach planted on his shoulder by the same motion. "Situation's changed, so has my mind."

Karnon snorted at his cowardice. "There's nothing to play frightened frog about, Executioner T. It's one measly army of mindslaves - what's the worst our driftwood liege could do with it?"

Henry messaged Caramel to incorrectly confirm the Church. "It's not him that's worrying me."

"Who, then? Me? Karnon The Reliable, God of Trustworthiness? Here, let me prove the critics wrong!"

Karnon, squatting low, leapt into the air and landed beside the convicts. Encouraging them to share their pleas, he listened to each. Picking an Alchemist who'd been tasked by the Senior Director with poisoning informants who'd reported on the smuggling operation, the God began whispering into their ear.

Henry, meanwhile, attempted to deny whatever prank was being plotted by shooting at the assassin. All of these were blocked by Karnon machine-gun flicking pebbles in the path of the projectiles. Henry switched to firing at the others; these were intercepted, too. Upon collision with the spells, the pebbles exploded in ludicrous puffs of rainbow confetti, making a mocking contrast with the convicts cowering from the assault as people do when you tried to kill them.

Henry sighed. "Trash game..."

Caramel gave him a comforting pat, only to shriek when her hand slapped another cockroach.

Once the conniving pair reached an agreement, the convict's bindings turned into strings of spaghetti. The freed Alchemist followed the trickster to the miniature river weaving through the courtyard. There, Karnon produced several ingredients and directed the convict to complete their mixture, before having him feed a finished potion to one of the lotus flowers floating in the river's waters.

The flower, absorbing the concoction through its petals, began to grow.

Downstream, the river's course travelled behind the tied-up convicts. By the time the lotus was passing them, the stem had elongated to the length of giraffe's neck and its head, the size of bear's torso, had sprouted a set of red eyes and a mouthful of jagged teeth. Using its leaf-base like seal flippers, this monstrous flower dragged itself out of the river and flopped towards one of the convicts.

The Alchemist who'd fed the plant the transformative agent broke into a panicked sprint. "KIVI! WATCH OUT!"

A woman shrieked, one of her legs disappearing into the monster's mouth. "KESO! HELP ME—"

The call for assistance was cut short by a spell-spear exploding her skull. A resulting volley shredded the monstrified flower.

As the woman evaporated, the Alchemist who'd been sprinting towards her lurched to a slow stop, the momentum carrying him a few futile steps further. He turned back to confront Karnon, his face locked in a mask of his previous panic, locked at the instant of his sister's death.

Karnon shrugged. "Hey, she did escape her chains, just not with her life." The God gave Henry a look of self-satisfaction. "Behold my reliability!"

"NAM! CEL! Reliability to betray people? KIR!"

"Others, yes, but you, my beloved protégé, never." The God pointed at the sister's dismembered leg being vomited up by the dying monster. "You wanted that vile, depraved, criminal scum dead. Well, she's dead! I, Karnon The Reliable, merely tinkered with the prelude. That's my sole mission, Executioner T: to improve your procedures of murder, to gift you some of the wisdom of one further ahead in this unique Path of ours."

"Not interested. PU!"

"See, it's not about the destination, which, if you stick around long enough, you realise is identical for everybody. It's really about how, in this temporary journey we share called life, many pranks we do."

"IN! TA! VEN!" Henry finally managed to land a shot on the brother frozen in dismay, putting him out of his misery.

In the disturbing quiet that followed this 'prank', he scanned for alterations to the environment the God might have snuck in during that distraction. Nothing seemed to have changed. The remaining convicts were silent, with no more thoughts of asking the maniacal trickster for salvation. Karnon himself was smiling expectantly.

"That logic is especially not persuasive," Henry answered. "It suggests you'd be on the side of the other party, who's the one getting his rocks off on death spectacles. My motivations for giving him one were pragmatic – miscalculated perhaps due to failing to factor in your nuisance existence, but still fundamentally pragmatic. I'm not giving him the mindslave army."

Karnon yawned. "Executioner T, I'm bored of pragmatism. You're bored of pragmatism."

"I'm bored of you."

"Huh? Wow." The God paused, his eyes tearing up. "Wow...Anyway, everybody's bored of pragmatism. Throughout this city of crumbling shacks, we're assaulted by the vision of paupers whose souls, under the boring whip of pragmatism, have shrunken to become as tiny, limp, and useless as Berbahaya's pecker. Did you see it, by the way? Did you get a good glimpse of the Pope's priestly penis?"

"This is not the time, Karnon." Henry refused to be sidetracked into a stupid, random discussion about a pantsing prank moments after blowing out a pair of siblings' brains.

(But, actually, according to his Overdream investigation, that specific part of the prank hadn't been random. In fact, it might contain one of the main points that this whole strange affair would hinge upon).