The castle walls were thick enough to mute sounds from even the next room. While they were all together in one big group, they made enough noise to make up the difference, but with just two of them, the silence made the hairs stand up on the back of their necks, and they instinctively walked quietly.

“Do you,” Roger said, meaning to ask whether Charlotte had the feeling they were being watched, but he thought better of it and changed to, “uh, do you know anything about how we’re sleeping? I guess guys in one room, girls in one or two?”

They passed into the banquet hall. Sue and Jason sat at one of the long tables, talking about something in voices pitched low; Sue and Charlotte traded waves.

“I guess it depends on what the bedrooms are like,” she said. “This place is huge, so we could probably give everyone their own room if they really wanted, but … it’s also kind of creepy. Isn’t it nicer to have someone with you when you’re sleeping in a strange place?”

“That’s true. Hey guys,” he said to Sue and Jason. He scanned the table, where they’d laid out seven sets of plates and cutlery, the cutlery a mass of mismatched silverware all to the right of the plates. “Aaron says they’ll be done soon.”

“That’s a relief,” Jason said. “I didn’t realise how hungry I was, until I smelled that stew.”

“Just while we’re waiting,” Charlotte said, “do you want to unpack one of the games and get warmed up?”

“I thought we were exploring the castle after dinner?” Sue asked.

“Well, yeah, but it’s late. We’ll have to stop soon either way until morning, and I want to do something all together before we break.”

The other three exchanged glances, a collective ‘fair enough’.

Roger opened his bag; she rifled through, took out a box, and opened it on a table. They sat around, two on either side. Jason took the instructions and began reading.

“I’ve wanted to play this for a while now,” she said. “It’s supposed to be a sort of cross between collaborative story-telling and Snap.”

“Pal,” Jason read aloud, “or Punny Ad-Libs: a game for both those of strong spirits and the sober. Yes.”

“Heck yes,” said Sue.

“Hoo boy,” said Roger. “Wait, is this a drinking game? Aren’t you all underage? Michelle specifically told me she needed someone with a driver’s licence.”

“Has that ever stopped anyone?” Jason asked.

“Speaking as someone who at least tries to be responsible, and who has an underage sister –”

“It’s not a drinking game,” Charlotte said. “Come on, Rog, I wouldn’t suggest that, and anyway, it’s hard enough coming up with puns normally. It’s just a tagline.”

“That, and a constant barrage of forced puns makes most people wish they were drunk,” Sue said.

“Pretty much. So you each get seven cue cards,” Charlotte said, dealing them face-down to everyone. “They have a picture. When it’s your turn, you can play one or more of them and say a sentence or two, using them as prompts, that join with what the last person said, to tell a story. There are also mad libs cards for if you can’t think of anything, and you put prompts into the blanks. You can use the picture however you want; noun, verb, adjective, or even abstract things like mood, if you want.”

“Where do the puns come in?” Sue asked. “And do you redraw?”

“Yes. When you’re done, other people can jump in to tell a pun related to what you just said, which is also how it’s like Snap. If they do, they get one point, or if they play a card related to it, three points. These little yellow tokens are worth one, the reds are five, and green are twenty. We probably won’t get that high, though.”

“This sounds hellish,” Roger said.

Charlotte looked at him with wide, soulful eyes. He sighed silently and picked up his cards. They had pretty watercolour pictures, like a cat sitting on a velvet cushion or a girl in a forest, dressed in a red cloak. He tried to think how to combine them into a story, and blanked.

Sue took a mad libs card. “Huh,” she said. “If this is what they’re expecting, I might have been overthinking this. I guess I’ll start.” She hemmed and hawed for a minute, then laid down two cards: a short redheaded girl, and a library with a wide glass front. “Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived by a library.” She hesitated, then laid down a third card. “And she had a pet bee.”

Roger opened his mouth to question this.

“You’re not supposed to take it too seriously,” Charlotte said, correctly divining his thoughts.

“It didn’t just fly away?” Jason asked, poker-faced. “It sounds very well-bee-hived.” He revealed a card with a house, and took three yellow counters and a new card. “Er, let me think …”

“Uh, you keep going in the same turn order,” Charlotte said, fumbling with her hand. “Um, one day, the bee … uh. One day the girl invited her all friends around for a party.”

Roger frowned. His cards all looked completely unworkable. Maybe you just needed practice, or possibly lower standards. He selected Little Red Riding Hood and one with a leather-bound tome on it. “One of her friends wandered away from the party to look for a book.”

“Little Red Riding Hood is wandering off?” Sue asked. “I guess the wolf tried to lure her off the path while she was going out, even if he didn’t succeed …”

“No,” Roger said seriously, “she’s for bad eyesight. Can’t tell a serial killer from a harmless granny, can’t find a book in a library.” Charlotte snickered, reached across the table for the bag of points, and slid him one.

Jason riffled his hand and played a card that looked like a shadowy Rorschach blot. “But she wasn’t looking for just any old book,” he said. He took his torch and put it below his face shining upwards, casting inverted shadows around his face, in the classic pose of someone telling a pulp horror story. “This was one containing a dark, forbidden secret.”

Sue slapped down a gorilla holding a sword aloft. “Nor was it a bold ook. Booyeah!”

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

Jason checked the rules. “Do Spoonerisms count? It specifically says puns, but most people take that to mean all kinds of wordplay. It’s a rich and nuanced field.”

“Screw you,” she said, taking three tokens, “I’m keeping these. Because that was my last good card. Seriously, look at this hot mess.” She laid her hand face-up. “Just look at these. How the heck am I going to use a spacecraft? Or … purple squiggles around some guy’s head? What even is it? Can we cycle cards?”

“I don’t see anything about that,” said Jason, leafing through the instructions. “We could house-rules it. But I don’t know, it might be better if you don’t, even if you think your ideas are stupid. It’ll be more organic and creative that way.”

Sue raised an eyebrow, then pushed two of her cards forward. “Hold my figurative beer, then. The reason why her friend was looking for the Necronomicon, was that her pet bee … was actually a mind-controlling god bee bent on world domination!”

“Yeah, I vote we house-rule we can cycle cards,” Roger said. “No offence, Sue.”

“Keikaku doori,” she said.

“A vote?” Jason asked. “Are we pollen, then?” Charlotte broke down giggling, and he took another chip.

Roger looked at his cards and mentally kicked himself. He had a flower: he could’ve said that one, and got three points for it.

“It’s a good thing Michelle isn’t here right now,” Sue said. “She hates puns.”

“Wow,” he said. “Imagine someone not liking puns. Her life must be so empty.”

“It’s why she’s always so despundent,” Jason said, taking his fifth point.

Roger let out another quiet sigh.

Charlotte got herself back under control and picked out one of her cards. “Ahem. But one of the girl’s other friends knew about the god bee, and she set out to break its spell on the others.”

None of Roger’s cards really worked, so he played the cat. “Along the way, she ran into a cat. In an unrelated development, she realised that the spell was too strong for her to break.”

Jason put his torch under his chin again. “So she set out on a quest to find the only being powerful enough to defeat a god. She set out … for the Guardian.”

There was a pause.

Sue blinked, looking from Jason to her cards and back again. “Wait, can you say that again? I think I had something for that.”

“Uh,” he said. “Mind blank. What did I say?” He looked down the last card he played: blank. “A wildcard, great. I think it was that she couldn’t break the god bee’s spell.”

“Something about spelling bees,” Sue said.

“I’ve been trying to think of a pun about that since I said it,” Charlotte said sorrowfully.

There came the sound of footsteps from the nursery. They looked up to see Aaron, Michelle, and Lucia, carrying large pots and plates. A rich, meaty aroma wafted ahead of them, forming a tapestry of deliciousness together with the cloying smell of the cheeses that Aaron had found somewhere, the fresh bread, and the sweetness of the chocolate mousse.

“Everything’s ready,” Aaron announced. “Let’s eat.”

They gathered around the set places and waited impatiently as Aaron ladled servings of stew and Lucia offered the bread and cheese platter, then dug in ravenously.

“Wow,” Charlotte breathed reverentially. “This is amazing.”

Aaron took a sip of the stew. His brow creased.

“It’s not perfect,” he said.

“Uh,” she said, not quite understanding. “It’s excellent? I’m sure this is the best thing I’ve ever had. There’s enough for seconds, right? I eat a lot.”

“I don’t eat a lot,” said Michelle, “and I want seconds too.”

“You don’t eat much because you only know how to make microwave meals,” he said.

“It’s not that I don’t know how to do anything more, it’s that I can’t be bothered.”

“Are you from like a family of restauranteurs or something?” Jason asked, scooping one seventh of the cheese onto his plate.

“An aunt,” Aaron said. He sipped again. “When there’s only one flaw, it sticks out even more. Especially if you know you can do it without any flaws at all. Have you seen those meme images of a tiled floor, where one tile is out of place?”

“It’s still fantastic,” Roger said. He drank a spoonful of the stew, and warmth flooded down his throat, a rich flavour that didn’t taste like any spices he knew. It was like Aaron had distilled the platonic ideal of lamb meat. Roger had been the one to do the chopping, and he still had no idea how that worked.

They polished off most of the stew and bread and all of the cheese, and were halfway into the mousse, when company arrived. Light footsteps pattered in from a doorway, and everyone looked up. It was a late teenage girl in a dark grey, woollen, shin-length nightie, holding a storm lantern at chest height. She stopped at the threshold and raised the lantern, so that they could see her face: heart-shaped, pale skin, dark brown eyes behind black oval glasses, brown hair in a long ponytail. She stood there silently, her eyes tracking over each of them in turn. It seemed like she fixed on him and Charlotte for longer than the others. The hair on the back of his neck prickled.

“Uh, hi,” Charlotte called out nervously. “W-would you like something to eat? This is really nice, and we have leftovers.”

The girl stared for a moment longer, then said, “Thank you, but I’m not really hungry.” Her voice was soft to the point of being hard to make out, like she wasn’t used to projecting to more than one person at a time.

Roger noticed her nostrils twitching and had the distinct impression she was lying. He looked harder at her. There was something irresistably familiar about her. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

Her eyes flicked back to him, her face unreadable. “Maybe. I travel a lot.”

Michelle swallowed her spoonful of mousse, pushed out her chair, and got to her feet. “You two are so awkward,” she muttered at Roger and Charlotte, then, louder, to the girl, “Hi, I’m Michelle Bright. I’ve just inherited this castle. You must be Mr Martin’s older daughter?”

The girl nodded. “Jill. Pleased to meet you.” She took a few steps forward. Roger followed her eyes to the game they’d been playing, to the blank card Jason had played. “Seven of you. That’s a large group.”

“Yeah,” Charlotte said, “we,” she flinched under Jill’s piercing gaze, “uh, we thought it’d be like a sort of slumber party …”

“I wanted to inspect my new property,” Michelle said, talking over Charlotte.

“We’re looking for treasure,” Sue explained.

Michelle very visibly restrained herself from facepalming.

Jill considered this for a moment. “I see,” she said. “You should be careful with that. This place is dangerous.”

“Does it need maintenance?” Michelle asked, sitting back down.

“Yes,” said Jill, “but I was referring to the ghosts. This place is badly haunted. You shouldn’t go off alone.”

“Ghosts aren’t real,” Michelle said.

Jill shrugged, not interested in arguing the point.

“Weren’t you alone yourself, just now?” Lucia said.

“I can take care of myself,” said Jill. She turned to leave.

“Uh, wait,” Charlotte called out again. “Won’t you stay for a bit? The food is really good, and we’d like it if you could show us around later.”

“Not tonight,” Jill said. “I have something I need to check on. Enjoy your dessert, Charlotte.”

And she glided out.

“Did I tell her my name?” Charlotte murmured to herself.

“Speaking of ghosts,” Aaron said, louder and at the same time.

“Speaking of treasure,” Michelle said. She slid out of her chair.

“You think she knows where it is,” said Roger, “and she’s going to hide it?”

“I think she knows something. Could she get any more suspicious? Everyone, stay here; I’m going to follow her.”

“Hey, uh,” Sue said, pushing her chair back, “why don’t Jason and I go? Everyone should do something, and you’re the best at organising people. It might as well be us.”

Michelle paused, looking from Sue to Jason. “You know, you’ve got a point. Keep quiet and hurry up. She could lose you if there are more secret passages.”

“Of course,” Sue said. She caught Jason’s eye and jerked her head to go; he took a torch, and they left.

“Out of all of us,” Aaron said, pitching his voice low, “you picked them to try to shadow someone?”

“No,” she said, “I picked them to be the decoy. There’s no way she can hear me with those two trying to sneak around. Stay here while I actually follow her.” And with that, without taking a light, she set off after Sue and Jason.

Roger, Charlotte, Aaron, and Lucia exchanged glances.

“So,” said Charlotte, “do either of you like puns?”

“Does anyone?” said Aaron.

“Not really,” Lucia said at the same time. “Why?”

Roger pumped his fist.