I made no move to join him, knowing full well Commander Zideo would be turned back by Luciano. Sure enough, the blade-handed guard puffed up his chest in the doorway, denying him an exit from the meeting. The potted plant looked on with what I suppose was a scowl, his mouth ceaselessly forming the letter “O.”

The conversation, usually a thing that happens between two or a few humans in an orderly fashion, jumped around the room like an animal threatened.

“You have no right to keep me here,” said Zideo. He seemed to be speaking to the group, but his eyes often went to the Princess. His hands were balled into fists and his arms straight by his side. Again I resisted the instinct to move to his side, to growl at his persecutors, to reflect his defensiveness and show my support. But, although the gathered beings were not solely human (indeed, I am not completely certain any of them might qualify for the word in the most technical sense), this debate had the unmistakable qualities of humans having it out. They would rage at one another, and move onto the next topic at hand. I’m sorry to say that the inertia holding me in place may also have had something to do with the extremely good head scratches I was receiving from Angelica’s human.

“I work hard,” appealed my human, as though on trial. “I am on my grind day and night. I got banned from Twitch for something that wasn’t my fault. It cost me everything. I even got kicked off of my esports team. And then when I finally got unbanned, somebody uses magic and summons me here.” He glared around the room. “So who did it? Was it you?” He pointed at the Princess, an infraction so detestable to these loyalists that they leaned away from him and her both, as if the breach of etiquette (or legitimate crime?) could splash upon their bodies and implicate them by proximity.

The Princess folded her white-gloved hands in her lap. Addrion took a step toward him from the dais and returned the accusatory finger. “You are out of line, Zideo.” I thought it might be the first time she had addressed him with his name, outside of mocking it when they had finally been introduced.

He returned fire with a swift babble of syllables, and I turned back to Angelica.

“The people here are very different from one another,” I said.

“Everyone says that,” she replied, “when they first arrive.” She leaned into the dangling fingers of her human, the dark-haired woman in athleisure-wear, whose name she told me was Quinoa. “The beings you see around you differ in quite fundamental ways. Have you noticed how, even in an organization that’s a big a deal as this one, people are still sitting with those like themselves?”

I admitted I had not. I sensed that there was generally an air of enhanced age toward this end of the room, the far end of the room (or stage left of her majesty), but I had little information on which to base my hunch. The flat people lacking the third dimension were here, and a couple of personages like the late purple cowboy, made up of nothing more than glowing blocks of light of a single color. I felt like the people nearer to the door (stage right of her majesty) displayed more detail, more interesting displays of light. Indeed their shadows reflected their own shapes, unlike the flat circle of darkness that trailed beneath many on this side of the room.

She pointed with her snout toward Torrence. “The captain of the guard is what is known as a Playable Character. Although its meaning varies greatly depending on the world they hail from. But still, not to be confused with Player Character—the most capable and self-absorbed of the lot.” She pointed toward Addrion. “Then the NPCs, like your human’s warden. And a list of others too long to name.”

“What is your human, then?” I asked. Her fingertips scrubbed behind my ears, and my back leg kicked involuntarily.

“Ah,” she said. “A particular kind of NPC that is found in many worlds, known as a ‘love interest.’”

“What is that?”

She shook off the question. “A type of person whose destiny is written for them.” She leaned again into the loving hand of her human. “But mine beat her destiny. And now we are here.”

“I see,” I lied.

Zideo was now quietly fuming in front of the throne. The Princess stood up and walked past him. “This is what will happen,” she said. She took the bag of red tokens, gripped it by the base, and swung it through the air, sending a splash of tokens across the center of the stone flower shape, raining and rattling down across the miniature Screenwilds and knocking over the representative tower of Ludopolis, the overflow of them falling to the floor.

The quiet tension in the room could have been cut with a knife. Meaning was thick in the still room, although the private ecstasy I was experiencing thanks to Quinoa’s head-scratches prevented me from understanding its full weight. I thought a deal was being negotiated, and the room waited for Zideo’s response.

“I think my human is a player,” I said, my lips loose.

“That’s what they say,” said Angelica. “What is the player world like? Are you one as well?”

“I do not think so,” I said. I told her that Airy Zone was full of very annoying squirrels, but it was mostly a comfortable place, although lonely because my human had broken my heart when he left the house to live at the other place, but now he was back and life was good until we fell through the big glowing triangle.

Angelica seemed to take all this in stride. “Do you have random encounters in the Airy Zone?”

I told her was not certain, but did not think so. We conversed more, deeply disinterested in the sentient conversation around us. Gradually we began to notice the tension relax, and there was a sense of work to be done.

“It is settled,” said the Princess, sounding unconvinced and returning to her throne. “You will go to Platformia. You will return the sun to the Screenwilds.” She gazed at him from behind her mirror sunglasses, and pulled at her lower lip before catching herself in the small act. Addrion was covering her face with both gauntleted hands, and shaking her head. “You will go with them.”

Addrion pulled her hands away to check who the Princess was speaking to—and found to her chagrin that she herself was being addressed. “But… your majesty…”

Her majesty turned her head and spoke much through the look on her face, although what she said in that look I could not say. Addrion did not say another word.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“What exactly is a Princess?” I asked Angelica. “Is it someone who can convey meaning through nothing but looks?”

“That’s close to it,” said the Australian Shepherd. “It is like the alpha that our wilder kin follow.”

I harrumphed. “She seems alright,” I said, “but not like an alpha. She is… hiding something. I sense discipline in her. Years of training.”

“My human and I have come to Ludopolis many times, even before the end of all the worlds,” she said. “Nobody knows what to think of this Princess.”

“‘This’ Princess?”

She blinked at me. “Well, yes. We only summon Princesses in times of great need. Why else would you have one around all the time?”

“That is all well and good,” said the elder man who accompanied the slime. (Although as I spoke with Angelica, I began to understand that he was not nearly as old—in some other sense—as Quinoa and many others in the room.) “But what do we call ourselves?”

“Nothing,” said the Princess. “This is a secret society. That is the point.”

“What about, ‘The Secret Order of Agents of the Princess!’” stated the ancient slime—whose name, it turned out, was Ancient Slime.

“A little on the nose, bud,” said Zideo. His arms were crossed again, but he was no longer raging. I thanked my ancestors that the sentients all must have been coming to some agreement.

“Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” said a man in fatigues. “Then we can be ‘Her Majesty’s Secret Servants.’”

“The Society of Sentients?” came a tiny voice from one of the small, pointed-eared people.

“Organization XIV,” suggested Shiori, but was shouted down.

“Ooh,” said someone I could not see. “The Wrecking Crew?”

“That’s taken,” said Zideo.

“How about,” piped up the gravelly-voiced Torrence, “the Valorous Paladins of Overwatching.”

Zideo’s eyes went wide, and he shook his head no, but would not say why.

“Defenders of the Fort, at Night. Or we could shorten it to-”

“No,” snapped Zideo. “No.”

The soldier dressed like a bush raised his hand high, its blades of false grass swishing. “Well, I was thinking,” he began, “that since we always answer the call of duty, we could-“

“No,” Zideo cut him off.

Someone in full plate mail armor, apparently named Frederick, flipped up his visor and suggested “the Five Knights of Frederick’s,” but we numbered too many for this to work. Other suggestions that were declined included “The Brothers of Smash” as well as the simplistic but meaningless (to me, anyhow) “Avalanche.”

Helmgarth’s voice rang through the hall. “What about the omen?” he urged them. “The late title card. The sign in the sky said ‘the Game Fellows.’” A ripple of discomfort went through the crowd at the open mentioning of that word, and I recalled that Zideo and Helmgarth had been tiptoeing around it for some time.

“I thought they did not say that word,” I said to Angelica.

“It’s fine,” she said. “These ones in this room, they all know. It’s their defining feature.”

“What the heck are game fellows?” someone in the chamber asked.

“We are,” said Helmgarth. He gripped his cane, and I could see his hands trembling. “We must be.”

Around that time, Quinoa returned her focus to the meeting at hand, retracting her own hands from us. The head scratch was over. It was good while it lasted, and I determined to endeavor to get more from her should we ever again cross paths. Much open discussion began between the attendees, dozens of side conversations happening at once, producing a din within the chamber.

I took my leave of Angelica the Australian Shepard, and roamed to see what else could hold my interest. The man with the crowbar only glanced at me through his thick-rimmed glasses, and gave me no second thought. The cluster of soldiers nodded respectfully toward me, but continued their conversation in low tones while observing the room. I saw one promising figure take notice of me: an enormous, brawny man, with arms almost bigger than my entire human.

He smelled like polish and hair product. He wore glossy black shoes, thin socks with a swirling, floral pattern, and formal slacks that looked comfortable and expensive. He had no shirt whatsoever, but wore a bandolier across his broad chest, covered only by his sports coat — a garment I have never seen within Lisa’s household, but which has appeared many times on her glowing rectangle in the living room. His hair was carefully meticulously shorn and greased. He regarded me with a half smile on his face beneath a proud, bushy mustache. I, taking this as an invitation, approached him, tail wagging hopefully.

He leaned toward me, and reached out a huge hand. I ducked my head beneath it to receive the impending rubs, but instead he tucked his middle finger under his thumb and flicked my ear painfully. I was too surprised to yelp, and I feared that making a commotion would bring the room down on me. (Humans do not appreciate interruptions by their dogs, and I suspected the same was true of these people. You must admit that a dog can read the room sometimes, or maybe that’s just me.) Instead, I bared my teeth at him and backed away quietly. His gray green eyes laughed at me silently.

“The question remains,” the princess was saying, and the conversations quieted down. “How will we get there?”

I noticed a few heads turning towards a man on this further side of the chamber. He was one-eyed, with a patch over the other, and dressed in navy blue clothes, with a red scarf and epaulets. A well-fed gut strained the burnished buttons of his coat. A saber with a golden cross guard hung at his hip, the hilt tasseled. He seemed to pointedly refuse to notice the attention, and occupied himself by scrubbing out the residue from a much used pipe, raising it periodically to his one good eye for inspection.

“Skypatch?” Said Addrion, the question in her voice.

“Well, I’d love to,” said the sailor in a voice worn from much use over many years. “But my ship is out of commission, thanks to the Empire of Sorrow.”

“Teleportation spells?” asked Helmgarth.

A few of the flat people and all of the tiny, pointy-eared humans scoffed openly. “Who is paying for all that mana? Besides, that’s a one-way trip.”

“What about… the more science fictional folk in attendance?“ Tried Helmgarth. “Surely you have some means of transportation.”

Heads shook, shoulders, shrugged.

“Warp pipes?”

“Grow up,” growled Torrance. “You know as well as the rest of us that’s not an option anymore.”

Helmgarth threw his cane into the air, snatched it back to himself in angry desperation.

One large arm raised in the group, and on its end, the hand that had flicked by ear only minutes ago.

“How is the empire transporting moving supplies and troops to and from Shards?” It was the two well groomed politician, for I was certain he must have been one, although I was not entirely clear on the difference between one of those and a princess.

“A fleet of air transports,” said the eyepatch man very matter of factly, continuing to scrub his pipe.

“Wait,” said my human. “Hang on. There’s something on top of Fort Weepus. It’s like… a big, giant crossbow? Or whatever?”

“A ballista,” corrected Helmgarth.

“What the heck is a ballista?” asked Zideo.

“A… large crossbow.” Helmgarth shrugged.

It was agreed-upon after much dubious deliberation that the group would have to re-enter the fort and make use of this contraption in order to reach the Shard called “Platformia.” The politician said he had spent some time in the prisons there and could help speed them through the premises if they could come up with a good disguise. The man in the fatigues suggested we cover ourselves with cardboard boxes and sneak when the troopers of the fort were not looking.