This, Giichi reflected as a hand roughly half the size of his entire body closed around his head and yanked him bodily into the Tolliver's cell, was not at all going to plan.

It had been a good plan, originally. The rune he had carved into the Tolliver's cell after commanding the skeleton guards to a different section of the dungeon would even now be redirecting any eavesdropping spells or enchantments Araxesendenak might have placed in the boy's cell. It would not last for long, twenty minutes at the most, but it would have been sufficient for his purposes.

It should have been simple. Walk into the room, exert dominance over a demoralized and helpless prisoner, then return to his workshop curiousity satisfied. Instead, he had walked into... Something else.

The huge red woman dragged him bodily into the room even as the Tolliver darted past to peer out into the corridor. And even as the red giant slammed him against a wall, a pixie-creature zipped up to eye-level with him and rested the point of a small but quite obviously deadly sword right against the bridge of his nose. And there was a fourth in here too--the small cell was very cramped all of a sudden--with silver skin and black hair.

"Mmph," he said by way of indicating he had no desire to fight back. Indeed, it seemed likely that any one of these three could rip him limb from limb if they so chose, and that simply would not do at all.

"Shut up," the huge woman said without inflection. "Sam? How's it look out there?"

"No guards," Tolliver darted back into the room, and Giichi saw through the space between the woman's fingers as the boy stared at him. Giichi could see his mind working feverishly, Which was also interesting. Usually King Araxesendenak's prisoners were not the kind to... Well. Think.

"Where are we Sam?" the silvery woman asked, looking worried.

“And who’s this guy?” asked the fairy, glaring daggers at Giichi.

"Calcified Fortress," Tolliver replied tersely. "The real Araxesendenak's capitol. And that’s some kind of jailer-tatooist-lackey-thing," the boy added, glancing at Giichi. “Keep holding him while I get my head around this.”

"How the fuck did we get here?" The red woman asked. "One minute something's trying to pull my soul out my ass, the next I'm a goddam nerd's foot fetish wet dream."

"And I'm the one who got crushed," the Tolliver grunted. "But it doesn't matter right now. We're all here, and no one knows it yet. Which means we've got one shot at getting the hell out of here."

The Tolliver had apparently stopped thinking and started moving, grabbing a mass of leather straps and rune plates from the floor and starting to struggle into it. But as he did so, his eyes came and met Giichi's eyes through the big woman's fingers.

"Here's what I know," the Tolliver said in a fast, clipped voice even as he stepped forward and snatched the glasses back from Giichi’s unresisting fingers. "The lich doesn't know you're here. You're probably disobeying him somehow. That thing you carved on the door," he jerked a thumb towards the door and the glowing mana sigil there, "is probably designed to keep people from finding out you came here. So it either disables whatever warding spells the lich has on this cell, or it does something with stealth and maybe memory charms.”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Giichi kept silent, but inwardly he grudgingly allowed his estimation of the Tolliver to tick up a notch.

“So here’s the deal,” the boy continued. “I’m gonna have Sally let you go–Pearl, no stabbing yet–and I want you to tell me what the rune does and why you came in short easy-to-understand sentences. Because we’re leaving here in three minutes, and how you answer will determine how many pieces of you I have Sally pull off before we leave.”

“I have hands now,” the huge woman said with far too much glee in her voice. “I can do things like that now.”

Giichi considered his options as the blade was removed from between his eyes and the giant hand around his head released him and he fell to the floor. He felt pain in his ancient joints as his knees absorbed the shock of landing, but ignored it as irrelevant to the current situation.

And as he considered, he realized that his plan had not been fundamentally altered by… Whatever was happening here.

“You believe me to be your enemy,” Giichi said, shuffling forward and easing himself onto the second of the two chairs in the spartan room. “That is a reasonable assumption, based on the fact that I am employed by a creature of whom you have earned the enmity. However it is fully accurate to state I am neither friend nor enemy to you, merely an interested third party. Would you mind if we sat down? I despise craning my neck to look up at a conversation partner.”

“No.” The Tolliver said flatly. “You’ll hate getting your legs pulled off even more. Keep talking, and make it fast.”

“Very well. You fear me. You should, but not for the reasons you think. I am old and powerful in my own sphere, but it is not as a representative of that sphere, or even of my employer, that I decided to approach you. I am here under my own aegis. As you deduced, the rune behind me is a privacy etching. For the next twenty minutes, the eavesdropping spells which you no doubt have intuited exist will show only a loop of you doing whatever innocuous things you were doing prior to my entrance.”

“Not talking fast enough,” the she-hulk named Sally growled. “Which is your least favorite leg? We’ll start with that one.”

“To the quick, then,” Giichi said rapidly as the giant’s hand closed over his ankle. “I have come to ask you: How did you come to possess a halfling racial trait?”

“How did you—?” The boy blanched at the question and quickly covered up—by the Hoary Kitchener himself, this stripling was lousy at this game.

“The information was contained within the spectacles you lost, and which I aquired, and which have now presumably been returned to you through some magical means.” Giichi’s irritation got through a little that time. “Come come, time is slipping away. Answer my question that I might return to my work undistracted.”

The boy’s mouth quirked up at that, presumably finding Giichi’s irritation amusing in the circumstances. “Alright, I’ll give you one for free. It was part of the benefits given when I went through Creation and selected Human(Unaltered) as my main race.”

Giichi stared. He knew each individual word the boy used, but when strung together like that, they sounded like pure nonsense. But before he could voice his disbelief, the Tolliver continued.

“That’s really all you came here for? To ask me a question about some obscure racial trait? You’re risking King Bonebag getting pissed at you just for that?”

“Of course,” Giichi said, and this time not bothering to hide his irritation. “My work requires total concentration. To have such questions nibbling at the edges of my attention prevents me from working as I must, so I came to discover the reasons.” And blast it all, not only have I not found a satisfying answer, I have come away with more questions! Damn Araxesendenak to the hoary hells for bringing this child into my life.

“So that is my story, Samuel Tolliver,” Giichi said finally, watching the boy warily. “What do you plan on doing with me?”