As was traditional, Harriet was absolutely unwilling to listen to anything her mother said, and Cassandra in turn was unconvinced by her daughter’s arguments.
As was also traditional, the deadlock was broken by Jason’s intervention. He’d soothed ruffled feathers not by the deployment of clever logic or piercing reason, but simply by hugging them both at the same time, looking a mixture of upset and determinedly placid.
They’d both scowled at each other and then, briefly, at him. Then they’d hugged him back, hugged each other, and gone back to discussing things with much less animosity. Briefly, because they’d had a long day, and they wanted to sleep.
Well, that was the excuse that they all used. Harriet was hardly going to demand a truthful accounting of her parents’ evening plans, and her parents were hardly going to babysit their baby girl, whose serial isekais had left her with a four-figure kill count and at least a theoretical understanding of de-escalation.
Instead, as most married couples do when their children are off doing something somewhere else which they will almost certainly survive, the pair of them nestled into each other’s bodies like they would otherwise freeze to death and slept like otherwise had, in fact, happened.
If they woke in the middle of the night, intent on finding a joy in each other’s company that would let them go back to sleep, kept away from nearby ears only by each other’s lips and the deliberate casting of Minor Illusion? Well, it would have been very convenient for them to have a narrator who pretended to ignorance in the matter, and let that be all that is said on the subject.
Minor Illusion
Illusion cantrip
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 30 feet
Components: S, M (a bit of fleece)
Duration: 1 minute
You create a sound or an image of an object within range that lasts for the duration. The illusion also ends if you dismiss it as an action or cast this spell again. If you create a sound, its volume can range from a whisper to a scream. It can be your voice, someone else's voice, a lion's roar, a beating of drums, or any other sound you choose [ed: fine, including the sound of silence]. The sound continues unabated throughout the duration, or you can make discrete sounds at different times before the spell ends. If you create an image of an object--such as a chair, muddy footprints, or a small chest--it must be no larger than a 5-foot cube. The image can't create sound, light, smell, or any other sensory effect. Physical interaction with the image reveals it to be an illusion, because things can pass through it. If a creature uses its action to examine the sound or image, the creature can determine that it is an illusion with a successful Intelligence (Investigation) check against your spell save DC. If a creature discerns the illusion for what it is, the illusion becomes faint to the creature.
The next day passed without anything of note. The wagons creaked along the road, pulled by the oxen; the patrol schedule was followed perfectly, with overlapping line of sight along the scrubby hills ensuring that if any one patrolman was killed, it would be in full view of at least one other patrolman; and the only real danger was that of boredom.
Not that it was a trivial danger. Harriet was, after all, a teenager in body and a Mischief Gremlin by way of origin, and getting into trouble was possibly her quite literal birthright given Cassandra’s history with other worlds. In order to distract her from picking a fight in order to have a proper sparring partner, as she was fond of putting it, the family convened to discuss the way the System had started to shift out from under their feet.
“It’s like there’s some sort of almost competent AI that put it together,” she complained. “And sure, it didn’t get all of the basic physiognomy right because everything has seven fingers with eleven joints each or whatever, but now it’s snarking at me because its setup was bad? Except that it’s got a far more human voice occasionally, and I feel like there’s something being redacted from Query every time it would otherwise show up.”
“That’s… different?”
“Yes, dear.” Cassandra patted her husband on the head. “It’s different. And so is how much is changing. Usually whatever I start out getting with Query is what I’m, for lack of a better term, supposed to be getting, though obviously it’s still cheating and I exploit the fuck out of it as hard as I can. Here, I started getting a lot and almost right away started getting less!”
“Can you figure out anything about what’s being redacted from, like, its context and surroundings?” Harriet frowned, distracted whatever gremlin plans she’d previously had by the conundrum. “Does everything fit and flow properly? Are there inconsistencies?”
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
“Dear, there are inconsistencies all over the place.”
“Like?”
“There are places where the Query returns that there will be two of this or that provided as examples, and then there are only one,” the woman with the cheat-skill in question explained. “The narrative flow is often different, and the formatting as well. How explanations are structured is inconsistent in terms of grammar and tense, and the phrasing isn’t always the same.”
“Huh,” the other two said in approximate unison, and then high-fived each other. “Aw man,” Harriet said immediately afterwards, “we can’t do Worldle while we’re out here!”
“That’s okay, honey. We’ll be back on Earth without any time having passed, so we won’t miss any Pacific islands!” Jason beamed at his daughter. “I know you’ve been really hoping it’s Micronesia every time we get an island nation.”
“Yeah, well, we finally got Wallis and Futuna, so you can’t blame me for being excited,” the girl pouted. “Anyway, I dunno, Mom. Maybe just let me know if you feel like you can tell something’s being redacted? Can you use the System Skills on it?”
“I don’t think so.” Cassandra sighed. “There just isn’t enough meta-awareness in this world’s iteration of Query. But it’s fine. Whatever the redaction is, or whatever they are if there’s two of them, which I think there might be, we’ll figure it out eventually.”
“Or, mom,” her daughter pointed out with a smirk slightly more savage than was appropriate for her age, “we’ll just break it into pieces and salvage its truths out of the wreckage.”
“Harriet Joan Claire!” The words came from two voices in unison, with two pairs of hands on hips that themselves rested on legs which had momentarily arrested their locomotion.
It would have been more effective if both adults hadn’t been smirking openly.
“I love you tons, kiddo.”
“I know, mom.”
“Want a ride on my shoulders?”
“You’re the best, Dad.”
And at that very moment, Cassandra’s enjoyment of their family dynamic was interrupted by a long-awaited System notification.
SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCE DOCUMENTS INGESTED
Background Query Completed: MISCHIEF GREMLIN
You grew up solidly middle class, provided for and cared for. You knew at every moment that your parents and your extended family and carers loved you and supported you, wanting nothing more than for you to be happy and grow. This was terribly boring, and out of ennui you began to cause problems on purpose. You fought fiercely to maintain independence from their stiflingly non-stifling love and affection. You slept on rooftops and in your friends’ backyards, exposed to the elements, and woke up having found out that your parents had swung by to leave you a sandwich and put a blanket on top of you and a pillow under your head. You've managed to stay a snarky piece of shit despite all odds without succumbing to the deep awfulness of the typical middle schooler, and did so through cunning, love, spite, or some combination of each—or possibly because every couple of years, you wind up on an extended life-and-death adventure with your parents. You begin your days of renewed independence with your trust fund and allowance an entire world away, a comprehensive suite of starter skills in the field of violence and subterfuge, and oh yeah, the continued presence of your loving and supportive family, whom you love in turn, HI MOM.
Skill Proficiencies: Sleight of Hand, Stealth
Tool Proficiencies: Disguise kit, thieves' tools
Languages: Infernal
Equipment: A day’s rations, a pet mouse, a token to identify your parents in case of overly-curious adults, a set of common clothes, and a pouch containing 10gp.
Other (Gear Budget): You may upgrade one of your starting items with a total cost of no more than 100gp. (Silvered Arrows x10)
Other (Eye For Trouble): You know the secret patter and mindset of troublemakers in all worlds. In or out of combat, you have Advantage at all ability checks related to troublemakers and mischief lovers, and they will treat you as a trusted ally. In any town or city, you will find no shortage of allies and be welcome among children and wherever they roam free.
Ethos: Mischief Gremlins are driven to cause problems on purpose. They can do this with love or with hate, but life is made of a stultifying mundanity unless you’re tricking your friend into triggering the anti-crash logic on her seatbelt while it’s fully tightened. They’ve probably been viciously bullied and have gotten their vengeance in clever and often deniable ways that nonetheless escalate everything vastly more than any adult anticipated possible, and there are better than even odds they’re already collecting a set of books on the best Senior Pranks across the country to supply ideas to their group of performing arts friends.
Silvered Weapons
Some monsters that have immunity or resistance to nonmagical weapons are susceptible to silver weapons, so cautious adventurers invest extra coin to plate their weapons with silver. You can silver a single weapon or ten pieces of ammunition for 100 gp. This cost represents not only the price of the silver, but the time and expertise needed to add silver to the weapon without making it less effective.
Cassandra kept walking with some difficulty, cackling in laughter like a madwoman. And when she shared the notification with her family, even her daughter joined her in laughing so hard she almost fell off of her father’s shoulders.
Mortifying as it was, it wasn’t like she could disagree with it in her father’s hearing, and even one out of his dad-eriffic adoration or the wildly dyspeptic look on her mother’s face would have been worth all the cringe in the world.