The upgraded room for Garland of Nowhere was rather nice. Like if you were staying at a Renaissance Fair-themed hotel room or something. It was warm, inviting, and came equipped with furniture. Basically, it was the exact opposite of the rest of the castle. It even had a perch for Jon, which made me wonder if it was meant for the "Garlands" who replaced the real McCoy. The fire in the hearth was magical and could be conjured or dismissed at will, just by concentrating on it.

Neat, a Medieval heat pump.

Plates of fresh fruit were laid out with pitchers of surprisingly clean water as well as bottles of wine. I hadn't had lunch that evening, so I ended up gorging myself on the spread before flopping myself on the bed. It was different feeling from your typical mattress but not necessarily worse. I was also exhausted from trying to be a hero and about ready to collapse either way. I barely managed to get my armor off before nodding off.

The last thing I saw before sleep was the portrait of the Rose family hanging over the hearth. A red bearded man in a lordly attire that I couldn't really identify the time of but vaguely a suit with a high collar. That, I presumed was Lord Tomas Rose. At his feet were the seventeen- and sixteen-year-old daughters, Ania and Agata. Ania was the younger one with red hair like her father and Agata had raven tresses like her mother.

Both daughters were wearing blue dresses that seemed more Bridgerton or Anastasia than Middle Ages. They both looked happy, so this was presumably before the traumatizing horrors of the first book. Finally, their mother was present with the brunette woman wearing a black Gothic-looking dress. Maria Rose had a severe expression that seemed almost accusatory toward the bed where I lay. Maria had been a minor daughter of the royal family that had hated Garland from the day he'd arrived. She believed he was her husband’s bastard and that the idea he was Perun’s son was ridiculous. Things had gotten worse once the attraction between her daughters and the sixteen-year-old Garland had become noticeable.

What had happened in the ensuing fifteen or so years of book time? Lord Rose ended up killed by the Mad Queen's brother, Lady Maria had been turned into a vampire by Veles, and both daughters had suffered terribly in the interim. All the secondary supporting characters had ended up killed, tortured, or corrupted as well until the castle's original inhabitants had all been wiped out. As a teenager, I'd thought this was the coolest thing in the world but as an adult I'd just wanted the remaining Rose family members to reunite. Now it was never going to happen.

Garland was dead, I was an imposter.

"Don't think about this as stealing a dead man's life," Jon said, sitting on his perch. "Instead, think of this as taking all of his stuff after he doesn't have any use for it anymore."

I threw a pillow at the raven before entering a strangely dreamless sleep. The next morning, I awoke to deal with pressing concerns.

"Seriously, man, I can't believe you're struggling with how to use the bathroom," Jon muttered as I left the private bathroom that the quarters came with. I'd managed to get "close enough" to figuring how it worked but the specifics were still eluding me. However, the next time I needed to use the bathroom, I suspected I might be in trouble.

"Listen, the other option is the bidet," Jon said, looking genuinely pained at my ignorance. "It's a washing bin you use after you use the hole in the tower bathrooms. They work just like outhouses and drop it all into the pits below."

"Uh huh," I said, looking at the sun streaming in through the windows of my room. It was a new day in this place. I could still smell the smoke from yesterday's attack, though. "Isn't that a security concern? I mean, if you're undead and don't care about wading through crap?"

Jon paused at that. "That might explain a few of the castles falling in the region. But let's put a pin in that until later."

"So, the bidet—" I asked.

"You use your hands and oil," Jon said. "It's how the Tarks do it in the Eastern Lands past the Great Forest and Mountains of Death."

"You've got to be kidding me," I said, disgusted. "My hands? Is there not a cantrip or something we can use instead?"

"Yes, use phenomenal cosmic power to clean yourself," Jon said, sarcastically.

"Like you wouldn't," I snapped, putting my hardened leather armor back on. It was a poor substitute for chain mail, but I had to make do with what I had. The real Garland had sacred metal forged from a star and enchanted by elves but, like with his levels, he had to start over each game with basic equipment.

"Just follow the instructions I gave you," Jon said. "A bunch of disposable paper isn't going to get you any cleaner really than the way they use what they use around here. There's also not exactly a supply of Charmin around these parts if you catch my drift. I got used to it and you'll eventually get used to it too."

I paused before shaking my head. "Screw it, I'm just going to get a bunch of leaves."

Jon covered his face with his wing. "Wait til we talk about bathing. You're going to have to start learning to wash your face and hands regularly but not take actual showers or baths save when you come across a waterfall or pond. Plus, sharing water is a thing."

"Ugh."

"On the plus side, communal bathing is totally a thing. They have bath houses for it and everything." Jon's voice took on a suggestive tone, implying that whatever the villagers got up to in the bathhouses wasn't just cleaning themselves.

I stared at Jon. "Just how horny are you at all times, raven?"

"On a scale of 1-10? 12."

I almost made a joke whether that was an actual stat, but I didn't want to know the answer. Instead, I decided to check my stats to see how far I was from leveling up again. Every new level, the counter for EXP reset and you had to grind an increasingly higher number of points. At least if it was like the game.

Level 2 to 3:

3200/5000 EXP

"That's actually really good," Jon said, looking at my bracelet feed. "I was only at 200 points when I finished the tutorial. You're going to start wanting to level grind as soon as you're in the village, but you have a pretty good head start. You should be at least 4th level before you leave Crossroad Village. This is a basic starting area."

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"Isn't that a rather dismissive way of referring to a town that just got sacked by Harryhausen skeletons?" I asked.

"I'm pretty sure that it's exactly as dismissive as that statement," Jon said. "But the fact is that, at least as I did it, the village of Crossroad is a place full of procedurally generated quests and content that will allow you to figure out how to use your powers. Also, get a few more Companions. As useless as I've always found them to be."

I felt a headache coming on. "I don't suppose it's the fact you treat them like NPCs that may be the reason they aren't your friends?"

"They are NPCs," Jon said, frowning. "They live in a video game world. They only exist now to help the main character."

"So do you," I point out.

Jon paused, not responding for a moment. "Crap."

"Yeah," I pointed out. "Also, procedurally generated? What do you mean?"

"As I understand, all the quests are different from Garland to Garland," Jon said, glad to change topics. "Sometimes the village is suffering from people needing to be rescued from lingering monsters. Sometimes they need you to do personal shit. It's all randomized."

I bit my lip. "I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark, Jon, and suggest that may actually not be procedurally generated content."

"Oh, then why is it different each time?" Jon asked.

"Because each of the sequences is with different people and every single one of these events matters," I said, wondering what I'd done in life to be cursed with such a self-absorbed familiar.

Jon seemed, again, to be affected by this. I was reaching him. I just wasn't sure that it was worth the effort. "Yeah, well, I bet Farmer Grub's wife is still fu—"

Whatever he was going to say was cut off by a knocking on the wooden door of Garland's quarters.

"Who is it?" I asked.

"There's literally only one other person in the castle," Ania said.

"Oh right," I said, heading to the door and opening it up.

Ania was on the other side of the door, once more dressed in her armor and prepared for battle. She had her hair up, though, and it kind of reminded me of Princess Leia on Endor. "Did you figure out the privy?"

I blinked. "Is that a common problem for the Garlands?"

"The two I met before you, yeah," Ania replied. "Honestly, I'm not sure how you keep yourselves clean."

"I plead the fifth," I said.

"The fifth of what?" Ania asked, confused.

"Nevermind," I muttered, looking around. "I was just about to go out and, uh, level grind."

Ania blinked. "Right. Well, how about we go together? The village is in dire need of help, and you are someone with at least some ability to fight."

"Some," Jon muttered.

"I have a pretty good idea at least some of Garland and my old companions are also at the local tavern," Ania said.

"We're heading to a bar? It's like nine the morning," I asked, confused. "What kind of drunken losers would be getting wasted at this hour of the day."

"The kind who may or may not have seen their wives, sons, daughters, or brothers dragged off to the Underworld by the living dead yesterday," Ania replied.

I paused. "Right. I suppose I'd be having a whiskey, neat after that myself."

"Well on the rocks isn't really an option around here," Jon replied. "Not unless you have ice magic."

"Fair point," I admitted.

Jon jumped from his perch and landed on my shoulder in one easy motion. "Wait, is it the Black Cat? The city's brothel? Because I'm in."

"Yes, it's the Black Cat," Ania said. "It always survives the siege intact. It's also, technically, a tavern."

I scrunched my brow. "The city's brothel is called the Black Cat? Why?"

Ania stared at me and raised one eyebrow. “Think on it.”

The meaning clicked for me. "Ah, I get it now."

"It’s not an exact translation, I think," Jon replied. "Anyway, it's also the base for a lot of the Dark Undermasters seeking extra work. Dragon Keep accepted petitions from all over the Southern Kingdoms but if you wanted actual action then you'd just put it up on the wall of the brothel."

"Yeah, I've read the short stories."

The Dark Undermaster collections had the typical premise of Garland in an unnamed brothel finding out about some local monster haunting the region or a twisted fairy tale story happening nearby. He'd try to intervene, everything would go horribly wrong, and there would be some valuable lesson at the end about how heroism sucked. In retrospect, they were kind of repetitive a well as needlessly nihilistic, but they were my jam growing up.

"Anyway, if it's like before then other friends and family will be drawn back here," Ania said, turning around and walking away.

I ended up following her. The halls of Dragon Keep looked slightly better in the morning with the extinguished fire no longer smoldering, sunlight streaming in from the various broken windows, and the overall effect more like immense emptiness than being the sight of a massacre. Still, I wasn't going to forget what I'd seen the night before. Maybe Jon had been trying to cope with his situation by thinking of it in purely video game terms, but I was very much aware that this was real. No continues, no save scumming, and real consequences for people other than myself.

"Anyone I know?" I asked.

"I dunno," Ania replied. "I don't know who you know."

Fair enough.

"So, what were the other Garlands like? I mean, the ones you remembered because of the bracelet," I said, interested if there was anything I could learn from them. It was a long shot, but I wasn't about to take on the Dark Lord and all his minions by myself. The bracelet was leading me to try to recruit more companions, but they'd all think I was Garland, and I didn't want to deal with pretending to be someone I wasn't, especially around Ania.

"They weren't Garlands," Ania said, sharply. "They were Imposters, just like you."

"Sorry," I said, grimacing. Clearly, I'd just erased whatever good will I'd managed to accumulate yesterday.

Ania sighed. "You already met the first one."

"What?" I asked.

"Skull King," Ania said, not bothering to look back. "He started as one of you people."

You people, I assume, meaning champions from Earth. This was a bombshell she'd rather casually dropped and changed the entire nature of my encounter with the dead man. I'd killed a "real" person, which made me feel like a hypocrite for feeling like since I'd already just reassured myself that I wasn't like Jon. Then again, I'd previously thought Skull King was undead and I was entirely okay with divorcing living people from undead monsters.

"What?" I asked. "He was from my world?"

"Yes, what?" Jon asked.

"Not everyone who dies becomes a crow," Ania explained, shrugging. "It's possible to make a pact with Veles and switch sides. The God of the Dead proceeds to make you a permanent part of this world and one of his minions. Valentin loved the fact he was trapped in a world where he was the strongest person around and he abused his powers every chance he could. I was too weak to stop him. I was confused, horrified, and angry at 'Garland' for most of our time together."

"You didn't know he was a champion at first?" I asked, avoiding the word imposter.

"I couldn't," Ania said. "The damn spell that Weis wove over us all made me crazy. I kept trying to justify his actions until I finally snapped."

"What caused that?" I asked, wondering if it would be possible to break other locals out of their confusion.

"He killed another Imposter," Ania asked, her expression haunted. "Another champion of Weis who was actually trying to make a difference here. I never knew their name but the incongruity of seeing two of them fight finally snapped me out of it. After Valentin won, I took the bracelet off their opponent's dead body, and everything changed. I started to see the walls of the prison I was in."

She lifted her bracelet. That was when I noticed it had suffered some damage and had scratches all over its runes.

"Did the other Garland have an Ania?" I asked, letting my mind wander.

"Huh?" Ania asked, doing a double take.

"I mean, if there's multiple Garlands running around, do they come with their own Anias?" I asked, speculating aloud. "It says I should recruit six companions. Is it possible that they're all the same like you've been magically cloned or something.

Ania stopped cold and turned to look at me.

"Oh, right, yeah," I muttered. "That problem would be disturbing to think about."

"No, she came back here," Jon said. "So, there's got to be recycling of characters. I guess that means we’re all competing to see who gets a full group.”

"You Imposters are so damn weird."

"Gotta catch em all!” I said, cheerfully.