As weeks went by I learned more about both the world and the castle that used to be that of The Dark Lord, long ago defeated by the hand of Matu. There was a pregnant half elf, that I soon learned was Mateo’s eldest daughter. I won’t describe her because her mere existence goes against my deepest nested beliefs. For example, that one which says no one in this world should have ever bedded a fucking elf. There were no servants in the castle, the cleaning and cooking tasks were the responsibility of an army of pit bulls. They were appropriately dressed for the chores at paw: some had chef hats, others maid or waiter outfits. They were overseen by one of the half-elves most of the time—turns out Mateo had half a dozen descendants, one son and five daughters. The boy in question was about fourteen and, unlike the females, his head was covered in eyes, not feathers. This for sure provided him with a… particular perspective of the world, and made his gaze unavoidable. He was always away from the light, hiding in the shadows, where you could notice small bright dots clumped, arranged like a Rubik’s cube made of wolves’ heads[1]. I describe him because even my deepest nested beliefs abide by the rule of cool.
That morning I approached him, and he saluted by closing all but two of his eyes.
“Hey Walter, need something?” said the ugly motherfucker —who, for my fortune, did not appear to be engaged in a grotesque relationship with whoever his mother was.
“Nothing for the time being, Cornelio. But I would like to know when will I be allowed by your father to go out and level up. He told me to wait ‘a little bit more’ for the last two weeks on end. And I want to realize my potential as a necromancer. “
“He is not forbidding you from teleporting away.”
“Between us, Cornelio, the problem is that I hold him in some esteem. I can’t repay his hospitality with a disappearance. I am his guest and he appreciates me as such.”
“I see,” he stated the obvious.
“And, well, do you know anything?”
“I know many things”
“About my situation and freedom as a guest!”
“You know I have a hard time thinking, most of my brain is devoted to processing and organizing visual information,” he said in all his honesty, but mainly because he had not enough brainpower left to lie.
Mariana barged in through the ventilation duct above, falling between Cornelio and I. She was covered in dirt, had lost one quarter her HP and held a dead rat in her maw.
“Walter, I brought a gift!”
“Why are you hurt?” I reached for her head and examined it.
“The rat was nearly at my level.”
“You had me worried. You shouldn’t go missing for three days. Not on your own.”
“The ventilation system of this place is labbierinthine.” I should note, by now, that a terrible design flaw of telepathy is that the words get spelled exactly as Mariana wants them to, and the receiver is miserably aware of it.
“You got rid of all the rats?” asked Cornelio, the fingertips of each hand touching the other’s.
“Eh, yes! Dog commander sir!” she stood at attention, wagging the tail because it had a mind of its own.
Cornelio produced a treat and traded it for the rat. Then, he threw the corpse away.
“I really like Mariana, you are lucky to have her. The pits are obedient, but there’s no fun in them. Sometimes they kind of dumb out into a gruesome death, but that’s the only interesting thing they seem to be able to do. Bred to be perfect servants and soldiers, trained for the same ends.”
“I hope you get conjunctivitis,” I said, and I meant it. The poor dogs were not for his amusement. They were cheap slave labor for the empire, and they enjoyed it, because they were still, fundamentally, dogs.
“That is a very hurtful thing to say, Walter. The sheer stress caused to me by a widespread conjunctivitis could induce a heart attack.”
“Okay, I am sorry, keep overseeing the pits, I will see if your sisters know anything”
I gripped Mariana from the loose skin under her neck and lugged her uncooperative ass over to the room of one of the middle daughters, Sabrina. She was energetic, insufferable and a machinery enthusiast, but the most unnerving thing about her person was the unkempt plume of green and blue that grew on her head.
We knocked on the heavy wooden door of her chamber of horrors —AKA Room— expecting the worst.
My deepest fears manifested as the door opened. She was actually there, not occupied with anything substantial, and, well, would probably drag us into some mad plan.
“Hello Sir Walter and Lady Mariana! I have been working on a super-duper secret project for dad. Wanna give me some feedback on it?”
“Won’t Mateo get mad at you revealing his super-duper secret project?” I said, raising an eyebrow.
“What is he going to do, get another engineer willing to fuck him?”
Confused, I looked at Mariana. She was naturally unfazed by the discovery. She was a pedigree dog, an inbred daughter of inbred parents. I should have imagined that she would see no issue with such a revelation of the Lagos’ family dynamics.
“Could you repeat what you said? I was thinking about the sweet embrace of hellfire.”
“What is he going to do, get another engineer willing to f—” I put a hand over her mouth. In my eyes, she had forsaken her right to an opinion.
I let her go.
“Well, I get it, you are judging my life choices and you are in your right to do so. Want to see the thing? I need a second opinion and my siblings would all be worried about the possible backlash. But daddy is lenient.”
“Listen, Sabrina, I don’t want to hear you speak the D word ever again in my presence, under any circumstance. I consider you a subhuman creature now. Below a Chilean, even,” I said, and that was a hill I was willing to die on.
“And I consider you two lab rats. We are even! Come in!” she said, enthusiastically.
“Lab rats are above Chileans.” I mumbled.
We crossed the doorway and entered a world of tools, cogs and metal pieces of the most varied shapes. There was not an inch of the floor that was not covered by polished steel paraphernalia. It was the primitive broth from which the grotesque organisms depicted in Pixar’s Cars must have risen.
“Does anything here squeak?” asked Mariana.
“Not when working as intended.”
“Boring.”
We maneuvered around the room, with me kicking what could be classified as metal gravel all around and Mariana being unusually careful with her step.
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“Why are you not kicking everything?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, turning towards me, expectant of an answer.
“It is a proven fact that you topple every single object that dares exist in your close vicinity, as if you were a young adult novel protagonist and the obstacles tyrannical governments and emotional stability.”
“What the hell are you going on about, Walter?”
“Nothing of the concern of an Elf-fucker-fucker, Sabrina.”
After traversing what seemed a desert of metal, we arrived to her working table, where she had some blueprints extended. They were inked on simple white paper, but one could understand they depicted a complex contraption of sorts. Sorts for sure not allowed in airports.
“Is it a bomb?”
“It’s an artifact to send dad back to Earth, as he calls it,” she explained, pointing at a big question mark scratched in the center of the blueprint. “But I lack the rarest material, so I am trying to circumvent that now that the other fine details have been taken care of.”
“This machine could send anyone back to Earth, correct?” Mariana surprised us both by showing a modicum of common sense.
“Yes, but, unless I modify the design, I need something the money can’t buy. A stone of legend that has the power to grant wishes.”
“And which is gotten by killing the fucking moon, right?”
She remained silent for a few seconds. I understood I had hit the bullseye. Fitting, as one Spanish word for target is diana[2]…
“Fuck me and my mouth.”
“I shall not, daddy would get jealous.”
I let my grimace do all the necessary speaking. Mariana was staring at some random point in space yet again. It had to be a blessing to have a void chamber for a skull.
“Well, don’t worry, the moon is indestructible. It has high amounts of HP and the strongest shooters ever only did damage in the low tens to it. So I need to get around that to send dad back. Please don’t tell my sisters, they would not take it lightly. Without Mateo the political power of the family is sure to crumble.”
“They would consider this treason, then?”
“Probably, but I do not care. I have lived all my life in this castle, I can’t imagine life far from home. I don’t even want to think about losing your home dimension. So I will send dad, you, and Lulu back, even if it means surrendering my way of life or burning bridges with my siblings.”
“That’s incredibly noble for an inbreeding enthusiast,” then I remained silent for a second. “But I guess inbreeding is the sport of kings, after all… so, averagely noble, if you will.”
“Does that mean I am royalty?” said Mariana, showing her usual excitement.
“Not every inbred motherfucker is a prince or princess, no.”
“Hey, I know my owner is an asshole, Sabrina, but I want to go out with him. We also need to pick up a few potions to make me temporarily fleaproof.”
“What are fleas?” she asked, as if she would have never heard the word.
“Small insects that suck the blood of dogs and other animals.”
“Mosquitoes, you mean?”
“Perhaps you heard the Spanish word for it, as I guess your father has taught you the language. Pulgas.”
“Rings a bell… he calls the dogs ‘Pulgosos’ or ‘saco de pulgas’ when he gets mad at them,” she said, her gaze lost in the roof.
“I got stabbed for those potions. And you tell me there are no fleas in this region?”
“I am telling you the fleas could be known as something different here, or perhaps not exist at all. I only heard you and dad talk about them, always in relation to dogs.”
“If they are extinct, we got a murder to commit,” claimed Mariana with a somber tone.
“Snap back into character, Mar. This is unbecoming of you.”
“But, Walter, someone killed all the fleas! Not some, not when they bothered me, but ALL of them. I will never be bitten by the flea of tranquility and sleep peacefully by your side forevermore.”
Death. She had to be talking about the concept dogs had of a manifestation of death. A fucking flea with the magic of prion diseases!
“Mariana, death is not just… a slumber. Your body stops functioning and it starts rotting, like the bones you bury and forget”.
“I thought you rotted if you slept long enough. That’s why I had the good habit of waking you up in the middle of the night.”
I chose to ignore the rising urge to strangulate my companion.
“Anyway, I could assign you two a task so my dad would let you leave the castle. Let me write a letter so you can hand it to him. And don’t you dare read it!” offered Sabrina.
I joined my hands and made a slight reverence.
“Thank you, deeply.”
“Can I eat the letter?”
Sabrina and I looked in the eyes, and silently struck a pact to not answer that kind of question.
“Write that recommendation, or however it may be called. I am getting sick of these black walls. Give us a quest that is long and wind up and makes us see the world and…” I raised two fingers to my mouth and remained pensive. It was, probably, in my best interest to leave out the arsonist desires nested deep within my soul. If there were any honest psychiatrists out there, they would probably recommend razing down a village or two… as long as they were comprised of the right people. And some would say we are stepping dangerously into Nazi territory, but the truth you could replace that people with any group you dislike: The rich, the racists, the Nazis, the dog breeders, the scuba divers. And just then you realize, we are not so different, we all want some people we deem the other dead or suffering, and that is okay, that is human. And from there, it is not a leap of logic to look at fire and come to the conclusion that most buildings the undesirables inhabit look submissive and burnable.
“Look, I will need you to go to the biggest library of the world and find out one of two things: Either you gather a ton of information about energy sources that are not widely known, or you find out something about how to kill the moon. A trip through a desert full of dangers and into a building whose architecture can’t be fathomed,” she hit her desk with the palm of her hands. “Is that good enough for you?”
“Are there strippers in the library and/or the desert?” I asked the second most important question.
“What about sticks?” Mariana formulated the first.
She turned to us and let out a defeated sight.
“I guess the desert is big enough to have both.”
She made a long pause, staring at the rather uneventful ceiling.
I grabbed Mariana by the loose skin posterior to the corners of her mouth and used them as handles to shake her head up and down.
“Ye-e-e-es! Sha-a-a-a-a-aki-i-e-e-e-s!” said the most powerful being I had ever met.
“I should warn you about the Sandooks. Don’t you dare use fire spells against them. The results would be apocalyptical.”
“Mariana, don’t throw fireballs, firecubes, firamids or any other fireshape at anything in the desert,” I told her, not letting go.
“Okay, keep wiggling me?”
I obliged.
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We sat beside the throne, in wooden chairs. A tea table before Matu and me, and a bowl of pristine water before Mariana. The reunion had started with some chit chat and small talk, the ruler asking us how we were0 adjusting to life in the new world at large, and the castle in particular.
The tone shifted when I handed him the letter from his daughter. It may have been because I called Sabrina his “deformed baby assembly line”[3] but I still have my doubts.
“I see, she needs you to go to the great library and retrieve…”
“I was born to retrieve,” truthed Mariana.
“Yes you were,” he said with an unfitting, soft tone. Then he cleared his throat. “I take you know your quest, and given that this could bring us all back to Earth, I would be willing to allow it. But, pray tell me, Walter, what do you miss the most about Earth? A love? A friend? A sibling?”
“I never played Doki Doki Literature Club.”
He broke into laughter. Maybe even narco wannabes had played DDLC.
“Good one. Now, seriously. What do you miss, hmmm?”
I pondered the ceiling for a moment. There was no point in hiding the truth between friends, right?
“Well, I had also downloaded the first episodes of Redo of healer in 4k. Not my thing normally, but a friend on Discord recommended it. On top of that, I needed to finish the first season of Keijo!!!!!!!! and rewatch Seikon no Qwaser to review it on MyAnimeList. But to be honest the real reason is that I am very invested in a series of Konosuba doujinshis about Lalatina Dustiness Ford where she finds true love with the demon lord and betrays the party. The next part was bound to be translated and posted on all the main hentai manga sites by… by what by then was next week. So I want to go back and read it. And jerk to it.”
I took a deep breath after finishing the last sentence.
His hand reached for my shoulder. “I know what the bible preaches. I believed any soul could be saved by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. But, my man, saving in Venezuelan currency is easier than saving you.”
“I understood some of those words and I am the most intelligent being in this castle,” said Miss Bellyrubs.
“Mateo, my friend, you still need me.”
“If you weren’t an Earthling, Walter, I’d have you locked in the dungeon and tortured until you—”
“How can you say that when you fuck your own offspring?”
A pregnant silence settled between us.
“I mean, we all have our demons, right?” he crowned the statement with a nervous laughter.
I glanced at Mariana. “Yes, but at least yours don’t sell you for treats.”
“Well… go, undertake your quest. I have things to do.”
“Are the things called Sabrina?” asked Mariana, making us both almost jump out of our seats.
“I appreciate being insulted by a Golden Retriever. Feels important. Now go.”
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[1] By this simile and mental image you are blessed, rejoice!
[2] No, you gigantic, relentless freaks, I am referring to the roman goddess responsible of protecting the moon, not your League of Legends waifu.
[3] This is not misogyny, I would have hated a —and the word could not be more fortunate— motherfucker all the same. Neither does this mean I don’t hate women: I do, because they are people, and therefore dumb until proven otherwise. It is then evident that my hatred is genuine and legal.