Mark stumbled along the road, trying to pull his hood off of his head. Eventually, Horan stopped and help him pull it off. Omet took a seat on a nearby wooden bench, obviously drained.

Mark and Horan took a seat next to them. The bench had been placed along the road leading out of the village. This part wasn’t as densely populated as the center, but several locals had followed the three of them to see if they did anything else weird.

Horan broke the silence, pretending not to notice the humans staring at him. “So. Every time I think ‘yeah, okay, today’s peaked, it can’t get any weirder than this’, it gets weirder. Is it my fault for having such low standards? Does the universe just… not want me to have a normal day?”

Mark shrugged. “I don’t even know at this point. I don’t think normalcy as a concept exists anymore. Who even was that?”

“Wife.”

Omet raised their eyebrows and leaned back. “That was a fast conclusion. How do you know?”

Horan shrugged. “I might not be good at telling when someone’s lying anymore, but I’m still good at figuring out relationships. Plus, it’s an advantage of actually having parents. I’m familiar with marriage dynamics.”

Mark buried his head in his hands. “And it’s not gonna stop, either. We still need to figure out how to get off of this place. At least there’s a whole Domain to help.”

Horan nodded. “Or we could figure out where that spider-thing came from.”

“Wait, yeah, where is that thing? Did we leave it in their house?”

Omet straightened up. “And where’s Quet? I assumed she’d just follow me, she usually does…”

Horan stood up. “Great, now we have to go all the way back. This is why I make lists of what I need to bring when I leave home.”

-

The creature came to, feeling something digging into his side. He opened his eyes only to immediately close them. He had a splitting headache, and sunlight would only make that worse. He still heard chewing, though. That was the particularly weird part.

Quet heard the creature on the kitchen counter groan and swallowed her chocolate chip cookie. “Cool, you’re up. Or, as close to ‘up’ as you can get. So, mind answering a few questions?”

The creature opened one eye, scanning the blurry outline of what was in front of him while relying on his other senses for extra clarity. “Hnngh… Cookie…”

“You mean these?” Quet held up her plate of cookies. “Sure, I’ll share. They’re homemade, you know.” She took a handful, reached over from the dishwasher she was sitting on and placed them on the counter next to the creature’s head.

The creature squirmed in his restraints in an attempt to reach the cookies, but stopped when he felt the thing in his side press against his ribs. Was that a faucet? Was he in a sink?

“Oh, right, you’re tied up. Sorry, that must really suck. How about we do a trade? You answer a question, I give you a cookie. Sound fair?”

“...Uh, fair, I guess. That was a question, gimme a cookie.”

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Quet’s eyes narrowed. “Sly, but fine.” She pushed a cookie into the creature’s fanged mouth. While the creature was chewing, Quet leaned back. “Alright, once you’re done, we’ll start. What’s your name? I assume you don’t want to be called Parker, like I’ve got you in my head as.”

The creature stopped chewing. “...What?”

“Never mind that, actually. Also, that’s minus one cookie, since you asked a question.”

“Wh-Why is that a rule, even?”

“Because I’m the interrogator, I make the rules. Now you’re one cookie behind, and assuming you can’t regurgitate your old food like a bird, I guess my next question is a freebie. But you still haven’t answered my first question.”

“Right, yeah. My name is, uh… Shades.”

Quet tried to think of a way to cast doubt on Shades’ alleged name without framing it as a question. She only had so many cookies, after all. “...Shades.”

“Yeah. It’s a pseudonym, sue me. I’d rather not tell a random human my actual name, and Shades sounds cool.”

Quet shrugged. “It does, I guess. But, wait, do you think I’m a human?”

“Uh… Aren’t you? You look like one. I thought it was safe to assume that anything on Earth that’s smart enough to bake cookies was a human.”

“Oh, I do look like one.” Quet shifted back into her true form and hopped off of the dishwasher when her extra weight made it start to creak.

“Right, you. Thought you were just some human, they and Primoi all look the same anyway.”

“So, you said Earth. Where are you and your friends from, then?”

Shades said nothing, preferring to just open his mouth expectantly like a baby bird. Quet sighed and stuffed another cookie into his mouth. While she waited for him to finish chewing, she noticed that under his armor, the skin on his torso was translucent. She could see the digested cookie making its way through… yeah, she wasn’t looking at that. Best to ignore the disgusting part of this guy. Quet decided to keep her eyes fixed on the cupboard above Shades’ head. Yeah, that was better. Besides, he couldn’t tell she wasn’t making eye contact; she didn’t have pupils.

Shades swallowed. “The Down Below. Figured that was obvious, I’m a six-armed monster with fangs and glass skin, you don’t need to act like it’s a sensitive matter.”

Quet shrank back slightly. “Right, uh, yeah, sorry about, um…”

Shades looked impressed. “Really? It’s that easy to rattle you? Wow, how did the other people ever think it was a good idea to put you in charge of this?”

Quet leaned back on the dishwasher and looked at the floor. Great. She’d decided to take care of this guy herself when it looked like anyone forgot about him, and now the whole interrogation was falling apart. Of course it was, she was the worst possible choice for this. She was giving him snacks whenever he asked, and in exchange, he was running circles around her…

…No. “They didn’t. I’m doing this myself, because none of the others even remembered that you were here. That means nobody’s around to stop me from doing whatever I feel like with you.” She pulled a stone from her bag and set it next to Shades’ head. When it made contact with the counter, several rings of geometric patterning began to visibly glow on its surface. “I am Quet, of the Aztec Domain of Primoi. We’re the roughest, toughest, meanest immortals this side of the Atlantic, and you don’t want to get on our bad side.”

Shades looked Quet in the eye, which made her tilt her head up ever so slightly to look away. Seeing this, he smirked. “And what’ll you do if I do? Bring out the cake? It was probably a fluke that you ever managed to tie me up. Go ahead, set that glyph off. It’s probably just programmed to make a funny noise, or something.”

Quet paused for a moment, then deflated. She picked the stone up from the counter, making the glowing symbols vanish, and put it back in her bag. She took a step back and slumped to the floor, her back resting on the dishwasher. “That was a bomb, actually, but… I couldn’t, anyway. I probably don’t even count as a real Aztec, even. You win. Happy? If any of my siblings were in my place, you’d be crying like a baby by now. But instead you got the runt of the litter. So I’m done. This was pointless anyway.”

She got up and went for the door. “I’m not gonna get off this island. I bet that in a few weeks, Hurat’s gonna show up out of the blue with that green-cloak person in chains, and he’s gonna bring us home. Better odds than me doing it, anyway.”

She left the room and went for the door. Maybe Omet could help with this, or something. As she was walking across the living room, she heard Shades shift position and call after her. “...Did you say green cloak?”