Calista was confused and a little giddy. It had been a long day and she was now dealing with an unhinged floating head of a skeleton. “So what exactly am I supposed to do with you?”

“That’s the thing. I’ve been waiting down here for someone to discover this instance and figure things out. You see, most people who come here don’t want anything to do with the bottomless pit and so you can imagine how I don’t get a lot of visitors.”

She nodded to the dead balor, “Well I can see you had a couple visitors shorty before I arrived.”

“Nope,” the skull made the strange sound again where he sounded tired and stressed and bored all at the same time. “That guy’s been dead for a century and a half. This whole instance has been in temporal stasis for quite some time and I’ve been here waiting for someone to discover it this the entire time.”

Calista was a bit taken aback. “So …” she looked around the laboratory again. Then she walked to the doorway and looked down the stairs at the dead quasits. “… I’m assuming here that these demons came for you and you took them down?”

“Not exactly,” the skull looked up thoughtfully at the ceiling as he contemplated. “I would say they just ran into the wrong guy. That’s kind of the story. I had my little lab down here in the basement of this fortress for a long time. One of many labs, actually. This one isn’t even that useful to me as I have several others that are far more fully furnished than this one. However, what happened was I needed to stop here to do some work and what do you know, here come these guys trying to break into the place and kill me for some reason and so I said, fuck you, you’re all going down now and so I dropped a few high level spells on them until they were all dead. The problem was that one of the little fuckers was too powerful and so he got away with my Emberblade and …”

“Wait!” Calista shouted. “Full stop!”

The skull looked at her patiently.

“What did you say?”

“Someone took off with my Emberblade.”

“What’s an Emberblade?”

“It’s a sword.”

“What kind of sword?”

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“The magic kind.”

“What kind of magic kind of sword?”

“Uhm … the kind of sword that high level characters like myself don’t explain to low levels like you.”

“So you’re an NPC?”

“Well …” the skull made the thoughtful, bored sound again. “… kinda. But only if you leave me here. You see, this whole instance down here was designed so that someone could come along and pick me up as a follower and then I’d transform from a skull into a neutral evil lich wizard, but the catch is that I have to start over at level one because if I didn’t, I’d be too powerful to have as a follower, because the game devs thought it would be funny if they left a high level lich wizard sitting a few hundred meters down the side of a bottomless pit for the next hapless player to find so she could unlock a follower and I’d follow her around and entertain her.”

“But you’re not entertaining, you’re boring and crude.”

“I’m not entertaining? Why am I not entertaining?”

Calista did her best not to smile. “You’re not entertaining, you’re an exposition dump.”

“Well that’s usually what happens when a player finds a potential follower. The follower has a lot of things to explain to the player before they set out on the rest of their quest.”

Calista made a face.

“I’m sure you have a lot of questions about this world and the Emberblades and whatnot, but I can’t explain all of that to you here, because as you can see, I’ve lost a lot of weight and the rest of me is somewhere else. As a condition for your foolishness of taking me on as your temporary companion, I’m going to request that you take me to my other laboratory where the rest of my body is so that I can come back into my full power.”

Calista continued making a face. “What if I don’t want to?”

“Well then you won’t get to know where the rest of the Emberblades are and someone else is going to take over the world.”

“What? The Emberblades take over the world?”

The skull sighed his long sigh and shook his head. “You know, there are times like this I really wish I was a drinking man. Anyway, here’s the deal, the Emberblades are end-game weapons that only certain people can use. I see that you already have an Emberblade on you. Don’t know where you got that, but good for you. I’m stuck here because these demons came in and took my Emberblade from me. I was just stopping by to check on a few of my experiments and then these bozos broke down my door and made a mess of things. Unfortunately, there were one too many of them for me and so their leader knocked me out, stole the blade, and made off with it. The only reason I’m still here is because said bozos failed to understand that in order to properly kill a lich, they need to destroy its phylactery. Because they didn’t, my skull stayed here and left me waiting. And waiting, and waiting, and waiting. So, using what little magic I had left, I cast temporal stasis over my little place here and waited until someone came along and picked me up.”

“So what, I’m supposed to stuff you in pack and bring you with?”

“Not exactly.”

“Okay, so what do I do with you?”

“Say the keyword and I’ll be able to get up off this table and then I can show you around the place. There’s a lot to find here.”

“Okay, so please tell me the keyword so we can get a move on because although I’m very sorry you’ve been stuck down here so long, I have a lot of work to do.”

“Nice.”

“Nice what?”

The skull rose from the table and floated up to her shoulder. “You said ‘please.’ I haven’t heard that in a while. You ready?”

“That’s it?” Calista snapped. “That was your big magic password?”

“I never said it was complicated. I mean, I want to get out of here just as badly as you do honey.”

Calista glared and pointed at the skull, “I’m not your honey.”

“So what should I call you?”

“Calista,” she said. “Or boss. Or boss lady if you really want something important.”

The skull managed to look a little taken aback. “You’re so aggressive.”

“Yeah, I am. Keep that in mind Mister Lich Lord. By the way,” she asked, “what should I call you?”

“Oh, so now you’re interested,” the skull’s eyes flashed. “My name is Mind Flayer Hitler.”