Joy had been on a truly exciting ride for the past few months. And it had all culminated into what he thought would be the perfect night.

After he had spent some time with Hope and tried to show the kid some of the beauty in the world, he had unfortunately been forced to answer a lot of questions by the prince and pinky promised that Hope wouldn’t cause anyone any trouble.

Finally, after Ian had stopped brandishing his sword at him, he had then had to field the bazillion questions about what in the gods’ names the glowing gold lightshow he had made was. And why did he have a beard now?

Lillian was oddly insistent about that last one, and only Theo seemed particularly intrigued by his massive lie about what his gift was. He explained the basis of the game room and how it worked at a condensed speed. He had only been missing for a few minutes to them, but for him it had been several months of playing games and education with the young Hope.

Then the awkward questions from the prince came, like: “if you have such a powerful artifact why have you not told us yet?”

Personally, the answer was because it was his damned artifact, and he didn’t have to tell the prince anything about it. But he gave the more diplomatic answer that the artifact was biometrically locked to him.

Did he know what it meant? Nope! But it shut everyone up. Still the prince requested that some of his personal scientists take a gander at it and see if they could glean any of its inner workings.

Joy didn’t really mind too much, since he wasn’t planning on getting into any massive fights for a while, so he ‘loaned’ it to the prince.

Finally, after all the questioning and badgering was done, the prince gave Joy back his stick. The prince had been using it to smack heads in during the final battle, but it was Joy’s prize, and he didn’t want to part from it.

The prince had then organized the remaining people into search parties, and even somehow got the Yeti roped into helping. For some reason they really loved Emmy and would do anything she asked; they somehow understood what she was saying and used them to move swathes of debris from the destroyed castle.

Lillian and Joy had even found Peku running around in between the legs of what must have been the little guy’s parent. He was still adorable and still just saying “peku peku” repeatedly, but his consistency was part of his charm.

The prince’s mission in coming to the Frozen Continent was two-fold. He wanted to get rid of the warlord, now named Hope, so that the civil unrest he was causing in the capital was stopped. This part of the mission was seen as a success to Joy since he had given Hope a new path in life to follow, or at least some inspiration.

The other goal was to find the Kingmaker, some staff of incredible power that was somewhere within the remains of the castle. So, the army set up camp and started digging again. It was reminiscent of having to dig tunnels through the ice and snow that they had to do to get to the castle. Joy found a deep irony to the situation.

Joy enjoyed the digging on some level. It was a meditative task and it allowed him to find Herbert again. Somehow the man’s gift to make many shovels came quite in handy.

Joy had to hand it to whoever came up with the group roster for this trip, they truly had magnificent foresight for bringing the man along. He was the third most valuable member of the expedition, only behind Joy himself and Sam the seer.

Speaking of Sam, they arrived a few days after the excavating began and did something that Joy would never forgive.

Sam spoke to the prince and told him that Joy’s special stick truly was the kingmaker. It came as a shock to everybody, but it did make sense.

All the kingmaker did was take someone’s gift and amplify it to an insane degree. Joy’s gift was just a deck of cards, his abilities that he used were all from the key to Game’s personal playhouse, so his abilities weren’t affected while touching the stick.

And the prince’s gift was the change of his hair and eye color, neither of which he had been doing for the entirety of this expedition. So, he had also not noticed that the amazing stick was an artifact of such power.

Hungry gazes turned towards Joy as everyone realized that he had been holding the object that had kept them in this cold miserable place for even longer than necessary.

It took a lot of cajoling and many promises, but finally Joy gave up his epic stick. He was told that he would receive more gold than he could ever spend, and live the rest of his days in comfort, which sounded like a sweet deal to him. Even if he missed his awesome stick.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

So, the long trek back to the prince’s personal castle made on the shore of the Frozen continent went by quickly, and even the voyage back to the southern tip of the Hearted Continent was quick. As quick as any large journey possibly could be.

The food was delicious, courtesy of Marissa, the greatest chef to have ever lived, in Joy’s humble opinion. Though her gift did make it slightly unfair for other chefs, she could literally turn shit into brownies, and wasn’t that incredible?

The ship was guarded by the pirate captain Robert, and his pet giant octopus called Eight. And they sailed back to the main continent, nothing even went wrong a single time.

All this finally came together in a massive party thrown in ‘the prince’s’ honor. And Joy got to meet the king face to face.

King Renoir did not look like the man that was embossed on every gold coin. Instead, he was even more attractive and somehow got Joy on the backfoot with his devilish charm. His eyes twinkled, his hair swayed just right in the wind, and he was a great guffawing man.

Joy had been expecting a severe man, but instead he was worried that he might fall in love with this incredible man.

He had been wined and dined by the prince’s incredible father, and Joy didn’t know quite how it happened, but he left the castle with a chest full of gold, a full stomach, and being more than a little drunk.

He had been thanked for his incredible deeds done for the kingdom and told that inside the chest was enough gold that he could live in luxury for the rest of his life, and a paper that would give him the rank of Baron.

Of course, Baron was the bottom of the totem pole, but it was still on the totem pole. He would be able to rent a manor in the second circle of Vena Cava, and not have to sleep in the prince’s terrible guest rooms.

Actually, he would never have to see the prince again, unless he wanted to. He didn’t need a job ever again.

That was when his night was ruined.

Joy normally kept his hair fastidiously short. During the earlier years of his youth, he had gotten in the habit of taking everyone’s money within the small gambling parlors that he frequented and had a beautiful mane of hair upon his head.

He was barely fifteen at the time and still hadn’t completed the journey to Vena Cava, so he was still gambling in little river barges where the only other patrons were disgusting old men who picked their teeth with knives. These places did not have to uphold their reputation like gambling establishments within the inner rings of Vena Cava.

He had learned the hard way a few times that if he went into one of those dingy little places that he had to be able to run incredibly fast to be able to keep any of the money he had won throughout the night. Apparently, a young man traveling alone was not a good deterrent for the crusty patrons.

Joy had found that he needed a partner, he needed someone who was feared and respected. So, he had made a friend.

Her name was Franny, and she had an insidious gift from Hair. She could control all hair around her, and if she touched it, she could force it to grow even longer. It was a devilish sort of gift that had to be respected on the battlefield.

The two of them galivanted around the countryside, he would use his incredible luck to rake in the gold, and Franny would rip the hair out of anyone’s head who started making trouble.

The two of them were truly an unstoppable tide moving inexorably towards Vena Cava.

Joy and Franny had ‘split up’ after he had scored a truly gargantuan amount of money from a traveling noble. The boy was barely older than Joy and had decided that he would travel through the countryside on a journey of self-expression.

Part of his ‘self-expression’ was going to local taverns and bullying as many people into giving him as much money as possible by saying how his father would do this or that to them and how they all were just such good chums.

Joy had taken all that miserable man’s gold, given the scraps back to the villagers the man had been bullying and Franny had forced his hair to exit his body. It was humiliating but it made the man run home screaming.

The man had been carrying a fortune on him for no good reason and Joy was excited while Franny was cautious.

Joy wanted to take the gold and run, no one would be able to find him in Vena Cava, and Franny wanted to hide out in the countryside for a few months and wait for the heat to cool down.

This argument caused a fracture between these two, and in the night, Franny had taken Joy’s long, beautiful hair and strangled him nearly to death with it. She stole the gold and the two of them never saw each other since.

After that night, Joy kept his hair short. Except, he had forgotten to take care of it so effectively when he was in the time dilation zone with Hope.

When Joy saw Franny on that abandoned street, he knew that she was going to steal a second fortune from him because he had forgotten to cut his hair while he was in the game room, and because the prince still had the key to the game room. So, Joy couldn’t even call out for Franny to play a game and give him a fighting chance.

Joy was demolished, he was beaten soundly by his arch-nemesis. And she even had the gall to rip off all his hair, so now he was beaten, bald, and broke.

To make his night even worse, someone cracked him in the head, and he passed out on the cobblestones directly in front of the king’s castle.

When Joy awoke, he found that he wasn’t seething. He felt no incandescent rage filling up his soul. Instead, he felt a great sadness that the person who had once been his friend kept using him like this, and never let him in to help her with whatever struggle made her keep taking his gold.

Joy sat up in the bed he had been placed in and looked around after his self-reflection. He was in Theo’s bed in his shared room with Lillian.

Lillian’s side was still covered in a mismatch of textures and colors, while Theo’s side was filled with cool blues and not even a spot of dust existed on his floors.

Theo watched Joy with his cool blue eyes, asking a silent question.

Joy simply smiled, “yes, I am fine. It just seems that my karma is still tied to you all here, I couldn’t leave the prince and his favorite underlings even if I tried.”

Joy knew that something was afoot.

He loved the world, and the world loved him. The first time he had been screwed over by Franny, the world had paid him back in full.

And he was sure that the same would happen again.