“I think we're ready,” Threadbare said, looking at the circle of allies around the halven.

With a nod, Chase reached into the jar of dirt, and pulled out a pink, wriggling strand of life.

“Transfer Condition,” Chase spoke, before lifting her finger from the earthworm.

“Scouter,” Cagna said, scrutinizing her, hard. “Okay. Unless you got Cultist levels when we weren't looking, you're clear.”

“How do you feel?” Threadbare asked the young halven, as she slumped back into her chair and squinched her eyes shut.

“Ow,” Chase said. “Everything hurts.”

“I'm sorry?” Threadbare asked. “Should you transfer it back?”

“No, no. Give me a moment,” Chase said, waving a hand around the dark-paneled, sinisterly-decorated dining room. “Greta, can you get me something to eat, please? I haven't touched food for hours.”

“Oh gods!” Greta gasped, and ran off.

“Nothing made of meat! Not from here!” Chase called, then rubbed her face again. “Ow, ow, shouldn't have yelled. No. I shouldn't put it back. That condition numbs all your pain. You don't feel any hurt, nothing mental or physical. No regrets, either. It's... dangerous.”

“More than that. Anyone with the right codephrases can puppet you like a marionette while it's on,” Thomasi said, settling back into a loveseat made from very strange leather. “And you say it was called Eidolon Conditioning?”

“Yes,” Chase said, putting the earthworm back in the jar.

“That plain-looking fellow in the odd suit, his title was Eidolon Operative,” Thomasi said. “And Copperfield is a member of the Scions of Order. This is starting to come together. Do you have time for a long story, Mister Bear?”

“I do,” Threadbare said, “but it might be best if a few other people heard it as well. Probably Mister Graves and Garon.”

“Graves should be finished up in the basement before too long, desu,” Kayin said, popping up from under a table.

“Gah!” Cagna jumped back. “I just got three levels off invisible things. Don't scare me like that.”

“Desu, desu. Anyway all of those are dead now,” Kayin said, perching on the loveseat's armrest, and pushing her head into Thomasi's glove until he scratched her. “We had one of the Guild Tamers get a look at them, and they're all maneaters. Not good pets.”

“And that raises the question of how she was feeding them in the first place,” Threadbare said.

Thomasi shook his head. “There's a dungeon out back. Very low level. I have a feeling she put a few prisoners in there, and used them to spawn people for meat and... other products.” He patted the furniture.

“That doesn't bother you, sir?” Karen Mousewife asked, peering up at him.

“I'm fairly sure that she had people clean it all, and I've sat on worse,” Thomasi shrugged. “But anyway, you raise a good point. You, me, Garon, Graves, and whoever else cares to listen, we should all discuss a few things before you set off after Copperfield. And you want to, trust me on this, you really want to.”

“He's certainly caused enough trouble,” Threadbare said slowly. “But on the other hand, we do have an army that's supposed to come fight us at some point. We have to move carefully.”

“Well,” Chase said, “he had me secretly working to disperse the God Squad and give misleading fortunes. So that's something. I'm pretty sure he was worried about me figuring out what he was really up to. The point is, I can throw the cards for you all again, maybe shed some light on it... oh my. Is that pastry?”

“Custard buns, I think,” Greta said, as she padded back in through the door and sat a plate before the small group of friends. “It'll do for a first round while I send back to town and get a good elevenses spread brought up.”

“I will go,” Jean said, standing abruptly. “I must go and help Celia, so I shall be going there anyway.”

“You can come with,” Greta said, slapping her waist, the highest point she could reach. “With what we went through I want a bit more than rabbit food, no offense and all.”

“Please do tell Garon to head this way when he can,” Threadbare told them as well. “The dwarves are back at the castle, so there's enough of a Council to resume business. He doesn't have to do everything himself.”

“That's a little ironic coming from you, desu,” Kayin told him.

“Yes. I need to get a bit better on that too,” Threadbare agreed. “These last few adventures have been a bit humbling on that front.”

It took Graves about an hour to return upstairs from where he'd been conducting highly-dangerous magical research in the basement. It took another half an hour past that to get Garon out to the now-secured manor.

And he didn't arrive alone.

“You bastards took all de kills!” Screamed Zuula, as she stormed into the room.

Chase and Greta were behind the loveseat in a heartbeat, and Threadbare hopped up off the cushion he'd been occupying and hurried over to the glowering orc doll before she could start destroying furnishings.

“Weeks she not been fighting! WEEKS! And you had a house full of monsters all up in here and didn't even come and tell Zuula 'bout it!”

“I had two reasons for that,” Thomasi said, reaching her a heartbeat before Threadbare did. “Firstly, they weren't big enough to matter. We took them down.” He gestured at the group that had hurried out of blast radius.

Zuula looked around at them and sniffed. Dramatically, since she no longer needed breath. “Point,” she said, but she was still glowering.

“Secondly, we thought we might need to take a prisoner or two.”

“Eeeeeeeehhhh.... Zuula tilted her head, and frowned. “Point. Dat stuff gets in de way of de good, old-fashioned sensible violence.”

“In any case, we might not be done,” Threadbare told her. “They departed using a waystone.”

“Two of them at once off the same stone,” Greta piped up.

Garon looked at his mother, then to the halven sisters, then to Graves, who was quietly finishing off a stale custard bun in the corner while Kayin curled up around his shoulders and purred.

“Graves, you remember how I told you once that I dreaded to see you coming? Because you'd tell me six impossible things before breakfast?”

“Oh yes. Do you remember what I told you about that?”

“That I should work on improving my imagination,” Garon sighed, and leaned against a wall. “Okay. Broaden my mind again, pal.”

“Perhaps a little. But Mister Venturi here seems to have more of the story. I'll begin with the results of my research, at any rate. The ritual that this group described to me seems to be a high-level Cultist ritual. Essentially it used the deaths of Lady Marks-Runcible's victims to fool the waystone into thinking that everyone using it was a single being.”

“So that's a thing that can be done,” Garon muttered. “We used to do the same before with packs of holding and golems.”

“Which worked because the gods didn't properly see the golems and doll haunters as individual beings. The... object tag overrode the entity tag, I think that's what happened.”

“Tag?”

“Ah... it's arcane theory. I'd love to explain but we'd be here a while.”

“Dear god,” Thomasi muttered, under his breath so low that only Threadbare caught it.

“Excuse me?” Threadbare asked.

“I... should come clean. About everything,” Thomasi said, sharing a long look with Chase. “There's another player involved in this. Possibly more if he was being honest with me.”

“This is the bit you told me about, Garon? That I needed to put on my research docket?” Graves looked to Garon.

“It is. You told us about things earlier. You're from another world?”

“That's a bit of a simplification,” Thomasi said, standing and pacing. “I'm going to be blunt and simplify things, because we have a moving target to catch. We created your world. Gods, dragons, dungeons, all that. It all exists because we were bored and wanted a playground.”

The room went silent.

“No you didn't,” Zuula said, hopping up to perch on an armchair. “World been here long time. You guys only been here, mmm, fifty year, more or less.”

“I know it's hard to believe,” Thomasi said. “But it's true. You're not the first game we've made. You won't be the last. But you're the first one we've had where something went this horribly wrong.”

“I'm not sure what's wrong,” Threadbare said, staring up at the man. He looked almost sorrowful.

“About... hm. Let me tie it to something that you can reference... shortly after your country's oblivion event, we lost the ability to leave this world and return to our own. We became trapped here. And where once we were effectively immortal, now we're only theoretically immortal.”

“I'm not sure I understand the difference,” Kayin tilted her head. “Are you immortal or not?”

“We don't age. And we come back from the dead until we run out of a resource we can't replenish.” Thomasi said.

“And you've been here fifty years?” Threadbare asked Thomasi.

“What?”

“Well. That's what Zuula said.”

“I... well, the game was only out for ten years before things went wrong...”

“Not a game,” Zuula told him again. “But you weirdos been showin' up for fifty. Not many at first. But lots more, about twenty-eight years ago.”

“It could be... beta testers maybe,” Thomasi pulled his goatee. “Time dilation. People doing things before the game's canon started officially, but that doesn't fit. There's never been a metaplot, nothing anyone could see, anyway.”

“Fifty years was about the time of the changeover,” Graves added in. “When the words started appearing, and the job system became a thing.”

“Before we get too deep into that, do we need to kill Copperfield?” Threadbare asked Thomasi. “I made a death list but honestly it's been working out better not killing people so far.”

“No. He's the prisoner we needed... need,” Thomasi said. “What I told you back in that tent still holds true. He'll just respawn somewhere else. But here's the thing: now that I've got a look at him, and now that we know what happened with Chase, I can tell you he's only the tip of the iceberg. There's someone else behind this. Probably more players, unless the guild's been subverted.”

Threadbare tilted his head. “There's a guild behind this, then?”

“Eidolon.”

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

“I'm sorry, but that doesn't tell me anything.”

“No... wait,” said Garon. “The Belltollian delegation said something about that. Graved, isn't that one of the surviving nations they mentioned?”

“Yes, it is,” Graves said, after a few seconds of review. “But I don't recall anything save for the name.”

“It's a player-made nation,” Thomasi said. “Back in the day there were two big guilds in this region— just east of it, anyway. They were the Bharstool Warmers and the Scions of Order.”

“Bharstool. That was a nation back in the day,” Garon said, slowly. “I remember reading old reports about them conquering a lot of the east.”

“Oh yes. Then the dragons destroyed them,” Thomasi said. “Eidolon won the war by default, but it didn't matter, because that's when our way home was closed. We lost many of our powers. We didn't used to feel pain. We used to... be able to deal with natives more easily. And as I said before, we can die permanently now. Sort of.”

“The dragon eggs!” Chase blurted out.

She quailed a bit as everyone looked at her, then smoothed her skirt and seemed to gather her courage. “The dungeon cores. They're dragon eggs. We think the dragons attacked Bharstool because the players were destroying too many of their eggs.”

“Dragon—” Graves started, eyes wide and bright. “Sweet Nebs! That explains so much of their reaction to the lower thaumic particles! They're alive... oh dear. Oh dear.”

“Graves...” Garon asked, slowly, “how many dungeon cores did Melos use keeping the oblivion engine going?”

“Twenty or thirty,” Graves said, sinking back down into his chair. “At least. I don't think he documented every core he swapped out.”

“This is why we came,” Chase said, “one of the original reasons. Because we think the dragons are going to hold a grudge, and we wanted to warn you.”

“It might not matter, though,” Thomasi said, doubtfully. “If they had held a grudge, I think they would have attacked you the second the oblivion fell. Their psychology suggests patient malice, willing to wait for vengeance but acting without hesitation at the earliest opportunity.”

“Ain't no true dragons in Cylvania,” Zuula said. “Just dumbass swamp dragons and weak little drakes and t'ings. Bunch of dragons died back around oblivion times, though. Not a lot left awake in de world.”

“We have a lot of puzzle pieces, and not many good ideas of what the final picture should look like,” Threadbare said. Celia had said that once, and it had stuck with him. “So let's try to get back to what we need to do.”

“Right,” Thomasi nodded. “I'm telling you all this to try and help you understand where he's coming from. If he wasn't lying to me, then he's chasing a way home. A way out of the game.”

“Which ain't a game,” Zuula said. “But we argue dat later.”

“Ah... sure,” said Thomasi. “The first thing to do is to figure out what he's doing in, and I quote, a land of ice and snow.”

“I think I know what's going on, there,” Chase said. “Lady Marks-Runcible had a price for helping the revolutionaries. She wanted to find a wendigo queen.”

Thomasi sat bolt upright. “Wait. Say that again?”

“She wanted to find a wendigo queen?”

“My god. He's looking for Livingdeadgrrl.”

“An undead?” Threadbare asked.

“No. No, one of the players made herself famous by figuring out how to unlock a cannibal job and streaming— ah, telling others how to do it.”

“Pfft, dat ain't hard,” Zuula said. “All you gots to do is eat people for dat. Bad idea, though. Got to put down orcs who gets too into dat.”

“Why her?” Threadbare asked. “Because it certainly looks like he started a revolution and abandoned it all just to go after her.”

“And he tried to bring me with him,” Chase gnawed her lip. “I might have to go. Under my own power, I mean.”

“Oh you have got to be kidding me!” Greta burst out. “We just saved you!”

“Greta...”

Threadbare hopped down and took Greta's hand. “If she goes, we won't let her go alone.”

“Oh you're one to talk,” Greta glowered at him. “Ran off on your own and let poor Celia worry, right after she got you back!”

“Hey...” Cagna said, raising her hands. “It worked out. Let's focus. Thomasi, what can he do with this... living dead girl?”

“All one word, and fewer vowels on the last bit. Livingdeadgrrl,” Thomasi said, tugging on his goatee. “She was one of the upper circle of the Scions of Order. I honestly don't know what he wants with her.”

“Lady Marks-Runcible wanted something with her,” Chase said, slowly. “He might have been doing this to get her on his side. She seemed powerful, but I wonder. You said he was in his thirties, Thomasi?”

“Level thirty-two, I think. I might be mis-remembering,” Thomasi said.

“Either way, that's awfully high level for Cylvania,” Chase looked down, thinking. “I don't know why he would go to the trouble of getting her help. Unless he just needed her for the guts gate trick.”

“He might have,” Thomasi pulled his goatee again. “I need to go after him. Talk with both of them, if possible. That's the only way to get answers, and if he's onto something about getting free of this game...”

“How do we pursue?” Threadbare asked Graves.

“Well, since their ritual left the waystone behind, there's a couple of ways to pursue,” Graves said. “We could use that trick you pulled off in Fort Bronze. Sew it into one of your hats, have people pop across one at a time, then call the outfit back with your model skill. The downside to that is that whoever went would be transferring blind.”

“I can run the cards on that if you want, but I'll tell you already it sounds like a bad idea,” Chase said. “They know they left the waystone behind, and they'll be expecting pursuit.”

“Or you send me, man,” Glub said. “I pop in, add the place to my map, then use another waystone to get back lickety-split. If I have time and get sneaky enough, I'll set a temporary waypoint somewheres. Either way, once it's on my map, we can see how far it is and figure out if we can get there in any kind of time.”

“You'd be taking a very large risk,” Threadbare told him. “I don't like that.”

“It's a bad risk, unless he's invincible,” Graves said.

“Say what now?” Garon asked.

“We've got a few items in the vault from the wars. Activate one, you'll be immune to physical harm. Activate another, you'll be immune to restraints. Activate a third, you'll be immune to all conditions.”

“Oh. Those,” Garon said, dismissively. “Yeah, they'll do that all right. For like half a minute, tops.”

“More than enough time, man,” Glub said.

“Why don't we have a vault full of those?” Kayin asked. “Those sound really useful.”

“Oh, they are,” Graves said. “But each of them took about three months to make, and also cost a small fortune. The previous kings kept them around to thwart assassins. They're simply not practical for field use in most situations.”

“Those sound extraordinary,” Jean said. “Do they have names?”

“Not really. They were commissioned secretly, long-ago. All we know is the name of the Enchanter who made them: Mac Guffin.”

“Could you check the cards for Glub, please?” Threadbare asked Chase.

A few flips later, and she nodded. “If he does this today then he'll return without trouble.”

“Now ask if he'll be safe if he goes without the Macguffins.”

A few more flips, and Chase let out a low whistle. “Whoo. Bad odds.”

“So there will be trouble. But the items will be enough. Yes, think we should make that happen. Garon, can you get Glub the items he needs, please?”

“Can do. C'mon, fishy.”

“Lead the way, horny,” Glub said and followed the minotaur-helmed suit of armor out of the manor.

“This was a lot of talking,” Chase said, scooping the cards together. “It's almost brunch time. Could we maybe find a place to eat that isn't a former murder house?”

“I see no harm in leaving the rest of this place to the guild,” Graves said, standing and stretching. “It'll be good trap experience for the Burglars. And healing practice for our healers, if the Burglars screw up.”

“Not if. When,” Jean told him. “This place is... murderous.”

“There's a dungeon out back, too,” Thomasi said as they left. “Probably emptied, but you never know.”

After a solid meal for the breathing people among them, they returned to the caste to find Garon and Glub waiting.

“That tinfoil hat saved my brain, dude,” the wooden fishman said as he divested himself of various inert bits of equipment. “I show up, there's like a ring of toothy bastards around me, and wooden dude who I'm guessing is Daffodil says something about gaslights. Which is a charm effect, according to the words, and I nope the fuck out of there before his beasty buddies decide to chow down.”

“Gas lighting. He's an Influencer, all right,” Thomasi muttered.

“So that's a no on marking a new waypoint, I'm guessing,” Chase said.

“Big ole negative,” Glub said. “But I had my magic map up, so let's see here...”

He reached into the air, and pulled down a sheet of parchment.

And kept pulling. And pulling. And pulling.

“Aw. Man. Uh....”

It ended with a snap, and the toys gathered around to help him pick up the much-enlarged map and study the results.

“So yeah,” Glub said, pulling out the bottom twenty percent of the parchment. “This is Cylvania.”

“And most of this is blank,” the Mousewife cheerfully announced. “Whoops! No, here's something. It's a teeny little spot.”

“Lemme see that. Rescale...”

It showed a mountain, and a small cave, like a cavity in a tooth, at the base of it.

“Northeast,” Cagna said, stooping and walking, hunch-backed, to trace a line from Cylvania to the mountain. “More north than east.”

“That's a ways,” Glub said.

“Can we get there by airship?” Threadbare asked.

“Um... not sure. The speeds we were going last time, it'd take a week or two, if I'm reading the distance right.”

“That was with several engines missing and no chance to gather the parts to replace them all,” Threadbare said. “But we have a little more time, a lot more hands, and a relatively safe and empty dungeon right now, don't we?”

“We do,” Graves said, cautiously. “Why is that a factor?”

“Let me tell you about something Anne Bunny taught me. It's called loot farming...”

In the space of a few short hours, with the full support of the Guild's adventurers and the pirate crew, they set up an efficient magitech part harvesting operation in the dungeon below Runcible manor. With the knowledge and experience Graves and his crew had manipulating and altering dungeons, they could seed the crucial parts directly into the loot control pillars, and harvest at a far faster rate than any wild dungeon.

“This is going to destroy the local magic item economy if this secret gets out,” Graves told Threadbare privately. “If we'd known about this trick before hand, we could have seeded the Macguffins in and mass produced them.... maybe. Given the thaumic weight of their enchantment it might have taken months for this dungeon to duplicate them. It's rather low level, and those items were... well... not.”

“From what Anne told me, this method won't work on reagents or crystals. So there will still be an item trade. We'll just have to be very careful about dungeons in the future,” Threadbare told Graves. “But it does make me wonder. If dungeon cores are all dragon eggs, how did they get here? Do dragons sneak in and hide them?”

“That's something I've wondered. I'd love to research it, if we can ever get the time and priority for it,” Graves sighed, and rubbed the white streak in his hair. It had grown quite a bit over the last few years, Threadbare thought. There were more wrinkles on his face than had been there, once upon a time.

Threadbare glanced around. Garon was talking to some of the others, Glub was recounting every detail of his trip he could recall, and the rest of the crew were looking over his map. Jean was nowhere to be seen— probably snuck off to go be with Celia again, he imagined.

It seemed like a good time for some privacy, so he looked up to Graves and said, “Would you walk with me, please?”

“Of course. Where to?”

“Just out to the battlements for a moment.”

He didn't miss the sharp look around that Graves took before stepping out into the open, or the way Kayin quietly followed, hands on her knives. It hadn't been too long ago that Copperfield had tried to kill him, Threadbare recalled.

“I just wanted to say thank you,” Threadbare told his friend.

“What? Well... you're welcome. But why?”

“You spend so very much time learning, and figuring out very dangerous things, and helping us. And it seems to me that sometimes we take that for granted. We don't mean to, but we get caught up in our own business and matters. And it seems so big, and eats up so much of our attention, that we forget what you do for us. And what you've done for us,” Threadbare told him. “So thank you.”

Graves gazed down at Threadbare's small figure, and the earnest button eyes staring up from under the brim of his tiny top hat. And he chuckled, and reached down to shake Threadbare's hand. “They say you never work a day in your life, once you figure out how to get paid for doing what you love. I enjoy my research. And unless that changes before I pass on, I look forward to trading this set of tired bones for a golem shell someday. So I'm going to tell you right now, think nothing of it, and thank you for making the world a better place... as far as retirement plans go, anyway.”

“Oh. You're planning to be a doll haunter?”

“Eventually. I've got a few good decades left in me before that, I hope.”

“I don't know. I thought it was a good solution at first,” Threadbare said, taking his hat off and rubbing his head. “But Celia's been having troubles. And she's not the only one, I think. I'm worried for Zuula, she hasn't quite been the same since she came back.”

“But Garon doesn't. And Glub's fine this way. It's... hm. I'll put this in layman's terms. I've been a Necromancer most of my adult life, ever since I ran into Madeline when I was living on the streets of this city. I know most of what there is to know about becoming undead. And doll haunters, even though they're cleaner than most, are still a form of undead. It's always traumatic, going from life to death and back again. The higher order ones have it easier, but it's still difficult for most.”

“Do you think I did the right thing with Celia?” Threadbare asked. He hadn't meant to, it just slipped out.

“I think so. It was the best option at the time, and it beat the alternatives. We wouldn't have saved everyone if you hadn't done that. Without her driving the resistance, without her planning and using what she knew to get us into the castle when she did... no. The daemons could have killed Melos at any time and turned Cylvania's dungeon overlay into a deadly hellscape. But thanks to her plan and your help, we managed to stop that before it happened. And none of that would have worked out if you had just let her die, Threadbare.”

Threadbare looked down. There was that pressure behind his eyes again, and he rather thought he might have cried, if he'd been equipped for it. “Thank you,” he said, and he didn't know why his voice was huskier than it should have been.

“You're welcome. And for what it's worth, I honestly do believe that doll haunters have better odds at avoiding existential angst than a lot of other undead do. But a good chunk of that is because of what you've done to rebuild our society to help them. What we're doing here is a good thing. It's the best thing TO do. And what we just did— stopping the revolution without a war, or any real major atrocities, that's a good sign for the future. And we'll both be there to see it. We'll all be there to see it, if we can. All right?”

“All right.” Threadbare patted his friend's leg. “We'd better get back to the others. And then I need to see Celia. It's probably going to take a lot of convincing for me to go on this mission.”

It didn't, much to his surprise.

“No, no,” she said, waving porcelain hands once he got her away from the other Councilors. “Look. I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to save me trouble and stress by taking care of things yourself. But what you don't seem to realize is that I'm fine with that. Just so long as you've got people I trust around you, and the ability to come home whenever you want.”

“You're really not upset?” Threadbare asked, staring up at her, turning his hat nervously in his paws.

“I'd be lying if I said I liked it, but it needs taking care of, and I can't do that and plan a war at the same time. Belltollia's coming.”

“It's certain, then?”

“God Squad and Chase confirmed it. Though we're having trouble pinning down exact details. Jean's confirmed that's probably their own version of God Squad doing the same thing to us that we are to them. Huh! We thought we were clever by forming God Squad, but from what she says most nations have something like that.”

“Then it's still good we have that, so we can cancel them out,” Threadbare put his hat back on his head. “Cagna whispered me that the pirates estimate we'll be repaired within a day, thanks to dwarven help, and it'll take three more to get the airship around where Glub's map indicates.”

She hugged him then, stepped forward and picked him up and squeezed. Threadbare hugged her back, and the two of them stayed that way for a while.

“You make sure everyone comes back safely,” she told him. “And be back in time for the war.”

“I will,” he promised, and very much hoped that he was telling the truth.