Gob jumped down through the hole he had just stchacked in the stone at the end of The Counts escape tunnel. He stood and looked up and down what they now recognised as another dwarven stone tunnel, exactly the same as the one they had previously exploded. This one however was in pristine, unexploded, condition.

"iz da cont ok?" Gob asked her.

"Let's move right away from the barrier before we get him out just to be sure" suggested Kylie. They walked along the tunnel a way and then Kylie swiped open the inventory.

"Aaaahhhhh…. Gob…" Kylie said, looking confused and worried,

"the sarcophagus isn't in here.

Um…

The Count…

The Count isn't here…

The Count is.. gone"

"gon? wer he can go?"

"I-I-I don't know. I've never heard of anything being able to disappear from an inventory." She closed and reopened the inventory a few times to be sure. There was no sarcophagus. There was no Count.

Without another word Gob turned and ran as fast as he could back up the passage,

he muz be stuk bak in da tunel, he thought desperately

He climbed back into the Counts escape tunnel, and having crossed back over to the other side of the dwarf barrier asked Kylie,

"chek da in-ven-tree agin"

She checked and shook her head.

he muz be bak at da palas, he thought desperately, running back up the tunnel.

He ran all the way back up to the dias in the great hall, hoping to see the sarcophagus returned back to its position. He got there breathlessly. Nothing. The castle seemed cold and empty without the beautiful candle light.

He slumped down, sitting on the edge of the dias unhappily, thinking.

After a while he quietly spoke,

"i fink he new somfin mite hapin. dat stuf he sed."

Kylie nodded, "Now that you say it, his last words did sound a lot like 'Goodbye'… He said earlier he thought that the dwarves might have a secondary 'trick or trap'. He must have been right. I can't think of any other way that something could just 'disappear' out of an inventory." she said. "At least nothing exploded this time."

It was a weak attempt at being lighthearted and it fell flat and silent in the empty great hall.

"Well, all we can hope is that he's ended up somewhere better than here."

"wot we can do but keep goin?" said Gob quietly and sullenly.

They made their way back down the tunnel and into the passage in silence, leaving the castle behind for the last time.

"Which way to goblin town?"

Gob pointed and they set off.

----------------------------------------

KYLIE.

Gob said nothing as they walked. Kylie let him process The Count's sudden disappearance in peace. Gob and The Count had formed a strong connection, as unlikely a pair as they were.

She flew over to him and sat on his shoulder, where the blue glowing lump of magic shard still stuck out a little oddly, his hide having grown over it.

She didn't need to sit, in fact there was no reason that Kylie couldn't fly indefinitely: she was a neon fairy. She was, as she had discovered over the last couple of years, a sentient gas life form. Most sentience in existence was created out of solid matter… brain cells, circulatory and respiratory systems to support them, and the resulting occurrence of intelligence and self perception.

The fairy archetype had followed a very different developmental trajectory: their sentience had arisen out of self-organising gas particles supported by electrical circulation and a transcendental magic respiratory system.

Technically, her form was composed of mostly neon, with some trace intakes of complimentary gases for stability and colour, and an electrical charge contained inside a 'body' of… well she didn't really know what her body was made of. It was made of something that her race, her archetype, had manifested over time to keep their sentience centralised… to prevent their gases from getting blown around and dispersed in the wind.

That was a long way of saying that she was lighter than air, and she could, with some minor conscious adjustments to her personal gas balance, float indefinitely. Her wings were only used for mobility.

However, she had used to sit on Gervais' shoulder a lot, and he seemed to like it, especially when he was having a bad day. It seemed to help to have a fairy on your shoulder when the going got tough. More so than a fairy floating around nearby. It seemed to her that range made a difference in a lot of non-combat related ways too.

Gobs ear however, was a lot pointier and flappier than Gervais', and it thwacked her on the back, and then in the face when he turned his head to glance at something. So she changed her mind about sitting on his shoulder and flew up instead to sit on top his head. It was bald except for a few fluffy tufts. It felt a bit like riding an elephant; a little ungainly at first, but with the feeling that you were being carried along by something no one was ever going to be able to stop.

Gob didn't complain, he just kept plodding along. She decided she liked it up here.

She reflected quietly on their time with The Count, as she was sure Gob was also doing as they walked. The Count had asked about Gob's stat as if it would have an impact on his decision about trying to escape. That was strange. As far as she knew, fate and luck, purpose and feeling were really just useless stats that no one cared about. They just floated in the middle of the sphere and didn't seem to impact anything, and eventually they ended up fading away from the sphere altogether. Was that wrong information? Did they have some undiscovered use? She had checked Gob's Spheraxis and his fate point had reduced by 1 as soon as they had crossed the dwarf barrier. Very strange indeed.

Meeting The Count in the first place really had been a fateful encounter. She had been absolutely sure the minute she saw him that they were dead, and it had been such a surprising, even funny turnaround in events for Gob to have actually made a friend out of a creature who, although a bit eccentric, was undoubtedly one of the most deadly individuals she had ever come face to face with. Was that fate? Or luck? Purpose? Or just life?

Not that a vampire could do anything much to her directly nor would one want to, but as Gob's familiar her life was literally tied to his. She hadn't mentioned that to him. There was a lot she still had to explain to him.

She had tried to describe the system of the Spheraxis and alignment to Gob earlier and failed dismally. He was intelligent for a troll, intelligent really for a young creature of any archetype, but his attention span wasn't there yet, or his grasp of language. Although if she was being honest, she readily admitted she was terrible at explaining technical things. She understood them well enough, in fact she'd been majoring in math and science before she came here… she was intelligent, and it all made sense in her head, she just couldn't ever seem to get her thoughts out logically.

She missed having the internet to turn to. If she could, she would just search up spheraxis.com any time anyone asked about this stuff, or anything else really, and hand them a phone to read for themselves.

She remembered trying to explain the internet to Gervais, and she thought he had kind of got it, eventually (though it probably didn't help that she didn't really understand how it worked). He had just said if she wanted one she should find a Technology Wright and ask them to make it for her. She hadn't. What was the point in having an internet if you were the only one on it?

Except to explain the Spheraxis of course. She'd have to keep working on Gob's reading so he could get a handle on his own stats without her having to read them to him all the time.

It was odd really, to be thinking about how she was going to teach the alphabet to a troll. It certainly wasn't the sort of thing you envisioned yourself doing when you thought about where you might be in two years.

"Hey Gob," she said "how about we learn letters so you can read the magical shapes yourself?"

Gob grunted. She knew his grunts now, and that one was a yes. Good, it might take his mind off The Count.

"OK" she said, the first letter is "A. A is for AWFUL."

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"wy iz a from orful?"

She sighed. This was going to take a while.

Trolls were awful, as well as disgusting, irreverent, odd, and extremely not human-like. But Gob, he wasn't entirely troll-like either. He was confounding. He was like a savage caveman who just suddenly evolved… was evolving as she watched.

"B is for BITE."

He was painfully naive, but he was also very aware of it. Which made him endearing. He had a… disgusting… fascinating… sweet sort of 'underdog' vibe going for him. And he had already given her something Gervais never had: the space to be… herself.

Gervais had sent her to Gob, she hadn't expected it, certainly hadn't had any warning about it, but to be honest, so far, she was enjoying it more than she had enjoyed anything in the time she'd been here.

"C is for CORPUSCULE."

Gervais was an impressive Mage, there was no doubt about that, and he had taught her a lot in the two years since the day she had materialised here. She had been young and impressionable and clueless about why she was here and how this place worked. And angry. She had been so angry. It wasn't as though he hadn't been good to her, he had been very good to her as she adapted to this extreme new reality.

"D is for DENIAL."

He had personally helped her level herself up from a naive young girl to a respectably powerful fairy, and in exchange she had played the happy-go-lucky part he seemed to love so much. But it was an act to try and pretend all this wasn't real.

She had heard of stories where people got suddenly 'zapped' away to new world where they left their boring lives behind and became OP godlike beings… there was even a Japanese word for it she couldn't quite remember. Icky chai? She wasn't sure. But that wasn't her. She had been icky-chai'd here to sit and giggle in denial on a giant old wizard's shoulder. What she really wanted more than anything was just to go home. To a 'normal' existence. To the small-town future she had laid out before her back there. If there even was a 'back there'.

"E is for EXISTENTIAL CRISIS"

But this was real, she was realising. And her resentment of losing the life that had been taken from her was so strong that it distracted her from the life that was in front of her. Gob had helped her work that out… somehow.

She sighed. Snap out of it Kylz!

Kylie knew that without any doubt Gervais would be able to see where they were going and review Gob's stats for himself. What she didn't know was 'why' he would have sent her to him like this. It must have been a spur-of-the-moment type decision, for him to give up a summoned familiar? That's a big deal. There must have been something very significant happen between him and the troll. She was more than just a little worried that she was unknowingly leading Gob into some sort of elaborate trap.

Gob had character, as well as some interesting stats which were only getting weirder, but was that really 'change The Realm' type stuff like the weird 'Mountain Troll' voice had claimed? Because that was the sort of thing the powerful and impressive Gervais Stormbrow liked to get involved in… he was a master strategist and a very, very insightful Mage. She had to admit that the things that had happened to them in the last three days had been something else. Had it really only been three?

"F is for— Whoa!"

Gob suddenly turned took a side tunnel that branched off the main one they had been tromping down.

"wy iz f from wo?" Gob asked confused,

"F iz from FITE!"

They had been going downwards, and across, and up and down again, as he lead her through a labyrinth of underground passages, caves and tunnels. She had no idea where they were going, but she trusted Gob, with his Spelunker skill. It was long ago that she had learned to 'trust' skills and traits in this world.

"G is for GIANT"

Skills on Earth had nothing on skills here.

In fact stats and skills were the things Gervais had formly insisted they intensively worked on together as soon as she arrived. Or at least as soon as she and could hold a conversation without fainting or hysterically screaming "GIANT!" at him.

Stats and skills were the basis of progression, and progression was what this place was all about. They even had a motto about it: 'THE LAW OF THE REALM: ALL MAY PROGRESS'. There was a complex system that measured it, known as the Spheraxis.

"H is for HAEMORRHAGE."

A really BIG difference between here and Earth was that any stats could be improved with use and practice, and almost without limit. Where Kylie came from, you could practice running faster but you would never be able to consistently outrun a car… It wasn't like that here. If you kept practicing your running you could, eventually, outrun a car. Well, maybe a horse. Cars weren't a thing here. Not that the average common people bothered learning to outrun horses, it took an inordinate amount of work, and horses weren't that pricey. But it was possible to pretty much improve anything you wanted, as long as you weren't capped. Like Kylie's size stat…

"i is from i" Gob volunteered.

"Well, yes it is actually" she said with a smile, "it's also for IRREVERENT. Just like J is for JOCK-ITCH."

AND here, when you started working towards improving your stats, not only did they improve, but new stats emerged out of them, and skills out of them. So with the running example, not only would you be able to outrun a horse, but you'd get like a super acceleration skill, or a spatial stride, or become a horse whisperer… skills were as wild and varied and personal as the imagination of the individual discovering them.

"K is for KNUCKLE." she said absent-mindedly, lost in thought now.

"no iz not!"

The basic, or starting stats were very similar across races, or archetypes as they were called here, but the way new stats emerged out of those was incredibly diverse. So that individuals may start off not too dissimilar as young, their paths quickly diverged. Kylie figured it was that initial divergence in Gob that had interested Gervais enough to part with her, his familiar.

Trolls, who had the potential to progress to be monstrously powerful, on average mostly just grew their bodies to a sustainable size and then stayed static the rest of their lives. But what would happen in The Realm if a divergence caused a more intelligent troll to really try to improve themself? Some archetypes, like elves, started life with high base stats, and culturally were encouraged to pursue nothing else except progression, growing into greatly influential and powerful infividuals, and forming advanced civilisations over their long lives. What would a civilisation ruled by super-trolls look like she wondered?

"L is for LICE."

"lice iz ichy"

Not all archetypes shared the same stats though. Some beings hadn't been known to develop some at all: for instance Gob had a very low literacy stat, but he did have one, indicating he had the capacity to learn language - but a cave spider, who was often as intelligent as a normal troll (maybe more so) wouldn't have literacy appear in their stats at all. Spiders had just never been known to read or speak in any of the 'civilised' ways.

Maybe trolls, divergent or otherwise, just didn't have the capacity for civilisation.

But all beings in the Realm had the capacity for cultivation and progression if they were willing to to work on their stats. What could trolls do?

"M iz from MAGGOTY" Gob said happily, taking over.

It was the hyper-civilised elves who had first proposed, and then perfected Alignment for all archetypes after several ages of sustained cultivation.

Alignment was, as far as Kylie could understand it, a way of pushing all the stats and skills in a specialised direction. If your goal was to outrun a horse, what value would there be in having an affinity with rock? Or a skill that helped you grow longer toenails? (that was an actual thing).

Alignment stripped all the extras away, and somehow, she didn't know how, made the stats you wanted, stats that were more relevant, into better ones.

"N iz from NUKKEL"

Before alignment had become widely accepted and encouraged, there hadn't been many individuals outside of the elven civilisations who had ever been able to develop their skills into MIGHTY feats, MAGIC manifestations, or CRAFT inventions. Now, since the development and study of many alignment pathways, Mages, Warriors and Wrights were commonplace across most archetypes.

From Kylie's perspective, Might, Magic and Craft were where things got really weird.

"O iz from OROFAS!"

"Good word Gob" she said.

+1li#e#ac#

"Hey well done, you got another point in literacy!" said Kylie.

"i neely reed dat!" he said excitedly.

While Kylie understood the concept of Mind, Body and Spirit from Earth, where though they weren't measured in points, were definitely concepts humans discussed and understood, Might, Magic and Craft being defined, practised and applied as actual functioning part of day to day life was entirely off the scale.

MIGHT was what happened when stats and skills of Spirit and Body coalesced. The skills of Mighty Warriors ascended from being just high level, to being incredible feats of Spirit and Body.

MAGIC was when the same took place between Spirit and Mind, with powerful blessings manifested by the Mages who focused on their aligned styles.

CRAFT occurred between the Mind and Body, and amazing inventions and breakthroughs could be made. The gear that came out of this invention could even used by other Mages and Warriors to complement and amplify their Feats and Blessings.

When an individual's stats and sphere grew large enough, and they had committed to their training and studies, the result was the realisation of powerful and mindblowing individual capacities where anything might be possible. A being might not just be able to run faster than a horse, they might be able to become a horse, or they could channel the strength and speed from a horse... or they could invent a car.

"P iz from PUKY GOBN!!!"

Orcs, Goblins, Trolls, Kobolds and Ratfolk Warriors were very nearly always aligned to SAVAGE MIGHT hence the racial reference 'Savage-kind'. Their Mages almost exclusively aligned to CRUDE MAGIC and their Wright's to MECHANICAL or RUNIC CRAFT.

Elves, Dryads, the Nixia and Fairies were almost always aligned to TRANSCENDENTAL MIGHT AND MAGIC, the only style that was able to produce Blessings and Feats.

A Human's traditional alignment was HEROIC MIGHT and BRIGHT MAGIC. The Realm, and especially it's capital, Azure City, promoted these alignments as the very basis of being a human… however there were plenty of humans who didn't subscribe to those alignments, even healers who no one in the Realm could do without. The heroic-bright alignment was a little bit elitist.

"Q iz from… wot Q iz from Kylz?"

"QUIRKY"

"good werd kylz! yoo go agin"

And then there were AFFINITIES. Kylie wasn't really sure what affinities did, even though she had two herself. They didn't get the same sort of attention as might, magic or craft alignments… they were more something you just kind of got because you needed them for certain skills? She wasn't too sure on that one.

"R is for ROTTEN" she said

She wondered how or if she would ever be able to explain all of this to Gob. Maybe she wouldn't need to. They were looking for The White Orc… hopefully he could explain more. She shrugged it off and came back to reality. To be honest, for a troll, Gob was doing pretty darn well already.

"S is for… "