“So,” I said, massaging the bridge of my nose with one hand and using the other to point at pirate lady, “Batman here, who turned my sword into a fish, needs us to do a job, and then she’ll take us to Emily. And she has a way to get into contact with Persephone, apparently, without needing Emily? It’s all very vague and confusing and, occasionally, everything around us suddenly turns into meat.”
“Wait,” Gregor said, “you had a sword?”
“Every man thinks their knife is a sword,” pirate lady whispered loudly.
“…I…have decided that…that for the sake,” I swallowed hard, “for the sake of my family-”
“Are you okay?” Burin interrupted. “You’re talking very slowly. Have he suddenly been hit by a slow spell, Samantha?” he asked pirate lady.
I stared at him, repeatedly clenching and unclenching my fists at my side. “Burin, I need your help to-”
He reached into his coat and offered me a cup. It was already halfway filled with water from his dunk in the lake. “Here. It should clear things up.”
“WHY CAN’T YOU JUST MAKE THIS EASY?!” I screamed.
Instead of responding to my cry, he forced the cup into one of my hands. “Drink up,” he told me. “You might have some mental damage.”
I walked away.
I plopped down in at the edge of the lake. Part of me hoped that the goose wasn’t dead and would come back to eat me…
“Okay, so let’s make this quick, and explain why Burin’s plan isn’t going to work, so that we can move on,” Samantha declared. She snapped her finger. Mercifully, this time the teleportation didn’t involve gelatin. The garden evaporated and she, the boys, and I were suddenly sitting in a giant room filled with rows of red seats facing a giant, wide magic mirror. I think, in Earth terms, it was called a movie theater? Samantha stood up and waved a hand. The disgusting frozen image of Baba Yaga’s gnarled face filled the magic mirror. Behind her, three on either side, were six tall pillars.
Samantha cleared her throat and turned to address us. “So, when you were in Baba Yaga’s realm, you returned her death to her. This means that she can currently be killed. As a stopgap measure, because she cannot remove her death again until the next Witch’s Moon, which is months from now, she needs your daughter fattened up. To fuel the ritual. She needs to fatten up Emily’s soul, store it with enough power for the ritual to work.” She pointed at the pillars. “At the moment, Baba Yaga has tied her lifeforce to these six pillars. So you need to destroy them. But you can’t do that till Lyriana gets back. So there’s something else we need to do before you do that. And by ‘we’ I mean you because I’m not going.”
I raised a hand.
She pointed at me. “Yes?”
“So, you need us to do a thing before we can do a thing before we can do a thing before we can actually do a thing and then do that next thing and then finish the thing so that we can finally save the day,” I said dryly.
“Exactly!” she laughed. “Glad you understand!”
“…And you just don’t want to do it yourself?”
“Oh, no! It’s just if I show up, Baba Yaga will know that we’re up to something. She’ll sense me.”
“And she won’t sense us?” Gregor asked. “Are we no longer her Black Riders?”
“Nope,” Samanatha replied.
“Because she gave the mantel to that bitch!” I sneered. “I knew it, guys! You can’t trust a bitch…”
“To be fair, the people Baba Yaga would least suspect of stopping her would be the ones she just killed,” Gregor said, a trace of anger in his voice.
“Yahtzee!” Samantha exclaimed. I don’t know why. She just did. She then pointed at me. “Now, imagine you have your robots, and you need to sneak into the farmer’s garden to steal the carrots. You don’t send a giant robot, because then he’d notice and whip out his shotgun. No, you send the tiny versions. You understand yet? I’m the big awesome robot and you’re all the teeny tiny pathetic robots.”
“Gee, thanks,” I replied sarcastically.
“So we’re stealing carrots?” Burin asked.
“No, I’m talking about destroying those pillars,” Samanatha answered.
I raised an annoyed eyebrow at her. “But you just said that we can’t do that until Lyriana gets back from…being dead?”
“Oh, no, Lyriana can’t truly die. She’s just on her own journey right now. She’ll meet up with us…eventually. But never mind that. We’ll burn that bridge when we get there. But now let’s talk about artifacts. Artifacts have certain conditions to be met so that they can be destroyed. What they are they are is…Eh. We’ll burn that bridge, too. But I happen to know that there’s this one object you’re going to need to destroy the pillars. At some point. So I need you to steal it while I wait here until Lyriana arrives.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And what exactly is this magic carrot?”
“Well, do you remember Typhon Lee?” Samantha asked.
“You know I do,” I spat back.
“Well, he was working with a demon lord. She was making some ultimate weapon for him.” She shrugged sheepishly. “I don’t know exactly what it is, but you’re gonna go steal it for us.”
I frowned deeply at her. “You want us to steal from a demon lord?”
“She’s not there right now! She’s busy!”
She waved a hand. Baba Yaga and her pillars were replaced by the image of a grey planet. “The Abyss sometimes sticks to the material plane and infects worlds. This is one of those worlds. There’s a laboratory there, so I’m gonna send you down there, you’re going to grab the ultimate weapon, and then another weapon that I know someone will pay you A LOT of money for-”
“Money?” I interjected. “Alright. We’ll do it.”
Samantha shot me an odd look. “Anyway. It’s going to look like an orb. I don’t know what it does. But you need to get it for me.”
It was Burin’s turn to raise his hand, yet he didn’t bother to be called on before saying, “The dreamlands is a massive place though. So in this analogy of the farmer’s plot, couldn’t this dreamlands have a form of government that could acquire the land and crash this space ship into said land?”
Samanatha stared at him. She didn’t look like someone used to being out…Burined. “Here’s the thing,” she finally said, “doing things like that is like…everybody wants the same land. Gods, demon lords. The Abyss has claim on part of Golarion, there are gods who wanna stop it, some who wanna help it, it’s a thing. So if I reach my hands in there and try to claim the land, there’ll be, like, thirty-two gods who’ll come and kick me in the face. And I don’t want that…So we’re not doing that.”
She raised a finger before Burin could argue. “And even if you did crash land this ship on Baba Yaga, it would destroy everybody else but here because the pillars are still up and functional.”
“Which means that Emily wouldn’t be eaten,” the dwarf countered.
“Er, yes, but she’s still in that area. So the impact would probably destroy her…or warp her horribly.” Samantha turned to me. “How do you feel about your daughter having tentacles?”
“…I am very opposed to the idea. Personally.”
She turned back to Burin. “There you have it. The dad vetoes it.”
All this talk about Emily dying brought up something I’d been meaning to ask, so I did. “Hey, so reviving just one person usually talks a lot of money and top tier magic. But you revived three?”
“I did,” Samantha said with a nod. “Easily.”
“Except Lyriana? Is that part of being an O’Halloran?”
“Hmmm, not really. More of a present I gave her before she was born.” She then smiled with far too many teeth, and the nausea returned. The room warped, becoming goopy meat. Gregor and Burin hadn’t changed and didn’t seem to be seeing what I was seeing. But what I was seeing mattered less than what I was hearing. It was like back when I’d been hearing Burin’s voice in my head, but this time it was a thousand voices in a thousand languages, laughing and screaming until they all came together, converging into one, booming voice.
THAT IS NOT DEAD WHICH CAN ETERNAL LIE.
As soon as the last word was uttered, the world around me went back to normal. Samantha was back to smiling with a normal amount of teeth, conversing with Burin while Gregor drank from his flask.
“…Uh, um, where…where was I…What was I talking about?” I managed to gasp out.
“Me reviving you all and not Lyriana,” Samanatha said.
“Oh. Right.” I swallowed hard and straightened up in my seat. “So, theoretically, you reviving a baby shouldn’t be a big deal.” I raised my hand before she could speak. “Okay. I don’t actually care about the money. I’ll do this. For my daughter. And my wife. But I also want my son, Toby, back. And that should be super easy for you, right?”
Samantha grimaced and sucked in air through her teeth. “That’ll actually be tricker than you’d think. See, Typhon kind of sent your son’s soul to-”
“The Abyss,” Burin said.
“No. Hell. Not the Abyss. The Abyss is easy. They don’t pay attention there. You can just walk in and out. But Hell? It’s all paperwork.” She slapped a hand to her brow and groaned, “There are sooooooo many forms. You have no idea. It’s like the DMV?”
“DMV?” Gregor, Burin, and I repeated.
Samantha rolled her eyes. “Okay. Let me think…Smuggling! You have to have the proper paperwork to smuggle goods from one city to another, maybe grease the right palms…Wait.” She snapped her fingers. “I got it! Okay! I know these guys. Super chill bros. They like saving the innocents. Well, one of them does. The other one likes experiencing new things and having fun. And making pancakes. A lot of pancakes. So I call in a favor…and another favor…And apparently Cayden Cailean is a friend of a friend of mine, so I’ll borrow one of his top guys. Tiefling. People think he walks around naked-”
“But he actually wears armor that’s invisible,” I finished. “You talking about Bard Pitt?”
“Yes!”
“Old friend?” Gregor asked me. “Er, well, considering this is you we’re talking about, ally?”
“Pitt was once a high-ranking general in Lee’s syndicate. Abdicated a year or two before…Well, what happened at the farm happened. I asked Pops to see if he could track him down for help while I was in Emily’s body, but no luck. Guy became a ghost. One who also considers himself to be Cailean’s boyfriend or something.”
“Anyway,” Samantha said, “these three will go on a little bit of a crusade and steal your son’s soul back from…well…” She coughed into her fist, “Asmodeus.”
No one spoke for a full minute after that. We just stared at her in horror.
“…Let me get this straight,” I finally managed to say. “My son, my baby son, was kicked so hard into the fireplace that he ended up with ASMODEUS!”
“…Basically,” Samantha replied sheepishly.
“He’s been with Asmodeus for the last THREE YEARS!”
“…Maybe he’s learning the magic dance?” Samantha leaned back against the back of a nearby seat. “Listen, Pitt and the guys will be storming the gates of Hell in no time. They’ll be out of there in twenty minutes…though time does run differently in Hell, so it’ll likely feel longer for them. It’ll take a bit, but I have plenty of faith that they’ll get Toby out.”
“…Okay,” I said, running my hands across my face. “So, my son is being saved by a naked tiefling and pancake-maker from the evilest of evils.”
“Eh, Asmodeus is more of a big grouch than an EVIL evil,” Samantha said. “I mean, he is so terrible at parties. He gets so mad when you put the bean dip by the nachos. Because apparently the bean dip should go next to the Fritos.”
“What the fuck are Fritos?” I groaned.
She snapped her fingers. Something fell into my lap. I looked up just in time to watch a band of men with fluffy mustaches bust in, playing guitars. Samantha had also replaced her pirate costume for a poncho and stupidly big, wide-brimmed hat. Atop my lap was a bowl of curved, brown chips. Gregor and Burin had also received a bowl.
Samantha gave us a few minutes to eat and mull over things and then whisked the band away. She then pointed at the image of the planet. It suddenly zoomed in, focusing on a few buildings made out black stones illuminated by magic fire. There seemed to be some commotion going on. I squinted and spotted three…demons? They were running away from the building, carrying various things. Had they just looted the place?
Each demon seemed to be a different type. “By three they come,” Samantha said with a wicked smile. She reached into the image and tapped one demon on the head. He froze in place and the others stopped to look at him. “By three, the way opens.” Her arm stretched and tapped the other two. They dropped their loot, pulled out knives, and slashed their own throats. Blood dripped out and rose up, creating a web of blood that stretched out across the magic mirror. Samantha took back her arm and nodded to us. “Alright then. Time to go.”
“Yeah, alright,” I said, unbothered by the casual demon murder, “but I’m gonna need a new gun, lady.”
“Oh. Right.”
She snapped her fingers.
A giant banana fell into my arms.
Unfazed, I peeled it. And found a new gun inside.
“Now this is just a loaner,” Samantha told me. “We’ll work on getting you something more permanent. But this should be enough for now.” She took a step back, gesturing to the giant, bloody portal she was expecting us to walk into. “Good luck, fellas. And you know what they say: when life give you random vials lying next to the corpses you’re going to spawn next to, drink them.”
Gregor, Burin, and I exchanged looks and then walked forward into the demon planet.
I mean, it’s not like things could get any weirder. Right?
Right?