“There’s no reason you have to do what this Kenneth guy asked,” Jessica said as she and John walked along the seaward battlements of Elsifeya Castle.

  John shook his head. “Barleyfield made a promise. And I don’t figure the king’d like takin’ care of a whole dang hamlet outta the kindness of his heart. Nor do we care too much for hangin’ around bein’ lazy. Ma always says idleness makes ya sick.”

  “Yeah but… do you even know how to make MSG? Or how to set up a factory?”

  He beamed. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way!”

  “Sure, but where there’s an industrial process there’s a much faster way.”

  Jessica couldn’t remember off the top of her head what the most recent chemical process for isolating L-glutamate was, but having done the vegetable protein hydrolysis method at home before learning MSG was legal to buy over the counter (in her defense, she was 12), it wasn’t hard to upscale.

  Ol’ Granny Marb was the only Barleyfielder who could read so Jessica jotted down instructions for vegetable protein hydrolysis and a few notes about what equipment they might need to upscale production of ‘flavor crystals’ and passed it to her. She trusted John’s humble cleverness to do the rest.

  The next day, Barleyfield was ready to take off. Rosemary threw her into a bear hug.

  “Promise you’ll come visit?” Jessica said as they embraced.

  “When we’ve got time off!” Rosemary said. “Just gotta figure out what this Kenneth guy means by ‘time off’. Ain’t it usually off once the season’s work is done?”

  Hearing those dreaded words made Jessica’s heart sink. She didn’t have it in her to explain to the serfs how wage labor worked after they were so recently freed from bondage.

  As the last of the wagons passed through the castle gatehouse, a feeling of being stranded crept up on Jessica. Her position was technically better, but with John and his family off to set up an MSG factory and Morkal so many miles away, Jessica was without friends or allies in a city full of adventurers.

  She still didn’t know what being a ‘concubine’ entailed or how much protection King Capra could actually give her from adventurers who, by this point, knew she’d blown another adventurer’s leg off. Her new employer’s drug habit was a ticking time bomb. And to top it all off, she was now sharing a roof with that little pink ball of concentrated evil called Mystiferia.

  What Jessica wanted to do was lie down, curl up in a ball, and cry until she felt better. Maybe a cup of tea after that. But the very next thing that happened was a page boy running up to dash her hopes.

  “Miss Jessica, you are requested for duty by her Royal Majesty!” the boy said with a salute that nearly knocked his black bonnet from his head.

  Jessica sighed. “I suppose she’ll be wanting more morphine…”

  As it turned out, Jessica was wrong.

  “We gotta play adventurers! I wanna play adventurers!” yelled Crown Prince Capra II.

  “We always play adventurers! I don’t wanna play!” screamed Crown Princess Katarina.

  Jessica stared blankly out the window of the children’s playroom in the north tower. She was a fifth-year PhD candidate with multiple first author papers on carbon allotrope chemistry to her name. And now she was being asked to babysit. Of the many things she’d planned to do upon sudden reincarnation in a fantasy world, this was not among them.

  “I don’t wanna play harem! It’s dumb!”

  A numb smile appeared on Jessica’s face as she stared out the window to the endless rolling ocean and the absurdity rolled over her like a wave. Would she be executed if she was a bad babysitter? Maybe. Regardless, she supposed she ought to put in effort and—

  “Wait, what did you say that game was called?” Jessica asked, turning to the two squabbling twins.

  “Harem? That’s what she always wants to play!” Capra Jr. said.

  “Cuz it’s fun, not like beating monsters over and over!” Katarina shot back.

  “I’m gonna be real with you both, I would straight up prefer we call that game literally anything else,” Jessica said.

  Both of the kids looked confused.

  “What else are we s’posed to call it?” Katarina asked.

  “Uh… well, what’s it about?” Jessica asked, suspecting she already knew the answer.

  “We pretend we’re part of an adventurer’s harem and we go do stuff. I even let Cappy be the adventurer and he still says it’s boring!”

  “Cuz it is,” said the pouting boy. “We don’t kill anything, we just sit around and bake pies. That’s not adventuring! Quests don’t involve baking pies!”

  Jessica felt like at least one webnovel involved a pie-baking quest. Not that she read those. She had no idea why she felt that way. But apart from that, she was starting to see why Melisande Hayek ended up the way she did. Obsession with adventurers began early and didn’t stop until you died in a squabble between them. Poor Melisande.

  “How about we play a different game entirely?” Jessica said.

  “Like what?” they both asked.

  “Like… what if we played mad scientist?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Basically, all three of us are mad scientists and we go and do alchemical experiments,” Jessica said, already thinking up some simple reactions to entertain the kids.

  Bottle rockets would be easy and she knew little Cappy Junior would appreciate the explosion. Then she could also make a sugar snake and claim they were ‘opening a portal to hell.’ That was always a crowd-pleaser. And maybe Katarina might like to learn how to make invisible ink so she could keep a secret diary.

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  “That sounds dumb,” Katarina said.

  Cappy nodded. “Yeah. I wanna go on adventures, not do alchemy.”

  Jessica put on a big fake smile. “Trust me, it’s fun! You know, I actually used alchemy on my adventures.”

  Their eyes widened a little.

  “Yeah? What’d you make?” Cappy asked.

  Jessica thought about the nitric acid bomb which nearly suffocated Akuhara and his party members and the hydrogen explosion that blew Min-woo’s leg off.

  “Soap?” she said.

  The kids rolled their eyes and went back to arguing about whether they were going to play adventurers or harem. Jessica decided the state of science education was not much better in Tushita than it was in Ohio.

  She let her brain go numb again as the kids did whatever they liked. It wasn’t like they could get into much trouble. Both of them being ten, they were allowed to leave and go elsewhere most of the time. It was only during official state meetings that they were locked up in their playroom and by this point they both knew the drill.

  “We’ve decided!” Katarina announced.

  “Oh yeah?” Jessica said.

  “We’re gonna play harem but I get to kill stuff,” Cappy said.

  “Cool,” Jessica said.

  Katarina tugged at her arm. “And we’re gonna be his harem members.”

  Images of the dragon girl being stabbed through the eye came to mind.

  “Nope. Absolutely not,” Jessica said.

  “Aw! Why not!?” Katarina asked.

  Cappy scoffed. “Cuz she’s already a real adventurer, Kitty. Obviously. She knows being a harem member is boring and dumb.”

  Katarina stomped her foot. “It is not! They’re cool and pretty!”

  “What if all three of us were adventurers and we worked together to do a little bit of everything?” Jessica asked.

  “That’s so boring,” Cappy said.

  “Yeah. Plus, who’s gonna give orders?” Katarina added.

  “We could decide… democratically?” Jessica said.

  This led into a short and fruitless discussion about what ‘democracy’ was. The kids were endlessly amused by the idea that everyone was supposed to be king and all live in the same castle and once they had this mental image in their head they could not be dissuaded of it.

  “How about you be the bad guy?” Cappy asked.

  Jessica pointed at herself. “You want me to be the villain?”

  This notion united both twins. For lack of any better idea, Jessica acquiesced.

  Attached to the playroom was a closet the size of Jessica’s apartment on Earth filled with clothes, shoes, accessories, and props, custom-made whenever the children asked for something. Everything looked like it was ripped straight from a light novel cover (which Jessica had only seen in passing at bookstores).

  Capra Junior threw on a tiny trenchcoat over his clothes and selected a two-handed wooden sword while Katarina put on a pair of fake cat ears, some elven-looking ear-extensions, and for reasons only fathomable to a ten year old, a doctor’s coat. Jessica wondered briefly how authentic an elven/animalar hybrid actually was.

  Suited up, Cappy placed both fists on his waist and announced, “I’m Zwei, the two-hander hero!”

  Katarina looked up at Jessica. “He’s usually Zwei.”

  “Oh yeah? And who are you?” Jessica.

  The girl twirled around. “Dr. Kitty!”

  “Wow, got your degree before me, huh?”

  The kids cocked their heads.

  “Nevermind.”

  “Who are you gonna be, Miss Jessica?” Katarina asked.

  There wasn’t much in the closet for grown adults besides a few pieces of outerwear from servants roped into the kids’ games. From these she selected a long white shawl that vaguely resembled a labcoat. With a fake wand, monocle, and glass vase in her hand, her transformation was complete.

  “I am Doktor Mondschurke! Ze most evil of alchemists in ze land! I vill destroy all ze kingdoms and bring down ze adventurers, starting vis ze Kingdom of Elsifeya!” Jessica said, throwing her head back in an evil laugh.

  The kids, hitherto skeptical of her commitment to the bit, were ecstatic at Doktor Mondschurke’s appearance.

  “Never! I’ll kill you! Agh!” Cappy said, charging her with his two-handed sword.

  The wooden replica cracked against Jessica’s shin and stinging pain rushed up from her calves where he caught a lingering patch of burn blisters. Air rushed into her lungs to stifle a scream full of age-inappropriate words.

  “Ow! Stop, Cappy!” Jessica said, abandoning her accent.

  “Never!” he shouted.

  At ten, he was right at the age where his swings were starting to have real force behind them. The next time he swung she grabbed his sword and ripped it from his hands. The look of shock on his face was priceless.

  “What? You can’t take my sword! That’s not fair!” he said.

  “I am a villainess, do you sink zat I care about fairness?” Jessica said, holding the sword well over his head. With her other hand she swirled the vase she was pretending was a beaker. “Now I vill attack you vis my special alchemical move: Blasting oil!”

  She mimed tossing a liquid at him but Cappy just stared at the sword she was holding.

  His twin sister shoved him. “You got blasted, Cappy!”

  “Huh? Nuh-uh! I have blast-proof armor. It’s got plus five against explosions!” he said.

  “Plus five what?” Jessica asked, amused at the random RPG nomenclature.

  “I don’t know! But I don’t get blasted back,” he said.

  Jessica shrugged. “Zat is fine. You are still powerless before Frau Doktor!”

  “Um! Um! I hit you with a sealing spell!” Katarina said.

  Jessica laughed maniacally. “I have concoctions to prevent zis, little girl. Now taste ze power of my potion which will turn you into a toad!”

  The game went back and forth like this for a while. Katarina actually enjoyed the pretend-fighting more than she claimed to. Jessica suspected this might have had something to do with her keeping Capra Jr. from talking over his sister and taking an extra ‘turn’ in their arms race of made-up powers.

  After a while, even Jessica was having fun. There was something endearing about watching kids come up with the same ‘forcefield-piercing bullet’-type declarations that she, her brother, and their neighborhood friends used to invent. Eventually though, their energy outpaced hers and she needed a break.

  Jessica raised her hands. “Alright! Okay! The evil Doktor Mondschurke surrenders!”

  Cappy Jr. stopped slapping her with the wooden sword and instead grabbed her arm. “Good! We’re taking you to Mystiferia, villainness!”

  The mention of Mystiferia sent a shudder through Jessica. But upon being reminded of her sadistic, pink-haired adversary, Jessica suddenly remembered something she hadn’t taken care of yet.

  “Shoot. Naga!”