Esteemed Journal,

  Some days, it is universally agreed, are not meant for getting out of bed. Not by humans. Not by gods. Not even by whatever it is that lives behind the fridge and may or may not be sentient.

  There are days so fundamentally flawed, so cosmically misaligned, that merely setting foot on the floor initiates a chain of events best described by historians as “regrettable but inevitable.”

  The kind of day that slips quietly into your life like a spider into your boot. The sort of day where toast lands butter-side-down before you've even made toast; where everything smells slightly like damp socks, even if there are no socks present; and that operate on the principle of narrative inconvenience, where the laws of probability aren’t just broken—they’ve been bribed to look the other way.

  And on such days, the only sensible response is the oldest of survival instincts: to retreat. To reverse course. To climb back into bed as if performing an emergency time loop, press your face into the pillow like you're trying to erase yourself from the carbon record, and pretend the world has been put in a very long queue behind something more important.

  Because, eventually, things will make sense again.

  Probably.

  Maybe.

  Hopefully.

  ***

  Even as Lionel watched it all unfold, his brain—normally a sharp, well-oiled thing, like a spreadsheet given sentience—completely refused to process them.

  One moment he’d been glimpsing a future lined in gold, glory, and a pension plan. The next, a small pink wrecking ball wearing an aviator helmet with flappy chin straps had exploded through that dream like a particularly cheerful meteorite.

  The mobility scooter—chaos and destruction vehicle of choice—had somehow reached escape velocity and detonation protocols simultaneously, and chose to express this with a roaring fireball that could have qualified for its own insurance claim.

  The dungeon core, a delicately tuned artefact of ancient magic and terrifying bureaucratic complexity, met its end not with a final roar, but with the metaphysical equivalent of someone unplugging a very expensive toaster. Or, perhaps more accurately, unplugging the very fuse that kept reality running.

  The veins of mana that once pulsed with the glowing promise of limitless potential fizzled, blackened, and died like hope at a budget meeting. The chambers walls and what pieces of the ceiling remained seemed to sigh, a deep, structural sort of sigh, and began the slow, inevitable business of collapsing in on themselves like a disappointed soufflé.

  The animatronic mannequin slumped over like a bureaucrat finally released from a very long, very pointless meeting. The skeletal hand let go of its mistreated mug, giving one last twitch as if trying to file a final complaint before systems failure. Even the cockroach in the corner rolled over, legs raised to the sky like it was declaring emotional bankruptcy.

  And there, amid the devastation—among crumpling ceilings and disintegrating railings—was her. The girl in the tattered, pink, bunny-eared hoodie, tumbling across the floor like a sock in a tumble dryer—graceful only in the sense that it was hard to look away.

  Momentum, combined with the laws of narrative convenience, carried her through the wreckage until she executed a final, unnecessary somersault, sprang to her feet, arms spread wide like some terrible mascot of anarchy, and bellowed a triumphant, "Safe!" — as though she were playing some great cosmic game of knock-it-over-with-a-stick* and had just stolen third base.

  * The rules of interdimensional sports, naturally, being mostly made up on the spot and enforced by whichever sponsor could shout the loudest.

  She declared this straight into the one armchair that had somehow survived the disaster—a lonely, battered throne amid a landscape of shattered stone, burning upholstery, and the faint smell of regret. Other chairs had not been so lucky. Most had been crushed under falling masonry, vaporized by mana shockwaves, or simply burst into flames out of what Lionel could only assume was sheer despair.

  Some part of him—buried deep in the hollow spaces between disbelief and aneurysm—wanted to laugh. Laugh at the absurdity of it all. Laugh at the fact that life, it turned out, had a very odd sense of humour, and most of the jokes ended with someone else's spleen.

  Another part of him very much wanted to punch the wall until either the wall or his knuckles gave in.

  An old, familiar migraine was pounding behind his eyes, eager to say I told you so in its own special language of stabbing agony.

  Lionel let out a very deep, very drawn-out breath as he pressed his shaky fingers into the bridge of his nose, hoping he might physically squeeze the madness out of his head.

  No. No, this can’t be real, he thought. This has to be a dream. A strange, terrible dream.

  A dream in which the Dungeon he had spent all his savings on—bet his future, his career, and possibly his immortal soul on—had been reduced to rubble before he even had the chance to fill out the insurance paperwork.

  Pink balls of carnage did not simply come crashing through ceilings at precisely the worst possible moment, laying waste to the fragile infrastructure of hope. They didn’t. It wasn’t done.

  And they certainly didn’t perform little victory dances afterwards, hopping from foot to foot, arms undulating, triumphant in an outfit that was not so much a fashion crime as a full-scale war crime against fabric itself.

  No. Clearly, clearly, this was a dream.

  Because if it wasn’t a dream… well, reality was going to owe Lionel one hell of an apology.

  Yeah, I’ll just go lay down for a bit.

  Lionel nodded to himself, moving with the sluggish inevitability of a man who had just decided that unconsciousness was the best available life choice.

  He turned on his heel and made his way toward a nearby door, which was already starting to disintegrate politely at the edges. It had a little brass plaque that read Broom Closet, and even in the pit of despair, the irony wasn't lost on him. He just couldn't muster the emotional budget to care.

  Without a singular thought in his blank mind, he fished a key out of his pocket. He didn’t even remember reaching for it.

  He pushed it into a keyhole that definitely hadn't been there a moment ago, twisted it round twice (widdershins, for luck), and watched the doorknob obligingly turn into a handle. Simultaneously, the entire entrance of the broom closet had turned into one that was far more familiar.

  Without any real ceremony—because even ceremony needs a minimum emotional investment—Lionel tugged the door open and staggered forward into... his own apartment.

  Which, in fairness, wasn’t much larger than a broom closet anyway. Possibly slightly smaller, once you accounted for the ancient water heater that groaned to itself in the night and the kitchen sink that sometimes wept gently when it thought no one was looking.

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  Like a particularly morose zombie, Lionel kicked off his shoes, sending them in two different directions in accordance with the First Law of Footwear Trajectories.

  Without bothering to change clothes or dignity levels, he shambled toward the bedroom, grabbing a bottle of Silchen from the counter as he went.

  He'd bought the vintage wine to celebrate.

  Circumstances had applied a hefty correction.

  In the end, he didn't even have the energy to open the bottle. It sat there in his hand, cool and useless, as he collapsed face-first into the pillows like a man determined to lose an argument with gravity.

  He was just so very, very tired.

  And somewhere, in the drifting moments before oblivion claimed him, he was dimly aware that if this was a dream, it had better not have a sequel.

  ***

  Lionel wasn’t entirely sure how long he’d been disassociated from life, but as he blinked himself back into the world of the barely functional, he felt... marginally better.

  In the same way a man thrown down three flights of stairs feels marginally better after realizing he hadn't broken both legs.

  Whatever madness he’d witnessed now seemed distant, like the tail-end of a very bad fever dream, the kind that leaves you with an inexplicable fear of garden gnomes and a burning distrust of light switches. The hundred or so blinking notification icons vying for his attention upon his interface were, therefore, a minor concern. Barely a blip, he told himself heroically.

  The steady clatter, bumps, and occasional heavy crash coming from the direction of his kitchen, however, were much harder to file under the same label.

  Slowly, very slowly, Lionel pushed himself upright, dismissing the lingering System notifications with an exhausted thought. Some were from friends and former colleagues—Why, in the name of every bureaucracy-loving demon, did I let Mira take my resignation letter with her down below?

  The thought made him cringe so hard his ears twitched.

  Most of the messages were from Cassandra. Some were from his family. None of them were things he wanted to deal with right now. Or possibly ever.

  There was only so much mortal shame one person could physically survive.

  What can I even tell them? he thought. That I’d fumbled a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity so hard it had bounced several times and caught fire?

  His stomach tightened into an intricate little origami swan.

  Even so, some stubborn, flickering part of his soul clung to the possibility that the more chaotic bits of his memory—pink comets, exploding dungeons, the death of all his dreams—had been a bad hallucination. A trick of the light. A particularly aggressive existential hiccup.

  That maybe, just maybe, there was something to salvage out there. Maybe—

  Clatter.

  Pling.

  CRASH.

  What the…?

  Massaging his temples like a man trying to rub two brain cells together to light a fire, Lionel shuffled toward the kitchen to investigate the racket.

  His private kitchen. In his private one-bedroom apartment.

  The same kitchen that was always spotless, organized, and carefully arranged according to the Holy Codex of Domestic Sanity.

  What greeted him was, to put it mildly, the opposite.

  It wasn’t that the room had merely become untidy. No, that would have been merciful. It was as if someone had tied the needle of the cleanliness barometer to a herd of stampeding bulls, set it loose, and then thoughtfully detonated a glitter bomb for emphasis.

  Somewhere, in the growing wreckage, something shattered with the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for landslides and poorly-trained circus elephants.

  Lionel stared.

  "I haven’t woken up," he muttered, not so much to reassure himself as to negotiate with reality. His migraine, now a permanent companion for the ride, crackled across his vision like a tiny thunderstorm composed entirely of paperwork and disapproval.

  The floor—his meticulously, carefully maintained floor—was a modern art installation titled Entropy in Four Square Meters: cereal boxes torn asunder like a sugar-coated crime scene, Tupperware once proud of their air-tight dignity now lying empty and emotionally discarded, and the rainy-day stash of candied nuts?

  Gone.

  Not merely eaten. Erased from existence.

  The fridge had been raided, the stove was beeping in a way that suggested it was about to start union negotiations, and every pot was boiling over as if auditioning for a dramatic role in Steam: The Musical.

  The sink groaned beneath the weight of abused kitchenware, each one apparently dipped in something sticky, then rolled through shame.

  Every drawer had been opened, searched, and rejected. Every cabinet had been ransacked like someone was looking for the secret recipe to immortality and suspected it was hidden behind the spices—or, in some instances, buried inside.

  And in the middle of it all...

  Lionel might have said it was a wild boar, had wild boars suddenly developed the ability to balance an entire charcuterie tower of stolen breakfasts on a single tray, while strolling with the serenity of someone who had never once considered consequences a real thing.

  Only the bottom half of the intruder was visible — unlaced boots, black leggings, a pink hoodie frayed at the edges, and a confidence that suggested the laws of physics were more like vague suggestions.

  She pivoted smoothly past him, aviator goggles flashing just enough for a glint of eye contact as she said, with a mouth half-full of something that sounded like it might have once been a roast dinner:

  “‘Scuse me, coming through.”

  Lionel blinked.

  Then looked at the tray.

  Then looked back at the fridge.

  Did he even have something that would mimic the sound of a roast dinner? Surely not. And he liked to think he knew every item in his kitchen by brand, expiry date, and emotional arc.

  Yet here she—this creature of bedlam—was, strolling by, chewing with the serene satisfaction of someone who’d discovered not just food, but treasure.

  What—?

  He shook his head, snapping back to reality.

  What she was chewing didn’t matter. What mattered was, why, in every last System-overseen hell, was she inside of his apartment.

  By the time he whirled around, a sharp “Hold on a damned minute—!” halfway off the assembly line of his mouth, she was already gone.

  Not in the disappeared, teleporting, burst-into-bats kind of way. No, she’d simply... relocated.

  Specifically, to his bed.

  She had buried herself like a highly snack-laden marsupial beneath his immaculately pressed satin quilt, without so much as putting down the tray or removing her shoes. Which were leaving tiny, sticky echoes of the outside world all over the bedding.

  And then, as if the universe had decided to give Lionel the tiniest break (just enough to be cruel), two muddy boots were ejected from the sheets and flopped onto the floor.

  It wasn’t politeness, of course.

  You don’t wear aviator goggles indoors and take off your shoes out of respect. No, this was clearly a move for personal comfort, or perhaps the creature’s instinctive thermoregulation strategy.

  On another day, maybe one with sunshine, or a croissant that hadn't fallen butter-side-down, Lionel might have gaped. He might have been confused. Concerned, even. He might have chuckled.

  But today?

  Today he followed the trail of dirt and destruction from the kitchen to the bed like a detective in a crime novel where the murder weapon is crumbs.

  Something deep inside him—a place usually reserved for worrying about whether the oven was off—snapped.

  “Get out from under there, you damned lycoon!” he bellowed, charging forward and grabbing the nearest sock-clad foot that dared poke out from beneath the quilt like a particularly cheeky ghost. (A lycoon, of course, being a distant cousin of the raccoon, only rounder, sneakier, and with far less redeeming qualities. Known for their instinct to scavenge, hoard, and nap in soft places that don’t belong to them.)

  As he forcefully yanked her out by aforementioned foot, what emerged from the once-pristine bed was no longer the peculiar girl who had drifted in earlier, humming around a mouthful of who-knows-what.

  No.

  This was a creature.

  A wild, hissing, spitting, kicking, screaming creature, flailing like a sack of goblins in a washing machine.

  The air filled with a shrill chorus of:

  “No!”

  “Let me go!”

  “Help, kidnapper!!”

  —all delivered in one continuous shriek that would have caused even the most attention-hungry toddler to take a respectful step back and reevaluate their life choices.

  To make matters worse, her cheeks were puffed out with food in quantities that suggested either reckless ambition or squirrel ancestry. Her attempts to scream through it only succeeded in producing a sound like a blender trying to digest a sponge.

  The aviator goggles, still perched defiantly on her face as if she were seconds away from launching into the stratosphere, did little to help her credibility.

  In fact, they did the opposite.

  They made her look like the sort of person you definitely wouldn't trust with your food, your furniture, or your gravity.

  And like so, amid the detritus of snacks, satin, and sanity, they met.

  The pungent, chaotic, fate-snorting first encounter between Annabell Smith and Lionel J’Khall. An event which, in years to come, at least three schools of historians (the sort who wore velvet jackets and smoked pipes purely for the aesthetic) would refer to as:

  “A Curious Turn of Events.”

  Exactly how much this unlikely pair would have to do with the chaotic years to come—those terrible, improbable, reality-altering years that would crash down over the Underfold in the wake of the 248th Season—well...

  Only time, the nosiest of all storytellers, could say.

  Gremling Girl Fights the Dungeon: The End.