The Story so Far
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Lionel J’Khall
— Spent most of every last credit to his name on a mysterious Dungeon, won at the illustriously shady Neo Nexus Grand Auction.
— Shortly thereafter, said Dungeon was rendered extremely non-existent by an UFG (Unidentified Flying Gremlin), which achieved impact velocity, structural annihilation, and interpretive dance all in a single motion.
Current Status:
— Engaged in mortal combat with the aforementioned Gremlin in an attempt to reclaim his bed, his sanity, and perhaps a small corner of dignity in his PPA (Personal-Pocketdimensional-Apartment).
Annabell Smith
— Following the sudden and highly inconvenient dungeonization of her homeworld, found herself conscripted into a game of survival without having ever signed a waiver.
— “Won” said game using a mix of nonsense, chaos, and aggressive nonchalance. Unfortunately, “restoring the world” was not covered under the prize package.
Had Hoped For:
— Lounging, resisting the forces of productivity, and clinging to the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a duvet day. Technically Lionel’s bed. Philosophically, hers by conquest.
Current Status:
— Currently being extracted from said bed like a stubborn wad of gum in a corporate carpet.
Fate
— Reclined in a sun-bleached lawn chair somewhere in the multidimensional bureaucracy, sipping tea and watching the carnage unfold with the relaxed amusement of someone who absolutely knew this was going to happen.
— Currently taking bets.
***
There are many types of battle.
There’s the formal duel at dawn, where two impeccably dressed gentlemen agree to murder each other politely over a perceived slight. There are the grand crusades launched in the name of justice, honour, or which god has the best toaster strudels. And then, quite a bit lower on the noble spectrum—but with significantly higher levels of breakfast-related casualties—there was this.
On the grand spectrum of conflict, this particular clash landed somewhere between two inebriated hobos scrapping over a chicken carcass in a ditch, and an especially misguided farmer who’d bet the house that he could wrestle an oiled pig and retain his dignity.
It began, as many cataclysms do, with a shriek, a stolen quilt, and a flying sausage.
To narrate it, however, beat for beat, would be a disservice to the singularity of destruction that was taking place at the same time. So, here, for your convenience, is a summary:
Bedsheets were shredded by flailing limbs. Snack foods achieved liftoff. Cereal embedded itself in ceiling corners where no cereal had any right to be. A piece of toast performed an aerial manoeuvre that would later be classified as “distressingly elegant.” A shoe went airborne. A tray followed, as if determined to see where the shoe was going. Somewhere, a spoon made a bid for freedom and may still be tunnelling.
Socked heels collided with chins. Elbows appeared from dimensions unknown. There were screams, howls, at least one attempt at levitation via flailing, and a great deal of profanity—much of it inventive, some of it anatomically improbable.
And whenever Lionel, poor Lionel, thought he might be gaining the upper hand—grabbing a wrist here, swatting away a noodle/booger hybrid there—the universe reminded him that it had absolutely no interest in playing fair. One moment, he was upright. The next, he was headbutted by an aviator helmet, took a knee to the metaphorical homeland, all the while suffering shrieked accusations that would make a priest blush and a lawyer nervous.
The end came—if one could call it that—through a combination of desperation, tactical quilting, and a very unorthodox interpretation of judo.
She landed on the floor like a very angry novelty pillow, flailing inside her makeshift cocoon. Lionel flopped atop the bedsheet burrito, panting like a man who had just survived a natural disaster and wasn’t sure if he was the hero or just a very lucky tree.
Muffled sounds continued to emerge from beneath the fabric, ranging from outrage to legal threats and one particularly cutting remark about his haircut. Most of it, mercifully, was absorbed by the duvet, which now served both as prison and editorial filter. Protestations like:
“Pervert!”
“Creep!”
“Danger man!”
“Defiler of innocent young maidens!”
Bounced harmlessly off the cotton weave and into the uncaring universe, where even they sounded embarrassed.
“What...” Lionel wheezed, sounding like a man who’d just done twelve rounds with a paper shredder, lost eleven of them, and only survived the twelfth because the shredder got tired, “What the hell are you?”
He could taste iron in his mouth. His lip had split. His ribs were sore. And his nose was bleeding somewhere behind the general blur of pain that used to be his face. Then there were his fingers, twitching from the strain of trying to grip things that had no business being so slippery, and if he were to look in a mirror right now, he was fairly certain his left eye would be auditioning for a starring role in The Colour Purple (And Also Swollen).
“And, more importantly…” he continued between strained breaths. “What, the fuck, are you doing in my apartment?”
He wiped at his chin with an unsteady hand, trying to intercept the blood before it made contact with his shirt, which was both a futile and wildly optimistic gesture. Blood was everywhere. Milk was everywhere. Cereal. Socks. At one point, there had even been a fork in orbit.
He paused to draw a breath deep enough to speak again and immediately regretted it. “And—” he managed, before gagging, “why, in the System’s name, do you smell like fermented sewage and garbage?
“Fermented sewage and garbage that has been digested, undigested, redigested, and politely returned by an undead giant with dietary issues?”
There was an offended wiggle from the bedsheet burrito beneath him, which suggested she took exception not to the accusation, but perhaps to the metaphor.
For a brief moment, Lionel considered the obvious solution: open the front door, toss the bundle outside, sacrifice the quilt to whatever eldritch horror claimed her, and get on with the business of rebuilding his dignity and apartment from the smouldering remains.
But then he looked around.
The damage. The mess. The scattered remnants of food, dignity, and hope. The pillow with teeth marks. The tray embedded in the wall. The very obvious fact that she had bitten him—several times—and not in any metaphorical sense.
Merely throwing her out, he decided, would be far too merciful.
He massaged the bridge of his nose, ignoring the continued squirming, wiggling, and occasional muffled insult escaping from the bundle beneath him.
Was it Cassandra?
Had the vengeful woman finally decided to outsource her bitterness and hire a free-range catastrophe to end his career and possibly his life? Entirely possible. She had once broken off their supposed relationship with a passive-aggressive fruit basket.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Or maybe some more hands-on member of my family?
Less likely. That would imply a level of emotional investment they’d generally reserved for quarterly loot-share reports and management of the family business.
A distant uncle, perhaps, dissatisfied with my chosen direction in life?
There were a few of those floating about, and at least two of them were fully capable of weaponizing destruction in the name of “constructive criticism.”
An enemy from university?
Oh, definitely. There were people there who could hold grudges across generations, even after he’d renounced his family name. Professors, students, the cafeteria lady... he still owed her a formal apology.
The more Lionel thought about it, the longer the list became, and the more he realised that his life was less a gentle stream of interpersonal relations and more a congested sewer of unresolved vendettas. And now the sewer had gained sentience, put on a bunny-eared hoodie, and exploded his future aspirations.
Well, whatever the origin of this squealing burrito of doom, he needed answers. There might be more of them. Clones, even. Or worse: broadcasters.
But first—
He wrinkled his nose.
No, scratch that.
His nose wrinkled itself, entirely unbidden, as though attempting to fold inwards and hide.
Hefting the bedsheet-bundle up over his shoulder, it flailed in protest, nearly costing him a tooth.
He just tightened his grip.
“System,” he grunted, staggering toward the bathroom, “prepare the heavy-duty cleaning cycle. And do not open the door until the program has run its full course. Twice.”
There was a brief pause, then the System responded with the kind of calm, chipper enthusiasm only an entity with no sense of smell could muster:
[Understood. Initiating Category Four Cleansing Protocol: Sewer Nymph Containment.]
[Estimated runtime: Forty-five minutes.]
Lionel sighed again. It was shaping up to be a very long day.
***
There was screaming. There was scratching. There was a noise not entirely unlike someone trying to drown a bagpipe that refused to go quietly. And somewhere amidst it all, there was the unmistakable, primordial gurgle of soap meeting a creature morally opposed to hygiene.
Lionel, for his part, did not flinch.
A man can only mentally process so much in one day, and he'd already reached the point where adding "bobcat-in-spin-cycle" to his internal list of tragedies barely made a ripple.
He’d chucked her into the reinforced sanitation chamber—also known as his shower—along with the bedsheets, three emergency disinfectant pods, and a System-mandated disclaimer that he was not, in fact, legally responsible for any bleaching of hair, memory, or soul. He'd sealed the door with the grim precision of a prison warden closing up Cellblock Catastrophe and left the System to do the Lord’s unholy work.
That left the other disaster.
Forty-five minutes later, when the bathroom finally let out a hiss that implied it was either releasing a wanted criminal or about to ask for a raise, Lionel was still hunched over a suspiciously sticky kitchen tile, wielding a scrubber with all the weary determination of a man who’d once dreamed of wealth, status, and a life that made sense.
Then he felt it.
The stare.
It landed on the back of his neck like a dead weight wrapped in unresolved trauma. He turned, slowly, like a man bracing for a punch from someone smaller, louder, and somehow significantly more dangerous when damp.
She stood in the doorway like a drowned cat that had learned to walk on two legs and was now very cross about it. Betrayal dripped from her like shampoo.
She was wearing one of his t-shirts, which hung off her like a curtain trying to pretend it was a toga. Her hair had been attacked by the drying cycle and fought back bravely—though not, it must be said, successfully. Her skin was the colour of a steamed lobster with low self-esteem.
"The hidden boss," she announced, voice quivering with dramatic conviction, "was here all along. Hiding in plain sight. Waiting. Watching. A coward’s tactic, to be sure, but—”
Thunk.
The kitchen knife embedded itself in the doorframe besides her head. It hummed slightly from the force of impact, vibrating with the finality of punctuation in an angry letter.
She stopped mid-monologue, eyes wide and mouth forming the sort of perfect ‘o’ usually reserved for startled owls.
Lionel’s gaze returned to the floor.
“Believe me,” he said, voice low and cold—too much scrubbing. Waaay too much scrubbing and a general headache not even an entire jar of pills and a bottle of wine could fix, “if I were some hidden boss, you’d already be dead.”
There are threats, there are promises, and then there are statements made with such calm conviction that even Fate pauses to check the terms and conditions. Lionel’s words belonged to the third category.
Now, officially, System regulations prohibited the wandering nightmares, eldritch horrors, and miscellaneous denizens of the Underfold’s Lower Layers from popping up where mortal people still did their laundry and worried about school grades.
But System enforcement got a bit fuzzy once you stepped over the threshold into a Personal-Pocketdimensional-Apartment. Especially one that had recently seen more chaos than the average romantic comedy involving time travel, mistaken identity, and a mongoose.
She shrank, visibly, like a wool sock encountering a dryer on the “vengeful sun” setting, as Lionel plucked another knife from the rack and casually began peeling the air of its illusions.
“So,” he said, “how about you sit down so we can have a little chat, hm?”
Like a penguin tiptoeing across thin ice, she obeyed.
Waddling over, she pulled out a chair, climbed into it, and sat there—feet dangling and eyes locked on him in quiet contemplation.
Three seconds passed. Three whole seconds of absolute silence. Then she gave up on the concept entirely.
“It’s really quite rude, you know,” she said, heels thumping against the side of her chair, “to hog the bed like that. And then throw a tantrum just because someone else wants to use it. Not to mention messing with someone’s food that they were planning to eat. Those sausages were arranged in a pattern, I’ll have you know. And I was still using those pots, by the way. Jeez. Ask next time before interfering with someone else’s process.”
Lionel stared at her. Then at the heap of pots in the sink. Pots which had, until recently, only known the gentle caress of water. Now they were a color somewhere between ‘molten regret’ and ‘abyssal char’. One had fused to the stovetop. Another was vibrating gently, possibly in grief.
He didn’t want to ask how one burns water. He feared the answer.
“I expect better from you,” she continued, “if you intend to share my apartment.”
A twitch flickered across his face.
“Your apartment?” he echoed.
“Of course,” she huffed, rolling her eyes as if it was obvious. “This is clearly my reward for saving the world from the zombie apocalypse. Really, you should be thanking me. Or apologizing for being so rude. Probably both, actually.”
Two twitches. In the eye this time. And possibly a minor cardiac tremor.
Saved the world? Lionel’s mind screamed. Everything out there is in splinters! It’s less ‘saved’ and more ‘lightly sautéed and tossed into a temporal woodchipper’!
He tried to inhale deeply, to center himself, to become the serene void in which chaos passed like a gentle breeze.
But serenity had already packed its bags and left for the coast, because she cheerfully rolled on:
“So, what’s for dinner?” she asked, heels still innocently thumping her chair. “I’m craving something sweet. Oh, and make it spicy. But not too spicy. Maybe something with bread. Fresh bread. And chilled drinks! Preferably fizzy. Oh, and don’t burn anything this time, it upsets my—”
She had just enough time to yelp before Lionel, whose patience had fled somewhere around “maybe something with bread,” yanked her from the chair and marched toward the door like a man possessed.
“No, no, wait!” she shrieked, flailing like a noodle in a wind tunnel as the door was kicked open. “You don’t have to do this!”
Beyond lay a world still very much in the middle of forgetting how to exist.
Reality was coming apart at the seams, and rather than going quietly into the void with grace and dignity, it was doing so with the grace of an overcooked pudding being hurled at a brick wall.
Bits of landscape flaked away like burnt pastry. Entire buildings floated past upside-down. Screaming undead clung to office chairs, flaming signs, and in one case, what looked suspiciously like the upper half of a mechanical goose.
“I’m a house cat,” she whimpered, clinging to the nearest surface available. Which in this instance happened to be Lionel. “A house cat, you hear me. The outdoors is for wild animals and postmen and… and joggers! Please, I’ve already had too much nature for one day!”
***
Scholarly Entry #849-903-QF4
In the event of encountering a wild Gremlin, the Department of Unusual Misfortunes urges you to take the following precautions:
- Guard your personal belongings. All of them. Yes, those too.
- Secure your health. Emotional, physical, metaphysical — they’ll go after the lot.
- Bid farewell to your sanity. It’s not a requirement, per se, but it does tend to speed things along.
Most importantly:
- Do not make eye contact. This is often mistaken for a challenge. Or worse, an invitation to converse.
- Do not let them near your home. They reproduce through chaos. And coat closets.
- And under no circumstances should you attempt to reason with them. You will Not because you're unintelligent, but because Gremlins operate on a logic system last seen staggering drunk through the back alleys of reality, loudly insisting it was a duck.
This has been your official warning.
— Arekus Cain,
Supreme Scholar of Honorable Pursuits
(Currently on indefinite leave, citing “Gremlin-related complications”.)