She took a moment to feel the odd contraption in her hands. Just big enough to fill up one of her hands, a sphere made up of a thousand tiny metal segments. It was embedded into a big, heavy necklace that needed a thin steel chain to even stay on her neck, the frame rectangular enough to prevent it from rolling across her collarbones with every movement.

It looked heavy and was even heavier than it looked.

“Okay, so… just put mana into it.” Katherine provided, rather unhelpfully, and after a moment of struggling to push energy through the circuit in her throat, she just decided to touch the frame with her hand and push mana into it.

The necklace-eye activated.

A world of black and white, crisp and sharp and moving, burst into existence within her mind, and she gasped, loud and sharp.

It was odd. The point of view was centered on just under the base of her neck, and she couldn’t exactly turn her head to shift her view, just the eye itself within its giant, heavy metal frame.

Her hand slowly waved in front of the necklace, and she felt the shifting, moving parts of the necklace twist to move the lens’s focus point to her fingers.

Her throat constricted, something like a wide grin of joy forming on her face, a pressure building up in the base of her throat.

She stumbled back, and collapsed into the couch, letting the eye observe the glittering light crystals of the chandelier above, colorless but wondrous.

“I assume it works?” A soft voice asked from above and behind her, and a shuddering breath preceded by a nod was her reply. The eye flit upwards, and tears prickled at her eye sockets.

Katherine looked almost exactly like she remembered.

She felt a little hand poke her own, and she sniffled, feeling her cheeks start to cramp and strain from the unfamiliar tension of a grin.

She lifted her hand and ran it through the goblin’s soft silky hair as Katherine lips curled into a barely-there smile before turning away to continue packing.

Whatever Katherine had done to the goblin's hair when she’d dragged her away for a bath, it felt like a soft cloud of silk now. Brushing it was extremely calming. Her pleased grumbles as she laid her upper body on the cushion, her knees on the floor, were also soothing.

She felt energized. She felt ready, even if she wasn’t sure what exactly it was that she was ready for, a mixture of having her sight back and being well-fed doing wonders for her spirits.

Katherine knew of a place where she could get a decent food supply out of without draining her, and their first sample had made her satisfied. Comparing it to the wolf’s blood was like trying to compare the taste of cardboard to a chocolate cherry strawberry cake, so there was no point. There wouldn’t ever be anything superior.

As if a signal borne from fate, summoned by her thoughts, she felt it again.

That tug, that directional pull.

Her friend was fighting something again. Already?

A mere ten seconds later, the sensation vanished again.

She hoped that meant he’d just gotten into a fight with a… rat, or something equally non-threatening.

With any notion of calming down gone, she hissed out a sigh through her teeth, and turned to the goblin.

She took her hand off, and poked her in the side of the head.

A confused gibber came out of the goblin as it turned its face to look at her, and she pointed at its nose.

“Your name is Scruffy now. Is that okay?”

A moment of either confusion or contemplation, and the goblin nodded.

She nodded back and got up to walk to where Katherine was organizing the giant bundle of clothes and… stuff, into something that could fit into a single large backpack.

A single outfit was laid on the table to her left, separate from the rest and she walked up to it, blasting the outfit with mana.

It looked…

Honestly, it looked like Katherine just decided to take her own pitch-black wardrobe, and replace the leather trench coat with a black cloak and hoodie. Long shirt, long pants, boots. Next to it was a wide, long, thin black scarf they’d use to cover her face until they could get their hands on a pair of masks of some sort.

The next hour was a blur of silent preparations and packing and changing, during which the only notable thing that happened was Scruffy dragging a chair to the desk that Katherine was organizing on and learning how to fold clothes that were about as big as herself.

She even looked like she was having fun. That was something nice the goblin could do. Be their… sort-of-servant?

It was slow and hard but it was a cute sight, and Katherine was more patient with Scruffy than before, so Emhreeil simply watched in silence, appreciating the fact that she could see. Black and white, but still.

The grin seemed to be permanently etched onto her face.

She couldn’t wait to find him again. She couldn’t wait to see him. She wondered if he’d be as horrific as his voice and species. Hopefully not.

Meanwhile, Katherine gave Scruffy some of Lady Anna’s old childhood clothes, which were… high quality and criminally adorable and very unfitting with their own color scheme, but was all they dared ask for, and Kat quickly shooed her away to dress up.

A green-skinned goblin in a white silky skirt and kid’s shoes with a vaguely brown button shirt was such an absurd sight that Katherine even started snickering to herself when Scruffy trotted back to them, pulling and glaring at the clothes that were likely so comfortable they were uncomfortable to her.

Soon, they had nothing else left to do, and so, unescorted and without much ritual, they walked out of the side gate they’d been told to go, waved through by heavily armored guards, and walked out into the Dungeon.

Since when were the streets so damn loud?

It wasn’t even the sounds she’d been expecting, like… actual violence, fighting, a civil war, or explosions or something like that.

She’d never heard anything like this when walking through the third floor’s streets. People were too downtrodden and depressed to do things like what she was hearing. At least not on such a scale.

Even as she walked beside Katherine, the goblin pulling and tugging at her new clothes like they were something magical and strange as she jogged behind them, she could identify at least three different, very distant chants from different directions, echoing and melding together into this hum-buzz of noise. There were posters on every main street wall, bright paint was used to write slogans on a genuinely mind-boggling amount of walls and alleys, lifts and chem-tanks, walkway supports and storefronts.

They couldn’t go more than five minutes without seeing some catchy or cheesy phrase like “the higher they’re born, the harder they’ll fall” scrawled across any vaguely flat surface. Including the floor.

After an hour which left Emhreeil mentally and physically exhausted from the sudden overstimulation of both senses and thoughts, they took another lift down.

To be able to see that sprawling vista of ominous wires and lights and fading bridges and walkways intersecting and haphazardly going through each other was so comforting. She could almost add color with her imagination…

The commotion and general buzz of activity somehow kept getting more intense when they arrived at their destination.

The station had so many people out and about that for a moment, she froze, feeling oddly disconnected, like a wrench within a pile of nails, just something that didn’t fit. It felt so odd to be around people again, so many of them.

It felt odd to see even a passing glance directed her way. She felt strange. It felt wrong to be amongst a crowd.

She adjusted the black bandage-like fabric that Kat had wrapped around her head, just to be sure nobody could see her face or really, anything at all under her hood. Another note of insecurity rang as she realized her mangled fingers were on full display despite the long-sleeved shirt, and she stomped down the desire to grab a glove from somewhere just to hide them too, instead shoving the hand under the cloak.

As they went down, further and further away from her furry friend, even if temporarily, she couldn’t help but wince and grimace every time his existence would flare out into the back of her mind, a subtle thing that rarely lasted more than ten to thirty seconds, repeating every ten to thirty minutes.

The surroundings got a lot more intense as they continued. Not hostile, but just… riled up. Ready and energetic.

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? The higher up, the more intense it will be? Why was it like this?

She tried to focus on shifting the eye-necklace around, staring at the odd sight of metal barricades suspended sideways several feet off the floor in every major street by amateur pulley systems and chains welded onto random buildings everywhere, all facing outwards. The fact there were no irate shopkeepers or enforcers tearing the things down for defacing their businesses or cluttering the air and forcing the passing wires aside was even more odd.

Someone was playing… very energetic jazz music through a loudspeaker, somewhere below, echoing up the vast edifices of weaving metal and glass, the distorted sound sounding oddly disturbing from up here, like someone scraping at a machine’s coiling innards.

The people were the biggest difference. They were loud, some smiled, some just talked, all things that people didn’t really tend to do from her experience, not down here.

Another couple lifts down, with her energy flagging and her body feeling like a sack of rocks, not at all helped by Scruffy holding onto her trench coat, more rough, vaguely melodic sounds gripped her attention.

She turned the eye-necklace to the side as they walked through a crowd in a vast overhang, seeing a big group of seeming strangers all huddled around a statue of some Dungeon Baron or another, while on a metal table right next to it, some guy with a guitar was giving a performance of a lifetime, nodding his head and swaying to his own beat. Even with the way the fighting lyrics were barely audible and the way the sound carried terribly through the commotion, she felt like his song and raspy smoker’s voice was revitalizing her, filling her blood with adrenaline, scratching at her eardrums in a way that made her want to move.

It had been so long since she’d last seen any kind of bard, or music related Pather just… giving a performance outside. No shop, no bar nor special occasion at a guild, no kind of payment she could see, just… a guy with a guitar singing fight songs while the crowd cheered or tried to sing along. Like some bizarre… impromptu concert, almost.

“Is there really a civil war going on…?” She muttered in disbelief as they turned a corner, flitting into one of a dozen alleys on the outskirts of the marketplace.

“It’s… certainly a strange thing. I guess having something to unite over, a common purpose, or at least common disdain towards something, is making people a lot more energetic and communicative. At least that’s Lady Anna’s theory. I will never understand how a civil war made the third floor better.” Katherine commented, and Emhreeil couldn’t help but find that comment ceaselessly hilarious because it was true.

“How are people this… changed, I suppose? I haven’t even seen someone shake a guy down for his money yet. Where are the gangs, what are they doing?” She asked, and Katherine sighed.

“I don’t think it really matters, Em. They’re pretending to be turning a leaf, ‘one with the people’ or some such drivel, but in truth they’re just letting up on their usual activities a bit to raise morale further and steer people towards fighting the kingdom instead of inviting it in. As far as Lady Anna knows, it’s not working the way they wanted it to. It’s like people are seeing that life can be more than what it was, better without gangs or the kingdom involved, and the tension’s gone three ways now.” Someone came near them, and Katherine briefly paused as the man walked past them.

“The gangs are trying to play nice but keep a hold of their authority and are barely managing to do either, the people seem to be forming up with the Crow’s Church and the Struggler’s Mantle as their chosen representatives, and it's gone from a possible two-way civil war to a four-way civil war, with a dozen small factions forming each side. In short, I don’t really think it matters. It’s an absurd, gigantic mess with millions involved. Lady Anna is following the developments closely and even she can barely make sense of it. Best to stay out of it as much as possible, I think.” Katherine finished as they turned another corner, and a simple question ate away at her.

“But what if the kingdom wins?” She asked quietly, and Katherine’s shoulders drooped.

“I don’t know. Whatever happens, I’m with you. Worst case scenario, we leave. There are worse places than this, but also much better ones. We could figure something out.”

Could they?

Her mood dropped, but she said nothing more as they shouldered past a crowd cheering and hollering at a pair of men fist-fighting in a makeshift ring of palettes and wire fence, smacked down into the middle of a wide commercial road under an arched bridge of steel, surrounded by shops like bakeries and tailors and blade sellers, lit by crystal lights.

The shops were sending people out to try and sell stuff to the people making a mess outside, instead of trying to tell them to pack up and leave. The gang enforcers were nowhere to be seen.

The scent of cigarette smoke, booze, fresh bread and sweets and oil, was a strangely addicting mix of smells, she noted, as the crowd thinned around them before cutting off, leaving them with a long road covered in people that weren’t glaring at everyone in sight suspiciously or trying to disappear into the walls around them.

She felt like she went into one Dungeon and came out into another, a copy, one too improved over the original to make sense.

She idly remembered reading about how in the days before magic became so widespread, before the system even existed, tens of thousands of years ago, a kingdom would cheer when a war began, and celebrations would commence, and thinking it the most absurd, nonsensical thing she’d ever heard in her life.

Maybe back then, wars did not mean that two groups of a couple high Leveled people would glass half the respective cities of each other until both sides gave up. Maybe back then, wars were not held back due to the mutually assured destruction of having high Leveled Pathers in their employ that could level a city within an hour, but some other factors like genuine diplomacy.

It was still absurd to think about people cheering for a war, even back then.

Now, she felt much the same, but she could at least see some kind of thought pattern that made things turn out like this. That sense of a common enemy, as Katherine, or Lady Anna, rather, had put it.

Her roaming eye landed on a newspaper held up by what looked like a teenager, halfheartedly moving it around for people to see, while a stack of them rested on his other hand, while behind him, a Bazi shop gave out hot beverages from an open counter.

She would have glanced away had the first words she’d seen not been “AWAKENED HOUND SLAUGHTERS DOZENS - ESCAPED EXPERIMENT, DEMON, OR HIGHBORN PUPPET??” printed out in gigantic black letters on the front, taking up almost half the page.

She paused, causing a confused croak from Scruffy as she almost ran into her legs.

“Wait.” She said, and felt Katherine slow, turn around, and stop, before wordlessly following the necklace eye’s gaze.

She should go up to the kid and buy it herself.

But it felt like her body had turned into half-set cement.

“Kat. Could you… buy that? A copy?” She whispered, feeling some hissing, squirming, vile little thing in the back of her mind scratch at her pulse, taunting her with a far-stretched possibility.

It was a coincidence, surely.

Katherine quickly did as she asked, turning the newspaper around in her hands with a blank look, reading as she came back towards them.

Emhreeil stood in place, silent and unmoving as a statue.

When Katherine glanced up at her face, before flicking down to the metallic eye on her sternum, she knew Kat had already connected the dots of why she was so interested in this paper in particular, that concerned, knowing glint in her eyes as apparent as ever despite the lack of color.

She took the newspaper with stiff fingers, and began to read.

“Last night, on the upper ends of the second floor, commotion broke out. It was an ordinary, standard day for the goers-to of Station 2-3-36. That was, until, according to people who have come to us with more information as well as folks interviewed on scene shortly after the incident, a giant black dog with glowing golden eyes crashed through an apartment building’s window near the station, landed in a worksite, before charging straight through the metal gate and onto the the outer edge of the platform. It immediately began running. Some reported it weaved between them, some said they only caught a glimpse of it before being bowled over and thrown onto the floor. But almost all of them reported that a mysterious group of men were very vigorously hunting the creature.”

She felt her meager confidence crumbling already, caution and a fearful sense of determination settling in.

Glowing golden eyes.

She’d only caught a glimpse of them back at the staircase before the world collapsed out from under her, but that bit of description ruined any chance of this being a coincidence.

It didn’t even go outside for more than two weeks before something went horrendously wrong. Any plan she had of concealing its existence just evaporated. At least to those who mattered. If it was already being hunted by professionals, the Barons likely knew what was up. Or maybe if she was lucky it would only be some independent group that was trying to catch a dog with glowing eyes for a quick buck and ended up in deeper shit than they thought.

Optimism was nice, but often led to disappointment. She’d bet on the former. Someone knew.

“For a few hundred feet, this group hunted the creature, and it evaded them. That is, until a gigantic explosion of unknown origin bent the outer walkway, and unfortunately, that is as far as anyone we’d approached had seen. Most fled, the rest were herded away by men dressed in black. Normally, this would be the end of our story. A monster appears in the Dungeon, it is caught, and its fate is decided by its captors then. As you can guess by the title adorning this very paper, such a happy conclusion did not come to pass. As the fight with the creature moved towards the center of the station, it would appear some lifts had been stalled or attempted to be halted, pointing to the suspicion that this was all either premeditated, or very, very well organized. Another massive explosion rocked the Dungeon soon after, a fireball seen from all the way down Brightman’s Alley. We do not know precisely what happened after, only the tragic ending. One of the lifts leaving the station seemed to have been burdened by the creature’s presence, likely using the lift as an escape from its pursuers. All thirty one passengers and a man presumed to be one of the hunters, arrived mutilated and torn to shreds beyond any hope of recognition.”

Her metallic eye moved up to the start of the paragraph. Down again.

She read it three, four times, before taking a deep, deep breath. Her throat felt dry.

“One of the people we’ve reached through much risk and expense, who was at the scene and wishes to remain anonymous, has described the monster. They have said its color to be darker than the most absolute, deepest black, a featureless, roiling void into reality, hazy as if covered by writhing fog, and mounted atop its back, three mangled heads dangled down from writhing tentacles that held onto them with black veins of nothingness. The darkness of its form dripped blood endlessly, but neither its steps nor its breaths made any sound whatsoever. And so, armed with all this loose, vaguely connected info, we are left to make our own conclusions, our own speculations. Was this another case of a madman losing his experiment and trying to reclaim it? Was this a real, genuine demon, as it appears, and does that mean the Church of The Six-Winged Dove will descend into the Dungeon for its head? Or perhaps, the highborn decided to let their monsters out to play within our home, hoping to kill our morale-”

She stopped reading, lowering the newspaper. The eye on her neck ran out of mana, and she didn’t bother turning it back on, finding the darkness helpful in just… processing all that.

Thirty two.

It was hard to visualize, to digest. Past a dozen faces, it started shifting, turning into a number rather than a group of people.

She turned, feeling like a blocky machine glued onto stilts, wavering in place a little as the newspaper fell from limp fingers. She lifted her hand to touch the necklace, charging it.

The fighting ring, the people within, without. She began to count them.

By the time she’d reached thirty, almost two-thirds of the people around her were a victim in her eyes.

It was a lot easier to drink in and understand the impact of her friend’s actions when she could see the people around her and imagine them turning into shredded piles of meat.

“Em? Is it… you know…?” Katherine asked from behind, a steady, firm hand landing on her shoulder, keeping her stable in more ways than one.

Emhreeil took a deep, deep breath that made her lungs burn, and nodded.

She felt… stiff, from the fact that despite the guilt churning in her gut, despite the resigned sadness for the lives lost and the acceptance of what exactly her friend seemed to be fighting every time his presence would flare out into the back of her head, she still could not bring herself to even consider changing her answer.

The line she’d drawn in her mind was carved into unyielding stone, and she could only wish her emotions would reflect that, in time.

“What do we do?” Katherine asked, tightening the hand on her shoulder.

Scruffy bent down to pick up the newspaper, and then hesitantly planted her knuckles on Emhreeil’s leg in some strange gesture of solidarity.

She felt unstable. And for once, it felt so nice to have people there to keep her upright.

She took a deep breath.

“Nothing different, Kat. I knew it was going to kill people. I’m not sure I’ll be able to even stop it. And I’m not sure I’d turn away, even if I couldn’t. It’s… you don’t have to be here, you know? You can still back out of this.” She said, her voice oddly firm and quiet even to her own ears, despite feeling like a stone had settled into the base of her throat.

Kat had said she couldn’t and wouldn’t ever hate her, but this was the first time that promise was brought to bear between them since it was made.

The hand on her shoulder squeezed with a deep, tired inhale, laced with uncertainty.

“It’s… Em, I’m… disappointed, even if I’m not sure about what. And I can’t say I understand whatever bond you have with it.” Kat continued, and like a sentenced man accepting the strikes of the whip, she stood there, stiff, tanking the blows in silence, waiting for the final strike of the guillotine.

“But I already said I’m not leaving you. I’ve told you three times already. If you’re sure we don’t do anything different, then let's just go to the apartment and regroup, plan. You still have a lot to tell me. And we could use a day to process, think. So let’s just keep going. Okay?” Katherine said, squeezing her shoulder, and she nodded, the lens of the eye unfocusing, relief releasing her tongue, snipping away the invisible ropes keeping her glued in place.

But it quickly faded, even as her legs stiffly turned, and began walking.

“Thank you.” She mumbled, and Katherine’s steps slowed, until she was walking by her right side, their pace matching.

An arm tossed itself over her shoulders, rather awkwardly, as Katherine was half a head shorter than her.

“No need. Come on.”

Scruffy swapped her grip to hold onto Katherine’s trench coat.

The apartment, if it could even be called that, was placed in one of the most unwelcoming spots she’d ever seen, at least from first impressions.

The visual of this squat, large metal dome, being entombed in place by the dreary towering skeletons of buildings once full of life, was very striking. Surrounded on all four sides, and with multiple fenced paths that led to it, she theorized that this could have been something like a central command point of some sorts, long ago.

The uncomfortably tall factory complex around the structure smothered all light from outside, hiding it through monstrous containers, machines and pipeworks, all half-nestled within its concrete floors. Only bare hints of bleed-over light peeked through the blurry expanse above, most of it serving to make the fog along the top floors seem like it was softly glowing.

Opposite the entrance to the dome was a thin alley they were currently walking through that led into the large complex, and behind them, across the street from the alley’s entrance, an open tavern-restaurant stood, well lit with warm light, the lower floor an open sprawl of activity, and the upper one a cozy, curving vista of glass and likely much higher prices. Baron Simian’s enforcers prowled about to make sure nobody started any trouble.

The sheer contrast between these two environments, despite being mere feet apart, was a strange feeling.

It was like she’d just walked into an alleyway and entered a different world, the clamor and chatting from behind them turning muted unnaturally quick, as if they were transitioning through limbo as the alley’s walls retreated behind them.

She took the opportunity to just gaze upon this bizarre, haunting scenery. The grandiosity of it, mixed with the cloying darkness not allowing her to see much more than vague shapes and impressions, the eerie silence broken only by distorted whispers of activity from someplace that sounded incredibly distant but was a mere hundred feet away, the fog accenting corners and pillars and gears and dizzying stretches of exposed machinery grafted into stone and steel buildings, blurring and fading.

It didnt even look real. It felt like she was gazing at the frozen memory of a dream.

Nothing moved. Nothing talked.

Just the gray impressions of dusty, hollow windows surrounding them like a cage of glass, stretching towards the white fog above, hinting at light they wouldn’t be seeing anytime soon.

Something moved out of the corner of her gaze, and the golem’s eye whirred to the side so suddenly she worried she might accidentally break its inner mechanisms.

A fleeting shadow, maybe? A trick of the eye? Whatever it was, she couldn't find it again.

Even stiffer than before, she did naught but keep walking.

She was sure someone lived in those ruins around them. She couldn’t find a reason for them not to. Buying or renting a place was a luxury for many down here, no matter how small or pathetic. Finding an abandoned little spot to live in was a good idea, if one was willing to deal with the very real possibility of being suddenly murdered or worse, away from people and any notion of safety.

The fact that behind each and every window, a desperate soul might be staring down at them, only made the place more uncomfortable to her.

How the hell did Kat live in this place?

The metal floor abruptly turned to a mix of cobble and concrete, uneven, seemingly ancient, slick with chemicals and half-melted moss.

To her right, the faint roar of rushing liquid drew her attention, and she turned the eye to catch a peek of a geyser of superheated water spraying out of a gigantic pipe towards the sky, turning into warm fog before it could even properly pressurize back into water.

That revealed where the absurd humidity was coming from. With the scarf in the way too, it felt like she was trying to inhale slime.

Before she could consider whether or not she should adjust or remove the scarf, she felt the arm around her tighten, Katherine's steps slowing.

A surge of mana revealed why, crawling all over a massive pair of curved metal doors as the eye on her sternum kept roaming the haunting, towering emptiness above.

Katherine’s arm swung off, and without much preamble, she stepped forward, opened an inconspicuous metal plate to the side, just six inches long, revealing a pad of buttons, unmarked.

Practiced and likely by rote, Katherine tapped at the buttons in a pattern, and the doors hissed open.

She stood there, staring at the pitch black hallway of metal that apparently led to Kat’s apartment.

Katherine gently placed the metal plate over the button pad, hiding it once more, then stepped into the hallway, absent-mindedly stretching her hand to press another button without looking, with familiarity that was oddly effective in settling Emhreeil's unease.

Kat knew this place well. Undue surprises were unlikely.

Weak sputtering light bulbs lit up the hallway, hanging from the ceiling on exposed wires, and she mutely followed, Scruffy nervously sticking to her side.

She curiously split her attention between sight and feel as they moved through the hallway, surprisingly cramped and short considering the dome’s size.

It was full of locked metal doors of surprising variety, some double doors with faded glass windows, some single, some made of heavy, enchanted metal, and the weirdest one being a door that had a massive glass wall to its left. She couldn’t see what was behind it, as the entire glass was covered up from the inside with glued paper and random trash, smeared paint and dried sludge. She could only assume someone lived in there and didn’t want people peeking at him.

Up a flight of stairs that rattled in place, cutting the dome in half, and they were on the upper floor, in the middle of a cross-shaped hallway that cut the upper floor in four equal parts.

Katherine turned to a door on the left, walked up to it, and repeated the same process of digging out a number pad and inputting a password to open the door before putting the plate back and reaching in to open the light.

Then Kat turned towards her, and awkwardly extended a hand into the room in invitation.

She hesitantly walked in, pulsing mana and letting the golem eye- or perhaps her eye, now, roam.

It was rather nice, surprisingly, and much smaller than she’d expected.

It was shaped like the top left quadrant of a circle cut in four equal parts, the left wall flush with the door once opened. In the middle of the large, curving wall opposite the entrance was a small skylight of curved glass, though the view was rather dreadful.

It hung over a giant metal storage cabinet with a mattress thrown atop it, and to the right wall was a single heating cell with a metal heating plate on top, a couple cooking implements hung across the wall on hooks and the like around it, while above and below it rested more metal cabinets.

In the left corner was a small open shower with a small depression in the floor and a series of small grates for the water, with a single curving curtain to hide the outside world, and just next to it was a single… nightstand, of sorts.

It was obviously some kind of storage closet of some sorts, before whoever owned this building turned it into a small but functional room.

Her eyes landed on a pristine-looking necklace sitting on the metal nightstand, and she paused as she observed it, surprised to see something like that amongst Katherine’s near-nonexistent belongings.

It was a rather intricate little piece of silver, not much bigger than a coin, and from its surface jutted out the portrait of a youthful smiling woman with pointed ears.

Was that… her?

Katherine and Scruffy’s steps followed her in, and before she could think of a way to ask, the door had closed.

Katherine took three steps before noticing her gaze, and pausing mid-stride.

“...I got that from an old man in the corner of a square. Did portraits on silver pieces with some tiny tools. A silver for two, he said. I… didn’t know if I’d ever see you again, so I asked him to sculpt you. Just as… a sentimental reminder, I suppose. Haven’t gotten to wear it much. People will do a lot of stupid, rash things if you look like you can afford to be carrying jewelry around.”

Her lips curled into an exhausted smile.

“That’s… really sweet.” She murmured, and felt Katherine relax a little behind her, before snapping her gaze to Scruffy who was poking around the heating box.

After working in a processing facility, the goblin probably knew a couple things about machinery. Still, Katherine didn’t seem to appreciate its clumsy poking, and quickly dragged her away by the scruff of her shirt to deposit her at the foot of the makeshift bed.

With three people in a vaguely triangular room that couldn’t have been bigger than twelve feet across in any direction, with a low ceiling and cluttered with sparse furnishings, they barely had room to walk around each other.

Katherine seemed to realize this too when she turned around and almost stumbled into her shoulder before peering around her feet to see where she could move step without stomping on anyone’s toes.

Em herself just kept looking at the necklace. It was nice to think that someone had been thinking about her even back then, even if only occasionally.

Katherine cleared her throat as Scruffy stuffed herself into the corner next to the heating box, trying to find a comfortable way to sit in a skirt.

“You get the bed, Scruffy gets a large pillow I have, and I’ll sleep on the floor if you want.”

She snorted, amused and nostalgic both, her shoulders shaking a little as tension fled from her frame.

“No, we’ll sleep in the same bed. We can fit. But… remember when we did that back at the manor, back when that royal event was happening and my parents were gone? And we overslept, so-”

“So Amelia came in because she thought you were out of bed, and then spent the next day panicking ‘cause she thought I’d bedded you. By the time I’d caught her and asked her to keep quiet, she thought we were having some affair of sorts, and was wondering how to cover for us. She was a good girl. ” Katherine murmured, a wide, amused smile on her face, a reminiscing look in her eyes.

“I didn’t know her name was Amelia.” She simply replied, and went to sit on the bed, letting her thoughts focus on something nicer and less complicated than her current predicament.

“I think you just forgot. Anyways. Let’s go to bed. We plan tomorrow.”

She hesitated for a moment before nodding, and beginning to shrug off the jacket. The scarf around her head remained.

The hands of a nonexistent clock spun until the metal wore away, hours spent thinking, jumping from one spiraling pit to another, until she had some vague notion of cohesion left in the tangled yarn that was her mind.

And finally, sleep came, hours later.

She dreamt of herself, wearing blood-slick fur, surrounded by the horror-filled screams of dying men and women.

Tomorrow began with an odd experience.

Waking up in a bed, relatively comfortable and warm, to the scent of food.

It was nice. Domestic. Unusual.

They all sat on the bed side by side with mushroom-paste bread slices Katherine had bought for them, a taste like bread mixed with mushroom sauce, strong and savory. She liked it. Even if she could only lick the small slice she had for the flavor, unable to actually eat it, it was still nice.

Her actual meal came in the form of a thick paper bag, tightly sealed and full of blood, sitting on the heating unit with a small preservation charm on it. Katherine didn’t tell her how much it cost, but she could guess it cost far more than anything her companions needed combined. The guilt of that was another drop added to the lake.

After opening the bag and carefully gulping down the whole thing to not spill any on the floor, she felt ready to face the world.

Or its diseased underbelly, at the very least.

“So. What do we do? If you have a plan, I’d like to know.” Katherine asked the vital question, and Emhreeil set the paper bag, now empty, down by her feet.

She cleared her throat, feeling well for the first time in a while.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a… while. It’s why I slept so late last night. First, we do that errand I mentioned. It’s on our way upwards anyways. It’ll put some padding to our pockets too, if that man is to be believed.”

“If. From what you told me, he did not sound reliable nor trustworthy.”

She nodded.

“Still, nothing to lose from doing that. We do that, then we find it. That’s where things get a little messy. For starters, he’s already being hunted. He’s already somewhat known. That newspaper was a local one, and it releases daily drivel. I recognize it. That means it was only a front-page story for a day or two, with some luck. Thirty people dying can’t be that big of a story with a literal war slowly breaking out, not for long. Also, this is the third floor. Not that many people can read down here. Maybe something like one in three? So… people might have heard or read about him, but I doubt its made him infamous. He’s not like what is described at all either, so it’s not like anyone will recognize him on sight. Regardless… the general plan of action is to go do that errand, find him, figure out some way to properly communicate. Likely while tagging along with him. Then I could explain things to him. Teach him who to hurt, to not have the entire Dungeon screaming for his head. There’s a difference between killing thirty innocents in a lift and killing thirty gangster scumbags spread out over half a floor. Another thing I want to do is finish this... vampiric Trait. I want to turn.” She said, and briefly paused to check Katherine’s reaction.

She looked a little cautious, in a way, but interested. Not disapproving, so far. Good.

"I'm not sure turning into a vampire is a good idea, or even possible, but if you're sure..." Katherine mumbled, almost to herself, thousand yard stare focused on the closed door.

Then Katherine’s expression shifted into incredulity, and she turned to her with wide eyes.

“Wait, teach it- him, how to speak? How?” Katherine asked, obviously disbelieving.

She grimaced. She hadn’t had time to mention that in much detail.

“He can do it already. I told you it’s a smart beast. I wasn’t kidding. It kept trying to get me to talk so it could mimic me. I think it was trying to learn how to speak.” She said, idly flicking the eye on and off, trying to get used to the sudden snap of stimuli that happened each time she did so.

“... You do realize how that sounds incredibly disturbing, right?” Katherine asked.

“Just wait until you hear its voice…” She mumbled back with a shudder, before deciding to get back on topic.

“Okay. After I teach him who to hunt without getting half the country on his tail… well, I don’t know. That’s quite far in the future already. A more immediate problem will be money. You need actual gear, I need spells. The reason is rather obvious. If you had any notion of having a peaceful life, I’d suggest you either throw it away, or leave before you’re too deep and have that choice made for you.” She said, and felt Katherine’s features twist into an annoyed frown.

Yes, she’d said it like three times. She knew that. But she wanted to make sure Katherine knew what she was getting into.

Emhreeil had accepted that she’d leave any notion of a normal life behind by doing this. Maybe Katherine hadn’t quite realized that yet.

“I’m not leaving.” Katherine coldly said, and she nodded.

“Okay. Thank you.” She mumbled, and extended her hand to the left to give Katherine’s hand a brief, grateful squeeze.

“So… money. I’m not sure how we’re going to get a whole lot of that. We might need to buy certain things for him too.” She vaguely said, wondering if it would be better to raid auction and trade houses for exotic, dangerous animals, or just outright buy them.

After all, there were only so many things in the Dungeon it could steal body parts and organs from. It would hit a wall eventually. A wall she could help him overcome.

Conversely, that same ability of his might be able to make them all the money they could possibly need.

She could convince him to grow a bunch of rare, excessively overpriced organs that belong to exotic animals and make a gigantic fortune from slicing them off him and selling them.

But she couldn’t exactly say that to Kat. That’d give away the… big secret.

She would, eventually, have to tell her.

But just… not yet. Not before Katherine had seen him, seen that he wasn’t what his species or the stupid newspaper said he was. Or maybe that he was, but that it wasn’t all he was.

“That plan seems… deceptively simple.” Katherine summarized, and she could only shrug in reply, because it was.

“If we get too caught up in the details, we’ll never get anything done. So, yeah. We need money and connections. I have some ideas for the first bit, some good, some not that great. The latter is… unlikely.” She admitted.

Money and connections formed the best and biggest shield one could have. She knew that, she’d seen that, she’d been behind that shield. And while the second part was highly unlikely, the first was not as unobtainable.

“Do you have any ideas for making a few crowns?” She asked, going through possibilities in her head.

Katherine hummed.

“Some, but I doubt they’d make nearly enough, nor be the kind of work you’re thinking of. I worked in a club for a bit, for example. The pay was… enough to eat. So that’s likely not going to cut it. What did you have in mind?”

She sighed, putting her elbow on her knee and supporting her head with her palm.

“The first idea I had was one you’re not going to like. I could make a new Adventurer team. The Guild doesn’t share information, and furthermore, any beastly 'pets' or companions do not have to be registered. Meaning that if I could convince him, and with some luck, we could almost have a legitimate career as an Adventurer team. You, me, him and Scruffy. Just taking up some jobs while we do whatever we decide to do on the side. Nothing too attention grabbing or dangerous, and we’ll keep a low profile. Alternatively, we could make a team in the Mercenary’s Guild, but it’s all rather… risky. I don’t know if we want to get involved in that crowd. The Mercenary Guild was essentially a third arm of the Dungeon Barons, as far as I know. I doubt that’s changed. We could also just loot whoever he decides to eat, which would be decent… pocket money.” She mumbled out the last part, feeling a vague sense of moral alarm at how her words sounded.

She cleared her throat, and turned to Katherine, who looked contemplative for a few silent moments, the hum of the vent fan and Scruffy’s shuffling being the only sounds in the room.

Katherine nodded.

“That sounds acceptable. Makes sense. We do have some money though. I kept the vast majority of the crowns you gave me back then. It’s in the central bank on the second floor. So we could buy another spell with that, and buy some half-decent armor for us both.”

She thought about it, and bit what remained of her lip.

'Are you sure you don’t want to keep it?' Is what she wanted to ask, but she already knew what Katherine would say.

“Okay. Let’s go.” She said instead, and reached for the hooded cloak on the nightstand, her eyes briefly lingering on the necklace.

Katherine nodded, and grabbed the backpack she had prepared, stuffed full of medical supplies, some money, and clothes. Mostly clothes.

-

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