*PZAFF*

I was Peregar the furnace dwarf, pushing a wheelbarrow full of sphalerite up to the magma furnaces in the smoky depths of Ilrom Ziril...

*PZAFF*

I was Garrulus Septimus the travelling salesman, about to broker a fat deal with Belethor in Whiterun...

*PZAFF*

I was back inside the quivering bulwark in Newbshere, gasping as my soul fought against the longport ritual gone haywire. Rosie palmed her mouth in horror. "Oh no! I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking!" The glyphs kept blinking on and off, and the transit drone was buzzing around the veil trying to stabilize it. I glared daggers at her as I caught my breath.

"Do you SEE this shield surrounding us?! Does it look like a decorative light show to you? Or could it possibly be so that any mana disturbance-"

*PZAFF*

I was wet. The water clenched me like the fist of an angry god, pressing itself into my mouth and torturing my eardrums. Far above me I could see a shimmering light, and I kicked my feet desperately towards it. Slowly, too slowly I began to rise. The deathly cold sent my brain into overdrive, and I broke out in spasms. Somehow I managed to stay conscious until I broke the surface, but all I could do was keep my mouth above water as I bobbed up and down. I cannot swim.

This is it, I thought. In memory of Gaylor Stonks, telefragged by a nincompoop.

And then a swirling impossibility opened up in the sky above me, spitting out a familiar inkeeper. A long, slimy tentacle grabbed my leg and pulled me out of the water. It held me dangling upside down in front of the purple maw for what felt like ages. I would have screamed if I had air in my lungs, but all I could do was cough up water, retching and vomiting through my nose.

"UGH. BAD SMELL. BRING BETTER." spake the vortex, and the tentacle tossed me onto a sandy shore. I landed hard on my back, but I was too numb by the cold for it to hurt. I rolled over and dug my hands into fistfuls of wet sand, crying bitter tears of salvation. Good thing I had picked my brown trousers this morning.

A pair of squelching footsteps approached. "Gaylor?" Her voice was shivering. "Gaylor, where are we?" I steadied my breath and spat out a mouthful of sand.

"Where. Is. My. Tophat."

"Um... it's here." Standing over me was Rosie, lips blue, her dress soaking wet and covered in sand. But more importantly, in her outstretched hand she held 50 grams of masterfully wrought silk plush, dyed a most pleasing shade of charcoal. All hope was not lost.

A few seconds later I was back on my feet, and its divine presence graced my head again. I silently thanked the Powers I had splurged on a neat-and-dry enchantment for it, as it remained in pristine condition. I also thanked them that I still had my bag of holding, and reached a shaking hand inside while I looked around.

We were standing on a sandbank jutting out from a rocky shore. Further inland were patches of shrubbery and a few misshapen pine trees, and in the distance the terrain sloped up into rolling hills. A cold wind blew from the ocean, straight through my bones. This was not Rumbark.

I pulled my nettoiage kit out of the bag and broke into a jog towards the vegetation, Rosie panting behind me. One of the pine trees grew in a depression in the terrain where the wind was not so fierce. We hunched down there as best we could, and she started talking while I fiddled with the kit.

"Gaylor. I- I'm sorry t-that thing almost ate you. I... it was talking t-to me, and..." I held up my hand and stopped the nonsense. Finally the kit sprung open and I found what I wanted.

Oh dryness. Sweet, incredible dryness that sprung out in blotches where the tip of the drying rod touched my clothes. A strumpet of mine once scoffed at me for my aversion to towels, but Gaylor always gets the last laugh. Alteration spells are woefully complicated, towels are filthy disease magnets, but rods? Rods are beautiful. Within a minute I was completely dry, and a scouring rod got rid of the worst of the sand, not to mention what I'd done in my smallclothes. Regrettably, my boots were beyond saving.

At that point I noticed Rosie was still talking. "...so it b-brought me here. I still don't know if it was a d-dream, but it seemed very real. Um, can I h-have it now?" She reached her hand out.

"I had a dream too," I said. "I dreamt that all my enemies, green with envy no doubt, decided to pool their resources and perform a hideous act of necromancy, conjuring up a walking curse in the shape of a fat toad following me around and ruining my life! I don’t have a clue where we are, but you can swim home for all I care! Blowing up half the village and then telefragging us into this sandy hellhole at the edge of the world,” I gestured around us, "you're lucky we didn't end up splattered all over the transit hall! Or, Queen help us all, fused together in some flesh abomination! I'm not going to be your babysitter any longer, I've had it with you.”

I turned around and pulled out my slate, gritting my teeth for having to text my father for help. But the thing was dead for some reason. Weren't they supposed to be waterproof?

Then she slapped my tophat off.

"Listen here, you candied, pampered, high and mighty donkey’s arse of a miscreant! I shouldn't have cast a spell inside that teleporter, fine, but I didn't know that! I didn't even mean to do it! And until I met you I didn't know who I was, or what anything was!" She pointed her finger right in my face and I very nearly smacked it away, but then I remembered what that finger could do. The rods had drained all my mana and I would stand no chance against her in a duel.

"And you could have helped me with that," she continued, “because you’re rich and well educated, but no, you were just grinning like an idiot from that nasty poppycock stuff, and then you dumped me off at the sick house like a... like a chicken! You're horrible! And I'm cold, and you're going to give me that rod RIGHT now, or I'm going to... I'm going to put a hole in you to let all that hot air out! Oh, and your trousers STINK like SHIT!" I took a step back and racked my brain trying to think of a comeback. I hate it when other people are right.

Then she snorted. And I chuckled. And then we both started laughing for a while, and then I gave her the rods.

"This is the drying rod, pat yourself down with it first and then use the other one to get rid of all the sand. But be careful, all right? Unless you want to end up as a raisin, you have to throttle your mana." I had a brief flashback to the day my father had presented me with a cage full of rabbits.

"The mana, yeah..." She took the rod and looked at it for a few seconds. "It did feel like something was rushing into my finger when I cast those missiles."

"Do you think you can control it? Try to close your eyes and see if you can rein in the flow a bit."

She closed her eyes and bit her lips, and I could definitely sense her mana fluctuating. Queen almighty, she was powerful. "I think... I may be able to... put a stopper in it. At least for a while."

"Good," I said. Or the rabbit dies. "Those things are pretty safe though, worst that can happen is it explodes and takes your hand off." She dropped the rod like a snake. "Just kidding."

A couple more minutes and we were both in a presentable state. The wind had died down a bit and the air was actually not that cold, but what worried me was that the sun was about to set. Hopefully we had only been stuck in the tele-loop for a few hours, but it was entirely possible we had traveled so far that it was a different season. I sincerely hoped we hadn’t gone millions of years back in time.

"We need a fire," she said and rummaged through her pockets. I was pleasantly surprised when she pulled out a firemaker and a tinderbox. "What?" she said with a cheeky smile. "What kind of innkeeper do you think I am?"

"An enthusiastic one for sure, but I'll hold my judgment until I've seen you manage a full tavern on a Herald's Eve. Probably best you use that thing instead of casting a fireball and incinerating us both. I'll head over and see if there's any driftwood we can burn, I'm sure there are some dead shrubs around here too.” I got up from the hollow and headed back towards the shore.

As per usual, I got lucky. I only had to traipse along the beach for a few hundred meters before I saw the bone-bleached remains of a tree that must have washed up during a storm. A couple of branches looked thick enough to serve as firewood. There were also piles of dried, stinking seaweed along the beach that looked flammable, but they were full of bugs and I’d rather not touch them.

To call me a physically impressive man would be a heavily modified truth, but my short time in the Academy hadn’t been entirely without results. I popped a few spirit stones, absorbed the mana and then cast a couple of Force Bolts at the base of the branches. It didn’t snap them off as I had hoped, but it splintered the wood enough that I could twist them off after struggling for a bit. Dragging them behind me over my shoulders, I headed on back. I still lamented the death of my boots, but there was nothing more to it; the sand and the sea had marred the leather in a way no scouring rod could undo.

Rosie had already found enough tinder to get a small, smoky fire going, and she helped me drag the branches down in the hollow. I spread out my greatcoat on the sandy ground and slumped down on it, exhausted. At least I wasn’t cold anymore. She broke a few sticks off, threw them on the fire and sat down next to me.

"So. As I was saying while you were being a fathead and not paying attention, you disappeared out of the shield and your hat fell on the floor. I picked it up, and then I was… tugged into someone else.”

“Yeah, me too. I’ve heard that can happen.” I shuddered at recalling how it had felt, and thanked the stars I was still my own charming self. "I’m not exactly sure how the longports work, you’d have to ask at the Academy, but they operate directly on the soul somehow. Quite possibly anything can happen when they go wrong.”

“Right,” she said. “I think I’d like to go there some day, magic is very intriguing. But then, at some point it felt like I was being… brought back. By that thing. It took me to where it lived. It’s a giant eyeball in a pink ocean, and those tentacles are just the eyelashes on it, it’s… really really big.” I looked at her, but she only stared into the flames.

“And then it talked to me,” she continued. "It was like it knew me somehow, it even called me “boss". And it said we still had a deal and that it wanted more. Then I said I just wanted to get back to you, so it spat me out here, and you know the rest. But I’ve seen it before, Gaylor. It was that same thing that brought me to the inn, when I first met you.”

I frowned. Thinking back, I realized that the purple void that nearly ate me had been the same thing I’d written off as a poppy dream earlier. And it hadn’t seemed to mind the taste of those two mages. If Rosie had a pact with it somehow, that would go a long way towards explaining her insane mana reserves and complete lack of memory. Probably the Rosie I had known was long gone, and the one sitting next to me was actually the incarnation of some warlock that had lost their mind in a previous deal. Or maybe this all really was the poppycock doing its job and I was currently drooling in an alcove at the inn.

Whatever the case, this could be an interesting relationship to cultivate. If there's one thing my father hates, it's warlocks.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Uh, as long as it doesn’t try to eat me again. Please tell it not to do that. Did it feel like it someone or something you could reason with? Or was it just… hungry?” Gods, I was hungry too. What I wouldn't give to be back at The Fat Duck digging into a plate of wings.

She pondered for a while. “I don’t know. It did seem kind of… simple. I wouldn’t even know how to contact it again. Oh! But that reminds me! You just wait here and I’ll be right back!” She got up from the hollow and marched off. I decided to remain here and feed the fire. I checked my slate again, but it still had no connection to any Core. Could we possibly have gone off the continent?

Eventually she returned, carrying the mangled remains of a very large crab. “Here!” she said, but she looked a bit worried. “Uh, we can eat these, right? It grabbed hold of my dress when I got out of the water earlier, so I smashed it with a rock, but the blue thing said they were edible, so I left it on the shore before I went over to you.” I looked from the crab, to her hopeful expression and back at the crab. And I grinned.

“You’ll have to explain what the blue thing is some other time, but this,” I got up and took the crab from her, “this is a premium mudcrab. And that means we’re in southern Eldebark somewhere, and Eldenrose is a few hours north of those bluffs.” I put the crab next to the embers, and it sizzled with the promise of dinner.

"And yes, they are so edible. And you’re the greatest innkeeper in the world. These babies cost a fortune at restaurants.” I hugged her, she lit up like a sunrise, and we sat down while I reached into my bag of holding. Again, I silently laughed at the bumpkin who had once mocked me for bringing my spice collection wherever I went. Mudcrab just wasn’t mudcrab without saffron.

The sun had gone down. The meal had been gorgeous, and we were lying next to one another on my greatcoat, watching the fire and talking about everything and nothing. She had many questions and I did my best to answer them all.

“I’m sorry I called you a toad,” I said after a while. "And you’re not fat at all. If anything, you’re pleasantly plump. Like a duck.”

She elbowed me in the ribs. “You don’t smell all that bad either. It’s a miracle you fit your head inside that tophat though. Has anyone ever told you you’re a cocky bastard?"

“Yes, but I had to kill them afterwards.” She giggled.

Sure, there was an opportunity here. And I thought about it, of course. She certainly had her charms, and more of a spine than most women I've met. But if I can be said to have a problem, it's a general lack of ability to care about anything. It's an occupational hazard when you’re a man who has everything, and somehow I didn’t feel like adding Rosie to that list. Besides, sand has a tendency to go everywhere, and I only had so many spirit stones for the scouring rod.

The fire was warm and I was quite content to lie next to her watching the stars. For the first night in a long time, I slept until well past opening hours.