"Huh, I guess you wouldn't know that, would you? An NPC is a non-player character."

The space between Nikola's eyebrows wrinkled. "And why did you call me one?"

The rope-laden boy's eyes went wide as he considered how to answer, and he swallowed before he did. "I... I'm not telling you until you let me go."

"If I let you go, you will leave, and then you will not be here to tell me."

"I'll tell you before I go."

"I have many more questions for you. This one is only the tip of the questioning iceberg."

"The longer you keep me tied up, the less I'll want to answer your questions."

Her nostrils flared then, a long puff of air flowing through them. How quickly the coward grew teeth when he had something to use against her. She realized, in that moment, how very ill-equipped she was to bargain. Usually, her problem would be dead by now, reduced to nothing but a memory in her mind. The urge to use her dining knife as a murder knife gnawed at her fingertips.

"The fewer of my questions you answer, the more I'll want to hurt you."

Another gulp. "But if I'm dead, I can't answer anything. Or I'll respawn and just run off to find my friends."

"Fine," she barked. "We can do the bargaining thing. I am not going to let you go yet, but if you tell me what it means to be a 'non-player character', and why you called me one, I will free your arms and give you bedding for the night. You will sleep free, instead of trussed up like a roast."

Her prisoner rose one shoulder, and then the other, wincing with the motion. "God, that sounds good. My arms hurt so fucking much right now. Okay, you've got yourself a deal."

The muscles in her shoulders went slack with relief. She gave a soft nod, and then made her way behind him and knelt down to his level. It took several minutes for her to undo her handiwork, but soon his bindings were reduced to a scraggly lump on the floor.

He groaned and rubbed his arms, each one sporting a series of grooves that made a sort of lattice pattern. To her eyes, it looked rather like an art piece, especially as the colour was returning to his flesh.

"My end of the bargain has been fulfilled. You may feed yourself the rest of your bowl, if you wish." Nikola went back to where she had been, and sat with her knees to the stone as she started to feed herself as well. The meat was tender and fraying at the edges, and the vegetables were soft with just a tiny bit of chew to their centers. The cabbage gave the dish a vegetal flair and the pickling liquid made everything sing.

But as usual, the best part of the meal was the bread. The crunchy exterior that gave way to the airy, springy center had her heart, and her taste buds as well. She tore a chunk from her loaf and dipped it in the broth, and then popped it into her mouth.

Mmmmm...

A brief visual check on the one across from her showed he had completely ditched the knife and was using segments of their shared loaf to just scrape the remainder of his soup into his mouth.

"That hits the spot! Wow, I wouldn't have expected a murderer to be such a good cook."

Nikola shot him a glare. "Let's not get too comfortable calling me such a thing out loud. Now, I believe we had a deal."

"Right, right. K, sooo, how to explain all of this to someone who is probably going to have no idea what I'm talking about?" He used his newly freed hand to cup his chin and looked upward, searching his brain for the info.

After going 'hmmmm' for a few minutes, he looked dubiously in her direction. "I'm only telling you the answer to your exact question, because believe me, you're going to have tons of other ones after I answer these two."

Begrudgingly, she nodded.

"Alright. So a non-player character is a character in the world who isn't controlled by the player. They're uhhh... a fixture in the universe, and they give the player quests and stuff. You are Nikola Brightdark, an NPC in this world. You are the daughter of Hansen Brightdark, a man who was sent to the dungeon for his crimes. You're one of the most popular NPCs in this entire game. They have a special edition version box with you on the cover and everything."

Her icy eyes shook. This was obviously some kind of nonsense he was feeding to her to get her to let him out, right? What other motivation could he have for telling her such lies? She was a fixture in the world, a mere deliverer of 'quests'? What sort of ridiculous drivel was he on about?

She looked down at her hands to ground herself, but doing so had the opposite effect. Was she flickering? Right before her eyes, her hands were developing a see-through quality, complete with discoulouration and the appearance of blackened squares and rectangles.

"Are-are you okay?"

"I don't know," she breathed. She felt like her skin was being pricked by tiny bees - not that she knew what that felt like. "This has never happened before."

"Try to calm down. Here, breathe with me." He sucked in a long, slow breath, his chest puffing out with the introduction of the new air.

Nikola copied him, and her chest puffed out too.

"Good, aaand again." Together, they pulled and pushed air through their bodies. Soon, after a few rotations, she began to solidify again.

"There we go. How are you feeling now?"

Nikola's eyelids fluttered and she assessed her condition. She felt a bit wobbly, but otherwise fine. "My condition is improving, I think. What you said just now, your answers to my questions, is there any way you're lying to me?"

The navy-haired Player Character shook his head, and as he spoke, his voice was gravelly. "I'm not lying." His statement had a certain graveness to it, as if he was sad to speak it.

"You are right. I have many more questions. But the first thing I wish to say is that I will not sit here and simply watch as you tell lies. If you continue to obscure the truth, I will not hesitate to make you my next victim."

Her prisoner looked at her with an expression she couldn't read. "You know... I've been sitting here so scared I've almost peed myself three or four times, so I haven't done much in the way of thinking. How are you talking to me right now? Has there been some huge patch I don't know about?" His eyes scanned her, from her hair to her knees. "How are you answering my questions as I ask them?"

It seemed like her threat had gone right over his head - his mind was elsewhere right now.

The question struck her as odd, but it was also one she had been asking herself, in fewer words. Ever since she had apologized to the blacksmith, she had been responding to inquiries without the use of her conversation branches. She had never thought anything of them; they had been there for as long as she remembered, guiding her.

She didn't know whether she should confide in this blue boy. But after mulling it over for but a moment, she decided that if he became a problem, she could just kill him.

"I am unsure. Usually, I have the option to choose between several choices when someone speaks to me, but recently I have found them lacking."

"So you're just responding to me as I speak? By yourself?"

"Yes."

"Wow. This is really... cool, but weird. So I'm actually speaking to Nikola Brightdark right now?" His voice cracked near the end of his sentence, his voice getting higher and higher as he spoke.

"You are."

"I'm in Nikola Brightdark's dungeon, and I was just tied up by Nikola Brightdark."

"Please stop saying my name," she delivered swiftly, "and I prefer to call this the basement." 'Dungeon' sounded too much like the place where they were keeping her father, and she got a wiggly feeling in her stomach when the comparison was drawn between this situation and his own.

"Wow, okay. Wow. I have no idea what this means, but I bet there are implications. I really wish my friends were here so I'd have someone to bounce ideas off of. Not that you're not a someone, probably, I just... they're a lot more 'in the know' than you are right now."

Nikola shook her head back and forth. "I am not offended."

"Wow. Wow. I'd say I didn't believe you, but here you are, talking to me."

Nikola settled back into the spot by her cooling soup and finished it off, along with the accompanying bread. As she consumed it, she couldn't help but miss her caged parent, whose loaves were always at least three times as good as hers. Still, it tasted like memories as it went down.

"I am going to go get you your bedding now, and then I am going to go to sleep." She stood and, without giving him much time to respond, she closed and latched the chunky door behind her. She and her father kept the sheets and such in a little closet, so she made her way to it and picked out a furry blanket, a wooly blanket, and a pillow stuffed with hay.

Then, she returned to the lowest floor and ducked through the door after unlocking it. "Here. You may arrange them in whatever way you wish." She tossed them into the pile with his rope, and the pillow made a grassy thud as it hit the floor. She picked up their dishes from dinner and arranged them against one of her arms, holding them to her body.

"Thanks, Nikola Brightdark."

"Stop saying my name." The way he said it, all familiar and warm all of a sudden, made her shoulders tense up. "Actually, what is your name?"

"My username is Lukeknight64, but you can just call me Luke."

Nikola narrowed her eyes. "I do not know what a username is, Luke."

"I'll tell you when you let me go," he returned, already arranging the fur blanket to sit flush with the floor. It was thick and peppered with black, white and brown fur, presumably from the local wolves.

"Goodnight," she repeated on her way out, with a bite to the words this time. She made her way upstairs, put their dishes away in a bucket with water in it, and retrieved a copy of the bedding she had gotten for Luke. Then, she made a nest for herself in the kitchen. The kitchen floor was no softer than the tiles in the basement, but there was a residual warmth from the fire she had used to heat their dinners, and the scent of fresh bread was still hanging in the air.

Since her father had been taken away, she had been considering sleeping in his bedroom; tonight, this room felt more like home.

"Goodnight," she whispered into the dark.