I expected Odin to show up the next time I fell asleep. Perhaps to taunt me, perhaps to manipulate me further, perhaps to go for the kill and offer a deal I would be forced to refuse.

What I didn't expect was a dreamless, uneasy slumber.

When I woke up, I half-expected to still be in a dream, with Odin waiting to finally spring the trap they'd spent weeks building. But... Experimentally, I waved my hand in front of my face. Unless Odin had somehow fundamentally changed the rules of soulspace, I wasn't in a dream. This was reality.

Odin had thoroughly outmaneuvered me, held me over a barrel in order to extort me, and then... left me entirely alone.

Somehow, the thought terrified me more than if they'd showed up in full demonic form, tempting me with every trick they knew.

My stomach growled, and I grimaced. Odin could wait; if they weren't immediately going to twist my brain into knots, I could at least spend some time trying to find something to eat in this hellhole. But I'd already spent a day wandering the upper reaches of the Plane of Elemental Falsehood, and I'd found nothing but wooden steaks and salads made of solid glue.

So that left me with only one choice.

I had to go deeper.

###

As dungeon names went, "Do Not Enter" was one of the scariest. Oh, sure, it wasn't "Quarznidoth's Tomb" or "Home of a Thousand Pointy, Tentacled Horrors," but there was something primally worrying about the only lettering on the dungeon entrance being "Do Not Enter," scrawled in a fluid that could have been oil or blood or something in between.

But I needed food in my belly, and it wasn't like there were many job opportunities in my nearby area, so into Do Not Enter I went. At least my contrarian side got some kicks out of defying the message.

The halls within were slick with oil, iridescent rainbow sheens glancing off their surface wherever one of the dungeon's strange, sourceless sunbeams struck. I could hear the click-click-clack-ing of one of those clockwork monstrosities that pretended to be human in the distance, and pointedly stayed away.

The only weapon I had was a wooden chair leg, and my only relevant offensive spell was soulsight. In theory, my soulsight would let me sense when anything with a soul got within a couple dozen meters of me... but that didn't exactly help when mimics didn't have souls.

I didn't fancy my odds against one of those demonic mimics in my current state. I was alone on my little adventure, and I needed to prioritize.

Find food, eat the food, live another day. That was my mission. Everything else was irrelevant.

I found it darkly amusing that the inhabitants of the dungeon quite possibly had the same goal as me.

"Hello?" A high-pitched, feminine voice called. Oh, rifts, it was another one of those mimics that could copy voices. The one that had done my mother's voice was creepy enough, but at least I could tell it wasn't human—this one, however, sounded perfectly real. "Is anybody there?"

Nnnnnope. Nope, nope, nope. I wasn't touching that with a ten-foot pole. The last creepy clockwork nasty had nearly gotten me, and that was when I had a convenient ledge to shove it off of; in these cramped hallways, armed with nothing but a stick, a straight-up fight with a mimic was just asking to be turned into dog chow. I hated myself, but I didn't hate myself that much.

But on the other hand...

It could have been a real person. It could have been someone else, lost and hungry and afraid, just like me.

And the part of me that wanted to lie in bed all day and never wake up would get just a little bit stronger if I abandoned someone down here without even trying to look.

"What do we think, gang? All in favor of risking our lives to get eaten by a mimic, say 'aye'," I muttered.

Of course, nobody answered. There was no-one here but me.

"And all in favor of doing nothing, and tiptoeing away to leave someone to die?"

I was alone. Which meant that there was nobody to stop me from doing something monumentally stupid.

Being a solo adventurer was tough.

Cursing the shard of myself that still tried to be a halfway-decent person, I slunk down the oily, dim halls to where I last heard the voice.

"Hellloooooooo?" The voice called out. "Is anyone there?"

I turned the corner and froze.

She looked like a real person, not a mimic. Her pale skin was the pale of flesh, not of cracked ceramic and ebony. Her eyes creased up at the corners instead of swiveling freely in their sockets, and their blue was the blue of a healthy iris, not of too-perfect paint. Her body didn't even tick and ping with metallic sounds like every other mimic I'd met did.

But my soulsight informed me that there was nothing in her heart.

I backed away, but she must have heard the splash of oil, because she turned around. And when she turned, it was relieved and human, not rigid and mechanical. "Oh, thank the rifts! Someone else came through! I thought... I thought that I was alone down here..."

I warily took a step back. "Don't come any closer," I warned, holding my chair leg between us as if it would do anything against a being made of metal.

Her expression flickered—and not in the uncanny shutdown of a mimic entering hunting mode, but... in genuine pain and shock. She complied, though, holding her hands up and taking a step back. "I... I'm sorry. It's just... been so long since I've seen another person."

"Are you?" I asked.

She blinked. "What?"

"A person," I continued.

Emotions flickered across her face—offense, fear, horror, resolution—and slowly, she closed her eyes.

"What... what gave it away?"

I... paused. That... wasn't the response I'd expected from a vicious killing machine. "You... I have soulsight. You don't have a soul." At her hurt expression, some part of me was compelled to say, "...Sorry."

She bitterly laughed. "No. No, don't apologize. I... I should have expected this. Why should I count as a person, anyways? I thought... I thought if I faked it for long enough, I could be... real. Laugh along when adventurers made jokes, instead of dumbly, numbly staring. Cry in pain when I break my leg, instead of idly thinking how inconvenient it was."

"Get out of bed with a smile on your face, instead of lying on the floor, wishing that you'd never wake up," I found myself blurting out.

The mimic turned to me, surprised, and I swallowed heavily.

"I... I know what it's like." I bit my lip, then... well, to hell with it. I was already in the room with the mimic. If she wanted to kill me, she'd have done so already. "Putting on a mask. Waking up every day and pretending to be human. Because you like what they have. Because you want to live in the light with them."

The mimic stared at me, shocked. "Are you another..."

I shook my head. "I'm a human, born and raised. I just... sometimes feel like I don't have a soul, either."

The mimic playing human and the human playing mimic traded long, bone-deep looks for a cautious... considering... vulnerable heartbeat.

Then she reached out to shake my hand.

"Meloai," she said.

"Cienne," I replied, shaking her hand.

"Come on," she said. "It's not safe out here. The other mimics aren't as... much of a person as I am." She shuddered. "I've got a saferoom with human-food and real beds. You'll like it there, I promise."

A faint smile crept across my face. "I believe you, Meloai."

At the use of the name—her name—she smiled back.

Being a solo adventurer was tough.

It was a good thing I'd found a friend.