Dungeon 42

Optional Options

Chp 91

I drummed my fingers on my thigh as I considered the conversation with Tiller. She seemed nice enough from what very little I knew about her. The contract with the Demonic Hawk was a surprise but nothing catastrophic.

What little I could find in my encyclopedia painted demonic animal contracts as reasonably straightforward. As Tiller put it, a bribe would be offered, and if the creature accepted, a pact was made. The demon got the bonded human’s mana to itself for power but had to render service in exchange. No years of lives or souls changed hands.

Despite the good news, my mind was fixed on something else. Tiller asking about making a contract had latched like a barb in my mind. I’d been honest, I wasn’t going to for now, but it wasn’t totally impossible.

Tiller would have to be honest with Elim. That was a given. Lying to someone I’d already built up a decent working relationship with was at best counterproductive. Despite that, I wasn’t sure which way I’d go in the end if it came down to it. Like I’d said to the woman herself, she was a wild card from my perspective.

“Mistress-” Chris whined. I looked over, my glare cutting him off. He’d spent a while writing “Pants are not a hat” on a chalkboard I’d set up just for him. The incident being half my fault, I’d told him to write it as many times as he could rather than set a specific goal. So far, he’d only managed to write it thirty times. Unfortunately, Chris wasn’t really fastidious about his handwriting. Still, he tried to make it legible, so I cut him some slack.

“Ten more times, then you're done,” I said, then sighed. He’d been relatively meek after having most of the bone brigade see his Illusionary fleshy bits. Illusionary fleshy bits which were firmly in the off position for the moment. Why Chris had been wearing pants on his head when I activated the illusion of life was still a mystery I didn’t care about getting an answer to.

I could turn the illusion of life on, off, and edit Chris’s appearance. However, I’d decided it was more manageable to turn it off until his punishment was over. Though things had gotten weird, I was game to try again. So as Chris entered the home stretch, I started preparing for round two.

I took a mirror out of storage and set some of Chris's clothes next to him in a neat pile. If he was wearing pants would not be left to chance this time. Chris got dressed without protest, thankfully.

I opened the editing panel for his illusion of life. I straight up winced at what I saw. I had a kind of mental image of Chris with skin that was Dickensian in nature. Like the artful dodger grown up and foul-mouthed after a stint in an “institution of higher learning.” Rough but very much still a tv-movie good-looking teenager.

The kid I was looking at was an incarnation of poverty and disease, not a Hollywood representation of genteel poverty. There was some kind of rash on his face, acne, bad teeth. It was a long list of things that added up to living hard and eating poorly. That wasn’t even counting the burns, scars, and other signs of repeat abuse.

“Chris… Is this what you looked like when you were alive?” I asked in a neutral voice. It took a hellacious amount of effort to manage that. Fortunately, Chris had been facing the wrong way as he pulled on his clothes and didn’t catch any of my internal struggles.

“Dunno- Oh shit, yeah. That's me alright,” Chris said, sounding pleased.

“Oh, good, just wanted to make sure,” I said, not letting anything untoward leak into my voice.

“What are all these things?” Chris asked, pointing at the editing options.

“Well, because it's magic, you can change how you look a bit. Watch,” I said as I selected an option. It removed the acne, and Chris leaned in to examine the image of himself.

“Well, I was already the handsomest lad in the downs. Couldn’t hurt to put a spitshine on it,” Chris said with a kind of glee.

“Yeah, uhm… You can feel free to make whatever edits you want,” I said. Then, as if the system had been waiting for those exact words, a new window popped open. This one was clearly oriented from Chris’s view. He jumped back in surprise, and it followed him.

After getting over having a window of his own, Chris immediately started checking options, turning things on and off with abandon.

“You can also feel free to activate or turn off your illusion yourself. So long as you're wearing pants in public when it's on and you aren't above ground when you try to turn it off,” I added. With Chris's new activity casting a spell over him, he’d gone to grab a can of chaos and flop on the couch.

I had around an hour to myself to think. I was doing my best not to think about Chris and what kind of life left someone looking like he had at sixteen. Unfortunately, I failed pretty miserably at it.

It was one of the weird aspects of the skeletons. I knew they were evil according to their alignments. I was even willing to say a lot of them had done some fairly heinous shit by choice. But at the same time, I didn’t really get the cartoon villain vibe from any of them.

They felt like people who’d grown up in shitty places who’d made bad choices. Of course, it didn’t excuse the fairly long list of terrible things, but it made me question the label. It seemed pretty unfair, especially since the god(ess) or what have you didn’t much seem to care about ordinary lives.

“MISTRESS!” Chris crowed triumphantly, running over to me and doing a full turn. He’d reactivated his illusion, and I was looking at a much healthier but still rough fight club Christmas elf of a boy. One ear was nicked and possibly bitten. A scar ran vertically from just beside his chin up through his lips. Another ran horizontally just under his eyes through his nose. Finally, what I felt was a scar from a noose encircled his neck.

“Didn’t take the first time,” Chris chirped. He'd noticed me looking at the noose scar. His clothes consisted of a sleeveless tunic and shorts, so I could still see a fair amount of him. He had several scars and a couple of burns on his body, like his face. There was also a tattoo of a snake coiling around his bicep.

“Is that the world eater?” I asked, distracted from the scar on his calf. The figure was typical in most religious doctrines I’d browsed. It held a place less like the devil and more Cthuluian in nature. The inevitable end of the world that could only be delayed.

“Yeah… Do I have to remove it?” Chris asked with a smirk that didn’t mask something hard in his eyes. He’d always given me a bored scamp with a heart of gold vibe, but that was under the highly controlled conditions of the dungeon. What sort of person he’d be if he had free reign and wasn’t surrounded by functionally immortal monsters wasn’t something I knew.

“No, though I’d like to know what it means to you,” I answered.

“Not how I got it?” Chris countered with a smile. There was a disconnect between his easy-going tone and how he looked at me. I didn’t doubt he was amused. His emotions felt sincerely expressed. The thing getting under my skin was a predatory glitter in his eyes.

“Some guy stabbed you with inky needles, repeatedly,” I replied, and he chuckled.

“You’re not wrong,” Chris said with a smirk.

“I was part of a cult of the serpent… sort of. I did what they asked. They gave me money and a place to sleep. I thought it was a good deal, but they apparently grew tired of my lack of faith in a lack of faith,” Chris said, pointing at the noose mark.

“So, Nihilism-” I started but stopped. It was probably one of those things that wouldn't mean anything to Chris.

“That’s the name of a philosophy from my old world. It meant rejecting faith, morals, and pretty much anything that claims life or how it’s lived has an inherent value. Basically, everything’s made up, and nothing has meaning,” I explained. It was just one of many doctrines people made up, and some even lived by. I probably felt a lot less uncomfortable about that kind of thing than someone from this world would.

“Sounds close enough, just tag on "so do what we say" and I think you’ve got it,” Chris said before snickering.

“Want to hang out, or would you rather show off your new look?” I asked. I felt proud I’d managed to be pretty chill about his tattoo. Finding out about the nihilistic doom cult was off-putting. Despite that, I remembered what he looked like without editing. Like he’d lived a life hard enough to make buddying up with that cult, despite not believing, seem like a good idea.

“Deeefinately going to show off,” Chris said with impish delight. I got a moderate to middling lousy feeling about his delight but let it be. He had a new look. He deserved to show it off and feel cute.