A Lonely Dungeon

There was a moment of silence, which budded, fruited and seeded a plantation of further awkward moments.

"Uh... Are you sure you got the right place?" carefully asked the human Katie, after it became apparent that everyone else was too busy staring at each other to react intelligibly.

"Everyone shut up!" shouted not-Blobby, despite the fact that, for the most part, no-one had been talking. "Who are you three? No, what are you three? I'm pretty sure mother didn't make any beastkin like you," she continued, pointing at the goddess Katie, before rotating her finger to the zombie Katie. "Nor any demons like you."

"How are we supposed to answer that if we shut up?" answered the zombie. "Oh, I know. We could write!"

She beamed proudly before tapping the goddess on the shoulder and doing an exaggerated pantomime of writing, then holding a hand out expectantly.

The goddess pulled out a harisen from thin-air and whopped the zombie over the head, who proceeded to mime a protracted, overdramatised death.

"Sorry about those two," said human-Katie. "We're Katie, all three of us, but those two... had some difficult experiences and have gone a bit crazy."

"A bit?" asked the delver, before realising she'd said it out loud. She clamped a hand over her mouth, blushing.

"I'm not crazy. I'm just differently normal," disagreed the zombie.

"Just shut up and answer the question!" demanded not-Blobby.

"She did it again!" complained zombie-Katie.

"I'm human," interrupted human-Katie before things could kick off again. "Those two used to be; they were originally me. Then magic happened and they stopped being human, then time travel happened, and things got complicated. If you want a better explanation, I'm going to need a few hours, a whiteboard, and at least a dozen different coloured markers."

"Hey, do you think that's the slime the guy upstairs thought we were going to see?" asked the zombie in the ensuing silence. "How weird is it that he turned out to be right?"

The slime in question sprouted a tendril, which she clamped over the zombie's mouth.

"Mmmpf!"

"Careful; she'll probably enjoy it," sighed the only sensible Katie in the room.

"Right," declared the goddess, speaking up for the first time in the encounter. "Looks like we've got the wrong place. She's not the one mucking around with people's souls. We need to go deeper."

"Look, will you please calm down! I get that you're angry, but you can't just barge in somewhere, interrupt a beauty treatment, then go 'oops wrong place' and leave again without apologising."

"Fine, I'm sorry. I rushed. I saw an unparasitised soul and made assumptions. It won't happen again."

"You're still rushing," pointed out the human Katie. "Might I remind you that she just mentioned a mother who supposedly made beastkin and demons? Isn't that a thing you should ask about?"

The absent-minded goddess replayed the previous exchanges of words, having missed it the first time around due to being busy scanning the rest of the dungeon with divine senses.

"Oh," she admitted.

"Should I... leave?" meekly asked the poor delver, completely out of her depth.

"No way! I'm almost done, and I'm not letting you out of here with one nail unpainted just because a bunch of rude intruders showed up. In fact, it's them who should leave. Mother?"

Another awkward silence ensued.

"Mother?" repeated the slime.

"Ah, sorry, but if you're trying to talk to someone outside, I've kinda frozen time around this room," admitted the goddess. "Didn't want anyone to have time to notice we were here."

"You can't just... do that," moaned the exasperated human Katie. "When we get back, I swear I'm spending the next week giving you 'being normal' lessons."

"Mmmpf?" asked the zombie, who still had a mouth full of slime.

"No, you're a lost cause," answered the human.

"Mmmpf?!"

"Not at all. I just made an educated guess."

"What the hell is going on here?!" screamed not-Blobby, only resisting the urge to throttle all three Katies because one of them had cut off her connection to Erryn. Effortlessly. The slime not known as Blobby was herself feeling somewhat out of her depth, and also somewhat terrified. Terror was new. Normally she was the cause of terror, not its recipient, and she decided she didn't like it very much.

Human-Katie facepalmed. "Just... finish whatever you're doing. We'll wait quietly. Apparently we have time."

Goddess-Katie looked very much like she wanted to disagree, but was silenced by a glare, and backed away against a wall instead.

The slime peered in suspicion, but slowly withdrew her tendril.

"Aww," complained the zombie, disappointed at losing yet another gag.

"Wish I could summon a harisen out from nowhere too," sighed the human, dragging the zombie over to the wall.

A few minutes of rushed silence followed, not-Blobby doing a hurried job and not living up to her usual high standards, but her delver client having no intention whatsoever of complaining. From her point of view, anything that got her out of the situation a second quicker was worth it. Human-Katie waited patiently, goddess-Katie less so, while zombie-Katie got bored and wandered off within the first five seconds, carefully inspecting a well-stocked bookcase instead.

"Right, let's start this all over," sighed human-Katie as the delver fled through the exit back to the floor's boss chamber, freezing the moment she stepped outside of the bubble of time. The door slowly swung shut behind her. "Hello. I am sane Katie, the fluffy one is crazy Katie, and the one with the attention span of a caffeinated toddler is insane Katie. Sorry for intruding, but crazy Katie has a thing about soul magic and mind control, and someone around here is doing both."

"Can we just drop the complicated subjects and have kinky tentacle sex instead?" interrupted the freshly designated insane Katie, without taking her eyes off the book she was reading. She might even have been flushed, but it was hard to tell with her non-existent blood-flow.

"Oh, come on. Even I know that's rude," pointed out the goddess, adding, "besides, I gave you kinky tentacle sex yesterday," in a quieter, slightly dejected voice.

"Yes, but this way you can be on the receiving side," pointed out the zombie. "Given the state of this bookshelf, I suspect the slime-girl is a kindred spirit."

"Kill me now..." muttered human-Katie, face cradled in hands, the will to live ebbing rapidly. "Will the pair of you please just. Shut! Up!"

The not-completely-sane pair of Katies shut up as self-professed sane Katie shook dust loose from the ceiling by means of pure volume.

"Thank you. Now, where was I? Ah, yes, sorry for intruding. Might I ask for your name?"

"Uh... Actually, it's Katie," said slime-Katie, who had heard the name from a delver the day before and decided she liked it.

"Oh, for goodness' sake," muttered human-Katie. "As if things weren't confusing enough already. Whatever. Back on topic; someone is mind controlling the population of the city above..."

"Town," corrected goddess-Katie.

"... and we wondered if you knew anything about it," finished human-Katie, smoothly ignoring the interruption. "Oh, and our original reason for coming; we were wondering why there are so many humans everywhere."

"You mean the Law? The thing Mother made to stop the idiots up there genociding themselves into extinction again? And there aren't that many humans. Demons and fairies outnumber them. Something to do with how the human birth rate scales with population, but the demon and fairies scale with occupied territory, so humans will win in the end, but for now they've been overtaken."

"And... now we're back over to you," said human-Katie, ceding the floor to the goddess while trying not to think too hard about what sort of reproductive arrangements could scale with territory, or how someone could go extinct more than once.

"We meant humans... well... everywhere. Not just here."

"Outside of Synklisi? That was what I meant."

"Outside of the planet," called over the zombie, who had started flipping through a second book, stopping on the occasional picture that must have consumed significant amounts of pink pigments to produce.

"Outside of the... Wait..." said the slime, eyes narrowing with suspicion, which didn't actually make a lot of difference given that both eyes and sockets were the same translucent blue. "Are you from Earth?"

"Oh my. Well, this suddenly got a lot more interesting," beamed the zombie, nevertheless not looking away from her book.

"How do you know about Earth?!" exclaimed a suddenly startled human-Katie.

"Hah. Knew it! You guys again!"

"Again?"

"No, I'm not from Earth," interrupted the goddess, who'd accepted that she'd never fit in anymore if she went back. "I'm from... you know, I don't think my predecessor ever named the place. But yes, we know of Earth. Big place. Lots of humans. Just like my place. And, apparently, here. We were wondering why there were humans everywhere."

"How in the hells am I supposed to know that?"

"Hey, wait a minute!" chimed in human-Katie. "It's not just that this world has humans, but that she's speaking English!"

"She's not, actually. I'm just magically translating," pointed out goddess-Katie.

"Oh."

"Everyone back on my world, though. Yes, they spoke English."

"That's even weirder than there being humans! Wait, does that mean she's not actually called Katie, and it's just a translation?"

"So we're just ignoring the mind control now?" asked the zombie, who was holding a page up and scrutinising it from various different angles. The contorted figures depicted within made it difficult to tell which way was supposed to be up.

"One topic at a time!" complained human-Katie.

"No," stated slime-Katie, the localised inanity overcoming her fear. It was hard to take a goddess seriously when she was... well... Katie. "Sorry, but all of you are crazy. I'm with the walking corpse person; kinky tentacle sex is sounding like a great idea right now. If you want to ask difficult questions, save it for Mother."

"Yay!" beamed the zombie, finally closing her book. "Also, you really need to hook me up with your supplier. You have great taste."

"They died almost seven hundred years ago."

"So? That's no excuse," shrugged the very much dead zombie. "People are just lazy."

Human-Katie, despairing of anything ever making sense ever again, found herself a corner to sulk in, although, when the noises started up behind her, curiosity won out the day. She was, after all, Katie, no matter how often she tried to claim sanity.

"Didn't we come here for something important?" she asked a number of exhausting hours later, relaxing in an enormous bath. Discovering the slime's room had an en suite equipped with a waterfall had been one of the many highlights of the day.

"Mmmpf?" answered zombie-Katie from the ceiling.

"Yes, soul magic and mind control," agreed goddess-Katie, who was trying to wash the slime out of her tails. "It's fine. I looked into it while you were doing that thing with the lightning crystals. Yes, it's the demons back home all over again, but the one doing it would rather die than start eating her slaves, unlike a certain red dragon. It's not like this is my world, so I'll leave her to it."

"Mmmpf!"

"Yes, yes. I'll make some when we get back."

"Don't even wanna know," sighed human-Katie. "But I'm sure there was something else. Something weird."

She looked around the marble room, the pair of them soaking in a bath big enough to swim in, fed by a steaming waterfall. The chandelier above them contained rather more zombie than it usually did, and a puddle of slime was floating in the middle of the pool, a yellowy core bobbing in its centre. Slime-Katie turned out to not be great at holding her usual shape when her stamina pool ran dry. A bunch of angelic statues peered at them accusingly.

"Weirder," she corrected herself.

"You were asking why humans were everywhere," answered slime-Katie, her voice heavily distorted.

"Ah yes, that."

"I have no idea. Mother doesn't, either. Or at least, she was very confused when someone turned up from Earth the last time, and that wasn't long ago, so I doubt she's worked it out since."

"Really? So this whole visit has been a waste of time?" sighed human-Katie.

"Mmmpf!" denied the zombie, feeling her time had not at all been wasted.

"Yeah, it was a good day out, and we made a new friend. We should come visit from time to time."

"What about the thing about humans?! Are we just going to ignore it?"

"Maybe Anya knows? I'll ask next time I see her."

Three Katies continued to soak in the bath, the fourth swinging in the air above. All were happy and content, so what did one little mystery matter?

And if one were to zoom out a little, moving their eye away from Erryn's world in a direction that couldn't be displayed by any compass, one would find themselves back in the Void. An infinite ocean of nothing, in which uncountable universes floated around like bubbles, the Creatures of the Void swimming silently around them. Sometimes, two bubbles would stray apart, and mages would wonder why their summoning spells suddenly cost an order of magnitude more mana. Sometimes, they would drift together, close enough for the walls between them to thin to almost nothing. Perhaps things would leak through. Ideas, concepts or dreams. A trickle of mana into a world that formerly had none. A drift of souls.

And sometimes... they'd collide.

Someone who had pulled their eye back from Erryn's world would have spotted Earth a mere shadow's width away from it. They might also have spotted Katie's pair of worlds, joined at the hip. Another world hovered nearby, very similar to Earth, but still baring the scars of Erryn's discovery of liquid mana. A whole cluster of universes had gathered together, and far away from them, but growing rapidly closer, was another.

And it didn't look like it was going to stop.