"You know, I thought your father would be more worried about all the magical malarkey over us being in a poly relationship," I quietly grumbled as I walked up the stairs in my house, and my dear assistant in front of me lightly shrugged.

"It was probably the most comprehensible of the outrageous things we talked about," she whispered back.

"I guess it was also in character," I mused, and she nodded with a hum.

We were talking in a low voice and walking on tiptoes because it was half-past eleven, in the middle of the night, and my sisters were already fast asleep, even though I lifted their curfew during the winter break. Habits die hard, I supposed.

More importantly, since Judy's window couldn't be repaired yet, it was decided that she would spend the night over at my place. Coincidentally, Ichiko remained in the Sennoma household, because after discovering that she could turn into a girl, Judy's mom became completely enamored with her and insisted on adopting her into the family. In fact, she had the little miko sit on her lap throughout the whole discussion, and seemed to be completely lost in her own little world. The fact that Clarke didn't find that odd at all spoke volumes of her.

But speaking of my second father-in-law, during the mandatory explanation about the supernatural and how we were related to it, I let it slip that I was dating both Judy and Elly, after which point he seemingly completely forgot about the wild and wondrous world of mystics, and instead proceeded to rake me over the coals about my relationship. Thankfully it didn't go any further than a few stern looks and disapproving harrumphs, but I had a feeling it wasn't the end of that discussion.

That was all in the recent past though, so let's focus on my present. Namely, Judy throwing herself onto my bed the moment she walked inside and letting out a content sigh.

"Chief? Do you think I should take this opportunity and finally move in with you?"

"Too soon." My instant deadpan answer didn't exactly please her, so I rolled the conversation along. "It's a little late, so do you want to discuss today's events now, or tomorrow morning?"

"I'm not sleepy," she declared, followed by a yawn and a flat, "Ignore that. That's just physiology."

"Yeah, sure," I responded with the smallest of smiles and took a seat on the corner of my bed, and she also sat up properly. "Before anything else, I want to ask you something: have you heard or read anything about Bel in the past?"

"Do you mean recently?"

"No, just in general," I clarified. "Did you ever come across the name in any of our sources?"

My dear assistant paused while she leafed through her mental cabinets, but ultimately shook her head.

"No, I didn't. Why? Are you worried about the lack of fame your alter-ego garnered?"

"Not quite. You see, I caught an interesting conversation through Far Sight earlier this evening…"

After priming her like that, I gave her an abridged explanation of the discussion in Crowey's office and my subsequent browsing of the Celestial Hub. She listened attentively, occasionally nodding along, and once I've reached the end of my description, she let out a thoughtful hum.

"So in short, this Bel of the Tenebrous Flames was the Abyssals' emperor, he had been struck from the records, and he was fantasy-Hitler." She paused here, then added, "Do you think he's the reason why we don't have banker goblins in this setting?"

"That's terribly offensive. Shame on you," I responded flatly, but she didn't take it to heart at all.

"Someone had to say it. More importantly, you do realize how this impacts the Narrative concerning Joshua's prophecies, right?"

"He's supposed to be the herald of the second coming or reincarnation or whatever of this Emperor of Chuuni Titles, right?"

"Precisely," she said as she pointed at me. "And you, his most prominent male friend, is now the closest thing we have to this person."

"You mean my alter-ego."

"A distinction without a difference," my girlfriend scoffed. "As far as the Narrative is concerned, you are the perfect square peg fitting into the square hole it has for an antagonist. The real question is whether it molded the hole to fit you, or sneakily shaped you into fitting the already existing hole."

"That's a weird analogy." After a short beat, I wiped the grimace off my face and shook my head to clear it. "In any case, we can't be sure whether it was a result of Narrative influence, sneaky retconning, or if there's a perfectly reasonable and logical Watsonian explanation, but it doesn't really matter right now."

"It doesn't?"

"Nope. Whatever the reason might be, I decided to go ahead and roll with this and use it to our advantage."

Judy's eyes slowly narrowed into a suspicious squint, and after a long beat, she said, "You're planning to make your Bel persona into the main villain."

"I probably won't take it that far, but yeah, that's the gist of it," I replied with a toothy grin. "You know how you've been joking about me uniting all the antagonists under my wing and becoming an arch-villain, right?"

"I wasn't joking."

Ignoring her retort, I continued with, "Originally I was a little miffed by this development, but on second thought, isn't that great? By assuming the mantle of the bad guy, and filling in the role whenever the narrative progression demands it, I could maintain the big dramatic action-climaxes this world seems to be so fond of while also completely neutralizing the dangers they pose."

"That would require knowing about these climaxes the Narrative is planning ahead of time," Judy said contemplatively, drawing an ambivalent grunt from me.

"Yeah, that's the tricky part, but if you think about it, it's not that hard to predict these situations in advance. Case in point, the whole plot with the new Knights and their planned attack on the tournament."

"Speaking of which," my dear assistant interrupted me with a finger raised, "You told my dad that you had apprehended the perpetrator who broke into my room and that he shouldn't involve mundane authorities in the matter, but you've yet to explain exactly what happened after you jumped out my window. I presume you've captured the Knights."

"Yep. It was simpler than expected, and I managed to overpower them fairly easily. Thankfully, neither of their armors were plot devices, so I could lock them up with minimal trouble." Suddenly a new thought surfaced in my mind, and I hastily added, "On the topic of armors, your father apparently shot the Raven Knight in the butt, but most of the pellets were deflected by the wards on the greaves, so he only suffered minor injuries."

"So birdshot is mostly ineffective against Knights. Noted."

"I wouldn't call it ineffective, considering the armor was deformed and rendered temporarily inoperative where it was hit. By the way, please remind me to fix that before the last day of the tournament. He's going to need it for the attack."

"Hold on, I'm getting confused. Didn't you capture them?"

"Yeah, but there were some complications, the Gorgon Knight guessed that I was playing Bel, and so I decided to make them into accomplices." Judy still looked perplexed, so I did my best to clarify my plans to her. "Let's make sure that we're on the same page: the interruption of the tournament is a given. The grand elder has been scheming around it since the beginning, and it's a cliché, so we can more or less consider it a guaranteed event. If I tried to cut it off at its root, it could lead to unforeseen consequences, but what if I actually play along and have the attack happen, just in a different context?"

"So you're going to have them attack the competition venue to keep the script. Where does Bel come into the picture? Are you going to make it into a three-way conflict?"

"Nah, that's too chaotic. The plan is still in the shimmering phase right now, but so far I figured I'd make them into Bel's brainwashed thralls or something. That's all I can say for now, as it's still pretty much a work in progress."

"I see. Next question: where are you going to be during all this?"

"… I just said that."

"No, I don't mean Bel. I was asking about Leonard S. Dunning." She paused for a beat here, only to then add, "Does the ‘S' stand for scarce?" Another beat followed, then she concluded with, "It's because there is only one of you, even if you play two. Therefore, you're scarce."

"… I guess you must be tired, because you've reached waaay too hard for that one. How about I answer it tomorrow, after you had a good sleep?"

"Don't be silly, Chief. The night is still young, and there are lots of things to be done."

"True, I suppose. We still have to compile all the new implications about Bel and the narrative, plus I still have to go back to the Hub and check if—"

"Chief, don't be dense. You know perfectly well what I meant by what I said."

"Nope, I understood the implication, but I'm stonewalling you," I told her just a touch miffed. "You've just been through a near-kidnapping, I've had a long evening, my muscles are still sore from combat, and now I have a second secret base to secure, furnish, and heat, even if only for a short while. In other words, no lewding tonight."

My dear girlfriend clicked her tongue and uttered a sulky "Spoilsport," so I put my arm around her shoulder and pulled her closer.

"I think you wanted to say 'responsible' but don't worry, I understood your meaning anyway. Now go ahead and have your beauty sleep. We'll have all the time in the world to discuss this topic tomorrow."

"Before or after the date?"

"Either/or."

"Can I say both?"

"… You know, Dormouse, lately I've started to feel that you might be a bit too into this whole lewding business."

"It's just your imagination." Declaring so, she gave me a kiss, then stood up and began to undress. "Can I use one of your shirts for pajamas again?"

"Sure, feel yourself at home."

After thus concluding our discussion, I got up as well and headed outside. As I'd just explained, I still had a long night ahead of me, so I quietly headed downstairs to grab a snack to keep me on my feet. Sparring with Penny and co. and then solo-raiding the hideout of Morgana and Raven Boy was quite exhausting, and since I only ate half a bowl of porridge in-between, my body was craving something high in calories at the moment.

My first stop was at the fridge, but since we haven't cooked anything in the past couple of days, it was only filled with raw ingredients. For a moment, I considered throwing together something simple, but I didn't want to make too much noise in the middle of the night, so I switched my attention to the cupboards and settled on the cookie jar instead. Plus some peanut butter. Also, a glass of hot cocoa. With marshmallows. I'm not going to make any excuses for any of that.

Anyhow, once I sat down with my calorie-kick, I could feel myself slowly deflate with each bite, and as relaxing as this midnight snack was, it couldn't completely wipe away my tension.

While I was doing my best to be confident in front of Judy, I still didn't have a full plan in mind, and that was a bit of a pickle. While I had derailed the 'plot' a couple of times already by anticipating and disrupting the events the potential Narrative may or may not have carefully laid out in front of us, this was the first time I was trying to completely supplant one with my own, and I wasn't exactly fully prepared for the task.

Worse yet, I only had a couple of days to iron out the kinks before the whole grand hostage situation would go down, further increasing the pressure. The fact that I was practically flying by the seat of my pants when it came to predicting the original plot I was about to hijack didn't help things either.

…

Actually, maybe it was the sugar-rush speaking, but I was feeling a little fanciful at the moment, so I decided to come up with a fitting analogy for this whole situation. Since I was in the kitchen, I figured I might as well go with a cooking theme, so here goes nothing:

First off, let's take a look at the ingredients the Narrative prepared on the counter. The main dish was the attack on the tournament, and it consisted of the competition itself, the Knights, and the grand elder's conspiracy, with the mystery ingredient named Xiao sprinkled on top to spice things up.

As for the side dishes, there was the Eastern Draconians' penchant for dueling, my potential conflict with Naoren over Elly, Josh's rivalry with Zihao, and the auction.

As for my contributions, by sneaking a spoonful of Bel into the conspiracy between the grand elder and Morgana, I shifted the focus onto the auction, potentially changing it from a hors d'oeuvres to a full dish. On the same note, I brought various enchanted items and my big bait there as well, the latter of which became kind of redundant due to tonight's events. Then on top of that, there were also my own negotiations with Naoren as well, to offset the grand elder's scheming.

Last, but certainly not least, I brought my own spices to the tournament hostage situation by introducing Bel into the mixture and subverting the Knights.

Now then, that is what I had to work with, but how do I take all of that, and make it into a great scenario-dinner? Honestly speaking, just randomly mixing all the ingredients into a big pile would've been the simplest, and the resulting chaos would technically serve as a meal, but if I've learned one thing about our more-than-hypothetical-but-less-than-theoretical Narrative, it was that it was one of those prima donna chefs, and if things weren't up to its standards, it would throw an enormous hissy-fit.

In less food-centric terms, I had a distinct feeling that if the climax I orchestrated wasn't bombastic enough, we could end up with another contrived 'Mountain Girl and the Knights coincidentally both cause a scene at the exact same time while we're already in the middle of something' kind of situation. Needless to say, it was something I wanted to avoid no matter what.

Still pondering, I finished my meal, if it could be called that, and I was still ruminating by the time I headed upstairs. Once I made sure that everyone was asleep, I planted a sneaky peck on my peacefully slumbering girlfriend's cheek, then immediately Phased away into the secret base's storeroom.

Almost everyone was asleep over there as well, so I quietly picked up a couple of spare electric heaters and Phased over to my next destination. The basement room of the abandoned warehouse was a little cramped at the moment, since my new accomplices and their Squires decided to set up their campsite in there. Surprisingly enough, they weren't sleeping, but I didn't dally for long, and after depositing the boxes, I moved on to ferry over the rest of the daily necessities they would need to stay hidden for the next couple of days.

On my trips back and forth, I ran into a few familiar faces and discussed a few miscellaneous things, such as whether or not the base could have a giant Christmas tree in the middle of the main hall, or if eggnog was really an essential research material, but I didn't really have my heart in any of it, as my brain was still busy trying to combine all the ingredients into a proper full course meal, with a dessert and all.

Because of this, I kind of lost track of time, and before I knew it, it was already five in the morning. The Fauns were early birds, so the ones who returned to the base were already getting ready for the day, while most of the people in the research division were just going to bed after getting caught up in doing their thing and pulling another all-nighter. According to Fred, half the reason why they were getting so friendly with me as of late was due to me moving around the base at night, and them mistaking me for a fellow night owl.

I wasn't going to correct the misunderstanding, and after getting things into order, I had one last stop to make before I headed home. Even though things went in an unexpected direction last evening, Judy still insisted on going on the date we planned in advance, and I didn't really argue with her. We would first go sledding before heading to an inner-city theater to watch a play recommended by Elly, and it was also our last chance to get Christmas gifts for everyone, so there were plenty of reasons I didn't want to miss this day.

However, before all that, there was something I needed to take care of, and since I managed to arrange the ingredients into a more or less coherent set of dishes in my head already, it was time to make contact with the sous-chef. Luckily for me, he was also an early bird type, so without any further ado, I Phased over to his suite.

"Good morning, Naoren," I greeted the man currently still wearing his sleepwear and brushing his teeth in the bathroom, and after the first shock, he jumped back and took up a martial arts stance, made somewhat silly by the toothbrush still hanging out of his mouth.

"Leonard?" he muttered in mild confusion once he recognized me, and after exchanging the toothbrush for his glasses, he added, "What are you doing here? How did you even get in?"

"I needed to talk to you in private, without anyone else being the wiser. As for how I got in, let's just say I have my ways."

"Is that so?" the young clan head muttered in mild annoyance, then gestured for me to wait before he turned back to the sink.

Without any reservations, he proceeded to rinse out his mouth and then used a thick green string to tie his long hair up. That was already enough to put him into presentable shape, thought to be fair, he was quite good-looking from the beginning, silly toothbrush-antics and all. Main characters were annoying like that. Anyhow, he swept his front bangs aside and turned a pair of critical eyes at me.

"I presume you had a very good reason to invade my personal space so early in the morning, so I'm listening."

"I'm happy you are so quick to catch up," I answered with an approving nod. "Long story short, I need your help with something crucial."

"Go on..."

For a second I hesitated on how to best put it, but I ultimately decided to go with the straightforward approach and simply said, "I need you to start a feud with me and challenge me to a duel in public." The guy remained silent and only raised a single puzzled brow, so I flashed my best reassuring smile and added, "Oh, don't look at me like that. Trust me, it's going to be fun and profitable."