Geela was hot on Hari’s heels, and she knew it. The soul searches were returning back stronger with every wall she leapt through, though each skip was a little harder with two passengers to keep together. Bugsquito and Scout made it clear that they’d both rather die than continue traveling with Geela, though, Scout sounded a lot more sure of itself. Bugsquito’s voice wavered a bit more every time it said it.

“I mean it! Just kill me! Kill me! I would go proudly to my death. Just d-do it.” At this last sentence, its voice cracked, and it covered its face with three hands, but not before Geela could see the panic on its little face.

“Foolish monstersquito would allow our foul captor to hear its weakness,” Scout’s voice burbled from her pouch. “I will show no such fear. I will stay strong or die trying.”

Wasn’t it just wonderful? During the actual traveling, it was mostly just griping and whining and cursing Geela to die in all manner of horrible and rather creative ways, which was entertaining enough to keep the days passing smoothly. They would occasionally start bickering with each other, and that was both amusing and educational.

“Just burn through her pocket already,” Bugsquito once said while they rested one ‘evening.’ It kept its voice to a low hiss, probably thinking Geela was asleep or something. “We need to get out of here! You’re in a glove! You can do this, Scout!”

“Call me that again, and I will sentence you to death personally.” Geela could feel Scout tremble with rage in her pocket, but no additional burning emitted. It was too weak. Geela could hypothesize that Bugsquito was also weak, but she couldn't quite test the theory. According to the monsters, it should be able to drain life with its needle nose. Maybe it was at its peak strength but wasn’t meant to be able to escape a cage. It was hard to say for sure but Geela wasn’t going to latch Bugsquito on her arm just to test a theory.

Besides, once she was done here, she could just spend some energy trying to bring the monsters back home. And she had a suspicion that she’d be home soon, judging by the strengthening returns from her search.

“If she continues this way,” Bugsquito said, voice still an easily audible whisper, “she’ll die to the medusa soon. Then we can consume her soul and bring it directly to Noirela!” It cackled, undeterred by Scout’s threats. “She’ll be no match for them!”

“Quiet your hysterics, foolish bug.” Scout sounded bored and far less optimistic. “We will deal with that when we do.”

The medusa, hmm? Geela had defeated a medusa before but it seemed like a very odd choice for a void guardian. Medusas’ powers were entirely visual based. Petrification was a very physical property of their eyes, so Geela wasn’t even sure if an apparition would retain the ability. Perhaps Noire had found a way, but it just didn’t really add up. Why would Noire go through the effort of taking a purely sight-based attack and translate it to the void, just in case a physical force showed up to try to break their way into Noire’s nest?

How many physical foes did Noire even have besides Geela? Would it have created a void medusa just for her? That might lend credence to the theory that it was tailoring attacks against her, but given the frogs had likely been existing denizens of the void, it didn’t make sense for the medusa to be have been brought in for her.

Either way, did she really need to care? She’d killed a medusa before, decades ago. How hard could it be now? Maybe it was time to prod a bit.

“Gorgons in the Void Realm?” she asked, propping herself up on her elbows. “Can’t imagine a worse guardian.”

“You fool!” Bugsquito lept to its feet, overjoyed at the chance to correct Geela. Geela, meanwhile, reclined back, job done. “Imagine a monster so stupid it can only cast magic with its eyes! No, Geela, no! You will see here the true power of darkness, of evil, of the void. The void medusas will charge your body with so much foul energy that the very building blocks of your entity will shatter!” Then it pressed its face against the cage, potentially noticing Geela’s half-relaxed, half smug smile. “Why do you ask?” Its eyes narrowed as much as those bulging bug eyes possibly could. “Er. I mean. Uh…” Its gaze shifted focus from Geela’s face to her belt, where Scout lay defeated in her glove. “Hey Scout, what do I do?”

“Sew your lips together and die quickly?” it suggested, voice flat.

Geela patted the lump at her waist, sympathetically. Of course she bore no true sympathy towards these monsters, since true sympathy was in low stock at all times, but it did hurt her soul a bit to consider her role replaced with the frog’s and Bugsquito’s replaced with, say, Jane Arlington, her mortal guide and Darkos’s minion. Imagining the two of them sharing the same amount of information and slowly watching Jane hemorrhage that intel to a scheming villain? Just the idea of it was enough to make her skin prickle with panic and shame. It was enough to make her stomach churn with anxiety.

In short, she had just enough empathy stored up for these monsters to understand just how afraid and trapped they must feel. And she loved it.

“So not gorgons but a different type of medusa?” Geela knew most things about most monsters, so it was all the stranger that this failed to ring a bell. Maybe it was some new kind of monstrosity, not comparable to anything she’d ever seen on the Mortal Realm, but if that were true, then why name them medusas? So far the naming schemes of the void monsters had followed reasonably close with their mortal counterparts: froggerts and monstersquitos.

“I’m not saying any more,” Bugsquito said. “You can pry more secrets about them from my cold, dead hands.” It balled up those aforementioned cold dead hands into tiny fists, one of which it stuck in its mouth for safekeeping.

“Really giving a new definition to the phrase ‘fist sucking idiot,’ aren’t you?” Geela asked. The jibe was half-hearted and distracted as she played through the medusa puzzle in her head. “I will say, I am surprised that Noire’s monsters are so stupid.”

There were three options here. One, the medusas were just gorgons—or gorgon-like— from back home. Two, the medusas were entirely new to the Void Realm and just shared a name with their mortal counterparts. Three, the medusas were based after something on the Mortal Realm that Geela didn’t know about. They all had their own share of unlikeliness, and Geela didn’t like that. Bugsquito strongly hinted that they weren’t gorgons, and Scout more or less confirmed. The naming conventions were consistent enough so far that Geela would be surprised to learn that there existed monsters here named after but unrelated to a Mortal Realm monstrosity. Which left the idea that Geela just didn’t know an entirely separate form of medusa that these were named after. This theory was both insulting and unhelpful. Geela knew most things. The biggest hole in her knowledge of animals and monsters were those that lived in the sea, given she’d only ever visited the ocean twice. It could be that these medusas were some form of water entity.

“Anyway,” she said, rolling back over, “we’ll just have to avoid them best we can. I’m not interested in tangling with fish again.”

“Captain Hari knows your aversion to water,” Scout said. “Especially when not in a boat. I wouldn’t assume you can so easily avoid the medusas’ region.”

“Scout, I’m disappointed in you.” A smile spread across her face at the confirmation of her theory. “That was a real Bugsquito move right there.”

Scout stopped, sputtered for a few seconds, before going quiet, mortified. Geela studiously turned her attention back to the mystery of the medusa.

So they were fish. Scout wasn’t entirely wrong in that Geela wasn’t looking forward to dealing with sea monsters. There were plenty of reasons she avoided the water. Animals in there were creepy and alien. Made of slime and lights and poisonous tentacles. Krakens were her least favorite but the rest fell reasonably close behind.

“Urgh, leave it to Noire.” The comfort she could take was that these monsters wouldn’t have tentacles or anything. Octopi, squids, jellyfish, krakens, none of them had ‘medusa’ anywhere in the name, so she wouldn’t have to worry about that at least.

___

Geela sat in the mouth of a small tunnel leading into the massive cavern below. She’d been careful to only jump when she was sure the wall-skipping wouldn’t deposit her into the middle of the cavern, the home of the ‘medusas.’ And, because she was Geela, she’d done a good job of it. She’d ended up on the precipice looking out into the medusas’ region, with plenty of time to formulate a plan of attack. Plenty of space to fully look out over the area and find some potential routes. Plenty of brainspace to contemplate exactly why these medusas had tentacles. That bastard Hari would have some real explaining to do as to why there were jellyfish in the void and why they were named after a far less terrifying monster. Geela would rather be stone than have to deal with slippery, gross tentacles.

This was fine, though. Fine! She could deal with this. They weren’t krakens, the unholy amalgamation of all tentcley monsters. They were just little bags of sea mucus that could zap you. Easy peasy.

The unfortunate thing about the whole place was that it was also really well lit, especially for the void. And with the shimmering, ethereal lighting, it’d be dangerous to try blinking through the cave. Maybe the jellies, the ‘medusas,’ were weak and wouldn’t do any damage, like the other monsters, but maybe not. She wasn’t in a position to risk it but she also wasn’t in a position to sit forever and wait. By her calculations, Hari wasn’t far. He might even be just on the other side of the cavern. The best call here may very well be to just run.

She had just started prepping for another hysterical plunge into enemy territory when she noticed something move out of the corner of her eye. It wasn’t particularly flashy or colorful, the blur of movement; it was, in fact, the opposite. A smudge of darkness, moving through the glittering display of lights and pro-void propaganda. No, not full darkness. Lights did blink off of it, but it was different than the jellies’. Duller, less erratic and eye-catching—enough illumination to blend in but not too much so as to draw attention.  The being didn’t disrupt the jellyfish very much. In fact, they didn’t respond to it at all.

What was the dark entity that crept through the jellyfish with such finesse? Another traveler? Adventurer? Someone else seeking to take down Noire? The void fiend was enough of a menace that she could actually believe that this being was here to try to kill her sworn nemesis.

The nerve of this thing, trying to steal her thunder. Trying to swoop in and take the power and glory for themselves. Geela wouldn’t even be surprised if it tried to claim the scientific learnings she had personally discovered. It made sense that there would be others attempting to kill Noire, and it made sense that none had succeeded, given they were taking on a fully powered void fiend. But now that Noire was weakening, now that most of its children were dead, the fiend was anyone’s game.

Geela’s face flushed hot enough to cause heat in a realm that thrived at absolute zero. A rival, someone else trying to kill Noire, someone else trying to intercept all her glory? Not on her watch. She pressed a hand to her face, trying to cool it so she could make her attack with a clear head, but as her cheeks returned to their normal pallor, a new thought struck her.

Maybe they could work together on this. For better or for worse, this scummy adventurer knew enough about the void to slip through the jellyfish unnoticed. They might have gathered significant enough data to help her through the realm, past any other monsters they may encounter. She’d pulled the whole ‘damsel in need of a hero’ bit before. She could do this. Then, when they reached Noire’s nest, she could kill them both, rescue Darkos, take all the power for herself, and return to the Mortal Realm with enough void creatures to cement her name as a hero of science and an enemy of the people.

It was perfect.

First things first, however, she needed a disguise. So she took Bugsuito’s cage, shrank it as much as she could without really crushing the monster, and attached it to her hip. Unwieldy, but at least her hands were free. Then she fashioned a cloak, which she adorned with enough glints and flickers that she should stay pretty hidden. After giving herself a once over, to ensure her illusions were sufficiently obscuring, she stepped off the ledge and oriented herself so that the wall she now stood on was her new floor.

Within a minute of moving, she was in the thick of the ‘medusa’ cavern. They were a noisy bunch, chirping amongst each other in a language Geela couldn’t understand. She wanted to snag one, but she’d only managed to apprehend Scout and Bugsquito because the two had gotten separated from their packs. It would be stupid to try and capture one of the jellyfish. No, instead she just furthered her illusion by capturing some of their chatter and echoing it back around her as she walked. She didn’t know exactly what the noise was or what it meant, but the content of the smooth, cold babbling was possibly the lowest concern on her list right now. If it kept her away from suspicion, she could be singing Noire’s praises for all she cared.

Okay, maybe she’d care a little bit about that. The odds that the chatter was in some way powering Noire was pretty low, though. That said, the jellyfish lacked the general pallor of Bugsquito and Scout. These monsters were very vibrant, very alive, very energized. Maybe Noire wasn’t running out of energy, it was just rerouting all of its power to the fish sector. Fine by her. If the most powerful and malevolent force in the void wanted to dedicate its time to interior redecorating, it was welcome to. A little smile crossed her face at the mental image of Noire sitting up on high, screeching unholy curses as a set of jellyfish wearing brightly colored construction garb and trying to explain the specifics of Void Realm safety building zones. When she was little, Noire had been as sufficiently terrifying as you can imagine a world ending menace would seem to any fourteen year old. Geela quite liked being in its neighborhood, demystifying her childhood nightmare a bit.

It just wasn’t as scary as she’d expected. She’d been through two massive caves already and had gotten out ahead. Evaporating some bugs and running through a frog storm wasn’t exactly her idea of a difficult time.

She was still in the process of conjuring more details in her personal fantasy, all for the important goal of mentally ridiculing Noire, of course, when she smacked into something rather abruptly.

“Oh!” she said, the little gasp escaping her lips before she could stop it. She took a quick step to stabilize, eyes darting around at the floating jellyfish to see if she’d alerted any of them. None seemed to have even noticed the interruption to their flow, so Geela’s eyes fell on the thing that had interrupted her.

It was the hooded figure she’d first seen moving through the cave. He stood, frozen, for several seconds at the impact, and Geela wondered if maybe he’d died of a heart attack or something. What with gravity being more of a suggestion, it wasn’t too much of a stretch of the imagination to assume his body might just be floating there. And it would simplify things quite a bit.

Then, as if just to disappoint Geela, the man shuddered slightly, implying he was unfortunately still very much alive. To make things worse, he then turned, confirming his life.

Geela sighed. Couldn’t even have one nice thing.

The man, under his hood, was younger than she’d expected. Probably mid twenties, though who really knew in the void. When you looked as good as Geela, you created an apparition that looked like you. Really, you couldn’t do much better. But it wouldn’t surprise Geela to learn that some of the more unpleasant void spelunkers might change their appearance. So this strapping young man, all muscles and swoopy blond hair, could just as easily be a heavyset teenage boy or an aging housewife.

He looked over Geela, face registering an appropriate level of surprise.

“Who… what are you doing in here?” he asked, voice as blandly heroic as she’d expected.

“I promise, however I answer this question is going to put us both in danger around the void medusas.” She kept her tone even and clipped, though for good measure she increased the volume of her auditory illusions. When the man showed no sign of responding, she walked past him, bouncing another soul search out.

“Wait!”

Every muscle in Geela’s body, her real body, all the way back home, flinched at his sudden sharp cry. They continued to flinch as the chattering around the two slowly began coming to a stop. She quickened her walk, anything to reach an area of jellyfish who were less on guard. To her immense displeasure, the young adventurer scampered after her, instead of just graciously facing his death as would be proper.

“I really don’t have time for you,” she said, pace swift. “Like, I promise you, this ends poorly for both of us.” If the jellyfish didn’t see to it, Geela would.

“But you’re a mortal! A mortal like me!” He was getting loud again, and Geela wondered just how much attention she’d earn if she were to incinerate the twerp. “In the Void Realm!”

“Yes. A mortal—” she shuddered at the word “—in the Void Realm. What of it? Don’t tell me you want to work together or something.” Her nose continued to wrinkle as she spoke. “It wouldn’t work. The position for enthusiastic chiseled hero types has already been taken.”

The man scowled, looking around as if expecting to find Darkos hidden under a jellyfish.

“I’m—nevermind.” She wasn’t going to waste her breath on this foppish youth.

“Hmph. A good thing anyway. I travel alone.” He actually dropped his voice an octave at this last sentence, and Geela groaned. It would genuinely be a mercy to put him out of his misery.

“Good. Then we will make our separate ways and never speak of this meeting again.” Geela was getting ever closer to Hari, and her steps were getting maybe just a little sloppier. Just a little. Not like, klutzy Mortal Realm Geela, but maybe distracted by a heroic knight all while approaching her target Geela.

“I wish I could help you,” he said, very much not making his separate way. “You seem as though you are lost and aimless.”

“You seem as though you are in extreme and grave danger.” Her foot caught on something as she spoke, and she had to put every ounce of coordination into not tripping.

He laughed. “I wouldn’t call myself the one in danger. You don’t seem well equipped for this, miss.”

“Not a miss,” she said, regaining her footing and moving even quicker now.

“Ah. My apologies, Sir. I always forget, with the Void Realm—”

“Ma’am, perhaps? Madame? Miss implies young and unmarried.” Why was she even having this conversation? Curse the thin ice they skated on.

“Right. Well you don’t seem well equipped for this, mum—”

“How about just Geela. Can you do that?” She was struggling to keep her voice even. If he was still with her by the time she left the jellyfish world, she’d just snuff him out quietly and be done with it.

“Ah, Geela. Lovely name. I hope not your real one.” He laughed, almost chidingly. “Not safe to use real identities in the void. Learned that one from an old teacher. That’s why I go by VoidCrusherXX. Intimidating while not giving anything away.”

“Intimidating is quite possibly the last thing I’d give you for that name.” Geela was seething by now. “Actually, no, I’ll give it to you if only because I am far too preoccupied to summon the scourge of well deserved mockery and derision you deserve for that.”

Finally his bravado flagged as his cocky smile drooped a hair. “That name is important to me! I chose it after my first master!”

“Mmm, and was his name VoidCrusherX?”

He perked up. “You’ve heard of him!”

Geela hadn’t murdered someone in cold blood for annoying her in a while. Probably not since that pirate aboard her ship had insulted her for grieving her favorite rowboat. So it had probably been a few weeks. This really was the best solution for both of them. Geela got a useless annoyance out of her hair, and VoidCrusherXX would avoid being turned into an eternal battery for Noire.

Her eyes drifted ahead, looking for a potentially quieter space to deal with her latest little problem, when the problem dealt with itself in a way that was probably the worst solution for both of them.

He tripped. He tripped and fell. He tripped and fell and shouted in alarm.

In that moment, Geela went from a woman about to murder a knight, slip unseen through the jellyfish, and reach Hari to a woman about to, once again, flee from a massive cavern of void monsters. She had no enchantments, no crew, and most importantly, no Darkos. Instead, she was armed with a mosquito, a frog, and a hero named VoidCrusherXX.

As days go, hers was about to get very very bad.