"Hey, come downstairs, you have a customer!"
Jill sighed. Really? At this time of day? Who was that desperate? Still, a job was a job, so she plastered on her work smile and went to greet her client. She had been expecting some ugly, hopeless old man, and was therefore rather surprised to find herself faced with a beaming girl, in an absolutely stunning black dress and without a single blemish visible on her body. Why the hell did she feel the need to pay people for sex? Surely men and women alike would be falling over each other for her. Was there some sort of horrid disfiguration hiding under that dress or something?
"Jill!" the girl exclaimed, running up and squeezing her in a far stronger hug than her thin arms should be capable of. What? Did the girl know her? Jill was pretty sure she'd never seen the girl before in her life. This had better not be one of those scams where someone tried to claim she was their long-lost mother. She looked over at the madam, who uncharacteristically just shrugged. Odd; she was normally pretty strict about this sort of thing. "Here, your share," she said, before tossing over a diamond. Jill just stared, completely slack jawed. A diamond?! What the actual heck? She stared down at the girl, who was still wearing a big, dopy grin, and shrugged in turn. For a diamond, she could tolerate a lot of weirdness.
She brought the girl up to her room, but still needed to sate her curiosity. "You're acting like you know me," she commented, "but I'm pretty sure I've not met you before. What's going on?"
The girl's smile vanished briefly, before reappearing in a reduced form that suggested a touch of sadness. "It's okay. I'll help you remember. But first..." The smile reappeared in full form, but this time, despite the friendly facade, Jill felt a sudden chill run down her back. "Since I've already paid for your time, and now that I actually know what I'm paying for, I'm going to take the opportunity to teach you the eel trick all over again. Slowly and carefully. And probably several times."
A couple of hours later, the madam again left the front desk, but this time for a completely different reason. Rather than packing her suitcase and fleeing, she simply made a note to see what could be done to improve the building's soundproofing. She was used to some amount of noise, but whatever was going on in Jill's room today was... distracting.
Keri watched on as a couple of porters loaded up her carts with barrels of wine and boxes of dried fruits. The wine in particular was a big risk; the weather up north had been dry this year, but while the grape crop was looking like it might fail, there was still plenty of time for it to be rescued by a last-minute shower. If that happened, demand for imported wine would drop through the floor. If it didn't, she would be the first one there with bulk wine for sale right at the point where it became certain that their own crop for the year would be useless. If the weather held, her gamble would pay off big time, but a gamble it was. No-one could accurately predict the weather. Sometimes she wondered why she'd taken on the life of a travelling merchant, but it wasn't as if new opportunities dropped from the sky.
"Keri!"
She looked around for the source of the voice, spotting a girl in an utterly ridiculous black dress, beaming and waving manically at her. Standing next to her was a rather resigned-looking girl who looked like she should have long since frozen to death, as undressed as she was.
"Hi Keri. I'm Jill, this overenthusiastic one is Anya, and yes we do know you." She glanced around at the porters, and suspicious looking guards, before adding, "but I suggest we go somewhere private to talk about it."
The closest guards frowned, one putting a hand on his sword. "Do you know these two, miss?"
"No," Keri replied, shaking her head.
"Then I'm afraid I must ask you to leave."
"What?!" exclaimed Anya, incensed, but Jill put a hand on her before she could say more.
"Leave it. You have to admit we look ridiculously suspicious right now. Keri would have to be a fool to go anywhere alone with us."
"But... the bandits?"
Now even Keri was frowning. "What bandits?"
"There are bandits active in the forest before Slightly-Newer-Than-Evennewerport-Port. If you head that way, you'll be attacked."
"And how would you know that?" asked the guard, as some of the others started making motions to surround the two.
"Time travel," shrugged Jill. "It's a long story. We'll just rescue you after you get kidnapped, like last time, if we can't convince you here." It wasn't like either of them particularly cared about keeping secrets. The bigger problem was that Anya trying to perform a delicate operation on Keri's brain while surrounded by hostile guards and the general public would lead to a ridiculous number of complications, and Jill really couldn't be bothered trying to sort them all out. Actually, speaking of kidnapping... Why wait? "Actually, Anya, change of plan. We're going to kidnap her ourselves instead. Don't injure the guards!"
A very busy ten seconds followed, starting with eight guards drawing swords and charging forward, and ending up with Anya, Jill and Keri standing on a spectacular golden beach, with the sun shining overhead in a cloudless, emerald-green sky. A floating eyeball that happened to be in the area spotted the new arrivals and bobbed over to see if they were interesting. Keri screamed.
Then Anya started doing her thing, and Keri screamed louder.
A few minutes later, Keri was sprawled on the beach, panting. "That was mean," she muttered. "Surely there was a better way of handling that."
"Well, we could have waited until your caravan got raided and your guards murdered, like last time," Jill answered pragmatically, "but I figured that since we could skip that part, we probably should."
"Fine, whatever. Let's just get back to my caravan before your faces end up on wanted posters across the whole kingdom."
"Wanted posters? People would want me? What's wrong with that?"
"That's... not what they're for. But never mind. Why don't you scrape up some of the beach, to pay off Keri's guards and stuff?"
"I can just make gold though. And don't we normally use diamonds?"
"True."
Keri, still prone on the floor, burst out laughing.
The general of the Rudellian army was confused. He had been on his way to Glimmerhome, along with twenty thousand men, and they'd set up camp in a forest. To keep the element of surprise for as long as possible, they'd been avoiding roads and clear plains where they could be spotted from a distance, even employing expensive illusion magics where there wasn't any natural cover available.
So far, so good. So why then, after falling asleep in his tent in that nameless forest, had he woken up in his own bed, back at home? Did he end up in a battle, suffer from memory loss, and have to be repatriated? That would be embarrassing. At the least, he hoped he managed to win the battle in the process. But he didn't hurt anywhere, and a bit of quick self inspection revealed no injuries, healed or otherwise. It was a mystery, and he hated mysteries.
If there was any consolation, it was that twenty thousand more men were currently sharing exactly the same mystery.
The bandit leader was dead. As were the bandits. Really, what did anyone expect? Anya's little group wasn't going to let them off the hook, especially with Keri still in the party. Anya did at least hold back a little this time, resulting in the bandits merely being 'dead' instead of 'minced', a small detail that the pair of captives they'd already collected greatly appreciated.
"Excuse me, master."
The mayor of Glimmerhome yelped and jerked, but just barely managed to keep his balance.
"I swear, one of these days I'm going to get a chair with a seatbelt. What's happened now, and how many people died?"
"One of the mages from the III has summoned a Creature of the Void again, master."
The mayor looked out of his window at the building in the distance. It continued to look distinctly building-shaped, with no signs of the smoke, destruction, craters, screaming, or other paraphernalia that should accompany that declaration.
"Are you sure? It still looks intact to me."
"One of the staff didn't show up for work this morning, and when the faculty investigated his room, they found the summoning sigil. It was drained, having already been used. There was also some amount of flesh, blood and bones coating the walls and ceiling, which when scraped off and collected together, proved to weigh about the same as the missing researcher. Eyewitnesses also reported a humanoid figure leaping the walls of the facility, and the guard captain confirms a breach in the barrier at a time matching the eyewitness reports."
The mayor considered that. His servant wouldn't be bothering him with this information if he didn't have confidence in its veracity, but even a small Creature would be a hundred metres in length, and be rather too well endowed in the tentacle department to be described as humanoid. The mayor would have suspected the mad mages of the III of confusing their sigils, and it being a demon summoning or something, except that a demon wouldn't have been able to escape the barrier. But... The mayor glanced out of the window again, at the peaceful scene playing out below. It probably wouldn't stay that way for long, Glimmerhome being what it was, but if there was a Creature out there then it shouldn't be that way now.
"A girl matching the description was seen entering a brothel in the marketplace, leaving with one of their courtesans a number of hours later. The proprietress reported that the girl paid in diamonds, and that her employee resigned, claiming they were going travelling together. Examination of the room revealed a number of eels in various states of distress, but nothing else out of the ordinary. There have been no further sightings."
"I think," opined the mayor, after some thought, "that it would be best to pretend this never happened."
It was a number of years later, and the group of three were dawdling over a narrow rock bridge. Keri peered interestedly over the edge at the tarry blackness below, which occasionally formed big bubbles that floated up to the ceiling. There was a time when she was afraid of heights, but somehow the world they'd visited last year that was entirely made out of spiders had made all other fears seem completely inconsequential. That feeling when they'd arrived, of sinking slightly into the floor, followed by the crawling as the floor itself rose up around her legs, still made her shudder at night. Besides, if she fell, Anya would catch her. Probably.
Jill watched one of the bubbles impact a bubble of light that had dripped down from the ceiling, the two annihilating with a loud fooomp, making Keri's ears twitch in surprise. "I thought it was like a scaled-up version of one of those lava lamps from that world we visited a couple of months back, but I'm pretty sure they didn't go 'fooomp'."
"Nah," Anya answered, "they just used wax. This is actual liquid light and darkness."
Jill nodded, it being a long time since she would do such foolish things as complain that there was no such thing of liquid light or darkness, or indeed that darkness was supposed to be an absence of light and not its own physically distinct thing. "It's very pretty."
"It is," agreed Keri, pulling back from the edge with a little jingle.
They finished crossing the bridge, stepping into a massive underground hall. Apparently this had once been the home of an advanced subterranean civilisation, but they'd delved too fast and too deep, unleashing an unspeakable evil that had dwelt far below the surface, forcing them to flee for their lives. Keri observed the unspeakable evil, cloaked in shadow and flame, curled up around a great pillar and large enough to be visible even from this distance.
"Aww, how cute. Can I pet it?"
"Sure," Anya answered. "Those things are actually pretty docile. Dunno why the people who used to live here were so scared of it."
Keri ran forward, tail wagging excitedly behind her.
"You know, I'm not sure you did that quite right. I don't think cat tails are supposed to wag when they get excited. That's more a dog thing."
Anya shrugged. "I think it's cute, you think it's cute, Keri thinks it's cute, who cares about accuracy?"
"True."
It had been Keri's request, originally. She figured that since Anya could perform brain surgery unaided, then replacing her costume ears and tail with real cat-like ones should be child's play. Anya had disagreed; she didn't want to half-arse it, and doing it properly would require careful genetic manipulation. That had resulted in a trial run on a bunch of humans on some random world they'd found that had a bunch of different populations of humanoids, calling themselves dwarfs, elves, fairies, demons and more. That had resulted in the accidental creation of yet another new race to add to the planet's oversized collection, who had named themselves the beastkin, and who had been busy building a statue of Keri at the time they'd left. Jill felt a bit guilty over that bit of cultural contamination, but for all she knew, that sort of thing was where all myths about gods came from, so she couldn't get too worked up about it.
The three of them had added more friends to their group from time to time, but for some reason they never seemed to stick around long term. They always complained things were too weird, and they couldn't cope any more. Anya didn't care; she'd worked out that being friends with someone didn't require chaining them to you, and was happy to head back from time to time and visit the acquaintances they'd made over the various worlds they'd explored.
So now here they were, the group of three, Jill and Anya watching with smiles on their faces as Keri stroked the shadowy fur of the fifty metre long unspeakable evil, which yawned in contentment, showing far too many teeth and melting quite a large patch of the cavern floor.
"Do you think we could keep it as a pet?" asked Anya.
Jill didn't dignify the question with a response. However hard she tried, there were still some areas of common sense that Anya had never quite grasped.
Of course, it's not without problems. When I started writing this, the plan I had was for Anya to meet Jill and then for everyone live happily ever after, with a word count of somewhere between 5k and 10k. But since I was enjoying writing it so much, I accidentally forgot to stop, and writing without a preplanned plot is dangerous. Not only does it apparently lead to excessive potty humour, but at around part 7 or 8 I realised that what was intended as eldritch fluff had somehow turned into an accidental apocalypse, and I had no idea how to fix it. Cue magical unforeshadowed time reversal. Oh well...
Any honest reviews and critiques would be appreciated, to help me decide what sort of style I'll try for my next story. (Comedic again, but with a proper thought-out plot? Something else I haven't tried before?)
Finally, here's an alternate cover, showing all three of the main characters. It's not accurate, (e.g. Keri's dress should be longer, Anya's should be lacier, etc.) but is reasonably close to how I was imagining them.
This was lovely. i require more stories. And a fluffy unspeakable evil.
Suggestion: assassin that kills malicious agents who try to isekai people
This sounds hilarious.
You mean a truck junk yard? Or alcohol/low temperatures/distractions to cause crashes?
I enjoyed the story especially the parts where laws of physics were ignored because Anya didn't know the weren't supposed to.
I liked it a lot. Honestly, while it was happening the apocalypse didn’t seem that bad. The way it was detailed and written made it kind of seem like an “oh well” thing. While the time travel was pretty well done, it did invalidate a lot words previously written, making them pointless. However, since you stated you did that all without a plan, and it was all sort of comedic anyway, I don’t think it’s a bad thing overall, just slightly off. The perspective was well done, I still don’t understand why the pooping thing was included, and my only complaint is that it ended.
P.S. - the pooping thing is a joke!
You are good at comedy. You maintained a light tone throughout, even with the apocalypse and all the gore. This story was done better than the vast, vast majority of books on this website. I think with a proper thought out story you could do a comedy really well without having the slightly off putting apocalypse scenario repeating itself. I wish it was longer, as I was getting pretty invested in the characters, but then again, with how powerful Anya is, any more plot would have been pretty much filler. I’m just used to 100+ chapters in the web novels I read.
This was an AWESOME story. I usually don't read short stories, but I'm SUPER glad I decided to check this one out.
at around part 7 or 8 I realised that what was intended as eldritch fluff had somehow turned into an accidental apocalypse, and I had no idea how to fix it. Cue magical unforeshadowed time reversal. Oh well...
This sort of thing is exactly why I love unplanned stories. They always have the best plot twists. I mean, if even the author has no idea what's going on, how are you supposed to figure it out?
Didn't you mention a character we should recognise from another one of your novels? Eh all well I probably missed it or you changed your mind... Or I'm thinking of another side story....
I swear, one of these days I'm going to get a chair with a seatbelt
This suggests cars are a thing they have already have invented and have created safety measures due to their high speeds.... But where's the cars? Lol
Not a character, but an entire world got cameo-ed here, that world with demons, elves and dwarves— that was probably from Erryn's world— before the first apocalypse (?). Like, before the System was created or something.
As SaddyStorm spotted, they popped into Erryn's world long before the System, before the war of the races had whittled the sentients down to just the humans/elves/dwarfs/demons, created the beastkin race, then popped out again.
@cathfach Just wondering, what races are there (unbound soul) now, besides humans, elves, dwarves, demons and beastkin?
Examination of the room revealed a number of eels in various states of distress
Those eels have seen some shit.
Thanks for sharing the story!
I really enjoyed this one, the silliness was adorable.
Examination of the room revealed a number of eels in various states of distress, but nothing else out of the ordinary.
Oh my.
"I think," opined the mayor, after some thought, "that it would be best to pretend this never happened."
Yeah. Just yeah.
"Examination of the room revealed a number of eels in various states of distress, but nothing else out of the ordinary. There have been no further sightings."
So, Anya used normal eels this time instead of the ones that make up their original shape, right?
How exactly did Anya use the eels?
I remember you told me you were going to post the image of the original cover in chapter 12. Did you forget that?
Thanks for the great story, it would only be better than it already is, if the s*x scenes had been described in detail instead of left to our imagination. After all, I love yuri, especially if it is with monster girls and I am also very curious about Anya's reactions to being introduced and experiencing human sexual culture.
I can't imagine myself being able to write decent smut. Better to leave that sort of thing offscreen than for me to spoil my story with a poor attempt.
I didn't forget the image, just didn't have time last night. It's there now.
@cathfach I can understand that, but even if you can't write a decent smut, just having a few kiss scenes like fanservice yuri before the summary report of the smut left, would make a big difference for the readers, you know?
Now that I've stopped to think about it. Was there any reason why Anya and Jill never kissed in public, not even on the cheeks?
@cathfach Thanks for the image, the three are really cute especially Anya.
I had my suspicions since Jill thought of Anya as a "sweet little gir"l and it was mentioned that she is "about one and a half metres" tall. So, Anya is a legal loli, right?
When you said that Anya's dress would be "lacier", you mean it is as lacy or even more than the one shown in the image below, only with more layers of skirts and an inner lining to be less transparent, right?
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/571411
@cathfach If you have a beta you can ask them, or say in an announcement that you need a smut writer. Someone than can write smut will probably offer to do so (in exchange for free patreon obviously, since it's hard to write smut for chapters you haven't read yet).