“So, this Dark Lord, what was he like?” asked Kai, trying to steer the conversation back towards something more interesting.

  “They, not he,” replied Rory, wagging his finger.

  “How come?”

  “They were a noncorporeal mass of information that didn’t exactly have a gender, and wished not to bother themselves with what they considered a trite subject.”

  “Does it really matter? I mean, they’re dead now.”

  “I always felt it was proper to offer simple courtesies to your enemies. It costs nothing, and they may do the same when you most need it. And dead or not, I do like being proper, even towards my foes.”

  “Uh, alright. Hold on, that sounds a lot like the ghost I saw at the arcade today. It was also made of information, I think. I mean, it was eating it. Maybe they’re related?”

  “Information ghost? While that does sound like one way to describe my once-enemy, I doubt that the two have anything in common. My Dark Lord had their ‘essence’, so to say, stored on several heavily guarded pillars across their domain. It was quite the fortification, but the alliance of kingdoms was able to rout the defenders and demolish them one by one! Once the last pillar fell, so too did they, and not one trace of them has been spotted across the World since.”

  Kai nodded, accepting that the entity he encountered was probably unrelated to Rory, but not dismissing its possible weakness. Kai figured that when he had the chance, he should start searching for whatever was anchoring it to headquarters.

  “Well, would you look at that!” exclaimed Rory. “We’ve arrived in the nick of time!”

 

  A large archway carved into the stronghold’s sheer granite walls greeted the two as they approached the imposing structure.

  “Ey, ‘old it there, you two,” a masculine figure loudly gumbled from the duo’s left. Standing in a small booth that looked much too cramped even for someone of his stature, a black-haired dwarf held out his hand and addressed the two. He wore scale mail armor whose color looked off from regular steel, with various colorful frills set around the neck and breast. “Now wot kinda business do you two tall folk have at the forges?”

  “Good evening to you, sir!” said Rory, addressing the guard with a curt bow. “We happen to have a delivery for Ingrid! Her usual monthly.”

  “Rory, is that you?” asked the guard as he squinted towards his guests. “I didn’t recognize you there with that haircut! I swear, some of yer human customs can be so strange! I mean, cuttin’ yer hair? Might as well cut off your p-”

  “Right then,” quickly interrupted Rory. “May we please enter?”

  “Of course! Let me get the door for you.” After fiddling with several controls in the claustrophobic booth, the ground began to shake.

  Kai instinctively spread his legs and arms apart in order to keep his balance, while the others casually stood in place. The slab of granite inside of the archway split into two by a growing vertical slit that went through its center, and the two new pieces began to move apart. Soon, the entire rock face had opened up, revealing a gargantuan hole in the wall big enough to fit several freight trains through.

  “Thank you very much, my good sir,” said Rory with a nod, ushering himself and Kai through the opening. “But did you have to use this entrance over the person-sized one? Our package is nowhere near as big as your usual deliveries.”

  “Sorry Rory, it’s policy to open the big gate for all deliveries. Including that pint-sized one! And keep an eye on yer kid, don’t want him getting lost.”

  Rory rolled his eyes as he passed through the gate. “Will do, will do.”

  Kai leered at the dwarven guard as he made his way right behind his chaperone. He was 17, he looked nothing like a kid! And he didn’t like the guard or anyone treating him like a child! Like how Rory and the rest of TOAL were doing with him right now…

  “Come now, Kai,” chirped the teen’s current authority figure. “These tunnels can be quite the maze, and I’d rather you not get lost in them on your first day here!”

  “Yeah, I’m coming,” grumbled the young man.

 

  Rory wasn’t lying. The following tunnels really were a veritable labyrinth, with numerous winding forks and intersecting paths on the way towards the pair’s destination. At one point, Kai even accidentally took the wrong turn and only realized his absentminded mistake when he heard his chaperone’s lecturing voice coming from behind him. He quickly turned around and went down the correct corridor with Rory being none the wiser.

  Eventually, the two reached their destination. The already large tunnel opened up to a massive cavern. Stalactites hanging from overhead were almost entirely invisible due to how high up they were on the cave’s ceiling, the only light sources coming from a series of equidistant cascades made of molten metal that descended from the top of the cave walls. The dim orange glow was somehow enough to illuminate the rest of the room. Kai expected to see stalagmites and uneven surfaces dot the ground, but he was instead greeted with a smooth plane and a small path paved with actual clay bricks.

  “And here we are,” said Rory in an almost reverent tone. He began to make his way down the walkway with Kai right on his heels.

  The regular sound of metal slamming against metal could be heard up ahead, and as they reached the far end of the room, Kai could make out what looked like a young woman intently hammering away at a piece of metal on an anvil.

  Cling, cling, thunk.

  “Who the hell’s there?” she asked with a frown, not bothering to look away from her work. Her voice rang with the unmistakable sound of irritation. “I’m in the middle of some me-time, so come back later if you don’t want your face kicked in!”

  “Oh, I’m sure our delivery would be quite beneficial for your ‘me-time’ as it were, miss Ingrid.”

  The woman quickly paused her work and carelessly tossed her hammer into the pile of tools to her side before quickly looking up with a look of surprise. “Rory? Just in time!” she smiled. “And who’s the kid?”

  “Not a kid,” Kai quickly shot back.

  “This is Kai Freeman,” said Rory, ignoring the teen’s outburst. “He’s our latest addition to TOAL and I’ve been given the pleasure of showing him around his first World!”

  “Would you look at that,” Ingrid said with a curious smile. “This is probably the first time someone’s come here for their first visit. I think I should feel honored!”

  “Well, your delivery was scheduled for today, and it just so happened Sheila was able to have Kai tag along!”

  “Well that explains that,” she scoffed. “Nothing much interesting happens here anyway, so I’d say you got pretty unlucky, kid.”

  “Kai,” he corrected her.

  “Yeah, Kai,” she halfheartedly rectified herself. “Point is, you kinda drew the short straw. I really don’t have much to show you except for this knife I’m working on.” Ingrid picked up the glowing piece of metal still on the anvil with a pair of tongs and waved it in the young man’s face. “Could probably pierce some really heavy armor if you get it enchanted just right. But with my Skills, you won’t even need ‘em!”

  “Oh come now,” replied Rory with a chiding frown. “You could tell Kai here your story, and the journey you took to reach your current position.”

  “Eh, I guess,” she shrugged. “So Kai, wanna hear how I became an honorary dwarf?”

  “Why not?” he shrugged back. “But let me guess first; you got brought here to fight some kind of a Dark Lord, didn’t do any actual fighting, but your actions ended up leading to them getting their ass kicked anyway. Right?”

  “Shit,” Ingrid tisked. “Go ahead and make me feel unoriginal now, why don’t you?”

  “Oh- uh, sorry,” replied Kai, awkwardly freezing in place.

  “Nah, I’m just messing with you! Most of these Heroic and up worlds are pretty unoriginal in why they bring us over, and that says nothing about the people who get summoned,” she chuckled. “But yeah, I was brought over here to stop the Dark Lord, but I’m no fighter. I mean look at me!” Ingrid made a pose to flex her right arm, revealing a well-toned bicep filled with a staggering amount of lean muscle.

  “Right…” Kai replied slowly.

  “Anyway, what I know is metal. I mean, I was even finishing up my degree in metallurgical engineering back on Earth before I got snatched up! So I decided to make a quick pit stop by this here dwarven stronghold on my quest to get some better gear, but instead of that, I ended up teaching them how to make what they had waiting for me even better. It started out with small tweaks in their smelting process to make the outputs purer at less of a cost, but then I started leveling up in blacksmithing. Next thing I knew, I was pretty much one of them, churning out upgrades and research that threw them a century forward in progress!”

  “So what happened to the Dark Lord?”

  “Yeah, I kinda forgot about that asshole,” she weakly chuckled. “But thanks to my work, the stronghold was able to outfit their and everyone else's armies with top of the line gear and weapons made of my patented magi-tech alloys! The Dark Lord didn’t even know what hit him, and I didn’t even have to lift a sword to do it! Just my hammer.”

  Kai nodded at the conclusion to her story. “Hold on, patented? That’s a joke, right? Or are there really an army of interdimensional lawyers running around?”

  “Oh, it’s no joke,” replied Ingrid with a stern expression. “These alloys were an absolute pain to figure out, and I hold all of the rights to them. If anyone wants some for themselves, they’d better pay me one hell of a premium!”

  “And the lawyers?” asked Kai.

  “Don’t need ‘em,” she spat and delivered a wicked glare at the teen. “Anyone tries to steal my shit, and they’ll have an army of angry dwarves at their doorstep there to break their kneecaps. That is, if I don’t get to them first.”

  Kai took a reflexive step back.

  “Besides, I don’t think there’s anyone in this World who could figure out how to make the stuff for themselves anyway, not without a hundred years of research. Maybe I’ll release this stuff to the public domain or something once I’m old, but in the meantime, I’m going to make a killing from it.”

  The young man nodded again, getting back his composure.

  “And you’re about to make a killing today, miss Ingrid,” added Rory with a curt smile, pointing towards the package just behind them.

  “Damn right, I am!” she exclaimed, running towards the wooden crate with a metal crowbar and prying off the top. “Even TOAL’s paying for my metal!”

  “And your research notes,” replied the posh gentleman. “Speaking of which, have you made any particularly interesting discoveries since our last visit?”

  “Yeah yeah, my notes,” she grumbled. “Only reason I’m letting you have them is because whatever you come up with by using them, I won’t see the results show up anywhere in this World. Oh yeah, and I made a breakthrough on the energy reflective material you were bugging me about.”

  “The reason you also provide us with your notes is because we make it worth it.”

  “That too,” replied the woman as she gazed into the floating box and licked her lips.

 

  “So what’s in there?” asked Kai, curious about what had her so excited.

  “The one thing that these idiots can’t make for themselves at the rate I need it, and the only thing that keeps me going.” Ingrid lifted out a square, cardboard container the size of her head from the crate and held it aloft for Kai to see. “Ice cream!”

  “Wait, ice cream? That’s what we’re here to deliver?” asked the teen incredulously. “Why the hell did we have to come all the way for something as basic as that?!”

  “Because they don’t have any here, dumbass! I just told you!” shouted the blacksmith. “The dwarven chefs are even more pig-headed than me, and despite the fact that I’m the most valuable smith in the entire stronghold, none of them want to bother learning something new! Goddamn traditionalists, I swear, think they’re too good for fucking ice cream.”

  “Then why not live at TOAL? They’ve got ice cream on the menu, I saw it there myself an hour ago.”

  “Because I don’t want to live at TOAL,” the smith sighed. “I’ve known the people here for years, and I’m not going to leave them just for some ice cream, no matter how tempting it is. I’ve got a job, a sweet office that beats the pants out of anything back home, and everyone here gets me! Stony Braids is my home.”

  “Oh, I’ve never felt that way before,” replied Kai despondently.

  “Don’t sweat it kid, you’re pretty young. Give it some time and you’ll find a place for yourself. Just keep exploring and you’ll find a place like this for yourself.”

  “Indeed,” added Rory. “After your basic education, you can settle down in any quaint World of your choice, or stay back with TOAL!”

  “Thanks,” he replied, mostly mollified.

  “Don’t mention it,” Ingrid smiled back, quite genuinely this time. “Besides, if I lived at TOAL, they’d probably kick me out within a week for beating up some snot-nosed brat for bragging that they were better than me over something stupid. Like because they had higher levels or something else equally idiotic. I mean, I met a couple of them the first time I visited and one of TOAL’s goddamn assault squads had to keep me from murdering this one asshole.”

  “Wait, you can get kicked out for beating up kids?!” asked Kai with wide eyes and held breath.

  “Shit Kai, you look like you saw a ghost,” chuckled Ingrid.

  “I did see a ghost,” he replied. “But I also beat up some kids earlier today. They were bragging about how they didn’t need to learn anything in school because they were all level 60 something, and were giving Ms. Neal a really hard time. I mean, they started it by picking a fight with me first, and I just did what they told me to!”

  “I have no idea who that is, but shit kid, I’m pretty fucking jealous!” she laughed out loud. “And whoever your Ms. Neal is, I bet she’s grateful for your massive osmium balls!”

  “Uh, thanks!” Kai replied with a weak chuckle, scratching the back of his head. He looked towards Rory, who returned a smile and a polite nod. Though he couldn’t tell for sure, that looked like code for “don’t worry, you’re not going to get kicked out for that.” He breathed a sigh of relief.

 

  “Right, then!” exclaimed Rory with a single clap of his hands. “Now that the delivery is finished, we should be on our way. One of the kitchen golems went haywire earlier, and we’ve all been promised a wonderful French cake as recompense! I’d like to be on time to get a hefty piece.”

  “Wait, we’re going already?!” exclaimed Kai with a deep frown over his open mouth.

  “You can get your crate of metal at the front gate of the forges,” replied Ingrid, ignoring Kai’s latest outburst. “And here’s a copy of my notes,” she added, handing Rory a disorganized stack of loosely bound papers from a nearby bench.

  “Perfect. Thank you, Miss Ingrid. Until next month!”

  “Come on, do we have to go already? We just got here!” complained Kai.

  “Yup, see ya,” replied the metallurgist with a nod. “And try to bring me some more of those fancy fantasy fruit flavored ice creams. I’m a real big fan of the tropical ones, like guava.”

  “For your information, guava does in fact occur on Earth,” Rory deadpanned.

  “Whatever,” she shrugged. “Just get me more of those and I’ll try even more new things.”

  “Seriously, guys!” shouted Kai again.

  “I’m sorry Kai,” finally replied Rory. “But this is all we’ve come here to do. Sheila simply desired to ease you into the idea of other Worlds, after your experience in the one you were summoned to. You’re probably scheduled for a more interesting visit to a more suitable realm later this week.”

  “I barely spent two minutes there before Artyom showed up!” he whined back. “And you can’t just tease me with an adventure and turn it into a boring delivery drive! I want to see the rest of the stronghold!”

  “A ‘boring delivery drive’ is exactly what was advertised,” replied a cross Rory. “You will have many more opportunities to sate your wanderlust in the near future, so I must ask that you come with me now.”

  “…Fine,” grumbled Kai with a pout. He didn’t bother making eye contact with his chaperone as he followed him back out through the maze of tunnels.

  “See you later, boys!” shouted Ingrid with a wave. “And Kai; next time you stop by, I’ll give you a personal tour of the forges! Just make sure you bring some ice cream!”

  Kai nodded back with a weak wave of his own.

 

  “So how was that for your very first adventure?” asked Rory, an excited smile on his face.

  “It was great!” lied Kai, a halfhearted smile on his own that went nowhere near his eyes.

  “Excellent,” replied Rory. “We’ll pick up the quicksteel metal bars from the front gate and head right back to the portal.”

  Kai absentmindedly nodded in response. He wasn’t about to let his first real adventure end just like that, and he was thinking of how to extend it just a little longer. If Rory couldn’t give him what he wanted, he’d just have to find it for himself.