“My lord! We brought you many weapons!”

“That’s great, Felicity! Too bad I don’t really care about any of them right now.”

Nyx-as-Athalie was standing in front of the throne, beholding a pile of weapons. The stuff had fallen like this when Felicity, Dodd, Ethel, and Agi brought it back from their Nmita excursion yesterday. Since then it had been untouched. And since Nyx was insistent on them heading out this afternoon, they hadn’t exactly planned on sifting through in search of “the good stuff.”

Felicity and Ethel were standing over the pile too, and both far happier to have it.

“We can sell it on the way,” said Ethel.

“Not too much,” said Nyx. “It’ll get suspicious.”

“That’s what Agi is for.”

“...Ah, clever,” the demon lord realized. The demicrow could take these weapons on errands, selling them in disparate towns—or continents. The money would, of course, flow back to Nightfall Castle. No more gold problem. “Well, maybe there’s a good short sword or buckler I can use.”

“Buckler...” Felicity faltered. “We should’ve checked the armor shop, too, my lord, I—”

“No need,” Nyx bit off. “I have bracers. They’re fine for now. I’m sure Farander has plenty of armor. It’s right next to a freaking dungeon, after all.”

Ethel reached into the pile and pulled out a sizeable, swirling telhorn. It was etched all over with zigzagging ribbons, and the result was somewhat hard to read. “Have you ever seen weapons like this before?” she asked Nyx, getting close.

“...No, I don’t think so...”

“If you find you have trouble with certain transformations—not now, but at any point in the future—maybe using one of these, assigning different forms and form-parts to different configurations, would help.” She launched into an explanation of everything the shopkeep had told her, plus computer-coding language that did little for Nyx's comprehension.

“I...um...that’s great, for you, Ethel,” they said, in the end. “I’m genuinely glad that you’re excited about...life. Wow, that sounded more awkward than intended.”

“It’s fine.”

“But yeah. I think you’ve found your weapon.”

“You mean my weapons,” said Ethel, pulling out another telhorn, just as long, but with a design that was complex in its own terrifying multicolor way. “With a hundred and six holes across two flutes, I expect fighting will be like engaging something in between hotkey-dense gaming keyboards and oboes.

Nyx squinted. “Can’t you at least color-coordinate?”

“It’s not in my nature,” Ethel said with the telhorns in an X across her chest, attempting to be cool.

“I won’t fight it. But I will expect you to get frustrated with them after five minutes—especially since you went straight for the oboes and not the recorders.”

“Please. You don’t know my power.”

“As for you, Felicity,” Nyx said, turning, “what are you still doing here? Just ogling?”

“I have a request, my lord,” said the wood imp. “I was wondering...is there a good place in the castle for sparring?”

Nyx blinked. “Sparring,” they said, half to themself. “That’s an idea so good I wonder why I didn’t ever have it myself.”

“It’s because you used to do nothing but eat pizza poppers, my lord.”

“I didn’t want sass from you,” sighed her lord, “but frankly I walked right into it. Anyway, there’s a lot of unused real estate in the greenhouse, I think.” And now they were remembering why they didn’t use that room, or share it, more often: so many strange, ambient Earth memories casually making themselves at home there. They’d rather fight on the Faranderan plain than look over their shoulder hoping the ice cream truck didn’t just get sliced in half (and then spend ten minutes in a moody purgatory over the fact of his non-existence, of Earth’s non-existence, of encroaching night terrors, of the vasty hopelessness of it all).

Well, anyway.

“Hey,” Ethel said with a sudden tap on Nyx's shoulder. “Is it alright if I spend a few more minutes getting ready?”

“Oh, absolutely,” answered Nyx. “I still have to check and see if Darling packed the rations right.”

“We don’t need a ration system...”

“...but the rations make it more authentic. And kind of fun, in a way I’m sure you can appreciate.”

“Resource-management simulation,” said Ethel with a faint smile. “Yeah.”

She took her telhorns to the lab, and Nyx chose not to ask what she was planning on. Meanwhile, Felicity had just grabbed a couple of eye-catching silver daggers and started off toward the kitchen, which led, of course, to the greenhouse. All that left was Nyx and a pile of kinda-sorta-junk. The servants could sweep it into the rec room later. That mess would be fine...Nyx didn’t plan on coming back in this castle for quite a while.