Hours before Agi’s arrival in the dungeon halls, a new day dawned at Nightfall Castle, announced by nothing but the clanging of a grandfather clock.

Dodd emerged from the cramped hall closet where the imps still faithfully “slept.” Felicity followed, looking a bit bedraggled.

“Hello,” chirped Dodd.

“Morning,” mumbled Felicity.

“Are you still hurt from—”

“From Nyx flailing me around? No!” she said, clearly offended. It’d been about a week since Nyx pulled her dramatically out from the castle, only to not-so-dramatically slide her back in. Let her have this. Let her feel valiant and strong. “I’m just bored.”

Dodd nodded sagely. “I understand. At least you’re not a creature used to roaming. Then you’d be really bored.”

Felicity sighed...Dodd had failed to make her happy with her lot in life.

They went their separate ways, and Dodd carried out her duties. She could hear Lord Nyx’s voice now: “Water the plants and weed the greenhouse garden. Dust the furniture in the dining room, even though no one really uses it or even looks at it. Clear out all cobwebs in the hallway and check the corners and cracks for vermin. And...uh...I dunno, brush a hand along the pots and pans hanging from the kitchen ceiling, make sure nothing’s been stolen there.”

After a long and busy morning, with dregs of destroyed cobwebs still trailing from her arms, Dodd arrived in the kitchen for her last daily chore. Time to brush those cooking utensils. Anything that required her to lug out a footstool really should have been a task for Agi, that bored creature used to roaming...but in the end, it was such a piddly, pedestrian task that she had no problem being obedient.

She hopped up from footstool to counter and clanged all the dozens of pans together. Nothing missing! Well, nothing newly missing—it seemed that Ethel must have misplaced a pot weeks ago, because one ceiling hook had been empty ever since Dodd began this chore. And anyway, why would banging stuff together create a sonic map accurate enough to tell Dodd what had gone missing, let alone how? It just made no sense. Dodd, however, had faith that her master’s words would make more sense as they matured.

Now her day was done. Nothing left to do but retread the ground she’d already trod and confirm that she’d done a good job. Perhaps she could go relax in the greenhouse...which she’d already explored every cranny of...

She strolled past an open door. Glancing inside, she caught Agi sitting beside a bookshelf with some dusty thing in his lap. The lucky dude could read.

Alright, Dodd admitted it: she was bored too. So bored that her mind seemed to be rotting in its infernal fleshcase. It was one thing to be bored and turning an eternal torture wheel. Hellfloes for her had been a land of zero expectations. But serving Lord Nyx had promised to be a pleasure garden of food, fun, and hijinx, and now that Dodd was without these things (except for the food, which she wouldn’t eat anyway), she felt restless.

Dodd looked left. Dodd looked right. She leapt to the basement door and ducked inside.

Cleaning the basement was a task arbitrarily assigned to Felicity, but there was a less-than-zero chance that she would be interested in checking her work. Dodd was free to poke around in peace.

All the games looked as they once had, touched by nothing except the duster’s feathers. Not a foosball player had spun. Not a pool ball had drifted. And not a single electric current had coursed through the Dance Dance Revolution device since Nyx’s departure.

It wasn’t that Dodd wasn’t allowed to be in this room. Rather, she would hate to be caught dead here. If even Agi had refused to touch the air hockey table, that was a sign that playing these human games when not under duress was still too embarrassing an idea to consider.

So it was with great guilt on her shoulders that Dodd switched on the DDR machine.

It whirred to life. Electric synapses powered the paper-scroll screen, and a poor facsimile of a logo whose original Dood had never seen rolled up. Even though CRT screens were evidently too advanced for this world, the synthesized tunes that came from the device were uncannily good.

Dodd stared. She sat in the center of those massive foot-buttons, poised so she could lean over and smack their corners with her palms. She hesitated to move forward, though. There was still time to shut it off, she assured herself.

Then she played eight rounds.

With each song, each frenzy of smacks and back-breaking bends, the dances got a little bit harder, the machine got a little bit hotter, and Dodd felt a little more aware, more alive. Soon the odd spark was flitting out of the machine, barely avoiding the highly flammable paper screen and the still-quite flammable wood and metal chassis. That was normal. Dodd paid it no mind. It became hard to devote any attention to things outside the game—once Dodd got used to her own way of playing, it became quite intuitive and, yes, even somewhat...fun.

Until the screen tore. Dodd yelped, the paper-scrolling mechanism squealed, and suddenly the screen was moving at hyperspeed—in tatters.

Her mind snapped into awareness. What was wrong?

...And then into horrified guilt. She’d done wrong, and what the hells could she possibly do to fix it!?

She could see the problem, sort of. The arcade terminal was smoking from the back. As the screen slowed and the inner systems put themselves into automatic shutdown, Dodd walked over to give it a look.

At least the disaster wasn’t entirely her fault. Besides, it was a blessing in disguise—it was the way she discovered a graver one.