“Huh,” Mikkel said as the only thing that came to mind at that moment while caressing his beard pensively. “Well, there's my answer then.” Or one of the answers, he added to himself. It was the one to the question that started with ‘what’, the kind that was usually at the base of every pyramid of necessary questions and not too far from ground level in your average pyramid of needs, period, either. However, as a dwarf who, unlike other dwarves, liked to work his way up most things, including thin air, what Mikkel saw at the moment was the rest of the aforementioned pyramid, beckoning to him to climb it.

He listened to its siren-like call until blondie said something that made him glad that he didn't have any ears that could bleed, because if he had had them, they absolutely would have.

“Bitch?!” he started, his voice suddenly raising by nearly one octave, “Are you being like, actually racist like now? Like, what?! Have you seen me? You see a walking, talking skeleton, one with a conscience and the ability to think more than one thought for their entire unlife, mind you, not like the other poor revenant sods who just crumble once they think they've done what they felt they had to do. And you say I'm too short to be a lich.”

He spread his arms and looked at the Tonberries in a silent plea for support, just in case they knew better than that guy, which wasn't going to be too hard anyway. Most of them stared at him with the same transfixed, cold, almost threatening gaze that he had seen quite often in the past few months in Grudge's eyes. Nevertheless, to Mikkel's satisfaction, one of them crossed his arm and nodded understandingly. He knew. Or she. They. Whatever their pronouns were.

“Look, being a lich just means that you're undead and that your soul is out there, somewhere. Height doesn't enter into it. Meaning: I'm also a lich. Not a kraken, I think you need tentacles for that, but definitely a lich. Got it? Good! Now, to explain my previous question: I know what happened to me, but not quite why it happened, and I'm not about to get working on whatever it is that I might need to do, if anything, without a lead or a reason. And since I don't need to eat or drink and I intend to take care of shelter momentarily, one big priority of mine is entertainment. Watching people do things is what I like. Watching unusual people doing unusual thing is a bonus.” He pointed a thumb at the general direction of the arena. “Something a bit less institutionalised than this maybe, hmm? As for your question, name's Mik- I mean, people call me the Rust Baron, and please pretend I followed this up with an evil laugh here. All you need to know, really.”

It took Mikkel several moments to process the first bit alone. Words tended to carry meanings well beyond those intended by their speakers, which in simpler terms meant that shit people said had implications and one of them was that he did not, in fact, end up elsewhere in space and that was it, which unfortunately was the space-time equivalent of ruling out a caged lark as the culprit in a murder mystery.

If only time travel was indeed involved, then there were two reasons for that man to have never heard of Ronka before: either Mikkel had ended up in a past long before its foundation, or in a supremely distant future. But then, of course, you had to consider different planes of existence, which incidentally made the ‘when’ part kind of irrelevant, and- Hold on, yes that's indeed what happened, that dude had just told him as such – though in his elucubrations he could only catch bits and pieces of what he said – and what the sexual intercourse is Zephon anyway?

“Oh! It's normal, then? For your world to just decide to suck in people from other places entirely, in a giant blasted envelope made of crystal – which by the by left me like ‘why though’ – and messing in general with the balance of other worlds.”

Much like the Void did and– Okay, yeah, there was the answer, the key, and the lock too, the whole package, actually. Strangers got sucked in and powerful monsters popped up for a visit more often than tax collectors. As far as Mikkel was concerned, that was textbook Void. You learnt to recognise it in sixteen centuries of witnessing the odd twat or group of twats attempt to control its power. He had known some of these twats. Each time it happened, the World would try to defend itself. So far, it had succeeded.

“Well, you've gotta have one netherworld for irredeemable souls of a defence system for your city to be still up,” he conceded as he took in the sight of the Colosseum's main arena. He couldn't see so much as a chip even in the woodwork of the shacks in the city's outskirts. “Should be fun to see it at work one of these days. See its limits. Not me though, 'cause for now I feel I've got bigger fish to fry.”

For one, setting up a lair. No honest, self-respecting evil lich could dispense with one – it really came with the territory, which, conversely, tended to come as a natural consequence of setting up a lair. A new lair. How many centuries did he spend in the last one he left in the mountains?

“Wow, still processing this. I think I might be the giant monster of the month too?” If anything, he was a monster and he was, by dwarf standards, a giant. “I don't know. Can't be arsed to attack though, you don't look like you need any input to get things done, now, do you? I prefer to watch things. I like entertainment. Nice arena, by the way. Any suggestions on who to watch in case I feel like something that unfolds outside of a giant playpen?”

Sometimes all it took was to open one's ears. Metaphorically speaking, anyway. All Mikkel had left was the acoustic meatus and plenty of magic, though in retrospect that meant that the only way his ears could get any more open would be if he ran a drill through his skull. Still, the main point was that one only needed to pay just enough attention to hear, well, interesting things, some of which travelled from mouth to ear and from ear to mouth without ever seeing so much as a drop of ink and a piece of paper or decent parchment. Or when they did, it was never for long.

One thing that Mikkel noticed about Torensten was how quickly people came and went. It was a port city where merchants gathered and then set out to sea or ventured beyond the city's gates on land, and where adventurers... did pretty much the same thing. From up high in the sky far above even the local Air Trains, which was the vantage point for most of his observations, the only way to tell them apart was often to try to spot which one was the muscly guy who wore a thong and little else, though those might have just been regular perverts. Or sex workers. Or both – who was he to kink shame?

Anyway, people coming and going meant that real estate was an especially vibrant market, all in a city that bustled with life and people from all walks of life and races, and the core local population appeared to be very on board with the idea of keeping an open mind as long as the other party kept an open purse.

Torensten, Mikkel concluded, was the kind of city where things happened, and he could get behind that. One teeny tiny little problem was that even assuming that a good chunk of said real estate market was not off-limits to him, he did not care for neighbours, and cities did not tend to deal in single houses. It was then that one of his rare moments with his feet on the ground provided him with a small revelation, which was to say that there was at least one uninhabited cave system ripe for the expert hand to pluck it, just far enough from the city to be considered outside its outskirts, but not quite far from it either.

Well, soon to be uninhabited, anyway. At the moment there seemed to be pirates in there, but that was, quite frankly, just part of the renovation process. Their eviction, that is.

Mikkel landed on the white beach with the careful grace of an albatross, dispelled the hang glider into his personal dimensional pocket, and took a few perfunctory paces forward. In front of him stood a hole in the rock – the entrance of a cavern, as it were – which was partly covered by a sun-bleached black drape onto which somebody had painted a skull with white paint, and he could tell it was painted instead of sewed because there were traces of drops of paint trickling down the image visible to those who would look closely enough.

It was the kind of sunny morning where only a few miles away vacationers were probably taking most of their clothes off as they rushed either to the sea for the first swim of the day or for a nice spot on the beach where they would place their towel and nap until lunch time, both of which, against what he believed was even possible, made the dwarf in him die a little more.
From the cave came the distant, buzzing sound of early morning chatter. It would have taken ears much finer than he had any need for to make out what they were saying, but presumably most of the talk was made during the journey from one's hammock to the larder.

“Anyway!” Mikkel said to nobody in particular. He then began to whisper words that were just as unintelligible, and two cylindrical shapes appeared beside him – transparent and ethereal at first, but each syllable bestowed them with opacity and solidity. One end was a round cap, and was pointed in both cases at the entrance of the cave. On the opposite end it was being consumed by what could have been best described as a localised wildfire. Eventually, the two cylinders gained fins. Satisfied, Mikkel let them go. And like hunting dogs seeking to drive out a hare out of its burrow, the two missiles went.

And then they went again. Specifically, they went kaboom. Since Mikkel needed the tunnels not to collapse, it was not a very strong kaboom. But then a few people in there went aaargh in response, and that was oh so much louder.

It would do well for the sake of thematic congruity to ask the reader to picture another landscape. This time it was a coast with red sand, with a sea that looked wine-dark under the night sky. A pair of femurs emerged from the mud in the strip of foreshore that the high tide did not submerge. And once more the metaphorical camera closed in on the local fauna, which mainly consisted of a consortium of hermit crabs and an insomniac seagull who was trying to decide if it was in the mood for a midnight snack.

Again came the whistle, constant and ever-closing. Again a number of creatures turned their heads up and searched the heavens for its source, until they caught a gleam that one would be forgiven for mistaking for a shooting star. As the sound got louder, the crabs scuttled away under the cliffs and retreated inside their shells. The seagull watched the gleam become bigger and brighter. Whatever it was, its flight (falling?) pattern suggested that it was not going to hit him. After a lifetime of flying you became good at these calculations.

And indeed, the unidentified flying thing eventually hit the waterline, bounced a couple of times (how a thing that big and with that shape managed to bounce on the water was beyond him), and then ploughed to a halt on the beach, leaving a deep groove in its wake. It was a massive shiny rock with a blue hue to it, or whatever colour a seagull might see it as.

When the wind rose – it was the kind of wind one would expect to experience during a storm, certainly not on a warm and clear night such as that one – the crystal started to disintegrate into dust from top to bottom, with each grain turning into speckles of light and rising into the air before disappearing for good. In its place stood a skeletal figure, clad in full armour, with a beard growing, for lack of a better word, from its mandibles.

It said, to nobody in particular: “Okay? Where the afterlife for naughty people am I?” It – no, he looked around and, after having confirmed that there was not a living sentient soul in the vicinity, he called, probably as an exercise in futility: “Girl? White?” A pause. “Big guy?”
There was no answer.
“Oh well,” he said in the end. He then walked away to a cliff.


Since nobody was on that beach to greet him, the scene now shifts to a few days later – no more than two or three – and the point of view changes from external to the living (though this is a bit stretching the definition; yet, to use just ‘moving’ carries the risk of making him sound like a machine, or an object that can move only through external factors and not on his own volition) skeleton's internal one.

Mikkel had taken to the skies as soon as he could ensure that nobody was there to watch him, and nobody was there to get in the way by pure accident either. Contrary to conventional wisdom, you never got a better view of your surroundings the higher you got. If anything, the quality tended to get considerably worse. What you did get to see was more of them, and even if was all broad strokes, one eventually learnt to discern the little twinkles above you from those below you, and understand that the former were (usually) stars, and the latter were (usually) campfires. There were lots of campfires going... Uh... Campfirewards. Yes, that would have had to do for now.

And campfirewards Mikkel did find the first signs of civilisation, which consisted of a small group of bandits who pointed shivering scimitars at him when he landed mere yards away from their base. It was not a very long fight. The conversation that followed was, however, actually much longer than he had expected it to be. It touched topics of displacement geographical and temporal, for Mikkel could not recognise, for the undeath of him, any of the toponyms mentioned that the bandits mentioned one after the other, and they had never heard of any of those that Mikkel brought up instead, which was as puzzling as it was pretty damn annoying.

After this summary of a flashback – for one needs some preliminary context for these matters – where Mikkel was at this moment was some city called Provo, a behemoth of a port that might as well have been a hut of reeds the last time he was there, if the temporal displacement theory had any credit to it. Still, he had been around for long enough to know that geography did not change that much that quickly. Not, he thought, on its own, and that raised three possible explanations: one, it must have been more time than he would dare imagine; two, some serious shit had gone down while he was absent; and three, the only place where the aforementioned thing had really gone down was his metaphorical throat, and, by inference, had never left since.

He had found the entrance of the tunnels below the city itself fairly quickly, which probably was those poor sods' only solid contribution to his situation, and plodded his way to the infamous Tonberry Colosseum, where he bought a ticket with some of the money he got from mugging a man who was guarding one of the beach resorts nearby. Mikkel had set himself three objectives: the first was to find a place where he could set base, the second was to figure out what the hell happened to him (and also where he was – technically the bandits had already answered that, but it didn't really help), and then decide what to do from now on, in no particular order.

So unparticular, in fact, that this visit might as well been part of step two: for starters, there were Tonberries in there. He had been travelling with one until, as far as he was concerned, quite recently, so maybe there was a connection there – also he didn't really hear of any Goblin Colosseum or Dog Colosseum or even Himself Colosseum, so that was as good a place to start as any. He looked at the number on his ticket and walked thet terrace looking for his seat, found it, raised the ticket again and stared into the empty space ahead of him for around five seconds, which was about as much time as he felt he needed for any kind of self-reflection.

“Ah, what am I even doing?” From up there, Mikkel could see almost the whole stadium. Contrary to most dwarfs, Mikkel rather enjoyed the high ground enough that he didn't feel the need for the ‘ground’ half – more often than not, he rejected it. But at a Colosseum, this just meant a bad seat. And he'd bought the ticket. With money. Which he stole, but that was only a partial consolation. He pocketed the small piece of yellow paper and made his way down until he spotted a group of Tonberries confabulate with some person who, if anything, did not look like a Tonberry, as they stood next to the gate from which the fighters were going to make their entrance.

Mikkel hopped over the guardrail with a lithe movement that he dared people to expect out of a fully armoured and highly senior citizen, and scanned each creature through eyeless sockets. None of their reactions were indicative of any of them being the one Tonberry he did know, which was to say that any of them could have been, well, them. Or that was what somebody who thought all Tonberries looked pretty much the same would have thought. Mind you, that somebody wouldn't be wrong, but after that much time spent together you eventually learnt to recognise at least your Tonberry in any crowd whether you liked it or not.

“Oh, for intercourse's sake, he groaned, which was not an easy feat when you had to simulate having vocal cords with pretty much nothing but wind magic and just a little bit of creativity. “You didn't happen to see a Tonberry who is like... different from the lot of you but for the undeath of me I couldn't tell you how, quiet bloke, actually not even a bloke nor for that matter a lass, and also very single-minded? No? I thought so.”
He turned to what he was going to call a hume until proven otherwise.
“'sup? Say, if I say ‘Ronka’, does that ring any bells for you? I'm new around these parts, in case you didn't catch that already somehow.”