Chapter 176: A Few Screws Loose

The procession winds its way into the palace, Princess Kathoril leading them deeper through gleaming, brass-lined halls toward the throne room, polished floors reflecting the glow of lantern-crystals set into the walls at even intervals. Vuvi trails near the back, visibly frustrated, arms crossed tight, jaw set in a hard line.

Maribelle leans in close. "What’s wrong?"

"I want to see Pip," Vuvi mutters. "I have no idea what he’s up to right now, and it’s driving me insane."

"We can handle things here," Maribelle offers. "You could go."

Veena’s already stepping up on Vuvi’s other side. "I’ll handle anything to do with the business. I’ve learned enough from you by now."

Vuvi’s whole face softens, warm and grateful. "Thank you!" She grabs Penelo’s wrist without another word and takes off at a run, the two of them vanishing back down the corridor they’d just come from. "We’ll meet you back here later!"

"Do you even know where you’re going?" Sera calls after her.

"NO!" Vuvi shouts back, already gone around a corner, footsteps echoing off polished brass walls. "BUT I’LL FIND OUT!"

Penelo’s delighted shriek trails after her, fading fast. Maribelle sighs, watching them go, then falls back in step beside Veena. "That girl has never once let a lack of information slow her down."

"It’s scary, honestly," Veena states flatly.

Kathoril leads the rest of the group onward through hall after gleaming, brass-lined hall, past rows of portraits depicting stern, bearded dwarven monarchs of ages past, until they finally reach the throne room doors, where she stops dead, visibly distressed, wringing her hands together tight enough to whiten her knuckles.

"Please," she says, turning to face them all, "don’t mention that Pip is in the city. Not to the King. Not yet. He’s... going through a bit of a phase right now. I’d prefer to let him know once you’re all settled in."

She pushes the doors open.

Inside is not the opulent seat of royal power anyone was expecting. It’s the dwelling of a mad scientist: walls plastered floor to ceiling in frantic scribbled diagrams, equations spilling off the edges of the parchment and continuing directly onto the stone behind them, half-finished constructs scattered like abandoned toys across a cobbled-together laboratory-slash-workshop that has clearly, aggressively consumed what was once a throne room, tools and spare gears crunching underfoot with every step.

Somewhere beneath a heap of discarded blueprints, what might once have been an actual throne pokes out, buried under so much clutter it’s barely recognizable as furniture anymore.

And in the middle of it all, buried under mountains of loose paper, a man sits hunched over a desk, scribbling madly, muttering equations under his breath.

"Um... brother?" Kathoril calls nervously into the chaos.

A head pops up from the paper mountain, grinning ear to ear. The man erupts upright and comes barreling toward the princess, cackling with delight.

"Kathoril! I’m SO close! I think I finally cracked the servo mechanism for the hips!"

"That’s wonderful, Kandor," Kathoril says, with the weary patience of a woman who has said this exact sentence many, many times before.

Kandor waves her off entirely. The King of the Dwarven Kingdom and Kathoril’s younger brother, he is a well respected engineer who has recently developed an all-consuming obsession over the mechanics of Pip’s construction. "No time to chat, sister, I’m halfway through Mark Twelve of the prototype—"

"I’ve brought the Demon Queen to meet you."

"Ha! You’re hilarious." Kandor laughs, delighted. "It’ll take a lot more than that to drag me away from my work."

Vexena, watching all this unfold, lets out a low chuckle of her own.

Eris steps forward, scythe igniting to life behind her in a slow blaze of crimson light. "The Demon Queen," she says, cool and cutting, "will receive a proper greeting. Royalty or not."

Kandor finally props his goggles up onto his forehead and actually looks at the assembled group. The Demon Queen, her generals, an honest-to-gods scythe floating in the air, blazing crimson in broad daylight. He lets out a shriek of pure, unfiltered panic, hurling his papers into the air in a great scattering cloud and flinging his goggles clean off his head.

He bows so deep his nose nearly brushes the floor, then scrambles upright and rounds on his sister, scowling. "You couldn’t have told me we had important guests?"

Kathoril pinches the bridge of her nose, drawing a long, weary breath. "He does this every single time. Every single guest. Our parents are absolutely rolling in their graves right now, I promise you."

The King turns back to Vexena, stammering, visibly trembling. "W-What exactly brings the... the D-Demon Queen to our humble lands?"

Vexena answers before Kathoril can get a word in. "I’m stranded here. With five battalions of my army. I’ll need somewhere to stay until I find a way home."

Kandor’s eyes go wide as saucers. "F-Five battalions of demons?!" His voice cracks clean in half on the word.

"Five battalions," Eris corrects smoothly, "of the Demon Lands’ strongest, most dedicated warriors. More than enough, between them, to tear this entire continent in half."

The King spins on Kathoril, face draining several shades paler. "What exactly did you get us into?"

"One thing led to another," Kathoril replies, waving a hand breezily. "You don’t need the details. What you do need to know is that I trust Vexena completely, and I’ve already promised her, on behalf of the Kingdom, that we’ll help her and her army find a way back to their lands."

Kandor buries both hands in his own hair, groaning, pacing a tight, frantic circle through the clutter, kicking a loose gear skittering across the floor tiles without seeming to notice, nearly tripping over a half-finished mechanical arm propped against the workbench in the process. "There is absolutely no way the people are going to stand for this! Five battalions! In our farmland! Do you have any idea what that’s going to do to the harvest schedules alone?"

"The people," Kathoril says dryly, "seem perfectly fine, considering we just walked through the front gate."

His head snaps back up. "Wait... the commoners saw you? Already?"

"They did." Vexena shrugs, entirely casually about the whole thing. "Though they seemed considerably more interested in the Pleasure Prince than they were in me."

Kathoril claps a hand over her own face hard enough that it makes an audible smack~.

Kandor goes very, very still. "...D-Did you just say the... Pleasure Prince... is here?"

Vexena hitches, realizing her mistake half a second too late. Behind her, every single one of her generals, and Vuvi’s team behind them, simultaneously drags a palm down their own face, shaking their heads in perfect, weary unison, as though they’ve all rehearsed the exact same gesture for exactly this moment.

The King doesn’t wait for confirmation. He crosses the throne room in a dead sprint, seizes Vexena’s hand in both of his, and stares up at her with an expression of pure, radiant anticipation.

"Is the Prince really here? In my city?" Kandor demands, practically vibrating.

"He is." Vexena replies, wrinkling her nose as she yanks her hand free.

Kathoril sighs, already resigned to how this is about to go. "Yes, but he’s currently on a—"

Kandor is through the throne room doors before she can finish the sentence, robes flapping wildly behind him, goggles forgotten under a workbench, leaving nothing but a slowly settling cloud of loose paperwork drifting down in his wake.

Everyone turns to stare at Vexena, exasperated, in perfect, unified silence.

She just shrugs, entirely unbothered by the mess she’s created.

"Mortals," she says, "so peculiar."