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Life aboard the Joyful Damnation was pretty good, once you got your sea legs. For all he is a fool, Corazon was actually quite good at multitasking at being both a captain and an idiot who cares more about his appearance. If anything, Prudence would literally die before actually saying so, he was generous, bordering on nice, if he thought no one was paying attention.
(She had vague memories of telling him so once when very, very drunk, and it is to his credit that he had never tried to leverage this appalling lapse in judgement. Which, capriciously, she did somewhat judge him for. It is hard to be the only evil-aligned person in the guild.)
He also was a very good cook, which was also good fortune, because the others are fairly committed to chaotic hopelessness, which isn’t really conducive to timely supper time. While Prudence doesn’t have to eat all that much, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t appreciate a good meal. She’s a simple warlock. She likes cigarettes, black coffee, and hatred, plus nachos, same as any sane person. She made the decision early on to share her favourite recipe for hatred sauce with Corazon, and it turns out that she likes Corazon’s hatred sauce the best of all she’s tried. It helps that he adds caramelised onions to everything, and it really works.
So she isn’t hungry, per se, not really, she hungers for so much, power, favour, knowledge, arcane secrets, mere physical hunger pales in comparison, but all this contemplation of the navel never fails to build up an appetite.
Fittingly at that point the banging of pans and the swearing and invocation of gods even Egbert hasn’t heard of begins, heralding the coming of dinner. By today’s symphony of curses, it sounds like it's going to be a hell of a meal.
Sure enough, after a few more minutes of banging and the sound of expensive boots stomping on timber, Corazon’s head pokes above deck.
“That seal’s been in the stores again,” Corazon bitches, delicately balancing a platter of something that looks pretty gourmet for depleted stores at sea. “Gods know how he got through the traps, but he ate all our eggs, drank several gallons of oil and somehow consumed an entire sack, a sack!, of gravel. It wasn’t even the gravel grade flour I bought by mistake, but actual gravel, for ice storms. Which I suppose is my fault for keeping it in the pantry, but anyway,” he shakes himself like a dog and bellows up to the crows nest, where Dob and Merilwen were playing at being birdbotherers. “DINNER!!!!”
“I thought he was looking a bit bloated.” Egbert said, ambling up and stroking Seal Gaiman’s enormously turgid belly, and helping himself to dinner. It did look good, and so Prudence helped herself quickly to her own gently steaming plate of potato smiles, beans and salt pork sausages. Seal Gaiman honked incomprehensibly in reply and attempted to bite Egbert’s hand off. Hard to tell whether he’s really warming up to them or just constantly distracted from his blood feud by pork products.
(They should have made Merilwen speak-with-animals him ages ago, but they’re all too afraid of what he’d say.)
Being at sea is nice, Prudence thought as she chewed the pork fat carefully, and then applied more of the bottled hatred sauce. It really was better than what she could do herself, though Cthulu knows she’ll never tell. She smacks her lips and puts her plate down. She’d spent the last week communing with her books, and like the others she’d learned some really choice new spells, and while normally she would save them for battle, it has been ages since they even saw anything more nefarious than a petulant seagull, and so she was itching to cast magic.
“Who wants to test out this banishment spell then?” Prudence asked, rubbing her hands together with determined glee.
The group, predictably, immediately descended into a chorus of “not it”-s, and then further into bickering over the precise initiative order they had declared not-it. Prudence pouts, but she’s smiling on the inside with friendly pride. They’ve all come so far.
“Come on! I’m bored and we’re adventurers! It's a portable adventure! I’m bored, and you all look like you need a good...adventuring. Do it or I’ll do something you’ll regret. I’ll...call Binbag.”
“How much of that hatred sauce have you had? I thought it was supposed to sate some of your evil urges.” Corazon said, holding the bottle up to the light and inspecting the levels with a critical eye. Prudence snatched it back and cuddled it to her chest. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you the recipe, you’re just jealous.”
“I’m really not. It made the hairs on my chest grow their own hairs. My barber was appalled.”
“Liar. And I mean it about the Binbag thing. Pleaseeeeeeeeeee. Just one little banishment. It’ll barely hurt.”
Corazon shoved the plates into Merilwen’s arms, it being her turn to do the washing up. She liked the practice of using all of her Octowen legs independently when it was her turn. Corazon pulls a cork out of a bottle of rum with his teeth in a movement that Prudence momentarily had to pause and shake out of her mind, lest she have a feeling she didn’t want to confront, and when he wouldn’t melt beneath her most aggressive pouting, she gave up and went to get drunk with Dob and Egbert. They were just sitting a few feet away, but it was the appearance of the thing.
“Lads. Lads. You know what would be great? What would be fun?”
“What, Prudence?”, Dob replied, and she likes that about him. Eager.
“Banishment.”
“No!” They both roar, and down their drinks. Ah, alright. It’s that drinking game, tonight.
“Come on! Don’t you have any intellectual curiosity? There could be so many amazing things in there, god, I can’t even imagine the number of different types of tentacles that could be present. Not to mention the blood! Imagine, an entire dimension of blood and viscera! Or whatever you guys like.”
“I’m not going. I feel sick enough without the promise of hot and cold running viscera.” Egbert says, getting up and then immediately falling down. “Oh no. My legs stole all my drunkenness. This rotgut works fast.”
"Ugh. Fine. Cowards.” Prudence says, and downs her drink in the sulkiest way possible. She spends a good few minutes really leaning into her pout, and gets distracted thinking about whether she can get a new portrait done next time they’re in town. She really thinks she’s perfected the next level of pouting now.
“Cheer up Pru”, Dob says. “Could be worse.”
Prudence sighs dramatically. “Could it? It’s like you guys hate me, I mean when am I going to get to banish someone? You know what it's like, that new spell itchiness. it just feels wrong to have this power and not be able to use it."
“Look, okay, you can send me to your dimension if you promise to send Egbert too, so I can have some company.” Dob said, staring at Egbert where he is throwing up over the side of the ship. No stomach on that one.
"If you keep saying things like that, he's going to get ideas." Prudence says quietly, because despite her best interests, while she loves feelings, the messier the better, she would usually declare, she has to live with these idiots, and she is the Yoko Onobees to their Beeples. If they’re breaking up, it’ll be at her hand.
Together, she and Dob watch as Egbert bumbles away, the alcohol firmly pooled in his large feet, Seal Gaiman tucked under his arm, honking loudly.
"What ideas?” Dob scoffed. “I wish! He's handsome, I'm easy. You guys really don't understand just how easy I am. It’s kind of embarrassing, really."
“Maybe the banishment dimension will be good for being easy in?”
“Some kind of...makeout dimension?” Dob said, ponderously. “That could work. Maybe it’ll spur him to get over his paladin hangups and you know, really go to town. On me. Dob. On my body. And my mind. I’m easy either way.”
“Well he’s wandered off now.” Prudence says. “I can’t help you tempt him into the makeout dimension.”
Dob claps her on the shoulder, “Friendly tip, you’d probably have more success if you call it that rather than focusing on the infinite capacity for tentacles.”
“Really?” The note of hope in her voice disgusts her, but she’s drunk and getting drunker, so she’ll kill anyone who brings it up in the morning.
Dob takes her by the shoulders and looks into her eyes. "Okay Prudence, you win. Please banish me. Banish me but good. Together, we can get what we both want. You, knowledge. Me, distraction, and possibly a good time."
Prudence sighs. "It doesn't work if you want it."
“If it only works if we don’t want it, why didn’t you just do it earlier? Unlike you.”
“Ugh, fine.”
"Okay, no, no, I’ve got this", he puts on an exaggerated sad face, bottom lip trembling dramatically. "Pweese, mighty Pru, down't bawnish meee!!! I'm scawed!!!"
She rolls her eyes, but it is a very good pout, at least a level ten. Maybe they could get matching portraits together. "Okay, it works fine. Fine! Fine! But take a deep breath first, I've got no idea if it's got breathable air," before hastily correcting herself, "Or not, I mean, I don't care if you suffocate."
Dob dutifully takes a massive breath, and then Prudence takes a deep breath, holds the feeling of the spell in her mind, raises her fists and completes the ritual by extending her index fingers out and sticking her thumbs up, and yells “BANISH!!!”
Sure enough, Dob disappears in a pleasing pop of black smoke. Her eyes sting pleasingly with the afterimage of a perfectly spherical void.
A minute later, Dob pops back into their home dimension and inhales dramatically. In the low light of the ship at sea his clothes are steaming with a pale blue smoke, and he smells of frosty winter mornings and the promise of the full moon. "Oh, that was cool."
"What was it like?" she asks, not even bothering to not be excited.
Dob looks pensive, stroking his chin as he mulls the question. "Oh, well...it was kinda hard to explain...you kinda had to be there? I think it'd make a GREAT hideaway though. Quite cozy? And I am fairly sure there was air."
Prudence stared at him, her mouth hanging open in incredulity. "Seriously!?”
“What?”
“That’s it?”
Dob shrugs. “I mean, yeah. I don’t know what else to say.”
The world flickers for a moment for Prudence, so intense is her rage. “UGH! See that I don't banish you again. No makeout dimension for you!" She starts to stomp away, but Dob grabs her by the hand.
“Aww, Pru! You promised!! Please banish me!”
Prudence snatches her hand away and growls at him. "No. And as punishment, if I do, I'm going to banish you with Corazon."
Dob rolls his eyes, "Which part of easy do you not understand? Try to NOT send me to your makeout dimension, oh infernal queen."
“Nu-uh, you lost your makeout dimension privileges.”
Instead, Prudence bullies Egbert and Corazon into getting banished together, which is actually a hell of a lot easier once Dob comes and tries to convince them not to do it, and a few minutes later she has two more points of data which determines two important things about the makeout dimension. First, it appears that you can breathe in there and second, no one can really describe what it's like. Corazon described it as “indescribable yet comforting, covered in vaguely insulting runes” because he’s still very proud of being the only one in the group who could be bothered to learn comprehend languages, while Egbert talked poignantly about the dense atmosphere of “cloying incense that makes you want to take your clothes off and a smell that makes you slightly salivate.”
Oh, and apparently they had made out in there. In her peripheral vision Dob was glaring at her with a fury that would be very funny under any other circumstance.
“Did it compel you to?” she asked a very drunk Corazon a few hours later, after he had just dreamily described it for the third time. Dob, at this point had given up and gone to bed, cashing in an IOU from Merilwen for some quality cat-form time to calm himself down.
“No, it just seemed like a good idea. It was kinda scary, and you know, you hug, the tentacles are coming closer, the human mind goes places, and those places are sometimes dragonborn mouths.”
“Tentacles?” Prudence snapped awake. “Why didn’t you mention tentacles? Were the milky tentacles there? Is this the void between the stars?"
"I wouldn't call them milky." he ponders. "More, velvety? And maybe less tentacles, more...appendages. Maybe like the tails of a really dense black cat? Hmm, actually that would explain the purring noises. Oh sorry, did I not mention them? Seems like an odd omission, really. They’re pretty ubiquitous."
Prudence slumps, dejectedly, into her rum punch. "Ugh, I hate this. Common doesn't have the right words! Why didn't you idiots learn any actually useful, deviant languages?"
Corazon looked hurt. “Hey, I’m the most cunning linguist of all of us! I speak common, thieves’ cant, and French. Not to mention -”
“Comprehend languages, I know, I know. What’s French?”
“Some dead language, I don’t know, we all learn it at St Posho’s Academy. I was pretty good at it.”
“That’s so stupid.” Prudence says, to which Corazon just shrugs. “The benefits of a classical education are few and far between. I’m also nationally ranked in horse rumba and rugger bugger.”
“No,” Prudence shakes her head, angrily, “I mean, it's just wrong, it’s inaccurate; you can’t speak to the dead in French! They mostly speak infernal or abyssal! Ugh, formal education is useless. All of this is useless!” she says before she stomps off to go find Egbert.
He’s lying in his bunk, using Seal Gaiman as a pillow and staring dreamily at the ceiling. “Oh, hi Pru. You wanna climb in?”
Of all the guild barring Corazon, Egbert has the nicest bed. He’s got an eye for pillows, even discounting the obese seal, and so she does like to nap there, sometimes, if there’s room.
“What are you thinking about?” she asks, as she gets comfortable.
“Oh you know, just thinking about the makeout dimension. Mostly contemplating whether it is the best name for it, I mean...” he raises his eyebrows meaningfully.
“Wait, did you and Corazon…” she makes a vaguely obscene gesture, which if she wasn’t already red, would have caused her to flush.
“Bone? No! Make out passionately as if we were going to die if we didn't? Totally. The tentacles kinda did put The Fear in us, and you know fear is a great motivator for Corazon to stick his tongue down your throat.”
“Ugh, really?” Prudence said, grimacing. “What a waste of good fear.”
Egbert nudges her, “Do you think you could do it again? I want to see if I can get to second mace next time.”
“What’s second mace?”, she asks, knowing she’ll hate the answer.
Egbert waggles his eyebrows. “It's a paladin thing. It’s when -”
Prudence takes this as an invitation to leave. “I don’t want to know,” she says, sliding out of bed and stomping off to her own room. Gross.
Prudence goes to sleep that night furiouser than usual, and gets nipped by the book babies for keeping them up. “Sorry babies,” she murmured. She thought about banishing them with a charmed quill or a scrying mirror or something, but who knows which dimension they come from originally. She already has lost the orb, if she were to lose the books as well, she can’t even bear to think about it.
The next morning, after breakfast, when it was Prudence’s turn to drive the boat (“Sail the ship!” “Whatever”), while Corazon took a very long, very elaborate bath. Usually, this would take up most of the time until lunch, but today he hadn’t even dried his hair when he came to see her, flanked by Dob and Egbert on each side of him.
“We’ve talked about it and I think you should banish the three of us. We think we’ve worked out a way to capture the makeout dimension, but we all three need to be there for it to work.
Dob brandishes his paints and easel.
“Why do the other two have to go?” Prudence asks Dob, suspicious.
“Moral support”, the three of them say in unison. Dob coughs. “I mean, it is scary in there. And if there are more of us, you’re more likely to get actual workable intelligence, not just vague bollocks.”
“Okay.” Prudence says, and before they could get too cosy, she finger-guns them out of existence.
When they reappear, it’s a disaster. Egbert had paint in his eyes, somehow, and didn’t see anything. The painting Dob hands her is a preschool level atrocity, it’sfrankly just a smeared handprint of black paint across the cream canvas, and Dob isn’t even all that sorry, and worse for all of them, Corazon’s good white shirt is ruined, and Prudence knows it is serious because he’s barely even complaining about it.
Instead, he and Dob are talking in hushed tones.
“Oh my god,” Corazon says.
“I know,” Dob replies, his eyebrows pulled right up to his hairline.
“I mean, I never knew”, Corazon touches Dob’s arm in something more of a stroke than anything else.
“I don’t like to talk about it,” Dob says. “But maybe I should? Maybe we should?”
Corazon looked coy and honest to god fluttered his eyelashes. “Okay. Maybe later?”
Prudence stamps her foot, interrupting their hushed filth. “It’s not fair! I’m going to have to do it myself, and I can’t!”
“Maybe if you cast it in a mirror?” Dob asks, helpfully.
“Ugh, no, I already tried that! It needs to be a cursed or enchanted mirror to reflect back a level four abjuration, as any fool knows. Where are we going to find a magic mirror at sea?! I can’t look at you right now, you three smell of the void and smugness, I hate you all.”
“Oh wait, Prudence?” Corazon calls out. She turns, and he gestures between them, “Can you just…” he does the finger guns.
Prudence does another offensive arcane sigil at him as she walks away.
“What languages do you speak?” Prudence asked Merilwen, who was whittling something floral and viney out of one of her arrows, perched carefully on the prow of the ship.
“High, Middle, Low, Upper and Nether Elvish. Common, obviously. I can read some dwarfish, and Corazon taught me some French once, but it’s not very useful.”
Prudence ponders this for a moment. “How's your drawing? Or well, whittling would work. Could you whittle something in a minute?”
Merilwen jumped down from her perch and smiled helpfully. “Okay, Pru, what's this about?”
“I want to know where the banish spell sends people, and I banished Dob and then Corazon and Egbert and then all three of them but none of them can describe what’s there! And they’re being weird about it!”
“Right.” Merilwen said slowly.
“Also they keep going there to make out.” Prudence pouted.
Merilwen’s right eyebrow cocked in surprise. “Riiiiiiight! I think I owe Bismuth three gold pieces.”
Prudence ignored this. “And I don’t know if it's the dimension or just some whole deal I don’t know about that they’ve got going on, but I need to know!”
Merilwen sighed and ushered her over to the captain's chair and perched on one of the arms. “Well they’re young. I remember what it was like, sneaking off to make out with people in the sacred copse, skinny dipping in the gilded lake. I swear my elbow still twinges from the injury I got the first time I fell out of a tree because well, we were going at it and it's so easy to lose your balance…”
Prudence gapes at her. “I’ve been travelling with you lot for what, nearly five years? How did I miss that you’re all sex obsessed?!”
Merilwen shrugs. “We know how much it upsets you. Face it, Prudence by name, prude by nature.”
Prudence’s mind went blank with the sheer offence of being seen and known in such an offensive and brutally correct manner, before styling it out. Today certainly was a day of uncomfortable truths. “Ugh, I’m not, you are, whatever. Do you want to get banished or what?”
Merilwen jumps up and checks her teeth in a shard of fairy glass she produces from her pocket. “Bring it on.”
Dutifully, Prudence rounded up her compatriots and cast banish at them. As the portal opened she craned her ears towards any low infernal purring or chiming of dark bells, but the only thing she could make out was Corazon’s pleased giggling. Ugh. Disgusting.
She flopped down on a hammock and stared, despondent, into the middle distance until they popped back into existence, looking pleased and pleasantly rumpled. Egbert was faintly smoking, and Merilwen’s flowers were looking decidedly wilted. She hadn’t even taken her whittling knife.
Prudence didn’t bother to question them, just walked off, building up a good head of huff, before realising that she had nowhere to go once she reached the back of the ship, so consoled herself by shooting fish with eldritch blasts until she calmed down.
Merilwen appeared at her elbow, looking sheepish. “You alright, Prudence?” she said, softly.
“I’m not a prude.” Prudence said. “I’m not. I always just dreamed of normal things, you know. Normal fantasies, like, okay, I’m a great mighty immortal sorceress imprisoned in a tower by my enemies for a thousand years! Then a good, pure prince rides up on a white horse to rescue me, because I look to him like a lost princess, and I slowly corrupt him until he falls in love with me and then I kill him and take his kingdom for my own! Or, me and my true love battle our enemies and then have sex on their bloody and mangled corpses! Or, I think I’m just a normal human girl, I don’t know that I’m magical, and I accidentally corrupt my true love, and am tearfully forced to kill him to bring about the apocalypse! Normal fantasies! None of the depraved fetishes you lot seem to be harbouring.”
“I get it”, Merilwen says, patting her on the arm.
"Everyone gets banished except me! I am jealous, okay? I want to go to the deepest darkest dimension! I want to see the horrible runes! I want to touch the tails of enormous black cats! I want to smell the burning incense and see the infinite yet welcoming void and kiss some people!”
"So...you want to make out too?"
"Yes, fine, I’m jealous, you're all going to the makeout dimension and I don't get to go to the makeout dimension and maybe I want to go to the makeout dimension for once, alright? We're always meeting the wrong kind of evil people! The only chaotic evil person we've met is evil Dob and then we had to kill him and that was years ago, and you just don’t understand how hard it is to be evil in a world so relentlessly good”, and then she bursts into tears.
“Oh Pru.” Dob says, appearing behind her and patting her back awkwardly but sincerely. “You should have said. I’ll be evil Dob for you anytime you want.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure.”
She sniffs, and wipes her eyes on her sleeves. “Now?”
“Absolutely, let me just get Corazon to lend me eyeliner, and I’ll be right back.”
Her lip wobbles again, but she manages to force it into a watery smile.
“Thanks Dob, you’re a pal.”
They all turn up wearing eyeliner. Corazon has even cast minor illusion on himself to transform his artful stubble into a sharp goatee, the moustache waxed within an inch of its life. Merilwen has swapped out her flower crown for a spiky metal one, and Egbert has taken off his shirt, and well, Prudence may be a prude, but even she can appreciate that. Wow.
“We made this for you,” Merilwen says, and produces a strange composite of her fairy glass, Corazon’s hand mirror, backup hand mirror and emergency hand mirror, all stuck to Egbert’s backup breastplate, shining with the distinct aroma of prestidigitation.
“If you cast banish at it, and we all stand near each other, we think it’ll reflect back. Turns out all of Corazon’s mirrors are cursed. Something about his face, I think.”
“Hey!”
“Just getting into my new alignment”, Merilwen said sweetly, and this is why Prudence likes her the best.
They all huddle close, Prudence in the middle, and before she casts the spell she pauses and commits the image of them all to memory, and then meets her own eyes and casts.
A long, indescribable minute later, they pop back into Geth and clutch each other to get their sea legs back as the ship hits a small wave.
“How was it?” Merilwen asks.
Prudence takes a deep shuddering breath, savoring the final tendrils of the impossible incense and licks her lips where they still tingle. She’s not sure whose mouth it was from, whether from stubble or scales or just contact with so much goodness, but her heart is racing in the best possible way. She knows she’s flushed as she tugs the neckline of her dress back into place, and smoothing her hair from where fingers had been tangled in it just moments before, pushing the adornments back onto her horns from where they have become dislodged. She sighs, dreamily.
“It was...perfect”.
EPILOGUE
After a long and grown up chat about feelings and logistics and protocols, it turns out Egbert can also cash banish. Prudence bribes him to secrecy, because first, it’s only really funny with moonbeam, and second, she is much scarier than Merilwen, though Merilwen is improving at being a scary, scary woman, something Prudence has reported back to Cthulu proudly every time they have their monthly catch ups.
By the time they finally pull into shore, Prudence has lost the itchy feeling of a new spell, and is a lot more relaxed than she normally would be. She even catches herself smiling when they’ve set up camp in a nice woodland clearing, and she’s sitting under an umbrella with Merilwen recovering from a good overdue bout of Bearilwenning next to her. A short distance away, the boys are larking about in a stream. However much she loves the sea, it is good to be back on dry land.
“I hate seeing them like this,” Prudence sighs.
“What, happy?” Merilwen snarks, stretching out deliciously in the sun, happy herself. Only Octowen truly enjoys the sea.
“Yeah. It's just not right.” Prudence says. “I feel like I’m shirking my duties.”
“Well, you could always” - and then she does the banishment finger guns.
Prudence considers it. It was fun. The tentacles were so cool, even infernal wasn’t enough to truly explain just how cool they were. Plus, the making out was pretty good, though they’d maybe got a bit better at doing it without the crutch of another dimension as an excuse, it still isn’t the same. They should find a way to sell that incense, though. They’d be rich. Well, richer.
“They'd just enjoy it too much,” Prudence says, begrudgingly, and warms up the Eldritch blast instead.