”It begun with my family. They were.. merchants, making a living traveling the Labyrinth.” I lied.
I must’ve prepared a hundred lies. The road to Skystead from the Capital took me two weeks on foot, and that was impossibly fast - possible only because I knew of shortcuts through the time-space-bending Labyrinth not discovered yet. But I had a maddening amount of time to think, with lemming trolls as my only conversation partners, so.. I had thought up a lot of potential backstories, prepared for this moment when the MC inevitably asked the question, ’how did you get here?’.
I was struck by sudden inspiration - I decided to tell her a truth. The person before me wasn’t an amalgamation of my thoughts, but a PERSON - don’t ask me how this was possible, but this was undeniably reality. (Or perhaps I just hit my head really hard and this was the desperate invention of a dying mind, who knows.) In other words; I had set up a flesh and blood person with.. quite a few, uh... lets say, things that I wouldn’t want to personally experience. I didn’t exactly feel guilty, not for writing stories as a hobby, but.. part of me wanted to give her a chance to avoid some of those things. Make it up to her. Even if only a little.
Then of course, there was the mad scientist part of me who wondered how she’d change her life, if it was by her own choices, and not by my design. One could arge that this wasn’t a kindness, that the potential gain of avoiding disasters might come at the price of unintended consequences, that fate was what it was (I’m a fatalist, see, and this WAS after all a world of my creation) and that I’d just muck things up.
But I had already mucked it up - right now, no doubt, some of this worlds most powerful people were stirring up a ruckus looking for me, and the news of my disappearance were bound to cause fear and warp the timeline. Who knew how her story would end, even if I didn’t rock the boat any further?
I couldn’t tell her the WHOLE truth. But I could take her story, give it a different finish, and use it not only as a backstory I knew she’d buy with the hide still on the beast, but also to maybe plant a few ideas in her mind.
”Me, I could never enter it. The Labyrinth, that is.” I continued. ”I was always sickly as a kid and didn’t have any means of self-defense. It was just a chafing dream that flared up every time they left, and every time they returned with stuff from places I knew I’d never be able to visit. My life wasn’t bad or anything but, some dreams are just relentless, like fire burning ones insides, keeping us awake till late at night, you know? For those dreams, you can either achieve it or you can be safe, but you can’t have both.. but, then the safe option disappeared. Some stuff happened. Stay where I was, or enter the Labyrinth... both turned into equally shitty options..”
I talked on, and on, making sure to highlight the parts I knew Kiri would be interested in, and downplay the parts I didn’t have the skills to live up to. Then, at a suitable point, I abandoned Kiris story and started making it up to fit with my alibi.
”... then, in the middle of the battle with those lemming trolls, I noticed my party was poof, gone. So was my bag. When I noticed that even my adventurers ID tag was missing from my neck, that’s when I realized how deep of a shit I really was in. Only moments later, an owlbear charged at me, breaking through trees like they were toothpicks to get me. I was only saved ’cause of the terrain being on my side.. but before I ran away, arms gloriously flailing, guess what I saw? My party. On the other side of the owlbear. With my bag. With their hands full of owlbear eggs. I was set-up from the start.”
I pointed my thumb over my shoulder at a small group of beastmen on the other side of the pub. ”Those guys - Relmach and his people - they found me in time. Brought down the owlbear. I must’ve done the Lord of Luck a favor in my past life or something.”
Neither Kiri nor Relmach needed to know that I could take down owlbears on my own. OP hero cheat skills are handy for that. But I didn’t have a cheat that stopped me from slowly losing my mind to cabin fever. The days in the Labyrinth just.. trickled away. Somehow I forgot the count. For every day that came and passed, I worried more and more that perhaps I had already missed the exit, and was already lost. Finally meeting someone else and hear from them that I was still on the right path to Skystead.. from that perspective, it was not an exaggeration to say that they really did saved me.
”And thus, my largely accidental journey across way too large distances comes to a temporary end, in a nice cozy inn, after a nice warm meal, with my socks completely dry for the first time in days, and a bed that is positively free of lemming trolls. Thank you, for coming to my Ted Talk.”
”What’s a Ted Talk?”
”... oh, uh... it’s an expression that means something like ’thanks for listening to my long as hell educational speech’, or... you know what. Never mind.”
—————
I stayed in Skystead. The day I arrived, I got myself a ”new” adventurers ID number to replace the tag that I ”lost” - and more importantly, with it came an official document with my name on it. It was the proof I needed, to ”prove” that I couldn’t possibly have been in the Capital during that fateful heroes summon.
Without the shortcut I knew of through my cheat knowledge, it would normally take six weeks to reach Skystead, even through the Labyrinth. It only took five weeks for the soldiers that heralded the news of a missing hero, which illustrated how serious a problem the missing hero really was. A dangerous variable. Her name was unknown. Her skills were unknown. Her potential was unknown. And, worst of all, so was her attitude towards the citizens of the world that basically abducted her to solve their problems. Anyone with half a brain would realize what a problem she might become.
They brought fliers with her portrait.
”Heh, doesn’t she look kind of like you?” Relmach said with a bantering grin and peered between me and the flyer.
”Shit dang, do all humans look the same to you or something?” I replied. ”How do we look the same?”
I had changed a lot in the Labyrinth. My hair caught fire in a fight with something that used spells, so I used ”shinies” to pay an old lemming troll to cut it short (it was a side-adventure all on its own - and it had an hilarious ending when it turned out that she was a better hairdresser than my local hairstylist back on Earth). The sun had bleached my hair several shades lighter, and burned my skin several shades darker. My face was nowhere near as round, either - really, when I first got out of there, I barely recognized my own reflection. That was a little unsettling... but very useful.
I know that Relmach and his party eventually figured it out, somewhere along the years after I joined their party. And I’m really grateful that they never brought it up. They’re good people. Better company than I deserve.
As for Kiri, she obviously went on her own adventures. Since I knew approximately when she would show up back in her hometown according to the plot, I made sure to catch her and hear about her adventures.
I was a little disappointed to realize very little changed even after I told her that story all those years back. She kept showing up on schedule, kept telling me about the adventures I already knew about.
Until the day when she didn’t show up on schedule. I showed up at the inn every evening I was free, until she finally showed up several months later. She looked at me with a deadpan frown that was unusually deadpan, even for her. She had graduated from the queen of deadpan frowns, to the deadpan frown overlord.
”You know,” she said quietly when no one else was within earshot, ”... things REALLY went to hell in a basket case when I accidentally said ’thanks for coming to my ted talk’ in front of a summoned hero...”
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WELL. THAT WAS LONG.