The Emperor resided in the capital of the Empire, Altdorf, as was to be expected. It was a significant distance to the south, several days’ journey, in fact. Which meant they would either need to hire a carriage or attempt walking the entire distance. The first was problematic because they had no money to speak of. The second was problematic because the forests surrounding the road were filled with monsters that, apparently, liked to attack weary travelers.
Vivian preferred the idea of walking. She believed she could hold herself in a fight and loved the idea of not being hidden in a sack the entire time. Luigi wanted to use a carriage since he did not believe in his ability to fight nightmarish creatures of the night and didn’t have to worry about being in a sack on the ride. When asked where they would get the money, Luigi suggested they find some way to use her abilities secretly to get it.
In the end, it came down to rock paper scissors, and Vivian won. They set out the following day without a carriage or a sack.
“See? This is fine!” Vivian said, spinning around and holding her head to the sky. “We’ve got the warm summer air, a Void-less sky, and all the time in the world to enjoy ourselves!”
Luigi tightened his grip on his hammer. “Until the daemons surprise us and eat us and wear our flesh as jackets!”
Vivian sighed. “Come on, I’ll hide you in the shadows if I have to.”
To Vivian’s credit, they did make it the entire day without encountering a single monster or enemy of any kind. The few carriages that passed by didn’t see them because Vivian would always duck them into the shadows before anything could be made about her “daemonic” appearance.
Unfortunately, they did not make very good time, and night fell before they reached the next town. Vivian poked her head into the woods and found a nice clearing just off the beaten path where she made a fire.
“H-how can I sleep?” Luigi asked. “There are monsters all around us..”
Vivian nodded. “Good point.” She found a couple old, dead, fallen trees and had Luigi help carry them back to the campfire. She slowly began to break all of the wood into small, manageable chunks that she spread in a dense circle around their campsite. Carefully, she shoveled dirt up from the ground around the edges of the circle, creating a sort of outer ring.
Then she lit the entire thing on fire, creating a wall of fire around them.
“There we go!” Vivian clapped her hands. “Those logs are big enough to burn for hours.”
“So I’m supposed to sleep in a raging ring of fire?”
“Yep!”
“...It’s too hot.”
Vivian sighed, putting her hands on her hips. “You can sleep outside the ring where the monsters can get you, if you want.”
“No thank you!” Luigi dropped to the ground, pretending to fall asleep immediately.
Vivian rolled her eyes. She realized the irony in their situation. She’d been concerned about not having anyone to follow on the adventure, and now she was undoubtedly the leader of this little group of two and was concerned that Luigi didn’t have it in him to handle all of this. How the tables turn. She let out a yawn and laid down inside the central fire, allowing the flames to soothe her into the land of dreams.
She was woken up by an arrow piercing her hat. She jumped up, finger burning.
There was a beastman standing outside the ring of fire, drawing his bowstring back to fire again. She burst his entire weapon into cinders with a thought. “Get out of here!” Vivian shouted. “Shoo!” She threw some fireballs just to add to the warning.
“Wha?” Luigi grunted, sitting up. “What happened?”
Vivian burnt the arrow in her hat before he could see it. “Nothing, just an interruption. Go back to sleep.”
The next time she was woken up by the sound of Luigi screaming. With a groan, she lifted her head, more annoyed than afraid to find a dozen beastmen all standing around the ring of fire—which was nowhere near as hot as it had used to be—all apparently waiting to ambush them the first chance they thought they could get past the fire.
“Tenacious little…” Vivian twirled her finger, lighting all of them on fire with Fiery Jinx, sending all of them running in a panic. She took one look at the sad state of the fire ring and sighed. “All right, that’s not going to burn until morning… why’d I think it would…” With a yawn, she left the fire ring to gather more wood.
An arrow struck her hat again.
Vivian decided enough was enough and just lit the forest on fire, grabbed Luigi, and sunk into the shadows. Since it required focus to maintain the shadow state, she would not be getting any more sleep that night. But the beastmen were pretty determined to ruin her sleep schedule, so she figured she might as well just deal.
When morning dawned, they were surrounded by ash. Vivian popped out of the shadow, only to find that Luigi had somehow managed to fall asleep during the whole ordeal. With a sigh, she gently nudged him awake. “Hey. It’s morning.”
Luigi’s eyes flew open. “Monsters!”
“All either burnt to ash or running away from the forest fire I caused.” Vivian rubbed the back of her head. “You were… right. We should have tried for the carriage.”
“I knew it!”
Vivian facepalmed. “Yes, yes you did…”
~~~
They arrived in the next town, Vivian hiding in Luigi’s shadow. They still had no money, and if they wanted a carriage, they were going to have to scrounge up some money.
“You could just… steal it,” Luigi suggested.
“Luigi!” Vivian gasped. “These people are hard-working and very poor individuals. Why would I steal from them?”
“...Steal from the thieves?” Luigi shrugged.
“I… hmm.” Vivian paused, thinking about it. “If we could find a thief…”
“Hey, bud, are you talking to your shadow?” a man passing by asked.
“Uh… yep!” Luigi laughed nervously. “That’s me! Luigi talks-to-his-shadow McGee!”
“...Right.” He rolled his eyes and continued walking.
“We need to be more careful,” Vivian whispered.
“Well, we need to find a thief! How are we going to do that?”
Vivian, who had spent a large chunk of her time in a certain thief-ridden city known as Rogueport, knew exactly how to do that. Go to the market and watch. Vivian ended up doing that while Luigi wandered around rather aimlessly, leading her around the marketplace in his shadow. She couldn’t see as well as she would have liked, but she could still get what she needed.
Apparently, this town had a particular obsession with selling fish from the nearby lake, fish of all sorts lined in rows, sorted by species and size. Vivian wondered if you could play them like a xylophone. It took a fair bit of effort to get herself to focus on the task at hand: find a thief. Specifically, a thief who would have a stash. Someone who was experienced and wouldn’t be noticed. Someone like… a child covered head to toe in rags so his face couldn’t be seen. Bingo.
She left Luigi’s shadow, moving around slowly so as to not draw attention to herself. She eventually ended up in the kid’s shadow, following him around as he robbed a grand total of five people. This is the guy. She stayed in his shadow even as he ran to the outskirts of town and ducked behind a tree, jumping down a rather well-hidden hole. Had she not been a shadow at the time, she would not have been able to fit. Genius.
To make matters even more interesting, the actual tunnels under the ground were a maze. It was so complicated Vivian was concerned she wouldn’t be able to find her way back. She began to wonder if maybe there was more to this kid than just being an excellent thief.
Her concern was momentarily dissipated when the kid arrived at his hoard, and what a hoard it was. Gold, silver, and copper pieces everywhere mixed with several items of significantly less value: glass beads, metal plates; basically anything that was shiny was apparently worthy of being put in the treasure pile.
When the kid took off his robes, Vivian’s concern returned in full force. He wasn’t a kid at all, but rather some kind of humanoid mutant rat with warts all over its fur. It stuck its snout into the gold and breathed in deeply, letting out a chuckle before saying something in an unknown language. Then it went deeper into the caves where Vivian heard lots of squeaking from other, presumably similar rat creatures.
Cautiously, Vivian rose out of the shadow and started piling gold coins into her hat. The rats didn’t seem to notice, so she got to fill all the space the stone Heart wasn’t occupying. With a smile, she turned to leave and remembered the maze-like nature of the tunnels. How was she going to get out?
She got an idea.
She hated it.
With a deep breath, she turned back and called to the rats. “Hey! I’m stealing all this stuff you stole!” She ducked into the shadow as quickly as she could. As expected, the rats came running on all fours, running right past her actual position and out into the tunnels. Gotcha. She followed them out in their shadows. They were faster than her, but their enraged squeaks kept telling her where to go until she was at the entrance once again. Several rats were standing there, hissing in the light of the day, looking left and right for her. Naturally, they found nothing.
Eventually, they started grumbling at each other and returned to their cave. Now free from mutant rat-man eyes, she moved along the ground back to town, finding the shadow of a woman to hide in until she got back to the market. It took quite a few hops, but she eventually got back to Luigi.
He was talking to his shadow. “So… how long do I wait here? ...Still giving me the silent treatment, huh?”
“Luigi, I’ve been gone for quite a while,” Vivian whispered.
“...Oh.”
“I’ve got the gold though. I’m afraid I don’t know who they stole it from, though, so we can’t return even a portion of it.”
“Eh, I’ve got no problem with that.”
“Still talking to your shadow?” the same guy from earlier asked.
“Oh no... let’s just get that carriage.”
~~~
They almost made it all the way to Altdorf in the carriage.
Almost.
Four days traveling without incident (with Vivian in a sack) came to an abrupt end on the last day of the journey. The sun was high in the sky, lighting a pleasant summer day. The driver was a midget of a man with wild hair and a perpetually bored expression while Luigi and Vivian sat in the back, only speaking to each other in whispers. For his part, the driver didn’t seem to care that Luigi appeared to be completely crazy.
The beastmen attacked without warning. One moment, the horse was trotting along nicely. The next, it had three arrows in its neck and it was down while two dozen beastmen charged out of the forest and assaulted the carriage. They embedded axes in the sides with their battle cry while the driver let out a panicked scream and climbed onto the roof of the carriage. It would not stop them for long.
Luigi swatted a few of them back with his hammer, but even he couldn’t handle this many at once. “What are we gonna do!?”
Vivian sighed. “Hold on.” She pulled herself out of the sack and cast her Fiery Jinx, burning all the beastmen in the face simultaneously—however, none of them ran, they only looked at her with more rage.
Vivian pressed her hands together. “You’re not going to leave? You’re not going to leave? I demand, in the name of the great Lord Tzeentch, that you leave this carriage now before I burn every last one of you down to the bone and use those bones in my rituals!” She lit her hand on fire.
She was fairly sure the beastmen didn’t understand her, but they had understood the name Tzeentch. One look at her fiery fist and they suddenly decided it was a good idea to back away, retreating into the woods from the supposed servant of Tzeentch.
“W-woah!” Luigi stammered. “How’d you do that?”
Vivian sighed. “I lied. And… it was a pretty disgusting one. I don’t… feel good about it at all.”
“But you saved u—”
The driver pointed at Vivian. “Daemon!” He ran away in a random direction, screaming at the top of his lungs. “Daemon!”
Vivian facepalmed. “I saved us, but now we’re stuck in the middle of nowhere without a functional carriage.” She hopped off the carriage and started moving toward Altdorf. “C’mon. We’ve got a long road ahead of us…”
“How long?”
“It’ll be nighttime by the time we arrive and we’ll have to wait for the gates to open in the morning long.”
“Oh…”
Sure enough, night fell before they arrived at Altdorf. Vivian was ready to turn anything that attacked them into burnt cinders the instant it appeared, but, bizarrely, nothing tried to attack them on their entire trek. After the assault on the carriage, there was no sign of any animals, let alone beastmen.
This made Vivian very, very uneasy, and she wasn’t sure why.
She wouldn’t have been able to sleep even if she wanted to that night, so she was aided in her silent vigil, waiting for the gates of Altdorf to open. From outside, Altdorf wasn’t very impressive because there was a huge wall that surrounded it on all sides, with only a few spires of the tallest buildings visible over it. Those few tips she saw sparkled, but they were hardly any indication of what actually lay within the capital city of the Empire.
“Vivian?” Luigi asked, yawning.
“What?”
“How are we gonna get to the Emperor?”
“I’ll worry about that when we actually get in the city.” Vivian stretched her arms and rubbed her eyes. “Ugh…” She still had that nasty knot in her stomach that had remained ever since she’d stopped the beastmen from attacking the carriage. It hadn’t gone away—if anything, it had gotten worse.
But it kept her up. In an odd way, she was thankful for that.
The silent night wore on. But, eventually, the sun rose, and with it the gates of Altdorf opened. Vivian disappeared into Luigi’s shadow and they entered the city. They didn’t bother to see any of the sights—Luigi went to the first inn he saw and paid for a room.
They were asleep in seconds.