“Can I help you?” asked a bored-looking elf woman with a brown bowl-cut and glasses sitting at Mystiferia’s desk.

  “Yeah, I’m coming to speak with one of the prisoners.”

  “Do you have permission?”

  “Do I need permission?”

  The elf pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Any visitation has to be approved by the Warden, the King, or a member of the royal council.”

  “Can you give me permission?” Jessica asked.

  “No. I’m the warden’s deputy. I don’t have the authority to approve visitation, I only verify approval.”

  As it turned out, fantasy bureaucracy was not any more fun than regular bureaucracy. If need be, Jessica could try to get either the king or queen to approve her visitation, but she was trying to save up political influence for something useful. Like asking for Naga to be released.

  “Well let me ask you this, miss…”

  “Alpinaea,” the elf bureaucrat said.

  “Miss Alpinaea. Would Queen Samara require approval?” Jessica asked.

  Alpinaea squinted. “No, but you’re not the queen.”

  “Ah, but you see, I am a royal concubine, which makes me equal in status to the queen.”

  “I don’t believe that’s how that works,” Alpinaea said.

  “You don’t have to believe. That’s the beauty of hierarchy. It works whether you believe it or not. I can say I don’t believe Mystiferia should be allowed to give out approval but she has that authority regardless of my beliefs, does she not? I mean if the gauntlet fits, you are obligated to acquit.”

  The elf nodded slowly. “Be that as it may, it’s not—”

  “This is about something bigger than us, Alpi. May I call you Alpi? You see, rules and hierarchy are the bonds by which nuclei are held together in relation. And it is precisely these bonds which create emergent properties. A leaf is a leaf and water is water but if you brew both you get tea, do you not? So it is by obeying this higher ordering we call hierarchy that the entire kingdom can function,” Jessica said in a tone of voice she reserved for undergrads.

  Alpinaea bit her lip. “Are you absolutely sure concubines have that authority?”

  “That’s not for you to question.”

  Jessica proceeded to enter the dungeon with a hesitant Alpinaea at her side. During their descent she periodically ordered Alpi to turn her lamp down or inform her where they were. From dealing with her university’s administration, Jessica had learned that authority figures had to be arbitrary to preserve the ability to make people do things they didn’t want to do. If they wanted to do it, it wasn’t authority.

  In a way, she almost felt sorry for bullying the woman. But upon reaching the bottom floor, the stench of blood and sweat and other unpleasant smells reminded her how little sympathy she had for Mystiferia and anyone who worked for her.

  The monsters in their cells cowered at their approach. A part of Jessica wished she could release them, but on top of being incredibly unlikely to happen, there were some legitimately dangerous monsters held here. Naga was intelligent and sentient and deserved better, but there were also creatures that had decimated entire villages. Better not to get involved until she had a better sense for why things were the way they were.

  “How often do the monsters cause problems when you release them for guild quests?”

  “Haven’t a clue,” Alpinaea said. “That’s not my job.”

  The glint of light off scales caught Jessica’s eye and she stopped. Inside the cell was a pile of coils.

  “Naga?” Jessica called out.

  The coils unspooled and Nagakanya’s torso and head emerged as she slithered over to the cell door.

  “Oh, hello Jessssica! I sssee you’re not dead,” Naga said.

  “There's a lot to explain but I’d prefer to do it under better circumstances. I’m gonna try to convince the queen to let you go, but I wanted to ask what my chances are first. And if you had any ideas for convincing them.”

  The lamia smiled faintly. “That will be difficult, I think. I have never heard of monsssters being shown leniency.”

  “You’re hardly a monster! You’re basically a human with a snake’s body,” Jessica said.

  Naga’s snake-slit eyes flicked to Alpinaea at Jessica’s side. “You will find it difficult to convince anyone of that.”

  “You’re harmless though! You haven’t done anything wrong!”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  “That’sss not entirely true,” Naga said. “My family raised me to fight humans, and fight I did. Twenty-two sssoldiers came to capture me. Ssseven sssucceeded.”

  “But that was self-defense!”

  “It doesn’t count as ssself-defenssse when a monssster does it.”

  Jessica sighed. As far as she was concerned, she had vowed that first night in the cell to free Naga. She might not have said so out loud, but that didn’t absolve her. Without the lamia’s company Jessica would’ve given up long before her execution. Leaving Naga to rot would be a betrayal. Plain and simple.

  Jessica clutched the bars. “Wait for me just a little longer, Naga. I’ll find a way. I promise.”

  Alpinaea cleared her throat. “You do not have the authority to—”

  “Oh my God, shut up!”

  Jessica spent the next several days thinking of how to get Naga released. The most direct route was asking the queen outright, but Jessica no more had the queen’s ear than her own children did. She found this particular fact out when she asked Katarina what her mother might like as a gift and the girl seemed confused by the idea of seeing her mother outside of formal occasions.

  The only people who did have the queen’s ear were a gaggle of aristocratic women whose job was to sit around, drink wine, and look pretty. This was a group Jessica did not have an invitation to join according to the maids who formed a defensive perimeter. Outside of this, she had only one other avenue of attack.

  “I don’t suppose you could inquire about something with Her Majesty for me?” Jessica asked one day as she and Galloway were isolating other opium alkaloids.

  She had no immediate plans for them besides naloxone. That one she wanted as a precaution in case the queen started to enjoy her morphine too much.

  “Her Majesty doesn’t have a lot of time for chatter, but I can certainly try,” Galloway said.

  Jessica wisely kept to herself that chatter was all the queen did all day besides get high and drink sparkling wine.

  “There’s a prisoner I’d like to have freed,” Jessica said.

  Galloway raised his bushy white eyebrows. “Oh? Who?”

  Jessica rubbed her arm. “So uh… her name is Nagakanya…”

  The physician frowned. “You want to free a monster, eh? You understand it’s dangerous to let monsters out, right? There’s a reason they’re locked up.”

  “The reason is so adventurers have a drip feed of shit to fight! Look, I’m not saying release all of them, but Naga’s a good person and she won’t harm anyone. I promise. If she does, I’ll take responsibility.”

  Galloway shook his head as he wiped down the counter. “Mercy me, Jessica, but you are something. You remind me of my granddaughter.”

  “How so?”

  “She’s as good a pharmacist as me. Maybe better. She was slated to take over my practice except she insisted on joining an adventurer’s harem.”

  Jessica grimaced immediately which won a good-natured laugh from her colleague.

  “Believe me, I had the same reaction. I tried to tell her how dangerous it was and her reply was to tell me she knew damn well and was willing to take responsibility. I had to respect that.”

  Jessica smiled hesitantly. “Is all that to say you’re gonna relay my request?”

  “That depends, do you know what you’re getting into?”

  The real answer was no. Her main reason for springing Naga—aside from the wonderful, stress-relieving squeezes—was out of a sense of loyalty and fairness. It was not, however, out of a deep understanding of the consequences. The rational, scientific side of her balked.

  Unlike her life on Earth where every decision could be agonized over with minimal consequences, she had no such luxury in Tushita. There was no way to tell when her lamia friend would be thrown on the chopping block. And with Mystiferia returning any day now, that might be sooner rather than later.

  “I know what I’m getting into,” Jessica said.

  Galloway exhaled and drew his hands through his stringy white hair. “I’ll talk to Her Majesty. But no guarantees. If she says no, she says no.”

  “Thanks, Galloway,” Jessica said, and then because she had a deeply-ingrained need to return favors, added, “By the way, if you can get me some willow bark I’ll show you how to isolate salicylic acid so you can treat skin-diseases and ringworm.”

  The old pharmacist smiled. “You’ve got a deal, little lady!”

  The following day Jessica was out in the courtyard teaching Cappy and Katarina to make bottle rockets. She jury-rigged some carbon-dioxide with baking soda and vinegar and the beer bottle lifted up to about Jessica’s neck before falling down to the grass.

  “Whoa! Let’s put more in!” Cappy said. “I wanna make it go high!”

  Katarina clapped her hands. “Yeah, let’s make it go onto the roof!”

  “If it goes too high it’ll shatter when it comes down. I don’t want your parents mad at me,” Jessica said.

  “Oh they don’t care! It’ll just be the servants that get mad,” Katarina said.

  Cappy nodded in agreement. “Yeah, mom and dad don’t care what we do so long as we don’t bother adventurers.”

  Jessica was in the middle of thinking up another excuse for not making a glass bottle grenade when Galloway walked up.

  “Well, Jessica, you’ve got your audience with the queen.”

  The term ‘audience’ made it sound more formal than it was. Jessica found the Queen sprawled languid over a chaise-longue with a tray of fruit in front of her. The queen looked thinner and paler, but it also could have been association with the pack of thin, pale, judgemental noblewomen around her.

  “So, you want a monster pet, do you?” the queen asked, pinching a green grape between her ruby red fingertips.

  “Naga isn’t a pet, she’s a—”

  “You adventurers just have to have a harem, hmm? I’m not judging, of course. What I wouldn’t do to have a troupe of handsome men following me around, doing whatever I want, speaking sweet nothings into my ear— oh! I think I’d want a golden retriever animalar boy. Wearing nothing but a collar. What do you think, ladies?”

  The other noblewomen giggled and blushed and covered their mouths at the queen’s scandalous comment. Jessica thought it sounded like something her aunts might say after 2.5 glasses of boxed wine. Jessica politely smiled, the same way she would with her aunts.

  “Normally I would say no to releasing a violent monster into our midst, but if you promise to keep them under control I will let you keep your pet snake.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty, I—”

  “After you run a little errand for me.”