Mark looked up from his holographic books on magic to stare out into the lava fields.

  They were going on hour 15, and Sally was doing fine. Nothing was out there in the fields except for lava slimes and crystal towers and lava. Big Red was nowhere to be seen. So Mark went back to reading about Waterpeople; the language of avoiding monsters by altering fate itself through ‘fortune making’, which was not fortune telling at all.

  Waterpeople worked best when the people who spoke it all spoke it together, in communal gatherings and never alone, and then they moved themselves out of the ways of the monsters that would be coming through. It was easier to work magic on one’s own vectors than it was to work magic on monsters you didn’t even know existed, after all. Waterpeople worked worse when the speakers used Waterpeople to try and influence the rest of the world away from them, unless they put up a lot of structural defenses first to support that use of the language.

  Those ‘structural supports’ were ‘treehouses’ and ‘living inside hidden caves’ and ‘knowing the timelines that monsters went out to feed, and then fishing when the monsters were specifically not out there at the same time’. All in all, Waterpeople kinda reminded Mark of feng shui, which was yet another thing he didn’t know at all but which he had seen on television shows now and again.

  Mark suspected that Waterpeople worked on ‘dreamland principles’, which was a nebulous designation that Mark was coming to terms with, which was about connecting together magic and superheroes and demons and witches and more. The book on Waterpeople didn’t mention any of that sort of stuff, though. It was much more concerned with actually speaking the language—

  “Snake is back,” Quark said, dismissing the holograms and putting an arrow into Mark’s vision. “Six kilometers and closing.”

  Mark rapidly hurried down into the dome, taking care to pass through without disturbing the pressure. Sally was doing okay; still glittering like a diamond and illuminating the absolute dark of the dome. She was hugging a full-body adamantium pillow right now and rather cozy, but there was a certain stress in her vector that Mark had solved many times already, so he went about solving it again with cycles of Unions to cool the place down and fix the air. Sally calmed.

  She seemed to be glowing just a bit less, which was great! That meant she was close to being done cooking. Maybe only 12 hours away instead of 36-ish.

  Mark grabbed his dragon-face parts and pushed out of the dome again, right as Quark finished doing the sigils to make the face invisible. Then Mark held ‘his face’ outward and lifted it up above the dome, to face the incoming snake… Somewhere out there. Mark could barely hear it, but it was out there somewhere—

  “There,” Mark said, turning to the right slightly.

  The lava slimes roiled as something huge passed underneath them, disturbing the surface. And then the white head of the snake poked out of the lava slimes, about 3 kilometers away. Way, way too close. The snake looked at the dome, and then it looked at Mark.

  Mark lifted his invisible dragon face up and out, angling it toward the kaiju. He even made some extra scales ‘magically appear’, as though an invisibility spell was ‘peeling away’ from the face, as Quark did exactly that, ending the invisibility he had put onto the metal with a few different sigils to rapidly dissolve the magic.

  The face ‘appeared’ out of the haze of the heated air once again.

  Mark waited.

  The snake lifted up out of the lava, fully rising above the surface of the slimes. It was a centipede and a snake at the same time, but leaning more toward snake, and with a thousand human-like arms and hands lining down the sides of its entire body… And Mark realized, as it started doing sigaldry, that it wasn’t just a kaiju.

  It was a dragon.

  That was not a snake’s face.

  That was a dragon’s face on that snake…

  … Or something else entirely.

  Power swelled as hands flashed magic, and then the kaiju meep’d, and the Call came out as tens of languages, all overlapping and mixing with each other. Mark had no idea what it was saying, but Quark picked up what the kaiju was putting down. He pulled apart the blush of words in the air and digested them into 3 languages Quark knew and some higher number of unknown words in unknown languages.

  Quark put words into Mark’s vision.

  “What you here? You stay long?”

  Mark rapidly asked Quark, “Can you do whatever sigaldry the snake just did? So I can talk to it like it is talking to me?”

  “It did that with 17 pairs of hands doing stuff in the center of its raised portion and 3 doing still-Sigaldry at the top and bottom. I have no idea what would happen if I tried the same.”

  Mark rapidly made a decision, Calling out in English, “Sleeping. Resting. Defending. Moving soon. Days or sooner.”

  The white snake paused, stared, and spoke in another cacophony of words that Mark could kinda hear, now. “Strange words. Where language from?”

  … Mark got the distinct impression that this interaction would not go like it did with Nobody Important. Something in the kaiju’s Call was much more… pointed, than it was with Nobody Important.

  Mark replied, “Elsewhere.”

  “You stupid? Yes. I understand. Make simple: I want metal. Give metal.”

  … Straight to it, then. Mark was deeply unsure if he could handle a weird wyrm-dragon that was 2 kilometers long while also trying to protect Sally.

  Mark tried, “Bargain better.”

  White Snake rumbled with a small hiss, maw opening wide, fangs flaring, tongue flapping, arms flaring outward. And then its mouth angled weird, and a spray of something shot out of its upper fangs, casting streaks of bright blue fire into the air before it fell down onto the lava between Mark’s fake dragon face and the kaiju’s body. It had a kilometer range on its venom, and it didn’t look like the kaiju put much force behind the flaming blue spit at all. It could probably shoot a lot further if it wanted.

  That blue venom cascaded down like rain onto the lava slimes and it killed and spread, turning slimes into dancing green fire. The green fire rapidly cooled and cracked and burrowed into the lava. Whatever that venom was, it left a pocked land of death, the lava turned to stone that was then burned down to nothing at all. Parts of it were still on green fire.

  The snake swished forward, into its own destruction, breaking the pocked surface like a candy shell. Lava spread out and around and the snake twisted backward, back into position. It was showing Mark that it was immune to its own venom… or something.

  The snake meep’d, “Familiar familiar. You give metal. I protect, too. Your master never see me. Gone before wake. Sneaky sneaky snakey.”

  … The giant snake with hands all up and down its sides was… was a familiar?

  Oh.

  Well.

  Uh...

  “… Bargain accepted.” Mark added, “You watch from far away. Then I give.”

  The snake stared, and then it moved away, rapidly gaining a kilometer of distance, the entire body rumbling and rushing through the lava. Waves of lava crashed across the surface of the tunnel, churning at the thin shell of venom-cooled stone, tumbling that thin layer of stone into the lava once again.

  Mark began making an orb of adamantium the size of his own body, and then he made it a bit bigger than that, muttering to Quark, “Holy fuck, it’s a kaiju-familiar and it thinks I’m a familiar, too.”

  “I did not know such a thing was even possible. Who could it even belong to?”

  “I get the feeling that asking those sorts of questions is a bad idea… Can you enchant this to fly toward the snake? Actually. I should do this… too…” Mark paused. Mark remade the sphere, crystallizing an intent into the metal, saying, “For the cooperative white snake.” The sphere of adamantium felt like it melted just a bit, before it then solidified into a perfect sphere, the surface so smooth it was like looking in a black mirror. Mark eyed the distance to the kaiju… “I cannot make it that far. 4.5 kilometers? How fast would I have to throw it? Can you make it lighter?”

  The ball of metal was probably 2 or 3 metric tons of adamantium. If it was lighter Mark could probably throw it further.

  “You would need to throw it at approximately 2,500 kilometers per hour; assuming a lot of things that I should likely not assume,” Quark said, “I have a cantrip ready to make it lighter, but lighter objects slow down faster, so this is not the optimal solution toward getting the metal that far.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Oh shit… It’s not?”

  “Based on what I know of you, you should be able to throw it with Alacrity/Slowness. That should make it there anyway.”

  “… Okay well… Let’s just try it— Oh. Air resistance. Can you kill that on the sphere?”

  “I can kill that, yes sir. Shall I do this?”

  “Yes.”

  Quark did some things inside of his handy sphere and soon the giant metal adamantium sphere in Mark’s grip felt a bit more… slippery. Mark grinned. Quark said, “It will not last in this atmosphere, sir.”

  “Good enough,” Mark said, as he opened the dragon mask’s mouth and Unioned with Alacrity and Slowness, hiding himself in the base of the dragon’s tongue. The orb remained in the middle of the open maw.

  The world crawled to a standstill.

  White Snake eyed the orb instantly, its eyes moving fast, its attention solid. But it was not actually moving.

  Mark pulled back on the orb by 20 meters, and then he pushed with all of his might, as fast as he could make the orb move, shoving it in the general direction of the kaiju, but off to the side, just a bit. The ball ignited the air, moving in a perfectly straight line right ahead. Mark let go. The ball slowed instantly as it left Mark’s faster-than-thought Shaper control, but it was still going way, way too fast to ever stop for any normal reason. Shockwaves of supersonic air crashed away from the cannonball, and Mark watched as that shockwave slowly spread outward. Too slow.

  Mark went back to normal time.

  The cannonball vanished and a huge plume of lava erupted behind White Snake, fountaining lava into the air.

  White Snake looked down at the arms on its left side, about 60 meters below its draconic face.

  One of the arms was missing a forearm.

  Mark had hit the snake directly.

  Whoops.

  The Kaiju Familiar waggled its broken arm and the arm healed, and then it turned around and dove into the lava to retrieve its prize. When a thing like that moved under normal conditions, it was like watching a slow motion reel. White scales vanished under liquid rock, and then kept vanishing under that lava, like a train passing into a tunnel. The tail of the snake lifted up and then went under-lava right before the face reappeared a kilometer away.

  White Snake had the metal orb in its maw.

  It was like a person holding half a grain of black rice between their lips.

  It lifted its head, the black orb flying upward, and then the orb touched down on the center of its skull, right onto a middle scale on its forehead. And then it remained there, turning white. Quark was the only one that could see that far, but Mark saw well enough through Quark.

  White Snake Called, “One orb, one day guarding.”

  Mark said, “I want more.”

  White Snake hissed… And then it asked, “What?”

  Mark asked what was perhaps a bad question, but he needed to know, “Where your master?”

  “… Gone gone long time. Sneaky Snakey alone,” White Sn— Sneaky Snake said, as he turned around and dove back under the lava. He muttered, “I remain.”

  And then he was gone from sight, but Quark tracked him based on the movement of the lava overhead.

  Sneaky Snake came back into view when he was 30 kilometers away, near a crystal city, whereupon he slithered in between the spires, clambering into some halfway-suspended configuration among the crystal. Half of him was hidden from view, but he wasn’t actually trying to hide at all. His head was in full view of everything, but he was angled toward the side, not looking this way. Mouth closed. Eyes almost serene.

  … Mark put the mask back inside the dome and Union’d away the heat from it and from the space where Sally slept. He had a moment, and then he took another moment, there in the glittering dark.

  Mark asked himself and Quark, “I guess I don’t want to hang out outside anymore? He can see me out there.”

  “I am rather certain that the snake kaiju familiar knows you were putting on a mask for him, or for others.” Quark added, “It is disturbing to think of a kaiju as a familiar, sir.”

  “Who could the master be?”

  “Either an archmage, a demon, or a god we haven’t seen yet, but ‘Sneaky Snake’ did say that he was alone for a long time.”

  “Right… Sneaky Snake did say that… Do you think kaiju lie?”

  “Dragons are known to be truthful most of the time, simply because to lie is to shy away from reality, and they don’t like that. Demons say whatever they need to say to get the effects they want out of people. Kaiju are not known to speak. Familiars tend to take after their masters.” Quark finished with, “Your guesses are better than mine, sir.”

  … Mark poked his head out of the dome and looked over at Sneaky Snake—

  Sneaky Snake was glaring directly at Mark, his vector pointed right at Mark’s head, and then he blinked a secondary set of eyelids and turned away.

  … Mark climbed out onto the black surface of the dome.

  Sneaky Snake eyed him again, and then he looked away, putting his head back down onto the crystal spire he was using as a ‘sunning rack’, or whatever it was he was doing, half-suspended among the crystal tower like that.

  “This is surreal,” Mark said to Quark.

  “Quite so, sir.”

  Mark Called out to Sneaky Snake, “You alone, Sneaky Snake?”

  Sneaky Snake turned slightly toward Mark, and from 30 kilometers away he meep’d, “I ate master long ago. Bad master. Your master good master?”

  “Best friend. Not master.”

  Sneaky Snake seemed to relax. He looked away. “Good.”

  Mark decided not to talk to Sneaky Snake again.

  An hour passed quickly. And then another hour went by.

  Mark remained on high alert, fixing up Sally’s cocoon every 10-ish minutes, and Sneaky Snake just hung out over there, barely-hidden among the crystal towers of a crystal city about 30 kilometers away—

  Lightning coiled overhead in the white plasma of the layer, and Mark knew what was coming. Sneaky Snake knew it, too. The snake rapidly disengaged from the city, slinking into the lava, and then white hot fire lanced outward from the plasma core of the layer, striking the city that Sneaky Snake had been inside. That fire spread and burst tower after tower, sending the nearby ecology into a feeding frenzy.

  Lava sharks swooped in from the side, eating the new fiery ‘suburb crystals’ of the city, while Big Red and his small army of lava dancers swung out of the other crystal city only 15 kilometers away, headed toward the flaming city. Fire birds spun out of the depths of the now-flaming city, to dance and soak in the flames of the taller structures.

  And then Sneaky Snake came out of the lava and everyone else got a whole lot less rambunctious. The snake kaiju got on top of the towers, holding himself up by his many hands as he soaked in the fire, plucking pieces of it away from the city and then rubbing it onto his back, and his belly. Mark hadn’t noticed that nuance before. Whatever Sneaky Snake was doing he was kinda… layering power onto his body? Hmm—

  Something bonked the cocoon under Mark. Mark was already moving toward the source of the bonking as Quark put an arrow in his vision.

  “Lava shark over there.”

  Mark didn’t so much as dive into the lava as he shoved his adamantium forward, prying the dense lava open, to then dive into the opening and send spears of adamantium at the inquisitive house-sized shark poking at the bottom of Sally’s cocoon. The shark wasn’t actually doing much to the cocoon, but it was poking in an aggressive way, and now that Mark was over here he was sensing three sharks in the area. That would not do. Mark couldn’t see shit, but he could feel with his vectors, so he poked the shark with some spears. The shark whipped around to eat Mark, but Mark never saw it. Mark threw out even more spears in response, cleaving through the open maw and killing the beast from the inside.

  Mark crawled up out of the lava, out of the floating shark, leaving the corpse behind for other sharks to feed upon as he cooled himself down with a Union. Lava flaked off of his skin as he settled down onto the top of the adamantium dome to wait out Sally’s Second Awakening.

  Sneaky Snake eyed him a little, and then looked away, basking in the gentle heat of white-burning crystals.

  Big Red tried to poke at Sneaky Snake’s tail, to get at a crystal the familiar kaiju was blocking.

  Sneaky Snake batted Big Red aside with a casual flick of his tail, and Big Red went skipping across the lava, bouncing and bouncing. When Big Red finally righted himself to stand on the lava once again, Sneaky Snake didn’t even care about him anymore.

  Big Red looked over at Mark, atop Sally’s cocoon. Big Red looked at Sneaky Snake.

  Big Red went running down the tunnel.

  Was it… Was it mad?

  It seemed mad.

  Mark hummed.