You never expect to find your sister in a dungeon.

  Okay, wait that sounds judge-y. I didn’t mean that I’d never expect to find my sister Binsa in some members-only clothing-optional party-time dungeon, because that sounds exactly like the sort of place Binsa might very well wander into and subsequently decide to live. That’s my sister’s life and more power to her. But the dungeon I’m talking about here is far less of the “” variety and more of the ” nature.

  But that’s where she was. My three friends and I had just fought some malicious cobra-necked ostriches and a shape-changing dog that was actually a beautiful woman, and then I’d opened an iron door in the basement of a small medieval shack where—to my shock—we discovered my sister dressed like a Shaolin monk from a 1970’s martial arts movie and posed like she was preparing to unleash a fair amount of kung-fu on our collectively bewildered ass.

  “Josh?” she said. Her brow furrowed, as obviously astonished to see me as I was to see her.

  “She knows you?” Gerik asked. Gerik is a fellow adventurer, a wiry and grizzled compact thief with strange shadow talents who I’d probably call a friend except that his friends tend to die in traumatic events.

  “Oh, that’s his sister!” Molly explained. Molly is a carelessly beautiful and outright careless half-elf barbarian who is another of my fellow adventurers. And I think she’s my friend. Sometimes I hope for more. Enough said of that, until I say more of that.

  “They don’t look anything alike, though?” Fridu said. She’s both an actual magic-user and an actual dwarf, like the ones in role-playing games. Like the ones I didn’t think existed for real until I found a bizarre doorway in my old bedroom, put there in place by a witch who was baby-sitting me when I was seven years old. “Binsa’s family adopted me when I was in my teens,” I explained to Fridu, understanding her confusion. Binsa and I are about the same age, she’s twenty-five to my twenty-three, and we both have big ears and short hair, hers black and mine brown, but that’s where the similarity ends. Binsa could be a model and I could be… someone’s wingman. Her lips are full and mine are a thin line sketched in at the last moment. The biggest difference is that I’m a mottled Caucasian man while my sister has incredibly dark skin, which she typically highlights by wearing bright colors—yellow is a favorite—though I have to say the rich reds, greens and oranges of her current clothes, the ones with bits of leather and metal armor sewn in, were effective too. Most eye-catching of all was the emblem of a fox—caught in the moment of a leap—embroidered into the cloth on her chest. I’d come to this village of Farmhaven, and ultimately into this basement, hoping to find information on the vicious blurred-face killer who’d murdered Selena, my childhood babysitter and Molly’s mother, and who was slowly killing me in the same manner, having magically tattooed me with three foxes, one on each arm and one on my chest. The foxes were a true deadline, gathering slowly over the course of a month, until such a that time they’d literally explode with flame and immolate me from within.

  “A fox on her chest,” Gerik muttered.

  “Yeah,” I whispered, not wanting to think about what that might mean. Instead, I thought about the rest of the very much unexpected room. Farmhaven itself was a medieval collection of near-huts, and the particular building we were in was at the lower end of the hovels, but this medieval basement bedroom was both richly and magically appointed. It had a bed that could accommodate either an entire family or about one third of an orgy, depending on your inclinations. There were a pair of large dressers carved with creatures I’d thought were mythical until I found the magic door in my apartment. There were plants large and small, common and bizarre, arranged throughout the room liberally enough that the room smelled and looked like we’d walked into a tropical rainforest.

  There were two windows, which was absurd considering we were well below ground. Even more absurd, one of them looked out on a meadow and the other looked out on a street in front of the Leaky Centaur, the tavern in Whitewater, which should have been miles and miles distant. Despite that, we could all see and hear and smell the current festival and street market in full swing. A cat, perched in the Whitewater window, hissed in irritation at the intrusion of our adventuring party and slunk down from the window, going outside. We could soon see it sauntering away through the market. It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense.

  “None of this makes any sense,” I told my sister.

  “Josh,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I have to attack you.”

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  “W-what?” I stammered out just as Binsa flashed forward at “” speeds and drove her fist into my stomach. I made a heroic noise similar to that of a goose caught beneath a dump truck’s tires and then doubled over, stumbling into a potted fruit tree and crumpling to the floor, wheezing and drooling even as miniature oranges fell around me.

  “The fuck?” Molly said.

  “Ah, I see,” Gerik muttered. “Brother and sister, but they don’t get along?”

  “Hold!” Fridu ordered Binsa, casting a magic spell designed to trap my sister in place, but it didn’t work. My sister whispered a word and the fox emblem on her chest literally snarled and then Binsa did a somersault and swept out a leg, knocking the dwarf to her stomach.

  “Are we fighting, then?” Gerik asked, looking to the others, catching my eye.

  “N-no,” I wheezed out at a level just above the sub-audible.

  “Fuck yes!” Molly answered. “It feels a whole lot like in here!”

  I should explain about Molly. She’s a barbarian. She loves to fight. And . . . well that’s it. I’ve covered the topic. Molly gleefully fights anything. Giants in particular. She’s one of those barbarian women who wears what amounts to a leather bikini and wields a battleaxe and her morality is suspect and I never know how to deal with her but I’ve grown to love attempting the impossible. I normally thrill to the sight of her incredible smile—I should probably call it a gaping grin—when she’s launching herself into combat, but the problem here was that she was about to fight my sister.

  “Molly,” I rasped out. “No. Don’t.”

  “Yeah fight!” she told me in total disagreement, and then ran forward. She prepared a slash at my sister with her battleaxe, but had to change the trajectory at the last instant because Binsa’s glowing fist was about to obliterate Molly’s face, so Molly slid to one side and caught the blow on the flat of her battleaxe, turning my sister’s fist aside. The impact still staggered Molly, and her smile widened as she reassessed my sister as an actual threat.

  “Everyone stop,” I wheezed out. The only reply was from the fruit tree, which dropped another orange on my head.

  “None of you can be here!” my sister yelled. “The Mark of Nine Hags forbids it!”

  “Uh, what?” I said.

  “ be the only one leaving marks,” Molly sneered as she reared back for another strike with her battleaxe, but my sister slid forward and punched Molly’s hand, deleting any power from the strike. Molly seemed like she’d actually planned for that, though, and head-butted Binsa with a noise like two or maybe even three coconuts colliding. Then Molly dropped her axe, which fell halfway to the floor before she caught it on her foot, spun it in place, and launched it at Binsa. The whirling blade whooshed over my frantically ducking sister and cleaved a painting in half. The bisected painting—depicting a majestic horse surrounded by nine women—clattered to the floor. Molly’s axe did not. It only fell halfway but then changed its trajectory and whooshed back to Molly’s hand.

  By then Fridu had recovered and she spoke some words of power and all the fruit from my personal harbor ripped free from their stems and sped toward Binsa in a swarm of oranges, moving at good speeds, perhaps even lethal ones. Binsa saw the danger and slapped a fist to her chest, causing the fox emblem to howl and a wave of force to burst out from all around her, fluttering her clothes like she was in the eye of a hurricane, which was—unfortunately—pretty much the truth of it. The wave of force shoved me solidly back against the wall and flung Molly into the open washroom. Fridu and Gerik tumbled along the floor and thumped into walls. The flock of oranges exploded in midair, scattering the atomized fruit in a sweet-smelling tropical storm.

  “Leave!” Binsa yelled. “You are no match for a servant of the Hags!” And then Molly tackled her from behind.

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked nobody in particular and everybody in specific, but nobody at all answered. Binsa and Molly were on the floor, elbows and fists flying, many of them finding their targets. They were like two quarreling drums, pounding away at each other. Then Binsa managed a kick that sent Molly literally up to the ceiling, which in turn batted her down to the floor. She’d barely landed before she had an amulet in her hand, clutched in her fingers.

  “Cats,” she said. “I need you.” A heartbeat of time passed, and then perhaps fifty cats streamed in through the open window that was impossibly showing Whitewater.

  “The fuck?” my sister asked, gaping at this feline incursion. The cats collectively leapt to the attack, and I saw one getting caught by the fox emblem on my sister’s chest, an emblem that opened its jaws and snapped up the hissing cat in its teeth, even as a wave of darkness—Gerik in magical shadows—snuck up behind my sister and thumped her a solid blow on the back of the head. At the same exact time a bolt of light shot out from Fridu’s fingers to catch Binsa in the stomach, even as Molly punched her in the face, and my sister went down, unconscious, beneath the wave of cats.

  The cats calmed down.

  I stood up.

  The cats moved away from my sister and looked to Molly, who shrugged in reply. Job done, the feline horde departed through the magic window overlooking Whitewater. I stood next to Fridu and Gerik, the three of us looking down to my unconscious sister Binsa, her colorful robes rising and falling with each breath.

  “Holy shit,” Molly said, flopping back onto the enormous bed. Her battleaxe clattered to the floor.

  “Holy shit,” she repeated, sitting up and staring at me. “What the hell was that?”

  I said, “I’m not sure what just—”

  “Holy shit I want to make out with your sister.”

  “W-what?”

  “Is that rude of me?” Molly asked. “Sorry. But, seriously. I just wanna, you know, get after it.”

  “Holy shit,” I said, and sat back down on the floor.