Inside the pizza oven, growing and festering and biding its time until this terrifying day, was a colony of cockroaches. The world inside of the oven wasn’t as harsh as one might imagine. Although of course roaches can survive just about anywhere, even in another world, these had access to the tomato sauce, cheese, breading, herbs, and meat chunks that had dribbled down into the wood every day for untold months.

Nyx insisted that they would take on the colony alone. Felicity and Dodd found this doubtful, considering the way their master broke out in a cold sweat whenever they even mentioned the word “bug.” Yet Nyx commanded that the imps scope out the rest of the palace.

Okay, sure, if you say so, thy will be done, etc. The imps shrugged and set about investigating.

In the entryway/throne room, nothing seemed amiss...until they looked back at Nyx’s throne again. Nyx had left a bunch of pizza poppers sitting there. It was a habit. Only now the poppers were getting devoured by a family of palm-sized cockroaches flexing their wings in delight.

“Oh dear,” said Dodd—seeing how big the things were actually gave her pause. “I-I can handle this one. You keep looking, Felicity.”

“Sure,” said the wood imp. Before she left, she grabbed a spike-tipped javelin from the avalanche of gear by the closet. Then the spike-tipped javelin fell apart. “Whoops,” said the wood imp. She ran off.

Dodd sparked a flame in one hand. For fun and experiment’s sake, she used it to light the chakram twirling on the other hand’s finger. It caught fire effortlessly, and the result—a whirling, burning, rusty razor—was eye-catching. She couldn’t come up with a good one-liner within three seconds, so instead she just went, “Well, here you go.”

The chakram flew from her hand in a long, high curve. It blazed down into the chair and incinerated every roach it touched (and their food). Then it clanked against the seat, its flame flickered out, and it plopped down next to all the sizzling black bug exoskeletons. The throne, fortunately, was only charred.

“...Hm,” said Dodd, turning the husks over curiously. “Nice.”

She may have won the battle, but Felicity was downstairs fighting the war.

The game room was her immediate destination. No part of the castle, besides possibly Nyx’s forbidden bedroom, had so much cheesy reek. (She may not have been able to smell it, but some smells are so terribly strong that they can, with the sixth sense, be felt.)

Her natural weapons weren’t as well-suited to fighting vermin as Dodd’s. She had her claws and horns, which she could sharpen and re-shape at will. In the best-case scenario, this made her a living weapon. But in the worst, she would be, y’know, eaten by termites.

Moving slowly, she eased past the arcade machine, careful not to push it. Along the way, she brushed her claws back and forth against each other, sharpening them. (Yes, tiny wood peelings did fall and make a trail on the ground.) “Come out, now,” she whispered.

In the corner of her eye, a couple of spiders ran under the pool table.

She froze and turned to them, but it was too late—she couldn’t tell where they’d gone. That was alright. The only thing she really needed was the source.

She kept moving. “So there’s more than roaches,” she mumbled.

Finally she reached the foosball table. With a grunt, she took a leg and a corner in her arms and shoved it away from the wall. There behind it was the hidden snack-hatch. It seemed pretty well sealed. There were no trails extending out of it, not that Felicity could discern. But that didn’t make her any less suspicious.

She wrenched it open. Inside was a swarm.

A chittering mass of insects, arachnids, and all their cousins writhed across a dark field of opened bags and crispy edible mountains. And it was so overpoweringly rancid that Felicity flat-out smelled it. A hard smell for her to define—maybe that was the age of all these opened snacks, or spoor, or bodily waste, or mold, or the sheer combined smell of the vermin.

None of that was more pressing than the tidal wave of bugs that started spilling as soon as she opened the thing.

Claws didn’t seem suitable for this. She changed one arm into a mallet, shut her eyes, whacked blindly, and screamed what she wanted to believe was a war cry but was actually kind of a little afraid.

What she smelled, though, wasn’t anything earthly—sorry, Gaia-ly—it was the kind of monstrous miasma that could only come from the underworld. And if she had looked in the corners instead of in the secret compartment, she would’ve seen void-dark blotches...