Scene 1

The Daemon Fyndraxis was slumming it. He was traveling incognito, and searching for a particular artifact that would improve his quality of life, slightly. This was a ridiculous thing for a creator deity to do, but he found it relaxing, and enjoyed the pursuit of novelty in a world that was stuffed to the gills with the familiar.

His quest had brought him to a village called Grenoble. There were many ways to describe this settlement. Podunk, one horse, flyover, and backwater all being quite suitable. These all served to portray what amounted to a cluster of buildings adjacent to a pond, which seemed to be the reason for the town being there in the first place. The economic factors that drove this settlement weren’t his primary concern, although he was there to conduct a bit of commerce.

Fyndraxis had come to this fair village in search of a particular shop. It was a bit of an anomaly, and didn’t participate in whatever pond based financial scheme the village as a whole was undertaking. This shop did precious little business, and had only a single customer. That sole customer being the creator of the universe. The proprietor of this shop was woefully ignorant of the nature of what he was actually selling. Were someone to ask him what he sold, he would probably answer, “I sell square pictures, but with round things inside them, maybe they are books?” Fyndraxis had set up these circumstances deliberately to try to solve a rather annoying problem. From time to time, he would get a song stuck in his head.

This shop was stuffed with old milk crates full of vinyl records for the lord of all creation to peruse at his leisure. This was statistically improbable, because the shop keeper had never seen a record player, electricity was probably never going to be invented here, and the music in the village itself was limited to one rather persistent song. Some kind of hammer dulcimer thing that played incessantly in the background while the guy that created the universe unsuccessfully tried to ignore it.

The people that populated this village, and the entire realm for that matter, were not something that Fyndraxis had spent a lot of time on when he undertook his act of creation. He thought of them more as constructs than anything actually approaching living beings. They went about their days according to some hidden script exchanging canned dialogue with each other and generally acting as set dressing to make this village, and the entire realm for that matter, appear real-ish.

He felt a little guilty about this whole situation, but there wasn’t really anything he could do about it. At some point in the very distant past, he had dreamed this world into being. There had been a moment of genesis in which he had created all that he saw before him. In retrospect, he had done a rather piss poor job of the whole thing, and the results left much to be desired.
As relaxing as he found the act of digging for records, he had to work rather quickly. Because of his substandard performance as creator, the land that he wrought had a number of undocumented features that he was forced to live with. There was a plague upon the land that he referred to as the narrative creep. There were also some places of power that he avoided at all costs, and some secret doors that called to him pretty regularly, but for the most part it was the narrative that was a pain in his ass from day to day.

Were he to linger too long in this place he would eventually end up forgetting himself again for the millionth time and have to rebuild his mind from first principles. That sort of work was not the kind of thing he wanted his afternoon to turn into.

He had come to this record seller in hopes of finding a song that had been stuck in his head for the last hundred years or so. It wasn’t driving him insane exactly, but the insistent half remembered rhythm was certainly creeping up his mental todo list. The name of the song was forgotten of course, and the actual tune and lyrics were just barely on the tip of his tongue. Like a skeleton in his head, hoping to safety dance its way into the flesh that would make it whole.

He was pretty sure that he knew the band, but he couldn’t be quite sure until he was holding the record in his hand. The song was one of those classic jangly laments that got into your head and wouldn’t leave without drastic intervention. Something about panic on the streets of somewhere, and the unfortunate lynching of a disk jockey, resulting in a brazen act of arson.

The records were not organized in any particular way due to the shopkeeper’s illiteracy. So fundamentally, this operation was somewhat challenging. The shopkeeper tried his best, but he was completely out of his depth. So Fyndraxis was forced to dig through haphazardly assembled collections of records slotted into milk crates, in hopes of digging out a treasure that would finally give the skeleton of this song the flesh it desired.

Fyndraxis was disguised as a regular dude. Green tunic, brown breeches, a dagger at his belt, and a truly hideous ginger bowl cut that made him look as if he was just as illiterate as the shopkeeper. He looked like a dork, but that was all deliberate on his part. The less he looked like a gallant young hero, the less likely the narrative was to notice him. It was a clever disguise, because in all honesty he wasn’t a dork. He was a nerd.

To the casual observer, his digging wouldn’t have been considered frantic, but there was a certain end of the rope feeling behind his actions that would be apparent to the more discerning eye. Eventually, after a few minutes of this, he selected a record that looked to be promising. He took his selection up to the shopkeeper so that he could maintain the illusion that this was an actual store. He could have just walked out of the shop with his record, but an action like that was not only terribly gauche, it would have aroused the suspicion of the narrative as well. Acting like a delinquent youth was something that the narrative dove at like a heat seeking missile.

“Just this,” Fyndraxis said to the shopkeeper as he glanced furtively over his shoulder, making sure the coast was clear.
“The Monsters in the Old Cave are powerful. You must use strong weapons against them,” the shopkeeper answered in a pretty classic non-sequitur from his list of canned dialogue.

Fyndraxis glanced down at the dagger at his hip. The shopkeeper wasn’t wrong, it was a nice enough dagger, but it would be kind of a useless weapon if he went into the Old Cave. There were Bore Worms and Giant Newts in there he was pretty sure, so a dagger certainly wouldn’t do.

“I’ll take a short sword,” he said to the shopkeeper, no longer in as much of a hurry as he had been just a couple of moments ago.

“Three hundred and sixty gold,” the shopkeeper shot back robotically.

“And the Record?” Fyndraxis reminded him.

“Three hundred and eighty, then” the shopkeeper informed him, but it was clear that giving a shit was pretty far above his paygrade.

“When did you start selling swords? I thought this was a record shop?” Fyndraxis asked the man. In answer he received a nihilistic shrug so brazen in its execution that Fyndraxis had to stifle a laugh.

Fyndraxis dug in his pocket and pulled out the appropriate amount of gold for the items he was on the hook for. He would have to drop by the armor shop on the way out of town, his tunic simply wouldn’t cut it in the Old Cave.

Fyndraxis left the record seller and made his way to the armor shop, where he bought a set of tan armor and a tan shield. This shopkeeper had the privilege of not being so existentially out of sorts, so the exchange was more or less standard as these things go. On his way out of the armor shop, girded in his new finery, he realized that he didn’t have any potion and if he got wounded in the Old Cave he would be absolutely screwed. He made a bee line to the Item shop, grabbed some potions, threw in some antidotes and a couple stone cures for good measure. Getting petrified in the Old Cave was a fate that he had experienced, and being a statue for the foreseeable future was not an attractive prospect to him.

The Old Cave could be pretty challenging if he didn’t have his shit together. The Old Man needed a treasure from the second floor of the Old Cave called the Fairy’s Kiss, once he received that he would tell Fyndraxis about Artea, the Elf who fought the Sinistrals at…

Fyndraxis stopped walking and let his short sword clatter to the ground. He looked up to the sky above him and let out an exasperated breath.

“Son of a thousand bitches,” he cursed to the firmament, feeling distinctly like an idiot. The Daemon Fyndraxis grew a set of owl’s wings and shot into the sky, leaving only a cloud of dust, a forgotten sword, and a sonic boom as evidence of his trip to fair Grenoble. He was once again on the run from the narrative.