“And you say this just showed up,” Hewho asked, examining the paper.

  His trusty Dride- his ‘Centaur’, Songie, stood patiently, slowly chewing on a bird-nugget as their master looked over things.

  “Yeah, like, in a spooky way. I come in, boom, dumb order,” The Elf known as ‘Flowing-to-the-sea-to-grasp-tasty-salts’ explained, leaning back on her wooden stool.

  “Ah. I think I might know who this is. Probably that newcomer Joe was talking about,” he remarked, noting the overly tiny lettering, thick stuttered marker lines, and the fact that this was written on yesterday’s newspaper.

  “That kid who doesn’t know shit about fuck?” Flowing asked.

  “Language,” he rumbled in lieu of an answer. “But yes… Mm.”

  He leaned down, gently prodding Songie, who mimicked their master and lowered.

  “Daughter, would you like to make a delivery for me?” he asked gently, looking to his nameless daughter. The little Elf at his side perked up.

  “It would be my highest honor, patriarch, a coronation of my noble oblige, and-” she mmphd at her father placing a finger over her lips, getting a pout and a failed bite for his trouble, the little girl chomping at the digit with a loud clack.

  “Alright then, I’ll let you deliver this very important meal,” he smiles, stepping past her into the back of the shop.

  The leather parts like a sea, washing aside to let him through without the disturbing sensation of liquid. A trick Flowing hadn’t quite managed yet, much to her chagrin.

  Here, several dehydrators kept the room from becoming too musty, despite the sunken bone tables of ingredients.

  Fresh meats of all kinds called this sealed den home, and it took a special license to sell it, due to the risk of parasites, if it wasn’t treated seriously and with care.

  Venison, wild bird, hog, each passed by as Hewho considered the prompt his store had been given. A ‘mighty’ sandwich, likely requested by one who didn’t even know the value of silver.

  While he didn’t think Joe’s catastrophizing was quite on point, that was no reason not to give them what they paid for.

  He rummaged around, until he found what he was looking for on the high shelf, a clean bolt of silk, a holdover from the caves.

  Songie nickered softly at the scent, but was trained too well to panic.

  Stretching it tight over a frame, Hewho began taking choice bits of pork and fish, laying it on the silk and beginning to press.

  As he did, beads of pale, opaque liquid began to drip down, beads of solid meat and fat curled in the bowl below, as he called on the Fleshseep deep within his appendix.

  Like a sponge filled with water, the meats packed down, filtering through the fine silk until all that was left was a foul smelling substance, and a single wriggling creature, not unlike a minnow in structure.

  With a grimace, the Centaur bundled up the silk and dropped it in a pot of boiling water nearby, to kill and sterilize the filter. He would need to warn the hunters that drowfish season was nearing.

  Nobody wanted to have to fish those out of someone’s guts, after all.

  His own hands promptly went to another bowl, filled with scalding alcohol. Long years of practice let him sterilize his hands sufficiently, before he returned to the bowl, and with another pulse of power, melted its contents into a sort of doughy soup.

  One by one, he measured out little balls of the mixed-meats, twelve in total. Each one a bright pink, the colors of pork and salmon, blended together.

  Next, of course, he summoned a stronger pulse, and began what truly made this dish special.

  One of the orbs rippled, not like a bead of water, but like a lake.

  He took one, and dropped it in the other, letting it sink like a stone into the depths of the lake.

  What remained was no larger than before, but thicker, multifaceted in nature.

  Again, he repeated the process with each, sinking each little meatball into the lake his power was producing, until finally, only one remained. Cutting this in a deli slicer, he felt he had achieved the request adequately.

  What came next was the bread. Simple whole wheat, sawdust free. A rare import, and a bit of a delicacy around these parts. Horse cheese and woodbeer sauce covered those, and with that, he closed the resulting sandwich, small, but no less mighty for it.

  One final process, however, was required. Drow cuisine was delicious, but its shelf-life could be measured in hours, normally.

  Much like sushi, it relied on the cleanliness of its ingredients, rather than the destructive stability of cooking methods.

  The solution was a box in the corner of the room, covered with frightening enough warnings to be a danger on its own to those with heart conditions.

  Taking the sandwich and sealing it in wax paper, he lowered it carefully into the box and sealed it, before turning a small dial that wouldn’t move until the box was utterly closed.

  A small piece of promethium inside the box was exposed, and a low humming began to emerge as the sandwich was sterilized with heavy, conjured radiation.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  With that done, he used a pair of tongs to lift out his creation.

  “Order up, double dirty on whole wheat with big sauce and cheese,” he announced, mostly out of habit.

  His daughter scrambled in with a splash of leather, snatching it out of his hands and running out.

  “Don’t run!” he called after her, shaking his head.

  Hooves scuffed the floor and he put a hand on the horse’s neck, patting it. “I hear you Songie.”

  –

  Rhett managed to make it home, despite it all, and watched with the utmost caution and care at the dropoff point.

  He had laid the groundwork, and now, the time had come to engage in the stakeout of the century…

  “Man, this is boring,” he muttered, belly-down on an arrangement of towel-matter with his head in his hands, waiting for his delivery.

  “Booooring…” he muttered again, rolling around and stretching for several minutes, making ungodly noises in the process as various bones popped in a cacophony of comfiness.

  Now upside down, he continued staring at the delivery point, which he had made a point of marking with a large dry-erase-markered X.

  Even in this magical world, he was sure the natives understood something as simple as operational security and plausible deniability for supplying the underground rat society with crucial supplies for the rebellion.

  With that thought drifting away with a yawn, Rhett accidentally did a really long blink. A long blink that was not a nap in any way.

  “KNOCK KNOCK!” the voice of god boomed, sending him slamming into the ceiling, gravimetric systems undergoing a critical error, errorcode: “He jumped”.

  “Gah!” Rhett yelled in terror, as the giant face occluded his domain, a little Elf smiling in like the devil herself.

  “Comestibles to be relinquished to Homo Rodentia!” she boomed.

  He dove into Fort-Sawbread, kicking crumbs at the little girl as he dug into the loaf and hid behind his glove.

  ‘Children are stupid, she’ll mistake me for an imaginary friend shortly,’ he thought.

  “Sanguinary words from a naturalist lacking in the competence to garb oneself,” she replied.

  ‘I said that out loud didn’t I,’ he thought again.

  A surge of demonic power began shoving something large and waxy into his doorway at this, prompting him to panic. “Okay! I give! Stop!” he cried, causing the wall of waxpaper to halt.

  “The brute yields?” a voice from outside calls, as he shoves the soft package out, glaring through the slit created in the process.

  “Yes, now pretend I’m not here and go, or- I’ll call the horde!” he replied. Kids liked it when you threatened them, right?

  The Elfin child giggled. “Fool, you are known far and wide! You pursue sequestration in a hamlet knit by familial bonds? Whose populus is enfolded in the sureness of proximity? What nonsense!” the child exclaimed, chortling loudly.

  Rhett paused. Why the heck would news of one rat spread that fast?

  “Okay Th-elf-saurus, are you saying every godda- goshdarn person here already knows about me?” he clarifies.

  “A newcomer? In Sunnymeat? Such news is Brobdingnagian in its bloviation by the elderly,” she mocks.

  “Stop making up words,” he orders, much to the child’s amusement. He thinks this over carefully. It stands to reason, by the fact that he hasn’t seen any mousetraps, that a rat, talking or otherwise, is both newsworthy, and not panicworthy…

  Unless…

  “Is this sandwich filled with rat poison?” he asks.

  “Nay, no pestilential pests were butchered into this nor any other of my father’s creations,” she answers. "Such organisms are not autochthonal."

  She chortled at him. Outright chortled, with a downward palm framing her chin dramatically as she did, in a pose of superiority.

  “Ridiculous, regardless. Who would want to dine on poison?” the child scoffs. “My epistemophilia sated, I bid you day,” she concludes, turning and skipping away.

  “...Weirdo,” the naked rat man says, dragging his hundred-dollar-ish sandwich back into the chewed-up hole in the wall.

  He needed to think this over, but first…

  “Hell yeah, fantasy-sandwich. Fantisandwich,” echoed from the shadowy pit, like the haunting laughter of a cthonian deity.

  –

  “The hero is spending all of their money on food,” Zeus remarked, leaning back on his proper throne, court having ended, and his two cohorts in the secret plan having remained behind.

  “Eh, I’m sure he’s just bulking, Pops. No clue why he wants to become a Corporeal, but it’s a worthy route for any true warrior to take,” Ares chimed in, leaning against a golden pillar.

  “A Corporeal trains their body, my son. He has done little but patter around and nap for days since his arrival,” Zeus countered. “Shall our hero become a sphere? A rotund cannonball to be fired at the demon king?” he asked rhetorically.

  “Patience, father. It’s been only a few days. No otherworlder has ever done anything interesting in the first week, I’m sure he’s itching to engage in some proper battle. Earthrealm’s wilds are rich with monsters and beasts, and that area in particular is no different,” he soothes.

  The pair stared at one another, platinum robes billowing in the silent ozone winds of the Olympian throne room. The holy, divine silence grew a holy, divine bit awkward.

  “Eh, I gotta agree with the big man. This kinda sucks. We can’t even see in his pothole, so even if he was doing closed-door cultivation or something, how would we know?

  “Speaking of which, did you figure out why one measly rat-person is somehow hiding from… Yaknow, gods?” Eris interjected with a raised brow. For whatever reason, once Rhett had finished his pitiful mousehole, it was a black hole of information, the trio getting no more from scrying it than they would the inside of a rock.

  Zeus shook his head ponderously. “No. There are few I can contact on this matter without risking one of them interfering. We shall know more only once Saint Titi Superstar reaches them. They are still-” he sighs. “- ‘On tour.’ Whatever that means,” the King of Olympus explained.

  “Hey, it’s no problem. Hero plan or not, you still need to keep your saint popular, pops. PR is a big deal in this era,” Ares answered.

  “I tell you and tell you, the real wars are on the net nowadays. Every time she signs an autograph, that’s bank for your Oath of Office. If my Saint of Ares hadn’t done her Confluence Tour, I’d have fallen behind Mars by the next stellar alignment,” he once more reminds his father.

  Zeus’s next sigh came out as more of a groan. The task of pandering to Earthrealm grew more tiring by the era. Still, it had to be done. Couldn’t let those damn demons monopolize the Mortal-economy after all.

  “Yes, yes. I suppose all we can do is wait, then. I did strike down a Roc that was set upon the village. Should I perhaps let the next one test the hero’s resolve, then?” he mused aloud.

  The two cousins shared a slightly uncomfortable look. “Might not be a good idea. It’s not like he can keep this dullness up permanently. The Trinity of Realities is a madhouse, or so outsiders say,” Eris smiled broadly.

  It was a mark of pride for her, after all. All the otherworldly Eris’s were quite jealous.

  Finally, Zeus reached a conclusion. “...Indeed. Let us hope our hero shines his dullness in time, then, before the Hellscape grows ornery once more.

  “…Or before one of the other pantheons tries to poach him, at the very least.”

  –