Phyllis’ Mini-Mall Mania Two: Lich House Let Down

Phyllis snapped her fingers and watched as the doors to the nearest empty shop flung open. There, a portal momentarily appeared, spitting Ishara out at terminal velocity. The bullet of a boy skidded across the floor, screaming before entering the food court and plowing through tables and chairs alike. The sight of which was as horrific for the triop as it was hilarious for Phyllis, which brought the lich substantial amounts of joy.

With a loud crash, her oracle collided with one of the chest-high divider walls, resulting in a comedic cloud of debris and splatter of gore. The plastic plants atop this fixture shook under the impact, some even tumbling onto the heap of bones resting in the messy meat puddle beneath them.

Phyllis cackled some more as the triop witnessed this, screaming in terror as they raced to the obviously dead boy's side. She let the scene play out for a few minutes, even going so far as to take beratement from Rionriv, death threats from Sharzin, and allowing Aesandoral to offer her soul as collateral for his life. And while Phyllis truly considered the offer from the elf, she begrudgingly passed since the three were technically already in an informal subcontract with Ishara. 

Once Phyllis was finally content with her fill of misery, she held her hands up to silence them.

"Hey, it's cool—it's cool." She insisted, waving off their sorrow as if it were something as insignificant as a fly. "I'm just having a little fun."

"He's dead, Phyllis!" Rionriv screamed at the lich. "Can't you see he's dead? How is that fun?"

She watched Rionriv looking down at Aesandoral, who had been crying over Ishara's corpse, before shifting her gaze back at the lich. As lightning crackled at the edges of her eyes, Phyllis sighed. Waving her hand once more at the sorceress, the arcing bolts dissipated in an instant, discharging into nothingness.

"Listen, I'm just having a laugh! See how seriously not worried I am? It's just a little harmless fun. He's not even that dead."

"Wh-what do you mean?" Aesandoral sniffled, her tear-soaked eyes reddened with anguish. "He's playing dead?"

"Oh, sweet dumb girl." Phyllis approached and patted Aesandoral's head. "No, he's actually dead. He's just not dead dead. No one dies in this exoplane without my express permission."

"What does that even mean?" Sharzin asked from her perch on one of the tables, her solemn expression shifting from Ishara to Phyllis.

"Typically, souls go to the Gods once the body expires. And once those bastards have their grubby paws on them, they don't like to let go. But my domain is separated from their control. It's like Las Vagus, it's God's blind spot."

"Las...what?" Aesandoral tilted her head.

"Oh, sweet dumb girl." Phyllis patted the elf's head once more. "Here, let me show you. I just have to raise my hands, mutter the magic words and—WIBBLEDEE BIPPITY WAZHOOO!"

With a crack of Phyllis’ ancient fingers, Ishara's broken body snapped and popped back into a recognizable shape. He opened his eyes with a start, screaming as though he had just woken from a nightmare. Unfortunately, the boy's sudden resurrection caused the girls of his triop to scream equally as loudly.

“Zombie!” Rionriv yelped and instinctively punched him in the face.

“Ahg!” Ishara cried out, grabbing his face.

Holding his bleeding nose, the only part of his body currently damaged, Ishara tried to stop the gushing stream that came from him. 

“What the hell, Ri?” His nasally voice whined. "What was that for?!"

“You were dead!”

“So, you punched me in the face?! How does that make sense? Owwww-uhh! Uhhhg. That really hurt. Is it broken? Did you just Rowen Wilson me? Aes. Aes, tell it to me straight. Is this broken?”

“No, you look perfect,” Aesandoral spoke softly, the relief to have him back washing over her. She leaned her teary face in, lifting one of her sleeves to wipe the blood from his nose. “You can hardly tell.”

The lich watched from afar as the tension between them grew more palpable. Inhaling the pheromones hanging in the air and listening to the thudding of hearts, she began to move in.

“Now kiss.” Phyllis directed as she casually floated up to the pair.

Aesandoral and Ishara paused their interaction, slowly pivoting towards Phyllis. The three of them now shared a very tight bubble. Soaking in the awkward energy with a devious smirk, Phyllis wiggled her eyebrows. She wanted them to do more than kiss in that moment. Preferably, the nasty things. And she demanded to watch.

“No," Ishara grumbled, standing to his feet with Aesandoral's help. "Can we go now?”

"Boo! Lame!" Phyllis shouted as she began her slow walk toward a small pizza stall. “No! Absolutely not! Pips Pizza first!” 

As she approached, she quickly realized that Sharzin was already there, sitting on the counter with a bowl in her hands. She had gotten over the moment with Ishara with relative ease, which Phyllis admired, or at least didn't hate.

“What you got there, Zin?” Ishara asked as he approached from behind Phyllis.

“Something called…poutine?” She replied, poking the fries, cheese curds and gravy with a spork. "It's salty and good.

“Oh, nice. Can I have some?”

Phyllis watched as the groundling stabbed her little ruby with a spork. He cursed, grabbing at his hand before the two exchanged heated words. The verbal sparring and tussling went on until a loud grumble came from Ishara’s stomach. Defeated, he narrowed his gaze and looked up at the menu.

“You know what? Pizza and studying go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly. Phyllis, can I get a large everything and a large Hawaiian to go?”

“Hawaiian?” Phyllis scoffed. “Those poor girls. And they called me a monster. You're a fuggin' sadist.”

Ishara’s pizzas appeared instantly, hot and ready, in the boxes as Phyllis stared up from the counter, pondering what she wanted to eat.

“Phyllis, can you send us back to my room now?" Ishara interrupted her browsing. "We’d really like not to die on our next mission.”

“Can’t you just put it off? That loot isn’t going anywhere after all! And I’m bored. And hungry. And I don’t want to eat alone.”

“Why don’t you just ask one of the Lich House kids?” Ishara paused as his face twitched with the look of a boy doing mental math. “Phyllis…tonight’s Samhain, right?”

“Yeah, what about it?” She replied. “Oooh, I think I’ll do the meat lover. Love me some meat.”

“Phyllis, did you remind the students to stay in their rooms with their doors locked while your home does its yearly Samhain Shuffle?”

Phyllis’ face dropped as she looked towards the ceiling. Once a year, she allowed all the horrible ghouls that she kept locked up in her exoplane a little bit of yard time. Over the course of the evening of Samhain, they were allowed to roam the shoppe and any of Phyllis' exoplane locales, so long as they didn't enter any rooms behind a closed door.

“The children!” She screamed out, realizing she hadn't told the children anything about the deadly threats to come.

With a turn, she began her slow, methodical pace back towards the Dwindlefyre shoppe door, abandoning Ishara and his triop in the food court.

“Phyllis,” She heard the boy calling after her. “Phyllis! Send us back to my room. Phyllis, I know you can hear me! Phyllis!”

But she chose to ignore him.

Phyllis eventually made it back to her shoppe and up the spiral stairwell to the attic, where she had created the twenty-four-person dormitory. Moving up the slippery stairs, she began to realize something was amiss. 

“Hmm, I don’t remember installing a blood fountain,” Phyllis mumbled between the squelching sounds of her feet. “I may have sprung a leak somewhere. I should get Vathos—“

With a sigh, she paused, allowing reality to set in.

“Damn it. I shouldn’t have given Vathos a pass.”

Eventually reaching the top, Phyllis rounded the corner where she froze before the two-dozen bodies that lay eviscerated. Standing over them was a six-legged creature with an obsidian black carapace. The pair of scorpion stingers on its back dripped with blood as a dozen eyes turned her way.

“Gah!” She exclaimed. “Bad! Bad kitty. Bad! Skit! Skit! Skeedaddle!”

With a horrid scream akin to a baby crying out in terror, the creature climbed up the walls and disappeared into a hole that had been blown in the ceiling.

“Damn. Going to need to fix that.”

Turning her attention back to the bodies on the ground, it was easy to tell that everyone was dead. Obviously not dead-dead, but enough so that Phyllis would need to put in a modicum of effort to restore all their souls.

That was when she realized that not everyone was, in fact, dead. At the far end of the hall stood a trio of figures. A small, shy tortan boy named Giovanni Galilei, a towering, kind ruminantfolk girl named Maren Highland, and a disgruntled little faerie girl named Lemon Poppy Seed. The heroes that Tahvin had written to save the world.

“Children?” She asked, slowly approaching the blood and ichor-soaked forms. “Is that you or are you doppelgängers?”

“Phyllis!” Giovanni and Maren cried out with tears racing down their faces.

They ran over to the lich and hugged her. Crying uncontrollably, they smeared blood and ooze against her robes.

“There, there.” She reassured them with gentle pats, examining the carnage around their bodies.

“It’s okay, sweet children—Aunty Phyllis will fix this. It’ll be like a bad dream that no one will ever forget or really talk about again, okay?”

Reaching into her pocket, she withdrew slips of paper trimmed with gold and ruby edges. She quickly handed them over and continued to talk rapidly.

“And here, you get coupons to the shoppe! These are for me accidentally killing your friends. Fifty percent off! Non-transferable. One-time use. Wow, what a deal, Phyllis!”

She continued to respond to herself, not giving any of the survivors a moment to speak. Then, in the time it took her to take a breath, she was already reaching into another pocket and withdrawing three small bags of gold coins.

“I know, I’m amazing—and look, here’s some money too, enough for half of a full price magical weapon. Of uncommon quality or lesser. Wow, you’re so generous, Phyllis. Yes, I know!”

She paused, taking one more breath before looking at the three. At this point, she drew them close before stressing the final bit of her bribe.

“Children, please don’t tell the school about this. They’ll close the dorm. Think about your friends! And the bonds you've made.”

With that, Phyllis snapped her fingers once more. The space quickly came alive as broken doors and furniture were repaired and exsanguinated blood withdrew into its respective corpses. With little effort on her part, life and soul were once more returned to the bodies of the remaining children.

Going from one terrified expression to the next, Phyllis ensured that every Lich House student was compensated with shoppe coupons to smooth things over. There was no monetary gift for them, though. She only gave that to the heroes since they survived the night, and she couldn't easily alter their memories. All the coupons were going to cut into her short-term profits badly enough, but in the long run, she believed it would pay off. As for everyone else, the evening quickly became a learning moment on what happened after taking too many drugs. A story that the triop agreed to maintain on Phyllis's behalf.

“Phyllis?” Giovanni asked, tugging at her robes some time after she had finished with the final restored student.

“Yes, dear—What?” Phyllis snipped, caught off guard.

It wasn't that the small, tortan boy had scared her. It was simply that her mind was elsewhere. Specifically, she wondered if Pips Pizza would still be open when she returned.

“Who’s Navec?” He asked.

“Navec?” Phyllis repeated, trying to remember if she knew someone with that name.

“He was this scary guy who was controlling the monsters and saying he wanted to kill us to show up his mommy—you.”

Phyllis' eyes went wide. She didn't have any children, only failed experiments. That was when it hit her.

“Oh, you mean Stewart? Mwahahaha—he goes by Navec now? That's so lame! Anyways, he’s a failed experiment from millennia ago. Is he still kicking around somewhere in my domain? What a little rascal.”

Phyllis laughed some more, thinking briefly about her estranged creation, trying to remember why she had even created him in the first place. That was when a horrible thought crossed her mind, and she became solemn.

What if the mall Pips created my meat-lover pizza and then closed when I left? Does that mean it's getting cold? I should know this answer, damn it! Ugh, I hate getting old.

“Children, I must go." She bellowed, clapping her hands. "Don’t worry, you’ll be safe now. You took the drugs. The drugs were working! And you're fine now. GO. TO. SLEEP. And lock your doors!”

And, with that, Phyllis made her slow escape back to the pizza place.