Chapter 3 - Episode Three

Waking up on his own was always a luxury for Ian. Usually his alarm clock bawled him up out of bed at five-fifteen in the morning, earlier than the sun even deigned to rise, trying to hustle him into squeezing in a few minutes of writing before he had to hare off to school on his bicycle. But on weekends such as this, he could wake up as slowly as he wanted, relish the dreams from the night, curl up around the multitude of pillows and—

He only had one pillow.

Ian opened his eyes, and for one brief moment thought he was still dreaming.

His eyes were drenched with shifting, falling, reflecting, shattering, glittering, sparkling scraps of iridescent light. It nearly blinded him in its shimmering glory. Reflexively, he reached up for his glasses, hoping to make some sense out of the kaleidoscope around him, but instead of the familiar little shelves that were supposed to be at the head of his bed, his fingers tangled in filmy veils of gauze.

“What the bloody hell…?”

Ian got to his feet, pushing away something that felt but didn't look at all like his old down comforter, and realized in the process that he was wearing a shirt and pants made out of what felt like the lightest of airy silks.

“I did not go to sleep wearing this. I don't even own anything like this.”

Shock and confusion bred italics in Ian's self-directed dialogue—always had, probably always would.

“What is going on here? I don't even remember falling asleep! I was in Edi's house, watching Shamanic Princess with him and Christine…and then…now…I'm here, in somewhere I've never seen, wearing something I do not own. Actually, in somewhere I still haven't seen, because I don't have my glasses. And I can't see anything!”

Which was slightly frightening, now that he thought about it.

“Okay, no use panicking. I have to actually do something. Something aside from stand here and talk to myself.”

Carefully, Ian blundered forward, nearly tripping over several fluffy pillows scattered hither and yon across his path and nearly strangling in the gauze somehow hanging in the air. The dancing rose-gold-azure light, though lovely, combined with Ian's myopia to make it almost impossible for him to see anything.

Then something shone brilliantly brightly.

Ian squinted, rendered effectively blind by this third strike against his eyesight. All he could see was a shimmering emerald light, which reflected off of everything, turning the world green.

“Milord? Ah, perfect, you're already awake! The last Overlord was such a lazy bum. She had us come and wake her up at dinner every day.”

Something bright and purple materialized out of the emerald light, which was dying down, filtering back to pink and gold.

“But you seem to be up with the sun. Isn't it gorgeous when it's all pinky like this at sunrise? I wish my room was like this. But then it wouldn't be the Overlord's room, would it? And I got to use a king's ransom stolen from a sunken ship to furnish my room anyways.”

“Sorry?” Ian said blankly.

“Your glasses, Milord!” The purple thing came closer and shoved something on Ian's nose—and suddenly the world leapt into focus.

Unbelievable focus.

Ian's mind had seen some pretty weird and fantastical things, but this…this went so far beyond its comprehension that it froze completely, trying to absorb what it could see.

The room was a tower, the very top of a tall tower looming hundreds of feet above the ground. And it could be seen that this tower was hundreds of feet above the ground, because it was made completely out of faceted, ice-like crystal.

The early sunlight was caught by every facet of the multisided tower room, transforming translucence into shimmering pink touched with gold, causing the entire room to glow as though by magic. The spilling carnation light dripped through the veils of lightest white gauze, which fell from the highest point of the tapering ceiling to surround the only recognizable object in the room—a bed of sorts, a huge circular mattress laid flat upon the crystal floor like a giant cloud, covered by pure white comforters and a sprinkle of snowy pillows. All the white fabric further caught the golden pink of the rising sun's light, seeming almost to glow.

The truly spectacular part of the room, however, was the ceiling, where the floating veils of gauze met at a single golden point at the apex of the ceiling's height. For dripping down from this crystal ceiling were impossible sparkling shapes formed from innumerable crystal prisms, each and every one catching the brilliant morning light and reflecting it out as twirling rainbows, which were in turn caught by the faceted walls to add further to the ambient lightshow. This was what was responsible for the dizzying blurred iridescence Ian had awoken to.

To call it mindblowing would be an understatement of criminal degree.

“So anyway, as I was saying, the last Overlord was just lazy lazy lazy. You couldn't get her up before six-`o-clock if there was a war going on. Then she gorged herself at dinner, plunked down to play video games all night, and went to bed at five in the morning, just before sunrise. She really didn't—oops, I'm not supposed to mention her, am I? My bad, milord.”

This all came from a small young woman with waist-length amethyst hair, dressed in the frilly dress and headband of a maid, at least a foot shorter than Ian's six feet. She would have seemed even shorter were it not for the height offered by her (color?) heeled shoes. At her waist hung a rather odd-looking feather duster, which she removed from her belt with a businesslike air and began to flick over every surface in the room.

“Subaru's coming up now,” the purple maid informed Ian. “I've been trying to improve the transportation symbols to include more than one person in a go all by myself, but I still haven't made any progress. It's starting to tick me—ah, here he comes now!”

His brain making a vague kind of connection between this rather odd sentence and the sudden appearance of the maid when she was still a purple blob, Ian looked back to where that purple blob had first appeared and saw on the floor—thrown into focus now by his glasses—a large circle of runic sigils traced in some luminescent kind of brilliant lime-colored light. This was presumably what the maid meant by “transportation symbols.”

Even as Ian began to understand the connection his brain had made, the symbols flashed like a miniature lime sun all over again. Ian had to squinch his eyes closed against it. Then out of the unbearable brightness came another voice, this one definitively masculine. “Nanairo!! You woke the new Overlord up?! Didn't it occur to you he might not sleep as deeply as the old one?!”

“You're not supposed to mention her, Subaru!” the maid's voice said. “Besides, he was already awake when I—owch! Hey! Stoppit! OWWWWIEEEEE!!!!”

Green afterimages still dancing faintly in his vision, Ian opened his eyes to see the purple maid—Nanairo—having her ear yanked at a rather painful angle by a sun-browned, whiplash-lean boy wearing green trousers, brown fingerless gloves, and a pair of indigo goggles pushed up into his spiky blonde bangs. His boots and rather unusual winged backpack were the same indigo shade as his goggles—aside from the backpack's bulky straps, the only clothing he wore on his sandy-brown torso was a necklace of small red and blue stones.

Dear God in Heaven…or Hell…or something. I'm standing in the same room as a Scout and a Prism Mage. I'm in Disgaea.

* * *

“OWIE! OWIE!! OWWIIEEEES!! LEGGO, SUBARU!! YOU'RE BEING MEAN!! I DIDN'T WAKE HIM UP!!!”

“That's what you said about the dragon in the Sea of Gehenna!!”

“But I really mean it this time!!” Nanairo wailed. “I just came in and found the Overlord being surrounded by giant spiders—”

“Whoa, excuse me?” Ian demanded. “Giant whats?”

“You're doing it again!!” Subaru yelled, bearing down harder on Nanairo's ear.

“OWWW!! WAAAAAAAAHHH!!!” Nanairo burst into veritable seas of tears. “Okay! Okay! I give! It wasn't giant spiders! It was zombies! And I had to Mega Fire them before theyyyyooOOOWWWW!!”

“The Overlord wouldn't need help to destroy a group of pathetic zombies!” Subaru started to shake Nanairo's head back and forth. “Stop lying!”

“There were no zombies!” Ian flared, figuratively stepping into the fray. “There wasn't anything! I woke up and she came in and gave me my glasses! That's all!”

Subaru dropped Nanairo like a hot potato. Dignity (?) lost, Nanairo lay on the floor and bawled.

“Forgive me, milord!” Subaru gasped, bowing deeply. His backpack stared upside-down over him and winked lasciviously. “I forgot myself! I should have respected your privacy until I better understood your needs! And please forgive Nanairo as well—she can't help herself!”

Ian, somewhat sidetracked by the looks cast at him from the backpack, had to forcibly drag himself back on subject. “What's with her? Talking about giant spiders and zombies?”

“Nanairo,” Subaru explained, glaring down at her as she continued to water the floor, “is a pathological liar.”

“Am not!”

“See?”

The logic was indisputable.

“Ah. That would explain it. Um…Subaru…”

Subaru jerked upright again. “YES?!”

The vehemence of the response took Ian somewhat aback. “Er…um…where am I?”

Subaru looked genuinely confused. “You are in the palace of your Netherworld, conquered in single combat as of yesterday. In the Crystal Tower—the retreat solely of the Overlord and whoever the Overlord deigns to…” Subaru groped for a word, finding only a blush that spread rather vocally across his desert-colored face. “…honor.”

“I see.” Ian made a mental translation from “honor” to “sleep with” and added a note that the previous Overlord didn't seem to have presented that great of an example to her subjects. “So I really am in a Netherworld.”

“Of course, milord,” Subaru said. “Was there ever any doubt?”

“Well, you know, milord,” Nanairo began, her teary misery gone as quickly as it had appeared, “there is a rumor that this isn't really a Netherworld at all, but really a front made by sea cucumbers to—”

Subaru stomped on her.

“Anyways!” Ian interrupted rather desperately, although far too late to stop Nanairo from redissolving into wails, “you said that I'm also the new Overlord?”

“Yes, milord,” Subaru said over Nanairo's prone body.

“Then if that's the case,” Ian said, not entirely sure he was convinced, “could you two take me to where I would go to make new charac—uh—vassals?”

“Right away, Milord!” Nanairo leapt to her feet, all harm and tears forgotten. “Please follow me!”

She skipped forward onto the transportation symbol circle, stuffed her feather duster (which she had not dropped all throughout her punishments and resulting tantrums) back onto her belt, and folded her hands in front of her face as though praying.

“Oh great powers that be interred in these runic shapes,” she intoned gravely, “release your great influence from the bonds of the abstract and send it to me here in malleable form! With your awesome strength, great powers, please follow the writ of this circle to send me to a new destination!”

The runes began to shine with light again. Anticipating it this time, Ian covered his eyes.

“Displace me through space and time to the location laid out in this circle!” Nanairo called. “Teleport Me!”

The light exploded, and Nanairo vanished.

“That's an awfully long incantation,” Ian said, letting his hands fall again.

“We've tried to shorten it,” Subaru explained. “It never works—or it does work, but it ends up turning people into fish or sending them to the other side of the Netherworld. It turned the last Overlord into a ferret for three days—and was she mad about that.” Then he blushed again, becoming rather the color of a steadily browning rose. “I'm sorry, milord—I didn't—”

Ian refrained from rolling his eyes with an effort. “Please, enough of `milord.' It sounds way too weird. My name's Ian, and I'm ordering you to call me that.”

Before Subaru could respond, Ian stepped forward onto the transportation symbol himself. “All right, so what's that incantation again? I think it'll take a few times before I can remember that whole thing.”

* * *

The transportation symbol's twin was strategetically placed at the center of the Overlord's palace, in a large room blossoming off on all levels in all directions. From this room, or so Nanairo (a less than reliable source) assured Ian, one could reach all other sections of the palace.

The room was cavernous, and had oddly the same shape as a pumpkin, albeit the largest pumpkin ever imagined—overhead, the ceiling curved in clear crystal ribs, revealing the aquamarine sky and the tall, glimmering figure of the Crystal Tower directly overhead. All around them, small spiraling staircases gilded with gold pirouetted out into the air, surrounding a massive sweeping grand staircase made of pale marble, gliding regally down to the floor of a foyer covered in a deep fluffy carpet of pale leaf green.

A badger girl greeted them at the bottom of the marble staircase.

“Greetings, Overlord! Will you be soliciting the Dark Assembly today?”

Ian did a double-take. “Are you a badger girl?”

The girl checked. “Well, I have stripes and the right kind of tail, so I believe so, milord.”

“Christine really had me nailed, didn't she?”

“Overlord?”

“Nothing, never mind, forget it. No, no Dark Assembly today…I was hoping to create some vassals, though…”

“Well, I can certainly help you with that!” The badger girl adjusted the hem of her emerald dress, which was shorter than a quick sneeze. “Right this way. Please lay your hands on this crystal, and I'll be your tutorial.”

Ian laid his hands on the crystal the badger girl indicated—it was huge and multifaceted, raised up on a kind of golden spire stand, and it glowed with a pearly, opalescent light. Under Ian's touch, it flashed briefly with all the colors of the rainbow, then returned to a milky, restfully-colored glimmer.

The badger girl adjusted her dress again, then pulled from nowhere a sheaf of cue cards covered with block-lettered sentences. She cleared her throat importantly. “Ahem! `Welcome to the Overlord Vassal Creation System Tutorial. Kindly have the vital statistics of your preferred vassal in mind before beginning creation.' ” The badger girl looked over her cards at Ian, dark eyes serious in her striped face. “Do you have a preferred vassal in mind?”

“I think so—yes,” Ian agreed.

“Super. Then…” The badger girl cleared her throat again and switched to a new cue card. “ `Please decide the level of competence for your vassal, either Good-for-nothing, Incompetent, Average, Skilled, Distinguished, or Genius. Keep in mind that unlocking Distinguished or Genius class requires a written petition from the Dark Assembly. If you desire this class, but have no petition, kindly withdraw from the system and get your butts over to beg for one.' ” The badger girl looked up again. “Which class would you prefer?”

“Skilled.” Then Ian had a slight nagging worry. “Wait…doesn't it take mana to create vassals? I'm not sure I have any mana to—”

Suddenly, the very weirdest feeling Ian had ever had in his life ran over his entire body from head to toe. It felt like a vacuum cleaner moving over each individual hair on his skin, leaving him feeling airbrushed and dizzy.

“Are you okay, milord?” Nanairo asked anxiously.

“I…think…so,” Ian answered dazedly.

“The necessary mana has been withdrawn!” The badger girl flicked her tail. “ `Your vassal is being created. Please give him a name while he is being formed.' ”

“He?” Subaru inquired.

“He.” Ian considered. “Alejandro. Alej for short.”

The crystal Ian still held between his hands suddenly emitted a soft ringing tone like windchimes. Ian jumped—the entire crystal had vibrated with the sound, sending echoes through his arms.

A sparkling whirlwind burst forth from the crystal, causing Ian to jump backwards with an involuntary squeak. The whirlwind crystallized and took on form, shimmering like a heat mirage, and hardened into reality, resolving itself to be a tall, muscular, fiercely redheaded man with rose-wine skin, extremely prominent canines, and absolutely no clothing.

Nanairo whistled appreciatively. “I like your mana, milord.”

“Eh?” The man seemed disoriented, as might be expected. “Huh? Whutha…?”

Ian flushed deeply. “I didn't—that wasn't—it's—somebody get him some clothes!!”

The badger girl turned to her last cue card. “Um… `Congratulations! Your vassal has been completed.' ” She replaced the cards into nowhere, and they vanished. “Don't worry, there's always a Prinny on hand to outfit the new recruits.”

Sure enough, the badger girl had no sooner finished speaking than a Prinny came tottling up, flippers full with a mountain of yellow and red fabric. Within moments, the Prinny had a pair of voluminous yellow pantaloons cinched decently around the muscular waist with a leather belt.

Nanairo sighed. “Wait'll I tell the girls about that…”

Subaru glared at her. “By the time you tell it, it'll be a tale taller than the Crystal Tower!”

“It already was,” Nanairo said wickedly.

Subaru pulled a harisen out of the air and smacked Nanairo with it. “Hentai!!”

The certain eruption between Nanairo and Subaru was halted only by something that sounded like the mashing gears of a bad car engine in the middle of Death Valley during a heatwave.

Everybody, including the Prinny and the newly-created Alejandro, looked at Ian.

“Wow,” Ian said, laughing embarrassedly. “Even my stomach's never been that loud before…”

“Your stomach? That was your stomach? I thought it was the giant red bull underneath the castle snoring for the third time this centur—OUCH!!”

“Oh, I get it!” the badger girl exclaimed. “That's why you made a Dark Chef for your vassal!”

Alejandro, the Dark Chef in question, was too busy trying to make sense of the Chinese vest the Prinny was trying to force onto him to pay much attention to the unveiled secret of his life.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Ian admitted. “Hey, um…what's your name?”

The badger girl began to twiddle her fingers, trying to hide her face behind her shoulder-length mahogany hair. “Kitty.”

“Ki—?” Ian blinked. “But—”

“I know!” the badger girl interrupted, clouding up. “I know—it's not—not the right kind of name for a badger.” Rainclouds of despair roiled up as she clouded, appearing with the same startling suddenness of everything else in this place. “It's my parents' fault! They're so crazy about X-Men!”

She pulled a leaf-colored handkerchief out of thin air and wiped away a threatening tear. The rainclouds began to rain busily on the Prinny.

The idea that the parents of a badger girl named Kitty were X-Men fanatics was a little much for Ian to digest after the rest of the morning, so he decided to push it aside for now. “No, I think it kind of fits you.”

Kitty lit up like a Christmas tree, dispelling the rainclouds, much to the Prinny's relief. “You think so?!”

“Oh, most definitely. It's cute. It fits you.”

Kitty's eyes went watery with happiness, and she dabbed at them with her handkerchief again. “Oh, thank you, milord!”

Ian sighed inwardly. That title was going to chase him, wasn't it. “No, thank you for helping me with Alejandro. Just, could you tell me one more thing?”

“Anything, milord!”

“Where's the kitchen?”

* * *

Next Time, on Disgaea: Overlords' Dance

Etna: The super monster trainer Etna has captured one of every monster species in the Netherworld!

Ian: Hey…what the heck is Etna doing wearing a baseball cap?

Etna: With her boundless spirit and the help of her monster friends, she has become the Ultimate Trainer!

Ian: Oh, I must be in her little end-of-the-episode thing.

Etna: But wait! There, in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a…

Ian: A what?

Etna: It's the very rarest and most powerful of all monsters—an Etna Clone!!

Ian: Those Clone Geoforce panels are a pain, aren't they?

Etna: Next time, on Monster Mistress Etna, Episode Four, “The Eternal Battle Between Etnas!”

Ian: How can it be eternal if it ends at the end of the series?

Etna: …Will you shut up? Your practicality is really getting me down.

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