Chapter#02

Jenny's face was the placid smile of a thrift shop horror, but Reggie the rat king wore an expression of doubt. Mike paused to see what they were looking at, and realized that the two of them were playing Battleship.

"Problem?" he asked.

"I am fairly certain she is cheating," Reggie said. The empty plates on the table rattled threateningly, but Reggie had long ago stopped letting the haunted doll intimidate him. The rat king and Jenny, once enemies, had apparently worked past many of their differences, and it said quite a lot about their relationship that Jenny didn't actually attempt to hurt him. "I have yet to figure out how."

"Hmm." From where he stood, Mike had a great view of Jenny's board. She had snapped the boats into pieces and scattered them about. As far as he knew, the rules didn't explicitly state that was forbidden, which would probably be argued about later. It wouldn't be the first banned game in the house as a result of rule-breaking. "Well, good luck."

"Thank you," Reggie said, and Mike continued into the kitchen.

The smell of baked goods reached him well in advance, and he entered in time to see a feminine figure with a very shapely ass bent over in front of the oven. He paused to admire the view, then kept moving when Sofia stood holding a muffin pan.

"Cornbread?" he asked. He saw that the counters had been covered in different baked goods, such as pies and cakes. "Seems a little basic."

The cyclops turned to regard him with a long stare. She stood well over a foot taller than him, but he feared her tongue more than her physical presence. Though she could be sweet when the two of them were alone, she typically chose to berate him over little things. It didn't bother him anymore, because he knew for a fact that it just played into her kink.

"I thought it would be nice to offer something that wasn't so sweet." She lifted the door of the oven with her foot, which caused it to slam with a metallic bang. The kitchen itself had expanded toward the end of February, but nobody knew why. This had allowed Mike to purchase a much larger fridge and redecorate the place so that it looked almost like a kitchen in a high-end restaurant. Sofia had appreciated the extra room to cook, and had spent a good chunk of the winter prepping meals that tasted like they had been cooked by professional chefs.

"Sounds like a great idea," he offered. "I love cornbread."

She huffed at him, and then moved the pan over to cool. "Aren't you supposed to be helping somewhere?"

"Yep." This was an outright lie, but it would get him out of the kitchen without further discussion. He snapped up a small pastry from the edge of the counter on his way out, then dashed out of the kitchen when she opened her mouth to yell.

When he passed the dining room table, Reggie's arms were crossed in anger, his whiskers twitching. A pair of forks hovered threateningly over his head.

"The rulebook does not have to explicitly state that you can't break the pieces," he declared in anger. A small rat squad that Mike hadn't noticed before huddled nearby, clearly fearful for their king. Reggie squinted beady eyes at Jenny, who stood defiantly with her hands on her hips. "In the instructions, it clearly stated that you were to place your ships fully on the board. By breaking your pieces, they are no longer ships, and that means you are unable to even start the game!"

A heavy pitcher lifted in the air, but Mike grabbed it as he walked by. "He's got you there, Jenny." He set the pitcher down at the other end of the table. "Jenny, if you mess up the table settings, you'll piss off Sofia."

The forks immediately dropped out of the air and clattered on the table. Though lacking a mouth, Jenny was able to blow a loud raspberry before hopping down from the table and running into the living room. Reggie just shook his head as he put the forks back where they belonged.

"Thank you," he said. "I was afraid that we were about to have another Clue incident."

Mike shivered, then shook his head vehemently. "We don't talk about the Clue incident," he reminded the rat king.

Reggie snorted, and Mike left. Not having a destination, he decided to head out back to see how preparations were progressing for the equinox.

His backyard was so large that it rivaled the front, and was now easily half the total land his home sat on. A large fountain sat in the middle of the garden, and the massive oak tree behind it dominated the view. Just past the tree was a gentle slope that terminated at a stone wall with a large, wrought-iron gate. Beyond the gate, the occasional howl of a demon could be heard, but as long as it remained locked up tight, Mike wasn't worried about another invasion from the Underworld.

That, and Cerberus was always watching. The three-headed demon dog was loyal to Mike now, and they sat on the other side, always watching for trouble. Tethered to the Underworld by dimensional chains, they couldn't come more than a hundred feet into the backyard before reaching the end of their tether. He felt bad that Cerberus could never properly join the household, but it was probably for the best.

A few centaurs milled around a device that looked like a cross between a snail shell and a water tower. Tink had built the thing over the last two weeks, and was inspecting a large cistern that she had attached to the base, which consisted of long lengths of pipe that went beneath the ground and around the home to the front yard.

"How's it going?" Mike asked when he walked up. He took a bite of the pastry and almost groaned in delight when the buttery texture traveled through his entire mouth. There was a hint of some kind of berry, but he couldn't quite tell what. It was somewhere between raspberry and blueberry, which made him wonder if it wasn't both.

"Tink find small problem, fix with hammer." The goblin indicated a broken pipe made of PVC that sat off to the side. Mike's best guess was that she had smashed it with the hammer and replaced it.