12th of the Month of the Storm Claw, 1493 DR. Evening.Three-Tower Street, Neverwinter.
Victor knew a robbery was about to happen to this girl.
To be precise—
A cute young elven girl, carrying a bulging pouch of gold, would soon be cornered in a narrow alley by several assassins sent by the Zhentarim.
What followed would be somewhat unsuitable for children.Not in an obscene sense—just a bit bloody. Still well within publishable limits. Otherwise, no one would ever get to read this story.
No one would die.
Only the two hundred gold pieces she had scraped together with her familiar cat—money meant to pay off compensation—would be taken.
Unable to repay the debt, the girl would be forced to mortgage the potion shop her parents had left her to a merchant consortium. She and her cat would end up on the streets.
The Zhentarim would then take over the shop, seize its valuable research notes, and move on to the next stage of their scheme.
Victor knew all of it.
The time.The place.The cause.The outcome.Why this event existed in the story.Why there was such a pitiful child.Why she needed money in the first place.
He knew everything.
Because this entire sequence was a side quest he had written one bored afternoon for his players.
But he had no intention of telling the girl who was now clutching the coin pouch.
According to the design, if everything went smoothly, the adventuring party would "just happen" to pass by. They would save the poor girl, kill a few assassins, accept a quest to recover the stolen two hundred gold, and eventually wipe out a Zhentarim hideout.
That is—
If ,everything, went smoothly.
The noise inside the tavern was like a pot of soup that never boiled dry. Tankards clinked, dice rattled, curses bubbled upward without end, shaking the beams overhead.
The place was called the Big Cleavage Tavern.
Not because it was near the Great Rift—but because Victor had named it after a painfully bad joke.
For a novice adventurer like Molly, the tavern had its merits. The drinks weren't expensive, the chairs weren't broken, the crowd wasn't large, and the work wasn't hard.
Most importantly—
her companions weren't terrible people.
When Victor designed the quest, he hadn't spared a thought for how a fifteen-year-old, level-one alchemist was supposed to earn two hundred gold under these circumstances.
Molly sat curled into a corner of the bar, the bulging coin pouch resting on her lap. She pursed her lips, lake-green eyes peering through the opening of the pouch as she counted the coins inside.
She was delicately built, pale-skinned—the kind of girl who clearly spent most of her life under a roof.
Her light blond hair fell to her shoulders, the tips slightly curled, as if she idly twirled them around her fingers when she wasn't paying attention.
Her clothes weren't pretty, but they were worn with care: a faded gray dress beneath a dark brown leather apron, permanently stained with herbs and potion residue.
A thin belt cinched her already narrow waist into a tempting line—though no amount of tightening could give her underdeveloped figure any real curves.
The only place she had any flesh at all was her legs.
Too short to touch the floor when sitting upright, she kept her calves neatly together, small feet resting on the chair rung. With her knees drawn up, she could cradle the coin pouch against her chest.
Victor was deeply annoyed that the pouch had taken the best seat.
"That's the third time."
The orc woman across the table—muscular, buzz-cut—muttered as she drained her mug of Frostkiss.
"You're not going to bite every single coin to check if it's real, are you?"
The dwarf cleric set his mug down, his beard braided into thick cords.
"Have some patience with kids, Laim. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if those debt collectors did bite coins. But lass—are you sure it was your potion that caused all this?"
Molly nodded. Her pointed ears drooped.
"They had documents from the Iron Hand Cult," she said quietly. "And… Barn, you know the potions I make."
"Sounds airtight," muttered the goblin rogue, taking a long swallow of ale. "By the way, Molly, could you keep your black cat away from me?"
The table fell silent.
It really did seem plausible.
For reasons no one could explain, every potion Molly brewed came with strange side effects—and no two batches ever shared the same one.
The resulting mishaps were countless. For years, she had been trapped in an endless cycle of selling potions and paying compensation.
Take recent events, for example.
The spell slot recovery potion she sold to an arcane caster in the Rift District did restore a 1st-level spell slot—at the cost of full-body paralysis. He nearly got kidnapped and dragged back to a goblin den.
Fortunately, the party's cleric knew Lesser Restoration. Molly still compensated him with a Potion of Superior Healing, which—according to rumor—left him unable to speak or cast spells for an entire day.
She'd wanted to offer more, but never saw him again.
All she could do was wish him well.
Or the Potion of Enlarge sold to the House of Delight.
The tiefling madam reported that when a client took it in preparation to "perform magnificently," he discovered he had lost all tactile sensation. By the time the potion's one-hour duration expired, so had the service session.
Molly refunded the potion.
Then paid the service fee.
The madam mentioned that the girls wanted more—unfortunately, the second batch caused magical sleep.
The client drank it and collapsed on the spot.
The madam never returned. Not even to demand compensation.
Of course, some potions did prove useful.
Like the Potion of Invisibility that helped Nott steal crucial information.
Its side effect—an intense fear of anything black for a few days—was, by Molly's standards, a great success.
If one ignored the fact that the information came in a black box.
Which caused Nott to scream.
Which led to the entire party being chased by goblins from the western sewers all the way to the Great Rift in the east.
As a side note, torches are forbidden in sewers.
That is why he now calls himself Nott the Brave.
Compared to all that,"Four healing potions failing entirely, forcing Lord Devon to spend 1,000 gold to resurrect his child" sounded absurdly reasonable.
So reasonable that Molly thought asking for only two hundred gold made them practically saints.
In truth, it made sense.
Her shop was never short on potions—many of them rare, high-grade items difficult to find elsewhere. But no one dared buy them. She earned no money, ran out of materials, and now had to take commissions just to pay compensation.
Victor knew that all those absurd incidents were real.
This one thing—the demand for two hundred gold—was not.
"Victor! Come here. Stop lying on Nott."
"Meow."
A black-furred cat with yellow eyes rose reluctantly from the table.
He padded over to Molly, nudged aside her arm, found a warm spot, and settled down, obediently enjoying her gentle petting.
Victor wasn't going to tell her the truth.
First, he needed this opportunity to meet the protagonists of this world.
Second, if the shop was gone, he could convince Molly to leave Neverwinter as soon as possible.
Because he knew what was about to happen to the city even better than the villains did.
Neverwinter was about to go straight to hell.
The dwarf tapped the table, and a server immediately came over.
"Molly, you should give Victor an extra meal today. Without him guiding us through the sewers, we'd have been in real trouble. How about a fish? Cats like fish, right?"
Nonsense.
Unless he wasn't a familiar.
Unfortunately, he was.
When Victor wrote high-difficulty encounters for players, he never considered how NPCs were supposed to survive them.
Because it didn't matter.
They were nothing more than narrative backdrops—motivation for the story. If Molly hadn't needed money, he wouldn't even know the others were named Laim, Barn, and Nott.
Victor was the Dungeon Master.
The god of this world at the narrative level.The one who sat among the players and told the story.
Well.
He used to be.
Until one day, a player drew a crooked Find Familiar magic circle and declared they were ritual casting it.
Victor, describing the scene, solemnly recited an incantation he'd written on a whim.
The circle actually began to glow.
And when Victor opened his eyes again, he had become a familiar cat—belonging to this very "side quest NPC," Molly, owner, alchemist, and server of the Black Cat Potion Shop in the Three-Tower District.
It had been a month.
If he were a proper familiar, it wouldn't be so bad. He could be dismissed into a pocket dimension and ignore the world's destruction. If his master died, he'd just get a new one.
The problem was, he couldn't enter the familiar space.
His body had only 2 HP.
If he ran off adventuring and got killed by dangers he himself had written, Molly would have to spend ten gold to resurrect him.
Who was he supposed to complain to?
Also—
despite being a familiar cat, he genuinely hated fish.
Molly knew this. She picked Victor up, placed him on her head, slung on her small backpack, and grabbed the coin pouch.
"Victor and I will pass—we've got work at the shop. But if there's a job like this again, remember to call us."
The dwarf waved goodbye.
"Jobs this juicy don't come often. Missed the caravan run to Phandalin—probably have to wait a few days now. Travel safe!"
Alright.
According to the script, the moment Molly stepped outside, the Zhentarim assassins would have their eyes on her.
Victor glanced toward the tavern entrance behind them.
Four cloaked men stood there, exactly where they were supposed to be.
The platinum-blond girl, wearing her black "hat," skipped cheerfully and unknowingly onto the road home.