Ask Cady about her outfit

“My… clothes?” says Cady. “Is that… really important right now? I want to know how you plan on… getting… stronger…” Her words trail off, no doubt discouraged by the look on your face. You are staring at her pretty intensely, after all. Now that you see the resemblance, there’s no way you can ignore it. She looks exactly like Blue Cloak. She even sounds like Blue Cloak.

I knew she sounded familiar when we met, you think. Why didn’t I realize it until now? What does this mean? Is Cady really Blue Cloak? If she is, then was escaping the wizard’s alternate dimension a lie? Has all of this been an elaborate trial setup? But then how did we go to the monster village? And I’m sure those adventurers are the same ones that I saw when Blythe and I were captured. There’s no way that all of this is… fake, right?

No, there’s no way, you decide. Blue Cloak never stuck around for more than two minutes each time. And the paladin definitely wasn’t an NPC. There has to be something else going on here. Maybe Blue Cloak was never an NPC either?

“In Hesperos’s alternate dimension,” you say, “there was a mysterious person who wore your same cloak. I never saw their face, but they had your dark, slender arms. They spoke with your voice, too.”

“Oh,” says Cady, “is that it?” Her indifferent response leaves you stunned. The cloaked arachne huffs and moves to stand up. “Sorry, excuse me for a minute. I’m getting cold, so I’m going to shut the front door. I’ll be right back.” The woman doesn’t wait for you to give a reply, and quickly disappears around the corner. By ‘shut the front door,’ you assume that she means sealing up the mouth of the cave with her webbing, like the spiders who sealed your four prisoners in their tree houses. You would have thought that she could do that from her seat, seeing as she was able to guide you to her cave from halfway across the forest, but apparently not. I don’t like this, you think. She better not try to dodge my question when she comes back.

If she comes back. I guess she could be ditching me here. The old bathroom date escape trick.

“So, about this ‘mysterious person,’” says Cady, suddenly reappearing in your field of view and reclaiming her seat at the table. The hood of her cloak is back down around her shoulders now. “What were ‘they’ like?”

So much for the idea that she would try to avoid the subject, I guess. “Aside from being you?”

“Aside from that, yes.” There’s no hesitation, nor any hint of emotion, in her reply. It’s simply matter-of-fact, similar to the rehearsed lines that Blue Cloak always delivered.

“Alright,” you say. “They were a quest giver, or I guess you could say a guide. They appeared at the start of every trial, told us where we were, and what we had to do, and then they would magically disappear. Is any of this ringing a bell?”

This time, it’s Cady’s turn to be stunned. “Did… you say every trial?”

“That’s right.”

Your confirmation leaves Cady momentarily speechless. One of her slender hands slips out from beneath the cloak, reaches up, and press into her cheek. The hand then repositions itself to cover her mouth, as well, but it isn’t quick enough to conceal the dopey grin spreading over Cady’s face. After a few seconds of her silently grinning to herself, you start to wonder if she forgot that you’re here.

“You seem pretty happy about this.” Your words startle Cady out of her happy thoughts. “Look. You clearly know something about this ‘character’ in the trials, and the resemblance to you is freaking me out here. Mind telling me what the deal is?”

Cady takes another moment to recompose herself, then slips her arm back inside the cloak. “Sorry, you’re right,” she says. “I do know about her. I just didn’t know… I didn’t think I’d be given that kind of role. I thought… well, never mind. You want to know why she looked and talked like me, right? Let me explain.” The monster girl looks towards the strange mannequin for a moment. Magically, the thing begins to move like a person, stepping its way up and down the room. It’s subtle, but by watching Cady you can see movement in her cloak as the four spidery limbs on her back manipulate the plastic doll. The mannequin eventually stops touring the room and comes right up to the table, striking a T-pose when it arrives. “The ‘people’ you met in the wizard’s game were all golems like this,” says Cady.

Golems? Like, magic robots? It makes sense, but you still have a hard time believing it. Sure, you thought of them as NPCs in a video game, but to call them ‘golems’ carries a whole different set of assumptions. A golem is supposed to be a roughly person-shaped collection of dirt, rocks, or machinery, bound together and **** to move through magical means. Like the Earth Elemental that you and the girls fought. That was a golem. Not the people you met.

“This is just the basic form,” says Cady. “It’s no different from a puppet on strings.” The mannequin brings a hand to its heart and bows, then goes to stand in the corner of the room. “Somehow, the wizard figured out how to make them look and act like real people. When he figured that out, he said he was going to model one after me.”

So that’s it, you think. Blue Cloak was an NPC after all. Cady was just the model. That explains the resemblance, at least.

Wait. If Hesperos made all of the NPCs in the trials, could he do it again?

“You and Hesperos must be pretty close, then,” you say. “Do you think he would be interested in making some golems for me?”

“O-oh…” The arachne’s shoulders slump, and the last remnants of her smile fade away. “I thought you knew. I told Lia and the elf about it while you were ****, but I guess they never mentioned it? The wizard… is dead. He laid himself to rest inside of the alternate dimension, just over a year ago. That’s… one of the reasons I was… supposed to be guarding it…” Cady chokes on her words near the end. Her six additional eyes remain unphased, but the two larger, humanoid ones start to show signs of tears welling up.