Tell Lisandra

The Inn is warm and low-lit when you push through the door, smelling of woodsmoke and something vaguely stew-adjacent. You drop onto the bench at your usual table, set what's left of your shield against the wall, and stare at the worn metal for a moment while your brain attempts to file the last few hours.

It fails. You flag down a drink.

Lisandra joins you in the seat across from you before the cup even arrives. This, you've learned, is her primary talent: appearing at precisely the moment you least have your guard up. Her head tilts at the scorch marks on your armor and the conspicuous absence of your shield's upper half.

"You're back later than expected," she says lightly. Then her eyes sharpen. "...You look like you've seen something."

You take a breath. "I saw her. The Demon Goddess."

The warmth drops off her face like a curtain falling. She's on her feet before you finish the sentence, one hand braced on the table, the other already beginning to gather a faint, flickering light between her fingers.

"Are you hurt?" she demands. Her voice has lost all its usual scatter. "Are you unharmed? Did she touch you? Tell me everything, right now—" She's already leaning toward you, scanning your face with an intensity that is frankly alarming. "That foul, wretched, ancient demon. I swear on every Creator in every realm, I will personally vanquish her. I will smite her so thoroughly she won't remember which direction is up. I will—"

"Lisandra." You say calmly.

"—rain down a divine reckoning the likes of which this world has never—"

"Lisandra."

She stops. "Yes?"

"She's someone important to me."

A pause. Lisandra blinks once, slowly, like a bird processing unexpected information. Then she straightens up, folds her hands together, and nods.

"Of course," she says. "Yes, of course she is."

You look at her. "...You understand?"

"She's the final boss." Lisandra nods again, even more solemnly. "Your great nemesis. The ultimate challenge at the end of a long and harrowing journey." She places a hand over her heart. "And when that moment comes—when you stand across from her at the cusp of your destiny—I want you to know that I will be right there beside you. It will be the most important battle of your life, and together we will face it with courage and—"

"That's not what I meant," you say. "I mean Lilith is someone I know. From my old world."

Lisandra stops. "...Pardon?"

"Lilith's someone I knew before I came here. Before I died." You wrap your hands around your cup. "They got reincarnated too. Somehow they ended up as Lilith."

The solemn warrior-of-destiny energy evaporates. Lisandra sits back down slowly, her expression cycling through several things at once. "That's...that shouldn't be possible," she says, quieter now, and more careful. "Reincarnations don't just...jumble up. The Creators map each soul to a designated vessel well in advance. There are forms. There is a process." She pauses. Her lips press together. "...There is supposed to be a process."

"So how did it happen?"

She is quiet for a moment that stretches a beat too long.

"Well," she says. "The Creators don't have...well, total control over the reincarnation process. There are...variables." Another pause. She looks at the table. Then she looks at the ceiling. Then she looks back at you as she fidgets with her fingers. "When I collected you slightly...but only slightly...early, I may have....jumbled things up in the processing queue. For outgoing and incoming souls." She dims a bit. "It's possible that the soul originally designated for Lilith's vessel was...nudged. And that yours wasn't the only reincarnation that got, as one might say, creatively rerouted."

The silence that follows is profound.

"You bumped someone into the Demon God," you say.

"I strongly prefer the phrasing 'inadvertently accelerated an alternative soul placement,'" she says. "But." A very small pause. "Yes."

You close your eyes. You open them. You pick up your drink.

"Okay," you say.

"I am very sorry," she says, with genuine feeling.

"Okay," you say again.

She watches you take a long sip. Then, as if distressed by your calmness, she leans forward on the table with both elbows, in a masked desperation and says: "How important, exactly? This person from your old world."

You glance at her. "What?"

"You said whoever was possessing Lilith was 'someone important' to you." Lisandra's wide blue eyes are fixed on yours with a precision that is entirely at odds with her usual scatter. "I am simply asking, as your divine companion and official guardian, for a clarification. Important like—a neighbor? A colleague? A—" she pauses, and the pause has a distinct shape to it— "a friend?"

"Lisandra—"

"I require a full inspection," she announces, standing up abruptly. Her halo pops back into sight, wobbling like a shaken glass of water.

You blink. "A what? Lisandra, calm down! Your halo is showing," you say in a hurried whisper.

"Of you." She gestures at the general totality of you, while quickly ripping her halo off her head for concealment. "Your wellbeing. Your spiritual integrity. Y-your purity." The word lands with a kind of defiance. "As your divine protector, it is entirely within my mandate to conduct a thorough inspection following any encounter with a hostile demonic entity, and I am invoking that mandate right now, immediately, starting from the top."

"She just hugged me, that's it." You say.

"Top," Lisandra repeats, reaching forward to take your face firmly in both gloved hands and turn it left, then right, with the focused air of someone checking a melon for ripeness. "Hm. Eyes: present. Complexion: acceptable. Expressions..." She squints at you. "...Suspiciously complicated."

"I just found out that someone I knew from my old life is the Demon God," you say.

"Mm. Mmhmm." She releases your face. She does not look entirely satisfied by this answer. She takes a step back, crosses her arms, and fixes you with a look that contains, just barely visible beneath all her divine regality, something that resembles a pout.

"I see," she says primly.

"Lisandra," you say carefully. "Are you...jealous?"

"I am conducting a welfare inspection," she says. "That is all I am doing. That is all that is happening here."

A long beat passes.

"You are absolutely jealous," you say.

"I am not." She shoots back.

You look at her. She looks at you.

"Thank you. For checking if I was okay."

Something shifts in her expression—quick and unguarded, before she pulls it back behind the official guardian composure. She sniffs. She smooths her hands over her armor. She takes a step back from the table.

"You are welcome," she says, hiding a smile. "It is my job, after all. Now, if you would kindly join me upstairs in my room," She says, gesturing towards the spiral staircase of the Inn.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait, what?"

"As I said, if you would please join me upstairs—for your well being, of course. I need to complete a full inspection of you. One that would not require the presence of the other patrons of this inn."