"Really? Did the scales look believable?" Lothar asked, suddenly distracted by actually having a fan.

"Oh hell yeah," Chris said.

"Though I'm not sure about the forked tongue and... ."

"AHEM!" Tarloh uttered.

"Sorry," Lothar said quickly, wiping his hands on his garish robes.

“What brings you down this way?" Talia asked.

“Forget to tell us when we were..."

“I think we may have a problem," Lothar said hurriedly.

"Yeah, the Shoggoth. We've met it."

“You MET the Shoggoth?" Lothar said, his eyes wide behind his glasses.

“Well, one of us did," Anya said softly.

“I'm sorry for your loss."

"No, she's not dead, but it was close. And it was close to being worse," Anya replied.

Lothar looked perplexed, so Tarloh quickly explained the whole story.

Lothar listened intently and with great interest.

"She actually drove the Shoggoth off?" he said at last.

"This Jane person sounds quite formidable. Too bad she and Red aren't here, ‘cause you guys ALL need to hear this." He took a deep breath, indicating the approach of a verbal onslaught.

"The Shoggoth it didn't make sense to me. Not that it was here, but that it would be trying to ascend, so to speak. So I began to wonder, how did this thing get loose from its prison? ‘Cause there are a lot worse things in those prison dimensions than a Shoggoth."

"Like WHAT?!" Mindy shouted.

"Like the things that created the Shoggoths . . . the Elder Gods."

Suddenly, there was silence. Lothar, being a bit of a ham, actually cast a silent spell that dimmed the lights, almost as if it were story time.

“According the keepers of order . . . you might call them ‘angels’ and their disciples, the Shoggoth rarely started power plays on their own. So either this one is one of the few rare rogues wanting its own dimension to play with, or it's just the tip of the iceberg. It may be trying to draw together enough power to free its master. And if that happens . . ." Lothar trailed off, his theatrical spell forgotten.

“Lothar,” Arthur began, “what would happen if an Elder God got free?"

"Hell would be like a rest stop compared to what this dimension would become," Lothar replied with a gulp, then a breath.