Nastasia was doing important office work. She was always doing important office work, because building an interdimensional castle and army out of nothing took an significant amount of effort. It helped when you had forces of darkness and destruction on your side, but even they had to bow to the laws of physics. Pure dark magic couldn't generate working kitchens, drainage systems, comfortable beds for the minions they hadn't hired yet, and so many other things. Castles weren't built from pure dark magic. It took money. And money meant paperwork.
She adjusted her glasses and squinted at the lines of fine print detailing the contract with Celephais Construction Works, LLC. Good, good, good, but what was that? Something about souls? "Your souls will be forfeit to the Great Lord of Abernaelkoth upon the 7th payment?" Unacceptable. You couldn't destroy the multiverse if you owed your soul to some elder god or other. She raised a pen to make angry adjustments and was rudely interrupted by a dimensional box opening right behind her. Someone screamed in her ear, "HELLO WE'RE BACK—"
She dropped the pen and turned around. Mimi and Dimentio smiled back at her with perfectly innocent smiles. They were not perfectly innocent people. They were some of the least perfectly innocent people she knew. She wondered how many towns they'd destroyed this time.
"And we didn't even destroy any towns this time!" Mimi said, pre-empting her question. "They were destroyed already! Didn't make for super good sightseeing, honestly. We should go somewhere less depressing on our next mission."
"You can go somewhere less depressing on your next mission when you can prove it won't cause, let's see, a multiversal PR incident that ends with a horde of angry dolphins showing up at our door because you burned down their city. Even though it was underwater."
"Aww, but that was a one time thing! And this time we got a bunch of super valuable crystals! They were right where Dimmy said they'd be, I bet you'll be so happy to see them. If you can like sell them and give us the money..." Mimi clasped her hands. Nastasia could see the new and elaborate dress designs spinning themselves into existence. She made a mental note to expand Mimi's walk-in closet when the construction crew came around.
"You should see this," Dimentio said. "We intuited that the crystals may have... certain mind-altering effects. So we may need your assistance for this one!"
Then he opened a portal.
One headache-inducing experience later.
"Let me summarize," Nastasia said. "You have an entire mini-dimension full of highly dangerously cognitohazardous crystals that I have to cleanse now, because...?"
"Um," Mimi said. "It's kind of a long story..."
"Please file your after-action reports properly this time, so I can actually read them and maybe learn how to not get you chasing after cursed artifacts yet again. We already have one way to destroy the world. We don't need other ones."
