He blinked slowly, not quite sure if this was something to take at face value.

But he was pretty good, he thought, at shocking people just in case. Time to flex that old muscle.

"Well, you see," he began, "I just appeared here from the Fade, which is a sort of realm adjacent to my own world, where magic comes from, where no one is supposed to be able to enter physically - but I did, with five other people, by accident. The problem is that the Fade contains all of the Demons that want to come over to the real world. In order to let everyone else escape, I was chosen to fight the Demon that ruled that area of the Fade. It was a gigantic spider, larger than some of the Keeps I've seen in my lifetime, that dripped venom and had more eyes than I think anyone would want to count. It could manipulate the Fade around it, just like all Demons can, and I'm not exactly sure this isn't the Fade. I expect you'll say it isn't, but that's what a Demon illusion would say."