Dealing Blind

[Anders Nazret]

What was a man to do when stripped of purpose? Mickey had pondered that question for the past year. He had pondered it since waking up in the hospital with his magic completely gone. It was like waking up without a limb, or, more accurately waking up without the ability to taste. It’s not something you’d realize immediately. Maybe things would seem a bit off or your mouth a bit stale, but nothing alarming. Until it came time to eat, that is, that first bite after waking up would be so perplexing that you probably wouldn’t even realize what was going on. Perhaps the food was bad? You’d take another bite and only then, only when your brain finally became aware of its new reality would you realize what had happen. Detective Mickey, ex-detective Mickey had spent the last few months fine-tuning that little metaphor to explain what it felt like to wake up with his connection to magic completely and irrevocably severed.

It didn’t do it justice. A man could still function without his sense of taste. Life might become a bit bland without the satisfaction of a home-cooked meal, but he could still do his job. A firefighter could still fight fires, a doctor could still diagnose an illness, and a school teacher could still teach. But Mickey? He was a detective with APD, but not just a clever beat cop turned gumshoe. No, Mickey was a member of Arcadia’s thaumaturgical crimes department. In other words, he was a magic detective without any magic. To stretch his labored metaphor even further he was a test-taster without a sense of taste. That is to say, he was useless.

It wasn’t like he couldn’t take witness statements, sure, but when it came right down to it - without his magic he wasn’t anything more special than a run-of-the-mill beat cop.

So he retired. It was with honors. Chief Whitesel made sure he was set for life with a nice pension and a medal that distinguished him as an officer injured in the line of duty. And, it was all true. He had been injured in the line of duty. He had been maimed. He didn’t feel maimed, at least not physically, but that’s what all the papers said. He had given everything short of his life for Arcadia and her people and that the despicable terrorist Anders Nazret maimed him for his troubles. Of course they didn’t speak about the other members of the strike force who barely scraped through with their lives, or the ones that didn’t even make it through alive.

So without purpose what did Mickey do? What was he supposed to do? He was nearly fifty. What could he possibly do with the rest of his life when he had spent his entire life pursuing the arcane? He hadn’t found an answer. Rather, he hadn’t found a good answer. What he did was binge. He started smoking again. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but he found his way around a few bottles. He watched cooking show after cooking show. He ordered fast food to his apartment. He devoured pizza and tubs of ice cream regularly. He let himself go. He let his body fill the void his magic had left and it fell apart.

He had never been overweight before, and he wasn’t sure if he was now, but his gut had definitely outgrown his police uniform. Without the regular conditioning demanded of him by the APD he struggled to even make it up the three flights to his apartment without pausing halfway to catch his breath. Most painfully, however, was his mind. It had become slow. Where his synapses once fired like lightning to draw connections and solve puzzles and notice details it had crawled down to a snail’s pace. It had become a nicotine addicted slug squatting in his skull waiting for the next rerun of Kitchen Panic.

So it was this slowness of the mind that blinded him to the intruder crawling in through his apartment window. To be fair, the creature was small and able to easily scurry hidden behind discarded takeout boxes and ice cream tubs. He didn’t notice its approach until it climbed up the side of his recline and jumped onto the power button for the remote. He yelped and pulled his hand away, pulling himself up into the body of the recliner in a poor attempt to defend himself. The creature was humanoid in shape and its skin was soft pink, but it had no head. Instead, on its chest, it had a pair of wet green eyes with disturbingly developed eyelashes and on its belly was a mouth with bright white teeth and nice full lips.

“Detective!” It cried from its belly-mouth, “Detective! You must come quick, yes? Hurry, come quick and stop them, yes?”

“Slow down Al, slow down,” He couldn’t remember the last time he had actually spoken out loud, but it had been a while, He cleared his throat and continued, “What’s going on?”

“Mhm, yes, they summon big bad demon, yes? Real nasty snarling devil-one,” Al explained, gesticulating and slobbering all over the remote as he did, “Yes, yes, they summon real nasty piece-of-work. I come to you and tell you and you give Al candy, that was the deal, yes? Our deal, yes? Al tells detective all the nasties and detective gives Al candy, yes, please caramel or nougat, maybe?”

“Al, I’m not a detective anymore, you’re gonna have to go tell someone else at the APD,” Mickey said, grabbing the remote carefully to avoid the spittle and turning his show back on. He added, “They’ll have one of the new guys take care of it.”

Al shook his head-body vigorously. So vigorously in fact that he sent slobber all over Mickey. Al said, “No, no, that was not deal, deal was - Al bring you nasties and you give Al candies, yes, simple deal, yes?”

“Yeah, well, that wasn’t me, that was Detective Mickey,” He said, turning the volume up, “I’m just regular ol’ Mickey now, sorry buddy, but you’ll have to go talk to Maldera or somebody else.”

“No time,” Al explained and rubbed the top of its head-body worryingly, “No, no time, oh, too far away, Al found summon too late and they are almost done, yes. Al means no, no time to get other detectives, no time to make other deals for candy, Al is gonna staaarveeeeee. Al is gonna starve to deaaaaaath.”

The pink-bodied gremlin began to cry from its disgustingly beautiful eyes. It cried these big wet sobbing tears that burst upon contact with the recliner’s upholstery. Mickey peeled himself away from the splash zone and sighed. Demonic incursions usually weren’t that big of a deal. Summoning anything truly nasty required an inordinate amount of skill or just plain dumb luck. Usually incursions were dumb high school kids who had taken an “Intro to Demonology” class as an elective and wanted to impress their friends. They rarely managed to summon anything more terrifying than a wedgie demon - if they managed to summon anything at all.

“Fine,” Mickey said, “Fine, stop crying Al, you’re getting… fluids everywhere, I’ll help and you’ll get your candy once you lead me there.”

Al sniffed and batted his tear-soaked eyelashes, “You mean it, yes?”

“Sure,” Mickey said, standing up and lighting a cigarette, “Probably just a few dumbass kids, I’m not a detective anymore, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do my civic duty as an old person to rain on the younger generation’s parade, now does it?”

“Yes, you make Al happy with your old-rain, candy, yes? Candy, candy, candy, yes, yes, yes!”

Mickey paused as stepped outside. His trench coat had grown a bit tight in the past few months, but it was naturally loose-fit so it wasn’t too noticeable. That wasn’t what gave him pause though. What had given him pause was that for the first time in a long time he had stepped foot outside with the intent to do more than grab a food delivery. For the first time in a long time he walked downstairs and out into the world with a goal. A real tangible goal. Was it foolish? Yeah. Was he getting in over his head? Maybe. Could he have given Al a bag of candy and phoned in the APD? Absolutely.

Well, these were questions for another time he figured as he finished off his smoke and followed after the awkward pink gremlin.

 

[Anders Nazret]

The pair made their way through the myriad streets of Arcadia. Even at night the city never truly slept. They passed people on the streets going about their business and none of them turned a wayward glance to the washed-up detective and his bubblegum colored companion. For all his oddities Al wasn’t all that unusual when one considered where they were. Magic was everywhere. Even the street lamps had illumination charms on them instead of actual light bulbs. Wizards, witches, mages, and all other forms of spellcasters were the commonality and by extension all manner of wonderful and strange creatures. Some even went so far as to call the place The Melting Pot of the Crossroads and as Mickey shuffled past a passed out centaur laying in the middle of the sidewalk he found himself agreeing.

“This way, yes?” Al said and abruptly spiraled off into an alleyway.

Of course being a melting pot also meant that some less than desirable things found their way into Arcadia. Mickey smirked and followed after the gremlin. These things were the creatures of alleyways and dark crevices. Slimy festering things that lurked in sewers and clung to the very tips of dead roots that had sloughed off as the city grew. As a general rule most things were not inherently evil, but some were. Some were the twisted sorts of creatures that kept honest people up at night. Of course the trick was distinguishing true evil from the genuinely misunderstood. Al was a good example of that. The little gremlin had been some fledgling conjurer’s school project and came out less than half-baked. Mickey had picked him up after reports of some demon terrorizing a local candy shop. Despite appearances Al was no demon, he was just a hungry little creature with only a handful of brain cells to rub together. In other words, Al wasn’t evil. But what he led Mickey to most certainly was.

Mickey followed the gremlin into the deeper and more remote expanses of Arcadia until they found their way to a largely abandoned industrial district. He recognized the area. He remembered a time when it was a bustling sector of industry, but that was a long time ago. The area had once been the point of several arcane convergences and had been absolutely steeped in magical energies. Mana refineries had churned away at all hours of the night like esoteric oil derricks, but now they sat as sleeping leviathans filling the skyline with motionless shapes in the dead of night. What had happened was nothing special. Things change. Places change just like people. A celestial alignment that had acted almost like a magnifying glass had shifted and the locus of energies vanished practically overnight. All that remained were the empty skeletons of factories.

He had worked in one of those factories when he was a kid. His dad was the foreman and being a single father meant that the man couldn’t always afford daycare or afterschool activities so Mickey got to hang out in the factory. He loved it. The smell of raw mana ionizing the air as it was refined and bottled. The subtle vibration of the entire building as the loping arm of the mana extractor reached high into the sky and fell down in one smooth mechanical motion. It reminded him of simpler times. He had learned his first spell in that factory. It was a simple light cantrip, but one of the workers had taught it to him during the man’s lunch break. Looking back, learning that spell had been the catalyst for the trajectory his life had taken. He felt bad that he couldn’t remember the guy’s name.

Regardless Al led him into the heart of that metallic graveyard and they came to a stop outside an old warehouse. A soft red light emanated from inside, spilling out from the single row of high-mounted windows that surrounded the building. Even without his access to magic he could smell the telltale scent of it. It was hard a hard sort of scent to describe, but magic carried this sort of essence in the air and each spell had a different sort of flavor to it. It was a subtle thing, not something you’d notice unless you were paying attention to it. Mickey’s nose crinkled instinctively. Sulfur sprang to mind… and almonds. It was subtle, but it clung to the nostrils something fierce once it got in there.

“Here we are, deal complete, yes?” Al said, staring up at him, “You give candy now for Al, yes?”

“How many people did you see?” Mickey asked quietly.

“One, just one, yes?” Al said. The poor guy was practically vibrating with anticipation of his prize. He added quickly, “Yes, just one man, old man, older than you even. Now, candy, pleaseeee I am so hungryyyy.”

Mickey nodded and reached into his coat to produce a bag of malted milk balls. He held it out for the creature, and Al excitedly just up and grabbed it. His little hands tugged open the shiny piece of string keeping the bag held together. Milk balls rolled out onto the concrete and the creature happily scooped them up one-by-one and tossed them into his mouth. The noise of Al eating was always… sloppier than Mickey expected. He smiled and crouched down in front of the engorged gremlin and said, “Y’know Al, I’ve got a whole jar of those pecan caramel clusters at home, the ones you like so much?”

“Yes, yes, Al loves pecan and caramel, yes, yes, yes,” The gremlin said excitedly and in the next breath nearly deflated, “The deal has been paid. Oh no, no, no, I wasted it. Stupid, stupid, stupid, wasting deal secrets on milk balls and not premium clusters, no, no, noooooo.”

“Relax, Al, let’s make a new deal, yes?”

“New deal?”

Mickey nodded, “I don’t have my magic anymore so I’m going in a bit underprepared, you distract the summoner for me and you can have the entire jar.”

Al’s overly-detailed eyes practically wept with joy at the good news. His belly-mouth smiled and flashed his chocolate-stained chompers. He shook his body vigorously in agreement, “Yes, yes, this is a good deal Not-detective Mickey, very good deal. I’ll go distract him now, yes?”

Mickey nodded and watched as Al scampered away. He walked towards an access door and waited. He took a deep breath. His heart had started to go a million miles an hour. His throat was tight and he dropped his pack of smokes as he tried to fish one out. Why was he so nervous? It wasn’t like he had never kicked open a door and ambushed a potentially psychotic demonologist before. Well, he had never done so sans magic. His mind drifted back to the carnival with Jester and Molly. He had died. He had died real fuckin’ hard and it was only by the grace of Jester and her mysterious benefactor that he had returned to the land of the living.

That scared him. Death scared him. He didn’t remember being dead. He hardly remembered that night at all. He just remembered waking up in the wet grass with Jester and Molly standing over him looking all sorts of worried. He remembered feeling like he had the flu for the next month and he remembered coming home, hanging up his coat, and sinking into his apartment for the next several months. He had died that night, but did he really come back to life? Or had he just become a walking corpse?

“Hey over here, yes!?” Al shouted from inside the warehouse and blew a disgustingly wet raspberry, “Nasty demon, summoning man, look over here at me, yes!?”

Mickey cocked his head and flicked his cigarette off into the night. Those were thoughts best save for the bottom of a bottle. He grabbed the door’s handle and carefully turned it. The lock had rotted away a long time ago and the door opened. He took one last breath and slipped inside.

Mickey had seen his fair share of ritual circles and this one was no different. It was quite larger than he had expected, but it wasn’t the size that surprised him. No, it was the sheer intricacy of it. Scriptwork was a large part of magic and covered hundreds of different disciplines, but the general idea was that stronger and more powerful spells required more and more intricate scripting. The summoning circle had been drawn in chalk, but painstaking effort and time had been spent inscribing every last square inch of it with the sort of detail that would make a watchmaker weep. The entire circle vibrated with energy and hummed at the frequency of a dental drill. The red light that emanated from its center told Mickey that it was drawing on some real profane shit. Whatever was being summoned went far beyond the realm of wedgie demons, this was the big leagues.

Besides the circle was a man dressed in similarly red robes. Al’s distraction was working splendidly and the occultist had his back turned towards Mickey. Mickey took a moment to assess the situation and upon noticing no traps or other people he moved forward. Of course this didn’t mean that there was no danger. Without a sixth sense he could have been staring an arcane snare in the face and not even know it. Which he was. An invisible thread of energy snagged against his ankle and snapped as he strode forward. A similarly invisible klaxon sounded and screamed all around him - an alarm spell. The occultist whirled around and Mickey broke into a sprint.

He collided with the man and they both fell scrabbling to the ground. Arcane energy danced across the summoner’s fingertips, but Mickey’s police training reared its neglected head. He had never been one for brawling, but he had picked up a thing or two from Maldera. The man he was wrestling with easily appeared to be twenty years his senior and had little in the way of strength. Even as bolts of eldritch lightning arced from his fingers, past Mickey’s head, and into the air Mickey continued fighting. Before long he had managed to get on top of the occultist, pinning his hands to the ground and delivering a few solid socks to the jaw to take the piss and vinegar out of the would-be summoner.

With them both breathless, but Mickey in a decidedly superior position, the scuffle came to a close. The man was indeed an old man, bald and wrinkled. If it weren’t for the literal portal to hell behind them Mickey would’ve felt bad for busting the man’s nose. And, it was definently busted. Blood poured out from the man’s now-crooked nostrils and collected in a pool below them. He had drawn a series of intricate whirls and sigils on his face in black greasepaint that seemed to repel the blood even as it gushed out. His eyes crackled with devilish energy and a sneer crept across his face.

“Professor Maloit?” Mickey blurted out as he came to recognize the broken face beneath him.

“Ah, Detective Anders,” The man sputtered, “It figures you’d be the one to stumble across me, you’ve always had a knack for sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

The man that Mickey had clobbered had been one of his many teachers in college. Not just any teacher, he had been one of his favorites. Professor Maloit was a well-respected researcher that had revolutionized several fields of magic in the past few decades. He was not the kind of person one would expect slinking around in abandoned warehouses summoning demons, but that would explain the sheer craftsmanship of his work. In fact, Mickey was sure that the only reason he was still alive was because the professor had spent most of his energy activating the circle in the first place and was now running on fumes.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Mickey glanced over at the still-active circle, “... Tell me why.”

The professor laughed. Blood splattered onto Mickey’s jacket and face, but the professor kept laughing.

“Can’t you feel it, Detective?” He asked, still chuckling, “The veil between worlds has become razor-thin. The unseen skein has become frayed and unraveled, do you not hear them? Do you not feel them!?”

Mickey narrowed his eyes. Was he possessed? Was he just mad? Without magic Mickey had no way to tell if the professor was being glamoured in some way. It didn’t matter. Whatever was going on was far from anything that could be fixed with a quick wave of the magic wand. Mickey shook his head, “No, I don’t feel them… Professor Maloit, stop the ritual and we’ll get you some help. This doesn’t have to get any worse than it already is.”

“Stop it?” He laughed again, “Detective, do you think me some amateur? This ritual can’t be stopped any more than an erupting volcano can be stopped. I’m not the one powering it.”

“What?”

“Everyone abandoned this place when the locus realigned, but not me, Mickey, not me,” He explained through a bloody smile, “The realignment was never permanent… can you not feel the arcane energies in the air? Can you not feel them in your lungs with every breath? It shifted back, just for tonight, but I only needed one night. Without all that damned machinery there is so much mana here it is intoxicating. And, the best part? I have it all to myself.”

The realization stunned Mickey. It would have been obvious if he hadn’t been blind to the energies flowing around them. Such a complex circle would have been near impossible for a single person to power. Professor Maloit hadn’t gassed himself powering the circle, he had gassed himself merely trying to control it. Mickey looked at the circle again. The red light had coalesced into a crackling sphere of energy. Raw magic so utterly concentrated that it became visible to the naked eye. The professor had managed to draw in the locus’s power and was using that primordial and boundless source of energy for his ritual. Whatever needed that amount of energy to come through would be a walking catastrophe. He looked for Al, but the little gremlin must have scurried off while they were fighting.

“How do we stop it?” Mickey demanded, grabbing the professor’s lapels and wrenching him up off the ground.

“Detective, are you going deaf in your old age?” Maloit sneered, “It. Can’t. Be. Stopped. You’re dealing with energy that even the most adroit of Arcadian mages could only dream of.”

“There has to be a way…” Mickey muttered, “Why would you do this, damnit!?”

He laughed, “There exists powers far greater than anything you can comprehend, and they beckoned me. They called on me and I answered. How could I not? Answer me that, how could I not answer them?! And all they wanted was for me to open the door to pandamonium. And you know what? That door is unbarred, unguarded, and unlocked. All that’s left is for me to turn the handle and let them in.”

“As if I’d let you.”

“You have no choice,” The professor answered and in the same breath chomped down on his tongue. Blood sprayed over Mickey’s chest and face as the lunatic sawed through his own tongue. He cackled madly as his life drained away.

“You bastard!” Mickey shouted.

Before he could act the circle behind him surged, spurred to great heights of chaos by the professor’s blood tithe. Beneath him the professor fell limp as blood continued to leak from his mouth. Mickey had seen that sort of wound more times than he’d care to admit, the bastard would be dead within minutes. The ex-detective stood up and looked towards the circle. Judging by its reaction it needed a final offering of life to truly become active. Mickey swore under his breath and glanced towards the door. How many people could he warn? How far could he get before whatever came through leveled the city block?

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” He muttered, “Okay Mickey, if you’re ever going to get your magic back now’s the time for it to happen.”
He stepped forward. He stepped beyond the circle’s threshold and entered it. It was a stupid decision even if he did have his magic. It was a monumentally stupid decision without it. The warehouse vanished. His body vanished. His mind was scattered to the wind like a pile of ash. Within the raging torrent of unrestrained magic he was swept up and away. Yet, he was still there. In a matter of half seconds he experience eternity several times over. He saw churning shapes and shapeless galaxies. He saw the impossible. He saw the inconceivable. He saw many things and felt many things and yet none of it was real. None of it had any basis in the reality that he had come to know. It was like transporting a deep-sea fish to the top of a mountain. The creature would simply have no frame of reference. It wouldn’t be able to even comprehend that such a place existed and it would die.

And yet?

And yet the washed-up detective didn’t die. He was familiar with this place. It was like returning to a childhood home that had been burned down and rebuilt. It was familiar yet it was not the same, but it was that familiarity that allowed him to hang on. He allowed himself to be twisted away and in doing so he became a part of the greater whole. It was chaos, yes, but the chaos itself had one defining rule - there were no rules. This was its weakness. This was what he had learned all those decades ago when he was first taught magic. He remembered the worker and even though he didn’t remember the man’s name he remembered his words, “Magic has no rules kid, it’s not something like gravity where you can get the same thing every time. It doesn’t work like that. No, when it comes to magic all you can do is put out your hand and let it do what it wants, if it wants to give you light it will… it will.”

So he let the magic do its thing. He let it give him light. He allowed himself to become nothing more than an empty pitcher to be filled with whatever liquid it decided, and in doing so he became a part of it. He could feel what it was trying to pull through. He could feel that fathomless creature so utterly alien as to be indescribable. He couldn’t stop it, but he could redirect it. He could shift the alignment ever so slightly. He had given up on making it through alive. If he had to give his body, then so be it. He allowed the magic to flow through and out from him and it obeyed dutifully.

Then it was over. The eternity collapsed and the warehosue returned. He fell to his knees gasping and clutching his body. The scent of the professor’s blood had mixed with the sulfuric stink of the ritual. He shuddered and looked up. Just what had come through? What kind of abominable creature had been summoned? Had he done enough? Had he bought enough time?

 

[Klarion]

Just as Mickey breathed in what he thought may very well be his last breath, he was so very exhausted and his heart was hammering so wildly inside his chest, a sound began echoing from the center of the immense, devil red summoning circle. It was a great and terrible sound—the creak and rumble of dimensions tearing apart, a guttural noise that dug its claws into your very soul like the sound of a mother’s wailing or the crack of a gunshot.

And then… then, there was an abrupt, anti-climatic 'pop!'

The rush of crackling arcane energy that had poured through Mickey felt suddenly distant, as if he was swimming underwater, hearing the muffled chaos of a storm brewing above—his ears ringing, trickling thin streams of blood, and his breath coming in harsh, ragged pants of exertion. As the magic calmed, he choked back a groan, his eyes sweeping across the now calm warehouse, vacated of its once turbulent tempest.

He was alive, sure—but what had he brought forth?

Just like that, the room was eerily quiet, save for the sputtering gurgle of the dying Professor Maloit. Then, tickling at the edge of Mickey’s senses, a peculiar scent filled his nostrils, overlaying the almond-y rotten egg odor coating the warehouse—reminiscent of sugary marshmallow fluff, chocolate cherry cordials and bubblegum. It was a familiar smell… but not in a comforting or even nostalgic way. No, not at all. It was laced with… the acrid tang of chaos magic, the sickly sweetness of a successful summoning. The powerful scent swelled and frothed outward, filling the warehouse, bleeding into the leftover sulfuric pungency from the ritual circle's intricate chalkwork.

At the very center of the circle, a tendril of reddish-tinged smoke began to materialize. It spewed forth, prodding irritatedly at the outskirts of the locus of arcane power, like a sullen teenager forced to leave their room.

"Ugh, what the hell is this place?" a voice whined from the smoky mass, petulant and strikingly boyish, not to mention about as nasal as an elephant with a botched rhinoplasty. It was filled with the arrogance of one who knew they could wreak havoc and get away with it, like a rich kid in a candy store. "I was in the middle of something, y'know? Not like summoning me across realms is any small matter, either..."

From the billowing puff of acrid, candy-scented smoke emerged a lanky figure with an angular face—then limbs, stick-thin and spindly, a mop-top of black hair shaped into devil-horn silhouettes arcing above his ears. The figure’s sharp eyebrows raised in distaste as their beady red eyes, brimming with impish hostility and lined with black, swept about and scanned their surroundings.

This… this was no demon.

In place of the great and terrible walking catastrophe that should have torn through the veil between dimensions and flattened buildings like tissue paper, a seemingly harmless adolescent had appeared. His skin was pale and tinted faintly blue, almost glowing in the dim light of the warehouse, and he wore an ensemble that looked like it was pulled from a vintage store's Halloween clearance rack—a strange mix of formal and theatrical, antiquated and occult.

"Dang it! Would you just look at this dump?" the boy-shaped creature grumbled. His crimson eyes breezily scanned the disordered scene, careless and profoundly annoyed—the summoning circle glowing with a harsh, unnatural light, the occultist bleeding out on the floor, and a terrified Mickey on his knees. The creature let out a loud sigh, his expression twisted into a frown. He cocked one foot to the side, leaning on it as he folded his arms over his chest. "Can't a Lord of Chaos catch a break in his second favorite dimension without stepping into some third-rate summoner's botched ritual?"

Mickey, admittedly, was still trying to catch his breath. That was alright, though, because the professor emitted another dying gargle just then—immediately snatching the creature’s dire attention, his glaring red eyes lighting up with disgusted intrigue.

"And what is this?" the kid demaded, his gaze falling upon the bloody mess that was Professor Maloit. His mouth curved into a reluctantly amused grimace, like a toddler finding a particularly funny bug squashed on the sole of their shoe. "Casting a spell and dying? Just like that? That's just rude. I mean, c'mon, I love a good mess as much as the next... me, but I’m not one for cleaning up!"

His cat-like gaze shifted from the dying professor to Mickey, the not-detective staring back at him in… well, in disbelief. Despite the gravity of the situation, the creature's presence seemed to drain away the mind-bending terror of just moments ago and replace it with a ridiculous absurdity. Like a fart at a funeral, or something else equally unexpected.

"You," the creature accused, his voice cutting through the chilling silence of the warehouse, that single damning word seeming to suck all air from the room. The bubblegum pink light that flooded the dusty, dreary space only served to emphasize the dramatic, petulant pout on his sharp teenage features, his arm lifting to jab one long, black-painted fingernail in Mickey’s direction. Tilting his head back so he could look down his nose at the other more comfortably, he sneered, "Are you the jerk that woke me up from my nap?! Ancient summoning rituals are so… soooo passé! I was getting some beauty sleep, for cat's sake! I was halfway into planning my next attack on a stupid, crispy, washed-up dream eater. It was the bee's knees! And you ruined it, ruined it, RUINED it!”

He stomped his foot, whiny voice swelling with power and causing a tiny tremor in the ground, layering his annoyance with a hint of unpredictable, chaotic magic—enough to send a jarring crack rippling across the floor. His eyes glowed a vibrant, angry red, the color of blood and battle and rage, a stark contrast to the pink aura still flickering around the warehouse, centered around his spindly form.

“Why am I here? And where—“ he seethed, his hands curling into fists, long fingernails biting crescents into his palms until they bled. “Where is my Teekl?! What have you done with her? If I find one little whisker out of place, you half-bit mage maggot, I’m feeding all your soft bits to the nearest—“

“—meow,” came an abrupt mew, originating from somewhere that was vaguely floor-adjacent.

Glancing down at the same time Mickey did, the blue-skinned kid’s face, once contorted with fury, abruptly smoothed out upon catching sight of an orange-furred cat sitting primly beside the professor’s leaky carcass. The cat’s tail curled around her legs as she sat on her haunches, her sharp feline teeth latched around the remnants of Maloit’s bitten-off tongue.

Her crimson eyes, matching that of her master, glittered—clearly pleased with her catch.

“Oh,” said the creature-kid, and promptly stepped out of the summoning circle. Or at least, he tried to.

Sauntering forward, his jacket swishing about his long, slender legs, he drew to a sudden and uncomfortable halt mid-step—and then wiggled his fingers, studying the intricate spellwork under his glistening dress shoes. The harsh red light curled around his fingers like inquisitive snakes, but the Witch Boy simply swatted them away as they tried to latch onto him, to bind him, an irritated expression on his face.

Yet try as he might, he couldn’t step out of the circle completely. Not yet, in any case. There were rules to that.

His demonic cat, Teekl he’d called her, immediately dashed forward to pounce up onto his shoulder—disregarding any such rules, as cats are wont to do. Perch thus secured, she yawned lazily, her ruby eyes flicking to Mickey in evident curiosity.

Following her pointed gaze, the kid wrinkled his nose dramatically.

“No! No, I’m not talking to him anymore,” he mumbled as if Mickey wasn’t even there, picking up a shattered vial filled with a weird brackish substance. Briefly examining its contents with disdain, he let it slip from his fingers, the glass shattering further upon the concrete floor. "I refuse, Teekl. Smells like failure and desperation. A hint of sweaty fear, yuck. No way.”

“Mrrr,” argued the cat, inexplicably. “Mrrow?”

The kid bared his sharp teeth, shoulders hitching up practically to his ears as if to throw his familiar off—to which she merely crawled atop his head like an ushanka, yowling spiritedly. “I don’t care if he’s clearly got magical knowledge, you ridiculous feline! Can’t you sense how puny his arcane essence is? It’s like a candle with the wick cut, there’s nothing there—“

His cat batted at his forehead with one soft paw, hissing.

“I said no!” snapped the kid, flicking his familiar’s paws out of his face. “He looks boring, and old! Don’t you tell me what to do!”

That was about it for Mickey, really.

“Listen,” he said, shakily heaving himself up from the floor, lifting his hands as if in surrender. “I’m not too thrilled about this, either. But can we keep the childish insults to a minimum? I don’t even know what you are.”

Sniffing haughtily, the kid turned to face him, his eyes finally dimming from their angry crimson to a way more eerie, yet markedly more mundane black.

“My name,” he declared grandly, tapping one claw-tipped finger to his scrawny chest. “Is Klarion the Witch Boy—“

“Mow,” said the cat.

“—And that is Teekl the Cat, yesIwasgettingtothat,” Klarion added in a reluctant hiss, scowling up at her where she perched atop his head, going hilariously cross-eyed in the process. Then, his beady pupils swiveled back down to fixate on Mickey. “Anyway, I don’t care who you are. Not unless you start being a good mortal and release me from this circle! Right now, post-haste, immediately. We’re gonna have a big problem, otherwise.”