Chapter 12 Melodia

“Okay can we also get a bacon cheeseburger with mushrooms and barbecue sauce with all the Cajun fries you’ll give her,” he pointed at me as I felt a chuckle leave my mouth.

I got away from Arturo as quickly as I could. All I needed to tell him was that I needed to use the bathroom and he was more than happy to let me go. I even managed to convince him to go on ahead in case the line was long. I found an empty hallway and opened my bag just enough to talk to Pickati.

“So where is it?” I asked as he emerged and took a deep breath. Once he was done, he sunk back in.

“I have good news and bad news,” he whispered from the bag, “good news, it’s close by. Bad news, it’s somewhere above us.”

And since Legion Arcade was the tallest part of the mall, and I wasn’t hearing any panic from the third floor, there was only one place it could be. So now the only question was, how I was going to get to the roof without getting spotted?

“We should start heading up,” I told Pickati as he got back into the bag and climbed up to the third floor. From there it didn’t take too long to walk past the fighting game players and find another empty hallway, this one with a door leading up to the roof. But now I had two new problems to deal with.

The door had a heavy looking lock on it, and right in front of it was a camera recording anything and everything in front of the door.

“Leave this one to me,” I heard from my bag. I opened it up and let Pickati out. He flew his way up to the camera, making sure to stay out of sight of it. He touched it with one of his paws and I heard a clicking sound from inside. The little light turned off and then he headed to the door. He did the same with the lock and a few seconds later, the door swung open.

“We’re in,” he said as we both started heading up the stairs.

“How did you do that?” I asked as I muttered under my breath. “Power of the stars, guide me through the deepest wells,” I transformed in the void and kept running upwards.

“A simple spell to make some of the inner parts of it heavier. For the camera, I made the parts heavier to disconnect some wires. For the door, I used gravity to shift the mechanism inside.”

“Are you going to teach me that?” Pickati gave me a flat look as we reached the top of the stairs and walked out onto the rooftop. We split up and started searching for the vortex.

“So do you want to talk about it?” I heard him say from the other side of the roof. I glanced over and saw him looking right at me.

“Talk about what?” Like I didn’t know what he was talking about. But maybe if I did my best to feign ignorance, he would let it go?

“You know full well what I’m talking about,” he narrowed his eyes. “That little scene downstairs. To tell you the truth I’ve been getting a bit worried about you. I know you and Anna don’t talk to each other, but you barely interact with each other after the dolls fights.”

“We can talk about this after the doll fight,” I quickly said before turning around and going back to looking for the vortex. With any luck, Pickati would forget all about his worries by the time we were done.

In the end, we didn’t find it anywhere. We had both looked around the whole roof and didn’t find a single bit of black sludge. We had looked under all the pipes and by every vent and fan and still nothing. And there were a lot of those all over the place. I always thought roofs were relatively flat, but this place was so crowded I needed to keep my eye out so I wouldn’t trip on anything.

With no other option, we had to sit with our backs to the door and wait for the doll to emerge. With any luck we’d spot it right away. At least all this extra time meant Pickati had probably forgotten about asking me about my troubles. Especially since he had gone off to start casting the spell to keep people away. I took the time to cast Internal Stabilization on myself in case I needed it.

I had barely sat down for three minutes when I heard a bird scream from behind me. I turned to see the biggest bird I had ever seen standing on top of the little stairway leading up the roof.

So I guess there had been one part of the roof we hadn’t checked after all. The doll stood up and I got a better look at it. It had a feathered body, with long thin arms ending in red claws. It had four bird wings on its back and instead of a beak it had the face of a crazed plushie. The doll’s button eyes scanned the rooftop before locking onto me.

It let out another screech as it spread out its wing and took flight. It was flying way too high for me to either punch or hit with a Gravity Crush, so I was going to need to think of something else. Maybe I could try jumping up to it? Getting into the air with it felt risky though.

My planning had to stop as the doll suddenly dove right at me. I ducked and rolled under a pipe as the doll’s claws sliced through it. Hissing steam filled the air as I got back to my feet and the doll started turning around for another shot at me.

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As it came, I eyed another pipe between me and the doll. The pipes were pretty big and heavy, they could probably take my weight. If I could time it just right… Now!

I ran forward, stepping onto the pipe and jumping right at the doll. I spun forward, ready to bring my heel down on its head. My foot swung down and hit… nothing.

I faced forward again as the doll flew past me, missing me completely. I brought my other foot down and landed on my feet before trying to find the doll again. I could see it from here, flapping in place at the other side of the building. It was putting its claws behind its back, but it was still flying towards me. How was it planning to hit me?

And as if to answer my question, the doll screamed as a third pair of wings erupted from its back, larger than the other two. Instead of helping it fly, the wings adjusted themselves so the flat part was directed right at me.

And then the feathers came.

My eyes widened before I rolled out of the way and behind the stairwell. If I was going to find out what they did, it wasn’t going to be from them hitting me. I took cover and watched from behind the corner.

I gulped as the feathers brought chaos down onto the roof. Thin looking things like the smaller vents and pipes got sliced apart, while larger objects ended up with a whole bunch of feathers sticking out of them. I didn’t know which one I would count as, and I didn’t want to find out.

I watched the doll fly past my hiding place again and start to loop back for another run at me. With those feathers, running at it was out of the question, but I still needed a way to take it down. I glanced around and spotted some of the sharper looking pipes the doll had sliced apart. There were a whole bunch of them scattered around everywhere.

“That’ll do,” I rolled out of my hiding place and grabbed a pipe piece. I reached into my magic and called for a bit of it.

[Gravity.

Object in hand.

Negate gravity.]

I took aim with the now weightless pipe, and let it loose at the doll with all the strength I had. Throwing objects with no gravity felt weird. They no longer had any weight, but they still had mass. It was a weird sensation I couldn’t describe with words. But getting hit right in the chest with the sharp end of it was probably an even weirder sensation.

Just guessing on that one, but I could ask the doll with the pipe sticking out of it if I really wanted to know. I grabbed more pipes and repeated the process over and over again. The doll swerved from side to side, avoiding a few of the pipes, but nowhere near all of them. By the time it flew over me, it had a whole bunch of metal and plastic pipes sticking out of it and was leaking black goo everywhere.

It got all the way to the other end of the roof before turning back around for another run at me. But unlike the last few times, it was a lot slower. Maybe it was all the extra weight from the pipes, or maybe it was the big holes I had managed to poke into its wings. Maybe it was a mix of the two.

Either way, the result was the same. I had an opening to take the doll down. And I was pretty sure I had a plan to do it.

I reached for some more magic and cast a quick spell on myself.

[Gravity.

Self.

Negate gravity.]

I felt myself go weightless as I jumped up and grabbed the top of the stairwell. I got on top of it and dropped the spell as the doll came flying towards me.

I had noticed it before during the first run. The doll couldn’t really aim its wings very much. It had to start firing and then fly towards me. And with it already aimed downwards, it would have to get real close to me to hit me with them.

I waited on top of the stairwell as the doll started shooting its feathers again. I stood still and started preparing a spell as the doll got closer and closer. My eyes glanced down to one particular spot on the roof between the two of us.

[Gravity

That spot on the ground.

Circle with a circumference of three feet.

Increase gravity by two times.]

The monster screamed as it suddenly fell to the ground. It smashed into a bunch of pipes, hurting it even more. Before it could do a thing, I jumped off the stairwell and into the increased gravity zone.

I landed right on the doll’s back, pushing it down even more into the debris. No way was it getting away from me like this. I aimed my finger down at its head and said two simple words.

“Gravity Crush!” The little black ball appeared and sucked in its entire head and upper body. I jumped off the doll’s body as it started to dissolve. I landed right in front of the stairwell, one of the few places not wrecked in the fight. I changed back into my normal clothing and waited for Pickati to come back to me.

“I’m back,” he called as came flying back. “I was actually able to get a pretty good look at your fight this time around. You did well. Even managed to use all three of the spells I taught you.”

“Thanks,” I opened my bag for him to fly into so I could start heading downstairs again. Arturo was probably going to start worrying soon. Plus all this magic had left me hungry enough for a nice big burger. “How’s the seal doing?”

Just because Pickati told me that as long as the building was still standing we were fine didn’t mean I wasn’t worried. The doll and I had trashed this place pretty badly during our fight.

“Barely affected and already recovering,” he explained as I opened the door to start heading back downstairs. “So you can stop worrying about the seal and start worrying about the conversation we said we were going to have before the doll fight.”

And here I was hoping he’d forget about it. I held back a groan as I tried to think of an excuse to give to Pickati so I could at least hold this off for another day or two.

“Well…” I got cut off as I felt my stomach rumble. With the look Pickati was giving me, it must have been loud enough for him to hear too. “Maybe we can talk about this after I find some food?” I suggested, my cheeks burning up.

“Acceptable,” he frowned before sinking into the deepest parts of my bag, “but I’m going to hold you to that.”

Well that was something I was going to have to worry about later. I walked down the stairs to find the whole arcade weirdly quiet. For some reason, everyone was splitting their attention between the games and the ceiling…

Oh, I must have made a lot of noise during the fight. It must have freaked some people out, even with Pickati making sure no one actually came up to check it out. Better to keep my head down and meet back up with Arturo.

I found him at the counter of the Five Dudes two doors down. He asked me where I‘d been, but all I had to say was there’d been a line for the bathroom and I was home free.

“Okay, so you want me to get you your usual order? I forgot to ask you when I left earlier,” I nodded my head as he walked up to the counter. He quickly got the server’s attention. “Hey that order I gave earlier, can I add something on to it?”

“Sure thing,” she answered as she started hitting buttons on her machine.

“Okay can we also get a bacon cheeseburger with mushrooms and barbeque sauce with all the Cajun fries you’ll give her,” he pointed at me as I felt a chuckle leave my mouth.