The short man was... kind of underwhelming. He actually leapt directly off of where he was standing, right into the pit we were looking up at him from. He swept his staff under him just before he jumped, and he wound up travelling way further into the air than was humanly possible. Not as high up as Super Semicolon- but pretty close. Once he reached the highest point of his ascension, he pointed his staff at us and various beams of light streaked out of the gem at the tip of it. Some streaks were blue, some were green, some were red- and every single one of them hit me. But upon hitting my armor, the beams of light dissipated and didn't really have much of an effect. Instead, my armor just shimmered in various colors each time a beam hit me, in each place that I was shot.

But this didn't stop the short man. He kept firing in mid-air; all the way up until he hit the ground, about 3 feet away from me. I couldn't help being surprised by his accuracy... but I didn't really want to drag this out longer than I needed to. He raised his staff, and I just grabbed the gem at the tip of it. Summoning my enhanced strength, I squeezed the gem- crushing into a fine powder with very little effort. As I crushed it however, the man was charging up some kind of spell- the gem had been pulsing various colors and he was murmuring under his breath, even as he tried in vain to wrestle the staff away from me.

The spell fired, splitting into multiple little beams of energy that went off in different directions as soon as the gemstone cracked. I assumed the gem was some kind of catalyst, and when I broke it as it was channeling all that power, the energy released and went everywhere.

Then, two things happened at once.

First, a loud "YAAARGHHH" resounded through the room. Not from the man in front of me- but from somewhere in the bleachers.

And next, a random laser beam hit the short man in the eye. The man then clutched his eye, and crumpled to the floor in pain. "OWWW, how could you... What was that? Ughh.." He stayed like that for a while.

I turned to look in the direction the other scream had come from, and saw the Old Man with the Ray Gun- evidently, he'd been in the audience, and probably opted to see what was going to happen when he noticed that I was in here too.

"BLAST IT! Gary's Friend, how... how could you?" he yelled, clutching his arm in pain.

"Oh, sorry about that. I didn't even know you were there... and, well, there was no way I could have known that would hit you." I shouted up at him, not feeling particularly apologetic.

"Hit me? I didn't get hit, you absolute fool. My... my poor ray gun..." I couldn't really see from where I was standing, since the Old Man was much higher than me; but he was pointing at the ground in front of him.

That's when it became clear where the laser beam had come from. But I was still confused as to why he was clutching his arm.

"Why are you... holding your arm like that, if I didn't hit you?" I shouted at him.

"SILENCE! If you must know... I was wandering around those stalls, and someone claimed that they could give me a 'wild tattoo' to bring out my 'latent power'," He sniffled.

"I always thought the Ray Gun was all the power I'd ever need.. but, then I thought, who wouldn't want just a little more power? And then the sick buffoon pulled out a little stick and burned my arm." He answered, and I could swear I saw the light reflect off of a little tear in his eye, but that could have just been my imagination. He began to make his way down to me and Tipsy, slowly.

"Right.. sorry to hear that. But we have to get out of here, let's quietly go meet back up with Deborah. Maybe we can get her to go to the Elder's Hut for us, since she brought us here in the first place."

I expected the Old Man to interrupt with "SILENCE!" again, but I guess he was in too much pain to do so. I couldn't help feeling kind of sorry for him. After he reached me, we slowly made our way outside.

Tipsy smiled at the Old Man, and I think I saw him blush a little. "Thank you for saving me, sir. I will make sure to repay you in any way I can. That ray gun of yours really was impressive, maybe I could take a look at it sometime?" She said. I'm pretty sure she was just being nice, but the Old Man looked like he was in heaven or something- which is saying a lot, considering how pale and sweaty he also looked, presumably from the pain in his arm.

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"O..O-Oh, Ri.. Y- Yes, Yes. I.. would love t-.. that is to say, I think that is a- well, a splendid idea.." he stammered out, his face redder than a cherry tomato.

We made our way outside, exiting through the back door. I noticed that the scary security guard from before was no longer here, which was strange. I would never have thought that short man with the staff could intimidate him that much. Tipsy turned her bright and flashy suit inside out- revealing that it doubled as a dark cloak with a hood, which she pulled over her head.

"Let's go." She said quietly, and that's just what we did. We made our way back around the tent, and headed down the row of stalls from earlier. Many of the vendors were closing up, and the ticket salesman from earlier actually noticed the three of us. He raised an eyebrow, and gave me the stink eye- but otherwise didn't really make much of a fuss, which I was grateful for. The last thing I wanted was to draw attention to the three of us, when we were apparently taking this town's most famous celebrity away from it.

We passed a stall where a man was running a wooden stick down a woman's arm. She just read a book silently as he did this, which I found to be quite odd.. since the end of the stick was emitting some kind of orange glow. It was leaving an odd burn mark on her arm, and I realized that was the stall the Old Man had complained about.

He actually stopped in front of the stall, and just looked at it- his expression gradually became angrier, and his face was turning red again. His hands were at his sides, balling up into fists- and I finally got a good look at his "tattoo". It was of a bird, like a phoenix.. which was pretty fitting I guess, considering he was related to Gary.

"Hey.. calm down... We can't afford t-" I murmured at him, as silently as possible.

But unfortunately, a shout then rang out- reverberating throughout the town, and drawing everyone's attention to us.

"SILEEENCEEEEE!" The Old Man with the Broken Ray Gun shouted, seemingly out of habit because he immediately clasped a hand over his mouth. When he did that, the tattoo that was burned on his arm actually lit aflame, before fizzling out almost instantly.. which was definitely strange.

Unfortunately, we'd been facing the stalls. Me, The Old Man, and Tipsy. And every single vendor looked at us- the vendors who aggressively marketed everything about Tipsy, to sell their products. Dozens of men and women looked at us- and nearly simultaneously, a look of recognition spread across each of their faces.

"HEY! THEY'RE TAKING TIPSY!" Someone shouted, and immediately, every single person in town pulled out a little stick.

I realized, every single person in this town was a wizard of some sort. And clearly, they recognized us as outsiders- and did not for one second question why Tipsy was with us.

"Sorry about this, guys... I guess we'll have to fight our way out." Tipsy said with a sigh.

I reached out to my right, and willed my spear into my hand. "Don't worry about it. Let's just get this over with."

The battle was intense. Little bursts of light zigged and zagged all around us, most of them dissipated upon hitting my armor but some of them still stung a little. I swung my spear like a maniac, landing horizontal slashes against all the people in my immediate vicinity. One brave wizard attempted to hit me with a flurry of spells- I hit them with the butt of my spear, knocking them to the ground. I was trying not to wound anybody too badly, as these were just townsfolk- but they were making it kind of hard.

Tipsy was.. kind of insane. She pulled out a big bottle of.. wine? I'm not really sure, but she downed the whole bottle and suddenly became crazy strong. These black veins appeared all over her arms, and she generated these huge shockwaves just by punching the air- they sent some people flying, and others fleeing at the sight. Most of the magical bolts didn't seem to affect her, which was a relief to me; I was spending a lot of my focus on protecting the Old Man.

I had to protect the Old Man very aggressively, since he had no way of defending himself. He just sat in between me and Tipsy, with his hands over his head in the fetal position. The good news was that getting used to using my "Universal Awareness" more seamlessly- I found myself being able to sense exactly where the next bolt of magical energy would hit us. Eventually, we'd dispatched of most of the townsfolk that had been attacking us- I assumed there were more, but many had fled upon realizing that they couldn't really damage us.

But that's when real trouble found us.

A massive troop of heavily armored people marched toward us, led by someone wearing significantly less armor. It was a woman wearing a black cloak, and a giant staff strapped to her back.

"Alright guys, a little birdy told me that our spells don't work on the purple guy... and I'll bet it's because of all the armor he's wearin'. Let me just take care of that right quick, and we can save our Tipsy from this intruder."

I couldn't help scoffing a little. So far, no energy had really worked on my armor- unless it was concussive in nature, and even then the armor usually took most of the brunt of whatever hit me. So I was a little curious to see what exactly this person could do to get past my seemingly impenetrable defense.

But they began chanting something, and immediately, Tipsy spoke up with a tone of strong urgency.

"Don't let her hit you."

I didn't have much time to gauge what that meant, because that's when this bright purple beam streaked out of the tip of her wand- and when it came into contact with my armor, I definitely felt... weird. I felt all tingly, and the armor seemed to be attempting to block the attack, since it shimmered in response to being hit.

But then, slowly, that one little piece of armor began to crack, and slowly crumble away. They'd found a way to break my armor... and this was about to get dicey.