As Joy, Lillian, and Theo were walking back to the prince’s abode, it started raining. Earlier that day, Joy had decided that an umbrella would be too over the top and had decided to leave his back at the castle. Which he was regretting as the water started chilling him to the bone.

“Can’t the king’s weather-gifted just poof away all the bad weather.” Joy grumbled through his chattering teeth.

“You know they can’t Joy. It would have unknowable consequences.” Lillian muttered back while trying to keep her rat dry by shielding it with her own body.

“But isn’t that exactly what they do for big parties for the king?” Theo said, without any chattering teeth. He had repurposed the treasure chest full of gold and was using it to protect himself from the rain.

“Yeah, and these are the untold consequences of that.”

“Well then they aren’t exactly untold consequences are they.” Joy bickered with a grin.

“Shut up.” The other two said in unison.

Robin Red didn’t know how he had been cheated by that man, but he was seething. No one got away with swindling him. And so, a plan for revenge came to him. It was ham-fisted and stupid, but who needed to be intelligent when you had overwhelming power and luck.

Robin certainly had luck in droves tonight, as he had been following the swindler and his two guards, it had started to rain. If any of Joy’s group had bothered to look behind them, they would have seen a truly horrifying scene. Hands reached out of the puddles on the ground and pulled out doppelgangers of Robin. Soon a mass of thirty or so copies were sloshing down the street, preparing to attack Joy, Theo, and Lillian. Robin just chuckled as he hid in a nearby back alley as his little army crept towards them.

Lillian was the first to notice Robin’s copies, unfortunately she only noticed them after one of them had latched onto her back and tried to force one of its watery arms down her throat.

She scrambled to turn and face the creature. She ineffectually kicked its legs and grasped at its arm. But she found that she just passed through the water, barely causing a ripple in the surface. Thankfully she had gotten a more useful power for once, and aimed her rat at the water copy.

As Lillian yanked the tail, the rat let out a piercing wail then released a gout of fire that turned the clone into steam. Lillian took a deep breath after being freed from the water copy’s grip, then aimed the rat again, ready to open fire.

Theo heard more than saw Lillian getting attacked, because he had a couple copies of his own to deal with. A group of three were charging him, so he glared at each of them in turn. Forcing chunks of ice to form in their bodies.

This turned out to be a bad choice for Theo, since the copies could still move, and the ice made their watered-down slaps turn into deadly strikes. Theo found this out the hard way, when one of the copies struck him in the gut and he dropped the treasure chest he had been using to shield himself from the rain. It clattered to the ground spilling Joy’s fortune and the ring onto the cobbled stone.

Theo had trained for many years to keep his eyes open through intense pain though. The weakness of his gift was that he needed to directly see what he wanted to freeze. So, Theo’s eyes bulged, but didn’t close.

He darted back a few paces, keeping intense eye-contact with the copy that had struck him. After a few seconds of staring, there was too much ice content in the copy for Robin’s liquid-based gift to continue animating it, and the copy collapsed.

While Theo was gazing into that enemy, the other two copies started closing in. Theo knew that it took too long for him to freeze a copy and the group would be overrun in seconds once the bulk of the copies arrived. That was when Theo heard Joy ask in a raspy voice, “do you want to play a game?”

Joy was not as well-equipped as his two guards to face off against these water copies. So, when one of them burbled over and started shoving water down his throat, Joy had given up and assumed that this was the end for him. His punches couldn’t stem the tide of this watery visage, nor could he dam them. These and many more water-based puns swam through Joy’s head as his lungs filled with water.

When the water copy had been evaporated by the rat Lillian had been carrying this whole day, Joy just assumed it was his air-starved brain hallucinating one last thing before he died. When Lillian stomped on his chest to force the water out of his lungs, he realized the pain was too real to be a hallucination. Then he proceeded to barf out his lunch, dinner, and an unreasonable amount of rainwater.

Once Joy could breathe again, he stood up and got into his pose. Thankfully, Lillian had been standing nearby, letting her rat incinerate any copy that got too close to Joy. It was a scary sight, her face occasionally getting lit by the fire coming from her rat’s throat.

Then Joy clapped his hands and said weakly, “do you want to play a game?”

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Joy, Theo, Lillian, and Robin then heard a voice in their head. The voice proclaimed in a far too dignified voice, “freeze-tag. Do any of you need the rules explained to you?”

Joy replied, “No, but thank you.” Then he started running at the water copies.

As he ran Lillian and Theo both began to shout, “Get back here Joy.”

But instead of properly explaining to them anything about what was going on, he just looked back, winked, and shouted, “don’t let any of the copies touch you. Now let’s have some fun!”

Robin was a little frightened at first when he heard the voice in his head. He thought that the group had found him in his little hiding spot. He could control each of his clones individually, but for fighting he left them on a kind of autopilot, so the most effective way to stop his minions was to incapacitate him. However, the voice had asked if he wanted to know the rules.

Well, it couldn’t hurt to know. Robin whispered, “yes.”

“You are now playing freeze tag. It functions similarly to normal tag, except once a player is tagged, they will be unable to move until they are tagged by a teammate. Your team is comprised of you and your water clones, while the group of three and the rat are your opposing team.” The voice sounded far too dignified to be explaining a children’s game.

Robin sat there pondering how or if this game would affect the fight.

Unfortunately for Robin the fight was almost over by the time he decided to look through one of his copy’s eyes again. All his water clones just stopped moving. This made them easy prey for the fiery rat and the piercing, icy-cold eyes.

This was bad, he had already used up most of the surrounding water, and the rain wasn’t coming down nearly hard enough to give him enough base material to create a whole copy out of.

Then Robin noticed on the ground, the ring was just sitting there. All his foes were so preoccupied with dealing with the clones that they had forgotten about the ring.

There wasn’t enough water for a whole clone, but he could muster up enough for an arm or three.

Joy was feeling particularly pleased with himself. The games were always random, but sometimes they felt handpicked to help him out of these sticky situations. Though he always wondered why no one else played the game; they were always free to play, but everyone just wants to keep fighting the normal way.

The clones didn’t even know what hit them. Once Joy was in their midst, he would tap them, and they suddenly wouldn’t be able to move anymore. They stood as still as a normal body of water. Kicks, punches, grabs, Joy never stayed close to the clones, but as soon as any of them overextended, his lightning-fast hand would tag the clone, leaving it helpless.

The clones surrounded him, but Joy didn’t care as he jumped and tumbled around. As long as their hands didn’t touch him, he would be unstoppable. As the crowd rushed in at him, he dove through their watery legs, splashing out the other side and tapping them as he moved on.

Theo and Lillian were not holding still during this exchange, they started freezing or evaporating clones much faster now that they weren’t moving. Flames and ice mixed until all that stood in the street were oddly dry patches, frozen statues, Theo, Joy, and Lillian.

Now that was fun, Joy thought. Even if it was a bit boring for him that none of the clones even started trying to play freeze tag. But he felt a job well done was a job well done.

Joy was about to cajole Lillian into telling him what that rat was all about. He thought her gift was invisibility, so maybe the rat was some second age artifact that the prince had loaned her. Or a powerful and ancient first age artifact that slowly morphed a normal animal into a mythical dragon over time. Or maybe she fed that rat a spicy pepper and it started belching flames. At this point he was just curious.

“Hey Lillian, what’s with the…”

He never got to finish that thought since a hand, made of water, formed on the ground behind him and tagged him. The same happened to Theo, only Lillian escaped the fate of being tagged since the rat had evaporated most of the water around her.

Simultaneously, a hand formed nearby the checkerboard ring and threw it back down the street. All Theo, Joy, and Lillian could hear was it clatter down the street and then some very fast footsteps as Robin started running for it.

Lillian was about to start running after the footsteps when she realized her two companions were not moving. Joy, being caught mid-sentence had his mouth open in a particularly unflattering way. Theo had his serious expression as always, and she knew he was alive because she could feel him lightly freezing her cheek, trying to get her attention.

Lillian considered blasting them with her rat and seeing if that did anything, instead she went with the safe option of asking nicely.

“What am I supposed to do?”

Silence. Well, they weren’t moving, so why would she expect them to be able to speak.

Joy was the closest, but she just went up to Theo instead to try and diagnose what the problem was. For all intents and purposes there was nothing wrong with him, he just stood there unblinking and unmoving.

She did the only thing she could think of, she poked him right in the face.

Surprisingly he grunted and started moving again after that.

“Do you know what that was? I just thought one of the clones touched me, but then I couldn’t move.” Theo went straight to business hoping to get some answers.

“That’s what I saw too, but it is almost exactly like what happened to the clones after Joy touched them…” They both turned to look at the still unmoving Joy. If he could’ve chuckled nervously, he would have.

After another poke to the face, Joy would have called it a slap, but Lillian absolutely did not slap him, Joy was moving.

“Why weren’t we able to move Joy?” Theo was glaring at Joy, possibly deciding what part of the man he wanted to freeze off first.

“Woah man, it’s just part of my gift. We all play a game together, but it would be unfair if only one team was allowed to play the game.” Joy was inching away from the scary blue eyes.

“That’s what the voice in my head was. My family used to play this game, it’s like tag, but you must hold still once you’re touched by whoever’s it.” Lillian exclaimed.

“So, he just made us play a game in the middle of a fight, then he lost the game.” Theo was angry, and he kicked some of the scattered gold coins in his fuming.

Joy stared longingly at his fortune being scattered across the street like leaves in the wind, when he had a brilliant idea. Distraction, give the scary ice man a task and he’ll forget all about this screw up.

“We’re wasting seconds here. Let’s go catch Robin and get that ring back.” Joy started running down the street.

Lillian and Theo took one long look at each other, then started sprinting after him. Maybe Robin was a slow runner.