A fit man, easily in what many would consider his “prime,” David’s tightly curled hair was just recently starting to silver above his ears from the rich brown color it had been for the last hundred and fifty years. His suit jacket was well cut and tailored to accentuate his physique, though it wasn't the latest style. More casual than a modern business suit, it was the perfect cut and color for a history professor at the local university. His right hand, long fingered and articulated like those of a practiced stringed instrument artist, groped from one pocket to another in his jacket and pants as he walked up to the front door of his row home in the area of Richmond called The Fan.

He slowed as he saw the slowly bobbing head of Babbette, who was both his housemate and woman he loved, as she sat cross legged inside the porch. She was working on what looked like a crafts project of some kind. From a distance, at least.

Opening the door to the front porch, he took a moment to take it all in. The mess. The progress made in turning the apparent mess into…something.

And then David had to stop himself from jumping to conclusions.

Looking at the spread of clutter, and the little pile of confections growing slowly on a plate sitting upon a small table next to where his girlfriend sat, he took several slow breaths as he put various clues together.

They had an agreement.

“Jokes” were to be discussed before being enacted.

“Jokes” had to be agreed upon and cleared.

Any “practical joke” Bob wanted to engage in would require her to float the concept by David first. It was something they had agreed upon after last year's chicken salad fiasco.

He cleared his throat in what he thought of as a pleasant way. He was attempting a stance of patience; Bob, she preferred that name to Babbette, however, was up to “It” again. “It” was always bad, “It” took no prisoners. “It” was something that could always fly off the proverbial rails at a moment’s notice. “It” sometimes cost him, though more often it cost Bob, in unexpected ways.

She was going “Hob.”

Again.

All Duende had a tendency to “Go Hob.” Usually when they had suffered some kind of insult. And while most never went “Fully Hob,” some went down that unfortunate path. And some poor souls tread that road earlier than others.

Bob’s father had notoriously gone fully Hob when Bob had been in her first year of med school at MCV, the Medical College of Virginia, though still living with her parents in Oregon Hill. What he had done had been destructive. It had cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars, and, more unfortunately, several lives.

David had been sent by Mr Stark to clear up the situation.

To cover up the worst of it, and to make sure none of the fallout led to "the Community” being uncovered by the general population.

Looking down at the bags and wrappers surrounding her on the enclosed porch, David wondered how she must have felt gathering this awkward collection of things together. How did she get through the checkout line at the store without giggling like a demented magpie? While she was very intelligent, and a frighteningly gifted medical student, he doubted she would comprehend in the slightest the term “Suspicious Tableau” at the moment she had decided to take these actions.

Bags of crème-filled cookies and tubes of bathroom caulk were strewn about the interior of the glassed-in porch with Bob sitting in the middle of it all, calm and methodically plotting the worst kind of trouble he could think of short of murder.

Slowly, a brain surgeon’s will animating her, she separated the two cookie halves, scraped the filling away with a butter knife taken from the kitchen of their row house that they shared, to make a small pile of dark chocolate cookie halves, now naked and cream-less on a happy little serving plate adorned with dementedly smiling snowmen. She hadn’t gotten to the next step yet, but it was becoming clear what she was up to as he looked about at the tools at hand. She was going to refill the cookies, replacing the extracted cream with the white caulk. It had its own odd stamp of genius.

It was simple, cruel, and done with a professional eye toward detail at which Bob, dear, dear Bob excelled.

David began wondering who the intended victim was. Who had torn Bob away from her rigorous study schedule tonight? What slight had they delivered that was so bad that a return salvo of adulterated cookies was the next logical response to Bob’s way of thinking?

Standing in the doorway, looking down at the spectacle, David knew he should say something. It should be well thought out. It should have an understanding of Bob’s feelings. It should take into account the effort and time Bob was putting into this attack, and appreciate the delicious layers of swift and vicious justice.

It should be something that he, David Starr, would not actually ever say, in fact. So he opened with, “So…cookies?”

He decided to keep the questions short, and as polite as he could manage; their couch was not nearly as comfortable as the bed they had been sharing for over a year. “Cookies.” Nothing was added to her reply, she didn’t want to give anything away. Her overlarge lips writhed in anticipation of a smile, lips stretching and pursing across an over wide mouth while her eyes and hands stayed on the treats being doctored.

“And…caulk?”

“Industrial grade, type 3 caulk…white, with a slightly sweet smell. Nothing plastic in the aroma to give away the nature of the caulk. I had to go to five stores, sample sixteen different caulk brands to find one that met my needs. I wanted a fudge brown colored caulk to do some filled pastries…did you know they don’t make caulk in a fudge brown color?” Her light tones, speculative, gave away nothing of her intent to unleash these things on some poor sod. “I really wanted some fudge…maybe to do some frosted cupcakes. Another day…” Bob’s eyes drifted to the speculative near future as the possibilities floated across her vision.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Here on the porch?” He slowly sat in one of the little wicker lawn chairs they placed out here for sitting and socializing in the warmer months. It was frayed, and over the last year David had patched the thing several times with odd materials and with varying results. Until he was certain the chair would take his weight he sat gingerly, and was ready to spring for safety at the slightest give; but the ragged thing settled under him with only minor creaking noises tonight.

“No mess inside; I remember last time.” She flashed a smile at David, and his legs went watery, his stomach fluttering, he was glad to have already taken a seat. Even after three years together, one of those actually cohabitating, he was still madly, wildly, giddily in love with her.

She was his height, just around five and a half feet tall, and had honey blond hair so dark it was almost brown. Bob’s nose flared wide at the bridge, and like the rest of her face was composed of dramatic geometries. “Stone Face” was what some people he knew called Bob, with her heavy and impossibly wide cheekbones, her flat boxer’s nose with the oddly wide top where it ran into her eyebrows, and lantern jaw she would never be what anyone would call “pretty.” In profile her nose and forehead were on the same unbroken plane. But when she smiled…oh…when she smiled, at the right angle she was the most stunning woman David had ever seen, and he was never going to let niggling little qualms like “sanity,” or “mental balance” ruin his happiness. He lived for that smile, some days he thought he lived in those moments when she smiled at him with her head cocked at a slight angle. David lived in that special angle, inhabited that spot where Bob’s face was not craggy and stone-like, but noble, ethereal, and even regal.

Sure, she might be antisocial, but Bob was fun. She might be vicious to anyone she thought slighted her, but David himself was never on her “List.” The List was a sticking point for a few of her past boyfriends, he knew. It got in the way of a normal dinner together when your girlfriend would go quite as the grave, and you knew she was contemplating making someone regret something. Possibly with malicious, and premeditated use of food.

In this case by tricking them with “Caulkies.” Babbette “Bob” Hagen had the figure of an athlete. Lean lines paired with gentle, though not overabundant curves that stopped David’s heart whenever she stepped from the shower.

Mel Grover, David Starr’s step father, was in printing, what he printed were “French Postcards,” and occasionally hard core porn magazines in limited runs. David knew good bodies when he saw them, no matter how deeply covered in layers of baggy clothes; much of his time was spent at model shoots for his step dad’s business, and that business was nude women with impressive, sometimes athletic, sometimes overly curvy and lush, physiques.

Even under all the clothes she wore to hide her own curves, David had spotted her amazing figure right away, it had been clear that she worked out regularly on top of being blessed with an amazing figure. But it wasn’t until she smiled at a stupid joke someone had told at the party they were both attending that he had the undeniable urge to ask her on a date.

“…um…” The love struck Starr knew he was flailing, but the next question just

wouldn’t come.

Putting down the last of the butchered treats, she stretched her shoulders and lower back sinuously. He heard a muted pop or two as her spine adjusted. When Bob finally let out the explosive breath she was holding, she turned her wide eyed hazel gaze on him.

“Doctor Lester, my Infectious Diseases professor, decided to spend the last two hours of lecture today yelling at us. He didn’t think we were paying enough attention.”

David knew her memory was so acute she could quote everything her teachers said in any class she had ever taken. Ever. It was uncanny.

“There are usually cookies on the side table in his office; he’s an unrepentant diabetic with a chocolate fixation. He cheats on his blood sugar, he really shouldn’t. I’m bringing cookies, I’ll leave them in place of the ones he has there now. Maybe his glucose levels will be better tomorrow during class. No mood swings. I’m doing this for everyone.” And there it was; justice and logic. Bob’s logic anyway; Bob’s justice, too, for that matter.

He shifted his position in the seat to remove the wound up jump rope from its usual place in his right rear pants pocket. She took that as an invitation, and sprang into the seat with him. He laughed as they shifted together in the chair to find the most comfortable way for two hundred and fifty pounds of humanity to fit into nine dollars worth of old and failing patio chair.

She even giggled a little as she drove her head onto his shoulder, and snuggled in tight. He inhaled as deeply as he could without fear of the impending collapse of the poor little chair. Bob smelled of her tart and acidic sweat, chocolate, and a fine sugariness he guessed had to belong to the caulk. Her light, almost ethereal voice, the one she used to change the subject of conversations, drifted up to David as he reveled in her closeness.

“Have you eaten? I’m about ready for dinner. Can we do the curried veggie salad again? That one with those crunchy bits?”

David sat completely content in the small chair with Bob. Nothing he could think of would ever rival the feelings he had for her, and the simple act of sitting around the house with her made his life better.

Work at the university may add stress to his life, and Elgin Stark, his off the books boss, might send him on random errands that increased David’s aggravations, but he had Bob. First thing in the morning Bob, last thought at night Bob, daydreaming at lunch Bob. She was his, he was hers, and they were each other's. …THANK YOU PRONOUNS! He thought, and giggled to himself.

And now, because of Bob, his life now was better than it had ever been.

Later, after dinner, he sat again in the small rickety chair on the porch, Bob sitting on the floor using a caulk gun to fill her tools of justice, with an epidemiology text open beside her. Dinner had been a simple salad and some stuffed peppers he had prepped at breakfast. Simple, fast and filling were his keys to a successful meal. He knew his friend, Cole, would cringe at the thought; but, unlike Cole, and Bob for that matter, David didn’t have the Duende metabolism that kept those little folk eating everything they could get their hands on. David and his people were Tavakia. Both groups were, technically, Goblins; but they were tribes from different regions of the world, different cultures, and different magics.

David’s talents didn’t rest in food magic like Cole’s, either. He let out a contented sigh, and looked down at the book he had been reading half heartedly. Something was nibbling at the back of his mind. It felt like he had forgotten something important, something of significance. Unpleasant feelings, schoolwork discovered undone in the morning, roast left in the oven too long, these kinds of images popped into his head to let him know something, some odd something, was wrong. It was a distraction to a mind not used to being distracted.

He set down his book and looked out at the street. Bob continued to exact revenge while studying her medical text. People, a small few, walked along Grove Avenue, in his opinion the best street in the Fan. But at this time of night he would not have expected more than one or two.

But there were six, scattered randomly, walking along now. They looked like they were together, all had the same bulky, loose,and tattered clothing; Neo-Goth was the term he had heard Cole use for the art students at the University who tried to look like fashionable post apocalyptic survivors. Two more sulked out of the shadows and into the light at the intersection of Grove and Harvie.

It was at that moment he knew something was terribly wrong. Two people stood patiently at each corner of the intersection. This late at night it could be some students assing about, but it was a trap; David knew how traps felt, that craggy-edged, sharp feeling that was now permeating the ether, somebody was going to get hurt.