Training arcs are all well and good, but they do have a tendency to take over. If you feel like we have left a few plot threads dangling you would not be wrong, and it's high time we got back to them. The first of those we need to discuss is Benny Gold, who has spent the past few days recovering in a hospital and trying to understand the world. Something had been made especially difficult, because he knew things nobody else seemed to.

Oh, don't be mistaken. Everyone else knew more than he did. About Danny's rampage, about the bombs he'd apparently left all over town. Bad enough for the feds to set up shop in town, just down the street from the hospital. He'd gotten a good description of what had happened the night of the dance. Some cops had come around to ask him about it, too, but they hadn't been too interested. Benny had been knocked unconscious, and several witnesses described him as being horrified by Danny's original outburst when he'd been knocked unconscious. So that should have been it...

But.

But there was that weird guy who'd been there right when he woke up. Taliesin Cromlaire. Even fuddled from just waking up from a coma, it wasn't an easy name to forget. Nor was it an easy man. The strange man had showed up, asking questions about Danny, and disappeared. Questions having something to do with an efreet. Benny had taken the time to look up that word, later on, and what he'd found was “a powerful demon and spirit of fire in Islamic culture.” It had not missed Benny's notice that Danny was accused of firebombingthe town.

And then there was the government. The federal agents had paid them a visit too. They'd been weirdly vague about what agency they were actually from, although they'd showed extremely official looking badges. And they'd asked a lot of questions about Danny, too. Benny had been...evasive. He wondered if they could tell. He'd played up his confusion after the concussion, and he'd also told them a lot of the truth. He'd been asleep through all of it, no idea what Danny was up to. If he'd known he'd have tried to stop it.

Which was, all in all, true. Ultimately, while Benny had been a bully most of his life, he lacked the ground-in evil of a Danny O'Brien. Untested, his soul had drifted sideways into the murky gray. While it did not necessarily make up for a lifetime of petty cruelty, a fair evaluation of Benny's character should take into account that his last act before going into his coma had been attempting to savethe same people he'd always picked on.

He had, however, left out a few things talking to the feds.

First, he'd left out Taliesin Cromlaire. The story sounded crazy anyway, but he had an eerie suspicion the lead woman, the one with the creepy eyes, would have believed him. It was her that put him on edge and made him cagey more than anything, and he'd decided to keep the story to himself for now. He could always go admit to it later. Probably. This of course also meant he'd left out any mention of efreets or demons or what have you.

Second, he'd left out the thing he could do with his hands now.

He looked around the hospital room, straining his ears as hard as he could to try and hear if there was anyone in the hall outside. His straining ears found nothing, so he turned his focus back to his hands. He held them up together, and concentrated. The thing that appeared between them looked like a sun made of golden lightning, crackling and spinning. He couldn't keep it up for long, and he'd done it by accident the first time. But it came easier every time he did it, and he was pretty sure the crackling sun thing was getting bigger every time he tried it.

He kept doing it, whenever people weren't around. It was like poking at a sore tooth, or scratching at a rash. Because it was the constant reminder, the thing he could always look to, if he started to think it had all been a dream. That he had imagined Taliesin Cromlaire, that his weird feelings about the woman from the government had been nothing, that all his thoughts about fire demons from the middle east somewhere were delusions conjured by a brain that had taken so much damage it had needed to shut down for a while to repair.

But the lightning was real. Tangible. Inarguable. And if that was real...anything else could be too. Danny really could have been working with a fire demon. Demons were as good a reason as any to explain Danny O'Brien. If he told the truth, Danny had always scared him a little. So why couldn't he be in league with the boogeyman?

Except, of course, whoever Danny had been working with probably wasn't the real boogeyman. In fact, every time he tried to conjure the word the image that came to mind was Taliesin Cromlaire. Creepy bastard. Whatever was going on, he was right in the middle of it. And, unfortunately, so was Benny.

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He stared into the crackling ball of lightning again. Whatever was going on had somehow touched him too. And he couldn't shake the feeling that was going to mean a lot of trouble, and a lot of danger, in his life all at the same time. He had to do something. He just didn't have any idea what. He was still pondering the question when something shook the entire building, and glass from his window peppered into the room.

Dark eyes watched the explosion from a distance. Too far a distance, you would think, yo make out any details. But by now you've probably figured out that you can't judge capabilities, skills, age, or even appendages by the human norm. The watcher in the darkness could clearly make out everything that was going on in the vicinity of her little production. Now all she had to do was wait until the cast showed up and see who'd get on the stage...

Or something. She wasn't proud of that metaphor. Whatever, she wasn't a writer, she didn't have to be embarrassed by the nonsense garbage words she came up with.

And she didn't have time to think about it anymore, because someone had shown up. A bulky figure in a hospital gown had just jumped out of the hospital window and landed amid the chaos. From the third floor.

I knew it! The watcher thought triumphantly. I knew Benny Gold knew more than he was saying!

One suspicion confirmed, which was more than enough of a thread to start picking at. Especially if he survived. If he died, well, less ideal but there was still plenty the watcher could investigate.

Benny had no idea what possessed him to jump out his broken hospital window into an explosion.

Into a green explosion. It looked like fire and smoke, but it was all green. And glowing. Not in a way that made him think of radiation, he'd heard that wasn't really green anyway. In a way that him think of witches. And spells. And general magic.

And fire demons.

It didn't quite click that the fall should kill him until he'd already landed, his feet leaving cracks in the pavement. That, he knew, was not normal. Not any more normal than the glowing green smoke and the explosion. But then he'd already known things weren't normal. And that he wasn't normal. The real questions was why the hell had he jumped out the window in the first place!?

Some instinct. The same one that had sent him flying between Kyle Anderman and a bullet. It was, all things considered, a stupid instinct that was likely to get him killed. An impression which only grew stronger when from within the bellowing smoke came the angriest tree he had ever seen. It was twelve feet tall, at least, with branches growing out of it's hulking shoulders. It had a face made from ugly holes in gnarled wood, and it's limbs branched off at the end like roots.

Okay! Benny said. Convincing myself magic is real over the last couple of days did not prepare me for this! What the hell do I do now?

It had no eyes in ragged holes in the wood that made up his face, but he could still tell the moment it noticed him from the tilt of it's leafy head. It stomped towards him, and Benny experienced a moment of crisis.

It was a rare, rare thing that Benny wasn't the biggest guy in the room. He was even bigger than Danny, but he'd deferred to Danny because, well...

Because on some instinctive level, Danny had scared him. He'd recognized someone stronger, mentally if not physically, and bowed down. Never mind he was apparently unstable, he'd been stronger, and Benny had acted accordingly.

There was, of course, no way to pledge his loyalty to the thing stomping towards the hospital. And in the end, when people had been about to get really hurt, he'd even stood up to Danny O'Brian. That same quality of his mind and soul pushed him to stand up to the tree. Raising a fist, he charged at it. It was a brilliant moment of self discovery, a triumph of the natural good that dwells within the human spirit.

It was not, unfortunately, a victory for Benny Gold, who was swatted aside like a fly and sent careening across the hospital parking lot. He slammed into a parked car, shattering it, and learning in the process that whatever was going on with him it had not made him invulnerable. He thought something was broken in his back, and there were definitely shards of windshield sticking in him.

Well that was stupid, he thought, his head swimming. He couldn't see the thing anymore, only hear it stomping around. Not near him, although it hardly mattered. He had a sneaking suspicion he might be dying. Or maybe worse, going into a coma again. The world above him was filled with the glowing green smoke of the explosion.

And then, suddenly, it was awash with gold.

He tilted his head and floating in the air in front of him was...a bird. Or almost a bird. It was more like a rough picture of a bird, with a rough brown color inside hard, black outlines. It's wings were splayed out and the lines of the thing were stiff, all except for the eye in the center of its back. The eye moved quickly and fluidly, turning down towards him.

Interesting, a voice echoed in his mind.

“Sure,” Benny mumbled. “Why not.”

Mmm. You are injured, so I will forgive you.

“Great, thanks.”

Hmph. I'll expect you to be properly grateful when next we meet. Until then...good luck, descendant, with what strength I can offer you.

The eye flashed, and the light flowed from it like golden liquid, pouring down from the sky into Benny's body. He felt warm. No, no he felt...he felt like he was on fire. In a good way. A great way. He leaped up from the ruins of the broken car, shaking his head. He didn't have time to think about how weird everything was. He had to go! He had to move!

As he ran towards the tree creature again, his fist raised, he didn't notice his body now looked like it was painted in softly glowing gold. Any more than he noticed the image of a bird, minus the staring eye, that had appeared on the forearm of his raised fist.