I decided to run over to the lab in a full sprint, and as the monkey, I was fast. Not as fast as the rabbit mind you, but it was about the same clip I could get with the tiger.

Once I was only a few yards from the Doc’s place, I cut into the woods and climbed into the trees, stopping along the treeline overseeing the house. I took a moment to breathe and to watch and listen for movement inside. I couldn’t see or hear anything, so I started to make my way to the front door. Going as slowly and as quietly as I could.

When I got next to the door I put my ear up to it, and after a moment of not hearing anything, Faye opened the door.

I almost fell over while just barely stifling a yelp. Meanwhile, the healer just stood there as I had to grab out and catch myself on the doorframe.

“Huh.”

“What do you mean, ‘huh’?”

“I was expecting another farm animal.”

I squinted my eyes at Faye, only for her to roll her own at me. I quickly squeezed past her and asked a question. “Is everyone downstairs?”

When she saw the big smile on my face, she shook her head. “Lucy is right there.”

“My bet was on something mythical, I'm disappointed,” Lucy said as she walked up to us.

“I’m not that good at this.” I deadpanned, “That and I was aiming for a specific goal with this body.”

“And what goal is that?” Lucy tilted her head.

“Is it climbing? Cause of the monkey thing?” Faye asked.

I shook my head and smiled. “Hopefully, you won’t have to find out, ey.”

Both of them rolled their eyes now. I let out a quiet laugh.

“Is everyone else downstairs?” I said again, with mischief. The others nodded their heads and I reached to quietly open the door to the basement.

From there I took every step carefully, even when I could hear the girls behind me barely holding in their laughter. As soon as the stairs met the roof of the basement, I bent down to see where everyone was. They were towards the back of the lab, near the couch. The Doc was pacing back and forth while going on about something.

As soon as I knew I wouldn’t be noticed, I grabbed onto the rafters and began slowly climbing my way over to them. It was a lot harder than I was expecting. I’ve done this once as the tiger, but even if it was easier as the monkey technically, trying to be sneaky and quiet while not being noticed by Reed or Casper was a huge challenge.

I did my best not to grunt with effort as I finally got above where the Doc was.

And as soon as I was in position Reed’s eyes shot up to where I was, he had sensend me. From there, one by one, everyone somehow noticed someone was looking up and followed their line of sight.

First, it was Casper and Sable, then Taylor and Erik. Rose and Michael surprisingly stayed quiet.

The Doc, however, was caught up in his anger about something involving the show, so of course, I was still gonna scare him.

Mustering as much control as I could, I slowly let myself down, still holding onto one of the rafters by one of my hands. The Doc was now saying something about Greenscale, so I guess either Rose or Erik had told him the full story this time.

He was pacing back and forth now, his hands wildly gesticulating everywhere. There was even a close call with his hand almost hitting me in the chest. Then he noticed everyone wasn’t paying attention to him anymore.

In fact, they looked kind of scared. The Doc stopped what he was doing and turned around.

“Boo,” I say with a wild smile, while face to face with the Doc.

“AHH!” I was forced to pull myself up as the Doc swung for the fences, his fist clipping me in the shin. Which was just enough for me to lose my grip and fall to the floor.

I curled up a bit and started to rub my shin. “Since when did you ever have a ‘fight’ response?” I said between gritted teeth.

“Wait, that's you?” Reed yells before Sable smacks him on the back of his head, but that doesn't stop him, “How long have you had this one?”

“Perfected it this morning.” I grumbled as I stood up and tested some weight on my leg, “Was hoping to surprise y’all with it but… ey.”

I could audibly hear Sable facepalming as I shrugged.

“And yet you can’t become human ever again…” I cringed as Rose spoke up, sullen yet pointed. Everyone, even the Doc, seemed to freeze at her words. I could even hear Faye and Lucy suddenly stop right next to me.

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I knew what I had to do. I knew I promised the conductor… But I couldn’t make myself tell them the truth…

Suddenly, I set myself on fire. I used the cover to rip the mask off and stuff it in my pocket. If I was going to do this I was going to do this now.

I heard Reed and Michael gasp when the flames went up. They did it again when they went down, as well as a few others. I was standing there as a complete human.

“Why YOU!” Rose started to get angry for some reason.

“wait.” I cut her off and held up my hand, “It usually takes a few moments…”

Everyone was just staring in shock now, most of them confused about what was going on. Then I think it was a pair of short dog ears that appeared first. It felt like it cascaded from there.

Soon enough I was covered from head to toe in small transformations. No claws this time though, which I was expecting. But my hands did become extremely calloused.

I didn’t bother correcting anything unless it was uncomfortable or dangerous.

“And this is the real me…” I said.

“Wow.” Reed was the one to break the silence, “That looks… uncomfortable.”

“Why do you use the fire?” Casper asked, “It’s not that weird?

I shot him a pointed look when I was blindsided by Rose hugging me. Then things started to get tighter and I didn’t know if it was because she was trying to squeeze me to death, or something was going wrong with my lungs again.

“You are going to tell me what happened.” Rose said, darkly, “Tell me everything.”

“Heh heh…” I nervously got out of her arms and stumbled over to a random rolling chair. Then I got sick of my current state and I quickly transformed into the rabbit. Then with a sigh, I started to speak again.

“So everyone here knows I have beef with my father right?”

That elicited a few laughs from everyone.

“Okay… To start, it was just me and my mom for my whole life. We were mortal, and the only times either of us even mentioned my dad was when we needed a scapegoat to blame for our awful situation. Otherwise, my mom never said a word about him.”

“Then when I was almost seventeen, he suddenly showed back up and said he wanted to try and make up for having disappeared. He ‘wanted’ to ‘make amends’...”

I had to pause, to breathe.

“All he wanted was to get back in bed with my mom, but I didn’t notice that at the time. He had pulled me aside in secret and told me that he was magic and that he happened to practice a form of it that was unique to him… and he needed to pass it on to me to carry its legacy. So take a middle-of-nowhere kid who's down on his luck and give him the prospect of powers and… yeah.”

“He gave me the absolute basics and nothing else. I didn’t know that I needed to know more until… after. But I thought I had enough.”

Lucy decided to interject, “So that’s why you're so far behind… I thought you were just an airhead like Casper.”

“HEY!”

“Nah, I’m just… stupid,” I growled the last bit. “So, one day my father takes my mom on a ‘romantic date’ and they get into a fight. And somehow, he pushed her off of a fucking windmill.”

It was starting to get hard to breathe. The others noticed.

“He then suddenly ripped me from where I was and showed me the spot where she fell. Tearing into me how I was a failure of an heir, and how my mom was useless for giving him a good human…”

My eyes were starting to water.

“So I pushed that fucker into the blades of the windmill and even his magic couldn’t save him.”

The room was quiet, and I swallowed hard.

“It turns out that he had spent thousands of years traveling the world and shirking every responsibility he had. So he wanted a human heir to replace him and take care of his problems. But somehow I failed whatever stupid criteria he had… and I retaliated.”

“Wow.” was all anyone said, even the Doc looked somewhat surprised.

“I guess that explains some things.” The Mad Alchemist said. “You were still stupid to try and pass yourself off as something else when trying to apprentice under me, however.”

He sure did know how to change the mood, as I went from anger and embarrassment to cringing and embarrassment. Was he never gonna let me live one mistake down?”

“Um.” Sable sounded out, obviously uncomfortable, “How about we move on?”

Reed suddenly began to quickly nod, “Sad storytime is over, now it’s time for something annoying.”

“Annoying?” Faye said, “Please don’t tell me I got pulled away from work for something small.”

“No…” Sable said with a sorry glance, “I wish this was small, but you know the message I got before the show?”

I remembered it was the same time I got another weird message… that I still have yet to read.

“So you know how there’s a bunch of Arc-Mages who run the Magus Sanctus?” Sable said in a way that showed she didn’t want to talk about this at all. “Well… they ‘requested’ the eternity of the theater to show up to a big gala they're throwing this Saturday.”

“Oh.” Lucy was the first to pick up on the problem with that. At least a problem for her and me.

The Arc-Mages were some of the most powerful casters on Earth, and “requesting” our presence was them telling us to show up or else…

And we were planning on robbing a place their organization was currently keeping under surveillance. If they catch us in the act everything would be beyond screwed.

“Should we wait until after Saturday to run the heist?” I asked Lucy as the others burst into murmurs, “Let this party blow over?”

She shook her head, Faye leaned in, trying to see what was going on. “We need to have it done by Wednesday, or else our window will close.”

“Shoot.”

“We need to get everyone in on this then,” Lucy said, and just loud enough for everyone to hear. “You think you can have a plan ready?”

“Uh… No, not really.” I said with a bit of panic, still not really over everything I just said, “We’d be going in completely blind. The last time I did that was in England, and that resulted in a sword in my stomach.”

“Why does he have to be the planner on this anyway?” Erik asked, “You told me that you wanted me to come along anyways.”

Lucy looked a bit nervous, her dream was starting to slip through her fingers again. “I’ll… I will find what I can. But we need to be ready to just rush in and grab the mirror if we need to.”