All I really remember is a very hectic few hours. Lucy had dredged up everything she could about where the mirror was and every speck of knowledge related to the Yin and Yang Demons. It was a lot at once, and the fact that I really didn’t let myself rest last night was starting to make the whole thing harder.

Add on top of that, Lucy’s urgency. She was letting details I found extremely important fall to the wayside, insisting that she could teleport us in. I tried my best to shoot that down, in every way I could think

I’ve heard stories of teleportation going wrong. I know her form of it is extremely safe…

It doesn’t account for security though.

It didn’t take too long for some of the others to drift off and head home in some capacity. Most everyone was expecting to pop on over and hear what Sable needed to tell everyone, possibly get some info off of the conductor if they showed up.

Eventually, it boiled down to just me, Lucy, and Reed. The Doc had run upstairs for something, and I was lazily tapping away at some formulas for a monster. Reed was doing his best to reassure Lucy that her life's work wasn’t going to slip between her fingers again.

“Look.” He said, trying to at least sound like he was happy, “We’ll get that stupid mirror no matter what!”

“But what if the Demons are actually there?” Lucy said, “We can’t handle them if even one of them is…”

“You are the perfect person to work around that. And I know everyone is willing to work with us if they are.” Reed got us from where he was sitting and rubbed Lucy on the back, “We can do this.”

“Yeah, but both Erik and Archer say this is a bad idea… You know how hard it is to get them to agree on anything.” I tried really hard to not react to Lucy’s words… But it’s true. This mission is practically asking for disaster.

“Don’t listen to them, they just want to make sure that everything is accounted for. Both of them have learned the hard way what happens when you don’t plan for stuff like that.”

Yup, I definitely learned my lesson. Got caught with a bag of art supplies a mile away from a spot I wanted to tag. Apparently, three spray cans were more than enough to get accused of shoplifting by a trigger-happy sheriff…

Look, it wasn’t my fault a few of my friends were caught smoking at that spot literally the day before, but my stupid butt didn’t consider that the area was being watched.

I shook my head when a few calculations and combinations came back bad. I wasn’t putting enough energy into a few of the muscle structures in the back of the monster, but I really couldn’t bring myself to get up and drag another conductor over. In fact, I was barely paying attention to what I was doing to begin with.

That was definitely my sign that I needed to head home. The Doc wasn’t demanding anything at the moment and I had no projects left now that the chimera was gifted away. So, I got up, walked past Reed and Lucy, and ‘ported home.

I walked through my front door and ripped the rabbit mask off of my face, taking a deep breath as random transformations started to roll in. I was already sick of it after a day or two of this curse… Wait…

How was I going to sleep? What am I going to do when something goes majorly wrong? When I got zoned out while making the mask I seemed to break from my magic for a bit, but when I’m actually asleep?

That could kill me…

I… I need some kind of machine or spell to help… But how? I have absolutely no idea how to make something like that… and I can’t ask anyone to help. At this point they would expect me to already have something like that, it would be suspect if I started asking now…

Should I go out of my way to find someone outside of the theater?

Or I could just sleep with one of my masks on, with no broken human body to worry about.

No, I’ve tried to sleep with my masks on before, when I first made the tiger. Out of four or five times, I only woke up transformed once. The rest of the time I woke up to a face full of mask.

Does this mean I have to sleep on the ‘couch’? If anything goes completely wrong and I don’t wake up it’ll at least kick in and keep me alive… Hopefully… Maybe I should do a combination? Sleep with the mask on and on the ‘couch’ just in case that gives out?

Not as comfortable, but good enough for a quick fix…

Am I to blame?

I kept the lie up to keep my privacy, to keep my secrets.

I was the one who implanted the idea and kept it going.

Now I’m actually forced to deal with it.

With a sigh I looked at the clock on my microwave, it was only six in the afternoon. I was just done with everything though, so I plugged my phone in, grabbed my tiger mask and laptop, and plopped my butt on the ‘couch’.

The HNN was running an article about Casper’s show. The author was absolutely digging into everyone involved, it felt more like a hit piece than a news report. The Saints got dragged through the mud for not stopping the theater and doing nothing about getting the SKYSHAKER moved from where it crashed. PrincessesShifter was pulled through that and a rant went on about how she joined the theater at the beginning of the show.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

As for the theater itself, it was just one paragraph about how bad the music was, and that was it. There was no mention of the monster or any of the other stuff we did for the show.

So I promptly looked on some better forums for some real opinions.

The general consensus on the music was that it was okay, nothing that was going to chart. The actual performance and stream did have a few talking points, mostly about what The Saints did, but a few people were talking about the monster.

Also some art, how nice.

...

Never let me look at the internet again. Why did I fall for that?

Here’s some brain bleach, there’s someone who’s making a few replica costumes. There’s even a replica of the one I was wearing. I knew it was a thing that people do when a hero or a non-violent villain gets big, but no one has made a replica of my normal costume yet so I was kind of surprised to see someone pulling off the half-shirtless look better than I did. There were some comments about the collar, no one really knew what to make of it.

Same here buddy, same here.

From there, I eventually faded after an unfortunate amount of time was spent on a wiki dive about something The Coalition did and maybe some stuff involving Greenscale the Terrible.

When I woke the next morning I felt the wood of the mask on my face, and something blocking something in my heart…

Yet I was fine. I don’t know if the thing I had to fix with my heart just happened as my alarm went off, or if the pad was pulling its weight… or if I got my hopes up, that I was safe.

I laughed to myself and started to get ready for the day. I knew there was a good chance I was gonna get pulled into even more planning today, and I did not want to do that on an empty stomach. I had other projects I thought I wanted to get to, but that was promptly halted by yet another text.

From Faye this time, at around eight-thirty.

Faye: Hey

- Can you and Erik come over real quick

- need your help with something

- soon please

A few minutes later after I sent an “okay?”, I thought I’d finally got a response.

Erik: Hey.

- Are you with Faye or Lucy?

-They’re not at the lab.

With that, I quickly finished grabbing everything I thought I would need and put on the rabbit mask. I gave the command to my phone to ‘port as soon as I stepped out of my front door.

“I’m here.” I shouted out as soon as I stepped out of the ‘porter. The only other person here was Erik himself, who was on the phone.

He looked at me and did his version of a low growl, “Faye isn’t picking up her phone, Oh… Nevermind… She wants us to meet her at the clinic?”

“Did she say why?” I asked, “All I got is she wants us.”

Erik just shrugged as I quickly looked up some coordinates that would work. I’ve never been to Portland… and anywhere in Organ for that matter.

It took a bit longer than I would have liked to find an okay spot close enough to where I thought the clinic was. I actually had to ask Erik to double-check it for me. But soon enough the pair of us were in our ‘porters and on our way.

Right into a rain storm, Erik’s already sour mood dampened further, and I now had to deal with wet fur. We quickly ran for cover as Erik found the exact spot of the clinic. I was caught off guard by a sudden emergency alert on my phone.

Turns out that the storm was the work of a local hero, who was keeping the sky together…

Like… that was the exact wording, there were warnings of sudden anomalous events that could suddenly injure you.

“Looks like there’s a shelter in place in effect,” I grumbled, “We need to move quickly.”

Erik nodded and pointed to a spot two blocks down, so the both of us booked it. The feeling of something being off only seemed to grow the closer we got to our destination.

Eventually, we got to Yggdrasil Care and Medicine and quickly made our way in. Fortunately, the door was unlocked despite the shelter in place. There was no one in the small reception area, so I led the pair of us into the back.

The feeling of unease continued to grow.

“There you are,” Erik said as we finally saw Faye. She was desperately typing into a laptop as if looking for something.

“Thank the gods.” She said the second she looked up, she looked frazzled, “I need you to help me stabilize a patient before he rips a hole in reality.”

“What.” my head tilted on instinct.

She didn’t say anything else as she started to ready a spell and pointed to a room labeled “surgery”.

Erik and I shared a look of concern as we followed her into the room. Whitin was a man on a stainless steel table, his body was spasming. Standing over him was an older and shorter man, who was doing his best to hold him down.

As soon as I crossed the threshold of the door I could feel it. My senses with space weren't that good. Most of my magical senses were tied up with extending my hearing, sight, and smell, but I could feel the space around the spasming man trying to rip itself apart.

Thankfully I had an idea of what to do, from the few resources I had for space magic, one of the lessons drilled into me was that it was a life-ending endeavor to tear space apart. But, I did learn what to do when it needed to be repaired.

I quickly started to draw a spell on the ground. It was mostly nonsensical to me, but I remembered enough of it to get the job done. I could also hear Erik casting his own spell, he must have felt something off as well.

“Faye!” The man yelled once he noticed she was in the room, “I still need those straps!”

“I already gave them to you.” She said, pointing to a table behind the man as she continued setting up her spell.

“DON’T YOU DARE!” The man’s voice raised when he noticed the spell, “I TOLD YOU TO NEVER USE YOUR POWER AGAIN! AND WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?”

“friends,” She said, almost inaudibly.

My spell form was finished. I slapped both of my hands on the ground and pulled at the magic as I slowly stood up, one hand staying at waist level and the other going above my head. Both of them rested on top of pillars of hardened space, which allowed the magic to reach out and stabilize everything around me.

But something was fighting back, causing me to almost falter. However, a few seconds later Erik finished casting his spell and everything got suddenly easier. The man on the table began to calm, but his breathing started to quicken.

Faye took her chance and quickly placed both of her hands on the man’s chest. The older man spent that time angrily glaring at her and at me and Erik. A few moments later, the man on the table fell asleep. Faye pulled her hands off of him.

“Wow,” I couldn’t help but say, I let go of the spell, “Everything’s stable now.”

“All clear on my end as well,” Erik let a string of magic fade from between his hands, “A better warning would have been appreciated though.”

“I know, I know,” Faye said sheepishly as she pushed a stray strand of hair out of her face, “We were in a rush and-”

“Faye,” The older man said in a way that made everyone’s blood run cold, “We have to talk.”