The sun was low on the horizon, and Carson was done for the day. He’d just finished locking up the riding mower and was crossing the soccer field when, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted something low to the ground and moving very quickly. In a heartbeat, his military training kicked in, and he turned towards the potential threat and assessed it: it was a dog, large-ish, some sort of Australian shepherd mix judging by the merle coat, leashed but currently lacking an owner. Its tongue was lolling out of its mouth as it loped joyfully across the grass.

Carson loved dogs. Carson had always loved dogs.

“C’mere!” he called, whistling and waving to get the dog’s attention. Its owner had to be around somewhere, right? It looked well cared-for. It was leashed. It must have just broken loose from its owner and made a run for it. Any responsible citizen would catch the dog and look around for its person. “Here!”

Shibrogane
Mendel was having a joyride. Mistral told herself that and tried not to walk any faster. Just because her body was stronger while she was transformed didn’t mean that she actually… felt good… after sprinting to chase her dog.

For his part, the dog had located two Things of interest. The first was a person. The person was waving and calling him: nope. Mendel definitely had Places to Go, People to See, and by people he meant the bad thing. He could smell it. And if his training covered one thing, it was Kill the Bad Things. The bad thing was circling around, probably to go for the person calling after Mendel, and maybe the person wasn’t His person. That didn’t mean the bad thing didn’t still have to die.

Mendel burst past Carson, leash trailing behind him like a secondary nylon tail. He leapt high and landed on a monster made entirely of flailing arms, like a giant masked spider, and dug in with his teeth. It flailed, screeching inhumanly as Mendel tore off one of the arms.


Carson turned, his attention following the dog as it sped past him and - what the ******** ********> There was - there was a thing behind him, a thing made entirely of flailing arms sticking out from some central point. What the ********? What the ********?! Was this some kind of joke? Because Carson had been a lot of placed and he’d seen a lot of s**t but he’d never, ever, in his life seen anything like that.

Following his initial shock, the dog ripping an arm off the thing didn’t really phase Carson, besides to think that the thing, despite making an awful racket, was not exactly suffering from a shortage of arms just from the loss of one. He felt… disconnected, which was something he’d talked about with his therapist and - okay, he thought, trying to brace himself. This is bad, and you should probably try to get away from this thing?

But… the dog. “C’mere,” said Carson again, chasing after the dog and the monster. “Leave that alone! You’ll get hurt!” (Because talking to dogs like they were people always definitely worked for him.)

On the other side of the soccer field, Babylon caught up to Mistral, having set out as soon as he got her call via magical mystery decoder ring. “So what are we dealing with?” he asked, kneeling long enough to let her climb onto his back. Piggy-backing always seemed like the best way to patrol with her - it let her save her strength for when she really needed it. “Any civilians around?” It was campus, but it was also a Sunday, so it could really go either way.

A moment later, the question answered itself: silhouetted by the setting sun were one dog, one youma, and one civilian, who foolishly seemed to be trying to get Mendel to disengage from the youma. “He’s going to get himself killed,” said Babylon, picking up the pace. “Alright. Let’s go save the day.”

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“Looks like the answer is yes,” said Mistral, splaying her fingers over the gold inlay on her weapon. It was only momentary, though; there was something more important to be done. She pushed herself up so as not to immediately deafen Babylon when she yelled. “Mendel!” Mistral stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled, loud and sharp.

Mendel looked up from dismembering the youma, an arm--different from the first three he’d pulled off--in his mouth. He considered the writhing mass of monster below him, dripping shadow-black blood all over, and wuffed disapprovingly. Dropping the arm, he trotted over to the nearest distressed person and butted his head up against the man’s palm. The bad thing was still thrashing around, but Babylon was there. Mendel could count on Babylon to do the right thing.

Mistral squirmed down from her perch on Babylon’s back. “Sorry for Mendel,” she said, tugging her skirt back into place. “He’s a bit overenthusiastic as a crime fighter. A bit of a hero complex. Are you okay?”


This was getting weirder and weirder by the second, thought Carson, settling his hands into the dog’s soft fur. This felt real, he thought, scratching its velvety ears. This was real. He glanced over at the thing with too many arms - currently being wailed on by a short man in a cape, using something that looked like the lovechild of a lantern and a mace to beat the everloving s**t out of the monster. “Yeah,” he said, looking uncertainly at the woman. She was dressed just as strangely as the man - in fact, whatever they were up to, they were very clearly doing it together, based on the shared color scheme and symbol they wore.

“Uh,” he said, “is this your dog?”

It was very clearly her dog. It was wagging its tail at her and circling her excitedly, looking for praise.

“Are you guys LARPers or something?” he asked, searching for an explanation for the costumes and the creature and the everything. Maybe it was just made of servos and foam! Maybe all of this was an elaborate game run by a campus club!

One could hope, right?

A few meters away, the man with the lantern hit the creature so hard that it went towards the goal. He chased after it, lantern swinging at his side.

Carson looked helplessly at the woman. “Please tell me you’re LARPers,” he said.

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Mistral arched an eyebrow, and gave Mendel the enthusiastic scritchies he was clearly looking for. “We are definitely not LARPers,” she said. “For one thing, I’m not sure how we’d get his eyes to glow if we were.” She nodded towards Babylon, and after a careful and considered moment, did not send Mendel to help. Babylon didn’t have the most controllable of weapons. “You’re a student here, aren’t you? Carson MacLeod?” He was in her Art 101 class. They both sucked, but that wasn’t the point of Art 101. The point was torture.

She sank to her knees, a hand possessively covering the identification tag on Mendel’s collar. There were many reasons to not bring Mendel to art class, most of them involving very inedible clays. “I am Mistral, Squire of Mercury,” she said. “I suppose that sounds LARP-y. Allow me to disprove that.” She passed a hand over her signet ring, activating her Aspect. Her image fuzzed out, glitching every few moments, like a heartbeat. “My friend Babylon Knight is the dorkus with the lantern.”

Glancing up at Carson, she gestured. “Sit your a** down,” she said, mildly. “You look like you’re going to pass out. You can pat Mendel, if you like. He’s a service dog, but he seems to think he’s everyone’s service dog, so it won’t hurt anything.”


Carson realized he’d seen this dog before. In art class. Actually, how had he forgotten having seen this dog before? This dog - Mendel - was a unique kind of ugly, the kind that came with a pit bull’s wide, flat skull wrapped in patchy Australian shepherd fur, with unnervingly light blue eyes that seemed like they were both looking at you and whatever was behind your head. “Uh,” said Carson, sitting down. It was true, he felt woozy and distant, and he wondered if it was that obvious. He settled his hands into the dog’s fur.

“That makes you Anabel, I guess?” he asked. She didn’t look like Anabel, except she did. Same eyes. Same hair. Same freckles, except everything refused to form a coherent picture. “This is too ******** weird.” He wanted to lie down. He wanted a drink.

On the other side of the field, the dorkus with the lantern hit the creature so hard that it exploded into dust. He jogged over. The front of his coat was splattered in black, oily creature blood. Carson looked up at him.

His eyes definitely glowed. So did his cheeks.

“I wish you were LARPers,” he said. “Is this the part where you mind wipe me and send me home?” Because he hoped it was that part. This was just entirely too weird. He didn’t feel well, and he didn’t think his therapist would take kindly to any attempts to talk about it.

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She nodded. “Clever,” she said. “The glamor’s supposed to stop you from doing that. How’d you know?” And then she looked down at her dog. Of course, she thought. She really needed to get on making Mendel a glamor of his own. Nothing was really ineffable, so she could probably figure it out in a month or so. “I feel that,” she sighed. “Try being on the other side of it.”

Mistral patted the ground next to her. It was no less an order for its politeness. Babylon joined her. She said, “Unfortunately, we don’t have that sort of technology.” It could probably be engineered, if she felt like it. She didn’t. “This probably isn’t the best way to get introduced to Destiny City’s magical gang war, but if it helps, at least you didn’t get inducted to a cult society based around planetary alignment on your first time out like I did.” Mistral raised both her eyebrows at Babylon. “Or getting half-eaten by an inflatable Easter bunny rabbit.”

Mendel hauled himself forward and put his paws in Carson’s lap. Puppy kisses were had. It was thoroughly gross.

“Do you need a hand getting home,” she asked. “Or questions we can answer? I’m not much for doing the unwelcome info dump, so if you’d rather play ignorant, we can do that.”


Was this what Elke had been trying to warn him about? Because if that was the case, Carson didn’t blame her - it was the kind of thing you had to see to believe, and he had seen it, and he still wasn’t sure he believed it. “Um,” said Carson, concentrating on Mendel’s ears (they were very silly ears). “So you just got dragged into this? At random? Or-”

Honestly, it all sounded very, very weird to him, and more than a little bit crazy, and if not for the actual demonstration of magic that had just happened right in front of him he would probably still be hung up on the LARP thing. “And then - you fight monsters? You said gang war, though. So there are other sides?”

How was one supposed to react to a situation like this, anyway? “I’m parked over by the English department,” he said, getting carefully to his feet. “I can make it by myself.”

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“Not so much at random,” she said. Though it often felt that way. “We’re descended from magical lines, finally returned to their powers. And yeah, then we fight monsters. And people, who are monsters.”

She didn’t know how to explain the Negaverse, since she’d never had dealings with them. “Babs, if you could take the floor on the Negaverse thing? You’ve got more experience than me.” Mistral rose to her feet, brushed blades of grass off her a**, and said, “We’ll walk with you. By the by, please don’t tell anyone about this. I don’t want to go to jail for saving lives. That would suck.”

As an afterthought, she disengaged her Aspect.


Carson eyed the other knight suspiciously. Mistral had turned out to be a classmate - was Babylon someone he’d met, as well? Not that he could immediately think of any short, freckly blondes in his life, but that just made him even more suspicious. “Sure, my lips are sealed,” he said, continuing to be totally weirded out. What would he tell Elke about this? Should he just not even bring it up? She was doing better, but she was still fragile…

Babylon, for his part, fell into step beside Mistral, having missed most of the earlier conversation because he was too busy doing youma dispatch. Explaining the Negaverse was something he could handle, albeit he didn’t plan to go into depth. Civilians knowing too much tended to end in tragedy. “So Mistral and I, we’re knights, and knights are part of a larger category called Order,” he explained, deciding to start with the basics. “White Moon and Zodiac senshi are Order, too. And then on the other side you’ve got Chaos - do you know Star Wars?”

Carson nodded. Babylon grinned. “Okay, great,” he said. “It’s like Star Wars. You’ve got the Light Side and the Dark Side. Jedi and Sith. We’re Jedi. The Negaverse is Sith. They - uh - this is going to sound crazy? But they collect energy from civilians and serve some kind of dark galactic bogey-man and a thousand years ago they somehow ended this vast galactic civilization and they’re doing their best to wreck life on Earth, too.”

He paused to let that sink in for a moment, and Carson seemed content to let the silence stand… at least for a while. “I don’t have a choice in believing this, do I?” he asked, looking to Mistral for help - she seemed like the more down-to-earth of the two.

Was this how Elke had wound up in a PTSD therapy group with combat veterans?

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“Sure,” said Mistral. “You always have a choice. You can choose to believe everything you saw tonight was just a great big live-action roleplay that the university didn’t care to flag for people who don’t play. There’s plenty of message boards online that’ll back you up--they’ll tell you how we can manage things like youma and aspects, all that bullshit--because plenty of people do that.” She shrugged. “Or you can believe it, and be better prepared in case you ever get cornered by a monster.”

Mistral stopped walking at the edge of the English Department parking lot. She turned to Carson and looked him square in the eye. “This is a war, and it’s everywhere. You’re lucky to not be part of it. So be careful, alright? I’ll see you Monday morning.”


Well, when she put it that way… Carson had been trying to talk himself out of this, but Mistral was too dead serious to doubt. “Alright,” he said. Maybe - maybe he could just keep his head down and this would be the last he’d see of all this? He certainly hoped it worked that way. Carson had had enough danger for a lifetime, and he was supposed to be getting away from war, not walking right back into one.

“Monday,” he confirmed, and turned to head to his car. He probably should talk to Elke about this - but what would she say? Probably I told you so.