"IIIIII WANNA BEEEEEEE ANARCHY!"

The sound of Puck's singing voice, loud and raspy as he belted the punk song, echoed through the woods around the tree dwelling he'd adopted as home base on his tiny planet-moon. The inside of the massive three-story tree house was nearly completely rehabbed and cleaned and polished so that the wood fairly glowed; now he was tackling the outside, clearing off the last of the dead twigs and leaves and branches still hanging from the limbs. His work here had cut into his busking time back on Earth, but that was okay, it was kind of the slow season in Destiny City, being winter and all, and he hated busking in the cold and snow. Not like he needed the money – between his parents' support, income from sales of his music online, and owning his half of the duplex he shared with them with no mortgage payments, he was doing pretty well and could afford extended forays here.

High up in the branches, perched on a huge limb, he was rooting around inside a hole he'd discovered in the main trunk of the tree. It looked like the kind of place a squirrel or an owl might have made a home in, except of course there were no squirrels or owls on Puck – only bugs, large insects that apparently the people who once called this small Uranian moon home had kept as pets, if his flashback-style memories were any indication. In fact, Puck himself had adopted a large pillbug-looking creature as kind of a mascot, which he'd named Iggy. It was maybe a foot long and followed Puck everywhere, like a multi-limbed dog without the barking. Iggy didn't climb trees, though, so it awaited its keeper's return on the ground, its four eyes looking mournfully up the tree.

Puck grimaced as he shoved his arm into the hole. It was deeper than he thought it would be; he was almost up to his shoulder in it. "How far back does this bloody thing go- hang on," he muttered as his fingers found something deep inside the tree's trunk. It felt like… paper? Only thicker. He pressed the side of his face against the bark of the tree as he reached deeper, finally able to grab whatever it was with his fingertips. Leaning back, he pulled it out, and was surprised to see that it was in fact a slip of some kind of paper, rough around the edges and thick, heavy to the touch. Parchment? Where would parchment have come from on a moon that had no animals? Did they trade for it with some other world? Maybe it had come from Uranus itself.

Shrugging, he unfolded the small document and looked at it. There was some form of writing on it, in a language and alphabet he'd never seen before. Still, though, there was something about the writing and the language that was…familiar. Oh no, was this going to be another of those flashback memory recall things? It probably was. Dammit, and here he'd hoped for a productive day.

With a resigned sigh, Puck started to read the words on the paper. "Oh, this isn't so bad," he said to himself, brightening a bit. "It's a recipe-thingummy, a wossname. Spell…"

...A pitched battle raged around him. This was it, the last desperate fight against Chaos. After years of thinking that they wouldn't bother with a world as tiny and insignificant as Puck, it came down to this. The people of Puck were fighting with whatever tools they had at hand: farm implements, cast-off tech, their knowledge of the woods. Puck himself was leading the charge; somehow (somewhen?) he had acquired a sword, and wielded it like he knew what he was doing. Suddenly the weapon was dislodged from his grasp. Infuriated, he shouted "Branch Bash!" and a large, thick tree branch complete with leaves, glowing ethereal green and gold, manifested in his hands. He swung it at the enemy in front of him like one would swing a baseball bat, connecting with the Chaos agent and knocking them back several yards. A feral grin crossed his face as he swung at another, the branch hitting them and knocking them back as well. Then there was a tremendous pain as something stabbed him in the back and everything went red, then black…

…And Puck nearly fell off the limb he was sitting on as reality once more appeared around him. The parchment twitched and disintegrated in his hand, leaving him staring at the hole he'd pulled it from. "What the actual bloody ******** was that," he murmured. Had he just experienced his own death? Or more precisely, the death of his former incarnation? As he tried to make sense of what he'd just been through, the realization that he'd used magic he didn't have in this life struck him.

Or did he have that magic?

Standing, he called out "Branch Bash" – and sure enough, an ethereal tree branch appeared in his hands, glowing green and gold just like in the vision. He swung it experimentally; it felt weightless, yet it clearly had heft to it if it clobbered those Chaos agents like that. Puck grinned and swung it like a cricketer going for a boundary. This was going to be fun to use...

(wc: 891)