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Blarney was starting to think of himself less like a superhero and more like a private, magical, detective. First the fires - still unsolved - and now...

The eggs.

The eggs. It was the darndest thing Blarney had ever seen. It was actually Madeline who'd spotted them first, of the two of them; they'd been taking a walk through the park when she saw them. Neither of them were exactly birders, but they'd both been in Scouts when they were younger, and Madeline had gotten a lot of badges about it, and she had said they didn't look like any eggs from any bird she'd ever seen, at least not in Destiny City. Which meant that it was either some strange foreign bird, or...

Madeline had looked at him, one eyebrow raised sharply. Or this was a Mason-problem. A Blarney-problem, to be specific.

So he'd returned to the park that night, powered up, ready to take a better look, see if there was anything that he could figure out while powered that hadn't been immediately apparent when he wasn't.

He poked at them with the end of his stick, very lightly, in case they came alive and bit it or exploded or something. It didn't...seem like something someone from the bad guys' team would do, but...well, what did Blarney really know about them, after all? Maybe a demented Easter-egg hunt was exactly their style. What did he know?

Blarney rocked back on his heels and sighed, staring with a frown at the eggs. He couldn't be the only one investigating these things, right? He hesitated for only a moment before he lifted his ring and activated it.

"To Joyeuse Garde--" Did he still need to do that when he was speaking aloud? He had no idea. "Hey, uh, Miss Garde? It's Blarney. From the other night? Have you seen these weird egg things around town? Do you know anything about them? They're...weird." Blarney shuddered. Deeply weird. He stood up. "Uh, let me know if you know anything. I'm in the DC Park, there's a whole clutch of them, and they are not like, duck eggs or whatever. They're not normal. Um. Yeah. Let me know. Hope you're staying safe. Thanks. Bye."

Blarney de-activated his ring and stared at it for another moment - he actually had never used his ring like that before, not since Logan had updated it for him, so he...had no idea if he'd used it correctly or not, or if she'd gotten his message.

Well, at least he'd tried.

Blarney sighed and let his stick come to rest on his shoulder. He was dissatisfied, but he didn't see what, if anything, there was to do about them. As far as he knew--as far as anyone knew, Blarney thought--they weren't hurting anyone.

...But they were weird.

Blarney sighed and turned around to go home, or maybe to patrol - maybe sometimes weird was just...weird. Maybe not everything was a conspir--

BAWWWWWK

Blarney froze, foot three inches above the ground, step locked in place. Maybe if he didn't turn around, maybe if he just took his time and walked, very slowly, nonchalantly, unbotheredly from here back to the street...there wouldn't be anything behind him.

baaaw....bawkbawk...baw...

It was getting closer.

Blarney winced. He turned around.

"...You have got to be kidding me."

Blarney could only stare - it appeared to be a demonic chicken, which was somehow the most baffling thing he had ever beheld, up to and including every strange thing he'd come across since he'd gotten attacked by the very first youma, which at the moment felt like it had happened in an entire other lifetime.

He probably would've kept on staring at the thing till it sucked his soul out his eyeballs or deep-fried him or did whatever it was this demonic chicken wanted to do to him, had they not been joined by what, for just a second, Blarney was near positive was an angel.

But it wasn't an angel, unless angels were allowed to swear, which he didn't think they were. No, it was--

Oh, thank God. Better than angel, it was his Auntie Joy, saving him. If it hadn't been for the giant demonic chicken, he would've made a joke about how quickly she arrived, would've asked are you stalking me, Miss Garde?, would've said any number of things.

Unfortunately, the giant demon chicken.

BAWKAWWWW

The chicken lunged at Joy, and Blarney couldn't stand for that. It was enough to jog him out of his stupor, and he let out a shout as he jumped for the creature, aiming to whack it over the head with his stick.

It wasn't much, but no way was he going to let a demon chicken hurt Miss Garde when he was standing right here, possessed of a magic stick and the ability to maybe put some hurt on this thing. Especially when he thought - he thought, couldn't be sure - that Joy was trying to protect him from getting clucked to death.

He got a whack on it and grimaced as the scent of rotten eggs--eggs, eggs, eggs--collided with his nostrils. He coughed and retreated, eyes watering. "Whatever it is," Blarney choked out, around the scent and the noise; the thing had made a squeal like one of those magician's rubber chickens getting run over by a truck when he'd hit it. "It's not--the usual thing."

One thing was absolutely clear to him, now that he'd hit it: it was not a youma.

Which begged the question: what was it?

Blarney yelped as Miss Garde attacked the creature, eyes going wide at the sight. Holy snapplejacks, he thought, am I going to get to do that some day? He had no idea if all Knights of Earth got basically the same deal, abilities-wise, or if they were as varied as the Senshi magic he’d seen so far, but he couldn’t imagine being able to do something like that.

“I didn’t do anything, it just–”

The fact he was staring at her and not the chicken was the reason he noticed the menacing blob appearing behind her - when there was already a demon chicken that had appeared from nowhere, he wasn’t taking any chances.

“Watch out!” Blarney shouted, vaulting over to stand behind her, back to back, stick out and ready to swing on whatever creature had decided to roll up and make their night even more difficult, just as soon as it looked…y’know, solid. He had absolutely no way of swinging on something that wasn’t corporeal - if it was a ghost (maybe Joy had a thing about ghosts, his brain supplied unhelpfully, remembering when she’d asked him about his having ‘memories or a ghost’), he and Miss Garde would have to do a little two-step and switch targets.

“What the heck is going on?” Blarney demanded, halfway asking Joy and halfway begging answers from the universe, God, the soup pot in the sky - anyone that happened to be listening.

—

"No, no, leave that one alone!" she said, snapped out in a brisk way like someone not at all shy about dispensing orders. All for the best, however, as it put herself between Blarney and the... well, whatever the chicken was, exactly.

The thing was in fact solidifying, and rapidly, even as Joy fumbled back and directly into Blarney as the chicken-thing, having regained its footing, let loose another godawful squawk and charged again towards them.

The air condensed as she did so into sudden reality, and the reality that it condensed to was, it must be said, kind of horrifying: a writhing stem of eyes and slavering mouths, which all began baying like excited foxhounds at once. The action of barking being one that is inherently somewhat vigorous, this made the animal look like it was about to yank itself apart at its jawed seams.

"Let her play!" said Joy, which was an even more horrifying thing to say, given the context, as the dog-thing launched itself past both of them with joyful abandon towards the bird, simultaneously giving chase in the way of a hound and reaching out with two clawed paws in the way of a pouncing cat. "She hasn't gotten to play in a thousand years."

---

“Wait, wh–” Blarney turned and bonked right into Joy - a proud day for Earth Knights everywhere. As he rubbed his forehead, he could only watch in abject horror/fascination as…she??? began to…

…play???

Was he high? Was this what being high was like? If so, he did not care for it, not one little bit, and furthermore he couldn’t understand why anyone would actively choose to experience what he was presently experiencing.

He had approximately eight thousand questions, most of them beginning and ending with ‘huh????’, but those were Mason questions, not Blarney questions, so he set them aside, squared his shoulders and refocused on the demon chicken.

And the eldritch nightmare that was batting it around like a cat after a mouse. The noise that was coming from that scuffle was enough to wake the dead, and Blarney felt a headache beginning to pulse at the back of his skull, which was really what got him out of observation mode and into attack mode. This could not go on, because if he had to watch it go on for another minute, he was probably going to lose his entire mind.

“Much as I hate to break up a playdate,” Blarney said, stepping around Joy with a grim look on his face. “I think it’s time to put this thing out of our misery.” He took a breath and a running start, springing into a handstand/midair flip that ended with him swinging the stick down, as hard as he possibly could, on what he was fairly certain was the demon chicken’s head, careful to avoid - and avoid getting bitten by - any of the other demonic creature’s heads. Plural.

Unlike a youma, this did not leave a sad little pile of dust behind when, with one final anguished BKAWWWWK it did disappear, in a puff of disgusting, faintly oily smoke that got in Blarney’s eyes and made them water. He at least had the common sense to hold his breath - he was pretty sure that if that got into his system, he’d end up with something worse than popcorn lung (whatever that was - Madeline wouldn’t stop talking about it whenever she saw someone vaping, and at first he’d thought it was some new weird food fusion thing she’d seen on TV, like popcorn-crusted lung, but - apparently not).

Blarney looked down and grimaced; beneath the chicken had been the eggs he’d discovered in the first place, now crushed to pieces beneath his boots. Maybe that meant it wouldn’t be back, if it had somehow come from the eggs themselves?

Somehow, he doubted they had that kind of luck.

Blarney looked back up, first to Joy, then to the….thing….that had helped them take out the chicken, which was currently extending one…face? Head? Tentacle? Limb? in Blarney’s direction curiously, not unlike a curious dog might do to a stranger that approached it without proper attention to Dog Etiquette. Pretty much every instinct in Mason’s body told him to get out of reach of this thing, but Blarney didn’t sense anything remotely evil about it, and it had done most of the dirty work on taking out the demon chicken. And Joy seemed to–not just know it, but love it.

“I don’t mean to be rude, Miss Garde, but what is this?” Blarney asked, cautiously lifting a gloved hand for the creature to sniff. He kept his stick in his other hand, slightly hidden by his body - this thing was radiating dog energy, and if there was one thing he knew about canines, it was that they loved fetch; he just wasn’t sure he trusted a canine with so many heads to return his stick in one piece.


—


She disregarded Blarney's question for the time being, focused instead on lavishing the monster with the sort of enthusiastic praise one normally had for a dog that had just successfully fetched and returned her first ball.

"Who's a good girl!" she cooed, delivering head scratches to the creature, who was mostly preoccupied in receiving them with frantic happiness, although she seemed to have a head or two to spare for both sniffing the stranger's hand also eyeing that stick, she knows you have a stick, you a*****e, although she was temporarily distracted from both by a violent set of sneezes, shaking her head and smacking her lips in disgust. "Aww, baby! Was it so, so disgusting? Was it just the nastiest thing ever? So brave!" Joy continued.

The praise was short-lived. Having exhausted her daily lease on reality and received her allotment of pets, Pal wisped away, first to ectoplasm and then to nothing at all. Joy, then, finally turned to Blarney, all business in stark contrast to the affectionate zeal she'd had for the... dog? Thing?

"Questing beast," she answered briskly, as if this answered everything. "The beste glatisant. Her name is Pal. Summons. You'll get one too, if you keep up. Not a questing beast, probably - something else - don't ask me what because I don't know." And then: "I have no ******** clue what that was either. Did it really just come out of nowhere from those eggs? I hate Destiny City so ******** much." And finally, belatedly: "Good work on getting those hits in. And on upgrading your ring already."

–

Blarney blinked, almost getting whiplash from the change in tone, but - well, he couldn't blame her. Dogs were better than people, even dogs with many-several heads. He was just lifting the stick to the nearest head when it began to dissipate into nothingness, which probably should have surprised him more, but since it had arrived much the same way, he figured that only made sense.

“Oh, thanks,” Blarney said belatedly, glancing down at his ring. “Thanks for showing up. I probably would've gotten pecked to death if not for you and…Pal.” Pal the Questing Beast Summons, which he might get one of his own someday. Sure.

Blarney squatted down to look at the broken remnants of the eggs, poking at them with the end of his stick cautiously. “I don't actually even know if it came from the eggs or…for the eggs. When I was examining them, they didn't feel…full? Like, it didn't sound or feel like they were…y’know, like eggs in the store? That have yolks and stuff inside them? But if it was like, that thing's demonic shadow children or something, maybe it wouldn't feel how eggs usually feel, I guess. Maybe it was just protecting its…nest?” Blarney said dubiously, wrinkling his nose a bit at the thought.

“The thing that is occurring to me is that there's probably more demon chickens and demon chicken eggs out there. If only because it usually takes two creatures to make a viable offspring, right?” Blarney sighed and stood up, giving her a tired smile as he looked back at Joy.

“Sorry I almost hit your dog. I'm just not used to them having so many heads. She seemed really nice.” Much nicer than he'd thought an eldritch nightmare would be, anyway.

—

“She is,” she said absently, her attention turned in an abstracted way towards the eggs. When she wrinkled her nose this time, it was with even more palpable disgust. “I hate this city,” she repeated. “As if we don’t have enough to deal with, now we have ******** demon poultry or whatever.”

Shaking her head, she turned go to, but paused and turned back, suddenly leveling the end of her whip handle at him like an angry Catholic school nun pointing with a ruler that might at any moment be used to smack knuckles, although she was at least too far away to do that.

“I told you not to go out alone,” she scolded. “I just happened to be really close when your message came in, or that woulda gone badly for you.” But her heart wasn’t in it, and she visibly relaxed, waving a hand. “I know, I know. You could have outrun it. Still.”

–

Blarney jumped in surprise, holding up his hands in mock defense. “Woah, woah, hey,” Blarney said. “...Fair enough, but in my defense they were just…eggs, y’know? It’s not like I saw demon chickens parading down Main Street and went to challenge them all to a grudge match. I actually didn’t even see the eggs at first - my sister spotted them, and she’s a naturey person and she said they looked weird, so I thought I should probably take a look at them when powered up ‘cause like, when there’s weird stuff around…” Blarney shrugged and gestured around, “it’s usually magical, apparently. If I’d thought for even a second that Mama Bird might be, yanno, six feet tall and nearby and made of nightmares, I promise, I woulda called somebody.” He paused, then gave her an impish smile. “Just as glad you were nearby, though. And good to know the upgrade works with this thing,” he added, waving his ring-hand absently.

Blarney glanced from her, to the park, then back to Miss Garde. He hesitated a moment, and when he spoke, his voice was a little bit softer than it had been a moment before. “Do you really hate this place, though? Maybe I’m biased ‘cause I’ve lived here all my life, but…even with the occasional monster, DC isn’t that bad a place to live, is it?”

—

“I hate it,” she said flatly, turning again to go. “But you’re not me, and if you want to love the place and all its ******** - cursed chickens and lake monsters and rabid cosmic dogs, you go right ahead.” And then, begrudgingly: “At least you can get Indian food at three AM on a Thursday, and that’s more than I can say for where I grew up. You couldn’t get Indian food there at all. Anyway. Stay sharp,” she finished.