Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The loudspeaker comes to life, a staticky screech that burns Riz’s ears. “Join me, students, in welcoming our latest exchange student, all the way from the Astral Plane. Miss Sae’ret Aziphiral will be shadowing each class over the next few weeks so, if you see her in your class, please give her a warm Aguefort welcome!”

“Punch her in the stomach?”

“Give her a tin flower?”

“Throw her in a trash can and call her The Ball?”

The Bad Kids laugh at their idle memories, so distant that they no longer hurt, as they climb the stairs into Aguefort’s main hall. They slow at Adaine’s locker, the first in their trek down the long hallway, and wait for her to collect her pouches of spell components and heavy books.

Riz likes these mornings, he’ll admit. He likes the routine that the Bad Kids have fallen into, meeting under the old weeping willow tree before the first bell, escorting one another to each locker, and finally, splitting off for their classes. He likes the way that they don’t leave each other’s sides until they have to. Riz would be content for the rest of his life if he could just stay close to the Bad Kids.

His fears begin to creep in when he thinks about the group splitting apart so, with intense psychic determination, he puts those thoughts out of his mind as Fig slams a fist on her locker, popping it open without inputting the code.

“You need to tell Jawbone you forgot the code so he can reset it for you,” Adaine says, rolling her eyes.

“You need to tell Jawbone what?” A familiar, growly voice says. Riz whips around and is greeted by a warm smile and a pat on the back with a heavy hand. “Heya, kids. Happy first day back from autumn break.”

“Happy is debatable,” Kristen says, rubbing her eyes with her hand. “I can’t believe you guys didn’t let me make a latte before we left.”

“I can’t believe you woke up thirty-seven minutes late, Kristen.” Adaine says, just a hint of amusement in her voice.

“Is that what you girls were yelling about this morning? I didn’t have time to check before I had to lea—”

“We wouldn’t have to yell if Kristen would just wake up when her alarm went off!” Adaine protests. “I swear, you need a familiar. If I sleep through my alarm, Boggy just licks the inside of my ear until I wake up.”

“Until?” Fabian asks, gobsmacked. “It takes more than one lick?”

“She wouldn’t know, she’d be asleep,” Riz says, kicking at the door to his locker. It slams shut. He doesn’t actually store anything in the locker—perks of having a Briefcase of Holding—but he likes to feel involved, so he’ll stop by his locker every day in between Gorgug and Fabian’s visits to their own.

Gorgug taps his short nails on his locker, just a few away from Riz’s. “Do you guys not ride with Jawbone to school?” He asks.

“Not today,” Jawbone explains. “Had to be early today, which is what I wanted to talk to you all about. We’ve got a new student at Aguefort.”

“Sae’ret, right?” Fig says. Riz raises an eyebrow. It’s not like Fig to remember someone’s name. “From the Astral Plane? That’s sick.”

“She’s a githzerai; her people are refugees who fled to the Astral Plane a few thousand years ago, if memory serves me right,” Jawbone squints his eyes. “It’s been a long time since I was in school… Does Aguefort teach you this stuff?”

“Aguefort teaches us almost nothing,” Fabian scoffs. “I mean, I learn more from our quests than our teachers, and that’s a fact.”

“You just don’t pay attention in classes,” Riz insists. “We learn plenty.”

“So you know about the githzerai?”

Riz looks down at the floor. “Well, no, but—”

“My point stands.”

“Anyway,” Jawbone interrupts. “I wanted to ask you if you would keep an eye out for Sae’ret during her exchange. Aguefort can be a scary place for a new student and I’d really like for her to have a nice experience. Having the coolest kids at school look out for her would go a long way.”

“You flatter us,” Kristen says, flashing a bright smile. “I mean, it’s true. But I’m just glad other people notice how cool we are.”

“It’s not cool to say how cool you are,” Fig says. “You have to be cool without knowing it. Or at least pretending you don’t know it. The disaffected rockstar thing, y’know?”

“I don’t know if I’m all that cool,” Gorgug says hesitantly.

“See? Gorgug gets it.” Fig points at him and nods proudly. Gorgug tilts his head to the side and gives her a confused smile. “He’s gonna out-rockstar me one day.”

The second bell rings and Riz’s ears perk up. “Gotta go!” He says, starting to scramble for the gym for first period. “See you all at lunch!”

“Kid, Sae’ret’s shadowing rogues today!” Jawbone calls out as Riz runs down the hallway. “Keep an eye on her, alright?”

Riz waves a hand absently in the air. He’ll help her out, for Jawbone’s sake if nothing else, because Riz knows how to look out for the people close to him. If Jawbone is asking for this favor, then Riz will make it happen. It’s not a huge ask, after all. Help out a new student.

Damn, he thinks, I wish I had someone looking out for me on my first day of school. He thinks back to his day, getting rejected over and over again as he tried to hand out his business cards, being bullied within minutes of entering the building and, of course, earning himself a detention. It was a rough first day of high school and it could’ve been a much less painful experience if he just had someone else letting him know what to do and, more importantly, what not to do.

Then again, if he did have that, he never would’ve met the Bad Kids.

So maybe, in the end, all the strife was worthwhile. He’d live that first day of school over and over again if it meant following the universe’s path that led him to his best friends.

Riz sees Sae’ret easily. Not because he knows what a githzerai looks like—he didn’t before this very moment—but because he knows every other rogue at Aguefort. The new girl, tall and thin, with green-ish yellow skin, a bald head, and nostril slits instead of a nose, looks around the gym, searching for something.

Riz is happy to be that something. He jogs over to her and smiles. “Sae’ret, right?”

“That’s my name,” she says, standing tall and confident. “What’s yours?”

“Riz Gukgak, nice to meet you and welcome to Aguefort.” He sticks his hand out to shake hers, but she doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. He nods and pulls his hand back. Maybe there’s no handshakes in the Astral Plane. “Jawbone told me to look out for you today.”

“The guidance counselor? That’s a kind thing for him to do, however I don’t need anyone looking out for me. I’ll be fine on my own.”

“Well,” Riz says, drumming his claws on his thigh. “Probably not today. We’re doing duos and you’ll need a partner. I don’t mind if you don’t want to chat or whatever, but I’ll still be your partner if you want me.”

She looks down her nose—nose slit? Riz wonders—at Riz and nods, eyes tight. “I’ll be your partner, then. We fight to the death?”

“What?” Riz chokes on his spit. “No, no. That’s not until finals week.” He shuts his eyes and shakes his head. He still needs to get his mom’s signature on his paperwork, consenting to Revivifies being used on him. He’s not looking forward to that conversation. “Just sparring. We have to get the others to say uncle before they make us say it.”

“I will never say uncle,” Sae’ret declares. “Will you?”

Riz smiles with all his teeth. “I think I got lucky with you as a partner,” he laughs. “Let’s win this thing.”

Riz beckons Sae’ret to lean down so he can whisper to her. “Adam, the human, he hurt his ankle in his last fight. Look, look, he’s favoring his right side. If we go for the left, he’ll be out in a second. I bet he’ll fold from pain, and if not, he’ll be easy to pin without his feet underneath him.”

Sae’ret nods and runs her pointed tongue along her teeth. “I like your strategy, Riz Gukgak.”

Riz smiles. “His partner, Pheodora,” he gestures to the dwarf, “she’s been sick lately so her stamina’s low. Her grade, too, though.” He frowns. “I bet… hm.”

“What is it?” Sae’ret cocks her head.

“Her grade’s just… it’d be really low with how many days she had to miss. I bet she’s at risk of failing out by now. Maybe—let’s leave her up for as long as possible. She’ll score better the longer she lasts and then it’ll be easy for us to take her out once she gets some points, yeah?”

Riz tries to figure out why Sae’ret gives him a meaningful look, something complex and serious. Before he can, the instructor blows their whistle and the fight begins.

“Time for one-on-ones!” The instructor shouts. Riz takes a final sip of his water bottle, dripping sweat. He and Sae’ret won their duos fight easily, controlling the field well enough to keep Pheodora up for long enough for her to earn a B+, too, so he’s feeling pretty accomplished.

Maybe not accomplished enough to take out someone twice his height and weight in a no-weapons brawl, but he’s used to losing at these sorts of fights. Give him a gun and a place to hide and he’ll knock everyone in class out. But take those things away and Riz struggles; he knows he does. Even without any previous rogue training, Sae’ret seems to be a very capable fighter. He doesn’t expect to last long against her.

“I won’t ask you to go easy on me,” he says.

“I wouldn’t, even if you did.”

Riz grins, a laugh in the back of his throat. “Fair enough.”

“In three, two, one,” the instructor says through their megaphone. “Go!”

Riz somersaults, diving for Sae’ret’s ankles. If he can rip them out from under her, maybe he’ll have a chance.

He doesn’t make it. She kicks her leg out—hard—and Riz goes flying, body limp, across the gym.

“Gods,” he gasps, pain sparking in his ribcage. Did he just break a rib? He looks to the clerics sitting on the benches and thanks Aguefort for having a few always sitting in on martial lessons. “Fucking… ow,” he mutters.

“Get up,” Sae’ret growls. “Face me.”

Riz leaps to his feet and dives back into the fray, claws outstretched. He rips his hand across Sae’ret’s stomach and blood begins to pour from the wounds. He doesn’t waste time smiling, instead, diving in for another swipe of his claws.

Sae’ret takes his hand by the wrist and rips it away from her, bending it at an uncomfortable angle. Riz swears he can feel his ligaments being pushed past their natural limits. When he’s absolutely sure that they’re about to snap, Sae’ret throw his wrist down. He breathes a sigh of relief before—

Before he goes deaf.

He vaguely registers Sae’rets hands clapping over both of his ears, sending a powerful wave of force down his ear canals. He thinks he can hear the moment his ear drums pop.

“Uncle,” he gasps, pain spiking through his head like the worst migraine he’s ever had. He feels dizzy from it, eyes swimming. “Uncle, uncle.”

Sae’ret drops her hands and smiles. Riz can barely make it out through his unsteady vision. He drops to the ground in a heap, landing hard on his sitz bones. He touches his fingers gently to his earlobe and they come back bloody.

“Shit,” he says, he thinks. It’s impossible to hear his own voice. Sae’ret’s mouth moves but he can’t read her lips. She offers him her hand and Riz lets her pull him to his feet. He gestures to his ears. “I can’t hear.”

I’ll heal you, Sae’ret mouths slowly. She raises her hand to Riz’s left ear and, without moving her mouth again, Riz feels an unpleasant sensation, nothing like the healing magic he’s used to from Kristen or even from other students. Is this what magic feels like on the Astral Plane? It’s a skin-crawling sensation, an uncomfortable squirming inside his head. The arcane power crawls down his ear canal and scratches at his already aching ear drum painfully.

“I’m good,” Riz says quickly, wanting the sensation to end. “I’m good, thanks. I’m just gonna, uh—gonna…” He gestures to the clerics.

Sae’ret tilts her head to the side, eyes tight, but she nods.

“Gods,” Riz swears. Rogues fight dirty, sure, but he’s never had someone take advantage of a goblin’s hypersensitive ears like this before. He’s never thought about how effective it would be to take out his opponent’s hearing. Not only did it make him deaf and dizzy; it made him afraid. There’s something about losing an entire sense that has him panicked, too panicked to think straight.

If he had been thinking straight, maybe he would’ve noticed that he can still feel the uncomfortable squirming, burrowing deeper and deeper into his head.

“So what’s your deal?” Fig asks, ripping the corner of her milk carton open with sharp nails. “Why did you come to Aguefort?”

Riz cringes. “Fig, you can’t just ask people what their deal is,” he whispers, elbowing her.

Sae’ret smiles gently. “I heard that it has the Material Plane’s most capable adventurers. I wanted to see them for myself.”

“You heard right,” Fabian says, setting his shoulders in a firm line. “The most capable six, specifically.”

“Well, I’ll admit, I’ve been curious what the priorities of Material Planers are. Most of you seem very different from the githzerai.”

“How so?” Adaine asks. “What are the githzerai’s priorities?”

“Well,” Sae’ret steeples her arms on the cafeteria table and darts her eyes between each of the Bad Kids as if she’s about to share a secret. Riz can’t help himself but to be intrigued by the display. “We were once known as the forerunners, before the Great Divide. A single race, escaped to the Astral Plane to hide from mind flayers and elder brains but, before long, the forerunners found themselves split. Half of us were angry, so angry at the circumstances life had brought us. They sought to spill blood in retribution. They became known as the githyanki.

“And then, there were my people. The githzerai. We didn’t see the point in being angry for anger’s sake. We value true justice, while the githyanki value bloodshed. And that’s not to say that the githzerai are afraid of blood, but the intent matters to us. If you intend to do something for the right reasons, leaving a trail of bodies behind you is not a mortal sin, do you understand?”

“Oh, you are preaching to the choir,” Kristen says, laughing casually. “We get that, for sure.”

“I thought you might understand,” Sae’ret says, voice intense and pointed. “I hoped so, anyway.”

“That seems so sad, that your race is divided like that,” Fig says, putting her fork down. Her face falls.

Sae’ret shrugs. “The githyanki call us philosophers. They say we are too worried about morality. But morality and ethics aren’t the same, yes? They think we are too afraid to break the rules but that’s not true. I’ve killed a hundred times. But I’ve done it for the greater good. I’ve done it to protect the ones I’ve loved.”

Riz wonders how old Sae’ret is. She must be a teenager if Aguefort allowed her to enroll but, gods, he thought he was a killer, yet his body count certainly isn’t in the hundreds yet. What sort of life has Sae’ret lived to have shed that much blood?

He thinks about what she’s saying. Justice. Morals versus ethics. Killing for the right reasons. It feels relevant to him. How many times has he hurt someone for the good of the people he loves? How often has he pushed the limits of his goodness for the sake of doing something just?

“I get it,” he says, meeting her halfway. “I get what you’re saying. For sure.”

“I thought you would,” Sae’ret says enigmatically. She smiles at Riz, somehow sharp and gentle at once.

“I hope you had fun today” Gorgug says, sliding half of his apple slices over to Sae’ret. “What class do you think you’re going to shadow next?”

“I’m not sure. I think I’m getting more from the people I’m meeting than from the classes. I’m glad to have met you.” Her eyes shift, slowly, from Bad Kid to Bad Kid, before settling on Riz. He breaks the intense gaze, a strange feeling in his stomach. Is he still afraid of Sae’ret after such a brutal attack in class? He’s all healed up, ear drums reconstructed by a senior year cleric after class. So why does his skin still crawl when Sae’ret looks at him like that?

“Dude, of course,” Fig says. “You’re welcome to have lunch with us every day if you want.”

Sae’ret smiles and nods her thanks. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to step outside.”

Adaine waves at Sae’ret. “It was nice to meet you! I hope you’ll try wizard classes next.”

Sae’ret twists her mouth as she gets to her feet and, before Riz can tell her goodbye, she’s gone.

Sae’ret speaks into a Sending Stone in the empty hallway of Aguefort Adventuring Academy, carefully counting her words.

“The job’s done. I found the right host and infected him. The adjustment should already have begun. Justice will prevail.”

Riz blinks. He’s in an arcade. He knows what to do next.

“Those girls are going to the AV Club. What happens to them when they get there?” The words rush out of Riz’s mouth like a tidal wave. He doesn’t give Biz a moment to breathe before starting his countdown. “Five, four, three—”

“I, I, I—please, please!”

Riz pulls the trigger on his gun and shoots one of Biz’s fingers off.

He blinks again. He’s in the school gym on the night of prom. He knows what happens next.

Riz looks into the red dragon’s eyes and pries off a chunk of its flesh with his sword. He shoves it in his mouth and chews messily.

 “I don’t know how long it’s gonna take me, but I’m going to eat you, bitch!”

He relishes in the sweet taste of dragon meat, bloody and raw. It drips down his chin, staining him red.

Riz blinks. He’s in the school gym, again, but it’s different now. It’s torn apart by an apocalypse. He knows what he’s seeing.

Riz watches Gorgug swing down, down, down, with his axe, cutting apart the blue dragonborn but never quite connecting where Riz wants him to.

He can’t help it. He has to say it, even if the others think it’s cruel of him. Even if it makes him a maniac. “Make sure to cut his head off so he can’t be Revivified.” The words are a deep, husky whisper—his voice has been shredded by the ash and smoke in the air—but it’s loud enough to be heard and that’s all that matters.

And loud enough to be heard by Oisin, too, who looks—

Terrified wouldn’t be a strong enough word to use.

Oisin’s eyes dart back and forth. Riz bares his teeth and hisses, tail lashing behind him. He stands by what he said. It’s what Oisin deserves.

Riz blinks.

He’s in his bedroom in Strongtower Luxury Apartments and he can tell that it’s the real place, not a dreamscape. He’s awake. He’s no longer trapped in nightmares that remind him of things he really, really doesn’t want to think about.

But Riz can’t help but wonder: why those moments? Why those memories?

What do they say about him?

He sighs, heavy and weary. He doesn’t want to think about that.

As he pushes himself out of bed, he wonders if he bit his tongue in his sleep. He must’ve, somehow, because, as his senses slowly wake up, all he can taste is blood.

Chapter Text

“What’s wrong?” Riz asks, standing on his toes and trying to read the note that Gorgug has in hand. “What’s that?”

Gorgug crumples the note up in his hand and slips it into his jacket pocket. “Nothing.”

Riz’s eyes narrow. He can’t help what he does next, he’s a rogue after all. He pickpockets Gorgug, unfolds the note, and reads.

ur not a real artificer and you never will be. ur nothing but a mindless oaf and you belong in fighter classes, not the lab. ur a waste of the teacher’s time and energy and you’ll never amount to anything. dumb as a rock and twice as slow. DROP OUT.

“What the fuck?” He mutters, bringing Gorgug’s attention to him. “Dude!”

“Hey!” Gorgug says, feeling his pocket for the note. “How did you—”

“This is insane, dude. Who writes something like this?”

Gorgug frowns. “I don’t know, man. I keep getting these notes and… I mean… maybe they’re right.” He deflates, shoulders dropping. Gorgug sighs, heavy and powerful, and it makes something in Riz’s heart ache.

“You’re crazy if you believe that, I mean, come on. You invented barbificing. You took four years of school last year and you excelled, dude. You, you—even with a teacher who resented you, you killed it in barbarian classes year after year. And now, with artificing, weren’t you just saying how much Professor Hopclap liked your work? That sub-elemental ionic dexometer? Why would you listen to some anonymous note when you have your teacher’s approval?”

Gorgug looks at the chipped linoleum floor. “It’s hard not to take it to heart,” he says, voice low. “But it’s fine.” He snaps his head up to look at Riz. “It’s fine. I’ll be fine, man, it’s just… it’s just another thing. I’ve dealt with this stuff before. I’ll deal with it again, you know? It’ll be fine, Riz.”

Riz’s eyes flash with something red-hot and deadly. “It’s not fair. That you’re treated like this? That’s not fair.” He feels a heat warm him, starting all the way down in his toes. Like he’s walking on coals, the soles of his feet burn. “I’ll find this guy. I’ll show him what happens when he fucks with you.”

“Don’t do that,” Gorgug says. “Please don’t do that, Riz.”

“Why wouldn’t I? If he’s going to harass my friend, he’s going to get harassed. Worse than harassed.”

“No, come on. It’s fine. I’m fine.”

Riz narrows his eyes. He nods twice, tail lashing behind him. “Sure. Okay. Fine. And, for no particular reason, these notes just show up in your locker? How often?”

“Every day,” Gorgug says. “Wait, no. Riz, come on, dude. Don’t stake out my locker to find this guy.”

“I won’t, I won’t. Don’t worry, man.”

Riz tucks himself inside the locker next to Gorgug’s and peers through the front vent. His hiding place is masterful, if he can say so himself. No one can see him and he can see everyone who passes by, especially anyone who stops by Gorgug’s locker to drop off a scrap of paper.

And someone does. Riz recognizes him as a fellow senior, one Lucky Dourmswalke, a half-elf artificer who, if Riz remembers correctly, is near the bottom of the artificing class. Not that Riz has ever broken into the school’s computer system to check on the average GPA of everyone in the senior class. Not that he would ever admit it, anyway.

“Jealous,” Riz mutters. He’s jealous of Gorgug for being better than him. It makes sense. Who wouldn’t be? A student joins the artificing class halfway through high school and blows everyone else out of the water with his discoveries and capabilities? Riz knows that jealousy can be a powerful force—he remembers Kipperlilly Copperkettle very, very well. But Riz knows that he can handle someone else’s jealousy just fine.

Can Gorgug?

He doesn’t want to wait to find out, not when Riz can handle the problem himself.

He’ll take things into his own hands and he’ll make things right.

It’s laughably easy to break into the school admin’s office—just like it was the last time he hacked into the system—and even easier to guess the admin’s password. They changed it since the last time he broke in.

By adding a “1” to the end of their pet’s name.

Riz would laugh if he wasn’t worried about being heard.

He flicks through Lucky’s digital paperwork. Bottom of his classes. Transferred in as a sophomore. Member of the Drama Club. And, at the very bottom, a link to two related students.

Happy and Sunny Dourmswalke, both eighth graders at Elmville Middle School, both with paperwork submitted to enroll in Aguefort next year.

Riz smiles. He knows his in.

He keeps scanning the page and sees the name of Lucky’s mother, the only parent listed as an emergency contact. Peppy, with a work number that sounds familiar to Riz. He pulls out his crystal and dials it.

“Krom’s Diner, my name is Peppy, how can I help you?”

He hangs up and a grin crosses his face, there and gone in an instant. He has a plan, he has the means, and he certainly, certainly, has the motivation. He’ll fix this. He will.

Riz drops his mashed potatoes on Kristen’s tray and steals her chicken-fried steak. She smiles and offers him the celery sticks on her tray but he shakes his head. Adaine swaps her bowl of pork noodle soup for his cup of fresh fruit and passes him a spoon. “Thanks,” he says, eager for his first meal of the day.

The other Bad Kids know he doesn’t get fed well at home. It’s not something he’s proud of, and it’s certainly not something he would ever share with others but it’s hard to hide when the Bad Kids have seen the inside of his fridge, cobwebs included, when they visit the Strongtower Luxury Apartments.

It’s not his mom’s fault she can’t afford much in the way of food. It’s unfair, sure, but it’s just the way the world is.

Riz feels his shins heating up, burning like he has a fresh sunburn. It’s not fair, it’s not just.

He wishes he could change things but he doesn’t know if it’s in his power.

But the Bad Kids know that he comes to school hungry and they never, never, let him leave still wanting. They play lunch-swap with him, making sure he gets the highest protein things on the cafeteria menu and he’ll never be able to thank them enough for it. He thinks, if he tried, they would all just shake their heads and say it was nothing. It’s what he would do if the roles were reversed.

“Where’s Sae’ret?” Kristen asks. “I was gonna tempt her to take cleric classes today.”

“Wasn’t in bard classes,” Fabian says. “But neither was Fig.”

“Fig,” Riz complains. “Go to class. Go to one class.”

“Ugh,” Fig says, slumping in her seat. “You know I go to class.”

“Go to your own classes. Bard, warlock, hells, go to paladin classes for all I care. Just go to a class that you’ll actually be graded on.”

“I had to know what sorcerer classes were like! They were calling my name. Did you know they still haven’t replaced Jace? The sorcerer students just sit around and talk about how naturally talented they all are. It’s gross. I love it.”

Riz rolls his eyes. “So Sae’ret didn’t take bard or cleric classes. Not rogue either. Wizard?” Adaine shakes her head. “Barbarian?” He asks Gorgug.

“I took artificer today.”

“Hm. Well, no matter what she took, she should be in our lunch period. So where is she?” A mystery tickles at Riz’s mind, somewhere near the corner of his head that still itches. He reminds himself that he should ask a cleric about the way his eardrum still feels weird after the incident on Monday. He knows he’ll forget to, like he does anytime he’s sick or injured. It’s just too much effort to look out for his own well-being. Not when he could spend his time, energy, and brainpower looking out for the others.

“Maybe she got everything she needed. Decided rogue was for her. Maybe she’s sneaky at heart.”

“You can’t become a master rogue in a single morning,” Riz protests against Fig’s declaration. “I’d like to see her out-sneak me.”

Kristen laughs. “No one can out-rogue you, dude. Not on a day you’ve had caffeine, anyway.”

Riz takes a long sip from his Everlasting Thermos and shrugs, a smirk on his face.

It’s true, he thinks. And he’s about to prove it.

Riz corners Lucky in the parking lot on his way to his small, red sedan.

“It’d be a shame if something happened to your sisters’ applications to Aguefort,” he says. He has homework to do. He doesn’t have time to pussyfoot around his point. “A real shame.” He pulls a cigarette out of his pocket and lights it. It’s a Minor Illusion, both the smell of smoke and the fire itself—courtesy of a mirrored reflector on one of his bracers that can create fractal images—but Riz needs to look like a threat right now and he can’t think of a better prop to use to look entirely disinterested.

This conversation? It’s below him. He doesn’t care about the outcome. It’s casual. He’ll smoke a cigarette while he talks; that’s how little he cares.

Or, at least, that’s what he’s trying to convey.

“What?” Lucky says, whipping around. Riz leans on the side of his car, as casually as he can manage. “What did you just say?”

“Would be a real shame if, for some reason, your sisters didn’t get into Aguefort. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Just a guy who knows what it takes to disqualify someone from Aguefort enrollment. And a guy who isn’t afraid to do it.”

“What are you talking about?” Lucky crosses his arms and puffs up his chest. “You got some sort of problem with me?”

“A big one.” Riz sucks in a long drag of his unlit cigarette. “You threaten my party members, I threaten you. Fair’s fair, my man.”

“Oh, you’re that goblin.”

Riz crinkles his nose, trying to refrain from hissing, spitting mad at this random artificer who’s not only an asshole but a racist. “And you’re that bully. So, like I was saying, it’d be a shame if something happened to your sisters’ applications. If they couldn’t get into Aguefort… if it was your fault? How do you think that’d make them feel?”

“What’s wrong with you, man? Going after my sisters for, what, a couple of harmless notes?”

Riz feels heat crawl up his calves, burning him up from the inside out. His knees alight with the fire and it has him chomping at the bit to go just a little bit further. It’d be so easy for him to say, not just your sisters. I know your home address. I know that your mom works at Krom’s Diner from 4:00 to 10:00 PM every weeknight. I know the name of your grandparents and the home they’re living in. It’d be easy to make Lucky shake in his boots if he pushed himself just a little bit further.

If Riz didn’t have a sense of ethical right-and-wrong, he could really put the fear of the gods in Lucky.

He shakes his head. He won’t go that far. As much as he wants to, as much as Lucky deserves it, Riz won’t take things too far today. He thinks he’s making headway anyway.

“I think you should transfer schools,” Riz says, punctuated with another drag. It’s a false offer, something he’s using just to make his next offer sound better in comparison.

“You’re crazy, dude.”

“You’re right. I am. Which is exactly why you should be afraid.”

“I’m not transferring schools.”

Riz shrugs. “Classes, then. You’re not an artificer anymore. Either that, or your sisters get black marks on their ledgers and are left going to Mumple. Is that what you want? You want that to be your fault?”

Lucky’s face screws up. He grimaces, sucking in powerful breaths. He doesn’t look far off from a barbarian himself in this moment. Riz isn’t afraid. He knows he still has the upperhand. It turns out information is a very powerful tool. He doesn’t need to rely on violence, not this time.

Not that he’s against it.

He smiles, sharp and wide. “It sounds like you have a choice here, Lucky. I hope you make the right one.”

He tosses his cigarette over his shoulder and strolls away, knowing he did his job. Gorgug won’t be getting threatening notes anymore; he knows that for a fact. He won’t have to deal with unfair harassment.

Riz grins, filled with adrenaline and delight at a job well done. He took things into his own hands, and he knows for a fact that he made things better. His loved ones are safe again. The world is fair, again.

And it’s all because he did something about it. It’s because he stepped up and did the thing that other people wouldn’t be willing to do. Riz isn’t other people, though. He’s not afraid. He’ll do anything to protect his loved ones, even if it means being a little cutthroat.

His chest glows with warmth, not the burning in his legs but a comfortable, soothing heat of a job well done.

Chapter Text

“I swear, he has something against me, Angie.”

Riz hears his mom on the crystal, complaining to a friend—someone’s name he recognizes from her time in law school—and his ears perk up. He can’t help it; he’s a detective. He needs to know more.

He holds a stethoscope that Fig stole for him from the hospital in freshman year up against his door so he can hear his mom’s voice from the living room more clearly.

“I mean, I know he does. Of course he does. No one wants an ex-cop goblin lawyer, a public defender, nonetheless, to tell them what-for in court. No one wants that. But here I am. Doing it anyway. I just wish,” a deep sigh, “I wish it wasn’t an uphill battle.”

“I know, girl. It’s hard for us. I mean, I can’t say I’m a goblin but I feel you on the public defender thing. And hells, people don’t like a pixie telling them they’re wrong, either. I swear, half the jury thinks I’m a child and the other half thinks I’m the object of their fetishes. Just once, I want to be treated the same way the other lawyers are treated.”

“Exactly! I’m not asking for special treatment. I just want things to be fair, that’s all.”

Riz’s thighs burn. He’s crouching uncomfortably against his bedroom door and his muscles feel alight with fire. Fair, his mom says. Well, he just wants things to be fair, too. It’s not a lot to ask. But if the universe won’t do it for him…

Well, that’s why he’s been in the business of doing it himself, lately.

“I can’t tell you how many times my clients get twice the sentence they deserve. It’s a joke. It’s awful. It’s their lives on the line, you know?”

“I know. It’s fucked up, Sklonda. Gods.”

“I want to be able to tell my clients they can trust me, that I’ll get them the sentence they deserve but I can’t do that if Judge Montair is going to fuck me over at every opportunity! Angie, I’m so sick of it.”

“I know, I know. Listen, it’s still happy hour, right? Let’s go get a drink and you can rant about him over margaritas, okay?”

“With what cash? You know how much public defenders get paid.” He hears his mom sigh. “I can barely afford to keep the lights on.”

“This is important. Consider it medicine. Seven copper pieces for the sake of your mental health.”

Riz can hear the hint of a smile, a crooked, amused one, in his mom’s words. “Medicine, right. Fuck it. I’ll meet you at Andry’s in fifteen, okay? Lemme just check on my kid.”

Riz scrambles away from his door and tosses his stethoscope under his bed, hiding it in the clutter of his belongings that pour out from under his mattress. He hears a knock at his door.

“Come in,” he says, throwing himself into his desk chair and opening the first book he touches.

“Hey, sweetheart. How’s your,” she eyes his desk, “homework going?”

“Good, good. I mean, lots of it, you know? But good. Lots of good.”

“Your book’s upside down, Riz.”

Riz’s eyes flash to his desk. “Ah.”

“So I don’t have to tell you I’m heading out, yeah? If you were eavesdropping anyway.” His mom smiles, wry, at him. “But I will anyway because I’m just such a good mother.” She crosses his room and drops a kiss on the crown of his head. “And because I need to tell you something else.”

“Hm?”

Sklonda sighs, buries her head in Riz’s hair. Her voice comes out muffled. “It’ll all be okay. Okay? I know you hear me complain about work and, you know, the world sometimes, but everything’s going to be okay. We’ve got guts and we’ve got courage and we’ve got determination, because we’re Gukgaks, and I don’t want you to think that I’m letting the world get us down.”

“I know that, mom,” Riz says, reaching for her hand to squeeze it. “I know. I just… I want to help.”

“You’re helping,” she insists, “by being the very best son you can be. I don’t need you to get involved otherwise, got it, sweetheart? I just need you to keep doing your best at school every day and being my very special little guy in the meantime.”

“Ugh,” Riz says, lightly shoving his mom off of him. “I’m not a little guy.”

“My little guy. My tiny, little son. Look at him. Growing up but still so small,” she teases. “Seriously, Riz. I don’t want you getting involved. Say you won’t get involved.”

“I won’t get involved,” Riz declares, voice firm. He nods seriously, looks his mom directly in the eyes, firm and intense. “I promise.”

His mom studies him, narrowing her eyes like the police detective she once was. “Hm. I think I believe you,” she says with a nod and a satisfied flick of her ears. “Now I’ve gotta run. A margarita awaits me.”

Riz smiles and flips his book right-side-up. “Bye, mom. I love you.”

“Love you more, kiddo. I’ll be back before you fall asleep.”

Riz nods and watches her leave his doorway. “Okay,” he whispers.

He swallows the bitterness on the back of his tongue. He doesn’t like lying to his mom but… in cases like these, it’s necessary. He has to deceive her because if he even alludes to getting involved, she’ll lock him down and ground him. He can’t give her a reason not to trust him.

Because he knows, for a fact, that he needs to take things into his own hands. There’s injustice afoot in the legal system—as there always, always is—and it’s affecting her. Riz knows how to protect his loved ones, he does. He knows that if he gets involved, he can make things better.

So he’s not afraid to do so. Like his mom said, he’s got guts, courage, and determination. If anyone can make things right, it’s him.

Riz doesn’t think most gumshoes follow their suspects on bikes that they bought from the thrift store, but he’s not most gumshoes. He pedals hard and tries to keep up with the slick black car driven by Judge Montair. He loses sight of it a few times, but always catches back up by breaking a few traffic laws and soon enough, he’s watching Judge Montair park in the garage underneath a short condo building.

Riz locks his bike up on the nearest street sign and jumps onto a dumpster, a surprisingly strong gutter, and, finally, the flat roof of the building across the street. He finds himself perfectly situated to peer into the window of Judge Montair’s home with his binoculars from his new perch. Riz lays on his stomach so no one on the ground can see him, and he waits.

Riz watches through the window as Judge Montair takes his shoes off, shrugs off his blazer, and drops his briefcase on the breakfast bar. He says something, a smile growing on his face, but Riz can’t make out the words. Riz waits for Montair’s wife—or maybe children?—to emerge from the other rooms in the condo but what he sees instead is a slim half-elf wearing a stereotypical maid’s outfit, complete with a frilly white-and-black headband.

Judge Montair takes her hips in his hands and leans down to kiss her, a smile on his lips. Riz nods slowly. Through his research, he knows that Montair has a wife, a dwarf woman with tan skin and red hair, who is certainly not this maid. It’s what he wanted to collect: blackmail.

But that doesn’t mean he wants to watch any more than he has to.

Riz snaps a few pictures of the two, lip-locked, but bails before things get any more inappropriate. He’s dedicated to his cause, yes, but not quite dedicated enough to put himself through… that.

Riz leaps down to the dumpster, glad the cover is still on, and scrambles off of it to the alley’s dirty ground. He pops out the roll of film from its compartment and shoves his camera in his briefcase, glad it served its purpose. Crossing the street, Riz enters a small camera shop, one run by a family of halflings, and pays them extra to not look at the film they’re developing. Soon enough, he has the photographs in his hand, a tool for him to use to set things right.

To make things fair again.

Riz climbs on his bike and flies down the streets towards Strongtower Luxury Apartments, enjoying the cool dusk air that blows back his hair. It’s a chilly day but there’s a burning within him that keeps him from feeling cold. The fire inside him creeps slowly upwards, consuming him from the tips of his toes all the way up to his hips, now. He remembers once, on a summer vacation, stepping into a too-warm hot tub and feeling like he was cooking himself alive. This feels eerily similar to that sensation.

Riz doesn’t care. He’ll burn alive if he has to, if it means he can protect the ones he loves. He’ll let himself crumble to ashes and embers if it means he died doing what was right.

Judge Montair,

Inside this envelope, you’ll find five photographs. I implore you to consider how your reputation might fare if these get out to the public. A judge is meant to be moral; an ethical pillar that holds up the legal system. What might the people you serve think if they learn that you can’t even treat your family with respect?

These photos won’t leak if you fulfill two small requests. First, give equal and just sentences to the defendants that you judge. Whether they have a private or public defender, they should not be charged differently. And second, treat the lawyers in your courtroom with the respect that they deserve, no matter who they are or how you might feel about them personally.

I’ll be watching closely, Judge Montair.

I hope you’ll choose your next step wisely.

Riz folds up his piece of parchment, written with gloves on and using his non-dominant hand, and tucks it into an envelope already bulging with photographs. He pauses before sealing the envelope.

He can’t help but wonder if what he’s done is enough to make things right. He threatened the judge, yes, but not with violence. Does the situation call for it? Riz is no stranger to threats of violence or the followthrough—his recurring dream about Biz Glitterdew is enough to remind him of that—but he just can’t decide if this is the right instance for it. He wouldn’t be opposed to something less pacifist than this letter but…

Is it the right time? Would a threat be out of proportion to the crime? Riz can’t decide. He feels his thoughts swirl. He’s doing the right thing, he is. The moral thing. He’s helping his mom, that’s all there is to it. He would threaten someone for her; hell, he’d do a lot more than that. And that doesn’t make him a bad person. He’s doing it for the greater good. For her good. He’s doing it because he sees something wrong with the world and he has the ability to fix it.

So he must. It’s his responsibility. He’ll step up to the plate even if no one else is playing ball.

He presses his eyes shut and nods. He’s doing the right thing. Riz seals the envelope. On the front, he scrawls Judge Montair’s full name and scribbles, for your eyes only.

On his way to school tomorrow, he’ll bike past the courthouse and slip it under Montair’s office door. The job will be done. He just has to wait and see if it’s enough.

His claws itch. He looks down at them and sees a smear of blood where one of his cuticles ripped. He lifts his finger to his mouth and sucks gently on the cut.

He looks at his finger again, free of blood, and wonders why something about the sight looks wrong to him.

Riz’s mom comes home glowing, cheeks flushed and mouth curved into a bright smile.

“Riz!” She says, scooping him into a hug and kissing the crown of his head. “How was your day at school, sweetie?”

Riz ducks his head away from her. “It was fine, mom. The usual stuff. I mean, Fig’s teacher got mad at her for showing up after a week of skipping class so I had t—I mean, uh. It was fine.”

His mom doesn’t seem to catch his almost-confession. Riz isn’t sure why he wants to keep the information to himself, what he’s been doing with most of his free time, that is. His quest keeps him very busy—it turns out there’s a lot of wrongs to right in the world—as he tries to help all of his friends, even when they don’t yet know that they need his help.

“That’s great, honey,” his mom responds, not quite checked into the conversation, Riz notices.

“What about you? Good day?”

“Very, very good.” His mom smiles widely. “My client today, I was sure he was going to have to serve time but we got lucky! Judge Montair only sentenced him to community service. How great is that?”

Riz lets himself smile, not quite as much as he wants to smile. He wants to grin from ear to ear, proud of himself for what role he played in this win. He did this. He helped his mom, helped her client, helped the whole world play fair on this day. It was what he did that led to his mom coming home so pleased.

He’s never felt so validated in his actions before. As satisfied as the cat who got the cream, Riz meets his mom’s eyes. “That’s great, mom. I’m so happy for you.”

“I’m just happy for my client,” she says, nodding seriously. “For once, I got them the ruling they deserved. Gods, I mean, I’ve had such a streak of bad luck lately. It’s nice that the judge was feeling generous today.”

“Oh, I’ve got a feeling it won’t just be today.”

“Hm?”

Riz shakes his head and fills his mouth with a too-large bite of his dinner so that he doesn’t have to explain himself. He shrugs.

“Maybe you’re right,” she says, “maybe the tides are turning. How nice would that be?”

Riz chews and swallows, the same pleased smile making its way to his face. “That’d make me really happy, mom. You deserve it, you know? You deserve to be treated fairly.”

“Fairly?” His mom tilts her head to the side quizzically.

“Uh, yeah, like… you work hard. You deserve to be rewarded properly for that work, you know?” He mumbles, filling his mouth again. “The universe isn’t usually fair,” he says, voice low. “But maybe, today, it’s just a little fairer than it was yesterday.”

His mom leans down again to squeeze Riz's shoulders and tuck his head under her chin. “That’s a really nice way of putting it, Riz. You’re a smart kid, you know that?” She pulls away and pats him on the shoulder. “I’ve gotta take a shower, but will you heat up some dinner for me? If you don’t mind, sweetie?”

“Of course,” Riz nods eagerly. “Of course.”

His mom disappears through the bathroom door and Riz is left thinking, idly, about her words.

Of course he doesn’t mind. He’d do a lot more than just heat up dinner for her.

His mom is the North Star to his moral compass. When it comes to her, for her sake, he’d do anything to anyone. When it comes to her, he wouldn’t even blink.

Chapter Text

“It’s a badge of honor,” Fabian lifts his chin to the air and flexes his bicep, showing off the long cut that wraps around it. Riz shakes his head and rolls his eyes. “I’m serious! The freshman can see us show up with cuts and bruises and think, ‘woah, those Bad Kids are real adventurers.’”

“Of course we’re real adventurers,” Adaine says.

“I know that. But some people need a visual reminder. If I’m showing up to class bloody, it’s proof that I’m on my grind outside of class.”

“On your grind,” Riz says, eyes working overtime to roll again. “Is that what we’re calling saving the world now?”

“No one even knows we saved the world,” Fig complains.

Riz nods. No one but the Bad Kids knows that the supervillain of the week had plans to use her arcanotech uberhalycon ion decyclometer to shake the core of Spyre apart. No one but the six people around this cafeteria table know that the people of Solace were a single button press away from an earthquake that wouldn’t have had a single survivor within three hundred miles.

Luckily, the supervillain in question couldn’t press the button after Riz shot a hole through each of her palms. She couldn’t even hold a weapon to defend herself as the Bad Kids knocked her out, called the Council of Chosen, and stole all the treasure from her vaults before the COC agents could arrive. Riz found himself one high-tech bracer richer, a bracelet with a special little trick that he’s looking forward to using.

That’s not to say that they survived the encounter scot-free. Fabian is covered with cross hatches from a high-level Cloud of Daggers. Gorgug has a lump on his forehead the size of a third eye. Adaine’s hair is stained pink with blood. Fig’s fingers are splinted after an attack by a stone construct left them pulverised to the point where even healing magic barely helped.

She says she’ll be fine as long as she’s playing guitar again by the end of the week but Riz can see a fear in her eyes that he wishes, desperately, that he could somehow help with.

“That’s what the injuries are for,” Fabian insists. “You see a Bad Kid fucked up and you know that the world is just a little bit safer. It’s a good thing, showing up to school beat to shit.”

Riz purses his lips. It certainly makes him feel cool. He rubs at the new scar across his eyebrow, a perfect slash through the arch, and remembers how he looked in the mirror this morning. He spent a few minutes tilting his chin back and forth as he shaved the peach fuzz off his cheeks, admiring his new look.

“Mom,” he calls out, pulling her attention away from the malfunctioning coffee maker. “Do I look badass?”

“Huh?” She replies, turning around, eyes half-open. “Do you know how to fix this thing, sweetheart? I could really use some caffeine.” She blinks three times, locking eyes with Riz but he can tell that she’s not quite seeing him. “Wait, what did you say?”

“Do I look badass?” He gestures to his eyebrow. “I…”

His mom pads across the kitchen floor to the open door to the bathroom and looks in the mirrored reflection at Riz. “You know, I think you do, Riz.”

Riz flashes a smile. “Thanks, mom.”

“I remember when your dad came home from a job once with a cut just like that one. It was before he told me what he did for a living and I just couldn’t figure out how a government employee would end up looking like he was coming back from a fight club. He wouldn’t tell me a thing but… wow, kid. You look just like your father.”

Riz's smile only grows.

“It’s certainly better than it used to be,” Kristen says, pulling Riz out of his memory.

“Hm?”

“Showing up to school hurt. Let me tell you, it did not go over so well when I was in elementary school.” She shoves a short straw into her juice pouch and takes a long gulp of the cran-apple-peach cocktail.

“What do you mean?” Gorgug asks, eyebrows knitting. “That was before you were an adventurer.”

“Yeah, that was the problem.” Kristen shrugs. “A ten year old rolling up to campus with a black eye was not… not as cool and fun. It got my teachers really worried about me.”

“Kristen,” Adaine says carefully, “why did you have a black eye?”

Kristen takes another long sip. She takes a deep breath in and out, seeming to be in no rush to explain herself.

“Dads, am I right?” She finally says, accompanied by another casual shrug.

Riz’s stomach burns with red-hot fire. He sees crimson blood, black smoke, and shades of gray. He smells the charcoal, long-burning embers. He no longer has eyes on the cafeteria, just a pinprick of vision focused on Kristen’s unaffected face as she admits something that he never, ever wanted to hear.

He can’t hear. Mouths move around him but he can’t make out the words they say. Fabian puts a hand on his shoulder. He can barely register the heavy weight on him. Riz’s hands shake. He shoves them under the table and sits on them, trying to stop the shuddering motion from making him shake to pieces.

His body is hot, too hot.

At some point, the grounding point of contact on his shoulder tightens, fingernails digging into Riz’s skin. He flinches but the hand doesn’t lessen its grip, not until Riz’s eyes go clear, finally seeing the world around him.

Fabian speaks in a whisper. “You good, The Ball?”

Riz barely contains a hiss.

“Yeah. Agreed.”

Riz rips his hands out from under his thighs and tries to figure out why the table is empty. The cafeteria is empty. It’s just him and Fabian left in a cavernous room, accompanied by the sound of dishes being done, coming from the attached kitchens.

“Why aren’t you in class?”

Fabian raises an eyebrow. “Maybe because one of my party member’s eyes went fucking black? I didn’t know goblin eyes could do that. Your pupils still look a little weird, to be honest.”

Riz frowns. “My eyes?”

“Yeah, you looked possessed, The Ball.”

Riz clenches his jaw. “I’m fine, Fabian.”

“I’ll believe you when you stop drawing blood,” Fabian replies, simply. He gestures at Riz’s hands, where his claws dig into the meat of his legs and blood slowly pools around each sharp point. “Listen, I, uh, I get it. I wanna do something about it, too. But after you spaced out, Kristen told us not to, alright? She said it was just once and it was her fault. She, fuck, she said she earned it or whatever. And I mean—” Fabian breaks eye contact. “I know what she’s talking about. So as much as I want to get involved, I don’t think I should. And I don’t think you should either, The Ball.”

Riz fumes. He shakes Fabian’s hand off his shoulder—missing the point of contact almost instantly—and pushes himself to his feet with a huff. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

“I’m not. But he’s not a threat to her anymore, you know? So what good would it do?”

Riz whips around and storms out of the cafeteria, cutting the conversation off before Fabian can convince him to calm down. He doesn’t want to calm down. He has one very particular goal in mind and it certainly doesn’t involve being calm. He disappears down the hallway and walks straight out of the school’s front doors.

His bike is waiting for him like a patient steed and Riz throws his legs over it, pedalling before he’s seated. It’s a six minute ride to the closest thrift store where he spends two silver pieces on an all-black jumpsuit, a pair of heavy boots, and a balaclava. He changes into them in the bathroom of a public park. From there, it’s thirteen minutes to Elm Valley and the cul-de-sac that Kristen knows intimately but Riz has only seen once, when doing recon on his new party members in freshman year.

He throws his bike on the lawn, ignoring the way it dents the perfectly pristine grass, cut to three-eighths of an inch, and leaps up the pergola to the second story of the house. The window to the master bedroom is easy to finagle open. Riz slides through and leaves it open behind him, a quick and silent way out once he needs it.

He listens at the closed bedroom door for several minutes, a quiet observer of the signs of life inside the Applebees residence. He smiles and nods once he’s sure that only one person is home and, by the sound of the heavy footsteps, it’s the man of the hour.

Riz leaps out the window and swings down to the front door. His balaclava disrupts his peripheral vision but he doesn’t need to worry about anything that’s not right in front of him. He knocks three times on the front door and waits.

A millisecond after the door cracks open, Riz shoves all of his weight into it and enjoys the sound of the wood slamming against Mac’s body. Riz slips inside the newfound gap and shuts the door behind him. Neighbors don’t need to see what happens next.

“Mac Applebees,” Riz hisses. He wonders if he should spit lines of the Helioc bible at Mac, reminding him what the bible says about hands acting with kindness and generosity, not hostility and violence, but he finds he can’t be bothered, not when his stomach is full of hot coals and his fingers are itching with need.

Riz presses a finger down on the bracer around his wrist and a heat-seeking gag expels from it, wrapping around Mac’s mouth. Riz nods intently. He can’t scream for help. He certainly can’t outfight Riz, an adventurer with more experience than almost anyone else in Elmville. And he can’t outrun him, either.

At least…

Now he can’t, Riz thinks as he shoots out Mac’s kneecap with his pistol, a silencer screwed onto the end of it.

Mac falls to the ground, catching himself with his hands. Riz hears a bone in his wrist pop. He flashes his teeth, sharp and dangerous, not quite a smile, not quite a sneer. “Mac Applebees,” he repeats, stamping down on one of his hands with his steel-toed boot.

Broken or removed? Riz asks himself. How does he make sure Mac never strikes his children again? How does he make his point about what Mac deserves for his crimes? Breaking his fingers, leaving with a final remark about what will happen if Riz ever, ever, hears about Mac being violent again? Would that be enough?

It’s more than a threat of enrollment papers. It’s certainly more than blackmail.

But it doesn’t feel like enough. Not for what Mac’s done. Not for how unfair his treatment of Kristen was. A ten year old. A ten year old. There’s nothing in the world that she could’ve done to deserve that violence. It’s unjust, plain and simple.

Riz seeks to even the scales. Mac is violent. He deserves violence. And not just something he can heal from in a matter of days or weeks.

Broken or removed? He asks himself again. Which does he choose? In what state does he leave Mac? With something to remember when he feels prone to violence again? Or with the inability to strike someone ever, ever again?

Riz’s chest burns, fire licking at every part of his body from his toes to his heart. He knows what he wants to do.

He knows what he’s going to do.

Riz returns to the public park where he made his outfit swap and changes into his street clothes. He emerges onto the grassy field, dotted with swing sets and monkey bars, wearing a button down and slacks, and he finds the nearest bench to collapse on.

He’s covered in sweat. A fight—albeit, a one-sided one—a strenuous bike ride, and this fire, this incessant fire, that burns within him, have him perspiring more than he ever has in his life—and he spent weeks in the desert climate of the Red Wastes last summer. He wipes a hand across his brow.

He’s proud of his work today, he thinks, mind moving sluggishly through the waves of heat. He did what needed to be done. He took things into his own hands and fixed them. Made them better.

He finds his fingers tapping eagerly at his thighs. There’s blood caked under his claws, the remnants that he wasn’t able to wash off in the bathroom sink. It’s not enough. He wants to swim in it. He wants more.

Riz shakes his head, trying to knock loose the bloodlust that keeps him from thinking straight. He needs to get his mind right so he can plan what happens next. He scans through his memories of the week and tries to highlight the moments where one of the Bad Kids complained about something, anything.

He tries to keep on top of it, anytime they bring up being wronged by someone, but it’s an endless uphill climb. It seems that the universe is intent on knocking them down, time after time. Riz is a tour-de-force but he’s just one kid.

Regardless, one step at a time, Riz is determined to make things right.

Where should he start? He wonders.

There’s a student in wizarding classes that Adaine regularly gripes about. The only person in class with grades higher than hers, and the only reason why is because he can afford better spell components than she can. Sure, being the Oracle pays well, but she spends half of her income on a scholarship that helps underclassmen afford their own spell components, leaving her with less than she needs to excel.

Riz could go after him, rob him blind, show him what it feels like to lack wealth. He could keep himself entertained for a few days if he went down that route.

Or, there was always Fabian’s list of nemeses. Fabian was kind to Riz today, staying with him when he blacked out. Keeping him company while he regained his composure. Doesn’t Fabian deserve that same kindness from Riz? Riz is quick to call him his best friend. He should treat him like a best friend would, and wouldn’t that include taking on his battles for him?

Riz wonders which nemesis he could take. The way he feels right now, with blood pumping under his skin and crusted under his claws, he thinks he could conquer anyone and everyone on the list.

If Riz wants to go another direction, he could always go after the stalker that Fig keeps downplaying. She says they’re no big deal anytime the topic comes up, but Riz knows that’s only true until it isn’t. Anyone who feels entitled to Fig because of her public persona could be a real problem depending on what they’re capable of. The stalker is a risk and will continue to be a risk until they’re incapacitated or dead.

Dead. Riz wonders where that thought came from, springing to his mind like it was the next logical step in his thought process. Dead? Dead. That would certainly be a way to make sure that they never bothered Fig again. Dead.

The word is a temptation that pulls at Riz’s chest.

He wants to tug at the string and follow it where it leads.

Dead.

Dead.

Chapter Text

“Stop it,” Adaine says, locked into spoon combat with Fig. “Eat your own ice cream.”

“Your flavor’s better.”

“You can order it yourself, then!” The metal spoons clink together like castanets and Adaine’s ears begin to hurt from the sound. “Basrar will make you any flavor you want, Fig.”

“I mean,” Fig’s face falls, and so does her spoon. “It’s what I used to order, you know, before.”

Adaine looks down at her small crystal bowl filled with two scoops of pink bubblegum ice cream and frowns. “Like, before freshman year?”

“Yeah, it was… it was the cool flavor to get; all the cheerleaders ordered it.”

“So why don’t you order it now?” Gorgug asks. “If you still like it.”

Fig looks away, gesturing with her spoon vaguely. “I don’t know. Feels like the Fig who ordered it was a different girl. I don’t know if I’m still her.”

Adaine’s eyebrows drop, sadness spilling onto her expression. “Oh, Fig.”

“It’s fine! Whatever, why are we even talking about me? We should be talking about the elephant in the room.”

“More like the elephant not in the room,” Fabian says, blowing out a breath. He swirls his salted caramel milkshake around in the glass with his straw. “How many weeks is this?”

“Three,” Adaine answers. “Three weeks of no Riz.”

“That’s not fair. He’s not allowed to skip that many Fridays in a row.”

“One, I can understand” Fig offers.

“I can’t,” Kristen pouts into her ice cream cone.

“Two? That’s pushing it.”

“But three!” Fabian exclaims.

“Exactly,” Adaine says. “Three’s too many.”

She thinks of the texts that Riz has sent her in the past few years, explaining why he can’t make it to a Friday night hangout at Basrar’s. Too busy, he would say. Or out of cash. She always argued against that as an excuse, saying she would be happy to steal gold pieces out of Fabian’s pockets for Riz, but he would refuse her help. She would try to tell him that Fabian wouldn’t care—he would probably be happy to pay for Riz’s ice cream—but Riz was having none of it.

“Is it a pride thing?” Adaine asks him on a Saturday morning. “Is that why you won’t let Fabian pay for you?”

Riz rolls his eyes. “It’s not a pride thing. I’m just… I don’t need you guys looking out for me. I can handle things on my own.”

“But you don’t have to! We’re the Bad Kids. We look out for each other. Right?”

“I mean, yeah.” Riz drums his claws on Adaine’s desk where he has thin leafs of paper arranged in some sort of mess that certainly makes sense to his own brain. Adaine tries not to let the organized-disorganization bother her.

“Aren’t you always looking out for us?”

Riz sighs and nods. “Yeah, of course. I have to.”

Adaine tilts her head to the side questioningly. “Then why won’t you let us do the same?”

He hadn’t had a good answer for that. Adaine frowns. She pulls out her crystal and goes through the Bad Kids group text, searching to see if Riz even bothered to tell them he wasn’t going to be here today or if he just no-showed them. She doesn’t like either option.

FIG: did y’all know that the sun is awesome. like direct sunlight? kinda fucking chill actualy

RIZ: why are you outside

RIZ: go to class, fig.

RIZ: my crystal now autofills that message whenever i text you, did you know that

FIG: hey i’m not making you type it

RIZ: where are you

FIG: i’ll never tell

KRISTEN: not without a lawyer

RIZ: i’m not a cop

RIZ: fig if i find you, will you go to class?

FIG: ooh i do love a game

RIZ: i get points in rogue class for hide and seek, lets do it

GORGUG: you get points in rogue class for hide and seek?

FIG: i wanna be a rogue

RIZ: stop multiclassing fig

ADAINE: Can you all please stop texting during class?

GORGUG: you could always pull a fabian

ADAINE: Turn my crystal on Do Not Disturb and forget it that way for 12 days?

ADAINE: Will do

The text chain fizzled out after that, just a picture of Fig hiding under the bleachers from Riz and, from Fig, a selfie with the two of them, grinning in the dappled shade cast by the bright sun. Adaine looks at Riz’s pixelated face and sighs. Where is he? And why isn’t he with the rest of the Bad Kids?

She sends a new text in the chain.

ADAINE: Riz? Are you on your way?

“Has anyone else seen him this week? Like actual one-on-one time?” Fig asks.

“Just in home room,” Kristen says.

“Was he normal?”

Kristen shrugs. “Chugging coffee, reminding the teacher to take roll, the usual Riz stuff.”

“I saw him at the grocery store the other day,” Gorgug offers, mint chocolate chip ice cream dripping down his finger and staining it a new shade of green. “And, uh—”

Adaine jolts to attention at the way Gorgug seems hesitant to speak. She feels like Riz, ears perking at the sounds of a mystery unfolding. “Yeah?”

“He had some blood on him. I don’t know if it was his own or…” Gorgug trails off. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask him about it.”

Adaine gets the sudden urge to scry on Riz. She doesn’t want to, not exactly, but her fingers itch with the desire to cast the spell. There are some lines she won’t cross when it comes to her friends’ privacy but, gods, does she crave the chance to see Riz and what he’s doing at this very moment. It would be easy. A silver mirror and a few minutes of casting time. Then, she could be reassured that Riz is okay, somewhere out there.

“I haven’t seen him at all,” Fabian complains. “What the hell is The Ball doing? What’s better than hanging out with us?” He presses a hand over his heart dramatically, an overly emotive display, but there’s real hurt in his eye.

“Maybe you should text him,” Adaine suggests.

Fabian purses his lips. “If he’s ignoring us, why would he answer my text?”

Fig perks up. “Ask him for help! Think about it, he never says no to that. Ever.”

Fabian nods and fumbles for his crystal, almost knocking over his milkshake glass before Gorgug stabilizes it. “What do I say?”

“That you need him,” Kristen says. “And then a winky face.”

Fabian rolls his eye and begins to type. Adaine peers over Fabian’s shoulder to read his text.

FABIAN: the ball! I need your help

“You gotta say more than that,” Fig says, leaning over Fabian’s other shoulder.

RIZ: what is it

RIZ: what happened

RIZ: fabian.

“I clearly do not.” Fabian leans back in the booth and smiles crookedly.

FABIAN: i need a sparring partner

FABIAN: asap

RIZ: aren’t you at basrar’s

FABIAN: you’d know the answer to that question if you bothered coming

For a long time, Fabian’s crystal says nothing but, “Riz Gukgak is typing…” Adaine holds her breath, praying that Riz will take the bait. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if he doesn’t. She wants to extend a hand to Riz, something he can grab onto and pull himself back up to shore.

Adaine’s own crystal lights up and she pulls it out of her pocket quickly, hoping to see a message from Riz. When she sees who is texting her, though, she grimaces and swipes the text notifications away. She’s not going to deal with that today. She has no interest in giving him an inch.

Adaine shoves her crystal back in her pocket just as Fabian’s lights up in response.

RIZ: meet you at yours in 25

FABIAN: i’ll pick you up

The next text alert goes off in a millisecond.

RIZ: No

RIZ: i don’t need a ride

“That seems… weird,” Gorgug offers. “How often does he say no to a ride, Fabian?”

“Never,” Fabian frowns, his eyebrows knitting together in thought. Adaine has the same concern. Why would Riz not be taking advantage of Fabian’s offer? Fabian can drive twice as fast as Riz can ride on his rusty bike. It’s less effort on Riz’s part and he gets to engage in one of his favorite activities: getting on the Hangman’s nerves. “Gods,” he mutters. “What is going on with The Ball?”

RIZ: why do you need a sparring partner btw?

Fabian clenches his teeth. “What do I say?”

“That you need extra credit for outside-of-class drills?” Fig says with a shrug.

FABIAN: extra credit

RIZ: why, did miss jones take points off you for something?

RIZ: did she grade you unfairly?

RIZ: fabian did she give you a bad grade?

RIZ: you don’t deserve that

Fabian sucks in a breath.

FABIAN: slow down

FABIAN: my grade is fine. miss jones is fine.

RIZ: i gotta go

RIZ: see you soon

“Well, that was a shitshow,” Kristen declares, taking the last bite of her waffle cone.

“It was fine,” Adaine tries to protest but her words don’t sound convincing, even to her own ears. “He’s going over to Fabian’s so… so that’s proof of life.”

There’s a sinking feeling in her stomach as she realizes now that she absolutely can’t scry on him. She knows he’s alive and well enough to text, to commit to a hang-out with a friend. He’s not dead or kidnapped. He doesn’t need her help.

Or does he?

Adaine rubs her head as a brain freeze overwhelms her senses. She just wants Riz to be okay. She wants to see him smiling over a bowl of raspberry cheesecake ice cream. She has no real reason to think that he’s in any trouble but, call it an Oracle sense, she has a bad feeling about things.

Something’s wrong with Riz and Adaine just wants to help.

“Well, get home,” Fig says, clapping Fabian on the back. “You’ve got a goblin delivery on its way.”

“Right, right. I… I’ll head out, then. I’ll update you guys later, I suppose.” He pushes himself to his feet and scoots past Kristen out of the booth. “Wish me luck.”

Adaine’s eyebrows knit. “Why would you need luck?”

Fabian raises an eyebrow and laughs, a single burst of air from his chest. “If you think I don’t need luck, you’ve never sparred with The Ball.”

Fabian claps Riz on the back and sends him home, watching him bike until his silhouette disappears around the street corner. He offered, again, to give Riz a ride home but Riz refused to leave his bike at Seacaster Manor.

He doesn’t feel good about letting Riz ride off into the night on his own on such a cold evening, especially not in the state he’s in.

He can’t quite put a word to it, the difference he senses in Riz, but something isn’t quite right. It makes Fabian’s skin crawl, interacting with a version of his best friend who is just a tiny bit wrong, a step to the left.

He tries to shake off the suspicion. He’s told Riz a dozen times not to investigate his friends so Fabian would be a hypocrite if he were to dive into his own investigation of Riz’s strange behavior. But he can’t say he isn’t tempted.

“Weapons or no weapons?” Riz asks him.

“Hm?”

“What did Miss Jones assign you?”

“Oh! Right, uh… weapons,” Fabian says, not thinking fast enough to realize he just signed himself up to getting cut to pieces by Riz for the next half hour. “I’ve been training with a scimitar so the Sword of Shadows would be good to counter that.”

“You want me to counter you?”

“I want you to give me a run for my money, The Ball.” Fabian flashes a cocky grin at Riz as he steps onto the mat in his home gym. He beckons Riz towards him. “Can you?”

Riz’s eyes flash with a dark look. It’s not quite the same as he looked that day in the cafeteria when he had some sort of episode—Fabian still doesn’t really know what happened—but the darkness is similar enough to make Fabian’s stomach roll.

“You’re on,” Riz says, and dives into the melee.

What is the look Fabian’s been seeing in Riz’s eyes lately? He’s not good at noticing little things, the ins-and-outs of body language or expressions, nor does he have much insight to understand what exactly those factors mean… but Fabian knows there’s something weird going on with Riz.

He just doesn’t know what to do about it.

ADAINE: How was yesterday?

KRISTEN: boring

FIG: it was chill

ADAINE: Not you guys

ADAINE: Fabian

FABIAN: it was fine

FABIAN: i guess

ADAINE: Was Riz acting normal?

FABIAN: i mean

GORGUG: it feels weird talking about him like this…

KRISTEN: oh shit this is a chain w/o him in it?

KRISTEN: that’s brutal

FIG: can you imagine if you figured out all of your friends had a group chat without you?

ADAINE: This isn’t, like… mean, like that

ADAINE: It’s out of concern

ADAINE: So Fabian, should we be concerned?

FABIAN: he was being the ball

KRISTEN: neurotic?

FIG: high strung?

KRISTEN: stressed out of his mind?

FABIAN: exactly

FABIAN: the ball being the ball

FABIAN: but maybe like… dialed up to 11

FABIAN: idk guys. gorgug’s right. it’s weird talking about him like this

ADAINE: Okay, we don’t have to talk about him

ADAINE: But can we all just agree to keep an eye on him?

FIG: hard to keep an eye on a rogue if he doesn’t want to be seen

FIG: and based on how many hangouts he’s skipped?

FIG: he doesn’t want to be seen

Adaine sighs and tosses her crystal onto her bed. She balls her hands up in tight fists, excess energy pouring from her fingertips. She wishes, in moments like these, that she was a martial class. How satisfying might it be to throw a punch when she’s struggling with all this frustration inside her body? How nice might it be to get it out? She can feel the arcane energy inside her blood begging to be manifested, preferably in Adaine’s Furious Fist.

Her crystal rings and she whips around, hoping beyond hope to see Riz’s name on her screen. When she sees who’s actually calling her, she huffs angrily and conjures a Mage Hand to deny the call. She doesn’t know what she did to earn this harassment but, nonetheless, here she is. Confronted by it any time she looks at her crystal to another six missed calls, eight texts, and two voicemails.

She should probably just block the number. She’s never going to answer the crystal when he calls, after all.

The crystal goes silent and Adaine is left in her empty bedroom, thinking about Riz again. Thinking about what could’ve possibly gone wrong to have a party member pull away from the others like this. She thought it was the Bad Kids forever, the Bad Kids for life. Her heart pangs painfully as she realizes that might not always be the case. Was this just the first step of a dissolution of their adventuring party? Would Riz leave them for good?

He’s never shown any indication of being anything but fiercely dedicated to the other Bad Kids. Any one of them could ask anything of him and he’d do it in a heartbeat. So why is he pulling away? How could both of those things be true? A loyal Bad Kid… who doesn’t get ice cream with the others. A dedicated friend… who never spends time with the rest of the party.

How is that possible? And why? Adaine wonders.

She wishes she could understand what has him disappearing around corners and melting into the shadows.

And, more than anything else, she wishes she could help.

Chapter Text

Riz tells himself that, one day, he’ll tell the Mordred Gang about the servants’ passages that criss-cross through the walls of Mordred Manor, allowing him to get from any corner of the house to any room of his choice. He’ll tell them eventually, but not while he’s still luxuriating in the ability to hide amongst the shadows, even in such a crowded house.

It’s not creepy, he tells himself. Jawbone and the others tell him that he’s welcome over at Mordred any time he wants. So he doesn’t feel too guilty about inviting himself over and spending some time in the corridors and hidden hallways, listening to the inhabitants of the manor going through their daily routines.

Maybe this isn’t quite what Jawbone meant, but Riz loves a technicality.

He sits in the attic above Adaine’s room, a cramped crawl space with a low ceiling that can’t be meant for more than storing a few boxes and chests. And, in this case, one Riz Gukgak.

Riz has felt antsy, like bugs are crawling under his skin, lately. He needs another quest, another task, another job to do. But the Bad Kids and Riz’s other loved ones haven’t mentioned being wronged lately, so he doesn’t know where to point his gun. A little bit of good old-fashioned spying seems like the next most obvious choice for him. If his friends won’t tell him what’s troubling them, he’ll find out himself.

As he sits above Adaine’s room, he hears her crystal ring, time after time. Calls, texts, even a voicemail notification, all within a span of a few minutes. Riz frowns. Who’s blowing up her crystal? And why isn’t Adaine responding? He hears her huffing with annoyance until, finally, she opens her bedroom door, slams it behind her, and disappears down the long spiral staircase.

Riz listens before he moves. He listens to the house, ears perking up, to get a clue about how long he has to investigate.

“I’m gonna take a shower,” Adaine calls out, somewhere in the living room. Riz can just barely make out Fig’s response, muffled by distance.

“I already used all of the hot water.”

Riz chuckles and opens the attic hatch, letting himself fall into Adaine’s bedroom. He lands on his feet, near-silently and takes a quick look around. Boggy sits in his terrarium and gives Riz a look, expression marked with discontent.

“It’s okay, Boggy. I’m just looking out for Adaine.”

Boggy croaks and narrows his wide eyes. Riz looks away; he’s not going to let a frog stop him from protecting his friends.

He scoops up her crystal from the charger and unlocks it quickly, glad that he knows each of the Bad Kids’ passcodes—or lack thereof, in Kristen and Fig’s case—for moments like these. He opens the texting app and his jaw drops at the name at the top.

Oisin Hakinvar.

Riz’s blood burns in his veins. He never once liked Oisin, not even when the others were rooting for him and Adaine to be a thing. Something about him gave Riz the creeps and he doesn’t know if it was the shatterstar in his heart or something deeper, something about his very self.

He opens the text chain from Oisin and, somehow, his stomach drops even further.

OISIN: Please, Adaine.

OISIN: I just want to talk.

OISIN: Adaine, please answer the crystal.

OISIN: Pick up.

OISIN: I just need a chance to tell you my side of the story.

OISIN: Please.

OISIN: Just give me a chance, Adaine. Please. I just want to talk.

Riz sees blood, blood red, staining his vision, blurring out all of his surroundings as his focus narrows to the screen of Adaine’s crystal and nothing else. Riz can hear nothing but the bubbling of blood in his veins and the sound of his own heartbeat. He looks at the notification bar: Seventeen missed calls. Two voicemails.

“What the fuck,” he mumbles. Riz tries to put together the mystery here but his brain burns with fire, too hot to think straight. He can only hold two thoughts in his head at once.

Oisin is harassing Adaine.

And Adaine doesn’t want anything to do with him.

Riz scrolls through the text chain and sees months of one-sided conversations, text after text from Oisin with no response from Adaine. The texts get more and more frequent. At first, they came in every few weeks. Then, every few days. And now? Every few minutes.

It’s harassment, plain and simple. It’s disrespectful and uncomfortable and, above all else, it could be dangerous. Adaine doesn’t deserve to worry about someone who seems like he’s just one small trigger away from lashing out at her.

And she won’t. She won’t have to worry about him anymore.

Riz types up a text, a single sentence, from Adaine’s crystal.

He knows what he has to do. He can solve this problem and he can do it without fear or hesitation. He’ll do it because that’s what good friends do; they make things better for each other. He’ll make Adaine’s life just a little bit easier. She won’t have to deal with harassing texts and calls anymore. She won’t have to worry about a certain blue dragonborn.

Not when Riz is done with him.

He hits the send button and drops Adaine’s crystal on her desk, darting from the house like a bullet from a gun.

ADAINE: I’ll meet you under the Marigold River Bridge in five minutes.

Adaine scrubs at her hair with a towel, wondering if she should just dye it pink at this point with how often it seems stained with blood. She thinks pink would look nice. Maybe a hint of orange at the ends? She’ll talk to Kristen about it over breakfast tomorrow.

The sun sets slowly, sending bright rays of light into her bedroom, almost blinding her with the fire of each ray. They perfectly illuminate her crystal which sits on her desk.

No longer attached to the charger.

She knows for a fact that she left her crystal charging when she left for the shower. Adaine holds her breath as she walks towards her desk, slowly, muttering the incantation for Mage Armor, just in case.

She picks up her crystal, with just one missed text on it.

OISIN: I’ll be there.

Adaine’s stomach rolls, nausea making itself known. Her mouth opens but she forgets to project her words. “Fig,” she says, voice shaking. “Fig!”

She swallows.

“FIG!”

The girl in question bursts through Adaine’s door with her guitar in hand and a spell on the tips of her fingertips. “What? What is it?”

“I think… I think, uh, maybe—Someone did something. I think they… He’s—I don’t know what’s going on.” Her hands tremble and she squeezes them together. “I have a really bad feeling about… about—”

Fig snatches the crystal out of her hand and her eyes widen at the sight of the text chain. “What the fuck? Oisin’s been messaging you? Why didn’t you tell any of us?”

“That’s—that’s not important right now! Listen, I didn’t send that last message. Someone else did from my crystal. And I think it’s pretty obvious who did. Someone sneaky enough to, to, to get into my bedroom. Someone who’s been acting weird lately. I just…”

Adaine’s vision goes pure white and the world fades away. She sees nothing but the icy foam on the top of ocean waves. Then, a shape manifests.

A goblin, gun drawn, eyes dark. He’s backlit by the setting sun, tucked underneath a familiar bridge. The sound of cars rolling over the bridge almost drowns out the tap-tap of approaching footsteps but, somehow, Adaine can still hear them. Gentle but eager, the steps get closer and closer to the goblin.

Closer and closer.

The gun fires.

Adaine gasps as the room around her manifests. She’s yanked violently from the vision and falls to her knees, overwhelmed by what she saw.

“We have to get to the bridge,” she says, grabbing Fig’s hand as she drops to her knees next to Adaine. “Riz is… he’s doing something really stupid.”

“Do you want me to get Kristen?”

“Fuck,” Adaine spits, “I’m out of seventh level slots. I can’t Teleport us there. Shit.”

“It’s fine, I can drive. I can mostly drive. Come on, let’s go.” Fig grabs Adaine’s hand and wrenches them both to their feet. She has something close to fear in her eyes, as close as Fig ever gets to it. “No better way to learn how to drive than by, uh, driving.” She pulls Adaine down the stairs. Adaine stumbles on every step, barely staying upright.

“Oh gods,” Adaine says, barely checked into the world around her. She Saw Oisin, killed by Riz’s hand. She knows her visions aren’t immutable but they’re pretty damn close. If she doesn’t hurry…

She doesn’t like Oisin, that’s for damn sure, but she doesn’t want him dead, either. She doesn’t want him to bleed out to a gunshot.

She crosses the gravel driveway, barefoot, and climbs in the passenger seat while Fig screams for Kristen to get outside, using Minor Illusion to amplify her voice.

What she doesn’t understand is why Riz is doing what he’s doing. Acting strange is one thing, going on a murder quest is another. What possessed him to go after Oisin? What is wrong with Riz?

The van peels out of the driveway with Kristen safely inside and Adaine holds on tightly to her own seatbelt, praying that Fig doesn’t crash the car before they make it to the bridge. It’s a short drive but it feels painfully long. She spends all three minutes and forty-eight seconds wondering if they’re going to be too late.

Fig slams on the brakes and Adaine’s head almost collides with the dashboard. All the air expels from her lungs as the seat belt cuts across her chest painfully. She doesn’t care. She unbuckles, leaps from the van, and scans her surroundings.

The fast moving River Marigold. The cars speeding across the bridge. The sound of a gunshot. The grassy shore along the river’s edge. The smell of sewage. The dark, shadowed corner, just a few feet of dirt underneath the bridge itself.

On that ground, a figure stands upright.

Another lays, prone, on the ground.

“Riz!” Adaine shouts.

Riz’s head snaps to her face as she runs towards him, trying to make out his expression. The damn sun, she thinks, still making Riz a silhouette. She can’t see the look in his eyes, not at the distance she’s at.

Fig and Kristen’s feet pound the ground behind him but, somehow, driven by pure adrenaline and fear, Adaine outruns them.

Riz drops to his knees and presses his Sword of Shadows against Oisin’s throat.

“No!” Adaine cries out, still too far to do a thing about it. “Riz, no!”

Riz begins to saw at Oisin’s throat, back and forth, back and forth. Blood pours from the gunshot wound in his chest and from the new lacerations across his neck. The ground is flooded with red, red blood. It covers Riz in arterial spray, making him look feral and unhinged.

As Adaine gets closer, she can see that his face does nothing to quell that distinction. His pupils are blown out, covering his irises in black. He bares his teeth in frustration as Adaine gets closer, sawing faster and faster.

“Stop it!” Fig says. Adaine hears her strum her guitar and a Gust of Wind sends Adaine flying. She stumbles into the shallows, soaking her shins in dirty city water. She doesn’t care when she sees what the real purpose of the Gust of Wind was: to throw Riz off Oisin’s corpse.

Riz hisses, animalistic and angry and flings himself back towards Oisin. He doesn’t say a word as he repositions and continues grinding his sword back and forth against Oisin’s neck.

“I said, stop,” Fig says, throwing another Gust of Wind. Riz tumbles, head over heels, into the dirt, rolling a few feet away. He slams his head against one of the bridge’s piles. He doesn’t even seem to notice as blood drips from the back of his skull.

“Riz, what are you doing?” Adaine asks, finally close enough to Oisin to touch his skin. She drops to her knees and presses her fingers against his pulse point. His hand is stiff but not yet cold. She can’t find a pulse. “Kristen, he’s dead.”

“On it.”

Riz growls, the loudest Adaine has ever heard. The force of the vibration shakes his chest, making him look even more feral than before, just an animal with base instincts, guttural sounds, and anger in his eyes. He bounds forward, trying to make up the ground he lost from the second Gust of Wind.

Adaine hates herself for it but she puts her hand on her Sword of Sight and speaks the incantation for Hold Person.

“I’m sorry,” she says as Riz’s limbs lock up, freezing him, mid-leap. “I’m so sorry, Riz, it’s…”

“How long has he been dead?” Fig asks Kristen, voice panicked. “Can you revive him?”

“I—”

Adaine takes her eyes off Riz and sees Kristen and Fig kneeling anxiously over Oisin’s head. Kristen fumbles in her pockets, pulling out a small diamond, which she presses into Oisin’s forehead. Twilight magic sparkles around her, dusty purple and dark blue, as the tendrils encircle Oisin’s skin and stitch up his wounds.

“No!” Riz screams, raw, insistent, and entirely unlike himself. Adaine flinches at the sound. She didn’t think victims of a Hold Person spell could speak. Something about Riz, the state he’s in now, seems to have defied that simple arcane law.

The spell snaps like a rubber band, there and then gone. Riz lunges forward, going for Oisin’s body just as the magic brings him back to life. Oisin gasps, his eyes widening, but the last thing he sees before succumbing to the void once more is Riz sinking his claws into Oisin’s chest.

“Riz,” Kristen complains. “You just made me waste a diamond, gods.” Kristen takes a wide swing with her staff, trying to fend off Riz who continues to dive towards Oisin, claws first. “Stop it!”

“Don’t hit him,” Adaine protests.

Riz sprays spit from his mouth as he hisses and dodges Kristen’s staff swings.

“He’s not going to stop! Gods, someone else take over, I need to resurrect this fucker again.” Kristen lowers her staff as she pulls out another diamond from her pocket and channels more pale purple magic.

Fig strums her guitar, a power chord, that sends out a Thunderwave, blowing Riz back and leaving him bruised and bloody.

“Fig!”

“Kristen’s right! He’s not going to stop on his own. I’m not shooting to kill but… But we have to stop him somehow.”

Adaine grimaces as Riz pushes himself to his feet like a zombie lurching back to life. He scrambles towards the girls, running on all four limbs, a goblin possessed. Adaine throws a volley of Magic Missiles towards him but, as the first hits and he hisses in pain, Adaine quickly redirects the other two, throwing them uselessly at the horizon line. She doesn’t want Riz to hurt at her hands. She wouldn’t be able to stand it.

Riz doesn’t seem to have the clarity of mind to think about things like pacifism or peace, though. He flies past her and digs his teeth into the juncture of Oisin’s throat and shoulder, ripping into the scaly flesh.

“Riz,” Fig calls out, swinging her guitar like a bat at his chest. The resounding impact echoes under the Marigold Bridge and Adaine doesn’t think she’ll ever stop hearing that noise: the combination of a guitar’s strings, all struck at once, and the moan of agony from her best friend’s lips. He’s thrown back and slides along the dirt, covered in mud and gravel.

Riz lifts himself off the ground with a determined look on his face, gritted teeth and jaw set strongly in place. He plants a foot in the dirt and picks up his sword. Riz licks the sharp edges of his teeth and lunges towards Oisin, once more, sword drawn.

Adaine can’t keep playing this game, this push and pull. She opens her mouth and bellows a word, one that drips with arcane power.

“Freeze,” Adaine insists, magic coating her Command in thick smoke.

Riz does. His limbs stop moving but his expression doesn’t go lax, staying intense, determined, and bloodthirsty. He scowls as his eyes dart between the other Bad Kids and the corpse on the ground.

“Oh, thank the gods,” Fig mutters, dropping her guitar by her side and putting an arm around Kristen’s shoulder. “How long does the spell last, Adaine?”

“Sixty seconds, hurry up and Revivify him.”

“On it,” Kristen declares.

Adaine knows what she has to do with the next fifty seconds. “Riz,” she says, looking into his black eyes. “What’s going on with you? Why are you going after Oisin?”

“You have to let me kill him.” Spittle sprays from Riz’s lips. He growls the words, almost inaudible through the rumbling in his chest and the saliva that fills his mouth.

He’s feral, Adaine thinks. He’s an animal. “Why?” She begs him for an answer. She wants to see a sign of her friend somewhere past this strange monster that he’s become. She only has forty seconds left to find Riz again.

Riz shows his fangs, bright white and dripping with Oisin’s blood. “It’s justice. It’s justice. He couldn’t take no for an answer.” Riz’s fingers twitch. Thirty seconds left. “He was harassing you, Adaine. I know right and wrong and I know that not leaving you alone is wrong.”

“Riz, killing people is wrong.”

Riz looks confused, genuinely thrown by what she said. “No, I know, I know but… but it’s different. I’m doing it for good reasons. Everyone I’ve hurt and threatened—even killed—I’ve done it for the right reason. I promise.”

“What reason is that?” Adaine says, voice shaking. She only has twenty seconds left to get through to Riz and she doesn’t like her odds. He’s cognizant, sure, but he looks like he’s just waiting for his chance to rip Oisin apart again. His eyes dart between her own and Oisin. Adaine doesn’t look behind herself, trusting that the others will be bringing Oisin back to his feet soon enough. She needs to focus. To get through to Riz somehow.

Riz looks back at her. His golden irises shine through for a brief moment, wide and bright. There’s Riz, inside this animal. Riz is still there, deep within. He’s stained with blood, from his claws, his teeth, the tip of his sword. His clothes are drenched in it. It drips off his fingertips, drips into his eyes, drips onto the ground. He’s saturated in a deep, dark crimson.

Riz licks his lips and looks deep into Adaine’s eyes. She sees desperation in his face as he speaks. “I did it for you. I did it for all of you.” He speaks the words like they’re obvious.

Adaine can’t help the small gasp that she lets out. “For us? But, Riz, we didn’t ask for this.”

“But—” Ten seconds remain.

“Riz, you want the best for us, right?”

“Of course,” Riz says, smiling. Adaine tries not to notice the blue scales in between his front teeth. “I want to make things right for you. All of you.”

“And you trust me?”

“Obviously.”

Adaine takes a step towards him. With three seconds left, she whispers a goodnight to Riz and taps his temple twice, casting Sleep.

Adaine looks up at the bottom of the bridge, wishing, instead, that she was looking at the starry night sky. She’s exhausted. She’s lost. She’s confused. She just needs the answers—or at least an answer—so that she knows what to do next.

The sun has long set, leaving the four people under this bridge shivering in the cold wind of the night.

“Incense,” she mumbles.

“What?” Kristen says, wiping blood off her upper lip. She was in the splash zone, unfortunately, for Oisin’s wounds. She isn’t hurt, not a bit, but, just like the rest of the Bad Kids crowded under this bridge, she’s drenched in blood.

“I need incense.” She sits up abruptly, knowing she doesn’t have any time to waste in an emotional hangover from the trauma of what she just had to do. Casting three combat spells on her friend in less than two minutes isn’t something she ever, ever, wants to do again. “He’s out for an hour. I need ten of those minutes to divine something. But I need incense.”

“Your jacket,” Fig says, dropping to the ground next to Adaine. She puts an arm around her shoulders and squeezes her tightly. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“Right,” Adaine says, wondering how she could’ve forgotten about the arcane properties of her denim jacket. She shoves her hand into her pocket and pulls out three sticks of incense, wrapped in a leather cord. She pulls out a small wooden holder, too, and balances them on the dirt in front of her where Oisin’s body once laid. Adaine hopes Fig made it very clear to him that he better turn around and run as far away as he could after Kristen brought him back to life.

Adaine never wants to see his face again and she thinks Riz agrees. For his own safety, Oisin better be long gone.

“A sacrifice.”

“What?” Fig asks, tail whipping behind her.

“I need incense and a sacrifice.”

“You can take me,” Kristen says, voice even. “I volunteer.”

“No, like a rat or something,” Adaine says, too tired to find any humor in Kristen’s quick offer. “Or a snake. A lizard.”

“Can I Minor Illusion one?” Fig asks. Adaine shrugs, half-here and half-gone. She can’t process what she just did, casting so many spells on a fellow Bad Kid, so she can’t seem to stay fully checked-in to reality. It’s like her mind is trying to protect itself from what her hands wrought by keeping some distance between her and her actions. She wants to think clearly again—she has to—but she doesn’t know how.

Fig doesn’t seem to share her struggle with dissociation, quickly spinning her hand in the air and conjuring the illusion of a mouse. She snaps her fingers and suddenly, the mouse’s neck breaks with a loud crunch.

“Ugh,” Kristen complains.

“It’s not real,” Fig insists.

Adaine shakes her head. It doesn’t feel real. The mouse? The world? The situation she’s in right now? Not real. Can’t be real.

She kneels forward and lights the incense with a whispered word, a tiny lick of flame. She takes the ghostly mouse from Fig’s hands and lays it in front of the incense. Adaine pinches her eyes shut. “Give me a minute.”

The world turns white, pure white. White like the clouds over roaring ocean waves. White like the sun-bleached coral on the shore. White like sand. Once everything has been wiped clean, shapes begin to take form.

A goblin, of course. Lying supine on uneven ground.

A tiefling kneeling at his side and holding his hand. A human cradling his head in her lap.

An elf with a pair of forceps in hand. She leans forward.

Adaine gasps in a breath, returning to the present moment. The colors of the real world filter into her vision and, with them, comes her clarity of mind.

“I know what we have to do.” Adaine smiles. Kristen drops to the ground and cradles Riz’s head in her lap. “Yes, good start.”

“What?”

“We have to perform surgery on him.”

“What?” Fig hisses. “What the fuck?”

“I know, but I Saw it. There’s—ugh, this is so gross—there’s like a parasite or something in his head. We have to get it out.”

“Truly, I’m going to throw up,” Kristen says. “No fucking way, dude.”

“We have to. You guys heard him, he’s talking… he’s saying all this stuff about justice. About making things right. There’s something wrong with his head. It’s been corrupted by… by… I don’t know what. Don’t you guys see it? That wasn't Riz talking to us. It was the fucking—the worm in his brain or whatever.

“I’m not doing brain surgery!” Kristen declares.

“Girl, you’re the healer,” Fig says, rearranging herself so she can take Riz’s hand and hold it tightly.

“It’s fine, Kristen,” Adaine says. “I’m the one who did it in the vision. You’re just here for… I don’t know, moral support. Or to bring him back to life if I kill hi—”

“You’re gonna kill him?” Kristen shouts.

“I’m not gonna kill him!” Adaine bites back. “I’m gonna try not to kill him.”

“‘Try,’” Kristen repeats, mouth gaping. “Try.”

“I don’t know, I’ve never done brain surgery before!”

“Calm down,” Fig cuts in. “It’s going to be fine, right? Right? Everything’s going to go perfectly well and Riz is going to get better, alright?”

“You don’t even sound like you believe it yourself,” Kristen says.

Fig sighs. “I don’t know what to believe.”

“I’m doing it! I’m gonna do it, okay, so everyone stop freaking out. Stop yelling at me, stop yelling at each other, I’m about to… oh my gods, I’m about to remove a worm from my friend’s brain.” Adaine tucks her hand into her pocket and pulls out a pair of forceps.

Then, for ninety-five long seconds, she blocks out everything that her body does.

She flashes back to awareness with her forceps still in hand, a parasite pinched in between its jaws, and her best friend, laying in front of her, bleeding from the nose.

“Oh my gods, you killed him,” Kristen says desperately.

“I didn’t kill him!”

“He’s not moving!”

“He’s asleep!”

“Wake him up!”

“How?”

“Cast Dispel Magic!”

“Oh my gods,” Kristen waves her hands in the air, mumbles the words to cast Dispel Magic, and grimaces. “Why isn’t he waking up?”

“He is,” Adaine says, studying Riz’s face carefully. It tenses up, just slightly, a tiny pinch in between his eyebrows. “Give him a second.”

Blood drips from Riz’s nose, a physical reminder of what Adaine just did to him. Is there permanent damage from her time spent digging around in his skull? Is Riz going to be okay? Is he going to be the same as he was before the worm?

He groans.

“Why are you still holding that fucking worm?” Fig asks, gesturing wildly at Adaine’s hands. She looks down and sees the forceps still holding the wiggling worm in place. “Kill it!”

“Augh,” Adaine cries out, seeing it for the first time. It’s short and fat, a pink, ringed bug that wiggles like it’s trying to burrow inside something. She drops the forceps in a panic and the worm begins to squirm on the ground towards Riz’s open ear. “No!”

Kristen wrenches Riz’s head away from the worm and uses the heel of her foot to smash it into the ground, leaving nothing behind but a smear of pale pink in the dirt.

“What’s h’ppening?” Riz moans, eyes blinking open. He rolls over onto his side, head falling from Kristen’s lap and onto the dirt ground, wet with blood.

“Riz!” Fig exclaims, helping him upright. She lets him lean heavily on her side, sitting up against her arm. “How… how are you feeling?”

“R’lly, really bad. Really bad.”

Adaine grimaces. “But like, is your head… do you feel like yourself?”

Riz’s eyes drift shut. “Hm?” His limbs are lax in Fig’s arms as he slouches against her side.

“No, no! Riz, stay awake, okay? Stay awake.” Adaine lurches forward to shake Riz’s arm. His eyes slowly blink open but he barely looks like he recognizes her as he looks in Adaine’s eyes.

“I don’t… I can’t…”

Riz goes limp.

“Heal him!”

Fig presses her hand on his upper arm and sends a wave of red-black magic through his body. The air begins to smell like cayenne peppers and cinnamon. Kristen stamps her staff on the ground and sends a Greater Restoration through the air, to burrow in through his temple. Adaine wants to help, to be able to do something, but she’s a wizard, not a healer.

She can do nothing but Prestidigitate the blood off his skin and mend the rips in his clothes. It doesn’t feel like enough.

Still, somehow, seeing Riz in better shape is a balm on her soul. He’s clean, tidy, free of wounds, and, more importantly, one brain parasite lighter. It’s a relief like she’s never felt before, knowing that the thing that once infected him is dead and gone, nothing more than fertilizer for the grass below her feet.

Riz stirs, eyes slowly opening. “Guys?”

“Riz, stay awake, okay? You’re gonna be okay now.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m… I can do that.”

Adaine narrows her eyes, trying to tell if Riz is better just by the look on his face. His irises are no longer dwarfed by his pupils. Adaine is soothed by their bright gold color. He’s not drooling, spitting, growling, or anything like that anymore. He doesn’t look like an animal.

He looks like Riz.

“Are you okay, Riz? We’ve… gods, I don’t even know what to ask you right now because I have no idea what happened. What’s been happening with you. You just—you disappear on us constantly. Where do you go?”

“It’s…” Riz sighs, rearranging himself so that he’s holding up his own weight. He looks guiltily between each of the girls. “It’s complicated. I mean… It sounds crazy, to be honest. Now that I think about it, it sounds really, really crazy.”

“Now that you think about it without a worm in your head?”

Riz’s eyebrows knit together.

“What?”

“What?” Riz asks, sputtering out the word. “What worm?”

Kristen points to a patch of pink in the dirt, only barely visible under ambient street light. Riz frowns.

“There was a worm in my head?”

“That’s literally all the information we know,” Fig says, voice low. “Can you… can you fill us in on the rest?”

“Well, I certainly didn’t know anything about a worm,” Riz explains. He tries to think about how it might’ve infected him. How does one even get a brain parasite? Was it something he did? Something he ate? Someone he fought? Just thinking about a worm crawling around in his brain makes him shiver but something about the imagined sensation is familiar… It reminds him of a sparring match a few months ago.

“I’ll heal you,” Sae’ret mouths slowly. She raises her hand to Riz’s left ear and, without moving her mouth again, Riz feels an unpleasant sensation, nothing like the healing magic he’s used to from Kristen or even from other students. Is this what magic feels like on the Astral Plane? It’s a skin-crawling sensation, an uncomfortable squirming inside his head. The arcane power crawls down his ear canal and scratches at his already aching ear drum painfully.

“Sae’ret…”

“What?” Kristen asks. “What about her?”

“Riz, what happened to you?” Adaine asks, reaching for his hand. Riz lets the connection pull him into the present moment, a grounding presence.

Riz tries to open his mouth to explain himself but he stutters on his words. “This—this is gonna sound crazy but, uh,” Riz sighs. “You can’t judge me, okay? I did some fucked up shit but I swear I thought it was the right thing to do. I was just… I was trying to help. I was trying to make things fair, to create justice, that’s all.”

“Justice,” Adaine repeats. “You said Sae’ret’s name, right? Do you remember what she was saying about justice, that day at lunch? Something about githzerai seeking justice, even through bloodshed.”

“Yes! Exactly,” Riz nods eagerly. “I needed—needed—to make things just. It’s like, hm, how do I explain this? It’s like I would see things that were wrong and know that I had to be the one to fix them. If something felt immoral, I had to do something about it.”

“So the worm just made you a better person? How did that lead to killing Oisin?”

Riz grimaces. So that wasn’t a bad dream, he thinks. “No, it made me a more moral person, but a less ethical one. I didn’t care about the ramifications of what I was doing, I just wanted to make things better for the people around me. No matter the cost. I was the judge, jury, and executioner. Gods, what did I do?”

“It’s okay,” Fig says quickly, wrapping an arm around Riz. “It’s okay. Whatever you did, I’m sure it’s fine.”

“I,” Riz blinks, thinking about the past couple of months. He sees flashes of people he threatened, blackmailed, assaulted, and now, even killed. He sees them walk through his mind like a carousel of his own depravity. “I don’t know.”

“But you can think clearly now, right? You’re better now, right? You’re all better.” Fig speaks like she’s trying to convince herself of her words. Riz wishes there was a bit more conviction in her speech, for his own sake.

He swallows and, for the first time in months, his saliva doesn’t taste like thick blood. His body isn’t alight with fire and heat, skin itching for violence. He doesn’t see scarlet in the corners of his vision. “I think I am. I’m better.”

He frowns and stares into the blood soaked ground. He can’t help but wonder what it says about him that all it took was a tiny little worm to turn him into a brutal vigilante with no qualms about spilling blood. Was he almost there already? Was he just a step away from this life?

Would he end up here again, one day? With or without the parasite in his head?

“We should call the others,” he says quickly.

“Oh shit, we didn’t tell them,” Fig says.

“We didn’t exactly have time!” Adaine protests.

Kristen taps her hands on the ground idly. “Why are we calling them, Riz?”

Riz sighs, chest shaking with the force of it. He isn’t sure why. He just wants to see them without the ever-present cloudy mist of blood standing between him and his loved ones. It’s gone now, the fog, and he feels one hundred pounds lighter alright.

“Because I miss them,” he shrugs.

The girls exchange a look, something sad but hopeful.

With a quick turn, Fig grins, wide and sharp. “I think it’s time to make up for all the Basrar days that you missed, Gukgak. One ice cream sundae at a time.”

Riz laughs and nudges into her side with his shoulder, exchanging grins with Kristen and Adaine. He sucks in a breath, oxygen rushing to his brain.

He can think clearly. It’s a gift, one he's taken for granted through all his life. But he can think clearly and he can think about his loved ones without his mind screaming at him to kill for them.

I did it all for you, he remembers himself saying. He did. Love is a powerful motivator, it turns out. With the right provocation, it can inspire earth-shaking damage.

Riz shakes off the thought. He’s free now. He’s not going to fall for the brain worm’s tricks, telling him that people must die for the sake of his loved ones. Even if it felt so obvious to him, and so easy, too.

He looks up at Fig and smiles at her, shaking off the dark thoughts and filling his mind with images of his friends, a warm night, and ice cream sandwiches. He finds it easy to nod at her words and say, “I think I can accept that punishment.”

Within the hour, he’s squeezed into a booth at Basrar’s with a scoop of strawberry cheesecake ice cream in front of him, paid for by Fabian’s pocket money. His head hurts, just a bit.

But he thinks it’s just a brain freeze.