It's never safe to spend too long with your own thoughts, especially when those thoughts have a tendency to get out of hand at times. Months upon months of waiting are finally at an end. Hannah's been busy, busy, busy, usy- John's been hounding her at every turn and potions are a lot more dangerous then Wizard-Burger's use of them would have you believe. The new season starts here folks! Let's see what the gang's been up to...

 

“Ari...”
My head snapped up harshly from the round thingy I was fiddling with on my work table and my jaw dropped open in shock.

“...M-mum?...”

“Ari”

“MUM!”
With a kick my stool crashed to the floor behind me and I broke into a sprint out into the void that surrounds my workshop.
“MUM?!”

“Ari”
Her voice seemed to echo slightly off in the distance to my left but all it did was encourage me to run faster towards her.

It felt like I was running too slow, the endless void of darkness around me playing tricks on me from its uniform abyss no doubt, but eventually a light formed up in front of me, growing progressively larger until I finally burst through it back into the bright daylight of the more publically accessible areas within my realm, only to come to a grinding halt as the bottom fell out of my stomach in fear.

“Ari...”
My body stumbled backwards away from her and I ended up tripping over my own feet, crashing heavily to the ground with a whimper.
“Ari-”

The face, the hair, even the dress was right for the last time I saw her.
It was my Mum without a shadow of a doubt... everything but her eyes?

In place of those warm, caring eyes that I came to know and love all over again in the month I got to enjoy being her ‘youngest daughter’ there are the same cold, dead looking milky-white eyes that have haunted my nightmares for months now.
Eyes that burned themselves into my memory when I saw a sea of their accusing glares staring up at me as John took me away from Wizard Island, the place where I committed the first atrocity of my current incarnation in truly awe-inspiring style.

“Ari”

“This is a dream, it’s just a dream, you fell asleep! You fell asleep you stupid, STUPID-”
Mum reached out towards me for a hug and I froze for a moment at the warm smile that crossed her lips before melting away into an angry sneer as the world around us darkened dramatically to match her sudden change in mood.

“You killed us Ari, why would you kill us?”
My mouth went dry at the hurt look that crossed her face as a single tear fell out of those horribly empty eyes to leave a bitter trail down her cheek.
“Why did you kill me Ari?”

From the growing darkness behind her, shadows started moving and slowly, one after another, bodies with recognisable faces shuffled forward into the light, every one of them staring with those same cold, dead, accusing eyes as they reached towards me in a terrifying mockery of life itself.

“It’s just a dream! It’s just a dream!”

“Why useless girl?”
My head snapped up again to stare broken-heartedly as a shade of Edith moved out of the darkness with a glare on her tired old face.

“Why Han?”
A shade of Sarah stepped out next, dark black lines burned all over her skin like a spiders web as her cold white eyes glared down at me in anger.

“Why Mom?”
To Sarah’s side a tiny shadow moved into the light and Eris’s beautiful little face glared out at me with those same eyes, her neck bent at an unnatural angle that made me nauseous just from the sight of it.

Almost subconsciously I shuffled my butt further back across the floor to allow some distance between us, both physically and mentally, not that it helped much at all as they all bore down on me as one group with Eris in the lead.

“I didn’t do it, it was all Arista! I didn’t do it sweetie, I didn’t, I’m sorry!”
I got lost in the moment when faced with everyone that I’d failed, everyone that I’ve been hiding from for so long, all accusing me of things that even I truly didn’t believe I was innocent of.
I fell apart into a desperate sobbing mess on the floor instead of fighting back as my rational mind was screaming at me to do.
“I didn’t do it, Arista did! I killed her, she’s gone! I stopped her, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry but I stopped her!”

They all moved a few more steps closer towards me and I frantically shuffled back once more until my back hit something that halted my progress with a startled grunt from me.

“Oh, did you now?”
My mouth went dry again and slowly I turned my head up to stare into the maliciously grinning face of Arista’s adult form.
“You didn’t really think it would be THAT easy, did you Alice? You’re mind is mine and nothing you do will EVER change that fact... darling..”
A scream of unadulterated fear ripped its way past my lips.

As everyone surged forth to grab me the world fluctuated and stretched wildly before finally falling to pieces with a deafening crash.

======

A jolt shot up my spine and I surged away from my desk in a cold sweat, my arms flailing wildly in a useless attempt to fight off Arista and her army of the undead.

Several more things crashed down to the floor from their precarious positions around me to join the box I’d been working on, which I’ll assume was the source of the big crash that finally helped me wake up at long last; a thing which has become worryingly hard to do as times gone on in my nightmares.

“Just a dream, it was just a dream Hannah, stop being a stupid idiot you useless-”
My hands came up to frantically scrub through my hair in frustration at my own weakness.

“Al never had problems like this! Stop being such a bloody girl about it and grow up you stupid-”
When they’d finished turning my hair into a mess of, admittedly already dirty, red tangles my hands dropped heavily to my side for a moment before shooting back into action as they reached almost unconsciously towards the rack of test-tubes I ended up sticking to the table permanently after the first few times I knocked it over while distracted.
“-never forget to take a dose idiot, what the hell was I thinking?!”

After a bit of blind fumbling my hand pulled sharply back to my chest clutching the thin vial of mouldy-green looking liquid I’d been searching for, I didn’t even hesitate to pop the top and down the nasty tasting potion at this point, the novelty of it’s disgusting taste completely outweighed by need and necessity after weeks of use luckily.

As I felt the liquid slowly make its way down my throat into my stomach a warm, happy haze of numbness settled over my mind once more, setting the world back to the way it should have been from the start at long last.

The final stages of the potion kicked in, forcing my eyes to roll back for a moment or two as the haze cleared leaving only the numbness and a stark feeling of clarity that comes from being wide-awake, which all flooded through my system in seconds.
It may be potentially dangerous and considered bad form in most places around the world but sometimes you’ve just got to love self-medication in all its completely ill-advised glory!

“Now to clean up this mess, get some more food while everyone’s asleep and water Bitey. It’s gonna be a busy day, busy, busy, busy day, busy da-”
My hand flew up to slap myself across the cheek and break my brain out of the loop it had unhelpfully decided to settle into quickly, much to my surprised delight.

“Thanks hand!”

With one final giggle and a gentle stroke of appreciation to said helpful appendage from its other, less helpful twin that I call ‘lefty’, I set to work on today’s tasks at last with an enthusiastically happy hum of anticipation towards the fun day ahead of me once more.

I think it’s a Tuesday? Feels like a Tuesday, I LOVE Tuesdays!

======

“Hannah’s log, supplemental, these are the voyages of the Starship Hannah, her continuing mission to... something the something?... I forget, but it’s very important so listen up!”
If he could I’m pretty sure my chlorophyll infused roommate would have rolled what passes for ‘eyes’ to his, admittedly one of a kind, species.
“Anyway, progress has been slow as always, everything's too slow, and food is just... I miss food?”

It’s difficult, the hour or two that comes between the end of my last dose and the time I can have another one without killing myself, talking to Bitey is pretty much all that keeps me sane in moments like these. Everything is too clear to be fun, too real to be imaginary and too much for me to handle without sinking into that same horrible state of lost depression I suffered through until I finally worked out how to make the wonderful, horrible tasting, potion at last.

“I can't keep what food I get down too well anymore for some reason, not that you’d know how that feels, would you Bitey?... and I miss it I guess, and... Ugh, never mind, carrying on!”
If he could I’m sure he would have agreed with me.
As it is, he nodded his bulbous little head in what I suspect is actually an automatic response to me breathing near him but one that looks appropriately close to a conciliatory nod for all I care at this point.
“The math isn’t working out on my thrust calculations still, I have NO idea why. Everything else is working fine but I’m missing something on this one... honestly, if I wasn’t scraping the bottom of the barrel on projects to keep my hands busy and my mind from drifting at this point I’d probably just give it all up as a bad job and move on.”

Bitey’s overly large, for his size, head split open to let the leafy appendage I’ve come to think of as his ‘tongue’ flop out stupidly in response.

I sat there for a moment or two feeling almost disappointed over his reaction, not surprised, but disappointed all the same.
Considering what he is and how he came into existence I can’t blame him if he doesn’t understand me honestly, it just helps to talk in general really, until he came along I’d practically lost my voice from a mix of disuse followed by a lot of use whenever a nightmare caught up with me.

“You could at least pretend you care... asshole, I should have named you John!”
His head, still eerily reminiscent of the larval stage to a certain ‘Audrey II’ from a certain little shop filled with horror which Sarah used to love watching along with Grease and anything else with music we could sing along to as a kid, certainly isn’t the most expressive of faces to work with but I’m pretty sure he’s offended now.

Either that or he’s come to associate the word ‘John’ with ‘food’ considering the amount of times I grumble about him whenever I try to get some edible sustenance at this point... that’s all under the assumption that he even CAN hear me, let alone understand any of the noises I make of course..

Speaking of noises I make, my stomach decided that now would be the perfect time to growl loudly with almost bone deep hunger.

“Everyone’s asleep at this point usually, no harm in me grabbing something real quick while John’s distracted, right?”
Yet again Bitey was less than helpful on offering input of any kind but I took his vaguely ‘nod-like’ movement to mean he agreed with me if nothing else.
“Okay, think, feel, do..”

Those words have become my personal mantra of late.
Ironically I seem to spend most of my time trying not to do the first two parts of it but with my magic the way it is I have to rely on what abilities I can take from Ari’s, admittedly pretty brief, instructions on how to control my mindscape and apply them to the realm instead.

“Think-”
Destination, food, no people.
“-Feel-”
Determination, want, need.
“-DO!”

My hand thrust out in a punching movement and a hole tore itself in the space in front of it, floating in mid-air as if gravity and reality were mere suggestions... which now that I’ve said it is probably true in this realm, considering I’m in control of it.

As I unclenched my fingers to start searching for the nearest food item in reach something cold, heavy and metal landed on my wrist with an almost deafening ‘click’, followed moments later by a cheer of some sort which I didn’t really get to hear properly before yanking my arm back out of the rift and clutching it frantically to my chest as the rift snapped shut with a thought.

For one heart-stopping minute there I thought John had managed to get one of his suppression handcuffs on me somehow but that idea quickly fell apart when the rift actually managed to close, a certain lack of a connecting chain holding it open being the biggest hint, naturally.

Carefully I eased my fist back away from my chest to stare down at an oddly shaped, bulky metal band which is apparently now sealed around my wrist like an over-inflated bangle of dark blue metal in confusion and worry.

As I twisted my hand over to check the underside for a seam of some sort a trail of previously unseen runes lit up in a ring around the bangle in a worryingly familiar shade of red, the same red my runes used to take on whenever I activated them using m- using Sarah’s stolen fire core!

The runes flared so bright that I had to wince my eyes down automatically and that was all the warning I got before something heavy, loud and soft appeared out of nowhere to land right on top of me, sending us both to the ground in a pained tangle of limbs.

“HA! I knew it would work, suck it John-boy you owe me a free coffee!”
Past my throbbing head and currently rather crushed lungs I could do little more than stare up breathlessly at the grinning face of Sarah as she supported herself above me on one arm while holding her other, bangle-sporting one, up to her mouth as she shouted out in victory.

“I’ll get you you’re stupid coffee, what about Hannah? Is she alright?”
Sarah’s smile slipped and her eyes cut down to mine making me freeze like the terrified ball of nerves that I am.

“Hi Han, it’s been a while, miss me?”
Even if she wasn’t sitting on my chest right now I doubt I could have drawn breath properly anyway from the warm glow that seemed to come from her face as she stared down at me so lovingly.
All I could do was stare as a smile I honestly never thought I’d see again, either by her choice or... or worse reasons, beamed down at me from Sarah’s normal, unmarked face.
“Han?”

My body tried to take in a startled gasp or two I think, all I know is that a few seconds later I was hyperventilating and Sarah’s smile had disappeared into a worried frown.

“Shit! I think she’s gonna-”
I didn’t get the chance to find out what she thought I was going to do because with one more half-hearted gasp the world faded to black and I passed out into oblivion, from shock I’d assume.

======

“-not going to slap her John. She looked like I was going to eat her or something before she fainted, she wakes up to me doing anything violent and I think we’re in for a meltdown of epic proportions which, after seeing what’s left of Crater Lake, I do NOT want to witness in person!”
Sarah’s voice was easy to pick out as I slowly came back to reality from my blissfully dreamless spell of unconsciousness.
“No harm in looking, I guess? Looks like she’s been busy at least... lot of stuff here I don’t want to even touch considering the power I can feel pouring off of them, the ominously glowing runes and utter mess around them as well come to that.”

I couldn’t make out what response those words got, however she’s communicating with John right now must be pretty damn quiet for me to not even make out anything above a dull mutter.

“She’s got some green junk in vials on what looks like her main desk and... some sort of plant too?... I dunno John-boy, botany was never my thing. It looks kinda weird, familiar but I can’t really put my finger on wh- AHH!”
My eyes flew open and my body jerked into motion at Sarah’s startled yelp.

Before I knew it I was across the room, crouched in front of her protectively as my brain struggled to process the scene around me until it all clicked in my head at last and I broke out into a fit of relieved laughter.

“Y-yeah, I’m fine John... it’s not funny, the bloody thing tried to BITE me you asshole!”
I couldn’t stop laughing as my little green roommate seemed to flex his two largest leaves as if shrugging his ‘shoulders’ before settling back down into his pot properly to wait for his next chance at food to fill his non-existent, yet somehow ravenous stomach.
“Yeah, that’s her laughing, she’s awake apparently... no, I’m not gonna slap her now either John... She’s not hysterical, she’s just laughing, for powers sake!”

The laughter wouldn’t go away and with Sarah’s watchful eyes on me I couldn’t exactly sucker-punch myself back to normal like I usually would without some rather awkward questions, so I went for the easier alternative and moved quickly over to my desk to snag up one of the vials left on there.
I’m a bit early, but having a second dose at this point isn’t going to kill me as long as I don’t make it a regular thing.

I cringed as the green ooze passed down my throat but that quickly faded away as Joy, anger, sadness and disgust all became rather abstract things for me to consider when the potion kicked in fully with the almost customary roll-back of my eyes that left me clear and laughter free at last.

“Han?”
My eyes cut over to Sarah and I put on an appropriately sincere smile for her.

“Hello Sarah, how have you been? I’ve been fine, I’ve been busy, busy, busy, busy, bus-”
Faithful old ‘Righty’ flew up to smack me around the back of the head and break that annoying verbal tick that keeps happening after I take the potion lately.
“-Better! You’re looking well? I was expecting to find you looking like you sunbathed on red-hot chicken wire or something? Reconstructive surgery, magical fix or just a boring old glamor?”

Sarah leaned away from me with wide eyes for some reason but that didn’t deter me in the slightest as I moved over to grasp her face in my hands and inspect her possible glamor for flaws.
Finally something new to focus on which isn’t those stupid thrust calculations!

As I ran my hands over her skin, finding nothing but smooth-ness on all sides I gave up the glamor theory with a frown.
No-one as new to magic as she is could ever make a glamor that covers touch, it’s practically impossible as it is and I really doubt her lines are in any way ready for something THAT complicated yet so it must be... Hmmm..

Almost subconsciously I squeezed her cheeks in to create a rather amusing ‘duck faced’ look while trying to work out how to test other possible hypothesis in detail.

“W-eva you’ gon- do John, ‘urry, sm-onthing’s wrong wit- Han.”
I paused in my inspection of her left ear for surgical incisions and stared at her for a moment or two in confusion as my brain parsed her words through a filter that allowed for the way her cheeks being squeezed would affect her speech patterns, but even then they didn’t make a whole lot of sense?

‘John’s going to do something and there’s something wrong with me?’
There’s nothing wrong with me!
I’m calm, and clear, and busy, and calm, and... something?... I forget.

======

“Why am I squeezing your cheeks Sare?”
She looked up at me with possibly even wider eyes then before for a moment or two as I pulled my hands away from her face in confusion.

In practically the blink of an eye she’d pulled away from me but I wasn’t really paying attention at that point as my eyes locked on the spiralling patterns of my fingerprints in fascinated awe.

“John! John, get here NOW! Something’s seriously wrong with Hannah, it’s like she’s stoned out of her head or something?!”
Heh... something..

Something, something, something.
So many something’s so little time.

“My hands are all swirly..”
I twitched my thumb and the swirls and curves of my fingerprints hit the light just right for a moment or two before going back to normal again.

A new goal and plan in mind, I set to work with renewed energy.
Finding the exact position needed to bring that absolutely PERFECT lighting back into existence!

At last, a challenge!

======

“No, she’s still doing it, how much longer John?”

I barely gave Sarah’s words a moment’s thought before moving back on to much more important things. The light just won’t cooperate for some reason!

Maybe if I... no, that wouldn’t work, as if the sun would cooperate with me?!
Maybe I can see if Bitey can get rid of my... no, that would make it hard to repeat the experiment at later dates past the initial two attempts available and-

Slowly my attention drifted away from my thumbs to stare at the wall to my left.

Something about it doesn’t feel right?
Has it always had so much built up magic behind it or am I just-

With an almighty ‘BOOM!’ which shook the floor beneath my feet, the wall I’d been staring at fell away into an interestingly messy pile of assorted dust and debris as a heavily breathing male form stepped his way through it all with a forced calm on his face which didn’t reach his eyes or his magic sadly.

“About bloody time!”
Ah, I guess this is what Sarah meant when she said John was doing ‘something’.
One something down, many more to go at least!

“Give me a break here Sarah, I worked as fast as I could, Han didn’t exactly build this place to be destructible and the endlessly dark abyss outside is hard to navigate. If it wasn’t for the bond I’d never have gotten here at all an-”
In one relatively twitch-free movement I was up out of my crouch and standing nose-to-chest with John, my eyes squinted in what I think is a glare of some sort, although I could be wrong on that one because my face has never been as cooperative as Righty tends to be.
“-uh... Hi, Han?”

A long awkward silence stretched out between us as I glared up at him and he stared almost nervously back down at me in return.

“You broke my wall”
Statement of fact.
“You’ve broken my wall before”
The house, my safe little bolt-hole in Russia, that tree house thingy he put his foot through when we were nine.
“What do you have against walls John? Is it a personal thing or does the reason behind your actions go deeper? Does Max hate walls? Did he try to stop people from building them back in the prehistoric era maybe or did he invent them and now just looking at a wall fills you with rage at other people stealing credit for ‘your’ ideas?”

For some reason the awkward silence was back as I stared up at him in consideration.
His mouth had dropped open in a weird way that left me wanting to calculate the angles involved to see if they were entirely possible on a normal human body or not.

“Um... I think I see what’s got you so worried now Sarah?”
He turned his head and the fact that he felt the need to speak annoyed me because it ruined the lines I’d been busy calculating in my head.

With an angry growl I reached up, snagged his cheeks in my hand and turned his face back into position without a second thought.

When that didn’t work I huffed loudly to myself and forced myself up onto my tip-toes before pulling his face closer with a hard yank so our lips could collide.
He made some weird noises of surprise but they were irrelevant at the moment because I was rather busy using my tongue to reposition his mouth into the appropriate shape, which his annoying lips didn’t seem to want to take up again for some reason.

In the end after about thirty-seconds of battle we reached a relatively acceptable compromise which, while not as wide and open as before, was formed in a similar shape to what I needed to finish my calculations at last if I factored in the changes inherent in a re-test of this kind.

With a jerk I pulled us apart and settled back on my feet properly so I could get to work memorising his mouth for study before he messes it up again.
It took a few seconds but I eventually realised that my hand on his cheeks would skew my result so, after a squeeze or two to test the elasticity of his skin for future reference, I fixed him with another glare before letting go with a sharp tug of my arm.

“Stay!”
He didn’t listen obviously because he’s John and he’s a jerk like that sometimes but luckily all his uncooperative mouth did was fall open slightly more which could actually work to my advantage as I work on my hurried calculations.

“Still think she’s just a little stir-crazy from being shut up alone in here for a few months John-boy?”
Sarah’s amused but still obviously worried and more than a little annoyed question distracted both me and John at a crucial moment, making both my train of thought, my completed calculations and the reasoning behind them crumble like sand through my mental-fingers all in one foul move.

======

“What were we talking about?... and what happened to my wall?!”
Sarah groaned loudly for some reason, bringing a hand up to her face in a universal sign of disbelief often called a ‘face-palm’, meanwhile John stared at me like I’d grown a second head for a few seconds before his eyes shifted down into angry little slits and he took a step towards me.

Instinct screamed in my head to run away but I was slow to react and in a matter of moments he had me secured to a surprisingly well-conjured chair by equally well-conjured leather straps while Sarah watched over me like a guard-dog and he carefully stepped around the room looking over my previous projects with an assessing eye.

“Are we having a peer review session? I’ve never had one of those before, I hear they’re annoying usually but- Wouldn’t touch that if I were you John-boy! -but I’m always interested in trying new things. Variety is the spice of life and life is a spice that spices the spic...e... um, what was I saying?”
Sarah knelt down at my side so that we were practically on eye-level again and let out a long gusty sigh of discontent.

“I honestly don’t know Han. I have no idea what you were trying to explain or what’s going on with you right now but we’re here to help you so just sit back and try to relax, okay?”
My head cocked to the side in confusion as I scanned the area around me for some kind of social cue on how to respond without upsetting her again.
“Jesus Han, what the hell have you done to yourself?”
Ah! I know this one!

A bright smile split my face and I stared into Sarah’s eyes with all the joyful banality I could manage.
She stared at me in shock for a moment or two for some reason before turning away to glare at John’s slowly approaching back.

“Speed it up John-boy, she’s not getting any better!”

“Well, I’m TRYING to be quick about it but this place is a mess, how the hell do you expect me to find out what’s wrong with her, let alone fix it, when I can’t even tell where an inactive doomsday weapon ends and an enchanted toaster begins thanks to them apparently being one-and-the-same item?!”
My eyes cut between the two of them and another social cue became obvious.

I giggled to myself obnoxiously, breaking the tension nicely as they both turned, once angry but now worried, eyes toward me at last.

“Want me to give you a Tour?”
John’s eyes practically glowed at the airy tone of my voice but instead of lashing out at me in frustration he took a deep breath in before plastering an almost painfully fake smile on his lips instead.

“That would be lovely Han, what’s this thing here do?”
Despite his insincerity I cocked my head to the other side and hummed to myself thoughtfully for a moment or two before answering him anyway.

“That’s the prototype communication unit I made to go along with the satellite.”
Yet another long awkward pause stretched out around us as the pair of them tried to process that idea, three awkward pauses since they got here, I never had this problem when it was just me!

“Satellite?... no, wait, nevermind..”

“Why does it have a sixteen-inch long blade sticking out the front of it that’s glowing yellow if it’s a communicat-”
John glared at Sarah until she stopped talking.

With a heavy breath he stepped over to the next item on the desk in front of him and waved towards it while fixing me with that same, painfully fake, smile of encouragement.
I shifted my head over to my other shoulder again and hummed happily to myself.

This peer-review thing is actually quite fun?
Bitey never had such interesting reactions so obviously on his face when I showed HIM my finished projects, even that one time I accidentally got googly-eyes stuck to him and he spent the day rolling them at me angrily..
“THAT is my auntie-matter recalibration stone!”

“Don’t you mean ‘anti-matter’?”
I rolled my head over to stare at Sarah thoughtfully and a grin split my lips slowly at her nativity.
After a few seconds she shuddered in response for some reason.

Honestly, she really needs to think things through properly sometimes.
What else would you name a stone which can flip someone’s biological gender through several concentrated blood magic rune arrays and an unhealthy dose of liquidised Aconitum injected straight into their heart, when you have an ‘Auntie’ who needs her ‘matter’ recalibrated by it and happened to be the one that inspired its creation in the first place?

“Let’s try to keep things simple and not question what she says until we come to a possible answer on why she’s like this, shall we?”
With that almost growled statement, hidden as a request, John snapped his fingers to get my attention again and purposefully took one step forward before waving to the next item on display.

This is almost like some kind of game, isn’t it?
I LOVE games!

======

“-and this one is?”
Before I could answer him on what the vials on my desk contain, Sarah let out a gasp of surprise and slapped her hand to her mouth in horror.

“She drank one of those vials before she started going insane John! That must be it, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it sooner, everything’s just been so overwhelming and... and..”
John didn’t really answer one way or another on that point, unless you count annoyed growling under his breath as words at least, but either way he turned away from Sarah to focus on me instead.

“What’s in the vials Han?”

I slowly blinked my eyes at him in boredom.
This game got boring ages ago, they shot down my suggestion that we play something else already and now he’s glaring at me while asking the questions too..

“Guess!”
John’s head sank down into his hands with a frustrated groan, mirrored shortly afterwards by Sarah on my other side as my eyes took both of their reactions in with great attention.
I like this new game, new reactions from them, new things to study and do, new things and new things, new things, new th, new, new new-

Eventually the running chain of fractured repetition stopped of its own accord but that didn’t stop me from cutting my eyes down to ‘Righty’ who, for the first time ever, had failed to slap me out of a bad verbal tick and deserved the angry glare on my face for it in return.

“Traitor!”
The now apparently useless appendage in question went limp against the chair in a show of submission that you tend to see a lot in pet’s that have failed their masters as I glared down at him, meanwhile ‘Lefty’ amused himself by twisting in the leather restraints enough that he could face his twin and flip him off in a sign of utter amusement no-doubt.
“How do you two handle this sort of thing, are there training schools for hands somewhere or something to make them behave properly?”

For the fourth time since they got here, we all fell into a long awkward silence, much to my frustration. I can’t believe I’m actually starting to miss being alone, tired, hungry and utterly depressed?
Oh... looks like the potions wearing off again..

It’s always obvious when I start remembering why I remember feeling the way I do about remembering the things that I don’t remember that I do want to remember, remember, remember, remember, member, member, member-

DAMN IT!

“Say, John, bestest of the best man-bestys ever. Don’t suppose you can toss me one of those vials from the desk real quick can you?”
He actually had the gall to look at me as if I was the crazy one, when HE’S the one who’s got me strapped to a chair playing guessing games inside my realm, as if I can’t just command the world around us to break me free anyway!
“I’m asking nicely here John, give me a vial before I stop asking nicely, okay?”

He took a step back away from me and I growled low in my throat as his eyes cut nervously from me to Sarah for a second.

He’s gonna do something stupid!
That’s his ‘I’m gonna do something stupid’ face.
That’s the face he wears when he knows he’s about to be an idiot but can’t stop himself anyway because he’s a bloody idiot!

“John... whatever you’re planning... don’t.”
His eyes cut around him one more time before, with a wild lunge, he snagged up all four of the remaining vials from their holder and sprinted over to grab Sarah around the waist.

She barely managed to let out a surprised squeak before, with a flash of blue light, they both vanished in a warp of some description.
For a painfully long few seconds I sat there in stunned disbelief.

Tha... that utter BASTARD! He stole my potion?!

He stole my bloody potion and he left me strapped to a chair that I’m not COMPLETELY sure I have enough mental-fortitude to get myself free from at this exact moment, despite my self-contained bluster a few moments ago!

How the hell do I get out of this thing?
Cheating?... yeah, cheating sounds about right at the moment!

“You’ll pay for this John-boy... oh, You. Will. PAY!”