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Merlinmeyer sat alone at the head of the table in the Ranger Station conference room. The broad, open window behind him filled the otherwise empty office with a swelling chorus of countless crickets, multifarious frogs, and incessant cicadas in a desynchronous sinusoidal crescendo-decrescendo of night noises that crashed within the space just behind his eyes. Gods above, he laughed to himself, all that's the tobacco talking. He exhaled a warm cloud in one slow puff, tricking the smoke into curling around itself in patterns he felt best complemented the symphony pouring through, before finally sending the smoke past his head and out the window. He briefly recalled the months-long curse a local witch had placed on him ages ago, forcing him to speak and think in laborious alliterations; the curse had eventually worn off, but never quite gone away, and enough smoking and stress could set it right off again. As he placed his pipe down, he thought about how badly he wished he could share the sound and the smoke with Bevan, who had been off and gone quite a bit more in recent memory than for most of their time knowing each other over the last century or so. He studied the long oak table on which his smoldering pipe now rested, traced with his fingers the table's meticulously sanded surface and gorgeous wood grain, itself an ancient park antique which had languished in a back storeroom for decades upon decades until Annie rediscovered it and enlisted Frank's help to restore it to its former glory. He tried his best not to think about the paperwork in front of him.
Hours earlier, the entire team had crowded inside that cramped conference room to hash out which party favor the Magic should opt for. The debate had followed traditional parliamentary procedure, albeit with the Magic's usual deviations, and the agonizing process lasted nearly six whole hours, well into the evening and past the park's closing. By the end, everyone was tired, antsy, and ready to walk out the door. They had reached a consensus, mostly: Containment was the way to go. The players felt confident that they could secure the Enhance blessing at the very least; this boon, coupled with Containment, would give them a strong fighting chance to protect the rest of the league from Parker MacMillan's Instability.
Alf reached for his pipe once more and leaned back in the creaky office chair to stare up at the quietly buzzing fluorescent light overhead. Several moths which had wandered their way through the open window now danced in aimless confusion around the harsh, ugly glow of the lamp. Alf closed his eyes, sighed, took a deep draw from the pipe in his hands, held. The welcome darkness filled his mind. Yellowstone was one of the few places in the League where one could get darkness like just outside anymore. The Magic's appeal for Night had kept the denizens of the park on a somewhat manageable circadian rhythm, unwittingly protecting its vast ecosystem from the global disruption of an exploding sun overhead. In the dark behind his eyes, Merlinmeyer saw Sobremesa's. The kid had spent the whole meeting sulking, tapping listlessly on their phone, leaving vending machine wrappers and granola crumbs all over their place at the beautifully lacquered table. But the team's soul-stirring appeal near the end of the conference had affected even Kirkland, who paid rapt attention as the players went around the table, one by one, declaring their consent to risk incineration for the sake of the league. The wave of unstoppable peer pressure finally reached the rookie, who wisely paused to absorb the momentum of the last few minutes. Kirkland had turned their head to lock eyes with Alf, sitting exactly where he still sat now, mixed up in the memory, and Alf looked back to where the kid had sat, remembered what their eyes had told him.
They spoke of fear, the innocent, cursory kind of fear that one can only muster when one has never before faced the prospect of one's own incineration, never had to consider it. One who cannot conceive of the reality of death and the finality of democratic consent to it. Merlinmeyer had signed the rookie just a couple of weeks ago in this very building, sat with them in this very room to go over the contract and the details of Yellowstone's arcane inner workings, the magic which would take root and grow within them upon signing the contract. The rookie had not quite understood; they never do. It's a hellish, predatory system designed to chew up kids just like Kirk, and Merlinmeyer knew he was the worst kind of bastard for enabling it. Now Kirk stared deeply into Merlinmeyer's eyes, and just as Alf saw the fear in them, he wondered what they saw in him. "Yeah, man, whatever. I consent, too." And the team's tension fell to a palpably lower state as the words bound them.
Alf made up his mind. He leaned forward in the chair, the smoke held inside his lungs this whole time slowly escaping his ears and then the rest of his face as he resumed breathing normally. Merlinmeyer conjured a quill from somewhere within the tangled nest of hair beneath his hat, dipped its tip inside a nearby inkwell, and finalized the paperwork.
✅ Team Roamless Crate
🟩 Team Squiddish Crate
🟩 Team Avoidance Crate
🟩 Team Containment Crate
Manager Signature: 𝒜𝓁𝒻 𝑀𝑒𝓇𝓁𝒾𝓃𝓂𝑒𝓎𝑒𝓇
Gazing down at the long oak table, he thought once more of Annie, then of Turq, Famous, Sosa, even Sutton. He had not consented this time. He would not be responsible.