Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s a beautiful day outside. 

The sun is shining brilliant and gold in the cerulean expanse of open sky, at last unbroken by the thick overcast clouds that once covered the bustling city in white and smothered every living thing with snow and slush and the icy bite of a long, unforgiving winter. 

It feels like years since Tommy last relished the warmth of sunbeams on his face, and he’s longed for the springtime months to arrive since the very first snowfall of the year, hating the restrictive layers of fuzzy fabrics he’s needed to bundle atop his frame even just to take a quick walk down the block. 

Today, birds are twittering their eager songs as hibernation season comes to an end and the air is once again fragrant with lush springtime blossoms, the final traces of frost melting puddles throughout the streets and washing them clean. 

It would be an absolutely perfect Monday morning—except for one thing.

“Tommy, if you keep pacing around like that you’re gonna get scuff marks all over the floor and I literally just finished with the broom and mop,” Tubbo snaps for the upteenth time. “Stop it.”

Tommy scowls at him, pausing mid-stride in the cramped entryway. There’s not a lot of room for pacing here, what with all the shoes scattered about the racks and the irritating curl in the living room carpet’s nearest corner that never fails to send one of them stumbling if they walk by in a hurry. 

Still, he can’t go anywhere else, his stomach physically rebelling against the thought of parting with the front door for more than a few seconds lest those be the precious few moments in which they hear back from the theatre. Tommy squats down with his socked toes digging into the creaky hardwood flooring beside the living room and ducks his head between his knees to keep still despite every instinct in his body screaming out for him to move-fidget-do something-anything! 

“I can’t help it! I’m too anxious!”

Across the open expanse of their flat’s main area, Ranboo towers over the kitchen-slash-dining room table, cradling a wide ceramic bowl teeming with orange batter in his willowy arms. Seeing Tommy’s agony, his pointed ears twitch with quiet empathy, and he extends the bowl outward with the handle of the wooden mixing spoon he’d been stirring around pointed encouragingly in Tommy’s direction. 

“You could try helping me with the pumpkin muffins, if you want,” Ranboo offers. He’s almost done with his last batch, the other two cooling on a wire rack beside the stove. 

The counter space of their cramped kitchen is utilized to its highest capacity, every free area crammed with baking ingredients, measuring utensils, splatters of dough that missed the pans, flour-crusted cookbook pages, and a number of serving platters stacked precariously with pastries. 

Among the population of finished confectioneries are three types of cookies, a steaming basket of flaky golden chocolate eclairs, buttery slabs of huckleberry biscotti in a bowl, and two different cakes frosted with clumsy attempts at lettering. 

One is a fluffy dessert the consistency of angel food cake with the batter dyed and marbled in every shade of the rainbow—that’s their Celebratory Cake in the event that Sapnap returns with good news—and the other is a dense mixture of red velvet and dark chocolate, pre-divided into gigantic servings in which they can smother their sorrows. The intended purpose of the heavy Bad News Cake is to induce a rich and sleepy food coma that will help them forget about their potentially shattered dreams, so Ranboo didn’t bother to do much in terms of presentation, only scribbling wobbled frowny faces on each slice with a pipe of chocolate icing. 

If Tommy noticed a few teardrops falling from Ranboo’s cheeks onto the designs when he drew them, he chose not to comment. The three sixteen year olds are equally paralyzed by the terror that all their hard work the past few years will all end up for nothing, and they’ve each taken turns weeping quiet cries into each other’s shoulders since the first light of dawn.

“Baking is always my go-to method to decompress a little. Helps clear the mind and keep your hands busy,” Ranboo explains, quietly content as he folds a teaspoon of vanilla into the pumpkin batter. “You could take a turn stirring it up—or maybe portion out the chocolate chips you want in each muffin?”

“Absolutely not,” Tubbo interrupts before Tommy can even think about responding, jabbing his finger out at Tommy across the cluttered coffee table where he sits in their tiny living room. “Tommy is banned from the kitchen indefinitely. We don’t want a repeat of last November’s Enchilada Incident, right Ranboo?”

Ranboo’s ears flatten. “Oh, right. Yeah, sorry Tommy.” He flashes a sheepish smile and sets to work doling the pumpkin mixture into a few prepared muffin tins, each adorned with the red and green wax paper liners they had leftover from Christmas. “I’d prefer to keep all my fingers and toes attached for our big performance.”

“Don’t jinx it,” Tommy warns, leaping up from his crouched position on the floor and resuming his pacing course in front of the door. “We still don’t know if we got the gig.”

“Exactly! And we won’t know until Sapnap gets back, so there’s no use freaking out about it,” Tubbo sniffs. “Take a chill pill, man. I’m getting nervous sweats just looking at you.” His hair is long enough to fall into his face from time to time, and he keeps flicking his head back to shake it out of his eyes, but it might also just be a nervous tic at this point. Tubbo’s brown curls are light enough that they’ll puff around his head for hours before they decide to sink flat against his forehead again.

Tommy snorts and rolls his eyes. “That’s all on you, Tubso. Don’t think I haven’t noticed your hands shaking. You’re just as antsy as I am, otherwise you wouldn’t still be polishing that same vase as you’ve done for the past ten minutes.” He gestures to the living room, where Tubbo has in fact unloaded every last item of glassware in the flat to be dusted and shined, now that there are no more floors to sweep or articles of laundry to fold. The couch cushions have also been relentlessly fluffed into plush submission and the bookshelves by the windows organized in reverse alphabetical order because Tubbo decided it was too easy to sort them the normal way. 

Once straightening out the main areas of the house didn’t occupy enough of his time, he moved onto deep cleaning the picture frames, oiling every last door frame’s hinges, dusting off the cobwebs on the fire escape stairwell, and now finally polishing the vases they’ve scarcely even thought about since they moved out on their own. Ranboo only purchased the set they have after Karl insisted that every home needed a place to keep flowers—because you never know when someone will give you flowers until it happens, and it’s such a disappointment to realize you won’t have a way to cherish them and keep them fresh until you can pop by the marketplace again.

So far, in almost two full years of living in a flat of their own, Tommy, Tubbo, and Ranboo are yet to receive a bouquet of flowers from anyone but Karl himself, who only thought of them because he went along with Ranboo to get the vase set in the first place.

Upon hearing Tommy’s accusation, Tubbo’s polishing rag freezes where it’s gliding over the spotless surface of glass and plops to the coffee table’s surface. He blinks down at his hands, eyes widening and owlish like it’s the first time he’s seeing them. 

“See?” Tommy accuses with a pointed huff. “I’m not the only one going crazy.”

Tubbo looks like he wants to argue—but then he catches Tommy’s gaze, which is accompanied by a goading smile spanning his cheeks and blue eyes alight with mirth—so instead he just slumps forward with a drawn-out groan, rattling the surface of a vase that sparkles so intensely in the light it could be carved from crystal solid ice.

Tommy laughs at his brothers and their antics, shakes his head, and sets back to his pacing. 

So that’s where they’re at. 

Rather than lounging outside on the balcony and soaking in the first light of spring, Tommy is pacing back and forth in the entryway, Ranboo is baking a hole through their grocery budget with stress-induced pastries, and Tubbo’s feigned tranquility is rapidly deteriorating the more he runs out of things to tidy up. 

And then there’s a knock at the front door. 

Tommy’s heart drops down to his stomach, sinks down to his toes, and melts a caustic puddle of terror and nausea straight through the hardwood flooring. Tubbo is already leaping over the couch in his haste to answer the door, and Tommy stumbles forward so fast his temple knocks straight into Tubbo’s forehead hard enough to make his ears ring.

“Come in!” Tubbo shrieks, clutching his head. 

Tommy seizes the doorknob just as Ranboo barrels after them, his lanky body colliding with Tommy’s back just as the door is thrown open, rattling in its hinges. 

Sapnap is there waiting with a spooked expression on his stubbled face. “Woah,” he snickers. He takes a cautious step back as Tommy stumbles forward beneath Ranboo’s weight, and both boys topple to the ground in a hurried pile at the dusty welcome mat. 

Sapnap lets out another startled laugh when they land, peering over them with his hands tucked loosely into his trouser pockets. “You kids doing alright in there?”

“Shut up,” Tommy grumbles. He shoves Ranboo off his shoulder and pulls himself to his feet, taking one of the hands Sapnap offers with a grimace. 

Tubbo practically climbs up Sapnap’s body, dragging him inside with all the strength contained in his tiny frame. “Welcome in! Please, sit down—sorry for the mess, it’s been a bit hectic over here. How’s your day going? Lovely weather out, isn’t it?” he prattles off, bouncing on his heels. 

Ranboo curls his fists in his hair. “Stop small talking! Just tell us what happened with Las Nevadas already!” 

“Yeah, what the tall bitch said,” Tommy parrots, breathless as he closes the front door behind them. “Go on, Big S. Give us the scoop. We’re big men, we can handle it. Don’t hold back.”

The electric current of anxiety in the air seems to multiply a thousandfold, the combined forces of their bated breaths, hands clenched tightly by their sides or clasped beneath their chins, and internal prayers of hope amplifying the energy into something almost palpable.

Sapnap takes one look at the three of them and puffs his cheeks, a strangled noise catching in his throat.

It sounds an awful lot like an awkward, apologetic sigh, and Tommy deflates. 

Shit. 

“Bad news, then?” Tubbo murmurs morosely, shoulders slumping as he comes to the same conclusion Tommy did, and Ranboo lets out a quiet mournful warble, ears drooping.

Sapnap’s eyes widen. He sucks in a frantic and stuttering gasp, his next words breathless and stumbling over themselves in his rush to get them out. “No! No, not at all! Sorry, I was—I was trying not to burst out laughing. Christ, you guys looked so excited, but now you’re all crestfallen, stop it! You’re hurting my heart!” He shakes his head and throws out his hands, placating and pleading.

Tommy lifts his head, scarcely daring to hope despite the renewed flutter in his chest, and it’s Ranboo who meets his gaze with pursed lips and wide eyes, a mirror image of the yearning soaked in trepidation that’s coursing through Tommy’s blood.

“What’s that mean?” Tubbo hisses, his back turned to the both of them to focus his sole attention on Sapnap, who at last straightens and spreads his arms wide in a showy sweeping gesture.

“It means you got the gig,” he explains. 

Tommy’s ears go numb, stuffed up with static and ringing, and it’s a miracle he even catches Sapnap’s next announcement.

“You’re booked for the sixth—this Saturday night. Quackity said he’d be down to set you up with more performances after that if your act really impresses him, so I hope you’ve been practicing!”

Tommy gasps so hard he chokes. “We got the gig?” he squeaks. 

The prickly spell of nerves is broken. 

All at once, the house erupts in noise.

“We got the gig!” Tubbo cries. “Oh my God, we made it! We really actually made it!” He jumps up and down, knocking over a pile of pillows precariously balanced on the arm of the sofa next to him, and shakes Tommy’s shoulders in a death grip tight enough to rival the Almighty Minotaur himself.

“I can’t believe it! We got into Las Nevadas!” Ranboo gasps, pressing his hands against his cheeks. “The biggest theatre in L’Manburg! We got in!”

“You got in!” Sapnap cheers with them, pumping his fists into the air, and Tommy collapses against him, his blood pressure dropping like a stone through water. Sapnap catches him with one arm and gathers the other two children in the other, easily hoisting them off the ground for a ferocious bear hug. 

Tubbo shrieks with delight, Ranboo bursts into tears, and Tommy’s disbelieving giggles are sharp and punching ragged gasps through his chest like there’s not enough air in the world to fill his lungs. 

His gaze catches on a faded poster pinned to the wall in the living room, the edges ragged and worn after almost a decade of service as Tommy’s most heartfelt inspiration. It’s prominently displayed alongside a glossy playing card printed with the six of hearts, and a collage of programs collected from every last one of the shows he and his brothers have attended in the past nine years. The programs and posters depict three magicians shrouded in varying levels of shadow depending on the illustration style, though their imposing silhouettes are unmistakable even in the lowest of light. They embody everything Tommy has ever wanted and more, the faces of the aspirations he’s spent so long straining desperate hands out to grasp—and now he can actually skim the surface of their world with his fingertips.

Again, Tommy feels himself go lightheaded with a dizzying rush of adrenaline and glee. 

“We’re gonna perform on the same stage as those guys,” Tommy whispers and points out to the decorated wall. 

Sapnap follows the path of his gesture with his eyes as Tommy’s voice comes out more sacred and reverent with every breath. The trio’s group title, plastered over the program covers, is barely spoken. Its syllables carry meaning and weight, just like a prayer. “The Mythos Three.” 

“Stop,” Tubbo whines, clutching at his chest. “It’s too much, I’m gonna have a heart attack.”

Tommy ignores him, instead turning back to curl his fists into the collar of Sapnap’s shirt, shaking him with violent desperation. “Do you know how long I’ve dreamt of this moment, Sapnap? I think I might legitimately die of shock.” He slumps his head against Sapnap’s shoulder, relishing in the rumble of his laugh. “I’m gonna throw up. Is this real? Is this actually happening?” 

“Oh, it’s happening alright,” Sapnap reassures him with a wry grin. “You’re welcome. If you’re gonna barf, aim for one of the vases you’ve got sitting around out here. What’s up with that, by the way?”

Ranboo stiffens and wipes the wetness from his cheeks. “It’s a long story, you don’t wanna know,” he sniffles. “Just—thank you! Thank you so much!” 

Tommy and Tubbo echo a similar sentiment, a slurry of gratitude and joy falling from their mouths in cries too enthusiastic to physically understand, and Sapnap lets out another howl of laughter. He’s beaming ear to ear, clearly adoring just to see them so happy, and it makes Tommy want to bawl like a baby—or like stupid Ranboo.

“Don’t worry about it guys, It was no biggie.” Sapnap finally lets go, righting the three of them on their feet, and clasps a hand around Tommy’s swaying shoulder with an encouraging squeeze. “You’re gonna do amazing out there. The whole coven’s already got tickets for the front row seats.”

“Oh Prime,” Tubbo wheezes and wrings his hands. “Now we really have to do well. If I fuck up my ignis frigidus in front of everyone I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Yup,” Sapnap taunts, popping the P. He opens his mouth to say something else, one hand outstretched to muss up Tubbo’s hair, but then he pauses and sniffs at the air with a confused frown. “Speaking of fire, is something burning?” 

They all look to the kitchen, where a steady stream of black smoke is seeping out from the cracks of the oven.

Ranboo goes ashen. “My pumpkin muffins!”

Chapter Text

Wilbur’s lighter flame hovers lambent and cozy over the mouth of his pipe. 

He inhales a long draw of smoke, eyelids fluttering shut as the mixture of dried herbs and petals sinks into his lungs, and lets it out in a cloud of periwinkle blue over the table. 

Techno lets out an annoyed grumble and fans the air in front of his face to fight back the haze. “Don’t blow that shit in my direction,” he glowers, tugging up the hood of his elegant crimson cape. “I won’t be able to get the stink of incense out of my hair for weeks. Can’t go on stage smelling like a grandmother’s meditation room, it’s bad for my image.”

“Oh, hush,” Wilbur drawls, taking another drag. “Nobody can smell you from the audience, don’t be melodramatic.”

Quietly, Phil clears his throat. “Boys,” he mutters, the warning clear despite the politeness of his tone, and Wilbur rolls his eyes, curling his lips to blow out the smoke from the corner of his mouth away from the table. 

They’re gathered in a spacious warehouse located next door to a large mansion, with sprawling acres as far as the eye can see in any direction comprising the land publicly known as the headquarters to the world-renowned illusionist group Mythos Three. 

Wilbur, Phil, and Technoblade just call it home. 

The building in which they’re currently meeting might be considered less of a warehouse and more of a workshop, if the definition comes down to particulars. Most of the space inside the gigantic barn-like room is occupied by the half-composed structures of gears and pulleys and steam-powered metal amalgamations that run behind the scenes of every Mythos performance. 

These inventions are the backbone of everything that makes the Mythos Three ‘magical.’ Phil is the so-called ingenieur of the family—his clever construction and sharp, creative wit rivals even the wildest of dreamers—and the devices he rigs up each show could place him in the pantheon of modern technological deities. 

Of course, Phil isn’t concerned with godhood, nor does he want to expose anyone except his closest circle of confidants—his family—to the Mythos Three’s greatest secrets. The fact that no one else knows how they pull off their tricks is what keeps their audiences coming, and those crowds have put more food on the table and money in their pockets than Phil ever got as an engineer at a legitimate construction company. So he keeps his work locked up, safe and secure inside the unassuming warehouse at the edge of his family’s property, and in the rare occasions that a stranger breaches the security of their hidden work, each machine is easily covered by a tarp or blanket or even tucked into the built-in compartments Phil’s rigged up behind a few false walls. 

This cool springtime afternoon is one such case of that. The family was busy making the final few adjustments to their equipment before the next performing season—tailoring their suits to fit without revealing the bulletproof armor underneath, testing out gadgets for spying on their audience to ascertain details that could later be declared as telepathic visions, and fitting new and improved gloves that made sleight-of-hand indissociable from the spellwork of fairytale mages—when there came a knock from the wealthy executive and owner of Las Nevadas Theatre. 

Quackity has dropped by the warehouse a few times in the past to help plan their performance schedule, and with the new season rapidly approaching, the Mythos Three decided it would be best to just invite him over that night rather than postpone their work long enough to take a trip into town proper.

Now, with the majority of their work temporarily tucked out of sight, they gather for a meeting at one of the many cleared desk tables in the warehouse, and there’s not a single face unmarred by exhaustion. 

It’s been a long day for everyone.

“That’s funny, coming from you,” Quackity huffs at Wilbur’s petty words, his grin splitting wide enough to show off the golden canine nestled amongst the rest of his pearly white teeth. He runs bejeweled fingers over the crisp edges of his lavish suit and leans back in his chair, the warm overhead lights of the workshop glistening against the sable of his hair. “Melodrama is like, the name of the game for you, O wise and fantastical King of Hearts.”

Wilbur shrugs. He doesn’t rise to the bait, knowing Quackity probably wants him to react even more over-the-top than he already is, and instead chooses to take another jab at his brother—whose buttons are easy to press and simple to navigate after being together their whole lives. “When I’m performing, yeah. I gotta have enough showmanship to go around, otherwise this expressionless brute would drive away all the customers in an instant.” He aims a kick at Techno’s shin, who dodges it easily and without looking—another benefit of knowing one another like themselves. 

“At least I don’t need to spy on people and pickpocket audience members to do my act. The Almighty Minotaur’s strength is nothing but razor-honed skill.” Techno flexes one of his gigantic arms, rolling with muscle and lean sinew like the body of a bull. “You just slink around coat check before each show and memorize their names and seat numbers like a perv.”

Wilbur’s cheeks go scarlet. He rears on Techno, a snarling retort on the tip of his tongue, but Phil clears his throat again and levels the two of them with a look cold enough to ignite a winter so merciless they’ll never hope to see the sun again.

“As I was saying,” Phil murmurs as his sons sink down in their chairs, effectively cowed, and turns to Quackity with an apologetic smile. “We were thinking about this upcoming Saturday for our opening night of the season, with repeating shows each weekend after that for a hundred nights total—no matinees, just Friday through Sunday at seven on the dot, same as always. Does that work with your schedule?”

Quackity hums and steeples his fingers in front of his mouth. “This Saturday, you say? Is that the sixth?”

Techno nods. “The devil’s number. Perfect for a magic act.”

Quackity winces and rubs the back of his neck. “Well in that case, I’m quite sorry to inform you, but I’ve already got something booked for that evening.”

“What?” Wilbur splutters, an immature pout forming on his lips before he can reel it back. “But we always open on the first Saturday of spring! It’s tradition!”

Quackity snickers. “Tradition or not, the stage is taken. You should’ve come to me sooner, it would’ve been open if not for the arrangements I made just this morning.” As he speaks, he rummages around in his pocket and withdraws a small notepad agenda with the names of events scrawled throughout the calendar, each entry more illegible than the last. He flips through a few pages, a pensive furrow in his brow, until he gets to one that’s practically choking on ink and packed tight with information regarding the next spring weekend. “I can set you up the following Saturday, if you’d prefer not to follow immediately after the new guys. Either that or just settle for Sunday the seventh. Still a perfectly symbolic number if you’re the superstitious type.” With every word, Quackity taps the page’s contents with the end of his glossy fountain pen, and the gold decals along the sides refract sparkles against his handwriting

“I don’t care about superstitions or numbers,” Wilbur snaps, earning a cross look from Phil at his impoliteness. Wilbur ignores it, plowing on with his pointer finger jabbed into the table before them. “Who’s earned a prime spot in the Las Nevadas spring lineup that’s more deserving than the famous Mythos Three?” 

Quackity doesn’t even pretend to smother the smugness from his grin. He and Wilbur always loved to try to get a rise out of one another, and it’s just too easy after a long and cranky night of work for both of them. “It’s another group of magicians, actually.”

That gets everyone’s attention. Phil and Techno lean forward on their elbows, their eyes widening and eyebrows arching with interest. Wilbur all but flinches, jaw dropping in disgust and abject horror, and Quackity’s smirk widens. 

“That’s pretty exciting,” Phil murmurs, drumming against his chin with three fingers. “There hasn’t been another big illusionist in showbiz since that Houdini fellow retired a few years back.”

“Yeah, I was surprised too,” Quackity laughs, squinting down at his notebook. “Let’s see… They’re calling themselves ‘Alchemysteria.’ Bit of a mouthful, but it’s got a nice ring to it.” He bounces his shoulders and takes one more look at the information, an intrigued glint in his eye. “It’s another trio like you, and supposedly they’re ‘unlike anything this world has ever seen,’ if you take their agent’s word for it—which I do. He’s a good friend of mine and I’ve never known him to exaggerate his compliments.”

Techno tilts back in his chair, gaze turning to the tall wooden ceiling above their heads. “Hmm… Alchemysteria… That’s clever, I like it. It’s like they’re turning magic scientific again, but still maintaining an air of obscurity for showmanship’s sake.” 

Phil nods in agreement. “Ah, that’s a good observation, Techno! Very cool indeed.”

Hearing this, Wilbur’s stomach lights up with indignant fury. He coughs out another lungful of blue smoke and wipes his mouth with a rough jerk of his jumper’s sleeve. “Are you fucking kidding me? First this circus act robs us of our opening night, and now they’re just stealing our entire brand! A group of three magicians with the ‘-my’ sound in their name? What a joke.‘Mythos’ and ‘Mystery’ are basically the exact same words. I already hate them.”

Phil straightens, head whipping over to face Wilbur with a mixture of amusement and aghast. “Goodness Wilbur! Who took a shit in your cereal this morning? There’s absolutely no need to be so hostile.” 

Before Wilbur can retort, Phil wags a disapproving finger in his face like he’s chastising a disobedient child rather than the grown man he is, respected by thousands as a celebrity in his field. “It’s just a bit of friendly competition, and the more illusionists there are, the more popular our trio becomes in comparison as we prove we’re more than worth the hype. If we push back our opening date by a week we can pose Alchemysteria like an appetizer before the main course. Then we’ll put on a spectacular set like we always do, prove ourselves worthy of our reigning superiority in the field, and that’s what will solidify our status as number one. Besides, it’ll be a refreshing change of pace with all the boring ballets and musicals they’re putting on the stage these days—no offence, Quackity.”

“None taken,” Quackity chirps around his pen cap, which is clasped between his teeth for safekeeping while he sets to work jotting down more notes in his schedule. “So, it sounds like you’ve got your heart set on that Saturday opening. Shall I put you down for the following week, then?”

“No,” Wilbur blurts. He leans forward and claps his hand over Phil’s mouth before he can give the affirmative, and Techno recoils to avoid getting his nose bashed in by Wilbur’s elbow. 

“We’ll open this Sunday, the day after Alchemysteria,” Wilbur drawls, elongating the syllables of the name, his voice dripping in sarcasm and disdain. “Anyone who wants to see real magic that weekend will save their money and time attending our show. If those wannabe bigshots want to steal our opening night then they get to do it in an empty theatre. I don’t want them taking any of our rightful customers away from us just because they got to Las Nevadas first this year.”

Techno lets out an exasperated growl. “Bruh. You need to calm down. We’ve never had a booking that didn’t completely sell out. One paltry competitor won’t empty a full house.”

Wilbur sniffs. “Whatever. I still don’t like that puny band of thieves. I won’t be taking any chances against them.”

Overhead, the quiet rasp of raindrops plinking against the workshop roof fills the air, and Wilbur is momentarily distracted from his rage by the crushing disappointment that comes with knowing the sun may have shone earlier that afternoon, but the first few weeks of spring will still technically fall under L’Manburg’s rainy season. They’ve got a long way to go before it’s clear skies and warm weather for good. 

It seems the sentiment is shared by his company at the table, as the corners of Techno’s mouth flatten out, Phil lets out a longsuffering sigh, and Quackity rubs his weary eyes. 

“I dunno man,” Quackity puzzles, his voice uncharacteristically soft. “They might blow your mind with their talent, and then you’d be begging just to share the stage with them—maybe fit in a few matinees around their shows, turning the tables you’ve held dominion over all these years. According to the agent I spoke with this afternoon, Alchemysteria could almost pass for the real deal. Some of their tricks just can’t be explained with mere trapdoors and body doubles.”

At last, the smallest inkling of condescension creeps onto Phil’s expression, and Techno snorts out a disparaging scoff. 

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Phil muses, crossing his arms and flicking the rim of his bucket hat up so the light sheds soft yet foreboding shadows over the angular planes of his face. “There isn’t a magician’s stunt in existence that we didn’t invent or recreate even better than the original. I’m sure they’re just really good at misdirection.”

“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just going off what I was told,” Quackity cajoles and stretches out a few crackly joints in his back. “You guys are phenomenal, but there’s still a chance Alchemysteria could be something truly unique for the Las Nevadas patronage to look forward to in the future. You guys might think about incorporating some new fanfare in your set if you want to stay ahead.”

It almost sounds like a threat, and the warm browns of his irises appear almost crimson when he stands and checks his watch, respectfully inclining his head at each of them. “I’ll make the arrangements for Sunday at seven. Have the light plot paperwork on my desk before noon on the day of the performance if you need anything special from my tech crew, and you’ll get the rental deposit back the next day when I deliver your cut of the ticket sales. Is there anything else you three need sorted before I head out?”

“Actually,” Wilbur stands, fishing around for his wallet in the deep pockets of his work pants. “Would it be possible for you to reserve a good seat at Alchemysteria’s show in my name?”

Techno makes a startled snorting noise. “Scoping out the competition? Really? I thought we all agreed that other magicians’ acts aren’t worth watching if we already know how it’s done, and you seemed pretty confident that Alchemysteria isn’t bringing anything new to the table. Don’t tell me you’re actually intimidated by these nerds.”

Wilbur pauses midway through sorting the crumpled bank notes in the main sleeve of his wallet. His face contorts into a wicked sneer, and as if on cue, the accompanying flash of lightning outside carves ghoulish shapes over his eyes. 

His next words are low and rumbling against the belated bellow of thunder, and if Techno wasn’t already used to his brother’s playfully murderous demeanor he’d likely be trembling like a leaf in the storm’s great winds. “Insinuate that again and I’ll gut you in your sleep.”

Techno only laughs. 

Chapter Text

Tommy was only six years old when he first fell in love with magic. 

Dream was taking him out on a shopping trip to get new clothes since Tubbo accidentally set fire to Tommy’s entire wardrobe one night in his sleep, and after a few minutes of begging, Dream finally gave him permission to explore the shopping district all on his own. 

Looking back, it’s more likely that Dream was just sick of Tommy’s grabby and destructive little hands inflicting property damage on every article of clothing that looked even remotely like his favorite red and white tee shirt, tearing buttons and seams so Dream would be forced to purchase them. With Tommy out of the way, Dream was able to efficiently organize a few cheap outfits and get them bagged and paid for with minimal fuss.

The clothing store was settled in the middle of a promenade in the L’Manburg shopping district, whose streets were more like a connected grid of outdoor malls than actual neighborhoods. The cobbled roads that otherwise would’ve been choked up with the beastly bodies of carriages and gigantic automobiles were completely paved over, dappled with flower beds and shaded seating pavilions that blocked any through routes for vehicles and left pedestrian foot traffic safe and free to roam. 

Deciding it was alright to let six year old Tommy play by one of the nearby water fountains, Dream left to finish shopping with the reassurance that Tommy wouldn’t go any further down the promenade than the outside borders of the children’s clothing store. It was nearly impossible for Tommy to lie to Dream, especially back then, so when he initially promised to stay by the fountain, Tommy truly had every intention of keeping his word.

But then Tommy heard something he never could’ve hoped to resist. 

Sitting on the concrete edge of the fountain with his shoes and socks in one hand, bare feet splashing through the pool of unnatural blue water, a distant voice cried out the word magic. 

Tommy spent his entire life until that point completely unaware that the world outside his coven knew what magic was, let alone that there were people who freely spoke of and even practiced it in public. Revealing that you were magic was supposed to be a death sentence—that’s what everyone told him—talking about magic was the reason they had to run away, and why Karl could never utter another spell in his life even though he was probably the most powerful witch in the universe. 

Talking about their magic was strictly forbidden. 

So then why was Tommy hearing the word uttered there, in the middle of the most popular shopping promenade in the city during peak hours?

Fearing that someone’s life was in danger, that they hadn’t heard the rules yet, Tommy tore away from the fountain in search of the voice. He was still barefoot and the ground was covered in rocks and bumps, but he could hardly feel it through the adrenaline stabbing a determined sense of worry and responsibility through his heart. 

A few moments later, Tommy burst through a wall of people gathered around one blank section in the walkway, and came staggering face-to-face with none other than King of Hearts himself. 

Of course, Tommy didn’t know he was such a big deal back then. Nobody did—nobody except the magician himself and his family, who were all equally determined to make something of their talents or die trying. At that point in time, the Mythos Three were mere street performers, slaving away from sunrise to sundown just to scrape up enough money for that night’s dinner. 

“Gather ‘round, all believers in magic! Skeptics, magicians, scientists, even just ordinary citizens who genuinely don’t give a fuck: we have something for each and every one of you! Don’t be so cynical, all you need to do is sit back and be amazed!” King of Hearts roared his campaign into his cupped hands in order to carry his voice over the traffic of passersby, dressed in black slacks and beaten leather boots to match the long shadow of his intimidating trench coat. His brown hair was a mess of curls springing out from beneath a crimson beanie, and a simple black mask covered his eyes and the bridge of his nose. 

King of Hearts was flanked by two other men dressed in a similar fashion in terms of quality, though their styles couldn’t have been more different. 

The bulky one with a full head of pale pink hair and scars criss-crossing his skin wore a simple white poet’s shirt and black pants, with the most recognizable aspect of his costume being an elegant cloak made of velvet and dyed a shimmering bloody red. His eyes were covered in a masquerade to match his brother’s, though it was off-white and painted to appear like the bleached skull of a giant boar. Strapped to his hip was a series of blades, each longer and deadlier than the last, and he stood motionless with his gaze pointed to the treetops to avoid eye contact with any ogling members of the audience. 

The other was layered in a billowing series of cloaks and robes, each colored varying shades of midnight black and pine green. Strapped to his back was a glossy pair of mechanical crow’s wings, whose metallic feathers shone iridescent like oil and tar and rattled with every shift in movement like a dying man’s last breath. His head was almost entirely obscured by a wide-brimmed black hat that reminded Tommy of the traditional witch hats Dream sometimes brought out as relics from their old coven, except the street performer wore a gauzy black veil around the brim that wasn’t quite thin enough to make out exact details of the wearer’s face. All Tommy could tell was that he was blonde, with long hair cropped near his shoulders, and piercing blue eyes that almost seemed to glow in the shadows. 

Seemingly satisfied with the small crowd amassed around their makeshift stage, King of Hearts lowered his hands from his mouth and instead threw them out at his sides, his lips curling into a charismatic grin. 

“Thank you for joining us this afternoon, my dear friends,” King of Hearts said sincerely, and somehow his voice carried over the entire pavilion while still remaining quiet enough to feel personal. “My name is King of Hearts, and I’d like to introduce you to my family, the Mythos Three! First off, we’ve got the broody meatheaded one to my left, Minotaur Almighty.” 

On King of Hearts’ cue, Minotaur Almighty inclined his head in a cool nod to the crowd, the razor-sharp glinting of his blades glittering along with the movement in a way that almost looked practiced. A faint smattering of nervous applause flitted through the audience, and Tommy couldn’t join in fast enough, soaking in the sights of these magic users with hungry eyes. 

King of Hearts then gestured to the one in the witch hat, and the man stood up a bit straighter as the wings on his back stretched to their full size and cast awe-inspiring shadows over the whole promenade. “As for the one that looks like a cheap Grand Reaper here on my right, you all can call him Crowfather.”

“Hello,” Crowfather greeted, his voice carrying a warmth and kindness unfitting for his ruthless silhouette. “It’s nice to meet you all, thank you for sticking around!” 

The applause was less hesitant this time, a few awestruck gasps still stuck on the sight of those terrifyingly beautiful fallen angel wings. 

King of Hearts took over speaking once more, and those next words would go on to mold Tommy’s entire existence from that point on. They were relentless in their clutches over Tommy’s mind, sometimes playing over and over and over again in his head each night as he fell asleep until he could think of nothing else. 

“We Mythos Three are a family of magicians. Stories of illusions and impossibilities are not merely figments of our imagination, but true, living forces that course through our very blood. We feel the spirit of this energy straining against our souls every day, begging to be set free, and as such we’ve made it our life’s mission to see it done! It’s time for us to prove to the world that magic— true magic—is beautiful and alive, and absolutely nothing to be afraid of.”

And just like that, it happened. 

Tommy fell in love with magic. 

King of Hearts touched Tommy’s soul in a way that no other person had ever done before—at least nobody outside his coven—and the sensation that washed over Tommy’s sternum that day can only be described as pure destiny. A confirmation of absolute truth seemed to swallow him up, choking him in the singular feeling that this was what he was always meant to do. 

Mythos Three went on to perform a few parlor tricks that earned a few coins from the audience, and although it was nothing Tommy and wasn’t able to do even as a child in the ranks of his coven—telepathy, precognition, shapeshifting, elemental transmutation, telekinesis, the list goes on and on—his attitude towards magic was fundamentally changed by that performance on the street. 

It wasn’t the magic they did, but the way they did it. 

They weren’t magic users the way Tommy and his coven were. They didn’t claim to be witches, nor did Tommy ever hear the word cross their lips. 

No, they were nothing like witches. 

They were magicians. 

And magicians were able to frame even the simplest of magics as impressive—impossible, even. 

It was the most incredible thing Tommy had ever seen. 

He learned then, and would gradually come to understand even deeper as each year that passed added new layers of knowledge to his experience, that a magician’s job is to perform. It didn’t matter if they were powerful or not—Tommy would never know, unfortunately, his aura back then wasn’t strong enough to sense such subtle shifts in any of Mythos Three’s—it only mattered that they could pretend they were. 

So long as the show goes on, any known law in existence can be broken, no matter how firmly the audience believes them, or how educated they suppose themselves to be on a certain subject. Fact and fiction don’t exist on a magician’s stage—the only constants are the ones established by the performer and dictated by the set. 

If an ordinary person claimed they could make pigs fly, they were nothing but a liar. 

However, if a magician said the same while onstage, then brought out a pig and commanded it to fly, so it would be true. 

So it would be done.

Minotaur Almighty would cast some sort of spell on his weapons to make them intangible enough that they could be skewered clean down his throat without hurting him, and yet from the outside it appeared as though nothing was even done to dull them at all. He actually fooled the audience into thinking that he could swallow the blade of his sword, and Tommy would’ve believed it if he knew it wasn’t so ridiculous. 

Crowfather used unlocking incantations to escape from even the most complex of entrapments, from course ropes wrapped and tied by volunteers from the audience themselves to multi-layered padlocks over thick iron chains. Tommy never saw his lips move to whisper the secret words, and at first he was frustrated at the opportunity for new magic knowledge missed, but in time Tommy realized he was more grateful to know that those incantations would never be observed by mundane humans. It wouldn’t be safe for these people to start suspecting devil worship or spirit possession or whatever else frightened people could come up with in order to justify the murder of innocent witches.

King of Hearts could read minds without Tommy even sensing it happen, a feat not even Dream could ever accomplish. He claimed it was impossible to blend your mind’s presence with the thoughts of the person you were trying to read enough that you became indistinguishable from their true personal thoughts. 

And yet, when King of Hearts singled Tommy out in the crowd and asked if he’d like to participate in a magic trick, he was able to discern Tommy’s name, age, favorite color, and even his favorite animal—all without even saying a word. Then he did a variation of one simple mind exercise that Tommy used to play with Dream all the time, where they’d take turns picking cards from a classic poker deck and try to use magic to guess what it was. 

King of Hearts did it a little differently, instead shuffling the whole deck in a very strange yet mesmerising way, and asking Tommy to concentrate very hard on his card despite the fact that doing so would definitely give it away. Dream always told him to summon the most random thing he could imagine and latch onto it, never letting his erratic thoughts drift back to the contents on the card or else he’d end up screaming it at the forefront of his mind the second he felt Dream’s telepathy nudge its way through. Tommy was already good enough at derailing his mind to keep Dream out if he wanted to, so he decided to test King of Hearts’ skills to the best of his ability. 

When Tommy returned to his normal train of thought to find his card—the six of hearts—pinched between the magician’s thumb and forefinger, a warmly triumphant smile visible in the uncovered portion of his masked face, Tommy almost fainted right then and there. He never even felt King of Hearts open his mind up, let alone extend it in Tommy’s direction or even make it past the walls of delirium Dream spent so long helping him build up against telepaths. 

Karl was the most powerful witch that ever lived. 

Tommy always considered Dream the second, as did everyone else in their coven, so all his life he was inclined to believe it—until that day. 

That day, when Tommy was six years old and fell in love with magic, he crossed paths with the best witch he’s ever known. 

“You’re amazing,” Tommy breathed, six years old and utterly obliterated by the sensation of his world expanding and his soul colliding with the infinite potential of a prophecy for the very first time. 

King of Hearts was oblivious to all this, of course, but that didn’t change the fact that he was the one that triggered the whole event. Most of the street audience had cleared out by then, petty card tricks unfortunately not quite as intriguing to them as the man who could swallow swords.

Not Tommy though. Tommy was so transfixed by King of Hearts, he couldn’t have returned to the fountain then if he tried.

He was more than starstruck—he was universestruck. 

When Tommy said this King of Hearts made a startled little squeaking noise and buried his fingers in his hair, combing through the curls in some sort of self-soothing gesture that Tommy didn’t understand but desperately wanted to. 

“Wha—? Aww! Thank you for saying that, Tommy! It means a lot to me,” the magician said, softly enough that nobody else could hear him. 

Upon hearing that voice lilted so carefully, even when he’d been capable of carrying his words across an entire promenade before, Tommy convinced himself that he could trust King of Hearts with one tiny secret.

One act of rule-breaking to set the precedent on his stage.

“It’s true,” Tommy whispered back. Then he glanced around the promenade clearing a few times, checking for anyone else that might be listening, and leaned in very close. “I’m gonna tell you a secret.”

King of Hearts tilted his head, questioning, and squatted down to the ground so his ears could be level with Tommy’s voice.

The next words Tommy spoke were probably the softest ones he’d ever say, but they felt so loud and roaring through the blood rush in his ears that he can still remember their exact cadence. 

“You’re the greatest witch I’ve ever met,” he breathed. His hands were trembling where they were cupped by the magician’s ear and covering his own words from any prying eyes. “You’re better than Dream. And I think maybe even…” There was a brief pause as Tommy took one last shuddering breath, gathering up the remaining shreds of strength he needed in order to betray his coven’s most important rule. “… Maybe even better than Karl.”

When King of Hearts pulled away, his face was carefully devoid of any reaction. If he heard the secret, he probably would’ve wanted to ask for more information, but all of a sudden Tommy’s eyes were welling up with frightened tears. 

King of Hearts stiffened. Tommy’s face must’ve gone white as a sheet by then, fists clenching in the hem of the shirt he was borrowing from Ranboo (Tubbo was a few sizes bigger than the other two when they were all kids) and his knees wobbled dangerously beneath his standing weight. 

“Hey, don’t cry,” King of Hearts fretted, questions forgotten as he reached out to wipe the trails from Tommy’s face before they fell. “Shh, it’s alright, you’re okay. I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”

“Not even your very most bestest friend?” Tommy challenged. His bottom lip quivered.

King of Hearts grew very somber. Using his right pointer, he drew a small X shape over the left side of his chest and stared Tommy dead in the eyes. “Tommy, I swear on not only my heart, but also my entire dominion over it as King, that I will never speak a word of your secret to anyone else ever again. Not even my very bestest friend, not even my father, not even my twin brother. No one else will know your secret unless it’s you who decides to tell it.”

His hands then went to the deck of cards he’d stowed in one trenchcoat pocket, and when they returned he was cupping the six of hearts in his palm, holding it out for Tommy to take. 

“Is this your card?” King of Hearts teased softly. 

Tommy nodded. Another tear fell from his eyes and King of Hearts huffed a half laugh through his nose in response, then pressed the glossy paper into Tommy’s hands and cradled them together. King of Hearts’ hands were broad enough to cover the entire card from anyone’s sight, but he knew they could both still feel it sitting beneath their fingertips.

“Why don’t you take this card as a promise, okay? You can hold on to it until you’re ready to tell someone else, or just keep it in your wallet as a good luck charm, or put it away in a box somewhere for safekeeping—whatever you want. It can represent your secret, and my promise to never tell, and maybe if we meet each other again you can show it to me as a reminder of our little oath.” 

Then he shook their cradled hands once, twice, and gave Tommy one final squeeze, solidifying their pact. 

“Okay,” Tommy replied numbly. “I’ll bring it with me when we meet again.”

King of Hearts grinned. “I’ll look forward to the day, Toms.”

With those words, the rush of prophetic destiny overtook Tommy’s tiny being again in full, bruising force. 

King of Hearts—the greatest magician and witch who would ever live in this world and every dimension beyond that—then stood up and walked away. 

Despite the vast expanse of time that’s passed since he was a tiny six year old child in desperate need of new clothes, Tommy still viscerally remembers every detail of that interaction like he’s reliving the moments each time he summons the memory. 

He remembers how amazed he’d been that nobody in the audience was angry or frightened by magic when it was done by a magician.

There were no pitchforks or scalding torches, no poisonous words spat from snarled mouths, no brittle shrines of thin kindling beneath a stake that crackled like bones when murderous fire sprawled at the base to lick up the sagging bloodied flesh of the innocent witch that was cradled still living (screaming wailing living dying torture agony burning bleeding sobbing begging but always still living) in the crucifix’s shadow. 

Sure, Tommy thinks it’s horribly unfair that his coven was hunted to near extinction once just because they were witches and not magicians, but there’s nothing he can do to change that. If people were going to stop trying to murder his people so long as they practiced their magic under a different name, then Tommy is determined to unlock the secrets of that name. 

He would end the existential terror that wrought his coven paralyzed and panicking in the dead of night whenever their memories slipped too loose in their subconscious, when nightmares reminded them what might come if they indulged in the euphoria of their magic ever again, when Tommy would sometimes wake find Dream staring empty-eyed at the ceiling, unresponsive and cold as his mind’s eye filled with remembered visions no living being should ever be forced to endure. 

This is Tommy’s purpose.

This is his fate.

Karl sometimes spoke of fate like it was a familiar scent one might sometimes catch on a quiet wind—always in the same place, with the same intensity and lasting the same brief moment of time, a queasy and strange nostalgia burning in his stomach whenever he caught a whiff. He’d try to remember where he’d experienced it before, longing to recall what memory the achingly familiar aroma was connected to, but it was never to any avail. He knew it must’ve been so deeply precious to him that it was painful to elicit such a reaction, but the memory was most likely lost long ago, and the wind was never strong enough for him to hone in on more than the barest knowledge that he knew of it in another time. 

Tommy’s brush with prophecy was entirely dissimilar to that—enough that it took years of agonized convincing before he developed the courage to admit it to himself, let alone ask the senior members of the coven for advice on the topic—and it nearly stole the breath from his lungs each time he felt it come rushing back. 

George supposes that it’s due to the nature through which Tommy’s destiny is to be pursued that caused such an immense rift in his comparative experience, and despite being the only member of their coven that isn’t a real witch, George’s intuition has never been wrong. 

Karl’s prophecy was a fickle, fleeting presence in his mind. He wasn’t meant to take any preparative measures in order to achieve his fate—he only remained distantly aware of its existence and acknowledged that it would happen when the time was right. The nostalgic feeling in his belly would curdle and whine for attention whenever it deemed a reminder necessary, and Karl would understand that it was there, promise not to ignore it, and move on with his life until it came again, when the final cue would be quiet yet unmistakable all the same. 

Meanwhile, Tommy’s calling is for an ideal that he must embody with his whole heart. It’s not just going to happen. He needs to make the conscious decision to carve one foot in front of the other, each step up the mountain of his prophetic journey intentional and wrought by Tommy’s own will.

All the while, King of Hearts’ initial words will sing an anthem to Tommy’s resolve.

Magic is a true, living force that courses through his very blood. He feels the spirit of that energy straining against his soul every day, begging to be set free, and so he will make it his life’s mission to see it done. 

Tommy will always be a witch, he knows this, but now he makes a promise to always be a magician, too.  

It’s time for Tommy to prove to the world that magic— true magic—is beautiful and alive, and absolutely nothing to be afraid of.

When Dream finally found him, just minutes after the Mythos Three had finished packing up their street show to perform in a fresh location, he was understandably furious with worry.

“Do you have any idea how scared I was when I left the store and saw only a little boy’s abandoned sneakers by the fountain’s edge, Tommy?” he rambled as they made their way back to the coven base that afternoon. “What was I supposed to think, huh? Why in Prime’s holy name would you run off barefoot like that? I thought you’d been swept away by a stranger! You could have been killed!”

“Sorry,” Tommy mumbled honestly, though he had to make a concerted effort not to brush Dream’s concern off entirely with the fate-fueled adrenaline dizzying his blood. “Here’s the thing, though—I saw some people down the promenade doing magic, yeah? So I thought—”

Dream stiffened. “What?”

“Yeah! Their coven is called Mythos Three, and they were performing spells for money and it worked, Dream! Everyone was just clapping and cheering for them, nobody brought out pitchforks or called for a witch hunt or anything!”

“Are—are you sure?” Dream spluttered. “They were witches, like us?”

Tommy nodded vigorously. “Absolutely. Except in this world they call themselves ‘magicians.’ They were so incredible, Dream, you should’ve seen it!”

“You said there were three of them?” Dream clarified, a twisted frown marring his face. “That’s—that’s extremely dangerous. What were they thinking?”

Tommy bounced his shoulders in a shrug. “I dunno, maybe magic is more acceptable in this world? Just because we haven’t seen anybody using it doesn’t mean it’s not out there somewhere—it’s just called by a different name. Magicians, Prime, they were so cool. When I grow up I’m gonna be a magic performer just like them.”

“Woah, no you’re not,” Dream blurted quickly, freezing in his tracks and whirling around to face Tommy with a panicked glint in his eyes, green like dandelion stems. He placed his hands on Tommy’s shoulders and squeezed, almost tight enough to be uncomfortable. “Tommy, you are under no circumstances allowed to practice your magic in front of outsiders. You know this.”

“But—” 

“No,” Dream interrupted. “Listen—we can’t afford to take that kind of risk out here. Not anymore. Once Karl got us away from Salem, we cut off any possible second chances. I get it, you want to show off your skills—because you know you really are a talented little witch—but there’s just no more escape routes if we fuck this one up. I’m not saying we can’t practice our magic ever again, but it has to be in private, got that?”

Tommy whined, his lip peeling up in a pouty snarl. “But Dream, this world is perfectly safe for us! The fact that Mythos Three were able to just flounce up on the street and do mind-bending magic for money should prove that we can afford to loosen up a little, you think? I tell you what, when King of Hearts read my mind without me even noticing him in there—barriers and all—I really felt like that’s where I’m supposed to be! I’m supposed to be a magician! I’ve never been more sure of anything in my entire life—really!”

Dream stared at him for a moment longer. In the recesses of Tommy’s mind, he could feel the vaguest inklings of magic working its way through his words, parsing through the sincerity he felt, and Tommy didn’t try to push back. He wanted—no, needed Dream to understand. 

Then, finally, Dream’s shoulders slumped. He ducked his head and let out a sharp sigh. “Alright, look—right now, we’re gonna keep doing what we have been for the past year and a half. Stay stealthy, keep our guard up, no magic in public.” 

Tommy made an effort to interject a complaint, but Dream barreled on even louder, his cool tone leaving no room for argument. “However, I may decide to revisit those rules at a later date—only once we get a better grasp on this world’s true opinion of magic. Just let me do some more research and observation first, okay? Can I trust you to be patient until then?”

Dream’s magic was prodding at Tommy’s skull again, demanding the honest truth, and Tommy wanted to roll his eyes or throw an entire tantrum. He just didn’t get it. 

But still, Tommy was begrudgingly willing to admit that Dream was only trying to look out for the coven’s safety, which meant that he was probably right to put Tommy’s destiny on hold for a bit longer. 

Tommy narrowed his eyes and let Dream read the impatience and candor in his reply, finally spitting out a reluctant agreement under his breath. “Fine. I guess. But also fuck you.”

Dream’s serious face softened into a grateful smile. “I appreciate it,” he huffed, ruffling Tommy’s hair before pulling back up to his full standing height, offering his hand to hold as they approached the busy intersections leading up to the house they shared with the other coven members. 

They were a measly collection of eight children back then—six witches actively practicing magic, one who would never cast again, and the token Regular Guy who was mostly just along for the ride (whether he liked it or not).

Bad was their eldest member at seventeen years old, and he did most of the financial heavy lifting to keep a roof over their heads and food in their bellies. He specialized in shadow magic and horrors of the eldritch variety, able to manipulate light and darkness, control people by their shadows, summon ghoulish creatures of nightmares forever at his beck and call, and so much more that Tommy would probably never fully understand. Bad used these talents to run a wildly successful bakery in midtown, where his customers were more enchanted by his delicious cooking skills and friendly demeanor than the logic-defying warm light that illuminated his pastries in enticing hues of gold and scarlet, unbothered by the strange otherworldly noises that sometimes warbled out from behind the closed doors of the kitchen. Despite his great and intimidating powers of the occult, Bad simply preferred to be an incredible baker over an all-powerful witch.

George was sixteen at the time, the second oldest beside Bad, and also the only non-magical honorary member of the coven. Not being a witch never stopped George from taking responsibility, though, so he did his best to contribute to the coven with a job as a secretary at the L’Manburg central police precinct. It wasn’t much unlike his first job in Salem, where his father was Sheriff and often brought George along to work when he felt especially disapproving of George’s friendship with the local outcasts. George could be surprisingly observant when he wanted to be, and he made an excellent detective-in-training to his father, the picture of a perfect son in every way. He probably would’ve led a long and illustrious career as Salem’s beloved Sheriff once his father retired, but that bridge was pretty effectively burned when he ended up fleeing to a completely different universe at fourteen.

Karl was also sixteen, just barely in the middle of George and Dream, but he was in no state to work back then—some days he could barely muster the mental fortitude to get up from bed and mingle with the rest of the coven. Once a witch with enough magical potential to level an entire city with a single spoken command, Karl was transformed into a listless shell of a boy in the aftermath of one miraculous act of magic, brilliant enough to rival the powers of Prime itself. He was the one that translated their quiet family—a heartbreaking fraction of their original Salem coven—to the world Tommy would grow to call home. It was Karl’s fate, a prophetic decision to bend the laws of space and time to his command, all in the name of rescuing the children of the coven from their inevitable execution. The force of that spell scrambled his soul near irreparable, his mind scattered throughout the farthest reaches of space in its desperate search for a new world that could shelter his kind from the murderous hatred they faced in Salem, and his aura was an unsteady and flickering little thing that dimmed and brightened as fickle as a candle’s flame. The other witches were able to stabilize it eventually, but the cost of Karl’s sacrifice meant that he could never touch his magic again. Even the smallest shred of turbulence in his aura would send the whole thing completely off its axis, and his mind would be lost in limbo forever. 

Despite being the second youngest of the elder witches, Dream took on the role of leadership in their scrappy new coven. He was thirteen when they abandoned Salem and their greater coven for a fresh start in L’Manburg, and fifteen when Tommy first found out about the Mythos Three on that day. His mother was the head witch in their first coven, and he fell into her footsteps like a duck takes to water. He had a baseline level of knowledge in most schools of magic, having studied under the patchwork tapestry of his mother’s magic for his entire life, but his greatest strengths were with magic of the mind. He could usually tell what anyone within his line of sight was thinking at any given time, and could seamlessly blend thoughts and ideas into their brains as if they came up with it on their own. Dream made a formidable enemy when he needed to be, but most of the time he only used his magic to get the children to eat their vegetables. While Bad and George worked to make their coven’s living, Dream cared for their youngest witches and educated everyone in the ways of the world. He taught them maths and the alphabet, practiced sparring and self-defense in the event that the people of L’Manburg turned against them, strengthened their magic to reach new and impossible heights, and made sure that nobody forgot the history of their people. Dream made sure they always remembered what they were: witches, survivors, children, and most important of all, a family.

Whenever Dream’s composure over the house ran thin, Sapnap became a constant supportive presence. He was two years younger than Dream, but the two of them were inseparable as friends, practically twin brothers in the exuberant noisiness of their laughter and the thread of mischief that wove their spirits together. Sapnap was an elemental witch, with powers over most nonliving matter that existed in the world. He could manipulate wind and water, shake the ground with earthquakes and lightning, and ignite flames in the palm of his hand. His proclivity for arson tended to get the best of his practice most of the time, and as a result he could control his fire with perfect precision. Tubbo definitely took a page out of Sapnap’s book when he first started manifesting his magic, modifying his elemental magic to focus on explosives and chemical reactions that went horribly wrong more often than right. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether such explosive mistakes were intentional or not, and Sapnap and Tubbo found it uproariously funny each time they almost torched entire sections of the house to charcoal skeletons of scaffolding. 

These young witches were the eldest members of their coven, and thus the sole role models that Tommy, Tubbo, and Ranboo had to look up to all their lives. They were too young to remember a lot from Salem, mostly just bits and pieces of fragmented nightmare fuel leftover from their four year old memories, and it showed in their magic. They were brash and fearless, wanting to learn and practice and perform more and more the deeper into their training they grew.

Nobody quite knew what to make of the three children, already masters of their chosen crafts by the time they were six years old, and still itching to do even more after that. Where the witches of Salem were cautious, their practices drenched in the tedium of religion and strict rituals, the new generation of witches couldn’t ever seem to break enough fundamental rules of magic before they were satisfied. 

Perhaps it was something in the L’Manburg air that made witches infinitely stronger than what was known in Salem. 

Perhaps the three witchlings were simply that good. 

Ranboo’s initial course of magical study focused on astral projection. They discovered early on that he was able to separate his mind from his body to go pseudo-sleepwalking when he was unconscious, so he worked to hone that ability into something he could control even in his waking hours. From there, he expanded his capabilities until he could give his astral projection a semi-physical form, and then could project infinite visions of himself into an army of ghostly clones. He also practiced matter manipulation in order to give the projections the ability to touch and interact with physical objects, which evolved into a reverse-engineering of said mechanics so his original body could switch places with his projections if he wished. Of all the powers of the witching world, Ranboo was the first to invent true, reliable teleportation.  

Tubbo’s fascination with fire and explosives wasn’t bound to Sapnap’s personal experience for long after the child discovered the horrifying potential of science experiments. L’Manburg’s exhaustive studies of chemistry and engineering were completely foreign to the Salem natives, who thought their Earth was the center of the universe, were just barely starting to understand that such microscopic creatures as bacteria could exist, and only knew pocket watches and telescopes as the newest novelties of invention. 

Tubbo, with an intellect that absorbed new knowledge like a sun-dried sponge, didn’t hesitate to dive headfirst into the resources this new world offered him. Traditional elemental witches only knew so much of the world and how it could be modified, and apparently that ignorance was a severely limiting factor in their capabilities. Tubbo discovered that there was in fact an entire periodic table of elements, each with a marvelous host of characteristics entirely unique to one another, with the determining factor in all these idiosyncrasies being a simple arrangement of atoms. 

Elemental magic was universally considered the easiest school to pursue, primarily owed to the complete lack of personal malleability it offered. There were lots of ways for a mind mage to expand upon the capabilities of their powers, the means through which they practiced like a fluid that seeped into the smallest nooks and crannies of a person’s brain. It was the same for most every other specialization in existence—excluding elementalists, of course. After all, what more can be done to a rock once you’ve learned how to crush it and form it back together?

Tubbo, eternally unsatisfied by that condemnation, used science to sharpen his magic with razor-sharp precision. He learned about the millions of different reactions that could be achieved when he adjusted the elements based on their individual aspects, inadvertently prodding at apocalyptic possibilities when one project flew too close to the sun. The nuclear bombs he engineered at only six years old contained power equal if not greater than the potential once contained within Karl, and that simultaneously terrified and excited Tubbo in equal measure. He flexed the boundaries of elemental magic until it became something entirely his own. 

Tommy’s magic was perhaps the greatest oddity of them all. Where Ranboo and Tubbo devoted feverish vigor to enhancing the powers they were genetically predisposed to control, Tommy just sort of… fucked around with everything. He didn’t have any singular magic moment like the other witches in his childhood that would’ve indicated how his powers might someday operate, like with Ranboo’s astral sleepwalking or Tubbo’s infant case of fire-breathing hiccups. 

Instead, Tommy’s witching practice involved randomly bouncing ideas off his aura’s walls until one of them stuck. 

To put it simply, he studied under the magic school of Stubborn Fucking Luck. 

Tommy had a vast array of talents at his disposal, from matter manipulation to astral projection to elementalism to telepathy to precognition to literally anything else he could think of that might be cool. The only issue was that he had no natural way of knowing how to do any of these things. 

Most witches were born with distinct auras already categorized into a particular school of magic, and while they were free to pick up new spells from other areas if they wished, it was infinitely more difficult to master something you weren’t already familiar with. It was like trying to imagine what a new color not already on the visible light spectrum might look like—unnatural, in complete opposition of instinct, and purely hypothetical in most cases. 

Tommy’s very existence defied that logic. He didn’t have a natural talent for anything except guesswork, and he honed that power into something maniacal. If there was a certain spell or ability he wanted to try out, he’d simply wave his hands all around, make random noises, kick walls, stab furniture, summon random spots of emotion he could find in his memories—anything he could think of to make the magic happen—and eventually it would. 

Then, after a few times practicing whatever combination of rituals he used to invoke the power in the first place, he’d memorize the sensation of it in his aura, file the information away somewhere within his magic’s reach, and the next time he wanted to cast that particular spell he could perform it with all the effortless ability of a wizened old master. Once he knew what it felt like, he wouldn’t even need an incantation. He just made it happen.

The biggest drawback was that Tommy’s knowledge couldn’t be layered on top of itself like traditional learning. It was like trying to memorize an entire vocabulary one word at a time, each one in a completely different language. He couldn’t count on the J sound in the English word June to be the same as in the Spanish word for the following month of the year, Julio, because he’d never get to expand on their tongue’s rules beyond the single example.

Magical sensations were intrinsically foreign to Tommy in the exact same way. He couldn’t imagine what the next logical evolution in one particular power would feel like because all spells just felt like random unrelated energies to him. 

Once, Tommy learned how to light a small flame the size of his fingertip, but he didn’t know where to push his magic in order to make it grow to the size of his palm. Sapnap tried to explain that he needed to feel some sort of rolling in his chest and focus on making it swell up hotter or something of the sort, but Tommy felt absolutely nothing in his chest except the plain buzzing of magic energy that came with any spell. The only reason he knew how to cast the flame when he learned it was because… he just knew. Not because it ever felt unique or different, but because it was all the work of instinct and blind faith that whatever spell his magical muscle memory summoned, it would be the one he wanted. 

Eventually, Tommy was able to expand the flame enough to cover his entire hand. Sapnap was overjoyed until Tommy explained that he’d just repeated the chaotic guessing process until the flame appeared with an entirely different spell, and that he could only cast the two distinct sizes without anything in between. 

Such was the language through which Tommy’s knowledge of magic was eternally translated. It wasn’t easy by any means, but it got the job done, and he was forced to be content as a half-formed bag of witchling tricks for the rest of his life. He didn’t have any potential options for growth lying in an observable place, and thus he never felt any underlying drive for more singing in his veins like his brothers.

At least, not until Tommy first fell in love with magic that day. 

The power of prophecy was a distinct and clearly identifiable rhythm in his aura from then on. Even if all other magics felt the same to him, Tommy’s destiny would remain nothing if not unmistakable, and for the first time he felt truly connected with the powers of his people. He understood it as instinctively as breathing, and it dawned on him that this was what he’d been missing out on all these years. 

So, yeah, he’d let Dream putter about observing magicians or whatever else he wanted to do, but in the meantime, Tommy was gonna do some research of his own. 

He scanned the streets of L’Manburg for magicians like a hawk for the next few months, head swiveling around hopefully whenever he thought he saw the long trench coat of King of Hearts or the flash of pink hair belonging to Minotaur Almighty. Tubbo and Ranboo joined in the search, eager to find out what got Tommy’s motivation pumping so intensely as it had since that fateful day, but it wasn’t until almost a full year later that they finally found another clue. 

“Look what I found!” Tubbo shrieked, throwing open the door to their shared bedroom with his chest heaving and cheeks reddening from exertion. Clutched in his fist was a large poster for a show at the Las Nevadas Theatre, which was still on its way to garnering the world-renowned fame it would someday achieve. Back then, it was still just a partially-reconstructed ghost story of a venue, not known for much except the supposed gambling ring that ran from its underground basement. 

“What is it?” Ranboo chirruped over Tommy’s scream of terror, staggering back and swearing at Tubbo for almost breaking his face open with the abrupt slamming of the door. 

Tubbo didn’t offer a verbal reply, just held out the poster even higher. 

Mythos Three, it read in bold yellow text, Masters of magic and the art of enchantment! See the formidable Minotaur Almighty, the charming King of Hearts, and the hallowed shadow of Crowfather bend space and time itself at the illustrious Las Nevadas Theatre! 

The members of Mythos Three were illustrated in enrapturing vibrancy, with Minotaur Almighty’s imposing figure standing cold and unbreakable as a solid marble statue on the left, and mirrored by King of Hearts with his back rotated to partially hide him from view. Standing behind them and slightly overhead, Crowfather’s wings extended nearly out of frame and shrouded the entire scene in dim and intrigue. 

King of Hearts wore an updated version of the same trench coat he had when Tommy first met him, slightly shorter and embroidered with threads that shimmered like they were made of real gold. His torso was covered by a white collared shirt peeking out from beneath a deep crimson vest with buttons and threaded decals the same shade of gold to match his coat. In place of the beanie that once covered his brown flop of hair, there was a smart top hat the same color maroon as his vest, and he was gently tipping it at the viewer with a rakish smile beneath a familiar black mask. 

Minotaur Almighty’s costume hadn’t changed much as far as style, but it was certainly updated with more expensive materials than before, and he was seemingly coated head-to-toe in an intricate web of golden jewelry. His pink hair was pulled back in a smooth series of plaits that wove together as one amidst sparkling baubles and clips to match his jewelry, and a gorgeous crown fit for a king sat nestled atop his head. Rather than paint a plain masquerade mask to appear like a boar’s skull, he now wore a bleached porcelain imitation of the real thing, the tusks capped in gold and snarling like it had a murderous mind of its own. 

Crowfather’s figure was ever shrouded in darkness, black swirling fabrics shimmering rich shades of corbeau and emerald to match the brief flashes of green adorning the rest of his costume. His hat was the same black veil as before, but now it was studded with tiny beads of green and gold that glittered like stars in the night’s sky. The veil had a split in the middle of his face, and the edges were pulled back just enough to see pale skin and a mysterious smile flanked by sharp cheekbones and weightless locks of blonde hair that tumbled around his face like he was suspended from gravity. 

Tommy would never admit it, but he legitimately got a little teary-eyed seeing them all again. 

“We have to go,” Tubbo was insisting, pointing to the showtimes at the bottom of the poster when Tommy recovered from the truly spiritual experience it was, soaking in the sacred beauty of the Mythos Three. “Opening night is this Saturday, and they’re only doing a few more shows after that. Who knows when an opportunity like this will come again?” 

Ranboo nodded in enthusiastic agreement. “What should we tell Dream?”

“Nothing,” Tommy rasped at last. His eyes darted to the door and back, making sure it was shut tight, then leaned in close and lowered his voice down to a whisper. “Guys, here’s the thing—Dream’s still a little iffy on the whole ‘magicians’ thing. If we bring it up with him, there’s a chance he’ll say no, and then he’ll be drilling our brains non-stop to check for any intention of sneaking out from now all the way until the shows are over and done with. Right now, he’s lowered his guard—he doesn’t know that there’s anything amiss to search for, yeah? So I say we just keep the Mythos Three on the down-low until Saturday night. Then we’ll sneak out and see the show, and worst case scenario, he finds out after we’re already gone and by the time we come back safe and sound, he’ll still have his proof that magicians are totally cool in this world. You with me?”

Tubbo broke out in a grin. “We’re gonna be dirty crime boys,” he giggled. “I love it. How ‘bout you, Memory Boy?”

“I’m down,” Ranboo whispered. “Cool, cool, cool. Sounds like a plan. I just worry what we’ll do if he actually does end up combing our brains, but it’s whatever.” He shrugged, then looked over at Tommy, who had a delightedly dastardly grin gradually making its way up his face. “Uh oh, I don’t like that look. Tommy, what are you planning?”

“Leave the Dream stuff to me, alright boys?” Tommy proclaimed, jabbing his thumb into his chest. “I’ll need a minute to get ready, gimme a sec.”

After several embarrassing minutes of Tommy wiggling his fingers in the air, hissing random syllables in his mind, and shaking his body in strange dance moves that made him look partially possessed, he felt some floodgate open in his aura, and a spell was made. 

“There!” Tommy yelped, snagging onto the sensation. “I did it! Alright, give me your noggins.” He extended his hands at the other two, and they hesitantly leaned forward until their foreheads were flush with Tommy’s palms. There was a soft twinge of pressure between their temples, followed by a feeling like their ears popping, and then Tommy was withdrawing his hands with a triumphant smile on his face. 

Tubbo looked at Ranboo, then back at Tommy, bewildered. “What did you do?”

Tommy puffed out his chest. “I made it so that if anyone tries to read your mind, they’ll only hear the Able Sisters playing on repeat. Now Dream won’t want to get within a hundred metre radius of our brains, he fuckin’ hates that song!”

“Isn’t he bound to notice something’s wrong after a few tries, though?” Ranboo protested, wringing his hands. 

“Hmm, maybe,” Tommy shrugged. “But I made it so the spell only lasts sixty nine hours, so it’ll wear off a little while after we make it home on Saturday. Hopefully he’ll just read our minds once and back the fuck off until then from fear of Able Sisters Hypnosis. That’s my theory, anyway.”

Tubbo giggled into his palm, hiding his face behind the poster. “You should stop putting such specific conditions on your spells, Boss Man. Now if you ever want to block Dream’s mind rays again you’ll have to keep casting it every couple days rather than leave it on indefinitely until you tell it to stop.”

Tommy blinked. 

“I hadn’t thought of that, actually.”

Ranboo perked up a little, nodding at Tubbo with wide eyes. “Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. Tommy, it’s good that you made an exit strategy because we probably don’t want to be stuck like that forever, but you could probably just set it with the intention that the spell can only be broken when you touch our foreheads and say ‘Unable Brothers,’ or something like that.”

“Hmm,” Tommy hummed and scratched the back of his head, contemplating. “Yeah, I mean, I don’t know how to turn off my spells naturally, so I usually invent new versions with different finite conditions each time I need them, but now that I’m thinking about it—yeah! I could just make the end condition ‘it turns off when I want it to.’ Wouldn’t be the most complex thing I’ve ever spelled. I’ll keep that in mind, thanks!”

“Of course,” Tubbo sang, gently rolling the poster up into a tube and tucking it under his bed, camouflaged amidst the junkyard of chemical waste and spare parts he kept there to prevent prying eyes from rummaging around in his shit and thus facing the risk of setting off a half-baked bomb. “Now, does anyone have money for tickets, or do we need to rob Gogy again?”

“Oh,” Ranboo blurted awkwardly, his hand already halfway disappeared through a teleportal to George’s wallet across the house. He pulled back with a few nicked paper bills pinched between his fingers, a sheepish blush creeping over his cheeks. “Sorry, I just kinda assumed—like, between the three of us—we’re completely broke, right? Or am I the only one—?”

Tommy let out a shrieking laugh. “Ranboob, we are seven years old. Of course we’re fucking broke.”

“Oh, good. Cool,” Ranboo snickered. He flicked through the paper notes with his thumb and hummed, “Uhh, d’you think five is enough?”

“Not if we want to get ice cream after,” Tubbo answered. 

“Good idea,” chimed Ranboo, unzipping another teleportal. “Might as well snag enough for something at the concession stand, while we’re at it. George is rich, he won’t miss… ten? Fifteen?”

“Twenty five,” Tommy commanded. He folded his arms over his chest and pursed his lips to keep from bursting into giddy laughter imagining the expression on George’s face when he inevitably discovered the distinct lack of pocket change left in his wallet. “I also want a new set of playing cards and Dream says he won’t buy me a new one until I can honestly promise not to practice throwing them hard enough to break the front window.”

Ranboo nodded, withdrew the money, and closed the teleportal just in time for Tommy’s composure to break, echoing giggles throughout the tiny wooden bedroom. 

Tubbo stashed the money with the poster and gave Ranboo a delighted high-five.

Chapter Text

“Techno, did you steal my eyeliner again?” Wilbur roars down the hall, his voice echoing furiously throughout the entire house. 

A series of slamming doors and angry thundering footfalls is the only response for a moment, until Techno appears in the shadow of Wilbur’s bedroom doorway with bleary eyes and hair a complete rat’s nest around his head. He probably dozed off in his reading nook again. “For the last time, I do not have your eyeliner, nor will I ever have your eyeliner. I don’t know if you’ve paid any attention to what I look like during our act for the past decade, but I wear a mask, you idiot. My eyes are never visible.”

“Oh yeah?” Wilbur counters, glaring at his brother through the vanity mirror before him while he struggles to glue on a false beard and mustache. “Is that right? Then why do your eyelashes always look so dark and pretty, hmm?”

“I have—!” Techno cuts himself off with a facepalm, groaning in exasperation. “I have naturally long eyelashes, I’m the cooler twin, you’re in denial. We’ve been over this.”

“Fuck you,” Wilbur spits, unwilling to string out a better retort and risk the adhesive on his carefully applied disguise coming loose. 

“Jealousy is a disease, bitch!” Techno calls over his shoulder and marches his way back down the hall, snorting his signature breathy laugh. “Get well soon!”

A few moments later, Phil pops his head in the door, a worried frown set on his face. “What’s going—? Oh my God, Wil, is all that really necessary?” He crosses the threshold to Wilbur’s side, cringing at the mess of makeup and props scattered over the entire surface of his vanity. 

Wilbur glares at him. “What are you suggesting? Do you honestly think I’m gonna waltz in there with my everyday clothes and risk defiling my reputation so outrageously? You think I’m gonna let these petty brats use my presence as clout to bolster their foolish pride? No, Wilbur Soot Watson will not be seen anywhere near the Alchemysteria show tonight, not if I have any say in the matter.”

Phil rolls his eyes. “Okay, you’ve officially gone off the deep end, mate. It’s just another magic act. We’ve competed with plenty like them before, what’s got you so worked up this time?”

“Oh, I dunno, maybe the fact that they have the audacity to claim our opening night as their own, as if we didn’t fight tooth and fucking nail to get to where we are today? Or the fact that they’re clearly riding on our coattails in an attempt to get to the top and Quackity is just allowing our image to be sullied so because their agent is a ‘good friend’ of his?” Wilbur seethes, jerkily affixing the finishing touches of his disguise with a plain brown bowler hat and a scarf in the ugliest shade of green he could find in his wardrobe. 

Rather than tell him off for being rude, Phil seems to soften a little at that, his eyes growing warm and fond. “Oh, Wilbur. Is that what this is all about? You’re feeling overprotective of our stage because you’re overprotective of our family?”

Wilbur stalls. “I guess—maybe a bit of that, yes. But more importantly, I’m pissed as all hell that we didn’t get to open tonight like I wanted to. They’re probably not even any good, y’know? I mean, did you ever even hear the name on the streets before now? Where the hell did Alchemysteria come from if not some rich old man’s connections with Quackity getting his snotty kid a gig for his birthday? It’s not right. I won’t allow it.”

“Whatever you say, mate,” Phil tuts, shaking his head. “Still, remember you don’t have to worry about us anymore, yeah? Things might’ve been a bit rough at the start, but we’ve made a good life for ourselves now. If the three of us retired today we’d still have enough to stay comfortable for the rest of our days. Don’t let your paranoia get the best of you, okay?”

Wilbur purses his lips as Phil’s hand comes down on his shoulder, squeezing once before leaving the room. 

See, of course Wilbur knows their whole lives aren’t going to come crashing down from one scheduling conflict. He understands better than anyone how lucky he has it, living in a beautiful house with a happy family and working a job he absolutely adores. That’s not in danger of vanishing anytime soon. 

It’s just—his pride, damn it. Wilbur is the prestigious King of Hearts, the greatest magician of all time! And the very idea of some tiny squad of petty illusionists attempting to upstage him just makes Wilbur want to scream and punch a hole in his bedroom drywall. 

He’s more mature than that, though. Obviously. 

Which is why he’s instead going to see Alchemysteria in a disguise and jeer his utmost disapproval throughout the entire show instead.

He hopes one of them cries. 

With that pleasantly vile thought in mind, Wilbur packs his pockets and double-checks his disguise, the frumpy clothes and stage makeup transforming him from a handsome magician into a scraggly middle-aged man. The family automobile is parked out front, the keys left on the front table by the entry, and Wilbur starts it up and peels down the long driveway into the city proper like hell is on his heels.

By the time he drops off the keys with the valet, he’s had enough time to start to feel a bit guilty for the anger that stews like a yapping dog in his stomach, snarling poison and toxicity that he’s never had a great deal of success with tamping down. Deep-rooted insecurities claw at his insides, begging for volcanic release in the form of hateful insults like scalding magma, and the knowledge that these young upstarts managed to draw it all to the surface so quickly is just an added insult to injury. 

Perhaps he should consider taking Techno’s advice and chill the fuck out. 

But then he enters the grand entrance to Las Nevadas, and any hope of internal peace negotiations are dashed in an instant.

The venue is startlingly full. Wilbur realizes that he’s never been able to fully appreciate the number of guests that frequent their regular theatre, usually ducking in and out of coat check before each performance so he can get a good peek at a few audience members’ personal information and seat numbers to use in his act. He’s never attended a show from the audience’s perspective, and the thrill of anticipation is a palpable mist in the air, choking his lungs like herb smoke. 

“How exciting! It’s been quite some time since we’ve seen another magic show beyond Mythos Three. I hope they don’t disappoint!”

“D’you think they’ll do a bullet catch? Haven’t seen a trick like that one in ages, not since Minotaur Almighty caught two cannonballs in each hand last year. I’m still trying to work out how he did it.”

“I heard a rumor that they’re doing a sort of homage to King of Hearts, something about a stage name similarly inspired by playing cards? Don’t quote me on that, though. Alchemysteria’s the only name they’re presently advertising.”

Compliments in passing are like brands against Wilbur’s skin, sinking deep and melting his flesh away with putrid scarring syllables that only serve to work him up even angrier as he finds his way to his seat, located in the front row of the tallest balcony. From here, his vantage point reveals the staggering size of the venue in its entirety, and it strikes a bitter note of nostalgic envy in his sternum when he imagines the view in reverse, looking out from the stage. 

He slumps down in his seat and adjusts the clumsy-looking goggles on his face, courtesy of Phil, who invented the binospecs for the express purpose of watching stage plays from a distance while still being able to zoom in and out with excruciating detail. When Wilbur adjusts a miniscule series of dials on the underside of the spectacles, he can zoom in enough to see every thread in the drawn curtain tassels. He wants to be able to pick apart every last clumsy trapdoor contraption, every poorly concealed sheet of flash paper, every anxious turn of the idiots’ faces when they realize they’ll never be anything compared to the prestige of Mythos Three. 

The rest of the guests trickle in gradually, chatting quietly amongst themselves as the seats begin to fill to an irritating capacity. They’re certainly not sold out, but from the looks of it, they got pretty close. 

“Ladies and Gentlemen!” crows an unmistakable voice, sucking the idle chatter from the room like a vacuum. Quackity lets out a chittered laugh at the abrupt hush and clears his throat. “Thank you—thank you for your patronage here at Las Nevadas Theatre this evening! I’m gonna tell you something—tonight’s show is definitely gonna be one to remember, Okay? I know we’re looking at a little change in the usually scheduled program this spring, but believe me, I am more than happy to invite these fellas to take part in this, my beautiful theatre, my baby, my community I built from the ground up. Anyway, as much as I’d love to stand around bragging about Las Nevadas all day, I’ve got a show to announce!”

The lights go dim, all except for the halo of spotlights twirling anticipatory circles around the scarlet surface of the closed curtain. 

“Without further ado, Las Nevadas presents… ALCHEMYSTERIA!” Quackity breaks off into a hooting cheer that melts in with the rest of the crowd as he’s disconnected from the speakers, and Wilbur grits his teeth against the uproarious applause. 

The curtains jolt, shudder, and begin to rise, and Wilbur makes sure his binospecs are focused squarely on the three sets of dress shoes that are revealed, adrenaline coursing through him enough to make his hands shake where they’re clenched against the armrests. Finally, his thoughts cry out, time to connect a face to these bastards. 

The first thing Wilbur notices is their hands—the three magicians are standing in a straight line in front and center stage, which would be a completely boring first impression by itself, if not for the fact that they’re all… holding hands? The magicians of Alchemysteria stand shoulder-to-shoulder, pressed together like spooked sardines, and they’re clutching each other’s hands so tightly Wilbur can make out crumpled white on their knuckles. 

Next is their uniforms, which are so obviously hand-sewn it almost hurts to look at. They’re wearing matching black slacks and vests, though the buttons are mismatched and tarnished like they’d dug them up from an antique store’s garbage pile. The only distinguishing features of their costumes are the colored button-ups they wear beneath the vests, the one on the left in a crisp spring green, the right in rich heraldic indigo, and the center blending obnoxiously with the vibrant vermilion of the curtain in glossy satin. 

As more of their torsos are revealed, Wilbur notices a few more key differences in their costumes, particularly in the way they’ve decided to accessorize. The green one wears a loose tie over his vest, sloppy and crooked to match the wrinkled cuffs of his sleeves, which are rolled up to his elbows. The one in violet has a lush bloom of allium poking out of his breast pocket that’s much too big for a boutonniere—it looks clownish and silly, even if Wilbur sets aside his vicious grudge against them. The curtain isn’t quite past their shoulders yet, so it’s hard to make out the exact shape of the red one’s silhouette, but he notices there’s some sort of cape thing thrown over one shoulder, embroidered with surprisingly delicate patterns of red, white, azure, gold, and black.

Then their faces are revealed, and Wilbur’s jaw goes completely slack. 

They’re—they’re children. 

Alchemysteria is a trio of magician teenagers. 

Their eyes are alight with childish wonder and awe, frissions of clear anxiety twitching through the tightness of their grins every once in a while, and of course they haven’t even bothered to mask their faces. Anonymity means nothing to a band of reckless teens desperate for attention—and Wilbur would know.

Finally able to absorb their appearances in full, Wilbur almost wants to snort at what he finds. 

First of all, the violet one has just completely tried to rip off Techno’s brand, a dopey-looking crown affixed slightly crooked atop his head. Sure, his hair is split-dyed down the middle, which is admittedly pretty interesting, but he’s done nothing to capitalize on that. He could’ve worn split clothing, or gone for some sort of partial possession angle, but instead he chooses alliums and a tarnished crown? How embarrassing for him. 

The green one seems to have missed the memo about dressing professionally, because his hair is a complete mess, brown swarming around a set of bronzed inventor goggles pushed up over his forehead like the ones Phil wears when he locks himself in the workshop for hours on end. They’re clearly not just props built for showmanship, with welding marks and soot stains scuffing the surface like he’d thrown a few sticks of dynamite at them just before the show and didn’t bother to give the metal a polish after. 

The red one’s cape actually turns out to be a hooded cloak that reaches midway down his legs, stopping just before his knees in two split diamonds of fabric almost reminiscent of a tailcoat. The hood is pulled as far back on his head as he can manage it, draping a distant accent to his beaming smile and blonde curls. Something about the pattern looks familiar, it’s on the tip of Wilbur’s tongue, and as he leans in to get a closer look—

“HELLO!” the red one bellows. 

Wilbur flinches back. Christ, that one is loud. 

“Hi! Thank you for coming to our grand debut!” the green one gushes, bouncing on his heels with a strangely unhinged look in his eyes. 

The applause dies down and the three magicians look at each other, giggling like children—probably because they’re literally teenagers. 

Teenagers! 

Wilbur just might die of shock.

The purple one swallows a nervous gulp and pastes on a smile, offering his free hand in a tiny wave. “Okay, wow—that’s a lot of people!”

A quiet surge of giggles floats through the audience, and Wilbur rolls his eyes. They're not cute, they're embarrassing! 

The red one clears his throat and steps forward, releasing his fellow stagemates’ hands, and all of a sudden he looks terribly serious. “Ahem—hello, patronage of Las Nevadas. Allow me to introduce myself. I go by many names: Wife Haver, Big T, Big Man, T-Money— ow, what the fuck?!” he whirls around on the green one, who is digging the heel of his shoe into the red one’s foot, glaring at him with enough heat to start a forest fire. “Prime, you’re bossy. Fine, I’ll get on with it—I am the Jack of All Trades! But to the ladies, you can just call me handsome.” 

The Jack sends a wink out to the crowd, earning him another flutter of laughter, and Wilbur burns. 

That’s where he recognized the pattern. 

The kid is dressed up like a playing card. 

Oh, Wilbur is going to destroy them for this. 

The green one steps forward and twists his face into a devious cackle. “My name is Doctor Frankincense!”

“And I’m Enderman!” the final magician chirps, waving his hands out at the crowd on his tiptoes, and Wilbur finally notices how he towers over the other two, previously hunched over with nerves that disguised his staggering stature. He might even be taller than Wilbur, which would be just fabulous . 

Note the sarcasm.

Go on, Enderman, add more fuel to Wilbur’s fire. It’ll just make the blaze burn all the brighter when he watches your little act crumble to dust and ash. 

The three children clasp hands again and take a quick bow as the crowd sends up their applause, and together they shout, “We are Alchemysteria! Thank you for coming to our show!”

As the cheers die out, The Jack glances at his compatriots with a glint in his eye. “Well, I think that’s enough chit-chat introductions, don’t you?”

“Oh, I agree wholeheartedly,” Enderman replies, nodding. 

Doctor Frankincense raises his free hand, fingers curled together, and scans the audience with a cool and confident smirk. “Then let’s give these kind people the show they paid for!”

Then he snaps, and the trio is engulfed in flames. 

Gasps shatter the calm of the crowd as they watch Alchemysteria burn a pillar of blue flame to the very tallest edge of the curtains, and Wilbur recoils. 

He can feel the warmth against his face all the way from the balcony. 

There’s no way that was fake, even if they rigged it with plastic and fabric—unless they installed flash heaters in front of the seats? No, that wouldn’t work, they’d need time to warm up, and the heat is already vanished along with the flame and the magicians—

Wait.

Alchemysteria has disappeared. 

Wilbur curses himself, squinting at the stage floor for any sign of a trapdoor opening, but it’s too late. They must’ve skittered offstage somewhere, waiting in the wings—

“Ready, set…”

Wilbur whirls around, and suddenly the three magicians of Alchemysteria are standing right next to him, balancing on the edge of the balcony banister. He lets out a strangled noise and rips off his binospecs, and sure enough, they’ve transported themselves all the way up in a mere fraction of a second. 

“Go!” they crow, and then they’re tipping forward and the children are falling. 

Wilbur’s heart drops down to his stomach fast enough it makes him nauseous. 

He makes a scrambling attempt to grab them before they slip, but it’s too late, their bodies are sagging into the empty air above the highest balcony and people are screaming out in terror, it’s too late, it’s too late—

The Jack twists himself around mid-air, and it’s like gravity is a mere suggestion to him, because he stops falling before he’s even properly begun. He drifts in the open air before Wilbur’s balcony with his hands clasped behind his head, the picture of ease and relaxation, and wiggles his eyebrows at the horrified faces of the crowd. 

He catches Wilbur’s eye and winks. 

Then he kicks his legs out beneath him and begins a bounding dance back to the front of the stage, leaping on imaginary obstacles in the air like he’s surrounded by trampolines. He turns himself upside down, pretends to stroll down an imaginary set of stairs on the ceiling, then topples to the side and cartwheels over the audience in the balcony below, screaming with laughter and joy all the while. 

Wilbur just barely manages to wrench his eyes away from The Jack in time to catch an eyeful of brilliant green flames bleeding trails through the air behind Doctor Frankincense. His palms and the bottoms of his feet are alight with fire, shifting with a myriad of impossible colors, and he paints the entire left side of the theatre in light like fireworks, curling designs that remain stationary in space for a few seconds like the light is a physical medium of art. The boosters at his feet keep him suspended in the air, and though he looks a little more unsteady on his feet than The Jack, he still shoots confident grins at anyone who looks his way, waving and bumbling around like a dizzy little bee. 

One of his flames gets a little too close to the wallpaper and he lets out a panicked, “SHIT! Enderman—!”

Before the words are halfway out his mouth, Enderman appears by his side, clinging to a pillar on the wall in a flurry of strange violet sparks, and pats out the flames before they cause so much of a scratch. 

“Frankincense!” Enderman shrills. “Get away from the walls! This isn’t like back home, you can’t just flirt with arson charges and expect nobody to snitch!”

Doctor Frankincense giggles. “Sorry Ender! It won’t happen again!”

“That chaotic piece of shit is going to kill me someday, I swear,” Enderman mumbles, but this time his voice comes from the unoccupied seat to Wilbur’s right. 

Wilbur flinches, eyes darting back and forth from where he’d just seen the kid putting out a fire across the hall, and Enderman extends one hand, oblivious and likely uncaring of Wilbur’s brain-melting disbelief. “Hey, thanks for coming to our show, Mr. Friend-I-Haven’t-Met-Yet.”

Casting a glance around the audience, Wilbur feels his already ashen face go dead fucking white when he sees every open seat in the theatre occupied by clones with split-dyed hair, all engaging in casual conversation with the other attendees like it’s just another day in the life of Alchemysteria. 

Maybe it is. 

Holy shit, Wilbur is going to be sick. 

The Jack finally floats back to the stage, the tips of his dress shoes resting gently on the floor before his body weight drops back to normal, and the weightless quality of his cloak and hair vanishes as if it was never floating in the first place. 

Doctor Frankincense ambles down the same route as best he can, laughing and crying out in surprise whenever he loses his balance on a current of air and is pitched sideways. 

“Uh oh, I think that’s my cue to leave,” every Enderman says all at once, a resounding chorus throughout the echoing acoustics like a choir of angels. The one beside Wilbur drops the hand he’d offered in greeting and instead reaches out to pat his shoulder, saying one final goodbye of “it was a pleasure talking to you!” before he vanishes in a puff of purple sparks.

Enderman reappears in the perfect place to catch Doctor Frankincense when he crashes into stage left, snagging the mad scientist by the arms and swinging him around until the flames on his toes die all the way down and he is at last grounded again. 

The audience is absolutely losing their minds by now, hysterical cheering and crying and laughing causing a swell of noise like an army in the cavernous theatre. Alchemysteria regroups centerstage and takes a few more bows, giggling and elbowing each other, and Wilbur’s entire body goes cold. 

Numb.

He has absolutely no idea how they did it. 

Alchemysteria truly might be…

“Let’s hope the rest of the show goes a bit smoother than that, yeah?” The Jack cries out breathlessly, coughing on his laughter. 

“Yeah, Frankincense,” Enderman accuses, jabbing a pointed finger into the Doctor’s chest. “You got singe marks all over me! And I really liked this shirt!” he points to his sleeve, where indeed a tiny curl of smoke wafts up from a blackened tear near the edge. 

Doctor Frankincense sticks out his tongue and laughs, his palms erupting in rich cyan flame. “But the crowd loved it! Everyone, cheer if you want to see me light Enderman’s hair on fire!”

Predictably, the audience goes wild. 

All too excited to comply, the Doctor lunges for Enderman’s head, but The Jack catches him by the wrists and points the fire up and away from their faces just in time. 

“Hey!” The Jack cackles. “We’ve only just begun! Save the hair stunt for later in the show, it’ll be funnier if you strike when he’s least expecting it.”

Enderman drops his head into his hands, peeking out between his fingers, and stage-whispers “Help me!” to the crowd. An eruption of laughter rings out in reply, and he whines, covering his face entirely and shaking his head in dismay. 

The Jack tilts his head back with a laugh, clapping Enderman supportively on the shoulder, and shrugs with a look that says hey, what can you do. “Listen, we have a lot of fun here. But I’m guessing you guys didn’t show up just for the laughs—you want to see magic. Am I right, or am I right?”

He receives a resounding cheer as a response, and his face lights up with wonder. “I’m so glad you said that! So, for my next trick…” he twirls his hand and a tiny metal spoon appears out of thin air. “I will be bending this spoon… with my mind.”

Wilbur blinks. 

After all that… a spoon trick?

It sounds like the rest of the guests feel the same way, because The Jack is met only by bewildered silence. 

He scowls. 

“What, is that not good enough for you?” he pouts, and the spoon vanishes from his hand. It’s quick enough that Wilbur can’t tell how he got it into his sleeve, which is all the more frustrating as he tries to parse through the show so far and decipher just how they’ve managed all these impossible tricks so far. Even Alchemysteria’s sleight of hand is top-tier, apparently. How irritating.

The Jack spreads his arms, palms facing up towards the ceiling, and snarls, “How about this for a magic trick, then?”

With a mighty bellow of creaking wood and metal, he slowly raises his arms up over his head, his hands curling into fists, and the entire stage floor warps and bends around him on each side. Doctor Frankincense and Enderman slide down the curved incline the floor created, each letting out abrupt cries of shock and delight, and The Jack tilts his head up with a wicked smirk. 

The silence of the crowd is over in the blink of an eye, hundreds rising to their feet in a startled standing ovation, and The Jack nods with satisfaction. His arms drop back down to his sides, and the stage flattens out to its original shape without a single hairline fracture along the transformed wood. 

“Yeah,” The Jack grumbles. “That’s what I thought. Fuckin’ pricks.”

Doctor Frankincense swats the back of The Jack’s head with a scandalized gasp. “Don’t call our audience pricks, you prick! Sit down and take a breather for a little while. Take a timeout and think about what you did.” He points to a spot on the stage behind them and The Jack snarls, but otherwise doesn’t resist, stalking away from the main spotlight with an exaggerated dragging of feet. 

“Yeah yeah, you’re alright, Boss Man. You’ll feel better after you cool off a bit,” Frankincense tuts. “Looks like it’s my turn, I reckon. For this trick, I’ll need a volunteer from the audience.”

Of course, a flurry of hands and excited cries for attention shoot through the air, and Enderman vanishes, only to reappear moments later holding two random members of the audience by their shoulders. They sway a bit, disoriented from the instantaneous travel, and Wilbur makes a mental note to hunt the couple down after the show and ask what sort of high-tech contraption made it possible for Enderman to supposedly travel all that distance so quickly. 

“Oh, hello!” Doctor Frankincense bubbles, trotting over to the two with his hand extended for them to shake. The woman reaches out to take it, then hesitates, glancing at his palm and back to the blackened marks on Enderman’s sleeve. Doctor Frankincense giggles. “Don’t worry, I won’t burn you. That treatment is reserved for my brothers.” He inclines his head at the other two magicians, and a shred of guilt curdles in Wilbur’s stomach. 

Oh. They’re family too.

“Aw, that’s cute,” the woman lilts, and Wilbur’s internal struggles are silenced the moment he realizes he recognizes the voice. 

No, it couldn’t be—

“My name is Niki,” she says, grasping the Doctor’s hand in a firm shake. She then points to her companion, whose sharp bob-cut hair is dyed an alarming shade of blue. “This is my friend Jack Manifold.”

“Oh, what a coincidence!” Frankincense gasps. “I know someone named Jack as well! But that’s just his stage name, unfortunately.”

Jack Manifold shakes his head, the satin locks of his hair glittering effervescent in the spotlights. “I figured as much, thanks,” he snickers. “I must admit, I’m a bit offended that he stole my name, but I guess it doesn’t matter much either way. To each their own!”

Jack Manifold, you stupid cunt, Wilbur hisses internally. How do you think I feel? Get off the fucking stage!

“Oi!” Jack of All Trades shrieks over his shoulder, spinning on his knees so he’s sat facing the two volunteers. “I didn’t pick this name because of you, I… Actually, you know what? Nevermind.” His face flushes abruptly and he spins back around so his hood hides the rapid reddening of his ears, and Wilbur feels something even stranger than guilt flutter in his stomach at the sight. 

It might be fury—no, it must be—as he was about to reveal he was inspired by Wilbur’s stage name, right? So what else would that achy coiling sensation be, if not overwhelming rage? 

Surely not fondness, no matter how similar it seems to the eruption of butterfly wings that chokes his chest whenever he spends lazy days lounging about with his family. Wilbur isn’t flattered that the impossible child almost sounds like a tiny little King of Hearts fanboy. He doesn’t think it’s a little touching, not at all.

No, Wilbur is just angry. Strangely, softly angry. 

He refocuses his attention on the stage, where Enderman is helping Doctor Frankincense into a horrific contraption of metal and chains, cocooning his body in solid steely ropes with intricate padlocks clamped over any available weak spot. 

Oh, Wilbur’s seen this type of thing before. His very own father practically invented it—the supposedly impossible straightjacket escape through a series of hacked locks and keys. Frankincense will ask the volunteers to test the locks, make sure they’re tight, and then when he goes to break out, an internal mechanism will release him in a dramatic display of lockpicking prowess. 

It’s a bit disappointing, actually. Wilbur’s seen this trick done a thousand times, with just as many variations, and at this point it’s become fairly old news. No doubt the audience feels the same, a few yawns floating through the white noise of the magicians explaining the instructions, and the righteous flare of haughtiness that lances through Wilbur’s ribs at the thought isn’t nearly as potent as it’s supposed to be. 

“Right,” Frankincense says at last, wriggling in his constricting prison of silver. “Now, Miss Niki, could you tug on the chains a bit? Just to reassure everyone that it’s solid stuff, y’know, the basics. Feel free to test the padlocks too, if you want. Try to bend or break any part of it with all your might. I won’t mind if something snaps.”

Niki does as she’s instructed, making a big show of tugging at the restraints, and part of Wilbur just shrivels up and dies right then and there. His childhood best friend has betrayed him, corrupted into an enthusiastic traitor for the enemy—the heartache is downright paralyzing.

“Yeah, they’re quite secure!” Niki singsongs, a little breathless from the supposed exertion she put into testing them, perfect for the role of ‘random’ audience member number one. Oh, the agony.

“Fantastic,” Doctor Frankincense affirms, nodding over at Enderman, who vanishes. When he returns, he’s holding—

Holy shit is that a—

“Blowtorch?” Jack Manifold splutters. “The fuck d’you need a blowtorch for?”

Doctor Frankincense looks at him like he’s an idiot. “To test the structural fortitude of my restraints, right? How else are we gonna prove it’s not folded with gallium or some other bullshit metal that can get all slippery and soft when it gets even the slightest bit hot? I’m trying to do a magic trick here, not a con act.”

Jack Manifold goes a little pale. “I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to point a blowtorch at another living person. Ever.” A whisper of gasps hush over the audience in horrified agreement. 

“Oh, well, y’know, Doctor Frankincense is pretty good with fire,” Enderman shrugs gently, passing the blowtorch to Niki, whose expression looks like she’s stuck halfway between an excited giggle and the urge to run away screaming. “He’ll be alright. We just need to test the chains.”

“In all fairness, I’d rather look the business end of a tiny little blowtorch in the face than risk making my trick look like a hack,” Doctor Frankincense enthuses, swaying slightly on his feet. “If you don’t want to do it, we can find someone else.”

Niki shakes her head. “No, it’s fine. As long as you’re comfortable.”

Wilbur stifles a whine of protest. She almost had the perfect opportunity to flee and redeem herself, and she threw it away! Pain, nothing but pain. 

Shyly, like she’s afraid it’s going to blow up in her hands, Niki ignites the blowtorch and runs it over a few sections of the chains until they glow red hot with warmth. 

Frankincense wriggles around some more, but they don’t budge. “Guess the blowtorch isn’t hot enough to melt them, that’s too bad,” he mock-sighs, sounding like he’s not disappointed even the slightest bit. “It was pretty hot, though. Right?”

“Um, yeah,” Niki reassures, ghosting one edge of her handkerchief against the hot surface of the glowing metal. Almost immediately, it catches a tiny flame, and she shakes it out before it can spread, holding up the blackened fabric for the theatre to see. 

She would’ve made such a lovely assistant, if Mythos Three used assistants. Wilbur should’ve appreciated her when he had the chance. 

Doctor Frankincense raises an eyebrow. “So we’ve established the physical integrity of these chains. They’re pretty tough, and wound up tight. Now tell me, Miss Niki, do you think I could escape these chains in less than… let’s say… an hour?”

“No,” Niki shakes her head. 

“What about ten minutes?”

Niki’s eyes widen. “Definitely not.”

“One minute?”

“I don’t know about you, but I think you’re supposed to bet on higher numbers if someone says they don’t think you’ll make it out in less than an hour,” Jack Manifold interrupts, shooting the audience a wary grimace. “I’ve seen these tricks before. They usually take a minimum of five minutes, I think. Depends on how you’ve rigged it up.”

An abrupt cackle cuts through the stage’s quiet, and Jack of All Trades whirls back around, launching himself to his feet. “We haven’t rigged shit, dickhead. My brother is a highly talented magician, and he’s gonna use his powers to escape in less than ten seconds. I’ll guarantee it.”

The theatre swells with a taunting “Ooooooh!” and Jack Manifold’s cocky grin is wiped flat. 

“Alright, let’s bet on it then,” he sniffs. “If this man takes more than ten seconds to break free, I get to choose a new stage name for you.”

The Jack of All Trades grins, a disquieting darkness swirling in his gaze. “I’ll take that money. But if I win, then you have to give me the teddy bear you’ve got hidden under your wig.”

Jack Manifold goes crimson. “Wha—! I’m not wearing a wig! This is my natural hair! How would I have a teddy bear under here, anyway?! Stop laughing, you fucker!”

The Jack doesn’t dignify Jack Manifold with a response, instead striding forward with his hand outstretched, eyebrows raised. “So? Do we have ourselves a deal, or what?”

Jack Manifold seizes his hand immediately, face still flushed furious. “Deal.”

Wilbur holds his breath. 

In all honesty, he probably would’ve taken the bet, if he was in Jack’s position. It’s gonna be impossible for Doctor Frankincense to free himself from those chains without a bit of squirming first, that’s why Phil always tried to work out new ways to set up the trick without the awkward half-minute or so of inevitable silence as he slipped into the escape position, but he was never able to cut it out completely. In order to maintain the integrity of the trick, there needed to be just enough difficulty in getting out of it that it appeared sturdy when checked by the audience. A magician would be a fool to claim he could achieve such an impossible feat in less than ten bloody seconds. 

But there’s still this ridiculous cloud of dread pooling over the stagnant air in the theatre now that Jack Manifold has signed away his dignity on such ludicrous odds. 

Because no matter how impossible a trick might appear to both the seasoned magician in Wilbur or the oblivious patrons in the crowd elsewhere, Alchemysteria has already proven themselves exceptions to the rules. The grave certainty in The Jack’s gaze when they shook hands only solidified that improbability, and there’s not a doubt in Wilbur’s mind that somehow, someway, Jack Manifold is going to lose.  

“Enderman, would you mind projecting a stopwatch overhead? Someplace big, where everyone can see it,” The Jack asks. 

Enderman nods and tilts his hands up into the wide open air above their heads, and suddenly a violet hologram flickers to life displaying a set of numbers that are locked in at zero. The audience oohs and aahs, and Wilbur can only shake his head in utter dismay. 

He can’t even see a gauze screen where the light might be reflecting to create the illusion. It actually looks like a real hologram. 

King of Hearts, the best magician who ever lived, is still utterly, hopelessly stumped by each and every one of Alchemysteria’s magic tricks.

Doctor Frankincense twists to see the display, nodding his satisfaction once before glancing back down at his fellow stagemates. “Miss Niki, how about since you’re a mostly neutral party, you can say when to start the clock. Does that sound fair to you, Jack Manifold?”

“Sure.”

“Alright, whenever you’re ready, Miss Niki,” Frankincense invites. 

Niki raises one arm like she’s holding a racing flag, grinning ear to ear. “Okay… Now!”

The stopwatch jolts into action. Wilbur watches the numbers tick by out of the corner of his eye, more focused on Doctor Frankincense, who’s standing completely still with his eyes closed tight in concentration. What’s he doing? Why isn’t he reaching for the slack in the chain, or the hidden lockpick, or whatever else it might be?

These questions only have a couple seconds to whiz through Wilbur’s mind before he’s left stunned and breathless in the aftermath. 

Doctor Frankincense shouts, “Abracadabra!” and then the chains glow coral, then marigold, then honeyed yellow, and then they’re tumbling in a goopy mess to pool molten at his feet. The air around him warps and shimmers in a mirage of violently high temperatures, and yet nothing catches fire—his clothes remain completely intact, and his skin doesn’t even look the slightest bit rosy from the heat. 

He steps out of the puddle and lifts his hands for applause, and the clock reads 4.33 seconds. 

There’s not a single voice in the entire theatre not bellowing itself hoarse with a raving mad standing ovation after that. 

The Jack starts leaping in the air, pumping his fist and shouting “LET’S GO!!” as he points down to the front row, where a few people—Wilbur guesses they might be his friends—are absolutely losing their marbles, headbanging and screaming, ecstatic beyond measure. 

“That’s a new record!” Doctor Frankincense cries. “I got a new record!”

Jack Manifold has fallen to his knees, paralyzed by the wash of emptiness left behind in his soul after the once massive presence of his hubris was so violently torn free. 

He’s wailing incoherent cries of disbelief, and Niki is making no effort to comfort him, too busy clutching her hair and yelling, “What?! WHAT?!” 

Even Wilbur, admittedly, jumps to his feet and cheers with shock until his throat is aching with the force of it. 

The buildup, the execution, the friendly banter between audience and performer—Alchemysteria has their showmanship down to an art—down to a science. 

All of a sudden Wilbur sort of understands why people still believe in magic despite knowing most show magicians are just really good at misdirection and lying. It’s a privilege to be mystified so profoundly that you can’t imagine a single possible explanation for it outside of pure magic. It’s like becoming a naive little child again, when things were simple and bright and dripping with optimism. 

“Looks like you lost, Jack Manifold!” The Jack shrieks once there’s a decent lull in the din. “Let’s see that teddy bear!” He holds out his hand and Jack Manifold pulls the blue wig off with a miserable defeated sigh, not even bothering to defend himself. 

“I’m tellin’ you, there’s no teddy bear. I dunno where you got that idea but—”

Jack Manifold’s words die in his throat. 

The Jack reaches into the hollow of Jack Manifold’s wig and his entire arm disappears inside. Wilbur’s given up trying to understand how it works, instead focusing his binospecs on the stage as a whole so he can see what these devilish little shits will pull next. 

“Aha!” The Jack shouts. He withdraws his hand and holds it up for everyone to see, posing like he expects applause, but instead he gets only perplexed quiet. 

Someone coughs. 

“Um, Boss Man?” Doctor Frankincense mumbles, tapping The Jack’s shoulder. “That’s not a teddy bear. It’s a theatre chair.”

The Jack looks at the object, indeed a gigantic hulking amalgamation of rich velvet cushions and metal installation materials, and his cheeks go slightly pink. “Oh, oops! My bad. This is what I meant to grab!”

Enderman is the one to break the news this time, quietly clearing his throat. “That’s not a teddy bear, it’s a plate of my famous chocolate éclairs.”

“Fuck,” The Jack curses. 

Next he withdraws a large piece of folded paper, and Doctor Frankincense leans in to read what it says, squinting a bit. 

“Um, it’s not a teddy bear, it’s… it’s a—this is a map to Dover, the capital of Delaware.”

“FUCK!”

And so on it goes.

“That’s not a teddy bear, it’s a road flare.”

“That’s not a teddy bear, it’s a brick from the road in Town Square.”

“That’s not a teddy bear, it’s a female equine animal, also known as a mare.”

“That’s not a teddy bear, it’s a pamphlet promoting orthodontic dental care.”

“That’s not a teddy bear, it’s a contract for a timeshare.”

“That’s not a teddy bear, it’s a lock of our older brother’s hair.”

“Hey! What the hell?!” an indignant voice cries out from the front row at that, and Wilbur smiles. 

At last, The Jack withdraws a seemingly innocent glass jar, though the inside glows an insidious blackish blue hue that’s just a shade too vibrant to be safe. It’s Enderman’s turn to deliver the punchline, and he blinks at the jar with a confused frown on his face. 

“Um, actually, I’m not sure what this is. I know it’s not a teddy bear, though.”

Doctor Frankincense elbows him out of the way. “Let me take a look—hmm… Oh! It’s a jar of plague-infested fleas! That’s not a teddy bear, it’s biological warfare!”

“HOLY FUCK!” The Jack screams out in terror. “Quick, get rid of it! Enderman, open a portal to space!”

Enderman slices a line through the air with his fingernails, and a crack appears in reality, a deep and everlasting black and starry void swimming on the other side. He sticks his hand through one edge and pulls it open wide. “Over here!” 

The Jack doesn’t waste any time flinging the jar through the portal that apparently leads to space, and it vanishes from existence, succumbing to the blanket of the void. Enderman yanks the seams in reality shut, and then it’s like the portal was never there at all. 

Cue the applause.

The rest of the show goes on in pretty much the same fashion. The Jack finally seems to figure out how to wrangle a teddy bear from the obnoxious blue wig, and an audience member reveals that it’s a long lost family heirloom that they lost at a lake over a decade ago. Nobody questions how Alchemysteria managed to get their hands on it. 

Enderman does a sawing-in-half trick, except he brings a cartoonishly large saw straight down the center of Doctor Frankincense’s face in clear view of the audience. There’s no blood or gore, and when he peels back the halves, there’s nothing but that same void of space sitting like a shadow in the shape of his profile. The Jack makes a joke about ‘no thoughts, head empty,’ and the loudest laughs come from a few children in the audience. It’s probably some new generation joke Wilbur doesn’t quite understand. 

They attempt a bullet catch with a grenade launcher apparently handmade by Doctor Frankincense, and Enderman chickens out in the split second before the trigger is pulled and teleports out of the way, leaving The Jack bowled over behind him with a half-formed explosion curdling over his stomach. Doctor Frankincense has his hands outstretched in panic, a strange green light hovering around the explosion, which is frozen in place like a freeze-frame image. They usher the still cloud of fire and danger offstage and plug their ears, and moments later there’s a boom followed by a thick cloud of black smoke drifting from the wings. 

“That’s showbusiness, baby!” Enderman snickers anxiously, and The Jack spends a solid five minutes chasing him around the stage after that with angry words and fists glowing red with superhuman strength while Doctor Frankincense extinguishes the flames. 

For their final trick of the night, they invite Quackity himself to the stage, and all four of them look more than a little starstruck. 

“Mr. Quackity Las Nevadas!” Frankincense squeaks, shaking his hand with a vigor unfitting his slight frame. “Thank you for having us tonight!”

Quackity shakes his head. “No, thank you for putting on such a… fantastic performance! Really fellas, I can’t thank you enough.”

“Well, you’ll be thanking us even more after our last trick,” The Jack drawls, a sly smile forming at the corners of his mouth. “Say, Big Q, have you ever wanted to be a bit… taller, perhaps?”

Quackity’s eyes go wide. “You can do that?”

Enderman stiffens. “Uh, Jack of All Trades, I don’t think—”

The Jack shushes him. “Quiet, Boob Boy. I got this.” He turns back to Quackity, plastering on a wide smile. “Yeah! Of course I can make you taller! Wanna give it a go?”

“By all means!” Quackity cackles. “Please, do your worst.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t have said that,” Doctor Frankincense snickers and shakes his head. 

The Jack laughs. 

To make a long, horrifying story short: Quackity really really shouldn’t have said that. 

Apparently, it’s only in The Jack’s personal arsenal of abilities to enlarge something to three times its original size, or smaller than a cup of tea. There’s no in-between. 

Finally, after a series of chaotic screams and laughter at The Jack and Quackity’s expense, they agree to just set him back to his original size and call it a day. 

Quackity invites the audience to give Alchemysteria a hand, and they take their bows to a full house of standing ovations, and then the curtains close, leaving excited chatter and anticipated rumors behind like a thunderstorm to take to the streets the moment the first guest shuffles outside. 

Wilbur remains planted in his seat, staring at his hands, and thinks of only two words:

Holy. 

Shit. 

Psst! Check out this epic art!!! (links in end notes!!!)

↑ By @Lamest_Child on twt! ↑ 

↑ By @mousetrappa on twt!!! ↑ 

Chapter Text

It’s been about half an hour since the curtain call on their closing act, and the magicians of Alchemysteria now bask in the silence following the uproar of an enchanted crowd.

There’s something nostalgic, Tommy thinks, about the backstage cleanup process at the end of a successful show. The theatre is long since emptied out, the dazzle and glare of spotlights exchanged for softened fluorescents behind a closed curtain, but the pure unbridled glow inside his chest still hasn’t faltered. 

Tommy’s stage makeup is gummy on his face and the sleeves of his button-down are wrinkled and rolled to his forearms as he sweeps a wide mop over the hardwood floors, and yet he still feels as if he’s standing resplendent and adored before the faces of hundreds that came to watch him practice magic. 

It’s addicting.

Ranboo and Tubbo wear matching halos of sweat-sheen glitter and flushed faces, their clothes and hair in utter disarray and dotted with singe marks and shrapnel from Tubbo’s nuked-up bullet catch incident, and each time they catch another’s eye they share blinding white grins. 

And, of course, the roar of his destiny bellows its satisfaction in Tommy’s soul and blood. 

They’re just finishing packing away the last of their props into the small suitcases they brought along for the show when there’s a slight yet unmistakable tremor in the atmosphere—a bassy rumble that shoots vibrations through the air and causes their hair to stand on end. 

Tommy’s eyes light up. He turns to the wings, mouth dropped open with an excited gasp, and absorbs the proud light pouring out from all five elder members of his coven—his family. 

Never one to deny the chance for a dramatic entrance, Sapnap is manipulating a light breeze over their bodies so curtains of the wings flutter in a wake around them. 

Dream is already drilling sharp telepathic arrows through Tommy’s skull, a tsunami of love-pride-awe fizzing deep within each groove of his brain like syrupy soda pop and making his limbs turn to jelly. 

Bad’s shadow is formless and crystalline, the dark geometric planes refracting holographic in the stagelight—a sure sign that he’s so overcome by emotions that his hold on his magic is slipping and accidentally manifesting a demon affectionately known by the coven as ‘Skeppy,’ exuberance and mischief incarnate.

There’s something shy and almost intangible tugging on the edges of Tommy’s aura, but he acknowledges it nonetheless with an exasperated smirk over at Karl. Despite his inability to practice magic, the fatefully powerful witch can still sense and interact with others’ auras, and has taken a particular liking to Tommy, Ranboo, and Tubbo’s ever since they first started coming to him with questions about prophecy. Tommy gets the distinct sense that Karl knows far more about the subject than he lets on, but it’s almost impossible to confront him about it since he always plays the memory card and claims he can’t remember why Tommy feels that way. 

George, of course, offers no magical welcome sign, but that doesn’t stop him from letting out a high-pitched squeal and closing the distance between them in the blink of an eye, bowling the three of them over in one fell swoop with a bone-crushing embrace. 

“Boys, that was amazing! You did so well! You’re actually insane,” he babbles, wriggling his arms around their necks like he’s trying to shake all three of them at once. 

“Thanks Gogy!” Tubbo breathes, muffled in the tangle of black hair covering George’s ears where his cheek is smushed uncomfortably against his skull. He’s stuck somewhere in the middle of their dogpile, being the shortest and most easily accessible for George’s similarly slight stature, and thus is effectively strangled by George’s lanky limbs. 

Ranboo laughs and offers the both of them an awkward pat on the back with one arm, the other trapped in the space between himself and Tommy’s spine. When Tommy peers over George’s head to look at him, their faces immediately contort into wheezy snickers. 

“Alright George,” Dream chides without any real intent, “Let them up, I think we’re all eager to take a turn congratulating them.”

George’s arms tighten for one last squeeze, his breath escaping him in a parting whimsical giggle, and he pulls away to help the three witchlings back to their feet. 

Immediately upon righting himself, Tommy is swept away again in a hug, this time feeling his feet dangle far above the ground as Dream lifts him by the middle and spins them in circles. “I’m so fucking proud of you, Tommy!” he enthuses with a laugh that’s just choked enough to sound like a watery sob. “All of you—it was perfect. Couldn’t have done a better job myself.”

“Damn right,” Sapnap chimes in, and Tommy peers over Dream’s shoulder to see both Tubbo and Ranboo slung over his shoulders like sacks of grain. “Great job with the ignis frigidus on that explosion, Tubbo. Froze the flame before it could even touch the floorboards! I don’t think even I would’ve been quick enough for that, I’m not even kidding.”

Tubbo’s entire body flushes incarnadine like fire. “Oh Prime, thanks, but I’m gonna be honest—that bit was entirely improvised. My intentions were to have it blow up mid-air after Ranboo and Tommy teleported out of its path like a classic disappearing act, but Ranboo forgot to drag Tommy along for the ride so I had to stop it before we ended up traumatizing our audience with bloody pieces of Tommy scattered all over the place.”

“Sorry,” Ranboo mumbles sheepishly on Sapnap’s other side, shooting Tommy a grimace and a wave. 

“I already told you, it’s all good, big man,” Tommy reassures him with a scoff. “Like I said, the genuine terror on everyone’s face just made it more realistic! Wouldn’t be a real magician’s act without the risk of almost dying at every turn, yeah?”

Bad opens his mouth to respond to that, but Sapnap beats him to it, vigorously shaking the arm that’s carrying Tubbo and hooting out a sharp whistle. “Damn, Tubbo! That’s even more impressive! Seriously, what kinda hacked witchling are you?”

“The kind that’s getting assigned more drills when we get home,” Bad interrupts, a well-intentioned frown tugging down his pursed lips. “Ranboo and Tommy, too. I don’t want you muffins getting hurt with all these crazy stunts.”

Three sets of protesting whines float through the room, the magicians’ heads drooping in defeat. 

Karl’s shoulders hiccup in a wiggly little happy dance, his mouth splitting in a bright grin. “Aw, cut the kids some slack on this one. I’m telling you, there wasn’t a single person out there not totally losing their minds over you guys.” His neon-colored eyes then skirt over to Tommy and stay there, unwavering and piercing. “You’re onto something insane here. I literally couldn’t be prouder.”

“Hard agree on that one, fellas,” a new voice echoes from the other end of the stage. 

In an instant, the coven members extinguish any visible traces of magic and drop their three youngest back on their feet, with George materializing in the very front of all of them with his shoulders squared defensively. It’s an instinctive reaction at this point—after the carnage at Salem, George is always quick to shove his non-magical self between the masses and his family, unshakeable in his resolve to take every metaphorical bullet aimed in their direction. He loves their coven more than anything in this world or any other. 

(George even loves them enough to turn his back on his biological family and the values that were instilled in him since birth—though it wasn’t an easy decision to make. The guilt he feels for not doing it sooner is what drives his protective instincts so overboard to this day.)

“Big Q!” Tommy gasps, straightening and bounding across the stage to meet the foreman halfway. “Sorry, we’re almost finished cleaning up.”

Quackity shakes his head with a wry grin, lifting his hands from his pockets to splay them out in a placating gesture. “Hey man, don’t sweat it. I’m more than happy to give you kids all the time you need back here. I’m gonna tell you something—that was the single most badass show I’ve ever seen. How the hell’d you do it?”

“Language,” Bad chimes in from behind them, and Tommy flips him the bird without looking. 

“Magic,” Ranboo replies simply, twirling his fingers and withdrawing a stack of cards from his voidspace, twirling them over his spindly fingers with raised eyebrows and a satisfied smirk. 

Quackity laughs like he said something coy, which doesn’t make any sense to Tommy, but hey—the guy’s a multi-millionaire. He’s bound to be enigmatic in one way or another. “Yeah, okay, whatever. At the end of the day, I guess it doesn’t matter how you did it, you still sold a fuck ton of tickets, and you’ll probably pull even more with a repeat performance. I’m thinking we start out with three times a week, since you’re still fresh in showbusiness, and we can talk extensions once you’ve gotten in the swing of things. Same time as tonight on Sunday and Monday nights, then one Saturday matinee before these other guys on my roster—they’re called Mythos Three, if you’re familiar. How’s that sound?”

Tommy goes a little weak at the knees. 

Ranboo’s eyes go wide as saucers. “Woah.”

“You’re joking,” Tubbo wheezes, slapping a hand over his forehead and ruffling his fingers through his hair, dumbstruck and shaky. “Surely not—is this real? Am I dreaming?”

Quackity raises an amused eyebrow, gaze skittering between the three of them with a smirk. “Can I take that as a yes?”

Tommy finally releases a breath, inadvertently lodged in his throat and stuck there from the moment Quackity started talking. His head bobs in a feverish nod. “Yes! Yes, absolutely. We—it would be an honor, Mr. Q—truly.”

“Yeah?” Quackity hedges, his grin broadening. “You’ll be alright sharing stagespace with another trio of magicians? I’m not gonna lie, it might get a little competitive, playing with the big leagues. Mythos Three are Las Nevadas veterans. They’ll be pulling out all the stops to prove themselves alongside you—although—and don’t tell anyone this—I think your act will have no problem blowing them out of the water before long.”

“No, we’re actually—” Tommy cuts himself off with a stammering sigh and shakes his head. “To be completely honest with you Big Q, we’re probably Mythos Three’s biggest fans.”

“We never miss a show,” Ranboo asserts, nodding. “We’ve spent every penny of our allowance on them for the past like—I wanna say a decade?”

“Aw, that’s cute,” Quackity coos, though there’s a glimmer in his eye that looks strangely devious, almost plotting—criminally calculated. “I’ll be interested to see what happens when you run into each other backstage.”

“You mean—there’s a chance we’ll get to see them?” Tubbo shrills. “Us—Alchemysteria. We’re gonna meet the Mythos Three. In real life. Are you fucking— what?!” 

Quackity’s mouth pulls up in a deeply entertained smile. “Sure! You’ll be sharing backstage space during setup and takedown on the days you’re showing together. It’s more than likely that you’ll run into each other at some point.” 

The magicians of Alchemysteria dissolve into varying states of hyperventilation and silent meltdowns, obviously trying their best to keep the giddiness from overflowing in too loud or destructive ways. 

Meanwhile, Quackity continues on. “Getting back to your contract—I guess I’ll try to meet up with either you three or Sapnap sometime this week to go over payment and such for your future show dates. Here’s your share for tonight, by the way. Good work, you three.”

He pulls a thick cream envelope from an inside pocket on his jacket and tosses it to Tommy, who fumbles with the catch before clutching it to his chest, bug-eyed and slack-jawed. 

“I’ll catch you later, sweetheart!” Sapnap calls as Quackity retreats, met by a casual two-fingered salute thrown over Quackity’s shoulder. Then Sapnap diverts his attention to Tommy, along with Dream, as the envelope is carefully peeled open. “How much d’you get?”

Tommy swears he can hear angels singing in the distance as the contents are revealed. 

Holy shit. 

“That’s—that’s a lot of money,” Dream stammers, strangled. Behind him, Bad hitches a breath and George lets out a shrill squeal-slash-gasp combo. “Mother of Prime, that’s a lot of money!”

Ranboo’s wiry hand clamps white-knuckled around Sapnap’s bicep, face ashen, as he asks, “Sapnap, how much did you say Mr. Quackity agreed to give us for our show tonight?”

“A third,” Sapnap replies hoarsely, then clears his throat. “He said you’d get thirty percent of each ticket, and that he’d increase the number if you ended up being really good. That’s—that’s less than half of your total ticket sales tonight.”

The astonished hush that follows is thick enough to swallow.

Only to immediately be broken by Tubbo, who leaps into the air with a shriek. “You know what that means, boys! We’re eating good tonight—dinner’s on us!”

“Ooh, can we go to the Cheery Blossom?” Ranboo pleads, eyes sparkling. “I’d die for a berry tart right about now.”

“With extra whipped cream!” Tommy pipes in. “And fancy Cola! The kind with the lime wedge on the glass, even though it costs fifty bronze extra!”

George shakes his head fondly and reaches up to ruffle his hair. “God knows you can afford it now, you deserve to treat yourselves. I think I’ll get one of those earl grey milk puddings. Did you know they put these little things called tapioca pearls on top? I always thought they were little fish eggs, like with sushi, but they’re not! They’re like, drenched in brown sugar. The locals call them ‘boba.’ I’ve always wanted to try it.”

“Your wish is my command, dearest George,” Tommy replies, puffing his chest. “We’re rich! We can do anything!”

“Fuck yeah!” Tubbo howls and slings his arms over both Ranboo and Tommy’s shoulders. “We’re rich! We’re rich!”

“Language!” Bad snaps after them, his glittering shadow nipping at their heels as they retreat to the exit through the wings. 

Alchemysteria, of course, ignores him completely. 

Chapter Text

In the moments following the curtain-call of Alchemysteria’s first ever Saturday afternoon matinee, rays of warm spring sunshine find comfortable places along the stark white planes of three disheveled old faces. 

The gentlemen are sitting on the curb in front of the Theatre, placed perfectly out of the way, just the slightest bit to the left to avoid being trampled, while still remaining in broad daylight view of the wealthy Las Nevadas patrons soon to pour out the doors and offer the poor beggars their paltry spare change. 

They truly are a sorry sight, wearing sick and weary bodies, trembling beneath the smallest breezes as they cut through the rags that make up their moth-eaten charity attire. They must feel so defeated and tired, poor things, oh won’t you spare a coin or two for those needy people who have nothing? 

That’s what breaks Wilbur out of his daze. 

A buttery golden coin lands squarely in the overturned hollow of Phil’s raggedy top hat, the one he’d worn to disguise Crowfather’s signature neatly groomed threads of flaxen blonde hair, but only at Wilbur’s death-threatening insistence prior to the show.

Phil doesn’t lift his head to acknowledge his benevolent donors, his hollow gaze stuck on the stained grain of the pavement beneath his scuffed-up leather boots. His head is slumped between his curled up knees, and his hands are limp and twitching with indescribable trauma and shock. 

Wilbur blinks out of his own dissociative state to the sound of falling money, the cigarette clasped between his fingers instinctively lit and burning down to ash despite him never once taking a drag. This whole time since first lighting the cherry bright end, he’d been unintentionally frozen in thought, with the spongy filter paper end hovering a hair’s breadth from stilled and parted lips.

He scowls chastisingly at himself for the waste and snuffs the powdery smoke’s cremated remains against the sidewalk before flicking the butt into a nearby trash can. 

He sighs. 

“Dad, get up.”

Wilbur is gentle at first, toeing at Phil’s shoe with his own disguised mockery of adequate footwear, just a little nudge to snap the old man free of his trance. 

It doesn’t work. 

Phil doesn’t even budge. 

Another coin lands in his hat, and Wilbur hears two girls pity-gossiping with one another about catatonia and I bet he’s over a hundred years old, and looks ready to kick the bucket any day now, and poor old thing. 

“Daaad,” Wilbur hisses, a bit more urgently this time, squatting down to level his face with his father’s in a vain attempt to make eye contact. “Helloooo? It’s time to snap out of it—people are pitying us. I don’t like it.”

Phil’s thousand-yard stare just seems to pass straight through Wilbur and into the darkened abyss of his fear. His face is completely pale and grey. The muscles around his expression are slack. He is utterly bewitched by something beyond mortal comprehension. 

Wilbur realizes with a sinking mixture of amusement, fear, and righteous indignation that the man is well and wholly shell shocked at the moment. Nothing will be capable of breaking him free from this state until he recovers on his own time, which sounds like it’ll take a fuck of a lot more time than Wilbur’s willing to put up with. 

He’s got to come up with a solution, fast. 

Until then, though, the world-renowned illusionist group incognito, the unmasked Mythos Three, are posted like beggars on the Theatre front steps. 

“Jesus skateboarding Christ,” Wilbur groans into his hands, swiping them down the flesh of his face in exasperated agony. “Are you serious right now?” He gives his father one last hopeful kick in the ankle, unsurprisingly receiving no response, and in frustration he sneers the full force of his breath out into a seething snarl. 

“TECH!” Wilbur bellows, volume unfittingly loud for his goal of reaching the other side of Phil’s squatting location, where Technoblade is sprawled out bonelessly across the disgustingly warm city pavement with bloody maroon eyes staring unblinking and hallowed to the heavens above. 

“Both of you, get up! C’mon! We have to head home before somebody—”

“Those children…”

Wilbur cuts himself off with an abrupt hush, slamming his own hand over his mouth to watch and listen, closer than worship, as Phil’s throat works over his first true syllables since they first entered the matinee. 

“What? What is it? What did you think of them?”

Phil’s lower lip trembles, and he swallows a thick ball of nerves and bile. 

“Those… children…” 

He trails off again, and Wilbur feels his heart sink in the silence—only to go lightheaded and dizzy with rapid ascent as his spirits brighten straight back up again when Phil at last tears his gaze from the pavement to sear Wilbur with the full force of his piercing, awestruck gaze. 

“They’re too good.” 

“I know,” Wilbur parrots cheekily, bouncing on the balls of his feet as Phil’s jaw works back and forth, grinding his teeth in anxiety and confusion and best of all—determination. 

“We have to improve our act,” Phil whispers. 

Wilbur nods vigorously. “I know.”

“They can’t—they can’t be—how are they so much better than us?! How did they do it?!”

“I don’t know!”

“We’re the goddamn Mythos Three! We’re the best in the business!”

“I know!”

“How are we getting upstaged by a trio of kids?! It’s fucked!”

“It’s fucked! The whole system’s fucked, Dad! We have to phase them out!”

“We have to be better than them! We have to be the best!” 

“We are the best,” Technoblade suddenly speaks up, and Wilbur turns his attention away from the empty shell of his father to meet his brother’s gaze this time, already finding its full unnatural ruby weight pinned down atop him. 

“I know,” Wilbur replies quietly. He purses his lips and clenches his hands into fists by his side, the parroted affirmation suddenly feeling like it’s the most important thing he will ever repeat again in his life. “I know.”

Thinking fills the silence after, overlapping like static on the breezes that sweep through high-heeled dress shoes and clink over monocle chains. Las Nevadas still bustles with life, but to the Mythos Three, it’s as though time falls utterly still, until it’s only them and their racing ideas left to replace the whole wide vanished world. 

Phil is the one to start them on their journey back to the present. 

He claps his hands and rubs them together in a mad scientist’s anticipation. 

“Well, boys—looks like it’s finally time for us to break out the big guns.” Phil’s grin turns impossibly more sinister after that, and Wilbur can’t help but laugh with devilish delight upon hearing his father’s next words—they’re ones that will seal the child illusionists’ fates for life.

“Alchemysteria won’t know what hit them.”

A few paces away, a disgruntled-looking young adult wearing a pair of white-rimmed shaded goggles and a blue cardigan hand-knitted with patterns of toadstools takes notice of the Mythos Three and shrugs to himself. 

It’s not like George will get to spend his cash on something worthwhile anyways—not with Tommy, Tubbo, and Ranboo’s penchant for pickpocketing him through the astral void. 

With that, the token Regular Guy tosses the remainder of his spare change into the hollow of the hat perched in front of the three beggars and jogs to catch up with the rest of his coven. 

Sapnap’s cooking his famous coconut chickpea curry tonight. There’s no way George will be late for that. 

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to George—though it tragically might’ve been easily sensed by any of the other true witches in their coven, had they noticed the beggars before him—the young Alchemysteria’s greatest rivals and competitors set to work brewing their demise. 

Tommy, Tubbo, and Ranboo will freely admit that they’re sad to have skipped out on Sapnap’s curry for dinner tonight. 

It’s true—each of them wish very much that they could’ve at least stuck around for a bite or two, maybe stolen a quick taste from the pan before they took off—and they’re not just saying that to be polite. 

But… 

There isn’t a force strong enough on earth that could bring them to regret attending the front row for Mythos Three’s show tonight instead. 

At the conclusion of their very first matinee that afternoon, Quackity had approached them with three shimmery gold tickets fanned out between his fingers and a (slightly) foreboding wickedness sharpening the edges of his smirk, and offered them the opportunity of a lifetime. 

For free. 

So yeah. Of course they wish they weren’t missing Sapnap’s famous curry for this. 

But Tommy would venture to say that the three magicians would gladly swear off the flame elemental’s deliciously spicy culinary expertise for the rest of their lives if that’s what it took for them to be seated here, beneath the dimming crystal lights of the Las Nevadas Theatre, close enough to the Mythos Three’s stage that they can taste the smoke in the mirrors. 

The brilliant white circles of spotlights meander around the rippled surface of the curtain. It’s bright red—exactly the same shade as it’d appeared to them from the other side when they’d performed as Alchemysteria—and yet their boyish excitement doesn’t abate. 

In fact, Tommy feels himself getting even more emotional as Quackity introduces his all-time favorite illusionist trio to the crowd. 

He’s so excited he can hardly contain it. 

He feels like he is going to explode. 

Or vomit. 

Or maybe both.

“Tommy! Get rid of the cow! I can’t see!” Tubbo shrills over the deafening roar of applause that thunders over Quackity’s voice, just as the curtains are starting to rise. 

Tommy glances over to his left, where indeed Tubbo is craning his neck to see over the hulking body of Tommy’s interdimensional pet cow, Henry. A few other patrons are staring at the animal like they’re the insane ones, rubbing their eyes to banish what they must imagine to be a hallucination, and Tommy’s ears burn with embarrassment. 

“Sorry!” He shrieks back at Tubbo, drumming his fingers together in the pattern used to spell Henry back to the interdimensional flower forest in which he spends most of his time, if not summoned on purpose or accidentally by Tommy and his erratic, untraceable casting methods. “I’m just so excited!”

“Just don’t drum your pinkies together!” Tubbo advises as he bounces in place, his eyes glued to the stage. “That’s how you keep accidentally summoning him, remember?”

Tommy doesn’t respond.

The curtains are almost a foot off the ground now—and he just barely spies three immaculate sets of polished black boots, glistening in the floodlights.

Tommy’s heart goes a little funny. 

His head feels pressured and faint. 

Again, he considers the probability that he would survive a bodily explosion due to happiness overload. 

Meh, in the grand scheme of things, he supposes it’s not a terrible way to go. 

King of Hearts takes a single step forward and spreads his arms out wide, tilting his head back in a charismatic display of confidence and raw, magical power—

Everything goes silent. 

The thunderous wailing of the crowd at Tommy’s back is replaced in an instant by a high-pitched ringing, his head plugging up with pressure and his ears melting and wobbling through the distorted sounds like he’s dunked his head underwater. 

King of Hearts seems to catch Tommy’s gaze—though it’s impossible to tell for sure through his badass fucking King of Hearts mask— fuck, Tommy’s actually going to die—and then he speaks.

“Prepare to be amazed.”

The Jack of all Trades fucking falls asleep, right at the start of their performance, and Wilbur wants to just spit at his stupid, puny, baby-ass face. 

How. 

DARE. 

He?!

Oh, it’s taking all of Wilbur’s showmanship willpower not to leap over the edge of the stage and throttle the brat right then and there. 

He knows the Jack’s doing it just to taunt him. 

Somehow, he knows. 

For Christ’s sake, they were maintaining perfect, gentlemanly-rivalry-style eye contact when he did it! 

Right in the front row!

The kid’s eyes rolled to the back of his head, his face plummeted into some stupid, oafish expression of utter boredom and aloof, and then he just—!

He just dropped! 

Fell right asleep, after not more than four whole words were out of Wilbur’s mouth, the Jack of all Trades said, “You know what? These amateurs have us in for a real snoozefest. I’m gonna catch some Zzs.” 

Ugh! 

The audacity!

Ugh!

Tommy’s spirit returns to his body what feels like only seconds later, but when his eyes flutter open, he’s greeted by the bleary sight of a full-stage illusionist’s setup, with the Mythos Three grandly expositing one trick or another, and Tommy’s bloody missed it!

“How long ‘z I out forrr?” He slurs, still only partially lucid. “King of Hearts… Packs one ‘elluva ‘vada kedavra, I’ll tell you that much.”

“Only a few minutes,” Ranboo reassures Tommy, whispering in his ear as Crowfather booms something probably incredible and awesome, and it causes the audience to break into hysterics. “You started to involuntarily hyperventilate when King of Hearts looked at us, and then you were out like a light. Just try to regulate your oxygen intake from here on out.”

“Can do,” Tommy breathes, straightening in his seat and willing his spinny vision to centralize on the masked faces of his idols—his heroes—his messiahs—

“Shit, I’m going down again—Ranboob, help me—!”

Chapter Text

It takes the Alchemysteria children just two and a half weeks of performing on the same stage with Mythos Three for them to come to the conclusion that they need to up their game if they want to keep up. 

Massively. 

“What did you call this formula again?” Karl grumbles with a huff that disturbs the air in front of his face, tousling the curled tips of his soft fluffy bangs away from his eyes for a moment. 

“It’s a natal chart,” Ranboo replies, equally defeated by the complex failures of his current attempt to understand one of Mythos Three’s newest tricks. 

Competition is ruthless in the magic business, as Alchemysteria recently discovered. 

The Mythos Three have never failed to introduce and pull off a brand new trick in their performance each week so far, and some of Alchemysteria’s most loyal patrons are starting to get antsy for more variety in their shows. 

According to Quackity, such rapid feats of advancement have never been done before in the business—magicians might switch up their set every season, or every year—but never a new trick every week. They weren’t prepared to enter the magic business with tricks still in the workshop, everyone said that they just needed a single setlist for the season!

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely fucking absurd.” Quackity explained as he doled out Alchemysteria’s ticket earnings at the conclusion of their curtain-call the previous Monday, “I honestly don’t know what Mythos is thinking… But, if you’re smart, you might try thinking about it too. I don’t wanna be a party pooper or anything, but sales are dwindling away from your favor these days. If you don’t up the ante just a little bit, you might get overshadowed so hard that you lose your place in the spotlight for good, if you hear what I’m saying.” 

Needless to say, they received the message loud and clear, and have now spent the past three days cooped up together in the coven living room—only returning to their shared apartment to bring back more study materials while they research spells and bother their elders for guidance. 

“I’m sorry, I still don't understand how the other witches used this confusing spiderweb of math to cast a spell,” Karl whines and rubs his eyes before resuming his ardent analysis of the book on Ranboo’s makeshift desk. “Like, these are planets from just one solar system. How does that give them any power?”

Ranboo shakes his head. “I don’t know either, but Crowfather said he could know anything and everything about a person, just by reading this chart. The audience volunteer said it was like he could see straight into their soul—he predicted some events that were hidden in their past, gave them advice for their relationships, and even prophesied something that would happen in their future. It was freaky.”

Karl pulls a face. “Well, that’s dumb. Future predictions are a piece of cake, you know that.”

“Yes, but we need to do it the astrology way,” Tommy chimes in from across the room. He’s squatting in front of an army of potted plants, each of them grotesque and ruined in some manner, the tragic consequences of his process in creating a new spell. “That’s the way Crowfather did it, and the whole theater took it way more seriously than when we’ve tried to just tell them stuff like that in the past. There has to be some layer of showmanship—some veil to make it seem less like witchcraft and more like magic, I’m tellin’ ya. This world likes magic best when it looks clumsy and wrong all the time. If our spells looked easy, then we wouldn’t be magicians, just witches! Nobody pays to see a bunch of witches!”

“Yeah, that’s why all the Mythos Three tricks look so clunky when it would clearly be easier to just use a transmutation spell or something,” Tubbo agrees, rolling onto his stomach and kicking his ankles up in lazy swirls behind his head while he sketches blueprints for his newest invention, the metal abomination taking up half the coffee table beside him. “It’s called ‘smoke and mirrors.’ They make it look like their magic just comes from ordinary optical illusions, and for some reason, the people just eat it up.”

“But it can’t be too obvious. There’s, like, a really precise middle ground.” Tommy carefully uproots his hands from where they’re buried in one potted plant’s soil and holds them up to gesture for emphasis as he speaks. 

Karl blinks owlishly at them for a moment before returning his gaze to Ranboo and the astrology book, brow furrowing as he traces the aspect lines over one particular chart. “So… if it only matters what the spell looks like, why don’t you cast a plain old memory projection, but throw in some new imagery conditions? Make the pictures look like constellations, dome it over their heads so they think they’re in space, and boom! You’ve got yourself an astrology reading without any math!” 

Ranboo’s eyes go wide as saucers. “Karl, that’s perfect!” he marvels, rummaging through the piles of papers at his desk to find his notebook of incantations to practice. “Let’s see… memoria imitamentum… per astra…?” 

The moment Ranboo utters the words to his newest spell, pinprick flashes of mostly white light appear in the air before him, a formless sea of shimmering stars coalescing together until they finally form one shape—a picture from Ranboo’s memory, of Crowfather and his precious little natal chart, during Mythos Three’s last performance. 

It looks, indeed, like it was peeled straight from the host of constellations that fill this world’s night sky. 

“You did it!” Tommy shrieks with a grin. “Now say something astrology-like!”

Ranboo’s eyes dramatically flutter shut, a pensive line of exaggerated worry creasing his brow. “Yes, the placement of this constellation in your chart is very special. I can see a great number of important events in your future… One of which should be getting the fire extinguisher, because Tubbo’s Hot Pocket is smoking again.”

Sure enough, when Tubbo glances down at the front pocket of his overalls—his Hot Pocket, which is where he keeps samples of all his most volatile and explosive discovered elements when they cross his inventing path—there is indeed a small fire eating its way through the denim seams. 

Tubbo holds up a hand to stop Tommy before he springs into action, the muzzle of the fire extinguisher already aimed and ready to smother them both in a layer of toxic snow should Tommy pull the trigger. 

“No, wait—I got it,” Tubbo sighs tiredly. “E contrario verticitatem magneticam in specimen numerum DICKFACE.” 

Just then, Sapnap rounds the corner from the kitchen and bursts into a full belly-laugh. “You named an element ‘dickface?’” 

“It gets all testy around electromagnets,” Tubbo grouches, folding his arms over his Hot Pocket defensively. “I’ve patched over it a million times and I still can’t keep it stable.”

Sapnap furrows his brows and picks his way carefully through the terrain of potted plants and natal charts and scrap metal. “Testy? In what way? Can you hook it up to a smart battery with a sensor to run a pulse if it gets too hot?”

“Already tried that. Specimen DICKFACE is immediately corrosive to just about every metallic substance out there—including copper wire.”

And so the evening goes, with Alchemysteria and their coven working well into the night to dumb down their spells, make their miracles look like parlor tricks, in order to keep their act afloat with the steady rising tide of showbusiness. 

Meanwhile, across the city, the magicians of Mythos Three are diametrically opposed in journey, but identical in goal, evolving the mundanity of their act to match the little witchlings’ unfathomable intrigue and maintain their veteran magician crown.

Neither is aware of the irony. 

Sometimes, Purpled wakes up and feels like he’s drowning. 

It’s a completely random phenomenon, and vivid enough to convince him it’s not just residual effects of a dream—the way he chokes on nothing, like he can’t get enough air into his lungs because they’re all blocked and filled up with a freezing cold heaviness— it’s all too real. 

In these moments, he will struggle helplessly beneath the bleary mirage of sleep, arms sluggish and bogged down by an invisible river’s current, and when he manages to open his eyes, he’ll see his brother’s face. 

Once his vision clears away the unfocused blur, it sharpens immediately on Punz, with wet glimmers of light pooling in his eyes, his mouth moving to form shapes of muffled pleas, the meanings of which are made indistinguishable by the muted roar in Purpled’s underwater mind. 

It’s not too long after that—after his brother intervenes—that Purpled is finally able to break free from the illusion, chest heaving in desperate gasps as he shivers and clings to Punz’s arm, to the rescuing hand that yanked him back up through the surface. 

Nothing else has ever triggered a respite from the sensation when it comes. 

A small, cowardly part of Purpled is downright terrified to think of a morning when Punz isn’t available, if bad luck happens to strike when one of them spends the night elsewhere, thus leaving him with no one to rescue him from the phantom river’s otherworldly chill. 

He feels connected, somehow, to space and the stars—and most importantly, his brother. 

He wonders why Punz will sometimes look at his violet eyes and make a face like he wants to cry. 

These mysteries hold questions that are better left unanswered—at least until the time is right. 

And then, one night, that time begins. 

Space opens up, the stars align, and it is revealed to him—a constellated pathway which is predetermined that he should follow. 

At the end of the line, connected by the silver spiderweb strings of fate, he spies a freshly printed poster paper advertising a city magician trio named Alchemysteria. 

In the morning, Purpled wakes up and feels like he is drowning. 

“For our next trick, we’ll be trying something a little bit different from past performances,” regales Doctor Frankincense, with his arms spread out wide as though to catch and embrace the wall of sound roaring forth from the audience. 

“Indeed!” The Jack of All Trades bellows. “Something new! Something fresh! Something… sinister?” his voice drops lower with the last bit, and he tilts his chin downward to grin at the crowd through the shadows of his brows. 

Predictably, and much to Wilbur’s annoyance, the theater sucks in a collective gasp of wonder and fear—including Phil. 

“Dad!” Wilbur snaps irritably. 

Phil lifts his palms in placation, his eyes gone wide with false innocence. “I’m just watching the show, same as everyone else,” he murmurs just as the chattering falls quiet, so Wilbur doesn’t have any time for a retort. 

“Jack, don’t tease,” Enderman chides lightly, swatting his brother’s arm on the way as he crosses to center-stage. 

Then, turning to address the crowd, Enderman announces, “It’s nothing scary or sinister. Just a bit of… spiritual activity.”

This sends more shockwaves of gasps bouncing throughout the hall, reaching all the way to the outermost doors and back, and Wilbur’s eyes narrow into slits at the stage. He clicks the end of his pen twice and starts scribbling Enderman’s words into the notebook open on his lap, its pages wrinkled and weakened by weeks’ worth of speculation on Alchemysteria’s act. 

“Spiritual activity?” Techno echoes under his breath. He shoots a glance at Phil, whose mild expression has morphed into something more severe, flinty as he adjusts the position of his seat to provide him a more critical view. “That almost sounds like—”

“That’s right! Today, I’m taking a look at the future, through the lenses of the past, using the power of stars!” Enderman throws his hands up, head tilted back, shoulders loose and free of tension, and dances lightly across the stage for a few seconds while the theater is overcome with cheers. 

By Wilbur’s side, Phil’s hands are calmly raised to clap, his face flat and free of fury to maintain utmost politeness, and he should know that it is far more terrifying than if he’d simply not reacted at all. 

It occurs to Wilbur then that this is probably the first time Phil is seeing Alchemysteria the same way he does—as a pathetic group of wannabes who have stolen something from them. 

Astrology and psychic ability is Phil’s thing. He spent years perfecting the fraudulent art of explaining broad concepts in ways that his subjects might find meaningful or personalized. Wilbur has to snoop around coat check and eavesdrop his way through secret information in their audiences, but Phil can actually uncover it onstage without any prior practice. 

If Alchemysteria knows what’s good for them, they’ll surrender this invisible battle before they publicly embarrass themselves in any feeble attempts to imitate the art of an old master such as Phil. 

Enderman calls for a volunteer from the audience, and Wilbur prepares to take note of the chosen participant’s seat and section numbers for analysis later. 

He hasn’t found a pattern in how Alchemysteria ‘randomly’ decides who in the audience will join them onstage each act, but they can’t truly lack any and all premeditation. No matter how fantastical the young magicians’ tricks may be, some feats of engineering are still physically impossible to pull off without the cooperation of a paid actor. They must plant the volunteers in the crowd according to some convoluted formula or cipher, and Wilbur is determined to spend every available moment puzzling over it until he can crack it wide open.

It’s not until Phil’s seat is suddenly bathed in the spotlight’s brilliant glow that Wilbur notices, in the corner of his eye, his father’s patiently raised hand. 

“You there!” Enderman invites gleefully. “In the striped bucket hat! Would you like to join us here onstage?” 

Phil grins and rises from his seat. “I’d love to!”

Chapter Text

Perhaps Phil’s pride got the best of him.

It was his hubris that suspended him high up on an imaginary pillar built from years of practice and tradition, blinding him from the reality that waited on the cold hard ground between his dangling ankles and the abyss of open air that he nonetheless somehow expected to catch him. 

This veracity that he would not be so easily overthrown, and that the Alchemysteria children would not become what he already knew them to be—it not only blocked his view of the intersection ahead of him, but also applied steady and exponential pressure on the gas. 

The collision was explosive. 

Denial and disbelief caved under the overwhelming presence of the real-world evidence that stood in front of him in the form of a ghost’s star-studded visage emerging from the black. 

Because at that moment, once Phil got to the stage and allowed himself to entertain Enderman’s request that he close his eyes and think very deeply about some event in his past that he’d like to revisit or have resolved, some part of his soft, carefree spirit warped. 

Philza wanted nothing more than to prove Enderman wrong. 

He wanted to prove that the child was no match for his intellectual prowess. To throw his hands up into the air and say, “Fine, how about this? Surely not even you could answer me this.” To ask an impossible question and bask in the satisfaction of Enderman’s inevitable failure to respond. 

Surely, Phil’s pride assured him, Alchemysteria’s enigmatic magic act—insane as it may be—would not be able to procure a recollection of this. 

And then it happens. 

There’s a face he remembers. A face he’ll never see again. A face he can’t forget. 

Not because of the pain it’s caused him, but the opposite. 

Love. 

He recognizes it in an instant—that rush of indescribable adoration and delight that courses through him at the very thought of seeing it again—and although the face’s projection is in monochromatic black and white, its contours and figures dotting together by the seemingly sentient nebula of stars that fill the stage from Enderman’s open palms and leaving only the palest impression of how it bursts with life in Phil’s memory, the impact is instantaneous. 

“Don’t be afraid.”

Her face softens with one of those sweet and watery smiles reserved only for Phil and their children. 

She’s sitting up in bed. 

“Even if I’m no longer here, I’ll always be with you,” she whispers.

It won’t be long now. 

If memory serves—and oh it does, it always does, it never fucking stops—she’s only got a few hours left. 

“You told me once that you believed in magic.”

He grabs her hand.

“Is that still true?” 

It isn’t real—Phil knows this, he knows— but it still feels like part of him is still there. 

It’s the part that he left behind with her, sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, as the dreamlike network of sterile white halls stretched infinitely away in the commotion like mirrored refractions of one another, all telling the same story as the one that took place that day in room 302. 

It’s the part of Phil that calls himself a husband and father to a small family of four. 

It’s the part that got erased when ‘husband’ became ‘widower,’ and ‘four’ became ‘three.’ 

“Yes,” his constellated character replies, and even now, Phil finds himself mouthing along. He’s memorized his lines. He knows what comes next. 

Part of him is still there. 

Her face lights up. 

“I’m glad. Don’t you ever forget it, okay? Believe in magic with all your heart.” 

She’s positively beaming. Radiant, flushed with life despite the gravity of it all, and that’s probably why her death still steals Phil away with shock every damn time his mind brings it into focus.

“Because it’s everywhere, inside all of us. Magic lives in death, as the spell that is cast upon us when our bodies and spirits split apart.” 

There’s a face he remembers. 

“Isn’t that beautiful?”

A face he’ll never see again.

“So please don’t cry over me.”

A face he can’t forget.

“Believe in magic.”

A face he loves. 

“Because magic— true magic—is beautiful and alive, and absolutely nothing to be afraid of.”

Like the silent camera-flash of overexposed white that spears through a whole stormy sky, furtive and unaccompanied by the lagging clap of thunder as it forever struggles to keep time with the quick whip of lightning’s elusive and unstoppable prelude, the Las Nevadas Theatre is suddenly overtaken by an unbroken veil of brilliance. 

Phil flinches free from his reverie with his late wife’s vanished starlit ghost, forcibly tearing himself back into the present moment as best he can, desperate to retreat from the past—despite the fact that part of him is still there—and blinks back the pinprick spots in his vision. 

The Jack is crouched in front of Phil with his arms extended strangely, as though he is Atlas, bearing some massive round weight behind him, but his expression is smooth. 

In fact, judging from the way he peers up at Phil with his eyes blown wide with worry and his eyebrows drawn tightly together, the crumple of his mouth screwed up into a grave frown, The Jack looks rather unperturbed by the white abyss of light that stretches around them—instead he is anxious for Phil’s sake. 

The young magician looks a little lost on what to do next. He opens his mouth, then snaps it shut, frown deepening. 

The two of them are utterly bereft of anything else in this world, suspended in a snapshot of time seemingly dissociated from reality, and while the impossibility of the situation would usually occupy much of Phil’s mind if it happened anywhere else, for some reason he finds himself comforted by the fact that one of the Alchemysteria children likely had something to do with getting them into this mess. 

It’s not the most uncomfortable magic trick they could’ve done, nor the most logically unfathomable, which probably means that they’ll make it back to the real world just fine—right?

Finally, The Jack ducks his head. He licks his lips and nods, seemingly steeling himself for something. A final decision is made, and it brings renewed determination to his gaze when he looks up.

They lock eyes. 

“We’ll talk about this later.”

And then everything vanishes. 

In the corner of his eye, Phil notices Wilbur’s pen twitching over the notepad in his lap as he blackens its lines with his irritated scrawl. 

Everyone’s gaze is fixed intently on the round glow of the spotlight as it dances over the heads in the crowd, bathing each of them in small flickers of light every once in a while, but it never lingers long.

Alchemysteria is looking for a volunteer. Nothing more, nothing less. 

Wilbur wants to find proof that the system is rigged—that they wouldn’t just call on any old ticketholder lucky enough to wave their arm up at just the right moment to earn their attention—because he just doesn’t know what Phil knows. 

Nobody does.

It’s incomprehensible—that the truth could be as simple as a patiently raised hand. 

“You there!” Enderman invites gleefully. He’s pointing somewhere else.

A stuttered gasp creeps up from Phil’s throat. 

It gets stuck somewhere in the middle, lodging at the base of his tongue and expanding jagged limbs to hook and claw at his flesh in a sort of sleepy morning stretch. 

It trembles.

Phil waits.

“In the purple hoodie! Would you like to join us here onstage?” 

On the opposite side of the theatre from Phil, the spotlight is affixed on a boy he’s never seen before.

The new volunteer grins and rises from his seat. “I’d love to!”

Wilbur squirms, neck craning to catch a solid glimpse of the seat and row number now fading from visibility as the young man makes his way from the section to the stage. 

The spotlight follows. 

Inside its round border line, Phil knows the sensation its illuminated subjects feel—like they’re at the center of an impenetrable beacon of light, their perception of the world beyond it shrouded beneath a veil of white. 

Everywhere else is dark. 

“Where’d you get that?” Technoblade’s whisper falls on the shell of Phil’s ear and breaks through the turmoiled din in his mind, a pointed finger directing his attention downward. 

Phil’s hands are clasped atop his lap, where an informational pamphlet describing tonight’s Alchemysteria program rests half-open beneath his fingers. 

One very obvious spot on the second to last page is left conspicuously blank, as though something grand and important was supposed to belong there. It should’ve been a thumbnail of a poster illustrating Enderman’s new act—complete with the unforgettable image of faces floating in the magic of the stars—but something’s been changed about Phil’s copy. 

“Hmm,” Techno scoffs quietly. “Clever.”

A playing card has been loosely tucked amidst the pages, the backside printed with tiny lettering that helps it act as a sort of themed business card, and it just so happens to be the exact right size to fill the blank space. 

Phil plucks it up and peers at it after a moment’s hesitation, partially distracted by the sounds of Techno gently leafing through his own program in search of the same page. 

Even before he sees the original unchanged picture on Techno’s copy, Phil knows it’s unlikely they’ll find anyone else with the same misprint as him. 

Alchemysteria HQ, the business card side reads. In cramped handwriting beneath the address, someone has added on, For when you’re ready to talk. 

When he flips it over, Phil finds another penned note filling the white space in the playing card’s middle, where it’s flanked by two identical rows of three scarlet suit symbols. 

Until then, it’s our secret. I swear.

Phil doesn’t utter a word for the rest of the show. 

The six of hearts sits heavy in his palm. 

Chapter Text

Thanks to his brief onstage stint as an audience volunteer, Purpled is well equipped with knowledge on how and where to maneuver himself through the crowd at the end of the show in order to evade security and slip quietly backstage through a gap in the curtains shadowed near one of the ornate golden pillars backed against one wall. 

It’d taken a bit of quick thinking and feigned nonchalance to convince Punz that he was responsible enough to wait in the car by himself while his older brother went to the bathroom, but soon enough he was standing on the familiar Las Nevadas stage with a stupid grin parting his face. 

“Who’re you?” Asks a man standing off to one side, standing in a circle with the three Alchemysteria magicians and a few others that look to be around Punz’s age. He’s wearing an obnoxious lime green hoodie and blue jeans, his hair just barely a shade or two richer than Purpled’s own sandy blonde. 

Purpled’s smile turns nervous, and he shoots the group a little wave, trotting up to them with what he hopes is airy confidence. “Hey guys, I’m Purpled—big fan of the show. You guys did incredible, as always.”

The Jack cackles like a madman. “Why, thank you, my friend! What brings you to this side of the curtain? Curious to see where the magic happens?”

“A little,” Purpled admits, relaxing under the kid’s casual friendliness. “I was actually wondering if you guys were interested in bringing somebody on to work the technical side of things? I’ve done some stuff with our smaller local theater downtown, and I think I could help take your show to the next level, if you’d let me.”

Purpled bites his lip to hide his bated breath, willing the desperation not to show on his face. This is it—the big ‘yes’ or ‘no’ moment that could make or break his whole career. All his hopes and dreams, the cosmic chords he’s spent endless daydreams basking under, everything. After the stars first aligned to show him his fate—a fate somehow inextricably aligned with Alchemysteria—he’d been imagining ways to get in on their little song and dance, wondering helplessly as to how and where he’ll get the chance to fulfill that destiny. 

And now’s his first real chance to do just that. 

Volunteering for one show wasn’t enough. 

He needs to be a part of this. 

Doctor Frankincense’s eyes widen with delight, and he glances back and forth between his co-stars to gauge their reactions as well, an affirmative response on the tip of his tongue—when something barrels through the gap in the curtains with a breathless curse. 

“PURPLED! Purpled, where are—?! You little shit,” Punz wheezes, face reddening with a mixture of fury and exertion as he zeroes in on his little disappearing act of a brother.

Purpled pales, dodging around behind Alchemysteria and their elder entourage with a yelp. 

“Get back here!” Punz demands again, skirting the outside of the group and making mini-lunges to either side when he sees Purpled trying to escape around the other way. “I thought I told you to stay in the car!” 

Ignoring his older brother, Purpled grabs Frankincense's arm in a vice-like grip, expression open and pleading. “You were about to say something, yeah? About me possibly joining your tech crew?”

Frankincense nods vigorously and turns so that he’s properly facing Purpled, clasping the hand around his bicep between his own and squeezing tight enough to ache. “Yes! Yes, we’d absolutely love to have you on as our tech guy! Quackity’s base crew do a fantastic job on their own, but we’d be honored to have a specialized, professional agent on our side—someone to help add our own personal flair. Isn’t that right, guys?” 

Frankincense’s gaze swivels to the faces of his brothers, imploring them to respond and agree with him, but the prompting isn’t needed. Their combined enthusiasm is immediately apparent to Purpled, who now feels like his whole insides have been replaced with effervescent champagne bubbles. He’s giddy, on top of the world, and nothing can tear him down. 

“Mmm-hm!” Enderman chirps.

“When can you start?” The Jack pesters, leaping onto Purpled’s back like a koala and climbing up and around his head to shout directly in Purpled’s ear. “I’ve got a few ideas—do you know how to make it so half the stage is upside down and the colours reversed?”

Purpled blinks. “Uhh,” he fumbles, uncomprehending.

He’s spared from providing an actual response when he and the other three children notice the way that all of their older guardians have gone eerily still, faces frozen in grave assessment of one another. Punz has stopped lunging for Purpled’s capture, and Alchemysteria’s elder guardians are standing ramrod-straight with their backs facing the children. If Purpled didn’t know any better, he might imagine they’re protecting him and the three magicians—shielding them—but from what? Punz? He might look like a big angry brother bear, but surely they can all see that deep down, he’s truly harmless (so long as Purpled isn’t in any kind of real danger).

Right?

The Jack scrambles hastily down from Purpled’s shoulders, frowning up at the faces of his friends. They’re all glued on Punz like tracker beams, petrified, as though they’ve just seen a ghost. Neither group speaks, mouths sealed to keep them from uttering a single word. They’re locked in some sort of freaky pseudo-stalemate, and there’s an implication of history shared somewhere in the corners of it all that makes Purpled’s hair stand on end. 

Attempting to dissolve the tension, Purpled shoulders through the group to stand just a little ways between the magicians’ entourage and Punz, partially blocking him from view with Purpled’s own scrawnier frame. 

“Um, so yeah—so this is my older brother, Punz. He’s cool. Right, Punz?” Purpled cranes his neck over his shoulder and shoots his brother a glare that screams, DON’T RUIN THIS FOR ME! 

Punz clears his throat awkwardly, dropping his gaze to the polished floorboards. 

At last, it’s like all the tension in the vicinity deflates. Together, they can finally take a breath. 

“Right, yeah. I’m not—I didn’t mean to barge in all crazy like that, I was just looking for my brother,” Punz explains. “Now that I’ve found him, we can get going, so… Sorry for the disturbance, and—”

“Don’t be daft, he can’t leave yet!” Frankincense shrills all of a sudden, startling more people than just Purpled, who notices that none of the Alchemysteria co-stars sustained any real reaction to the ear-splitting sound—not even the smallest flinch. “We still need to coordinate our practice schedules if we want to get a tech rehearsal in before our next show.”

Enderman snakes a long arm out and around to poke hesitantly at Purpled’s shoulder, and when Purpled turns and looks he sees a pen clipped to the top of a pad of paper with all three Alchemysteria magicians’ contact information already written down on the top page. They’ve left plenty of space for Purpled to do the same, and he doesn’t need to be told twice, uncapping the pen with his teeth and scribbling his personal details in kind, fingertips trembling with nerves and euphoria.

Once he’s finished, Purpled clicks the cap back onto the pen and hands it—along with the pad of paper—back to Enderman. The moment it makes contact with Enderman’s fingertips, the topmost page gets torn off all on its own, floating in a staticky haze of fuschia sparks that appear just barely visible to Purpled, and only if he squints. 

The young magician then holds up his hand, pointer finger aimed at a diagonal incline towards the hovering torn parchment, the rest tucked snug against his palm. Slowly, in a mesmerizing flow and slide movement that resembles a wave, a dance, and a melody all in one motion, he extends his pinky finger on the same hand, indicating the space down and to the page’s left. The flickering magic sparkles in the air seem to pop out a bit more excitedly than before, and before Purpled can blink, there appears an identical copy of the same torn parchment, blots of still-drying ink and all. 

So stupefied by this blatant display of illusionary talent, Purpled’s mind takes a minute to catch up with his body, and he fumbles to catch the copy that Enderman drifts lazily his way, violet sparks fading quickly but still dancing in imprints behind his eyelids. 

He doesn’t waste a moment after that. Flipping the paper around so he can read it upright, Purpled hungrily soaks in the shapes of their Alchemystical real names, memorizing each one and repeating them over and over again in his head as a renewed thrill of glee blossoms warmly in his stomach. 

Friends, the stars whisper, and Purpled agrees. These are my friends. 

While Purpled and Enderman—Ranboo, his given name is Ranboo —busy themselves distributing contact information and home addresses (Purpled included his, just in case something goes wrong with their act at HQ and they need someplace else to test their equipment, and certainly not for any other reason—like if they wanted to come over and just hang out together or something stupid like that), The Jack— Tommy —goes about introducing Punz to his own crowd.

“Great to meet you, Punz. How do? My name’s Tommy, and this is Tubbo and Ranboo. These bitches behind me are our big brothers, Dream, George, Sapnap, Karl, and Bad. Don’t pay them any mind, they haven’t had their shots yet so they can get a little funny-looking.”

This seems to snap the magicians’ family members out of whatever funk Punz’s arrival had them wrapped up in once and for all, and Purpled goes nearly dizzy with relief when he feels his older brother relax into a chuckle along with them. 

“What—?! We’re not ‘funny-looking.’ Tommy, take that back!” Dream reprimands squeakily, cheeks reddening with self-consciousness. 

“And you know I made double-dog sure to get us all up to date on our immunization records, from the moment we first arrived in L’Manburg!” Bad adds, shooting an apologetic smile at Punz and Purpled. “I assure you, we’re all vaccinated over here. Perfectly healthy!”

Punz shuffles awkwardly from foot to foot, looking like he’s about to take a shit or say something embarrassing, neither of which Purpled wants to be present for, so he takes one last look at the writing on the page before cramming it into his hoodie pocket, then spins on his heel to drag Punz away from the stage by one hand. With the other, Purpled waves goodbye excitedly over his shoulder, unable to contain himself and heed the words his flustered conscience screams to ‘Be cool, be chill, act natural!’ 

“Bye now! It’s late, so we’ve gotta get going, but—I’ll talk to you guys later?” Purpled calls out hopefully, craning his neck to see their faces one last time tonight before he and his brother reach the golden hemmed edge of the curtain.

“You got it, bossman!” Tubbo crows amidst his co-stars’ howling of similarly indecipherable acknowledgements. The three of them are stood in a circle, holding hands and bouncing around the stage floor in excitement. 

“Okay, cool!” Purpled breathes, just as he’s ducking back under the shower of curtain tassels. “Yeah—see ya later!”

Tommy shoots him one final violent grin, a fresh peal of piercing laughter just starting to bubble up in the back of his throat, and the curtain falls to accompany the sound with a muted fwssh!

As they make their way back to the car, Purpled tries his best to tune out Punz as he drones on and on about how worried he was, and how Purpled needs to be more careful , especially when it comes to strange characters (with even stranger energies), like those munchkin magicians and their creepy crew of older brothers, speaking of which, what was their deal…?! 

Purpled ghosts a hand over the place where his torn paper copy crinkles in his hoodie pocket. He ducks his head, the tips of his ears warming, and bites his lip to hide yet another stupid grin.

“Dad,” Wilbur tries. Again. 

“No.”

“Dad,” Wilbur whines (again), stomping one foot on the cool concrete floor of their workshop warehouse as though the bodily delivery of the word will change its meaning and response. “I’m telling you, this is the only way!”

“No!” Phil squawks (again)! His blonde hair sweeps around his face, haloing with the vigorous shake of his head. “I don’t care how you try to rationalize it, we are not going to kidnap our three biggest rivals in order to torture them out of their showbusiness secrets!”

“Not until they’re legal adults, at least,” Techno appends, shooting a quiet, sarcastic smirk in Wilbur’s direction. “Then, it’s no longer kidnapping—just regular ol’ fashioned abduction. Much less morally reprehensible.”

Wilbur sticks out his tongue at Techno, proving that it takes more than one’s age to determine maturity.

Phil, ignoring Wilbur (an art that they are all very well-practiced in), nods and points an approving finger at Techno. “Precisely. We’ll just have to wait a few more years until they’re eighteen.”

Wilbur lets out a strangled wail of frustration, long fingers clawing at his tangled nest of brown hair as he collapses dramatically to the floor. 

“But I don’t want to kidnap them when they’re eighteen, I want to kidnap them now! ” He knows he sounds like a toddler throwing a ridiculous temper tantrum right now, but he doesn’t care. “Kids now, not-kids in a few years—what difference does it make?! We’re still breaking the law, we’re still torturing them for their secrets, except there’s only one scenario between the two that gives us the information we need now! I don’t see how this is even a question to you guys! Can’t you see the logic in it? Don’t either of you have any common sense?”

“Oh, don’t you worry, Wil. That is one thing I’ve got in spades,” Phil reassures cooly—and Wilbur doesn’t miss the way he emphasizes the word ‘I’ve,’ as though critically comparing his own superior reasoning capabilities with those of… Someone else.  

“Besides,” Techno adds—unhelpful as always—his sympathies utterly heedless to his twin’s petulant writhing on the dust-covered ground. “Even if we wanted to kidnap and torture ‘em, we’d have no way to execute it and still make a clean getaway, which is something we’d need, if we wanted to stay out of jail long enough to actually apply any of the information we weasel out of them. Think about it: the Theatre is always crawling with security, so we couldn’t strike anywhere near there, and we can’t follow them home, either. They’re performers, so they take the hidden back exits to protect them from crazed audience members doing exactly that. Any grand abduction scheme would be over before it even began.” 

Wilbur is silent for a moment, then two. He considers this information with a sour taste in his mouth, pathetically reluctant to admit that his brother is right.

Finally, he keens a disheartened sigh of defeat. He droops his head back down to where it lay miserably sprawled out with the rest of him, absorbing a chill from the unfinished concrete, and smothers himself face-first in the workshop’s typical veil of machine oil grime, sawdust, and tobacco ash. 

“Fair point, I guess…” Wilbur’s voice trails off into the cracks of the slab. His shoulders spasm with a long, heavy, over-emphasized pout. 

He doesn’t dare crack open one eyelid to peek.

It’s alright, he can feel the electric energy from here. 

Dad’s Guilt-Trip tolerance levels reaching critical capacity. Reactor meltdown imminent. Prepare for acquiescence in 3… 2… 1—

“Um—well, actually…” Phil clears his throat and ducks his head, suddenly seeming quite interested in the grain of the wood workbench surface beside him. His hands are jittery as he picks at a splintered groove carved in one of the slats, his pale face warming with nervous perspiration. 

“Hm?” Wilbur prods encouragingly, doing his best to sound eager to listen and not impatient to hear. On the inside, his heart is burning with vindictive giddiness, and if his soul could wear but one expression in the moment, it would be a wicked smirk resembling that of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas (at his most smug and scheming). “Go on…?” 

Despite his sons’ laser-focused death glares, Phil manages to avoid meeting both Wilbur’s and Techno’s anticipating gazes as he reaches gingerly into his cloak’s inner breast pocket and withdraws a slightly-battered copy of the Alchemysteria Playbill from that night. 

Sticking out from between the pages, just barely discernible from the rest of the parchment, glimmers a familiar business card, printed to resemble a poker-standard six of hearts. 

Phil takes a deep breath in through his nose—already regretting the decision to mention this in the first place, but as a father unable to keep himself from holding it back any longer (he’s such a sucker for Wilbur’s dramatically curious puppy-dog eyes)—and extends his hand out towards the twins with the playing card pinched loosely between his middle two fingers. 

“I might, possibly, maybe… Might know of a solution to that particular problem.”

Chapter Text

“So I’ve been thinking, what if you do an outer space theme for your next set?” Purpled suggests as he and the Alchemysteria three stroll about backstage, clearing away the charred scorch marks and rubble left behind from their most recent show. 

It’s a pleasant Monday evening, and they’ve just wrapped up their final show of the work week, meaning they’ll have the next four days to start brainstorming acts for their matinee on Saturday. 

Tubbo looks up from where he’d been buffing out a particularly stubborn gash in the planks, using a strange bottle of swirling, sparkling liquid that looks like molten lava. Purpled isn’t exactly sure how it works, but whenever the potion is poured into a nick in the wood, slivers start to regrow and patch it up without leaving even the slightest implication of a scar. 

“That could be interesting,” Tubbo hums, pouring a few final droplets into the hole and dropping his hand towel over the top of it with a mindless shrug. “We’d have to figure out a way to get everyone in the audience into space suits for it, though. Or maybe just helmets with an air supply attached?” 

Drifting down from the lighting rafters attached to the ceiling, Tommy plants himself gently on the ground between Purpled and Tubbo with a little hop, rebound momentum propelling him forward with a slight stagger as he reclaims his balance. “Nah, we don’t have to send them all actually out into space. We could just have Ranboo open up some portals along the walls with invisible barriers so that nobody accidentally falls in, and I could try to figure out how to do my anti-gravity spell across the whole crowd so it feels like they’re floating.”

There’s that word again —spell. Purpled frowns and tries to nod along, but his mind is still whirring with the same implications he’s been struggling with since the first time he’d heard one of them mention it. 

At first, he’d just assumed that it was Alchemysteria jargon for ‘trick,’ something to add a little extra mystical flair to their brand, but they always sound so serious when they say it. 

Even if he can’t see them directly right now, being indoors and all, Purpled feels the stars whispering urgently at him—aligning themselves in a straight arrow towards the question he knows he should ask—but what if it comes across as insulting? Or worse, what if they laugh at him for asking such a silly question, and he makes an ass of himself in front of these friends he’s only just made?

“Um, hey…” Purpled bites his lip, steeling himself. “I was thinking, d’you think I could come over to your place tonight and get some explanations as to how you perform your tricks? I’m your tech guy, after all—shouldn’t I be in on the magic just a little bit, so I can know how best to support your act?” 

To Purpled’s immense relief, Ranboo instantly breaks out into a grin and replies, “Sure! That sounds great.”

“I’ll let the coven know we’re not coming over for dinner tonight,” Tommy offers, already striding over to the backstage door where the Alchemysteria trio’s guardians are waiting for them to wrap up. 

Purpled nods, adding the word ‘coven’ to his list of Alchemysteria oddities to possibly ask about later. “I’ll ask Punz if he and I can stop at the Cheery Blossom on our way over, too. We’ll pick up something for the four of us to snack on once he drops me off at yours.” 

“Sounds good, Boss Man!” Tubbo chirps, dusting himself off and joining Ranboo on his way to the supply closet. “I think we’re probably going to be all wrapped up here in a minute, so you and Punz should take off now. With the extra time it’ll take you to grab the grub, we’ll most likely arrive back at our place all together at the same time.” 

Poking his head back in through the opened backstage door, Tommy calls, “D’you need any cash?”

“Nah,” Purpled shouts back, swallowing his momentary surprise that Tommy’d somehow heard what they were saying through the door. “I’ll make Punz pay for it, he’s rich.” 

“Cool,” Tommy snickers, eyes glittering as he saunters back to centerstage. “Everyone’s cool with us skipping family dinner tonight, so we’re all set! D’you need to ask your brother for permission first?”

“I’ll ask on our way over, but I’m sure it’s fine,” Purpled replies with a shrug. “He’s not too much of a mother hen as long as he knows where I’m going.” 

Returning from the supply closet, Tubbo beams, a very strange halo of static electricity zapping through his brown hair and raising it all end-to-end off the top of his head. Purpled knows better than to point it out—whatever strange magic goes on in the supply closet stays in the supply closet. 

“Perfect! I guess we’ll see you later then, you’ve still got the parchment with our address?”

“Yup!” Purpled returns Tubbo’s smile, patting the pocket in his jeans where the paper still rests, folded and crinkling slightly under the pressure of his palm, then turns around to exit through the slight gap left in the curtains. “See you later!”

“Bye!” the three chime after him, and Purpled gives them one final wave with his back turned before the backstage lights slip out of view, curtains falling closed behind him.

Hissing under his breath, Wilbur scrambles to stay out of sight in the shadows bracketing the cobbled street while his father and brother trail absently after him. “No, c’mon—think of it this way: they’re orphans—” 

“They’re orphans?!” both Phil and Techno cry in different tones of voice, for different reasons.

Wilbur growls under his breath, shushing them violently as he dodges the gleam of another streetlamp. “Yes, orphans—so they probably need some extra guidance, y’know? A responsible parental figure to show them the way in life, protect them from the horrors of showbusiness. That’s all this is—it’ll be a charitable kidnapping.” 

Of course, Wilbur doesn’t know any of this for certain, but given the fact that the Alchemysteria trio are all children, and he’s never seen any adults come to pick them up after a show—aside from that weird group of friends that always sits in the front row, which Wilbur refuses to acknowledge as possible guardians since they all look to be about the same age as him—surely they must be on their own out there. 

Wilbur almost, almost feels bad for them. 

Phil makes a sad little sighing noise, then picks up the pace, joining Wilbur in the shadows beside a shop selling garish-looking top hats. “Oh, those poor things.” 

“Blood,” Techno chants darkly, still not bothering to keep himself hidden, but at least he’s not slowing down quite as much as before. “Blood, blood, blood…”

Midway through their stroll to the Cheery Blossom, Purpled stops in his tracks, gaze turned skyward. 

Punz slows down to a halt beside him, gazing curiously at the concentrated face of his younger brother. He tries not to let the familiar curl of nagging, nervous energy take complete control of him, just waits for Purpled to let him in on whatever’s bothering him. 

A vicious, overprotective voice in his head—one that Punz is locked in a constant losing battle with—nags at him to leap down Purpled’s throat and interrogate him as to why he seems so desperate to maintain a relationship with the Alchemysteria magicians, but Punz is practiced at avoiding the temptation. After all, they both know that stage magic is a load of hot garbage all dressed up in a fanciful guise of lies, so there can’t be any real harm in playing along with it—so long as they maintain a careful distance. 

At first, Punz had been hesitant at best to entertain his younger brother’s sudden enchantment with the whole thing, but now he’s starting to see that Purpled’s intrigue is only limited to the three miniature conmen and their act. It doesn’t extend to any of the other magicians that typically occupy the Las Nevadas stage with their scummy smoke and mirrors, nor does it seem to bleed into the topics of stage magic or illusions themselves. For whatever reason, Purpled really believes in Alchemysteria; he sees something in them that Punz simply cannot comprehend, and a lack of understanding on his own part isn’t nearly reason enough to put a stop to something that clearly makes his little brother happy. 

That’s all Punz really wants—for Purpled to be happy. 

Purpled has always been a bit of an outcast, mostly due to his obsession with aliens and outer space—topics which don’t seem to evoke in other people his age quite the same fervent level of fascination that Purpled has—but also because of the strangely mystical shade of his eyes. 

Unlike Punz, who inherited nearly exact copies of their mother’s desaturated powder blue, Purpled’s irises are entirely unique to him—two pools of magenta, indigo, and violet, constantly swirling and rippling like a vast ocean’s surface. Punz doesn’t know what the big hangup is, when it comes to other people and their reactions to his defining physical trait. He always thought they were cool, like looking into a portal to another dimension. 

Right now, this opinion is no different. Punz almost finds himself in a trance, hypnotized by the way they dart back and forth across the sky, tracking invisible paths to a vast, uncharted frontier, and practically glittering in the starlight.

“Actually, I think we should head this way, first.” Without looking, Purpled raises his arm and points at an intersection just ahead of them, indicating a section of road that leads slightly further away from the main city sprawl and into the quaint suburbs—away from the Cheery Blossom storefront, now just a few blocks down in the opposite direction. 

Wrenching his gaze free from Purpled’s face, Punz sighs, blinking away the odd wetness that always gathers in his own eyes when he looks a bit too deeply into Purpled’s. 

He’s never had an explanation for that, but, like many things in his life pertaining to his brother, Punz chalks it up to just another weird phenomenon resulting from Purpled’s unique status. 

That’s the other thing perpetually alienating him from his peers—the one they try to keep unspoken, save for a few private brotherly conversations reserved just for the two of them. 

“Alright,” Punz acquiesces, falling in stride to follow his brother wherever the sudden impulse guides, and doesn’t bother to ask any further questions. He’s merely happy to tag along, watch Purpled’s back, and make sure that no harm ever befalls him. 

Maybe that’s selfish, but Punz doesn’t care. It’s his biggest fear, losing him.

Together, they stroll in silence down a few winding roads, passing storefronts and potted floral planters as the scenery gradually transforms into soft shrubbery and picket fences, dotted lines demarcating the barriers between sidewalks and home gardens. Each time Punz steals a peek at his brother’s expression, it’s pointed skyward, wearing a wide-eyed openness to receive whatever information the cosmos has in store for him. 

Purpled slows down next to one of the larger houses in the neighborhood, nestled awkwardly between a few busy-looking intersections that would probably be choked full with traffic right now if not for the late evening hour, and Punz pauses in kind. 

At last, Purpled’s chin drops down, tearing the line of his vision from the twinkling stars above, and instead he turns his attention to the house’s broad wooden door.

Squinting at the residence number, Punz notes that it’s different from the address Purpled had shown him when he’d first explained his plans to join Alchemysteria in their home for dinner. Slivers of warm yellow light spill from the closed-curtained windows, and no particular noises of conversation or commotion float out from inside. The garden seems welcoming and lovingly maintained, along with the path leading from sidewalk to front door, and the stoop is well-lit. 

Punz allows himself to relax a fraction. Whoever lives here, they’re not giving any obvious indications that they might be malicious or evil, but still, he keeps his guard up. He should know better than anyone that looks can be deceiving. 

Turning to his brother, Punz watches as Purpled stretches out an arm and points, just as he’d done at the intersection that’d caused their detour in the first place, to indicate the door he’s been intensely staring at since the two of them arrived. 

“This is the place,” Purpled murmurs. “Let’s go in.”

“Alright.” With another lighthearted sigh, Punz takes the lead this time and strolls cautiously up to the front step, Purpled trailing closely after. 

He raises his fist to knock, hesitating for just a moment longer to read Purpled’s expression and body language, but the kid is fairly relaxed. The only detectable tension is in his vivid mauveine eyes, deep and eddying with rapt anticipation. 

“Knock,” Purpled breathes. 

With inherent trust in Purpled’s judgement, and despite his reservations about whatever stranger might occupy the space inside, Punz complies, his knuckles falling to the wood in a series of three gentle percussive beats.

Because his little brother is the first and only natural witch born to this universe. 

When he speaks, Punz listens.

Chapter Text

“You’ve got some pretty neat tricks there, my friends.” 

Quackity’s offhand comment takes Tommy a bit by surprise as he and his co-stars are gathered in the ornate back office to the Las Nevadas Theatre, collecting on their cut of the Monday night ticket sales. 

Blinking owlishly, Tommy watches Quackity’s gloved hands as he shuffles through neat stacks of cash gathered from a cashier’s lockbox that sits opened before him, distributing the bills into a few different piles on the tabletop before combining and splitting some from the rest, then tucking the remainder not meant for the three magicians away again. It’s an intricate dance, all according to a rhyme and rhythm that only Quackity seems to understand, and Tommy would be impressed with the subtle complexity of it all if he wasn’t still recovering from his momentary shock at the unexpected compliment. 

“Oh, thank you very much, Big Q!” Ranboo gushes, fortunately unaffected enough to speak on Alchemysteria’s behalf. “It’s such an honor to perform here at your theatre. We’re so glad you like our show!”

Quackity barks out a strange, detached sort of laugh, perhaps a bit too loud for comfort. “I do! I really do, I tell ya—but I’m not the only one who thinks so. I mean, your act is really, truly, one of a kind.” 

With his back turned to the three magicians, Tommy can’t quite gauge the nature of Quackity’s expression, but the plastic smile he’s wearing when he whirls back around to face them is unsettling, raised and peeling at the edges, like a graffiti patch on a billboard that’s been intentionally plastered on a bit too thick in order to cover up something particularly distasteful. 

Shrugging cryptically, Quackity goes on, “All I’m saying is, well… Watch your back. That’s all.” 

Tommy takes the offered envelope of cash from Quackity’s outstretched hand, frowning. “Uh, that’s pretty ominous,” he giggles nervously, “but thanks for the heads up, I guess.” 

Again, Quackity shrugs, clicking the lockbox shut. 

“Will do, bossman!” Tubbo enthuses with a salute. “Will do!”

Resuming that same eerily schooled expression from before, Quackity takes a moment to just look at the three of them, gazing deep into their eyes, one after the other. 

The intensity of his stare makes Tommy shiver. 

Finally, Quackity nods, seemingly satisfied with what he finds, and tuts, “Good,” in a deceptively blank, clipped tone. Then he turns his back on them once and for all, strolling out the doors to his private study with his hands shoved casually into his front pockets. 

As the three magicians turn to take their leave from him as well, overlapping goodbyes ringing out as they wave over their shoulders, Quackity calls to them one last time. 

“Heads on a swivel, kids! Heads on a swivel…”

“You got it!” Tommy confirms, then has to swallow back the anxious bile that creeps up his throat once the doors shut behind them with a note of dull finality. 

The trio makes their way back down to the main street level, and Tommy tries not to think too hard about why his nerves might be going so haywire all of a sudden. 

Once he, Tubbo, and Ranboo all meet back up with Purpled at their shared apartment, they’ve got an epic all-nighter filled with new friends, magic, brainstorming, and free food from the Cheery Blossom to look forward to. 

They’ve got their money, and they pulled off one hell of a show. 

All things considered, it’s been a fantastic night, with nothing but even more good times ahead of them.  

Frustrated with himself for letting the old theatre owner’s paranoia get to his head, Tommy stalwartly ignores it when a hair-raising tingle leaps down his spine as they exit through the theatre’s private rear doors—a possible indication that they’re either being watched, or that Tommy’s finally lost his marbles. 

He just barely manages to suppress his flinch at the sight of some strangely shifting figures looming out the corner of his eye as they make their way further down the back alley, away from the lamplight, and turns his attention to the next halo of light shining just a few paces ahead of them. 

Breathing out sharply through his nose, Tommy clenches his fists and steels his jaw. 

One step at a time. 

His stubborn refusal to ever fear usually works out well for him. It’s part of the reason why he’s great at putting on a charismatically ridiculous performance in front of a crowd, no matter how many people there are in attendance at any given time. 

Tonight, though, it’s also the unfortunate reason why he isn’t looking when the three unfamiliar silhouettes behind them begin to mold with Alchemysteria’s own on the wet pavement. 

One step at a time. 

Save for the gritty, whispered rasp of loose gravel crunching beneath an old magician’s shoe, their pursuers’ shadows cross over them without any warning. If Tommy had been paying more attention to his surroundings, perhaps he could’ve spotted the danger and gotten himself and his brothers out ahead of time, but instead he’s focused on steadying his breathing.

One step at a time, Tommy insists to himself, irritated—and oh, isn't it ironic? 

One step—

At last, the predators’ pack closes in on its prey—

—Exactly one step away from the open light and safety of the street. 

Karl’s head snaps up. His fingers have stalled over his knitting needles mid-stitch. 

Across the cozy living room from Karl, Dream quirks a brow at him, only mildly perplexed by the sudden faraway look stealing across Karl’s features and dimming the light in his eyes. It’s not uncommon for the star-brained witch to stare off into space like this sometimes, when he gets into one of his moods. 

All things considered, it’s a regular enough night at the coven house. Gentle sounds of George and Sapnap’s bickering can be heard from upstairs, drifting down the hall and stirring with the lazy drone of their enchanted gramophone. In the kitchen, Bad hums along to the record’s tune, withdrawing a warm tray of lemon poppyseed muffins from the oven and placing it promptly into the arms of one of his shadow puppets for them to extract the muffins from the hot tin and set aside on the cooling rack. 

Catching Dream’s curious gaze for a split second, Karl points at the door and mutters, “Someone’s here.”

Sure enough, mere moments after Karl’s prediction, three sharp knocks pierce the relative quiet inside, interrupting one of the two arguing upstairs mid-sentence.

“Any idea who?” Dream asks, rising from the sofa and crossing the room to the entryway. 

Karl shakes his head. “Nobody hostile, but we might wanna grab the others, first. Just in case.” 

Pursing his lips, Dream nods and uses a quick spell to send a telepathic message to George, Bad, and Sapnap, requesting that they all place a small pause on their individual activities to join him and Karl at the door.

Unexpected visitors are almost never an issue for them—this world is well and truly blind to the existence of witches—but the late night hour combined with Karl’s strange demeanor preceding the knock sets Dream’s teeth on edge. Part of him wants to agree; his instincts aren’t telling him that there’s anything dangerous lurking on the other side of the door, but there’s still something nagging at him in the back of his brain, insisting that whatever this is, it’s not going to be anything good. 

Dream waits until he hears the distinct sounds of Sapnap’s socked feet and the soft pad and scuff of George’s bunny slippers thumping down the stairs before he eases the door open, squinting out into the night with his brows slashed together, teeth clenched. “Hello?”

“Oh—hi! So this is your house, then.” From the other side of the door, Purpled’s voice sounds strangely startled yet unsurprised all at once. Shouldering past his older brother—Punz, Dream reminds himself, with no small amount of distaste—the kid marches straight through the threshold and plants his hands on his hips, appraising the five of them with a neutral expression. 

Dream blinks, awkwardly shuffling aside to let Punz in after his brother, and tries to make his mouth work properly again in the face of such a perplexing change to tonight’s plans. 

Fortunately, Punz fills the silence for him, flashing the coven an apologetic smile and a wince. “Good evening, sorry to bother you at this hour. We were just on our way to the Cheery Blossom when Purpled decided he wanted to take a detour.” 

Ignoring the perplexed looks on the coven members’ faces, Purpled wanders about the main sitting areas of the house while Punz explains their presence, examining the face of an enchanted wall clock with deep interest. 

“It’s no trouble,” Dream finally responds, extending an arm towards Punz and shaking his hand in greeting. He manages not to make the gesture look too rigid, but has to force himself to loosen his grip when his nerves make him squeeze a bit tighter than he intends, closing over Punz’s knuckles in a way that falls just this side of uncomfortable. “What brings you two out here to our neck of the woods?”

Punz drops Dream’s hand and glances quickly over at his little brother, a momentary flash of panic crossing his features, then shrugs listlessly. “Uh… To be honest, I’m not a hundred percent sure. Like I said, Purpled was the one who decided for us to show up here. I didn’t even know that this was your house until you opened the door.”

“Me neither,” Purpled chimes in from the far corner of the living room, where he’s crouched in front of the gramophone. 

“Oh, wow! What a coincidence,” Karl singsongs with an easy laugh, returning to his knitting. “In that case, I guess we oughta ask why you chose this place to visit tonight, instead of any of the others on our street?”

Purpled makes a noncommittal sound halfway between a grunt and a sniff, finally rising to his feet and shoving his hands into his hoodie pocket before he tears his gaze free from the glossy striations carved into the surface of the record he’d just been scrutinizing. When at last he turns to face the rest of them, his expression is pinched—a bit stormy-looking, like even he can’t comprehend how or why he and his brother wound up discovering the central hiding place of his new best friends’ coven.

“Can I be frank?” Purpled blurts out. 

Dream, Punz, and the remaining coven elders exchange a few baffled looks—save for Karl, whose attention is focused solely on the knitting needles in his lap, peacefully stitching away while his rocking chair sways back and forth in the pleasant evening breeze. 

Without waiting for a definitive response from anybody, one way or the other, Purpled clears his throat and points to George, of all people—a surmising furrow slashing his brows. “Why’re you the only one that hasn’t got a weird witchy aura when I read your constellations in the stars?”

Every single soul in the room stops dead in their tracks, frozen, scarcely daring to breathe.

… Except for Karl, of course. 

In the ensuing silence, Purpled coughs, awkwardly shifting his weight from foot to foot—but he doesn’t break his gaze from where it’s fixed on George’s ashen face.

Karl carries right along knitting. 

“WHAT?!” Phil wails, despondent, as he tries and fails yet again to latch another pair of metal handcuffs over Doctor Frankincense’s wrists. 

Again, the wide-eyed kid doesn’t react, just gawps up at him with something akin to awe spilling out from his round features, the thick reinforced steel turning red and goopy and dribbling down past his fingertips. 

Phil yelps, yanking his own hands back from the scalding heat before it can inflict any more damage upon him (he hadn’t been expecting it the first time Doctor Frankincense turned Phil’s patented lockpick-proof cuffs into putty—nor the second, third, and fourth). 

In the time it takes Phil to hiss and shake out the residual warmth building behind a burn on his palm, Frankincense’s fifth pair of restraints has fully melted and slipped away, the bubbly remnants plopping down to join Phil’s prior attempts in a sluggish pile of molten metal at their feet. 

The longer Phil struggles to do his part in carrying out Wilbur’s half-cocked kidnapping scheme, the deeper his desperation grows, until he’s all but ready to call it quits and check himself into an asylum for what he’s ostensibly 'witnessed' this night. Right now, his only comfort is the fact that his sons seem to be having a similarly tough time catching hold of the other two Alchemysteria performers, but the comfort is short-lived. 

No amount of prior planning or primed mental constitution could’ve prepared them for the insanity they’d face in trying to capture their professional enemies. 

“Stop it,” Techno growls at The Jack of All Trades, closing the latch on his handcuffs. 

The Jack gazes blankly at him, then blinks down at his cuffs. After spending a few seconds beneath The Jack’s sustained attention, they simply unlock themselves again, seemingly just by the power of his mind. 

Techno scowls and clicks them back shut. 

The Jack unlocks them. 

“FUCK!” The high-pitched swearing shriek that pierces the air above his head is Phil’s only warning before Wilbur falls from out of nowhere and slams bodily into him, the force knocking them both down in a crumpled sprawl atop the cobble. 

“Ah! I’m so sorry!” Enderman laments, his upside-down figure appearing over the two of them, suspended mid-air. He’s dangling from some strange swirling violet platform carved into space, arms extended to help Phil and Wilbur up—only, Enderman is not just dangling, he’s standing flat on the portal’s inverted glasslike surface, with his own two feet, the gravity of his hair, clothes, and jewelry unhampered by the reversal of physics. 

Numb, and utterly bewildered, Phil accepts the offered hand and uses it to pull himself upright, stomach lurching when he notices a distinct floatiness overtake him, like his body is temporarily exempt from the pull of any gravitational force. The sensation lasts all the way until Enderman releases him from his monochrome grip, at which point the weightless tendrils of Phil’s long blonde hair settle back in their usual frame around his face, and the swirly feeling in his gut subsides, his feet connecting squarely back where they belong on the cold, flat ground. 

Still fretting over the two of them, even as Wilbur snarls and sharply bats his other hand away, Enderman falls upwards, feet-first, through the bizarre platform-portal-thing and materializes upright behind them. “Are you alright? Christ, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to drop you down like that, I was just so startled when you grabbed me out of nowhere—I wasn’t thinking! I just teleported myself away, but I should’ve known that you’d try to tag along and made sure your gravity ended up safe here in the air with me. Oh, I hope that neither of you got hurt…”

Phil forces a warm, understanding grin and gives Enderman a tentative pat on the shoulder for reassurance. “Ah, it’s alright, mate. No harm done. Right, Wilbur?”

Fuming, Wilbur staggers to his feet and snaps, “Don’t tell them my name, you prick! No, it’s not alright. Come back here!” 

Eyes glowing with a deep, despicable, murderous rage, Wilbur lunges at Enderman with his arms outstretched as though to strangle him. The willowy young magician lets out an aborted yelp, again phasing out of existence in a mist of pink and purple swirls, and reappearing unscathed on the other side of the alleyway across from them. 

Wilbur’s face reddens as he releases a pinched and violent scream of barely-bated vitriol, and he shakes his trembling fists at the kid a few times before whirling around to jab a finger into Phil’s chest. “You keep focusing on the puny one,” he commands, all but barking the words. 

Briefly, Phil spares Doctor Frankincense and the silvery pool of failure at his feet another dejected glance. 

“Then, once you’ve got him all bound up in the cart, you can come back and try to help me with the half-and-half bastard. We’re not through with this, understand?! Nobody’s leaving here until we find out exactly what makes you brats tick!” The tail end of Wilbur’s threat is bellowed out to the general public, the grating echoes of his voice slamming abrasively against the cramped alley’s borders with a vengeance. 

The sound of his venom-laced derangement is vicious enough that it causes Enderman to flinch and phase out of existence again, materializing a few more paces away. This only seems to enrage Wilbur further, and the last thing Phil sees of his perhaps psychotically broken son is a blur of splotchy, frazzled, infuriated scarlet and brown as it jumps to try to tackle the elusive cloud of magenta sparks to the ground.

Dragging a weary hand over his face, Phil returns his attentions to Doctor Frankincense with a resigned and miserable sigh. 

Fortunately, the kid still hasn’t moved from the position Phil left him in—although, Phil can’t say he’s exactly pleased by the fact—the unsettling cocktail of starstruck adoration and unabashed reverence still is writ in bold across Frankincense’s unblinking face. 

“Listen, kid,” Phil all but pules as he cracks open the links to another set of cuffs and extends them weakly in Frankincense’s direction. “I don’t know how you’re doing it, but would you mind turning down the temperature on those arms of yours and just letting me put you in handcuffs, so I can take you and your friends back down to our workshop and interrogate you without incident like my crazy son wants? I know it’s a lot to ask—it’s probably a pretty big inconvenience for you to be kidnapped tonight, and if you already had other plans, I totally get it—but if you just go along with all this, you’d really be helping an old man out. So… what do you say? Wanna come take a look at the inside of the Mythos Three’s secret hideout? I promise we’ll try not to keep you too long. At least until my son gets bored of his little vendetta against you kids and finds some new hill to die on—hopefully one somewhere far, far away from your brain-bending magic act.” 

Slack-jawed, Doctor Frankincense bobs his head in a dazed nod as Phil speaks, the motion intensifying in vigor at the end of his plea. “Y-yes… Yes—! You’re…! I don’t know, but—?! Surely not…?” he breathes, strangled, flushed cheeks and shallow squeaking wheezes belying the ardent admiration in his disbelief. “I assumed—! But you’re actually—! You’re Crowfather! The Mythos Three! It’s really you! Oh, God! I can’t believe it!”

His eyes are so wide, and it’s been so long since he last blinked, that Phil can see a watery layer of teardrops at least half an inch thick covering the domed surfaces of his sclerae, an uncontrollable waterfall threatening to teem over the lip of his lashline at the smallest disturbance (not counting the unholy disturbed feeling Phil’s had gnawing at his chest for the past twelve minutes now).

“Uh,” Phil gulps, still fiddling awkwardly with the cuffs. “Yep! You know of me? You kids familiar with our work?”

Frankincense splutters indignantly, his eyelids finally snapping shut and turning on the water works in two thick streams that pour openly down his cheeks and gather in a steady dribble off the sides of his chin—which grimly reminds Phil of the metallic hellfire he’d witnessed raining down from the kid’s calloused touch mere moments prior. 

The same hellfire that he’s dreading possibly having to experience again, with this next pair of restraints.

“Know you?!” Doctor Frankincense finally manages to squeak, his voice coming out in a reedy whistle. 

Phil takes a hesitant step backwards to avoid the rapid whizzing blurs of motion as the kid’s arms flail around incoherently, punctuating his frantic word vomit. 

“KNOW YOU?! Crowfather, sir, I—we—! Oh my God, we literally worship you! Since we were six—you—the Mythos Three—?! I mean…!”

Cutting himself off with an agonized wail, Doctor Frankincense hides his burning pink cheeks behind his palms and shakes his head, his whole body wiggling with poorly-contained bashfulness and glee. “I’m gonna be honest, this is actually—meeting you—it’s just—it’s a dream come true! You guys taught us everything we know—well—kinda? It’s like —agh! We’re just—massive fans of yours—truly! So, yeah, that’s fine! I’ll go along with you! Wherever you’d like, for as long as you can stand me, Boss Man!” 

Shivering, his knees quaking beneath his weight, and overtaken by a dizzy, lightheaded type of hero worship that Phil would dare say he’s never seen before in his life—and he’s seen a lot of real fanatics for the Mythos Three in his time—the kid thrusts his arms forward, unambiguously offering himself up for cooperative restraint. Paradoxically for the situation, he's wearing a grin that's downright blinding. 

Astonishment and terror battle for dominance inside Phil’s chest as he clamps the shackles around Doctor Frankincense’s wrists, one after the other, and stands there stupefied when, this time, they remain solidly in place, the cool steel’s temperature never rising by even a fraction of a degree.

Too wrapped up in his own fanboying, Frankincense doesn’t notice the existential despair bleeding out from Phil’s every pore as he turns a chipper eye towards the alleyway exit leading out onto the street. “So, where’s the getaway carriage, bossman? If you wanna just point me in the right direction, I’m sure I could find my way there on my own after that—if that’d be what's easiest for you, I mean, Mr. Crowfather, sir. I’ve got a feeling that once I start walking, my fellow illusionists won’t be long behind me—seeing as we’re all about the same when it comes to our feelings of devotion towards you.” 

Doctor Frankincense doesn’t wait for Phil to guide him, instead just staggering drunkenly forward, and biting his lip to help manage the aching force of his smile. “I reckon Ranboo will probably just poof him and Tommy both on over together as soon as one of them realizes who they’re talking to.”

“Uhh…” Phil mumbles, trailing absently after. “Okay. Yeah, sure. It’s just there, parked off the side of that pâtisserie across the street.” 

“On it,” Doctor Frankincense chirps, giving Phil an enthusiastic double thumbs-up after a couple failed attempts at a salute, made awkward and clumsy by the handcuffs. 

For the first time since he and his family set out that night, then tension in Phil’s shoulders relaxes slightly, a thin stream of relief aching through his bones. “Thank you, Doctor Frankincense,” he sighs, pouring out enough gratitude to make his chest sting. 

“The pleasure’s all mine,” Frankincense insists brightly. “And please, call me Tubbo.”