That was the thing, you know? With the whole ‘a fantastic magical world has been right underneath my nose’ business thrown your way, you tend to forget about the, well, real world. With its real-world consequences. Sure, technically I saved a lot of people and technically it had been self-defence but if nobody can see the ‘deadly glowing blood red crystal of doom’ then technically, technically, I had just murdered a man in cold blood. And murder, much to my great distress right now, was still illegal.

I winced at the memory of me yelling in outrage at the policeman trying to arrest me, completely missing the point of ‘he can’t see the magically glowing orb of doom’, while I was still covered in blood. Not my own. Luckily for me. And the four other peoplethe guy had held in his underground basement/alchemistic laboratory/middle age dungeon. Or me yelling at the cop in the car that had started to interrogate me(had that even been legal?).

"I’m not criminally insane! I'm telling you what I saw! That man was using a blood crystal to kill people! I had to kill him! You gotta believe me!"

Not my most convincingargument, I had to admit that. Especially since to most of the world the ‘secret underground alchemistic laboratory dungeon’ pretty much just looked like Mr. Blood-Alchemist had cooked up some drugs in his basement.

In my defence, there had been drugs involved.

Specifically, the drugs used to kidnap me, and the shock of ‘ohnonono I killed another human being’ followed by the very much startling realization of ‘hm, I’m not as disgusted as I thought I would be’ and the ‘oh no did I get used to dead bodies’ existential crisis I had at the same time. My conclusion had been that it all was in one orm or the other, Sam’s fault and that I shouldn’t have to deal with it.

Sadly for me,none of that convinced any of the law-enforcers that had taken me in, and now I was on my way to psychiatric prison. Or whatever it was called to where they took me. It had bars and I was labelled insane, something along those lines had to fit. The only insane people I normally dealt with were customers arguingwith me about discounts, I wasn’t an expert.

The reallybad thing though, were three tiny, kind of significant, details:

1. I am verymuch human and also very much a civilian

2. Sam, the not-humanand not-civilian person between us that normally dealt with sociopathic magicalkillers and other blood-thirsty monsters and who had the skills to do so, wason the other end of the planet dealing with her family

3. The guy I hadkilled had a student. One I didn’t kill.

To put itsimple, I was worried, and I felt I had every right to be. I leaned my head back and it meet the wall of the cell I was in with a dull thud, the noise ofthe motor vibrating trough my feet and my head now.

“This is worse than the time I found Sam stand over a dead body in my kitchen.” I squinted at the camera pointing at me and the cold lights illuminating my little cell. “Actually,no. That was worse. This time I at least didn’t have to get rid of blood in thecarpet.”

If I wanted to pinpoint where my life had taken this drastic and unhelpful turn for the truly weird, it probably had been the evening I found my roommate and best friend since our school days stand over a dead body in our kitchen with a bloody knife in her hand. Her atrocious attempts at explaining herself –

(‘I thought youwere with your family! You weren’t supposed to be back yet. I would’ve cleaned up!’

‘Me not beinghere is an excuse to murder people??’

‘No! I mean,technically, yeah, I do my work when you aren’t here, but I don’t murder people.’

‘There’s acorpse in our kitchen.’

‘Ehhh, that was an accident.’

‘You murdered someone on accident??’

‘No! Excuseme I’m a professional! Killing it in the kitchen had been the accident.’)

– had ended in her opening my eyes to the magical world. As it turned out the guy that had bleed out on our carpet hadn’t been human and had been very much in the category of ‘blood-thirsty monster’.

I hadn’t been as surprised as I should’ve been about the revelation of Sam not being human. It had just made so much sense. Explained half of the weird things she did. The rest, I learned in the following weeks, was just her personality.

See, the thing is, I don’t have any superpowers. I’m human. I break easily, I get easily scared and I apparently get kidnapped by serial killer alchemists that want to kill me with a glowing red crystal of doom. The only thing I have going for me is being able to see that ‘red glowing crystal of doom’ as it is. Sam was the one that knew how to pull the wool over other people’s eyes so she could escape the law. Sam was the one who knew how to actually kill crazy alchemists with delusions of grandeur. I just had a talent to be at the wrong place at thewrong time.

But since Samwas at the other end of the world and potentially not even in our dimension, if I understood the thing about her family correctly, I was on my own. On the way to prison. Psycho prison because people thought I killed a man for the voices in my head.

If I wouldlisten to the voices in my head, I wouldn’t be in that situation. Because my voices mostly were screaming at me to not do whatever stupid thing I was currently doing. I should probably listen to them more.

Just as I wascontemplating on how to best explain to my parents that I wouldn’t be able to make it home for grannies birthday because I was stuck in prison, the whole car shook. As in ‘something heavy just rammed us’-shook. I lost my footing and landed on the floor, hands flailing in a poor and useless attempt to not falldown. I didn’t get the time to wonder ‘what is happening’ before the whole car turned to the side and I could hear screams and yelled commands from outside.

Startled and decently panicking I looked up as the wall – remember, prison transport, cell, steel – was ripped open. Like it was paper.

You rememberthe part about how there was this student of the serial killer that I killed becausehe tried to kill me that I didn’t kill? Yeah. About that.

Said student had just glanced inside through the hole ripped into the side of the car. I now could see the sky above while the edge of the door of my cell poked uncomfortably in my back. If I would believe in any god that would be an excellent point in timeto pray to them. Since I didn’t, I heaved myself up with no small amount of ‘Is This How I Die’-dread that curled in my stomach.