Hey, there. What's it's been - a week and a half? Two weeks? Something like that. I think I'm doing pretty well to have this proofread at all and put up on the site with my working full-time an hour away from where I live. I hope you enjoy.


Recap: Jake attempted to enjoy some time off at the magical community's autumn festival, but his plans got changed after a shape-shifter named Envy interrupted his purchase and the dragons were called in to stop him from harassing all the alchemists.


Chapter I

By the time his name came up again, Envy had been forgotten as a rotten prankster that had caused trouble once over a year before.

The note that mentioned him could technically be called graffiti, even with its engraved gold and its classy font being atypical for the crime, and the note was much more than a rotten prank. It was set into a gray brick wall separating the magic section of town from the mundane section of town.

Beside it, a lump of stone jutted out of the wall, having been severed where it was several inches in diameter. It was the scene of a much worse crime than graffiti, one that Fu had been sent to gather information on as a magical guardian while Jake was still stuck in one of his last weeks of school.

Sometimes, Fu really hated his job. Not that the warmish spring day was a bad one to be out on, even if there were a few spots of rain throughout the day, but because he hated dealing with death.

Fu was sent to this part of town after a dead leprechaun had been discovered that morning, apparently strangled by the wall itself. The corpse had been taken away by the time the shar-pei got there, but still….

He could almost picture a large, shadowy shape hiding in that alcove over there, a niche meant to hold a public trash can off to the side of the neat white sidewalk lined with planters filled with blooming white, blue, and violet flowers at this time of year. Not that anyone had seen anyone hiding in that alcove. Not that anyone had seen anyone they thought could have reshaped the wall into a noose at all in fact.

Fu already had several pages of his green mini-notebook filled with similar testimonies of the previous night. There was some variation of course in matters like when the dead leprechaun had left the club the previous night, but everyone was agreed that they hadn't actually seen a character who was the right kind of suspicious.

The dog inward grumbled to himself again as the day's humidity clung to his fur. The one good thing he could say was that he was almost done talking to everyone – he just had to finish talking to the last of the tired leprechauns who'd last seen their friend alive when he was drinking liquid rainbows with them the previous night. He just had to have a better look around the crime scene and he could go home.

With a closer look, the remnants of the structure that had killed the leprechaun didn't simply jut out of the wall – there were tracks, indentations of where all the extra brick had come from. The wall had been reshaped, quickly enough to catch a leprechaun it seemed, rather than truly having magically grown a stiff noose.

That was unusual. With the level of detail on what was left of the noose and on the note next to it, it was most likely sorcery, or possibly alchemy like the note suggested. Well, the note was inset with gold.

Dragon Council,

Envy has made alchemists stronger. We will show our might until the magical world recognizes us as its leaders.

- The Urban Alchemist.

The Urban Alchemist, whoever it was, had placed an image above the note. Fu thought he recognized a flamel – a symbol depicting a snake on a cross. Its detail was amazing – if Fu were tall enough to touch the flamel, he must have been able to feel actual snake scales from the image.

"I hate to say it's fine workmanship, but it is. Why can terrorists create such beauty?"

It was definitely bad news for the magical community: no one had seen a suspicious character the night before. To have time to do all this and still avoid detection…. Fu hoped it wasn't too many who were allied with the culprit.

If Fu's ears worked only as well as humans', he would have missed the quiet brushing sound coming from the niche he'd imagined a murderer in earlier. Just a few inches from the ground, something soft was sliding against the brick corner on its way out. He looked and saw a small yellow face peeking out from the crevice – a kitten. Or something like one anyway. Kittens didn't have a single humanoid hand in place of one of their front paws, nor fur that was actually long enough to pull into a long-spent braid that dangled from the back of their head to down under their chins. It froze just for a moment to meet Fu's eyes before it glanced around and hobbled the rest of the way out, revealing one humanoid foot and a tail covered in dried blood.

Fu could feel a headache coming on as the kitten came up next to him and sat on its hindquarters, looking at the wall with him. He hated dealing with cats – the smug little beasts. He just hoped that this one wouldn't be too bad because it was also, admittedly, a homeless kid. "Look, I'm busy here with something important to the whole magical world. Even you. So actually do something helpful or go away. Aren't you overdue to lick yourself or something? It smells like it! You just been hanging out in the trash cans?"

The kitten stretched up its humanoid hand toward Fu. It really was a humanoid hand – four fingers and a thumb, the same proportions as a human male's. The kitten opened its mouth and rasped out a "mew!"

"I don't understand your version of Cat. If you've got something important to say, speak English! You can, can't you? You look like you could be someone's magical guardian."

The kitten slowly lowered its hand to the neat, if damp, cement beneath them. It wobbled on its mismatched paws over to the wall and placed its front appendages on the Urban Alchemist's large signature. Lowering its ears closer to its head, it turned and fixed Fu a look.

"What? Do you know something about that?"

The kitten slid down the wall. It held still for a minute – much longer than Fu had ever seen a normal kitten hold a pose outside of stalking practice.

Fu fished his green mini-notebook and black pen back out of the fold in his pelt where he had stored them and walked closer to the still kitten and the altered wall. "Do you know something about this?"

The kitten glanced at the wall again, ears flattening more for that moment, and back at Fu again. It parted its lips slightly, but no sound came out. It tried again, and a single cracked mew cleared its lips. How long had it been since its voice had last been healthy?

Finally, the kitten just gave up and simply gazed up at the dog's wrinkled gray face instead.

At least the kid wasn't as smug as most his species. Fu patted its head. "Hey, look. Unfortunately, I don't understand you, but I'll see if I can find someone who will to come speak with you about what you know, okay? Just hang around a bit longer."

The shar-pei put his things into his loose pelt and turned to catch a taxi back to Lao Shi's. A set of four mismatched paw prints accompanied him.

He stopped. So did the kitten's paw steps. Fu glanced down at the kitten. It puffed up its chest and met his eyes.

Fu looked away. "It won't work, kid, I don't do staring contests with cats. You stay here."

He walked toward the magic section's taxi station, but so did the kitten. They stopped again. Fu looked down at the stray, who was staring up at him again with big yellow eyes.

Fu, despite what he'd just said, engaged in a staring contest with the kitten and broke away with a "Fine! You can come with me, but you've got to behave yourself, got it?"

The kitten finally blinked. Fu didn't know if that was a yes or a no, so he threatened to drop the kitten off on the street again if he caused trouble before he let it tag along.


Ring!

The bell released Jake and his friends from their final period of algebra. Next to Jake, the last straggler made a rushed scratching with his pencil as he hurried to fill in random answers to his white-and-green bubble sheet before he had to turn in his final.

The young dragon stood up and stretched right there in the narrow aisle before he picked up his light backpack and passed all the other desks in his row on his way to the front and through the classroom's thick doorway, where his friends stood with their own bags. "That's it. No more math pressure 'til next school year. Only Rotwood's whacked mythology test left."

"You said it," Trixie said. "We're free to enjoy the skate park. Just gotta get our things from our lockers."

It would have ended the school day perfectly to go practice for the start-of-summer skate-off the following week, but a slow rap song started playing in Jake's pocket and he reached in to retrieve his red cell phone. He checked the caller ID. "It's Fu. I guess I gotta take this."

Spud stuck his hands in his baggy pants' pockets. "Maybe this time you'll be fighting undead monsters from another dimension. That would be cool. Except we'll totally miss you at the skate park."

Ignoring his friend, Jake opened his phone and stuck it to his ear. "It's almost summer. There are other things I could be doing, Fu, so it better be important."

"Is terrorism important? Get over here as fast as you can."

Jake groaned and whined as the hallway filled up with other classes letting out. He could barely hear Fu telling him that it may be too dangerous for his friends amongst all the chatter. "Got it," he said and hung up.

The young dragon turned to his friends, waiting for him. "Looks like I've got to back out of the skate park for today. Something about terrorism. You go ahead without me."

"You be safe, Jakie. You need we need you for that skate-off." Trixie fixed him a look as he gave them a hopeless look.

"I'll wrap this up as fast as I can. Wouldn't want to miss out on anything." He shouted a goodbye to his friends as he shoved his way through the halls to retrieve his skateboard with a customized red dragon design from his locker.

Leaving the school, he rode through the warmish, slightly humid streets. About twenty minutes later, he arrived at Lao Shi's Electronics – a small shop with an apartment on its top floor – and caused the bell on the front door to chime.

His grandfather and Fu were already in the shop's front room.

"Young one," said his grandfather by way of greeting, "it is good you got here. Do you remember fighting a shape-shifter named Envy at the autumn festival?"

Jake remembered the wet, chilly night surrounded by booths and colorful fair-goers. He could still see his own dragon face grinning at him, head growing to match Jake's own size. It still ticked him off that Envy interrupted his shopping, insulted dragons and gotten away from him. "That jerk that attacked me when I was buying a necklace for Rose? Yeah, I remember him."

"Good," said Fu. "You're the only one of us who dealt with him directly. We need you to tell us all you can about him."

After Lao Shi flipped the sign on the front window over to closed and locked up the shop, they went through the back room, up the wooden staircase, and through a door immediately to the right on the kitchen's wall. Inside was a small sitting room with enough room for a red love seat, a coffee table with a manila folder set on top of it, a simple leather chair, and some wall and floor decorations.

Inside, the love seat was already occupied, at least in part. A scrawny yellow kitten-like being was curled up on the seat and staring at the coffee table with round yellow eyes.

Jake plopped down on the other half of the seat and pointed to the kitten. "What's this?"

"Fu found him," Lao Shi said, setting himself down in the leather chair and leaving Fu to stand on the floor. "He seems to know something about what's going on. We cleaned him up a bit, but we can't do anything about the moping."

"It's a stray kitten." Jake's eyebrows raised. "Fu, I thought cats and dogs were supposed to be natural enemies?"

Fu shrugged. "Try telling that to him – he's the one who followed me home. Besides, as soon as we find someone that speaks this kid's language, we'll want him around to ask him a few questions. Anyways, about Envy?"

Jake told the others all he could, but he'd only fought Envy once, and that was briefly several months before.

"He may be a bigger threat than we'd thought at the festival." Lao Shi gestured for Jake to pick the folder up, and Jake pulled out the first piece of paper – a low-quality photo of a gray brick wall with a message in gilded graffiti.

Just as Jake finished reading the Urban Alchemist's large signature, Fu asked a question.

"It fits, doesn't it? What he was goading all the alchemists about. If he really had anything to do with the dead leprechaun last night, we need to keep both eyes out for him."

Something tugged on the paper. Apparently, the kitten had gotten up and was trying to take the picture away from Jake.

Jake placed his hand on the kitten's rough fur and pushed him aside. "Don't. I'm looking at it."

The little yellow beast mewed and leaped for the picture again, snatching it away from Jake and landing ungracefully on Lao Shi's red rug. But when he landed, he put the paper on the beady carpet face-down, showing a different picture of the same gray wall on its backside.

Fu made a face. "You can't expect cats to listen, magical guardian material or no."

Jake was more interested in what the kitten was trying to show them. "What's that?" he asked, pointing to the symbol in that picture of the wall – the golden depiction of a crucified snake.

"That's a flamel," Lao Shi said, "an alchemic symbol representing part of Nicholas Flamel's process of making a philosopher's stone."

"Mew!" The kitten's voice was weak, but he looked at Jake with a fire in his round eyes that the young man could have sworn was as strong as any dragon's. With his humanoid hand, he was pointing to a detail at the top of the flamel: just visible in a thin nick of negative space jutting into the top of the cross was an image of a snake eating itself.

Lao Shi responded to whatever the young magical animal was trying to say by filling Jake in. "That's an ouroboros – a symbol of wholeness. It's not usually included in a flamel, but we've seen the same thing in previous crime scenes."

The kitten just looked at the old man, but Jake peered more closely at a kitten. If he really was magical guardian material – well, Fu was centuries old, and he was still around.

"How old do you think this kitten is? More importantly, do alchemist families have magical guardians?"

Fu left Lao Shi's chair's side and trod over to the kitten. "Not usually, but anything's possible." He sent the small yellow cat a look with his dark eyes.

Blinking, the kitten looked between Jake and Fu. "Mew?" His tail twitched.

"Well?" The dog stood all the way up on his hind legs and crossed his front ones against his chest.

The little kitten decided it was done and strolled off, back through the door into the apartment's kitchen.

"Cats!"

"Never mind him," Jake said. "What else can you tell me about this Urban Alchemist guy we're supposed to catch?"

Lao Shi gestured to the manila folder Jake left on the glass panels set into the coffee table's top. "Some faces, if they're reliable. It seems to be a group we're dealing with, and they do have a shape-shifter with them. Records of some old crimes too."

Jake slid pages of sketches out of the folder. The sketches only showed apparently human subjects, ranging from little kids missing their front teeth to little old ladies with flowery handbags. The young dragon glared at the innocent-looking faces. "I bet most of these are Envy. When I get a chance for a rematch, he's going down."

His grandfather chided him lightly for that as he reached across the coffee table for a folder and pulled out a map. "Don't be so hasty, Young One – your anger is a weapon your enemy can use against you."

Lao Shi unfolded the map, showing Jake red circles all over New York City. "Anyway, we started looking into the Urban Alchemist, or at least where his symbol was left behind, when it started appearing as graffiti in areas around magical New York. But until now, there's been no corpses or manifestos left with it, and known damage has been limited to vandalism and kidnapping stray animals out of pounds. Although I will admit, there does seem to have been a decrease in the homeless population lately."

Jake slouched a little less. "You think he – or they – have killed before?"

The old dragon shrugged. His mouth remained shut, making the room quiet enough to draw attention to a mew from the doorway.

The kitten was walking on three legs, carrying something gray and lumpy in his humanoid hand. He came and put the lump up on the coffee table, letting the dragons and Fu see that it was a little stone statue.

"Looks like he does know something," Jake said, as he leaned forward with the others to inspect the statuette.

The kitten had brought in an image of two men – one with long, spiky hair and a woman's get-up, and one scrawny guy with glasses. When everyone was gathered around, the kitten pointed a tiny yellow finger at the spiky-haired man's bare midriff. The man had a tattoo there – an ouroboros. Then he pointed to the base of the statue, where a flamel with wings and a crown was show before an addition sign next to another ouroboros. The winged, crowned flamel and the ouroboros together were shown to be equal to the Urban Alchemist's symbol.

Lou Shi picked the statue up and turned it in his wrinkled speckled hands. "One is much more detailed than the other."

Indeed, the spiky-haired man had teeth in his cruel smile and perfectly manicured hands placed on his miniskirt, while his scrawny companion's features were lumpier and more cartoon-like, his clothing very generic casual business wear.

"It's not surprising," Fu said. "Most witnesses' memory of a culprit's features are foggy at best unless they know them well. This does at least give us another point for tracking them down, if at least one of these faces is an alchemist and not our shape-shifter."

At that point, the old gray dog turned to the small yellow kitten. "Did you see them do it?"

The kitten's gold eyes stayed on Fu a few moments after he asked his question, but he ultimately didn't answer, choosing to hop back up on his previous place on the love seat and stare blankly at the others instead.

"Cats."


Yeah, sorry, it's a chimera fic, and a 2003-based one at that. I promise the focus is not on Ed being a chimera though - it's just an unfortunate situation he's found himself in. Please let me know what you think. I hope to be able to update soon. :)