I do not own TrollHunters. Tunafishprincess is an amazing beta reader. I hope you enjoy reading this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it.

"Atlas, I brought company," Mr. Strickler announced as he opened the door.

Thunk.

"What in Athena's name are you doing?!"

A kitchen knife had sprung from the wall adjacent to the front door and spun in the air before clattering onto the floor across the room. Jim shrugged sheepishly from the kitchen. "I figured if you could have a dagger cloak, and Nomura gets a pair of sickles, I should get a cool weapon, too. So I was practicing... and I was bored."

"You shouldn't be bored if you're doing the work you were assigned. And they're khopesh, not sickles." Mr. Strickler discovered a cutting board that was propped against the wall on the counter. It was evident from the damage on the wood that Jim didn't know what he was doing as far as proper knife throwing, for instance using the wrong kind of knife in the first place.

"Besides, I bring you something better than blades."

"More knowledge?" Jim groaned and rolled his eyes.

"Eyes."

Nomura followed him in, cradling a small wooden crate. With all the otherworldly things these two introduced him to, he was afraid it was going to be a real eye. The curator tenderly set the box on the countertop with the same caution she used when handling artifacts at the museum. "It's the box that's frail. Lead." She opened the wood box and lifted a metallic lid to reveal a single clear orb. It was smaller than the crystal balls used by psychics, maybe a little bigger than a tennis ball.

"A crystal ball?"

Nomura scoffed. "A Looking Glass," she corrected. She took it from the crate and made fancy work with her hands, rolling her arms underneath it while the orb remained suspended in place. It was possible it never lost contact with her skin, but the illusion could convince one that it was fixed solidly in the air. "Look into it."

He leaned forward, expecting to see a flipped image of the world in front of him, but instead of an upside down museum curator he saw himself from behind stooped down to stare at the mysterious object. She rolled her arms around beneath it again and it appeared as though he were watching a spherical TV taking a tour through the apartment complex. She held its position in one of her hands while with the other she reached into the box on the counter. There was a secret compartment (when one deals with changelings, there is always a secret compartment) that sheltered a pair of wire- rimmed glasses. "Put these on." He obeyed and looked into the glass again. "No, look that way." He turned in the direction she gestured and was surprised to find a pale orb hovering in the doorway of his room. It moved in a linear direction away from the door and he turned back to Nomura, realizing that as she moved her arms under the glass orb, it directed the other. He turned his attention back to the floating sphere and looked above the glasses. Nothing. It was completely invisible without the aid of the lenses. "Silver reveals the true nature of certain things," she explained. She ended the illusion and packed it back into the velvet lined lead box. "Sturdy little thing, but to avoid being scryed you'll want to keep it in the lead box. Which, again, is fragile. Keep it in the crate." She offered the package to him.

He measured the weight of it in his hands. "So my cool weapon is glasses."

"If anyone asks, yes to the glasses," she retorted. "Do not reveal that you have a Looking Glass. You're hard enough to trust as it is."

Strickler interjected, "she is not referring to herself. It may take some time for the other changelings to warm up to you. You're one of a kind, as far as we are aware."

"Yet you said this was the world where I belonged."

"In due time, your position in this world will be made clear. Keep in mind we've hidden from humans for centuries, one does not simply cross the gate of millennia." He lay a reassuring hand on Jim's shoulders, but visibly it had little effect. "Nomura, I'll meet you in the car," he instructed. When the two of them were alone he spoke openly. "Young Atlas, I'm trying to protect you. This is not just a dangerous world, but a dangerous time. You can trust no one but yourself. I will do everything in my power to make you indispensable to the Order, but it will take time and it will take your cooperation. Master the Looking Glass, for with it you can more safely explore the world."

It was as though he was still speaking in code, the way Toby described. "What's going on, Strickler. Why couldn't you talk to me like this in front of Nomura? What are you hiding?" He forced Mr. Strickler's hand off his shoulder, glaring warily.

"When the time comes that I can speak freely, I will. As it stands, the more you know, the greater a risk we are all in. Take the day off, from the gym, the goblins, your studies, and play with your new toy. Get to know it. Name it, if that helps you." Jim tried to look into those eyes. Were they kind eyes? Was that part of the illusion? What did they see in him?

"Sure," he grumbled. Mr. Strickler locked the door after him, the click of the chamber amplified due to the emptiness of the apartment. Is this how the hunchback of Notre Dame felt being locked away in a tower?

As cynical as Jim behaved about the ancient volumes, he knew there was power in them. He just refused to admit it in earshot of Mr. Strickler. There was a changeling book with fascinating illustrations that he withdrew from the others. He knew it was changeling because unlike the ones written by trolls, it was written in English using the Trollish alphabet, which he was getting the hang of. Since magical artifacts could go by many names, the guide didn't list them alphabetically, and Jim hadn't figured out how they were sorted, so old fashioned page flipping was a must. He mostly had to eyeball the pictures, sifting through amulets, armors, swords, stones, and eventually he found a simple illustration of circles devoid of colors. He read the text, slowly sounding out the syllables as he transcribed it in his mind. This was it! And indeed, the guide agreed that this was a wondrous item, hence the deceptively simple artwork (because changelings always depended on deceptive appearances). According to the text, suspending the sphere in a singular location in the material plane while spinning it gave traction to a duplicate sphere originating from the same point that could traverse another plane, the duplicate referred to as a Scout. He held out the sphere in his hand and thought about it. Nomura rolled it on her arms, giving it the spin while it looked like it was holding still. That's why the one he could only see with the glasses, the Scout, was able to move. It was rolling like the Looking Glass but wasn't affected by matter in the same way, explaining why it didn't drop with gravity or cast a shadow. He balanced it on the back of his hand. Got that part down. He moved his hand to get it to roll, and roll it did, right onto the table and then dropped on the floor. He leapt after it, his heart halting at the thunk of glass on the hard surface. /Take a day off,/ Mr. Strickler said. This was not a break, this was another chore, one more tedious than helping the goblins brush their teeth. (They were very particular about oral hygiene, since a toothless goblin was a dead goblin.) He sat on the floor. Even if Nomura said it wasn't that frail, he couldn't in his right mind not dread dropping it. He experimented with rolling it on his palm while suspending it in the "material plane". Rolling from near the wrist to the base of his fingers wasn't that hard, since he was accustomed to balancing knives in his hands. Getting the thing to be still while moving under it? A whole other challenge. After several thunks and not a glimmer of progress, he changed direction. "Let's see if this thing can run videos." He kneeled up to the desk and switched on the ancient brick of a computer. To his surprise, it clicked on, fully loaded in an instant. He learned quickly through searching the internet that the skill he was looking for was called contact juggling, and that this device ran videos smoothly without buffering. What kind of internet speed did Mr. Strickler get for him?!

He learned about the trick called isolation. If he could master that, his Looking Glass would have something in common with him. He used four fingers to roll it, switching between the middle fingers and thumbs of each hand, bracing its position with the rest of his fingers, moving his hands like jellyfish or something like that. Okay, that wasn't so bad. He kept it rolling, trying harder to keep it from moving in position. As he studied it, his attention was caught by the image in the glass, a mini reflection of himself holding the orb, and not from the perspective of the orb itself. Careful not to move it, he straightened his posture to look above it through the glasses. There it was! "Hey, Scout! Welcome to the world!" The flat disk said nothing, and did nothing, awaiting the instructions at Jim's fingertips. "Come to Papa," he cooed, twirling the glass in his hands in the opposite direction. It rolled to him, a translucent circle with no depth, and faltered, quivering before dissolving from visibility. "Aw, Scout. Come back." In his enthusiasm he must have moved the Looking Glass from its point. Trying again, however, was fruitful and rewarding. Though he kept his hands all over it, obstructing his view, he eagerly kept at it, playing with the Scout to direct it, eventually discovering how to get the Scout to raise elevation and repeatedly rolling it into walls. There were some things it couldn't pass through. It halted at some of the metal pipes in the walls, though it could go through the walls themselves, which he discovered by accidentally spinning it the wrong direction. It didn't like to go into the ground, but made for a really neat perspective as it traversed the floor, showing Jim what the underside of his bed looked like.

Curiously, Jim rolled it into the closet. He could see the closet in the Looking Glass, the Scout on the other side of the door. "Now for the real test." He rolled it through the back wall. Fortunately changeling doors were not solid metal. He tried to roll it down the ladder, accidentally bumping Scout against the walls but eventually rolling Scout down the surface of the stones. Finally it was low enough to be at about Mr. Strickler's eye level in the sewers. "Let's see if I remember how to get to the museum." He cranked at the Looking Glass, projecting the Scout into the tunnels. "This isn't so bad. It's like, life-size pinball. Yeah. Now, which way?" Scout was in front of the graffiti of the masks. "I'm pretty sure the museum is to the right, but… since I'm not down there, I can check out what's to the left. I'm just practicing with my magic crystal ball." This was better than exploring the Earth on the internet. This was in real time, and in places cameras couldn't go, and he had total control. It just took a lot of work playing with a ball in the air. He smiled to himself when he noticed in the glass a shape moving down the tunnel. There was something to look at down here! "What are you," he asked through the crystal. He stopped rolling it when it was clear in the view that it was lumbering towards the Scout. It was hard to see, not because it was dark since Jim could see in the dark, but because the object itself lacked color. It was bulky, filling out the tunnel with its form. As it drew closer, Jim could see its limbs. Its arms were larger around than Jim's body. It's posture was slouched from its own weight like a gorilla, the outline of its head broadened by two sets of horns, a pair of massive stone swords protruding from its back. Its details became visible as it drew closer, large sharp teeth protruding from its mouth. As he stared, it looked at Jim with glowing red and yellow eyes and snarled.

Thunk. He'd instinctively crawled two feet away from the sphere, clutching his chest. He tasted blood in his mouth. For a second it was as though those murderous eyes found him and were going to eat him. Was that a troll? He would have otherwise celebrated finally seeing his first true troll, but it seemed to haunt him more than anything. He went to the bathroom to see in the mirror how badly he bit his lip for it to be bleeding like this. He usually didn't bother turning the light on anymore since he didn't need to, but because of the doubt in what he saw he switched it on. He had punctured his lip with his own recently enlarged canines. He tapped the points with a fingertip, recognizing the ache in his gums he'd tried to ignore. He was a hybrid that included the race of that monster he saw downstairs. Another thing concerned him. He swished a mouthful of water and checked the time on his phone. It was already getting late in the evening, he had to warn Strickler before he went to the museum. He called. His call was rejected. Typical. He typed madly into his phone, hoping he wasn't too late.

J: there's something headed to the museum through the sewers!

J: it's big and black and has horns and swords. It looks like one of the trolls in the books.

Please answer your phone. Please don't be troll chow… Mr. Strickler started typing a response. He wasn't dead!

S: did he see you?

J: no

S: go home.

J: what about you? And Nomura?

S: we have a meeting. Go home.

Jim scoffed. Stupid, over confident changeling teacher. He better not die. Jim shuddered at the thought of his only shelter, only guardian, being crushed to green goop like a goblin under those massive, stony paws, leaving Jim in limbo between worlds. Nomura had been helpful at times, but she had made it clear that she could never be trusted to help shoulder Strickler's burden of caring for Jim. She could easily be the one to finish Jim off, honestly.

Meanwhile more thoughts came at him, questions he hoped he could answer himself. There was a history book with dark, almost monochrome pictures of creatures through the ages. Knowing the horns were the identifying trait that demonstrated familial relations for trolls, he scoured the pages at the end. He found it, and sounded out the name. "Bular," he read. The rest of his official title was in troll, so he didn't know what deeds Bular had a reputation for, but the trolls in this book ate humans, he knew that much. Would it be cannibalism for them to eat changelings? Would they care? What about a hybrid?

After the conversation Strickler had with him earlier riddled with secrets and this too- paternal response about risk of death, Jim wasn't too keen on obeying him. He donned the cloak, and fit the lead box gingerly into his satchel, still kept it in its wooden crate to brace it. He had never been so grateful to reek of goblin before now. Hopefully it was enough to disguise his scent around a troll. He deduced trolls probably didn't want to bother with goblins just because of the hassle of being on their vengeance list. He dashed ahead on light feet to the turn near the graffiti of the masks and decided it was a good place to start sending Scout. Maybe someday he could move the thing faster than he could walk and not break it, but for now while his life was on the line, taking time to scope ahead was vital. The path all the way to the museum was clear, so either big guy went a different route or actually surfaced. He tried not to shudder at the mental image of that kind of brute stumbling upon innocent humans; it was vital that he not drop the Looking Glass while down here.

How the troll would get up there, he didn't know. Was there a manhole or grate large enough? Did he burrow through like a fox sneaking into a henhouse? Jim found a crevice large enough for Scout to go through, though it took a lot of time and wiggling the silly thing just right to roll in alignment of the opening and then up. He raised it high enough to be at Strickler's eye level and sent it to the blocked off section adjacent to the medieval exhibit, where he always found Strickler and Nomura unpacking stones. He found Mr. Strickler in his human form, apparently speaking to the brute. Okay, so man- eating monster was an ally? Maybe he was reformed.

Oh crap. A light shone off of the two figures and Jim spun Scout to face the other way. Security?! They let themselves get discovered by security?! Why was the guy there at all? Nomura must not have made him tea this time. Where was she, did she get eaten? Moving forward- troll and changeling were discovered by a human. The guard ran down the hall, and Jim wheeled Scout around in place to see how Mr. Strickler handled it. He was surprised that Mr. Strickler's expressions were indifferent, much like the way he behaved at Coach's mocking of Jim, turning that stupid apple in his hand as he talked to Bular. Shame he couldn't read lips, but that smirk on the troll's face in response to what Mr. Strickler said was unmistakable.

No, no, no-

He didn't know what he thought he was going to do, but he sped Scout to the guard. Sound didn't carry through the Looking Glass nor could he ram it into anything on the material plane to distract the troll, but he couldn't stop himself from searching for the guard in desperate hope to warn him. He found him, the instant Bular caught up to his prey, and the snarl echoed through the chambers of the sewers, followed by the splat from the contents of Jim's stomach on the wet cement.