A/N – Hello, dearest reader! I'm glad you've decided to continue reading my fanfiction. Please leave a review if you enjoy reading this! I'd love to see what you think.

Disclaimer – I don't own Minecraft or The Bartimaeus Trilogy. I only own my interpretation of both and the plot of this fanfiction.

Enjoy!

Chapter 14

Dresden watched him from atop of the bed as he drew the lines of the pentacle. Just like the day before, Raptor was terrified that he was going to make some sort of mistake. The hands that held the chalk were far bigger than his actual ones, and the armor certainly didn't help. It had been easy to whip up a pentacle back on Earth. Now his movements were painstakingly slow, and he kept checking the parts that he had already drawn to make sure that they were correct.

He could have used the ones that Mist drew, but the fool had barely used any protections in them and he felt far more safe in his own ones.

As he drew out the final piece of his pentacle, Dresden hopped off of the bed. He inspected the pentacle that Raptor was going to be standing in before looking over at Mist's. Nodding to himself more than to the other magician, Dresden walked over to it. "So who are-" Dresden paused. He looked at Raptor before inspecting his own pentacle. "So what's the name of the demon that you're summoning? And what's its rank?"

"Bartimaeus. It's a djinni." He looked back at the pentacle across from him. "I'm going to summon it now, so don't distract me."

He took Dresden's silence as a sign that he wouldn't interfere.

Having long ago committed the summoning words to memory, he recited them with relative ease. There was one instance where he almost faltered, but he quickly recovered and continued speaking. They had already fallen behind Mist. If they were going to catch up to him, they would need to hurry.

Bartimaeus appeared in the pentacle. It took on the form of the Egyptian boy from the day before. Raptor wondered why the form meant so much to the djinni, but he doubted he'd be able to get an answer from it in the near future.

Before either the summoner or the demon could speak, he heard laughter coming from behind him. He looked over his shoulder, confused, to see Dresden laughing so hard that he was crying. "Frog," he simply said, tears rolling down his face as laughter continued to fill the small hut.

Raptor looked over at Bartimaeus. The djinni was staring at the other magician, seemingly dumbfounded by the reaction to its appearance. But then it narrowed its eyes in suspicion. "Frog?" Raptor asked, unsure who he should address the question to.

Dresden suddenly fell silent. "Its true form looks like a frog..."

"I don't look like a frog!" Bartimaeus indignantly protested.

Raptor stared at Dresden. "No it doesn't," he said. "I can see it too. I'm not sure what you would call that, but a frog is far from it."

"People interpret things in different ways," the other magician replied, but he hesitated before giving a small shrug of indifference. He almost certainly trying to hide something, but what was it? Try as he might to put the pieces of the puzzle Dresden presented together, he was unable to. The older magician was too much of an enigma.

May was confused. She still was struggling to wrap her head around the idea that the essence of a spirit was nestled inside of the seemingly human man before her, though Herobrine seemed to have at least understood enough to focus on something else. He gestured at the trunk of a tree that had fallen over long before they had arrived in the area.

One of the two entities controlling the body before her nodded, but she had no idea if Cassius or Anda had done the action. "It might take awhile to explain things," the spirit commented. May watched as both Herobrine and the human man sat down on the log. Feeling like she was intruding on something she shouldn't have been a part of – Herobrine and Anda seemed to have known each other quite well – she sat down on a nearby rock instead.

"So there's this group of ambitious magicians," Anda started, folding Cassius' hands and placing them in his lap. Her voice was one of the few noticeable sounds in the quiet of the forest; even the birds had fallen silent as if they wanted to listen to her tale. "They thought that by summoning a spirit into their own bodies, they could access the magic a spirit possesses. But they would never risk their own lives to test their theory."

May studied the speaker's face. There was a shift in it. The twinkle to the eyes changed and became more harsh, and the curling of the lips went down ever so slightly. Anda had completed the beginning of the narrative. Cassius had taken over once more. "So they found me, who they believed to be a traveling magician that no one would miss. Knowing that they would grow violent if we resisted, I agreed to help them with their tests. This," he said, gesturing at the entirety of his body, "is the result. Their test seemed successful, and they prepared to conduct more of them on unwilling subjects. So we destroyed the place and left. The only reason that Anda is still inside of me is because I don't have the proper tools to make pentacles."

"I think Mist might have some," Herobrine quietly commented.

May checked her bag. She did, and she gave a nod to show them that. Then she focused on the topic of the conversation. Anda had mentioned someone before noticing the spirit and his summoner. His name had sounded vaguely familiar, but she couldn't figure out why. "You mentioned someone with the name Dresden earlier," she said. "How is he involved? You don't seem to like him."

"They brought him in six days ago," Anda replied, green eyes meeting blue ones. There was hatred in them, and May was completely certain that the hatred also belonged to Cassius. "He was a wreck; supposedly he had stumbled into the building after nearly being killed by a zombie. Once they found out he was a magician, they decided he would be a good subject. He wasted no time in agreeing. A spirit named Marius of Britannia was summoned into him, and his trial was a success – save for the brief case of amnesia he experienced. Then he was back on his feet and back to being a typical magician."

There was a moment of silence.

"So only the magician is in control?" When one of the two in Cassius' body nodded, May's stomach churned in horror at what that meant. Marius had never agreed to take part in the experiments, yet they were living the consequences of that.

Can being used like that even be considered living?