Testing, testing.
Hello? Are we coming in? We are? Good.
This is Zara, reporting from the safe house we were forced to flee to. The fangirl army may have overrun the old place by now, but fear not! We're safe and sound in a secure location, and we ensured that no one followed us.
And we're not telling you where it is! We don't want that army to find us again!
"Sweet freedom!"
Yes, Bree. Sweet freedom!
Anyways, thanks to all you readers and reviewers out there. :3 Hiding behind your computer screens, reading about Demon Chase in all his awesomeness. He loves ya'll.
"I do!"
See?
Shinxshinx1595: O.o Calm down there.
Moonlit: "Who's Reid?"
"Who cares, Chase? I'd own his ass. xD"
"How to you know that, Douglas? Reid might be better than you."
"O_o Blasphemy!"
Mia-Teresa-Davenport: "Don't make Douglas demonstrate skyclad up in here! o_O"
J. Liz. 8: "They laid off the feathers once the fangirl army moved in. :3"
AllAmericanSlurp: That was literally only the third day after I posted the chapter before. Patience, woman! O.o
DisneyXDGirl: "Yay! Someone likes me! :3 Finally!"
Gg180000: Couldn't have said it better myself.
RissA15: Douglas wanted me to point out just before we left that crucifying the store owner was a little extreme. O.o
UnknownForNow: And now Leo is $5 richer. :3 As for the poor kitties, there are several psychological experiments that are far more twisted morally. Little Albert Experiment, The Monster Study, The Well of Despair (conducted by Harry Harlow), Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Milgram Experiment are a few horrifying ones.
Personally, I find the Stanford Prison Experiment to be the worst, in my opinion. Of course, that's all it is: An opinion.
Anyways, this is just a bit of filler, but it's here, right? So who wants to do this? Ysthry?
"Zara doesn't own Lab Rats or anything you recognize. If you don't recognize it, it's probably hers."
"You'll find boredom where there is the absence of a good idea."
Earl Nightingale
"No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it."
H.E. Luccock
Chapter Ten – With Lasers!
Bree
The meeting was going nowhere.
Literally everything that anybody came up with was shot down instantly. It looked like the only one getting anywhere was Yahn, who had decided to curl up in Mr. Davenport's lap and sleep for a while. It was cute to watch Mr. Davenport rubbing Yahn's back with a fond expression, like he was reliving a lost part of his childhood. Maybe he was; who knew? Yahn had stayed hidden, but he had been there the whole time Mr. Davenport was growing up.
As for herself, Bree was sitting on the end of the new couch, Tasha between her and Davenport. And she was bored. Why couldn't she get the cool spy mission again?
Oh, right: Because she didn't want to summon demons.
There was nothing to be done about it now, though, so she was discussing home security like it was the most interesting thing in the world.
Which it wasn't.
Because Mr. Davenport apparently had a hundred-and-one different ways to say that he wanted to put lasers up all over the place. It was at the core of everything he suggested.
Let's put up posts with cameras on them…that shoot lasers!
Maybe robot sentries…with lasers!
Let's hire a security guard…armed with freaking lasers!
Bree was starting to think that Mr. Davenport had an irrational obsession with lasers.
Tasha, however, was awesome enough to shut each and every one of those ideas down with a single sentence. "Do you really want lasers with Leo around?"
With how accident-prone Leo tended to be, her logic was sound.
So that left a few other ideas. Bree's personal favorite was putting up an electric fence. Why not shock the crap out of some intruders? Tasha's favorite? Security guards without lasers.
And both of those were shot down, too. Why? Douglas would likely spend time throwing things at the electric fence – most likely Leo – and no one felt like they could really trust a security guard.
After the whole Marcus thing, strangers weren't really something they were endlessly fond of.
She wondered briefly if Douglas ever missed Marcus. She would have to ask later.
So, while they were debating this, Bree found herself obsessively rubbing Ysthry's head with two fingers, since the dragon-imp was so small. For some reason, Ysthry had decided to abandon Leo's shoulder for a moment to chill on the back of the couch. Bree had been rather reluctant to touch her at first, but now, she was glad that she did. Ysthry's scales were rough and dry – a nice surprise, since the whole "slimy reptile" idea had planted itself in Bree's mind many years ago – and the little imp could actually purr, if one counted a throaty growl. She was like a tiny reptilian cat. It was cute. No wonder Leo kept Ysthry around; the imp grew on you.
"Oh, how about this!" Mr. Davenport suddenly started. "We –"
"No lasers," Tasha interrupted.
Mr. Davenport sighed and leaned back against the couch. "Never mind, then."
"What about a magic shield?" Ysthry suggested, yawning. It was strange hearing such a deep-sounding feminine voice coming from a creature that was smaller than Yahn.
"What do magic shields do?" Mr. Davenport asked, frowning.
"They keep unwanted people out," Ysthry explained, rolling her head so that Bree was rubbing her neck. "If you don't want someone coming through the shield, it'll kill them. Easy."
"No," Tasha immediately said. "My mother sometimes comes by unannounced. We don't need her killed."
"Then a magic trap that shoots fireballs at people?" Ysthry tried.
"No," Mr. Davenport said this time.
"What about that fence thing this one was talking about?" Ysthry flicked her tongue at Bree. "Only, instead of electricity, it has a spell that makes people who have less-than-benevolent intentions physically ill until they leave?" The two stingers on the end of her split-tipped tail clicked together in excitement as she thought of something else. "Oh, I know: Both electricity and a spell!"
"Well…the only one that can cast a spell is Douglas and myself, but I don't think mine is up that alley," Mr. Davenport slowly started. "And I don't trust Douglas to –"
"Wait," Tasha threw a hand up. "You can cast spells?"
"Used to," Mr. Davenport admitted. "It wasn't anywhere near as flashy as demons and their magic, but it worked. It was more of an elaborate ritual to ask the Gods to let certain things happen, like granting luck or peace or something like that. But I haven't done one of those in about twenty years."
"Is this part of that old religion you used to be a part of?" Bree asked, tilting her head. It was hard to picture Mr. Davenport doing anything that involved begging a god to make things happen.
"Yep," Mr. Davenport answered. "Anyways, I was saying that I don't really trust Douglas to put a spell on anything. Who knows how far overboard he'll go with it? We might end up with people spontaneously combusting."
"Okay, so why does Douglas have to be the one to cast the spell?" Tasha asked.
Ysthry answered her question. "Summoners know how to do it. Demons provide the energy for it, Summoners tell it what to do."
"They why couldn't Leo or Adam do it?" Bree pointed out.
"Does Master even know how?" Ysthry asked, tilting her head.
"He has a few days to learn," Mr. Davenport said. "That's the best idea we've had, and Adam and Leo will probably make it happen with the least amount of problems. But we need to get the wire run through the fence first."
Bree nodded slowly. "But if Douglas teaches them how to do it, then won't we be in the same situation?"
"I could help them."
Yahn's voice made everyone jump a bit. He sat up in Mr. Davenport's lap, yawning.
"What would you know about it?" Bree found herself asking. If Summoners were needed to do magic, then what could a demon possibly do to teach it?
Yahn shot her a look. "I'm 13,576 years old. Just because I can't do something doesn't mean I don't know how it works. I taught them how to summon a bit, didn't I?"
Everyone nodded, acknowledging the truth in his words. "Okay," Mr. Davenport began. "I'll get someone out here to run the wire for the fence. Until then, though, what are we going to do? I think we should get –"
"No lasers!" Tasha huffed.
"Buzz-kill," Mr. Davenport huffed, leaning back into the couch with his arms crossed childishly.
"The most effective way to deal with any manifestation of sibling rivalry among small children is to issue them with light sabers."
Wrongcards
"The truth is, unless you let go, unless you forgive yourself, unless you forgive the situation, unless you realize that the situation is over, you cannot move forward."
Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Chase
Ever been extremely bored?
Everyone has, so I bet you have, too.
Well, while Douglas was putting Adam and Leo through their acting paces – just to be sure – Oly and I were bored out of our minds. Well, I was. Oly was trying to get into the little box Bree kept her rhinestone-studded items in now. Fortunately, my fingerprint lock was having none of it.
Take that, Oly! I rocked!
It was as she was perched on top of the box – as if that would help – that Mr. Davenport and Bree came downstairs, Ysthry and Yahn in tow.
I was wondering where Ysthry was hiding. Question has been answered.
"Get off of there," Bree hissed at Oly.
"Make me," Oly hissed. It was almost menacing. However, the effect was lost when I picked her up and dropped her unceremoniously on the table beside the box. She muttered a few things – very inappropriate yet oddly hilarious things – and dusted herself off before sticking her tongue out at me. I rolled my eyes. She could be so dramatic sometimes.
In the middle of the Lab, the impromptu theater troupe stopped mid-scene to watch what was going on. I had no idea what they were acting out – they had lost interest in trying to impress Summoners and had fell into medieval roles a while ago, which I didn't want to be a part of… I think Leo was actually forced to be a princess at this point or something? – but as long as they could act, I didn't care. They looked pointedly at me, which made me sigh.
Did I mention that – even though I wanted no part of this – I had been assigned a part anyways?
In my most regal British accent, I announced, "Presenting the fair maiden Bree and the honored Mr. Davenport." Dropping the accent, I added, "Now stop including me!"
Douglas snorted, his character – some kind of knight-king-Robin Hood mixture – totally broken. "'Honored,'" he echoed sarcastically, using his fingers to make quotations in the air.
Mr. Davenport rolled his eyes. "Whatever you're doing down here, we want to tell you something."
"We figured out how to protect the house!" Bree took over. "Tell 'em, Yahn."
Yahn jumped down onto the table beside me. "We run an electric fence wire around the property. However, instead of it being electric, it would be magic. The spell would make anyone with harmful intentions physically sick until they left."
Douglas frowned. "So you're going to make me cast a spell?"
"Not you," Mr. Davenport snorted. "You'd probably go too far with it. So we're going to have Yahn teach Leo and Adam how to do it."
Huh; I thought Mr. Davenport had let the past go.
Apparently, Douglas had thought so, too. It was hard to pick up on, but it was there. Under his I-don't-care expression was just the slightest hint of hurt in Douglas' eyes at not being trusted with this simple task. Poor guy. It was hard to remember sometimes that he was still Mr. Davenport's younger brother. Essentially having his tendency to go way too far with things – case-in-point, the past twenty years, when he was a terrorizing anarchist who kidnapped us (all of which he was trying to live down) – thrown back in his face must have stung a bit.
However, he just nodded. "Seems like it would work."
I couldn't tell if he was trying to be mature about the situation, or if he was just having a pick-your-battles moment. Either way, it was probably a good thing that he let it slide.
Mr. Davenport, however, seemed not to notice. He just smiled at everyone. "Good. You'll probably have a couple of days before the fence is ready. So, how is your half of the plan coming along?"
"The next Council meeting is tomorrow," Douglas explained. He then did something I never thought I'd see him do: He threw an arm around both Adam's and Leo's shoulders. "We're more than ready for it, too."
As Mr. Davenport nodded, I found myself looking back and forth between them. It was hard to see, but it was definitely present.
At some point – probably when Mr. Davenport refused Douglas' help - this plan had turned into a pissing contest between the two.
How fun!
*Facepalm* Will they ever stop fighting?
Actually, they probably won't. They're them.
Anyways, this chapter wasn't awesome. I had to muscle my way through writer's block for some of it. But here it is.
So feel free to review. Or don't. :3 Do I really have to keep saying it?
And enjoy.
*Bows and exits*