Hazel didn't stop staring at the retreating Komyo, who vanished behind an invisible veil after he walked back into the tent. A strange sense of affinity tugged within her, although she could not pinpoint how exactly she found him familiar.
"Who was that guy?" Liam asked.
"Ain't got a Scooby Doo, bruv." Chester shrugged. "Never seen him before. He looks Asian though; probably an ambassador from the Japanese branch."
An awkward silence fell on the trio as they looked at each other, finally taking in how strange this whole night had been.
"Thanks for that earlier, by the way," Chester mumbled to Hazel. "I'm sorry you had to see all that."
"Wait, Tomoko!" Hazel exclaimed without warning. "She was here earlier but must've gotten lost in the forest when she ran off. We need to find her now!"
The two boys blinked in confusion. A yellow glow lit up in Liam's irises as he looked around the forest.
"Hazel, there isn't anyone else within two hundred metres of this forest." Liam blinked as the glow disappeared from his eyes.
"What? She was right here! I brought her here! Where did she go?"
"Oh god. You're on acid, aren't you?" Chester groaned in exasperation.
"Look. Even if Tomoko was here, she no longer is." Liam was trying his best to placate the increasingly hysterical girl. "She's probably somewhere safe now. C'mon, we'll get you home—"
Hazel backed away.
"No. Not before you two tell me what is going on," she blurted. "How did you do all of that? What are you wearing? Are you secretly wizards? Magic is real?"
Liam waved his hands as wispy traces of smoke trailed behind his fingers. He continued twirling his wrist in a circular motion, and the smoke gathered as it began to take form. Hazel watched in awe.
The boy snapped his fingers decisively and a cloud materialised in front of them.
"Fine. Hop on." Liam gestured to his cloud. "Where do you live? We'll take the scenic route back. That'll give us plenty of time to talk."
~ ~ ~
It was a windy night, even more so at five kilometres above the ground. And yet Hazel felt almost no sense of motion, other than the slight rumbling of the magic cloud somehow solid enough to support the weight of three people. It felt more like the world was moving past her instead. All she could see around herself was the twilight darkness, and all she saw below was an endless sea of clouds.
She would've fainted from the fantastical nature of it all, if she hadn't already watched two of her classmates literally use magic in front of her.
"I suppose I'll start from the beginning," Liam spoke without warning, making Hazel flinch slightly. "Yes. You were right, in a way. We are 'wizards', in the sense that we can wield magic."
He paused, as though to let Hazel take in the information. She simply stared at him, silently urging him to continue.
"The supernatural world has always existed alongside the natural world," the boy continued. "They are divided like so because each world draws from a different form of energy. While the natural world works on physical concrete energy, the supernatural world works on more fluid supernatural energy. That is what we call magic."
"'We' as in 'Magus'," Chester added. "A long time ago, some bloke found out that a certain group of humans have an affinity for supernatural energy. As such, he learnt how to harness it and sought out others who had the potential to wield it as well. They banded together and formed a secret society known as the 'Union of Magus'."
"The supernatural world was running rampant and slaughtering humans back then," Liam said. "Thus, the Union decided that the Magus should use their powers to protect the natural world and maintain the balance between the two worlds. A hidden war broke out for decades until the Union finally emerged victorious."
Hazel's eyes widened. "So you and Chester..."
Chester nodded.
"As generations passed, it was discovered that there is a genetic component to this ability." An uncomfortable expression crossed his face. "The Magus ability typically runs in the family, and so it became the natural responsibility for children to carry on the family career."
"But although the society grew larger and larger over the years, its primary directive never changed," Liam said. "They collectively decided that the best way to maintain the peace between both worlds was to keep the unruly monsters in permanent captivity while keeping an eye on the ones still allowed to roam free. And that's why we were there to save you."
"So you guys are like wildlife rangers..." Hazel mused. "Wait, but there isn't concrete evidence of supernatural monsters."
"Well then, you're bloody welcome," Chester replied haughtily with a slight smirk. "Liam has been spending every night strengthening charms on the cages at HQ for the past few weeks. And I've been spending my weekends on guard duty. It's not the best life to have, but it's ours."
Hazel took a breath in realisation, recalling how Liam had been practically sleeping through school every day for the past month.
"I've been hearing you guys mention 'HQ' quite a few times," the girl pondered out loud. "Is it not that tent that we knocked over?"
"What? Of course not!" Liam exclaimed. "The headquarters is a much larger building, where the upper echelons of our society do their work. It's invisible to the natural world, of course. Almost every country has one of them, and they're all linked by cross-dimensional passageways. Think of them like wormholes, if you may. Anyway, that crummy little tent is just a temporary storage for the Yokai migration project. A few weeks ago, the Japanese branch contacted the American branch, requesting help to hold a Yokai for a few weeks."
"And then they shipped over five cages before immediately going no contact. Bloody irresponsible is what that is," Chester huffed. "I don't even know what came over my parents to agree to such a project. The logistics are messed up, the instructions are unclear, the Japanese branch isn't responding... It's all such a huge mess. Our spells aren't even specialised at sealing Yokai away. If you ask me, we should've just rejected these foreign monsters and sent them back home."
"It is still our duty to follow the instructions of our organisation, no matter how much we don't like it," Liam said in a serious tone. "If we didn't, our world would've fallen to the supernatural world a long time ago."
Chester sulked silently as the cloud took a gradual dive. Hazel instinctively grabbed the floor to stop herself from plummeting to her death, but there seemed to be no need for that.
Her mouth hung open in amazement as her body remained firmly planted onto the cloud as though she was still on flat ground. Pinpoints of light blinked in the distance as her magic ride closed in on the street below.
"This should last long enough..."
Hazel looked up at Liam, who was practically standing horizontally now. He was muttering some kind of spell again.
"Alright... Vanish!"
White light flashed around the entire cloud. Hazel didn't feel any different, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that Liam had probably employed some sort of invisibility spell to hide them from the general public.
The trio stepped out onto solid ground surreptitiously a few minutes later. The cloud evaporated into the air almost immediately after. Hazel spied her house from just across the park they had landed in.
Magic was certainly convenient.
"See you in school tomorrow." Chester gave her a tired smile. "Let's meet up on the roof after school. There's a lot of work to do."
The boys flickered into thin air after waving goodbye, presumably magically teleporting away elsewhere.
Hazel made her way back to her house, which was already completely dark.
Unsurprisingly, her grandfather was already asleep when she came in the front door, so she walked up the stairs quietly and dropped her schoolbag onto her bed. Hazel opened the mini fridge by her bedside and felt her stomach clench up in anticipation of food.
She plucked a muesli bar and forced it down her throat to curb the sudden pang of hunger. It was only then that she realised she had missed dinner entirely. But it was way too late at night to be frying up a ruckus in the kitchen, and it was not like she knew how to cook anything substantial anyway.
So the girl sat on her bed in a daze instead, trying to process the night's events. It only made her heart race in anticipation of what these new revelations meant for her. Not only were Yokai real, but two of her classmates were wizards who kept them at bay. And the best part? She was somehow wrapped up in all of this. How many more adventures did life have in store for her?
Hazel looked around her room to calm her mind.
Posters of Japanese idols and anime characters covered her walls as if shamefully covering up the boring pastel wall behind them. A bluish-pale light peeped timidly from the single lava lamp on her bedside table, shedding a dim light onto a bookshelf crammed with cultural books about Japanese folklore.
Just across it, a modest night table held her computer. A 'Windows 95' logo was still flashed across the screen, but Hazel ignored it. It was probably going to take more than ten business days to boot up anyway, considering the number of Internet pages she had left open.
The world slowly blurred before her eyes as her consciousness faded, drifting into a dream-filled sleep.
A pair of green slit-eyes blinked outside her window before promptly disappearing.
~ ~ ~
Hazel rolled into her homeroom class in remarkably high spirits the next morning. It was a rainy Friday morning, which made it slightly perplexing as to why the class was buzzing with so much excitement. Even the quiet kid who usually spent his morning inventing all sorts of new chords on his guitar had suddenly deigned to participate in the pockets of discussion.
"Hey, Hazel's here!"
The girl scarcely had time to open her mouth in shock when her classmates swarmed her immediately.
"Do you know, do you know?" a long-haired girl asked excitedly.
"Yeah, tell us what you think!" another boy exclaimed, fighting to shove his face in her view.
"Is it a ghost?"
"Is it a poltergeist?"
"Is it a Yokai?"
Hazel opened and closed her mouth like a fish out of water, before waving her hands in front of her to clear the space.
"Wait, what are you guys talking about? What ghost?" she asked.
"Didn't you hear?" the class president explained. "Our janitor found his broom sweeping the floor by itself early this morning like a ghost was holding it! He freaked out and fainted immediately, but started babbling about this story to anyone who would listen after he woke up. Everyone was quick to dismiss it as a mere hallucination, but when they checked the security camera recordings—"
"— It turned out to be true!" another student chimed in excitedly. "His equipment went missing while the janitor was knocked out, but guess where they found it?"
The crowd went silent for dramatic effect.
"Right on top of our antenna lines..." someone whispered as the class collectively gasped. "The school had to get fire and rescue to take them down. And that's not the worst part."
"The worst part is..." a girl said, her voice trembling. "The storeroom where he usually keeps his supplies has gone missing."
"How does a whole room go missing?" Hazel asked.
"That's the scariest thing!" the class president exclaimed. "The room is clearly marked on our school map; even I remember seeing that room. But there's nothing but a wall where it should've been!"
"Gyaah, our school is haunted!" a girl shrieked. "Please, Hazel! Teach us how to avoid the ghosts! I just picked up all your articles from the journalism club!"
"Me too!"
"Me too!"
"I want them too! Where's the journalism club?"
The class began murmuring again as Hazel furrowed her eyebrows. The janitor's encounter sounded like a textbook example of a supernatural encounter, however...
"Everyone, listen to me!" Hazel squeaked in a meek voice, but her classmates went silent anyway. "I'm not sure if it's a Poltergeist, since all it does is sweep floors. But what you've just described sounds like a Hahakigami, a harmless broom spirit that only enjoys sweeping up our mess. So please don't be afraid of it!"
"A Haha— what?"
"Dude, are you laughing at me?!"
"Wait, I think I've seen that Yokai in one of her articles before!"
Confidence blossomed within Hazel at the sight of her classmates fishing out her occult articles, which had, until this day, had practically zero sales. She stood up and clapped her hands assertively to get their attention.
"If you are all interested, I'll work on more in-depth articles about poltergeists!" she piped as the class collectively cheered.
"I want a pre-order!"
"Me too!"
"Me—"
The classmate froze mid-speech, as though he was suffering a stroke. Hazel looked at him in alarm, before realising the entire class was frozen in time as well.
All except for two of them.
Chester and Liam strolled into the classroom, heading straight for Hazel. An orange glow outlined Liam and Hazel's bodies, while miniature purple clocks flashed in Chester's irises.
"Hazel. A word, please."12Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡlypr2931aP
