David and Sandra had just left a very strange meeting with his dad’s friend, “Uncle Mike.’

  On the street below his apartment, David turned to Sandra and asked. “So, Uncle Mike is your dad?”

  “I had some suspicions, especially when he turned up for mom’s funeral after everyone thought he had been dead for about eight years,” she replied. Then she stopped, a strange look on her face, and asked: “Wait, if he was here for eight years before Mom died, but he knew your parents before they met, does time flow differently here or are you only twenty?”

  “I turned twenty-one three weeks ago,” David replied

  “Ooh. I never thought I would be with a younger man,” she teased, sliding casually against him.

  He put an arm around her and just let himself enjoy the moment. She brought him back to awareness with “If I read that street sign correctly, we are very close to where there were reports of a building having an entire floor disappear. Maybe we should check it out?”

  “Given the number of reports that said the same thing, there might be something to it,” David admitted, and pulled up the map on his phone. “Should be about two blocks that way and just around the corner,” he said after a moment, pointing down a side street.

  As they walked along, Thellissandra suddenly felt that something was off. David felt her stiffen at his side, but she shook her head when he gave her a questioning look.

  Seconds ter, she suddenly pushed David to one side as she dove the other way, performed some kind of summersault/barrel roll combination and rose to a crouch, suddenly dressed in her armor.

  David had not noticed what happened with her, however; he only noticed the gout of fme from above that struck where they had been walking, and the fact that one of his shoes was now on fire. Almost on pure instinct, his mind pulled up two symbols that he ter realized meant “fire” and “air” and mentally tapped them. The fmes jumped from his damaged shoe and formed into a small ball inches above his right hand. He then gnced up where the fme had come from and saw something. It looked vaguely reptilian and clung to the building’s side like a gecko, but it was covered with red-orange fur, its forelegs ended in what looked like human hands, only ones with cwed nails and the thumb angled backwards, and the eyes also looked human but nothing else about it did. He hurled the ball of fire at it and the fmes washed over it like water on a rubber duck.

  “Should have guessed it would be immune to its own attack,” he thought. “Wonder if I could have inverted the effect, like the Fire’s Protection spell in Dungeoneers?”. The spell in the game could be activated with “cold” blue fmes or “hot” white ones - the former protected against heat, boosted his favorite cold based spells, but left the caster vulnerable to cold effects; the white fmes enhanced fire spells, protected against cold but left the user nearly defenseless against heat and fire. He saw the reptile thing inhaling and expected it was preparing to unch another jet of fire, when something hit it on the head - a thrown segment of a broken brick. Fmes dissipated harmlessly around its mouth, and it turned its attention away from David and to the source of this new attack - Sandra, who was looking around for something else to throw at it.

  “Throw,” David thought aloud, as an idea formed in his mind. He called up the images he thought meant “Air” and “Mind” and tapped each one with his left hand while balling his right into a fist. He almost cried out in joy to see a blue outline of a fist appear before him. He opened his right hand, and the fist opened. He saw the creature starting to inhale again and reached for it. The giant transparent hand wrapped around it; David was surprised to feel intense heat in the palm of his real hand. He gritted his teeth, ignored the pain, and plucked the beast from its perch. Unable to hold it long, he simply tossed it up and away. It arced through the air, screaming, until it smmed into the ground almost a block away - and exploded!

  Fmes and monster bits burst from the impact site and then just vanished. There was nothing but a scorch mark where it hit the sidewalk, another where the fire bolt had barely missed David and Sandra, and his damaged shoe to show that it had ever existed.

  Sandra hurried to his side; vaguely he noticed, she was back in her “street clothes” and she asked, “Are you okay?”

  “My right shoe has seen better days and my hand hurts but otherwise … What the Hell was that thing?”

  “Apt words,” she answered. “We call them Vyskr; I think ‘demonling’ would be close in your tongue. They are living creatures infused with an elemental power that makes them votile. This one was a fire creature, probably originally a goblin the way it walked on the wall like that “

  “And I thought my world was weird,” he ughed. And then added: “Wall-walking goblins? Do orcs fly in your world?”

  “We probably should not be discussing this out in the open. It seems to have been alone, so it was likely just hunting for food and not a scout or sentry.” She replied.

  He simply nodded and stood up. His shoe was still mostly intact but was not going to st long. He took a step and felt a wave of vertigo wash over him. Sandra caught him, her eyes full of concern. “I guess spell fatigue is real. Ghost Hand is a fairly high-level effect, I suspect, and I was not ready for it.”

  “Maybe we should call it a day and resume our investigation after breakfast tomorrow?” Sandra suggested.

  “At the very least I’ll need to grab a different pair of shoes; so sure. Besides, I promised Carol that I would give her some expnations tonight - maybe we could meet her for dinner somewhere?”

  “We should get back to your pce first and figure out next steps from there,” she suggested. He nodded and they headed off to his car. Neither one noticed a small blue creature, one that resembled a miniature human but with bat-like ears, rge amber eyes and long sharp teeth, that followed them for a block, clinging to shadows, before turning away as they reached his vehicle.