𝒴𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝐼𝓂𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓈𝒾𝒷𝓁𝑒 𝒢𝓊𝒾𝒹𝑒

Wild Town — Grand Midway — Late Afternoon

The confetti had been falling for three hours without explanation, and Toul had decided it was finally worth paying attention to. He sat perched on a lamppost that bent at an impossible angle, one leg crossed over the other, watching the paper drift through air that smelled faintly of caramel and something burnt. Mir stood below him, holding a small vial of something luminous and green, debating which window to drop it through. The building in question had already shifted twice since they'd arrived, its windows relocating from the second floor to the third and then vanishing entirely, which Mir took as a personal challenge rather than a reason to stop.

"You're wasting effort," Toul said, his voice carrying just enough to reach Mir without traveling further. He didn't look down. The Cheshire mask tied over the left side of his face caught the light from a lantern that had no flame, the fabric rippling though there was no wind. "The window on the east side will be back in four minutes. It always returns there before migrating to the roof."

"And how would you know that, darling?" Mir tilted his head up, teal eyes bright with something between admiration and suspicion. His pastel pink sweater slipped further off one shoulder, jewelry clinking as he shifted his weight to one heeled boot. Sunny, the potted flower cradled against his hip, made a sound like grinding teeth.

"Because I watched it do the same thing yesterday." Toul's gold eyes tracked a woman across the plaza who was walking a cat on a leash, except the cat was the size of a horse and the leash was made of living flowers. Neither of them acknowledged this as unusual. "And the day before. The building has habits. Most things here do, if you bother noticing."

Mir hummed sweetly, a sound that promised nothing good. "You notice too much, Toul. It's terribly unattractive in a man." He tucked the vial into his shorts — there was no explanation for where it went or how it fit — and turned toward the alley between the shifting building and a shop that sold bottled laughter. The sign above the door read "YESTERDAY'S GIGGLES — HALF OFF" in letters that rearranged themselves whenever no one looked directly at them. "I'm going to find somewhere with less architectural commitment. Coming?"

Toul dropped from the lamppost without sound, his boots meeting the cobblestones as though he'd simply materialized there rather than fallen. Which, technically, was an option available to him, but he preferred the aesthetics of descent. He fell into step beside Mir, their shadows stretching long and wrong behind them, one shadow too many between them though neither acknowledged it. The alley ahead smelled of old rain and brass, the walls narrowing at angles that suggested the space between them was a suggestion rather than a measurement.

"Did you feed Sunny today?" Toul asked as they walked, nodding toward the flower that was now gnawing visibly on Mir's thumb. A thin line of red trailed down the pot's edge.

"She's always fed, sweetheart. She just likes the taste of me." Mir smiled, saccharine and unbothered, lifting his bleeding thumb to his mouth and licking it clean without breaking stride. Sunny made a noise that could have been agreement or could have been a threat. With Sunny, the distinction was rarely clear. "Besides, it's romantic. She shows her love through nibbles."

"She drew blood last week and you needed Nami to fix your finger."

"A lovebite that got a little enthusiastic." Mir waved a hand dismissively, rings catching light that seemed to come from the walls themselves rather than any discernible source. "You wouldn't understand. You don't let anything close enough to bite you."

Toul smiled, revealing nothing. The statement sat between them like a card turned face-down — accurate, unanswerable, and best left alone. He changed the subject the way he changed locations: seamlessly, as though the previous moment had simply decided to leave. "The alley connects to Lantern Alley if we turn left at the drainage pipe that hums in B-flat. If we turn right, it dead-ends into a wall that only exists when you're not looking for an exit."

"Then we go right." Mir said it immediately, because Mir always chose the option that would complicate things."Dead-ends are more fun. They make you creative."

The drainage pipe hummed in B-flat as promised. They turned right. The wall appeared exactly when it was supposed to, which was to say, the moment they stopped expecting it to. Toul stopped walking. Mir stopped a half-step later, not because he'd noticed anything, but because Toul's stillness was its own kind of language and he'd learned to read it.

"There's something in our dead-end," Toul said quietly.

Mir leaned around him, teal eyes scanning the shadows pooled at the base of the wall. His expression shifted — not to concern, because concern required caring about outcomes, but to interest, which was Mir's default response to anything unexpected. "Oh. There is, isn't there?" His voice dropped to something theatrical, conspiratorial. "How delicious. Do you think it's dead?"

The figure was laid out on the ground like something discarded. Not crumpled the way a body falls — placed, almost, or deposited by something that hadn't bothered to arrange it carefully. The alley's peculiar light made details difficult to parse, but the shape was undeniably human, and the clothing was undeniably wrong. Too plain. Too coherent. Nothing in Wild Town looked like that. Nothing in Wild Town tried to look like that.

"Dead things in Wild Town have a specific look about them," Toul observed, his head tilting slowly as he studied the figure. His gold eyes traced the outline of limbs, the fall of fabric, the stillness of a chest that may or may not have been rising. "They look like they belong. This doesn't look like it belongs."

Mir crouched slightly, though he kept his distance, one hand still cradling Sunny who had begun making low growling sounds directed at the figure on the ground. "Belonging is such a strong word, darling. Lots of things don't belong here. That's half the fun." He tapped a finger against his lower lip thoughtfully. "Though I'll give you this — I've never seen clothes like that. Where's the flair? Where's the chaos? It looks like it was dressed by someone terribly bored."

"Or someone from somewhere terribly normal." Toul's voice carried a new quality now, something beneath the disinterest that Mir recognized as the earliest stage of fascination. Toul found most things in Wild Town amusing in the way one finds a clock amusing — it moves, it marks time, it's pleasant to watch. But things that didn't fit the clock's mechanism, things that fell between the gears without being crushed — those earned something closer to actual attention. "Look at the stitching. Look at the seams. Nothing here is made like that."

"So it's an outsider." Mir straightened, his sweet smile sharpening at the edges. "A real one? I've heard stories, but I've never actually seen—" He paused, batting away a vine Sunny had extended toward the figure. "Sunny, stop that, we don't know where it's been. Do you think it wandered here on purpose, or do you think something brought it?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters for the story later." Mir gestured vaguely at the air as though writing in it. "'I found a lost creature in an alley' is fine. 'A lost creature was delivered to my alley by forces unknown' is much better."

Toul considered this with the serious expression of a man deciding which wine paired best with a poisoning. Mir wasn't wrong, strictly speaking — the narrative of a thing mattered in Wild Town, sometimes more than the thing itself. But narrative was a luxury that came after confirmation, and confirmation required proximity, and proximity required him to stop standing three paces back like a spectator at his own discovery.

He walked forward. Three steps, measured and unhurried, bringing him to stand directly over the figure. He looked down at it the way one might look at a puzzle that had arrived without instructions. Then, with the same casual deliberation he applied to everything, he nudged it with the toe of his boot. Not gently. Not roughly. Just enough to shift the weight of a limb, to test the resistance of a body, to ask a physical question without bothering to form the words.

"Well?" Mir called from his safe distance, Sunny now perched on his shoulder like a violent parrot. "Alive or decorative?"

Toul didn't answer immediately. His gold eyes stayed fixed on the figure, his expression unreadable behind the Cheshire mask's fabric. The confetti from the plaza had followed them into the alley somehow, a few pink and gold pieces drifting down between the walls like the world itself was watching and couldn't help but comment.

"That," Toul said slowly, a smile finally reaching his voice if not his face, "is an excellent question."