Kaleb practically held his breath until they made it back to his car. Thankfully, after the first guard, he and Shaggy hadn’t run into any others. But he was sure they were going to be spotted at any moment or some wizard or mage would start scrying them immediately. Kaleb lead them around the guards, through the quad, around the dorm, and through their makeshift entrance. All the while keeping his senses peeled for anything. When they reached his hidden vehicle, he passed his keys to Shaggy and rounded the car to the passenger side. He got himself situated in the passenger seat and then started digging through his glove box for a pen or marker.

  Shaggy got the care started and carefully pulled them out of the overgrown grass and back onto the road. Kaleb had the werewolf keep the lights off until they hit the highway. Shaggy seemed to think he was being paranoid, but Kaleb went back to his work. With the marker he found in the glove box, Kaleb was drawing a warding rune on the roof of his car from memory. He had seen a couple while warding the hangar with Jar-lock and a few more while in Jar’s library. But the intricacies of the rune were a little muddled in his mind.

  Of course, it didn’t help that Shaggy’s fucking Super Serum kept trying to force its way into his brain. The formula’s intrusion into his thoughts made the rune take much longer to nail down. He wasn’t sure if he had messed it up, but Kaleb hoped the intention behind his magic would carry it through. Once the arcane rune was done, Kaleb placed his hand on the small sigil and forced his magic into it. He felt the car shudder and hum with magic, and Kaleb sat back in his seat in relief. It looked like the ward was working.

  Shaggy had kept so quiet during his work that Kaleb was almost surprised when the other player’s voice spoke up, asking a question.

  “What was that all about?”

  Kaleb adjusted his sitting posture and cleared his throat. “Should help us avoid scrying until we get back home. The Hangar has enough protections to keep me safe.”

  “Will they already be able to Scry us?”

  Kaleb wanted to snort, but instead shook his head. “No. But you can never be too careful. My Taser Eggs don’t knock people out for long. So any of the guards we knocked out could get up and raise the alarm. But with the rune on the car, we should be safe. As far as I know, anyway.”

  “You don’t sound too sure, Doc.” Shaggy said, looking up at the rune on the ceiling.

  “Cause I’m not. I haven’t really read much on anti-scrying runes or spells. Jar-Lock just got his study situated. Not to mention he is stingy as hell with his books.”

  “Also, it’s not my main area of expertise. But I’m not going to share that.” Kaleb add as an afterthought.

  “So, roughly, how much time would you give us? Should I be going faster in case your chicken scratch doesn’t help?”

  “Well, we collected the wires from both guards, closed the door to the lab, moved the guards to less suspicious areas. So if we get VERY lucky, we won’t have to worry until morning.”

  “And worse case scenario?”

  “The guards have already woken up and alerted the Wizards that something fishy is going on. They’ll investigate, see your handiwork on the door, perform a search for any hair follicles or skin flakes. Once they have some, they’ll start performing a mass scrying spell…”

  Kaleb fell into thought as different types of searching spells came to mind. After rifling through Jar-lock’s library, Kaleb was far more familiar with the types of location spells. Not all of them, but there were a good many of them that could be used to hunt people down. Some didn’t even require a token from the target. But those were much more board. Then again, if anyone was searching for a speeding car rushing away from the magic school, then…

  “Then…?”

  Kaleb snapped out of his thoughts as Shaggy’s voice echoed in his ears. He coughed awkwardly again and voiced his inner thoughts.

  “Oh sorry, was just trying to remember what I read about Scrying. It’s not really an exciting subject. Not quite the same as remote viewing or any other sensory power. But still powerful. I was trying to guess the likelihood that they’d try for a Remote Viewing spell. It’d take longer and this little rune ain’t going to help with Remote Viewing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Remote viewing is like putting a physical, invisible eye somewhere. Scrying is more like a satellite in the sky. The rune masks us with interference. But that would be useless for Remote Viewing.”

  Shaggy nodded in understanding. “We’d have to find and poke out the eye.”

  Kaleb winced at the mental image, but slightly nodded. “Gruesome, but not untrue. For now, let’s assume that they go with the easier option and start a scrying spell. They’ll want it to cover a large area, so they’ll either need multiple Wizards or a large artifact to help them. Then they’ll begin the ritual which takes…”

  Kaleb trailed off as he tried to remember the exact wording of Jar-lock’s book. Mumbling to himself, he said. “Was it forty-five minutes or an hour?”

  “Work with the smallest timeline ya got, Prof.” Shaggy said through gritted teeth.

  “Oh good idea, so let’s say thirty minutes. We will have thirty minutes after they discover what we’ve done. My Taser Eggs can knock a person out for fifteen minutes at the low end, and I punched that first guard in the head. So let’s add another fifteen there...”

  Kaleb leaned over to look at the clock in the car’s dash. “So, as of now, we have twenty minutes before the guard wakes up. Add in time to report his findings, the Wizards investigation, and the search for clues. That means we have an hour to get as far away as possible, as safely as possible. So slow down.”

  The car had been steadily speeding up as Kaleb spoke. But when he pointed out that Shaggy could slow down, the werewolf took his foot off the pedal. The car slowed as Kaleb suppressed a snort of laughter. Working through the problem out loud and had convinced him they were mostly safe. Shaggy would probably be screwed once he left the safety of the car and hangar. But he lived in Under-Town, which meant the mages were going to have a hard time finding him. Kaleb, on the other hand, would be safe behind Jar-lock’s wards.

  With that worry put on the back burner of his mind, the formula once again pushed to the forefront of his thinking. Kaleb sighed through his nose and closed his eyes. The swirling numbers and chemical symbols made his brain hurt as each one jockeyed to be acknowledged. He recognized a few of the more mundane symbols as they presented themselves. As he did, the symbol would fly off into the recesses of his mind.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Oh, no! Don’t you dare pass out on me, Doc. I have a long drive and I’m already amped from the escape. This was more nerve-wracking than just running in and breaking shit, then running out. If I gotta be up, so do you.”

  Kaleb snorted as he kept his eyes closed. “Calm down, I’m not sleeping. I’m going over the formula in my head and trying to get all the chemicals down. Like I said before, whoever you got it from had to use a lot of random chemicals to get it to work. I want to know if those are required or if we can actually replace them with better variants. It also contains a lot of stuff I can’t identify.”

  “Maybe it’s some magical game-mechanic stuff that makes the mixture work? By the way, do you want to write it down for me? My wolf is happily asleep.”

  Kaleb nodded, remembering his promise. He reached into the glove box again and found a notepad. The marker wasn’t the best writing implement for the pad. But it was what he had. As he wrote, Kaleb asked a question of his own.

  “You’ve mentioned that before, YOUR wolf. Do you have like an alter ego or something because you’re a werewolf?”

  Shaggy sighed. “It’s a long story, but you’re not far off. The short of it is that I have a cantankerous mutt inside of me. Whenever I wolf out, we kind of share the driver’s seat. But when I’m human, the damn thing stays inside and growls or barks at whatever is going on outside.”

  “Do all Were’s have it?”

  “Not as far as I know. I haven’t met any other Player Weres, though. According to my wolf sensei, it happens. But only in Pure-blood Weres. I’m a Mutant, so having one is odd. But probably not unheard of.”

  “Man, Pure-bloods are apparently a huge thing in this game.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, ‘pure blood’ is incredible important to some magical families. It’s a way from them to exclude the more Mundane. So they can focus on creating the strongest magical lines.”

  “Hehe.” Shaggy chuckled. “Well, people were always going to find ways to exclude others. It’s what we do. If the game was a utopia, there would be nothing for us to do.”

  “Fair. It’s just interesting to see how the game grew. I mean multiple magic families, differently tiered magical societies, not to mention the Were communities. Everyone is slightly separated, yet still a part of the whole.”

  “Also, you have your little Hunter community out where you are. What’s up with that?”

  “Just a group that were in Austin before the HLO moved in and turned being a hero into a business. They aren’t too happy with the HLO, so they are giving our group a chance. Which is great, but means a lot of paperwork.”

  “I really don’t envy you Heroes. I play games to get away from the paperwork.”

  “Meh. It ain’t so bad. Fill out a form here, stop a demonic incursion there. It all evens out. It’s all a part of living and playing in this world.” Kaleb lied through his teeth as he remembered the paperwork after the demon incursion.

  Kaleb saw Shaggy nod out of the corner of his eye and the car fell into silence again. When no new questions came, he began writing out the formula again. He had finished Shaggy’s copy, but now he wanted to play with the chemicals a bit and see what he could change. He wrote each chemical on a pad of paper before putting it on his car dashboard. As he did, Kaleb made a mental list of the elements he knew versus the ones he didn’t. Unfortunately, the ones he didn’t were the larger pile. Most of them were liquids of some kind. Used as a base for the overall serum. But then there was the catalyst, which appeared to be some kind of crystalline.

  Kaleb was chewing over the type of catalyst that would be required for such a serum when Shaggy spoke again.

  “So now what are you working on?” Shaggy asked, sounding bored.

  “Just seeing if any other chemicals in my, admittedly limited, knowledge could work with this formula. But I think you were right. Some of these reactants are liquid, but I don’t recognize the molecular formulas. Then there’s the catalyst. It’s annotated here by the spectrometer, but I’m out of my depth on what the hell it is, or even if there is only one catalyst.”

  “Is all that implanted knowledge or is some of that you, Doc? My head already hurts listening to you. Hopefully Vlad has already found an egghead to do this for us.”

  Kaleb chuckled as he felt the game feeding him answers. “It’s all the game. I mean, I know basic chemistry from school. But this is leagues over that.”

  Kaleb tapped the marker against his lips in thought. The formula was still pressing into his mind, but it was nowhere near as insistent. Which he thought meant it was fading away from his mind. As it went, he continued rolling each element through his brain. But the sound of squealing tires and Shaggy’s grunt interrupted him again.

  Kaleb was thrust forward against his seat belt and he felt it dig into his body. Next to him, Shaggy’s head slammed into the steering wheel and the sound of metal snapping filled the car. For some reason, the other player had slammed on the brakes, bringing them both to a rough stop. Kaleb felt a surge of angry as he looked up to the rune on the ceiling. Did the wizards already find them?

  “Fucking what!?” Kaleb screamed as he stuck his head out his window.

  But all he saw was a large man getting to his feet in front of the car. The man was wearing normal clothes except there were metal plates sewn into it in places. The man in the street looked a little battered and bruised, but otherwise fine as he raised a hand and smiled. There was an awkward pause as the three of them stared at each other until a flash of green light smacked the large man in the chest.

  The man’s armored clothing did nothing to protect him as he went sailing into the ditch at the side of the road. Kaleb winced as a woman’s voice echoed from the night sky.

  “Have no fear citizens. The malcontent has been taken care of!”

  Kaleb looked around for a bit, trying to find the source of the voice. But when he couldn’t, he simply gave a wave and pulled his head back into the car. Shaggy was rubbing his forehead. A big red welt was disappearing as Kaleb watched. A four-inch piece of metal was missing from the top of his steering wheel. It was head-butted off by the other player during the emergency stop.

  Shaggy angrily grabbed his piece of paper with the formula on it as he got the car moving again. The movement showed Kaleb that his own notes had been thrown about the car during the stop. He collected what he could from the floorboard and then looked up at Shaggy again. Glancing between the villain player and his steering wheel, Kaleb snorted.

  “Your paying to fix the wheel.”

  “That wasn’t my fault. Some dingus came flying out of the sky. What was I supposed to do? Keep driving?”

  “Then you’d be paying for a whole car. You could have worn a seat-belt and not fractured a damn steel steering wheel.”

  “Who’s to say the seat-belt would’ve caught my heavy ass? I may be short, but I’m dense.”

  “Pfft. I’m aware.”

  “Not what I meant, ya scaly bastard.”

  “Seriously, you're paying for the repairs.”

  “Oh, come on, dude…”

  The pair continued to argue as they drove into the night. Wizards forgotten and ill-gotten gains safely secured. As they argued, Kaleb’s brain drifted to the notes in his pockets. If what his brain was telling him was true, then the formula would work on him, too. He wouldn’t become some kind of unstoppable Hero or anything, but the bump would make him stronger. He had already bitten the bullet with magic. Would taking the serum make him a mutant as well? Could he be all three? Did he want to?