04/24/2026: Nine Pink Wigs and a Shadow in the Smoke

The afternoon settles over Strixhaven with a particular heaviness. The day has already asked too much of everyone. Tomorrow’s assignments loom. The altered campus hums quietly with a wrongness none of the Hexmates has yet named aloud.

Under the Star Arch near the edge of campus, the green foamy goo on the floor has been spreading for some time now, and Reyna is weighing the relative merits of telling someone about this. A door bangs open at the top of the stairs. Footsteps. A voice that is immediately recognizable.

“Who’s down here?”

Professor Murgaxor descends into the dim space beneath the arch, takes in the situation, and turns a long, evaluating look on Diro and Reyna.

“Why,” he says, with the patient tone of someone who already has a theory, “were you attempting to collect arcane plasma with a soda can?”

Reyna says nothing. She’s no snitch. But she looks at her project partner.

Diro, still a little entranced by the faint glow emanating from the equipment, comes back to himself and meets the professor’s gaze honestly. He’s been doing personal research. He’s not entirely sure what came over him. He thought the plasma might help.

Murgaxor studies him for a moment.

“You have a reputation on campus, Mr. Diro,” he says. “For brilliance. And for being, as they say, not quite by the book.”

He pulls on a pair of gauntlets, stoops, and carefully collects some of the goo into a small bottle. It glows with exactly the kind of light that has been pulling at Diro’s attention since he arrived. He extends it to his student.

“I was also like you, when I was your age,” Murgaxor says simply.

Diro takes the bottle with great care. He does not let himself examine why that sentence sits so strangely in the air between them.

Murgaxor asks about the project. Diro reports the anomalous readings — life energy and death energy at the extremes, nothing registering in between. A dead zone at the center of something that should not be dead.

“Interesting,” says Murgaxor. “Write it up. Bring it to class tomorrow.” He turns back to whatever he was doing. “You two should go.”

The pair climb the stairs and open the door. Before pulling it shut, they pause.

Diro hears nothing, but Reyna’s keener ears catch the sounds from below: the soft mechanical click and spin of a combination lock.

They listen for another moment. Then they walk back to the Hex, the bottle warm in Diro’s pocket.

⚔️

The news about KFC and Rampart travels fast — or at least, it travels to everyone who is present to receive it. Debbie delivers the message — Rampart had pulled her aside near the felled tree behind the Biblioplex, a favor asked with a grin.

“Rampart asked me to send his regrets about coffee,” says Debbie, feeling a bit uneasy with where this conversation may be headed. “But wanted me to tell you he’s gotten prom tickets.”

“Prom tickets?” says KFC.

“Who else would I take to prom but my girlfriend?” Rampart had laughed. “You won’t forget to tell her, right?”

Back at the Hex, KFC processes this information in the form of a distant, strangled sound from the other room.

⚔️

Debbie, meanwhile, has a plan.

She slips off campus with efficient purposefulness. She has decided that disguise is the solution to at least one of her current problems. The costume shop just off the university grounds is run by a cheerful man long since inured to unusual requests — the proximity of a wizarding institution will do that to a person. He eyes the mounting stack of wigs on his counter with mild interest.

“You must really like pink,” he observes.

“Half of these are for friends,” says Debbie. Then, reconsidering: “Eight of them are for friends.”

The shopkeeper bags up the nine pink wigs, takes nine gold, and wishes Debbie a pleasant party. Debbie walks back to the dormitory, distributes the wigs to various rooms across the floor — a small act of preemptive misdirection she declines to explain to anyone — and settles in to wait for nightfall.

⚔️

In the shared common space of the Hexmates’ dorm, Squid is on their stomach on the floor, working through a Star Wars Lego kit with focused, cheerful destruction. For every two pieces snapped together, one disappears into their mouth with a satisfying crunch.

Alister watches this for a moment.

“Should you be eating those?” they ask.

The answer, it turns out, is unknowable. Alister, apparently, has limited knowledge when it comes to fey children and microplastics. Squid holds out a piece with the gravity of someone conferring an honor.

“The red ones taste best,” Squid says. “There aren’t many left. You can have one if you promise to let me talk to Titania later.”

Alister accepts the red Lego with something approaching solemnity. “She’s been… a little bogged down by her own issues.”

Squid nods seriously. They have no idea what this means, but they’re good at nodding.

Alister proposes the grocery store. Squid’s eyes light up. The list, delivered without hesitation, is: lobsters. And one of those long salamis.

The question of leaving Squid behind while running errands becomes complicated for Alister when Diro, sitting near the fire with a thick, purloined text balanced on his knee, looks up and says, somewhat awkwardly, that he’s around if they want to leave Squid with him.

Squid hops up and skips over tp Diro’s chair. “I wanna stay here, Alister.”

“I thought you didn’t like me, Squid,” Diro observes.

“I like Diro now,” Squid announces. “I got better. Do you want a red Lego?” Squid adds. “They’re good.”

Diro accepts the red Lego with the appropriate gravity.

Alister takes the opportunity to study Diro for a moment — measuring something, trying to decide something. Then, with the particular air of someone who has decided to do a brave thing: “I share a body with a really annoying woman who used to be queen of the fairies.”

Diro takes this in. He knows that Titania and Alister share a body. But the rest of what Alister is telling him —

“You’ve got the Kingdom of Fairies looking for you?”

Alister nods. “That’s the general problem, yes.”

“I can see why you’d want a bodyguard,” says Diro. Then, after a pause: “But, honestly, what’s a single bodyguard going to do against an entire fairy kingdom?”

Squid, not looking up from the Lego kit, murmurs: “Titania’s mad because Oberon’s going to divorce her.”

Before they go, Alister reaches into a pocket and produces the amulet — the Votress on one side and Titania on the other— and holds it out to Squid. Squid takes it with both hands, opens it to the small portrait inside: Titania and the Votress together. They stare at it for a long moment.

“I miss Titania,” Squid says quietly.

“She’s going to come out,” says Alister. “Tell her to come out soon.”

“I will,” says Alister. But they say it to themselves.

Alister decides the store trip will proceed quietly, without a bodyguard, as one usually does. “Squid will come with me,” he says. But Squid has already disappeared, becoming invisible. No amount of calling convinces the child to reappear.

A Locate Object spell informs Alister that Squid is already on their way to the market. Without them.

⚔️

Across the Hex, Hester stands in the doorway of a room that is hers but isn’t. The walls are covered in diagrams and schematics of sculpture and printouts of digital art. A massive high-powered monitor blazes on a desk beside a half-built model of something intricate and unexplained. Behind the undead owl — still there, on its back, still a problem — there are tools for art forms Hester has never tried: a potter’s wheel, digital tablets, half-finished masks and marionettes hanging from hooks on the wall.

Whoever lives here, they are talented.

Hester lights a fire. Makes tea. The tea is warm and good and does absolutely nothing to address the situation.

KFC, in their own room, surveys a landscape of notes pinned to every available surface, an open laptop displaying a document. They flip through the forty pages of research for Ecological Thanatology. At the bottom of it all, in letters approximately three inches tall: HESTER’S BIT GOES HERE.

The model on the desk is half-finished. The bound copy of the paper is not. But it could be.

“I don’t know how we’re going to do it,” KFC tells Hester, with the conviction of someone who has decided to make it somebody else’s problem first, “but we are going to make the best project ever.”

Hester points out, gently, that there is still a large dead owl in her bedroom.

“It’s waiting to be paid,” Squid tells her, coming into the Hex dragging several plastic bags bulging with something that squirms within. Lobsters.

“Paid?” Hester is confused. “With gold?”

“Dead rat,” Squid mumbles, dumping nearly two dozen live lobsters onto the floor of the Hex. The creatures begin to scuttle around, waving rubber-banded claws.

⚔️

The undead owl is dealt with. Hester retrieves a rat with practised efficiency and leaves it near the undead owl’s talons. The undead owl twitches twice, then hops forward and dispatches the rat with professional briskness. It exits through the window without ceremony.

A small problem, resolved. Hester returns to her tea and considers some of the art materials in her newly de-owled room.

⚔️

There is a knock at the door. Aurora, Debbie’s project partner, stands in the hallway looking harried. Her half of the assignment, she implies, is complete. Is Debbie’s half ready?

Debbie searches. The shelves in the alternate-timeline version of her room hold books that are not quite right. The laptop on the desk is closed, plugged in, charging. Debbie opens it. A password screen.

The hint reads: guitar goddess.

Debbie types ‘Debbie Goldstein’ — her name in this timeline. The homescreen blooms open.

”Gah—what a narcissist,” mutters this Debbie about that Debbie.

She sifts through a blizzard of desktop files for ten minutes before she finds it — the project, mostly finished, structurally rickety but complete. She sends it to the printer downstairs.

“Is it better than the last time we were partnered?” Aurora asks, with the carefully neutral tone of someone who has opinions.

“You know,” says Debbie, “I think it’ll be fine.”

Aurora lingers in the doorway. She mentions, almost carefully, that Diro said Debbie has seemed upset lately. Is everything okay?

“Just reading too much news,” says Debbie. “I should probably cut back.”

“I wanted to tell you it was sweet of you to ask me to prom,” Aurora murmurs, “but you know — Quentillius and I—”

Aurora leaves. Debbie waits until the door clicks shut.

Then she throws up in the trash can.

⚔️

Back in his dorm room, Diro takes the glowing bottle from the windowsill and opens the book he ‘ borrowed’ from the Restricted Section of the Biblioplexto the section he’s found. After a while, he summons the Arms of the Astral Self through the open window, relieved that the second hand has reconstituted with this new conjugation.

Diro commands it to take the stopper from the bottle of arcane plasm and toss it back inside to him.

It bounces off his palm and disappears into the bushes five stories below. Swearing, Diro commands one hand to tip a single drop onto the other, onto his tattoo.

For a moment, nothing happens.

Then something shifts, somewhere between his skin and the air around it. It is not painful. It is not comfortable. It is the sensation of a door that was stuck for a long time beginning, very slowly, to move.

He understands that, if he wished, he can now breathe underwater. If he breathed: Diro is dhampir. No need for breath.

This is underwater breathing ability, somehow, both completely useless and exactly what was needed.

⚔️

Across the Hex, from the bathroom comes the sound of a bathtub filling. Then, through the closed door, a soft splash. Then seventeen more.

Squid has released the lobsters into the tub shared by Reyna and Titania’s little family.

⚔️

KFC and Hester work through the night. Hester’s contributions are real, and KFC knows it — the model that comes together on the desk is genuinely good and the maker’s mark on its underside show that this timeline’s Hester was indeed the artist. She sincerely hopes that this timeline’s KFC not only knew that but gave credit to Hester, whose name on the cover page was in a significantly smaller font than KFC’s own.

The paper grows from forty pages to sixty-five. It is something Murgaxor might actually stop to read. When they finally bind the thing, they place Hester’s name first on the cover, the same size as KFC’s own. The way it should be.

There is a knock at the door. It is late.

Rampart leans in the entryway, a grin on his face. “Hey, beautiful, I got off work early. We can grab that cup of coffee after all.” He pauses, studying KFC’s face carefully. “Um — is everything okay?”

KFC can tell by the loxodon’s face that he knows something is different between them. She sees in his eyes that he not only feels it, but he suddenly knows what he’s about to hear.

“You’re going to tell me you just want to be friends, aren’t you,” he says quietly.

“It’s more complicated than that,” says KFC.

She ask him to sit down in the empty living room of the Hex. KFC asks him to promise not to tell anyone what they are about to share. He promises, because he has known this KFC for three years and they have never lied to him — and then he sits very still while KFC explains, carefully and completely, that they are not the KFC he knows. That there are timelines, and they traveled between them, and the KFC who made plans for prom with him is somewhere that may or may not still exist.

Rampart’s brow works through several configurations.

“So,” he says slowly, “there are two KFCs. And one of them is still going to prom with me. But that’s not you.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Are you sure,” he says, with the faint desperation of someone trying a last exit, “that you’re not just telling me this story so I’ll go away and leave you alone?”

“You’re still my friend,” says KFC. “I still care about you. I wouldn’t lie about this.”

He sits with it for a moment. Then: “Are you also really smart? Because the KFC I know was going to help me with my project tonight, and I haven’t started it, and it’s due tomorrow.”

From behind the sofa, with the unnerving calm of someone who has been there for some time, Alister speaks.

“Could I help?”

KFC and Rampart both jump.

Rampart stares at Alister, who rises to his feet.

“Everyone always said you were such a jerk,” he says, after a moment. “I guess I thought you were.”

“I am, a bit,” says Alister pleasantly. “But I owe a debt.” They settle into the chair across from Rampart with the brisk competence of someone who has learned that being useful is its own kind of apology. “Let’s see what we’re working with.”

⚔️

The clock moves past one in the morning. Debbie pulls on the pink wig, climbs out the window on her Broom of Flying, and makes her way across the quiet campus toward the Biblioplex, keeping to the shadows. A few late students drift past, too tired to look up. Someone coming out of the Fire Jolt Café has the warm, unfocused eyes of one butterbeer too many. No one notices a pink wig moving low against the dark.

Behind the Biblioplex, the lumber pile waits. The stump, too, cut and raw and wrong.

Debbie pours oil. Strikes a light.

The fire catches. It spreads to the lumber quickly, the orange light pressing back the dark. And then something else rises with the smoke — not just smoke. An odor, old and organic and deeply wrong, thickens the air first from the lumber, and then more intensely from the stump itself. The smoke that rises from it is too dark, too heavy, and it does not move the way smoke should.

It holds a shape.

A bullywug shape. Broad-shouldered. Reaching.

Debbie has time to think “Well, that wasn’t the plan,” before the thing lurches toward her. She reacts, raising her hands to releases Thunder Wave directly into the smoke’s center.

The shockwave hits. The shadow-thing fractures slightly, dissipating at its edges, and is shoved back ten feet. Its tendrils thrash at the open air — but it is not gone, only shoved backward. It flows toward Debbie, reaching.

Debbie throws herself onto her broom and takes off.

Fifty feet of sky opens between her and the shadow. Her pink wig is still on. The creature, it seems, does not have eyes, and the dark and Debbie’s own considerable stealth are on her side.

The shadow rears up, inky and misshapen. It is somewhere between Murgaxor and the idea of Murgaxor. It begins to move across the empty lawn.

Back at the Hex Twoer, behind a dormitory window several stories up, Diro glances out. He sees a pink blur streak past at speed. He thinks little of it. Classic wizard behavior. He returns to his book.

The shadow roams. The fire burns. The stump, in its center, still smokes.

Somewhere beneath it, something that was buried a long time ago is not quite finished.