“I’m telling you, fool!” shouts the shorter man, his lower face covered in a thin, brown scarf and his eyes shadowed by the pointed hat he’s wearing, which barely sticks to his head because of his frantic pace. Shuffling around like an eager squirrel, his arms are laden full of papers and scrolls that he keeps reading through and balancing at the same time. “It’s in here!”

 

The tall man accompanying him sighs, softly shaking his head. “Wilstred, if I have to walk through this park one more time…” he starts, not finishing his sentence as he idly lifts his gaze up to stare at the sky above their heads.

 

Mirabelle follows his gaze from up in her tree, but doesn’t see anything except some clouds. They are pretty clouds, though. One of them looks like a bat.

 

“That one looks like a bat…” says the man, idly. She gasps, looking back down at him.

 

“Nonsense!” shouts his excited colleague, running off and through the park. “It’s a bird. Come on!”

 

The cloud-watching man sighs, meandering after his colleague, who is rummaging through the park’s many bushes and plants, looking for something.

 

If Mirabelle had to guess, the thing they’re looking for is her.

 

She’s not sure how exactly the humans traced her back to this park, but that’s where their ability to locate her seems to be stuck. This isn’t the first time she’s seen these two rummaging around the area. Grace said they’re with the city’s magical creature protection program, which means they’re the humans in charge of making sure she’s okay.

 

She appreciates that, but she still doesn’t want to talk to them, or be seen by them, or even let them know that she exists.

 

The shy fairy lowers her head, dropping herself back inside her hole in the tree, where she is safe from the world.

 

She has so much to do today… but… well, she doesn’t feel like doing anything today.

 

Mirabelle’s wings buzz, loaded with an energetic mischief at the prospect of being a lazybones today.

 

Wickedly, the depraved, lost caricature of a living person drops herself down onto a big pile of colorful fluff — like a monster — and rests there, nibbling on an old cookie she has for just such occasions.

 

Deplorable.

 

---

 

It is later.

 

— Something… plops?

 

Mirabelle opens her eyes, slowly. The fairy rubs her face and yawns, listening to the rain that has begun to fall outside. In a daze, she turns her head. “Oh. Butter biscuits…” swears the heartless wretch, her only mercy being that those who once loved her are now long dead and unable to hear the foulness of her words. Before all of this, she had been such an innocent, sweet person. Mirabelle looks at the darkness beyond the hole in her tree.

 

She rested the entire day away. She didn't sleep, as she can't. But she did zone out for quite a while there, lost in memories of the past. It’s nighttime, and it's still raining.

 

Slowly rising to her feet, Mirabelle hovers at the edge of the hole in the tree, pushing aside the fabric covering it and keeping the rain out as she stares across the park. Grace’s bench is empty. The man must be staying somewhere else tonight since it’s raining.

 

The leaves above her head rustle.

 

Mirabelle, the cautious fairy, looks up and stares in the darkness as something rummages around in her tree. The leaves shake, the boughs carrying them back and forth in the wind, which comes in sparse but heavy pushes. The noise that comes from the contact of the rain filled air and the tree is less of a storm’s howl and more of the soft moaning of a lost ghost, coming only every now and then.

 

Something cracks.

 

— A squirrel chitters its way down the tree.

 

Mirabelle screams in surprise, flailing and fussing, her arms hitting herself and the bark as she settles down and watches the squirrel march along the branch.

 

A moment later, she sighs in relief. The foul magic that had already begun dripping down her hands is leaking onto the wood, but not firing toward the squirrel — this time.

 

“You don’t know how lucky you are!” yells Mirabelle, shaking her fist out of the hole and at the squirrel, outside at night in the rain, which is unusual. They prefer to be inside at night, because of owls. Stupid squirrel. She almost turned it into mush, like the last one that had scared her. “Get out of here!” she fusses.

 

The chittering squirrel, acting strangely, turns to look her way from the end of the branch it's out on, swaying in the wind.

 

The squirrel vanishes. Something drops onto it from the limbs of the tree above, the ambush predator flopping over the critter like draping fabric. Terrified, the squirrel starts to try to escape, screaming. But its movements and its voice are constrained by the thick, blue, gelatinous mass that has wrapped itself around the animal. Mirabelle watches in mortified horror as the squirrel bubbles away, its fur dissolving to show the skin-less musculature beneath a second later. An instant longer, its teeth break and shatter, and its nails fall apart, floating freely in the mass. Highly acidic slime oozes down its throat and through its emptied eye-sockets as the squirrel is eaten alive from both inside and outside at the same time.

 

Mirabelle gags, holding her hand over her mouth as she watches the slime eat the small creature.

 

Slimes are ruthless, predatory, small hunting monsters that live all over the world. They’re boneless masses made up fully of nothing else except a strongly acidic gel, and they sustain themselves by hunting and scavenging, swallowing anything they can manage to catch and trap inside of their bodies. They’re merciless and will devour anything and everything they can catch, from babies in the crib to rats to full grown dragons — in theory, if one were ever big enough to wrap themselves around one. Mirabelle has never seen any slime that big, but there used to be stories.

 

The screaming stops, the squirrel now being in the sleeping place.

 

They hunt through vibrations. Slimes don’t have eyes or any other organs; they’re just nothing except goo.

 

— Mirabelle remembers this tidbit as her fingers squeeze the wooden edge of the hole, and a second later, the slime stiffens up, feeling her touching the tree.

 

It turns her way.

 

The fairy yells, shooting out and into the air. Being trapped in the hole would be death, for sure. The slime, only a few feet away, lunges, hopping at her. Mirabelle tries to dodge, slamming her head against the branch above and tumbling downward, the slime swiping at her and covering half of her body in acid. She screams, flailing as she gracelessly falls down through the air, disoriented as the heavy rain pelts her and the acid eats away at her body, the skin and flesh on her side falling apart just as much as the fabric of her clothes. Mirabelle sees spots of bone on her arms and spots of deep red from the inside of her body.

 

And then she splashes into the water of the pond, violently crashing down through the surface of the water.

 

 

Thrashing, she gasps for air, pulling her above the waving, disturbed waters of the pond, which, for someone her size, may as well be the ocean in a storm. Mirabelle tries to fly, her wings not catching enough air to lift her out of the water as she splashes around, struggling to stay afloat.

 

— A shadow drops down over her from above.

 

Mirabelle ducks down, swimming down below the water as a heavy, strong, flat mass crashes down. Sharp, slimy, acidic tendrils press down below the water as the monster floats on the surface, stabbing downward to try and snatch her as she swims beneath it. The fairy turns, twisting to the side as one of the appendages shoots down in her path, only to pull up a second later. Blood violently oozes from her body, her head spinning from everything as she tries to dive deeper still, her lungs burning for air.

 

Sand makes itself felt beneath her as she somehow has managed to fight her way through the tall fronds of the pond grass and begins to crawl out toward the shore, gasping for air. She rises to her feet, her wings buzzing as she tries to fly again, but Mirabelle just falls over instead, her crying face crashing into the dirt. Crawling, she looks back, watching as the slime floats over the water, heading straight toward her, not having lost her trail yet.

 

A shadow looms over her.

 

Mirabelle lifts her gaze, looking at the human she’s crawled over toward. The shadow of him hangs over her head.

 

She covers her face, getting ready to get stepped on a second time. This is it. This is the end.

 

What was the p-

 

— Something cracks.

 

And everything is silent.

 

Mirabelle, shaking and fidgeting, slowly opens her eyes, lowering her arms as she looks. “Get! GET!” snaps a man’s voice, as there comes an accompanying series of loud, sharp slapping sounds. “Scram!”

 

The human man, holding a stick, smacks it down over the slime’s head. The small monster barely reaches half of his shins. Its body sinks in over and over again as he whips at it with the stick. It bubbles in fear and agitation, its slimy mass spreading itself flat and wide to absorb the blows as best as possible as it drifts away, trying to escape.

 

Mirabelle watches as the stick-man takes the stick in his hands, breaks it in half, and then throws one piece after the other at the fleeing monster. The first half misses, sinking into the water at the side with a loud splash. But the second one strikes true, severing through the middle of the flattened slime that was floating away like a deflated jellyfish.

 

It loses the ability to sustain its shape and slowly sinks away beneath the water of the pond, where it vanishes forever more into the deep, dark brinks of the duck-water.

 

Scared, Mirabelle looks up at the human as she holds her wounded body, which is still in the process of healing, as she rests half in the water.

 

The stick-man, the one who is always here by himself, breaking sticks and throwing them when he wants to think, is her rescuer.

 

He looks down at her, blinking, and then kneels down.

 

“Fairy, huh?” asks the man. He looks around the dark park and then down at her. “You good?”

 

“I’m not,” replies Mirabelle, likely to the latter question, but not impossibly to the former — although that would be a lie. It’s hard to deny that she’s a fairy. “Thank you,” says the fairy, who feels like she could see her own organs right now if she tried hard enough. She holds her chemically burned rags in place over her half-peeled skin.

 

— Pond water leaks out of the hole that was burned through in her side and slowly heals itself shut.

 

“Do you need any help?” he asks. Mirabelle appreciates that he isn’t making a huge fuss about the whole fairy thing.

 

There is nothing he can do for her except make sure that no cat, frog, or big bug comes along to eat her while she’s healing. But there is something that he can do to help ease her troubled soul, which often has so many questions. Mirabelle, the selfish fairy, looks up at her rescuer and asks her question. “Why do you throw the sticks, Stick-man?”

 

The stars above shine brightly as they seem to listen in on the man’s deep, stick related secret, which they had so long been forbidden to know about. Eagerly, they listen in on the hidden words of the soul of a man who wanders the world below them.

 

He just has trouble at home and this simple hobby is a meditative practice that he uses to help clear his head.

 

That’s all.