At first glance, I knew that Baekhyun with Chanyeol and Chen would be the death of me. Why do I say that? Because while I stood dumbstruck as to why a mage had suddenly called me a peasant and demanded for me to bow to him, Chanyeol and Chen barked out laughter and ran to their companion.

"Oh Baek! I missed you!" Chanyeol lifted the smaller male into the air and began to spin, only to stop as Baehyun punched at his arms.

"Did I give you permission to touch me?" Baekhyun's glare could have pierced through Chanyeol right where they stood, so the cheerful mage let him down and stood back with his arms held up in surrender.

I glanced over at Jongin, who was staring at the trio with growing disdain and I leaned closer to him, "Is he like this often?"

"You bet he is." his teeth were gritted as he answered back, glancing over to an equally annoyed Joonmyun.

"That was a good joke, Baek!" Chen wiped at his eyes to remove the tears he had gained from crying, one hand still on his stomach in order to calm himself down and stop snorting out random bursts of laughter. 

"That's enough." Joonmyun's voice cut into their moment, his voice at a low warning tone.

Baekhyun's eyes turned to Joonmyun and a large pout made its way onto his lips as he ran over, throwing his arms around the leader and squeezing him, "But Suhonnie! I was just playing around!"

"He gets uglier and uglier every time we see him." Sehun was on the other side of Jongin, and the three of us had leaned away from Joonmyun and Baekhyun, since the sight was slightly disturbing and it was obvious that even Joonmyun was uncomfortable by Baekhyun's display.

The male who was insulted pulled himself away from Joonmyun and had stepped in front of Sehun so quickly that the youngest mage hadn't seen him coming and stumbled a step back into Yixing. Yixing, who could tell that the situation would only end badly if he stayed there, ran off and huddled together with Xiumin and Tao further away. I would have done it too, but Jongin had wrapped an arm around me in order to keep me in place.

"Do I see a couple of gray hairs?" Sehun covered his head in wide eyed betrayal, and Baekhyun's attention shifted over to Jongin, and finally to me. Ignoring Jongin all together, he leapt over to me, eyes squinted and invading my personal space, "Who are you?"

 "Yun Seung-"

"Your name is hideous. Change it." I was once again left dumbstuck at the way he spoke, my jaw dropped and my eye possibly twitching at the mage's audacity to tell me my name was hideous, "And your hair- what died in it? Don't even get me started on your clothes-"

"Baekhyun." Tao had joined us and put a hand on Baekhyun's shoulder, his voice low and dangerous, "Watch your mouth."

Baekhyun's eyes filled with michief as he shook Tao's hand off and stared at me, "What are you going to do, master? Punish me?"

That was his plan all along, wasn't it? To get me to punish him and make the others see me in a different light. But why? Did I do something wrong to Baekhyun to make him treat me this way?

"Stop it, Baek." Xiumin's voice was also getting closer, though I didn't bother looking up to see if he had actually made his way over to us.

"I won't punish you, Baekhyun." My voice was soft at first, but I looked up at Baekhyun and I swear I could feel the smirk playing at my lips, "But I just want to let you know that all the makeup in the world won't help you now."

The mages had all gone quiet and stared at Baekhyun and I before bursting into laughter, and when I felt someone pat my shoulder, I turned and grinned back at a proud Chen, "This is why you're my favorite."

Before Baekhyun could lunge at either Chen or myself, Yixing had walked into the group and pulled me and Jongin away from them, "How about we teleport home and let them deal with the brat?"

Jongin teleported us away right as the other mages opened their mouths to complain. After muttering something about a headache, Jongin went up the stairs to his bedroom, and a worried Yixing trailed after him, leaving me by myself in the living room.

The journey and my encounter with Baekhyun left me with a headache as well, but as I got to the foot of the staircase, I heard a thump and looked around with narrowed eyes, but the thump sounded as if it were coming below me. Below me? I was starting to get scared, because below me was the basement where Jongin was found and no one had gone down there after finding Jongin because it was absolutely terrifying.

So, being the idiot I was, I walked over to the rug hiding the trapdoor, opened the trapdoor, and closed it on my way down. I had been curious to see the basement again, but since I was afraid of what happened to Jongin, I hadn't even gone near the trapdoor. The odd thing about the basement now as I stood there was that it was lit. When we had looked for Jongin, it was almost pitch black and almost impossible to see anything, but it was illuminated now and the mess that had been there was cleaned up as if it was never there in the first place.

"Who's here?" I had both pistols out as I asked this, looking around cautiously even though there were no movements other than my own. There was thumping earlier, and I know for a fact that I wasn't the one who turned the light on, so who elve could it be?

"Put the weapons down first, and then we'll talk." That was undeniably Yongguk's voice. I remembered his voice too clearly from the time I had met him in person. After I slowly slid my pistols back into their holsters, Yongguk materialized just a few paces away from me, leaning against a bookshelf. 

"How did you get in here?" I don't know what made me so brave so suddenly, but if he was a threat to my mages, I would have to fight him.

He seemed amused with me and shrugged lazily before pulling away from the bookshelf and dragging it to the side, revealing a narrow hallway, "Follow me. I'll answer your questions when we meet up with the others."

Now don't get me wrong. It's not like I wasn't skeptical. I was definitely skeptical, and he knew it; that's why he threw a glance at me from over his shoulder as he walked into the mouth of the suspicious hallway.

"Let's be real. If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it by now." He had a point. Jongin and Yixing were two floors above us and the other mages were hours away so he and I were alone without other witnesses.

"And if you try, I won't hesitate to shoot you in the face." He pretended not to hear me and continued walking into the hallway, my feet slowly trailing after him. I had no idea why I was going along with what he said, or if he could be trusted after all, "Where are we going?"

As I glanced back at where we had come from, I noticed that the room we had come from was long gone and I could hardly tell where we were going, only following the sounds of Yongguk's footsteps up ahead.

Yongguk never answered me, though it wasn't like he had to. Just a few minutes more of walking later, we had walked into another room that was lit, though this one seemed to be much fancier. There were sofas and tables, bookshelves and desks, people and-... people. It took me a moment to realize that they were Yongguk's friends from the frozen lake I had found Xiumin and Suho at. 

"Took you long enough." that was the tall lanky male speaking, brushing past Yongguk and holding a hand out to me with a wide grin on his face, "I'm Zelo."

"Yun Seung." I took his hand and shook it just slightly, and after another moment of staring at me, Zelo let go of my hand and went to lay across one of the long couches. One of the other males took the oppurtunity to sit down on the tall male's legs, a smug look on his face when Zelo squirmed underneath him.

"Jongup, don't hurt him." Another male sighed, but as he said that, he grinned to himself and then sat down on Zelo's lap, the tall mage squirming even more with curse words spewing out of his mouth.

"I'm Himchan." Another male walked forward and pulled me away from what I was looking at, instead taking me to a corner of the space with Yongguk following him.

I spotted a chair in the corner of the space and sat down without caring about what either of them would think about it, crossing my arms as I looked up at them. Yongguk didn't sit down, but his arms crossed over his chest, "You had questions for us, did you not?"

Honestly, I didn't know what to ask them. Would it be wrong for me to ask them of my mages' pasts when the mages themselves didn't want to tell me? Do I ask them what I had to do with the mages and why it was me and not someone else who had found them? Should I ask them why they knew everything about me and my mages?

"Are you the ones who were trying to open Jongin's ring box?" When their confused expressions told me to elaborate, I let out a sigh, "When I found Jongin- I mean Kai, the basement was a mess."

"That was not ours." Yongguk shook his head and then let out a shrug, "We only entered this building when we became sure that you'd come here to find the mage and left a sign for you to know who we are. We had no knowledge of what went on in this house before we got here."

"Why... why do you know so much about me? Why have you been following me?" the six warlocks confused me even more than my own mages did. While the mages had nothing to do with me, BAP didn't even know of my existence... or did they?

Yongguk looked over at Himchan, and the male with oddly feminine features shrugged his own shoulders as he glanced back at the other warlocks, "Many years ago, when we had gone on one of our tours to make sure all of the magical borders were up and working, some girl had been riding towards us on a warpboard. Maybe if she wasn't in such a rush, we would have all been saved from this trouble, but after she crashed into me, I've been unable to stop seeing her future."

"You're talking about me, aren't you?" I groaned and dropped my head in shame, remembering that I had the tendency of running people over when I was on my way to school because of my stupid tardiness, "But why have you been able to see everything that happened before I did?"

"Mages aren't the only ones with powers." Yongguk informed me, and when I looked up at him, he had disappeared and slowly materialized again, "I have the power to become invisible, Himchan can see the future, Jongup can shapeshift, Daehyun has the power of dream walking, Zelo has the power of manipulation, and Youngjae has the power to create any kind of space he wants; like this room."

I looked around at the room before widening my eyes in surprise because honestly, the room was pretty damn cool. There was only one thing wrong about the room, and the rest of this all, "But can't one action I make now change the future?"

Himchan looked thoughtful for a moment before a grin lit his face, "You can, of course. In every one of my predictions, I can see three different options; backups, if you want to call them. We prepare to move according to each one of these options."

"But why? Why are you moving according to them? Why are you helping us?"

"Your mages won't remember since their memories were warped, but we were there." Yongguk's face fell as he said this, then turning so he could watch the warlocks, "We watched them be transfused with these powers, watched them destroy village after village with pure bloodthirsty revenge, and watched them as they were cursed and put into rings that no one would ever be able to find or claim ever again."

"It made us all pretty guilty, actually." Himchan sighed, and I turned to him to see he had walked over to Yongguk and rubbed the leader's back soothingly, "Those boys always followed orders, but in the end, it was the orders they were given that eventually caused them to be separated and sent away."

"But then something happened." Yongguk hummed and turned back to me, his eyes now lit with determination, "When Himchan told me he was having visions of you- of them- I was completely baffled. What did you have to do with them that would allow you the authority to claim these rings and break the curse?"

"We looked into your family line because of that." Himchan pulled himself away from the leader as he spoke again, now walking away from us and to the sofa where the other warlocks were wrestling on, "It took us some time to figure it out, of course, but we eventually figured it out."

Yongguk was now looking at me gravely,  holding a book out to me. When I looked at it, the names on the book seemed oddly familiar, though I wasn't sure why the book, the spell book, was under my family's name. 

"Your ancestors were the ones who cursed those mages."

You know, this was originally supposed to be a double update, but I got really lazy and only got this chapter done in the time span of about ten hours. I'm such a slacker, I know. So, you have another cliff hanger, and forgive me for the lack of EXO interactions yet again, I'm just trying to find a decent balance. Ohoho, I brought BAP back, right on time. Aha, I'm so happy. I really enjoy BAP, but I don't think I'd be able to write a whole story for them, so I have to keep them as the characters they are now. 

For today's question:

I was thinking of adding some real antagonists to the story line. I already had one in mind, but if there's anyone you want to see as a bad guy, who would you want it to be?

Like I say every time, thank you all for reading, subscribing, upvoting, commenting, and supporting this all together! I passed the 200 comments mark yesterday night and I was pretty stoked because comments always make me happy. Anyway, if you guys ever have burning questions to ask me, feel free to pm me. I have the habit of spoiling things to whoever asks to know, so yeah. Enough of my jabbering! Enjoy this chapter and have a brilliant day! Until tomorrow! :)