You're in the gym's basement, sitting on the floor, with various knives and daggers spread out in front of you, a rag in your hand. You're too pre-occupied with cleaning the blades to hear anyone come in, so you jump a little when Tao says "What are you doing?" all of a sudden, disrupting the still silence you were just enjoying a second ago. You almost jump out of your skin and look over your shoulder to glare at him. Tao looks smug.

"I love sneaking up on you, it's such a rare accomplishment to scare you," he says, pulling his phone out of his pocket. He's freshly out of school, you note, noticing the backpack on his shoulders. "That's a point for me," he says, punching something into his phone.

"Do I want to know why you count the amount of times you manage to scare me?" you ask, turning away from him and going back to cleaning the dagger in your hand. 

"Nope," Tao says, popping the 'p'. "Seriously though, what are you doing?" 

"Cleaning." 

"Cool." 

"Yeah? Wanna help?" 

"Not particularly. Whoa, this is pretty." 

You look up to see him staring at the shelf with powders, ashes and fairy dusts. You're particularly proud of how you arranged them. All the ashes, dusts and powders that you don't use on the daily basis are stores in these bulky glass bottles with cork plugs. There's some fluids there, too. Every ash and powder has a different color, but they're all pastel, and it actually looks nice on the white wall. 

"Are those ashes?" Tao asks curiously.

"Yes. And magic powders, and some weird fluids I still haven't figured out the purpose of," you explain. 

"Nice," the boy praises.

You continue on with your cleaning while Tao walks around the shelves, books, and things, careful not to touch anything. He babbles on and on about some teacher he doesn't like and you tune out, not really listening to him, but still enjoying a little bit of company, when he suddenly stops talking and the silence makes you suspicious. You put the last dagger down and look around the basement, trying to spot him. You use your tattoo to pin-point his location and look in the general direction your tattoo tells you to. Tao chooses that moment to emerge from between two tall bookshelves, holding something in his hand. It looks like clay. 

"What's that?" he asks. You frown.

"Where did you get that?" 

"It was on the floor. That's why I picked it up." 

"I don't think that was a good idea." 

"Why?" Tao asks, looking up at you, panicked. "It's clay. It's just clay. What does it do? Is it poisonous? Am I gonna die?" 

You stand up and walk towards him. Tao is not blinking. You look down at the shapeless, grey lump in his hand. You haven't seen it before. It doesn't look suspicious. 

"Why did you even pick it up? You know what happened the last time one of you touched something here," you say. 

"Three of us," Tao corrects you. "And I don't know. It was just lying there, in the middle of the floor, so I picked it up." 

"Must've fallen off the shelf or something," you say, shrugging. "Well, you're alive, so there's that." 

"Yeah!" Tao exclaims. "Now, back to Mr. Gan." 

You send him a questioning look. He makes a betrayed face.

"Mr. Gan! My chemistry teacher?" he says, throwing his arms to the sides. "He's a ." 

"I don't remember anyone named Gan at our school," you admit. Tao's face goes blank, then he puts his free hand on his hip and tilts his head to the side, giving you a full-on mean girl pose. 

"Did you listen to anything I was talking about?"

You laugh nervously. Tao rolls his eyes and turns on his heel, set on putting the chunk of clay back where he found it (but not the floor). 

"Oh come on, I was cleaning the daggers, I got distracted," you say, watching as he disappears between the bookshelves. You follow his steps and lean over one of the bookshelves as he scans the second one in search of a free spot he could put the clay back on.

"Friends are more important than daggers," he says, glaring at you. "And I was just saying that he's a monster and that I wish someone could kick his for once." 

And that's when you feel some weird magic. You snap your eyes at the clay Tao is putting back at the shelf, and the second you do, the thing disappears from Tao's palm. The boy freezes. Then he slowly withdraws his arm from where it's hovering above the shelf, and you stare at his empty hand. He shows it to you, pale. 

"What did you do?" he asks in terror.

"What did I do?" you panic, straightening up. You start looking around, as if expecting the clay to show up next to you out of thin air. "Where did it go?!" 

"What do you mean: go?!" Tao screams. "Clay does not go. Clay stays. It's like a...a rock pet! It does not go!"

"Well, it just did," you hiss, scanning the place. You run around the basement, Tao does the same, and you search everywhere, but the stupid chunk of clay is gone. "Jesus, Tao, what the hell did you do?!" 

"I didn't do anything!" 

You stop in the middle of the basement, your brain catching up, and you facepalm hard enough for Tao to stick his head out from a wardrobe that stands in the corner of the room. 

"You wished for someone to kick Mr Gan's ," you say, emphasizing the words. Tao's face is blank. 

"I said '', not '', but I'm glad you've finally started listening to me," he says after a few seconds of thinking. You let out a groan, grab your backpack from the floor (almost hitting yourself in the face with your baseball bat) and run out of the basement, Tao following shortly. "Where are we going?!" 

"The school!" you scream. "Knowing our luck, that clay was some kind of a wish-granting—thing." 

"Oh my God!" Tao shouts, suddenly out-running you. "And I lost it?!" 

You barge into your Jeep, turn on the engine and probably cross the speed limit on your way, but you make it to school in record time, your anxiety level over the roof. Tao can probably scent it because he comments on how stressful school is no matter how old you are, and then proceeds to laugh nervously the whole way down into the building. 

"You know, you'd think after all this time we'd learn not to touch anything," you hiss. It's the middle of the class when you enter the school and it's awfully quiet in the building; there's only that weird, kind of hollow echoing kind of sound in the hallways. Tao starts sniffling the air, trying to pick something up, and then you see him tilting his head in a funny way, meaning he's listening in. You try to use your magic senses, but come up empty. 

"Are you sure it's here?" Tao asks, sceptical. "I mean. Did it teleport, or something?" 

"I don't even know what it is, how would I know if it teleported?" you ask. You walk down the corridor, walking past your old lockers, and you feel a bit nostalgic at that. "I just know that you said something dumb right before it disappeared, it's the only lead we have." 

"Shh," tao hisses suddenly, raising his finger at you. You freeze. "Oh my God." 

He breaks into a run. He's much faster than you and he disappears around the corner. 

"Wait!" you shout, pulling your baseball bat out, and breaking into a run as well. You turn the corner on full-speed and just as you're nearing the library, someone opens the damn doors. 

You hit it with your whole body, bounce back with a yelp, and end up on the floor, your baseball bat thrown to the side and rolling away from you. You're in the middle of crying out in pain when someone crouches down in front of you, squealing. 

It's Heejin. And Minjoon is with her, looking shocked. "Oh my God, Dal," Heejin says, her hands on your knees and arms. "I'm so sorry, I didn't know you were here, I didn't—" 

You grab her hand unceremoniously and she reacts on an instinct - she helps you stand up. 

"I can't talk right now," you say, grabbing your baseball bat. "Gotta go!" 

You run past her. She calls out your name, but you're too busy trying to pin-point Tao's whereabouts; once you do, you follow the weird sounds you hear, and you barge into an empty classroom. 

A man who you think might be Mr. Gan is sitting on the floor, in the corner of the room, plastered to the wall behind him. He looks scared but not hurt, so that's a good thing. You look to the left, where Tao is wrestling with someone. It's just a random woman (or at least you think that it's a woman; she's , but the only thing that makes you decide that it's a female is her face and her long hair, because aside from that, she looks pretty gender-less) that you don't know, and judging by Tao's really confused face, he doesn't know her either. Either way, she seems hell-bound on killing Mr Gan, because she's trashing around in Tao's strong (albeit shaky) grip, making grabby hands at the teacher and shaping her palms into claws. She looks a bit mad and her eyes are shining piercing green. 

"She's strong!" Tao yells. The woman kicks him in the shin all of a sudden and you hear bones breaking; Tao yells, falls onto the floor, and the woman gets free. She throws herself towards Mr. Gan, letting out animal-like noises, and you're a few steps away from her, but you manage to get to her right when she's in the middle of Tao and Mr. Gan. You take a huge swing, your baseball bat secure in your palms, and hit her on the head with it.

The woman bounces back, hits the wall on her left, and slides down, shocked. She looks at you, only noticing you now; she's still for a few seconds. You're frozen in place, Mr. Gan is wheezing loudly, and Tao is on the floor, clutching at his calf, sweat covering his forehead. 

The woman tilts her head to the side in a bird-like manner. Definitely not a human then. 

"," you manage to say a moment before she changes her mind and decides to attack you instead of Mr. Gan.

You step to the side just as she's nearing you and she's running fast enough to run past you like a mad bull. You turn on your heels, following her movements, and notice Heejin and Minjoon by the door, staring at the scene in front of them wide-eyed and pale-faced. Then you also notice a weird sigil on the woman's back; it looks Tibetan. The woman looks around when she realizes she hasn't caught you and fixes her gaze on you.

"You're not too bright, are you?" you ask, frowning, wondering what the hell you're actually dealing with. You take off your backpack and throw it at Tao; the woman follows your gaze. Then she notices something or someone behind you, and you realize that Mr. Gan is still in the corner of the room, and that he's the one that the creature is actually after. You take a step to the side, trying to hide the teacher from her line of sight. "Tao, give me the two-bladed dagger." 

You hear the boy open your backpack. The woman moves her head abruptly again, like a little bird, lets out a grunt and takes a few big steps towards you, in quite a quick pace. She stretches her arm towards you, like she wants to move you aside. 

"Dal!" Tao shouts. You glance at him; the blade he throws you flashes in the air. You catch it in the middle and take a swing at the woman, choosing the silver blade to attack it with first. 

The blade pierces the woman's weirdly grey-colored skin and makes a cut right in the middle of her chest. She stops walking, looks down at the wound, then up at you, and seems to frown in confusion. 

"Not the silver one, then?" you say out loud, switching the silver blade to the iron blade on the other side of the dagger. Before the woman can look up at you, you the iron blade into her chest; the woman's body literally seems to be made of clay and the blade kind of disappears inside it. The creature looks up at you, its eyes flashing green momentarily, and then she shrinks back into a tiny lump of clay and you're left standing there with it impaled on your dagger. 

Everyone is completely silent. 

Then Minjoon speaks up. "This was by this far the most disturbing thing I've ever seen in my life," he says. "What about you, Heejin?" 

"Yes, definitely number one on my list," Heejin says, nodding solemnly at Minjoon's words. You lower your arm, look at the clay that's still impaled onto your dagger, and see the same sigil you saw on the woman on the back of it. 

"Ohh," you say, realization hitting you. "That was a tulpa. That explains a lot." 

"That explains absolutely nothing!" Mr. Gan screams out suddenly. 

"Don't worry Mr. Gan, this all has a very legit explanation," Tao says. You look at him, then walk up to him, still holding the dagger. 

"And what is that?!" Mr Gan screams, sounding hysterical. 

"Science, obviously," Tao says, laughing. You help him up. His leg is already healing, but it looks like his bone broke, so he's still hurting. "The truth is, I drugged you, and everything you just saw is in your head." 

You look up at him. 

"You did not," you say. 

"Knock him out," Tao whispers to you.

"Tao!" 

"Oh just do it already," Tao hisses. You throw your arms up in annoyance, then turn towards Mr. Gan and snap your fingers at him. The man goes limp and still and slides down the wall, unconscious. 

You look at Minjoon and Heejin, who are still standing in the door. It's like they've turned to stone, that's how still they both are. 

"I can't believe no one came in to check on all the noise," you admit. 

"I'm gonna get expelled," Tao cries out. 

"That was awesome," Heejin sums up. You wave your dagger in the air with the clay on it. 

"Thank you, thank you," you say, bowing at her. 

"I'm so getting expelled," Tao repeats, leaning against you. "Minjoon, you okay? Because your heart sounds like you're on a verge of a panic attack." 

You look at Minjoon to see him hyperventilating. Heejin panics next to him, grabs him by his shoulders, and starts calming him down the best way she can. You can hear a voice down the corridor then and you panic, recognizing your previous math teacher's voice. 

"Is everything okay?" he's asking. "What was that noise?" 

Heejin looks at you pale faced and then pushes Minjoon down the corridor. 

"Minjoon doesn't feel well!" she screams, desperate to get the teacher out of here. You look around in panic.

"Okay, we need to clean," you say, pointing at the knocked down tables and papers scattered around. Minjoon leans down the corridor, putting a great front, and the teacher goes to the infirmary with him. You're gonna have to thank both Minjoon and Heejin for quick thinking (and braveness).

Tao doesn't get expelled in the end because Mr. Gan doesn't do anything about the whole thing. The next time Tao sees him, the man sends him a very angry, very suspicious look and mouths a 'I'm watching you' to him. Tao is convinced that he didn't believe what he saw and decided to treat it like a dream. You did try to make the whole thing look like he's fallen asleep in his class. 

Heejin talks about that thing for the next week and you secure the magic clay in a special box labeled 'DO NOT TOUCH' for future use.

A Tulpa is a "physical materialization of a thought, resulting in the creation of a being or object", basically. Tao wanted someone to kick his teacher's , so he got someone to (almost) do it.

Thank you for reading white chip orange cookies!