Death by Bratz is not how I thought I’d perish.

But nope. I guess I’m going to die right here, as these girls make mincemeat of my internal organs.

“Let me have at her first,” Jade growls, cracking her fists. Cloe scoffs.

“Are you kidding? I’m the one who tracked her down.”

“You already scratched her, Cloe!” Yasmin exclaims. “You’ve had your turn!”

“That didn’t even count! It was barely a graze!”

I sigh, kicking aside a few rotting leaves and taking a seat on the rough forest floor.

“Are you guys done?” I ask wearily. “Can someone just take me out?”

“Shut up!” they screech in unison. I glumly rest my head on my palms.

“I get that you guys want to savor my death and all, but if you could just off me, that would be great,” I say.

Sasha looks at me with narrowed eyes. “Why’re you so resigned to your death anyway?”

“I don’t know. A whole bunch of reasons.” I count them off on my fingers. “I mean, one, Taehyung Kim is the biggest I’ve met in my entire life and has made my life completely miserable.”

    “Taehyung’s a doll, though,” Yasmin croons, clapping a perfectly-manicured hand to her heart.

    “No, he’s a . Two, Windsong Prep .”

    “What the- why?” Jade gasps.

    “Oh, I don’t know. The cultish obsession with sports. The cultish obsession with money. The cultish obsession with Taehyung- who is, as previously stated, a .”

    Cloe snorts. “You’re not seriously suicidal over this stuff, right?”

    “These aren’t really the main reasons why.”

    “Then what is?”

    I exhale. “Well, apparently, monsters are real.”  

    “Um, that’s really ing rude,” Sasha says, raising her eyebrows. “You can’t use that word.”

    “Sorry. I meant succubi. And... sorcerers, apparently. Wait, before you guys kill me, can you just explain what’s going on with this whole sorcerer thing?”

    Yasmin rolls her eyes. “Okay, this is getting really old.”

    “Just tell her and put her out of her misery,” Jade grumbles.

    “Look.” Cloe sighs. “Windsong is filled with magical creatures. Not just us succubi, but goblins, elves, harpies, banshees, ghouls, dwarves-,”

    “There was Vlad,” Jade says absentmindedly, picking at her nails. “The really hot vampire. He moved back to Albania at the end of the semester, though.”

    “He was really hot,” Sasha hums.

    “Point is,” Cloe continues, speaking over her friends. “All of these beings? They exist.”

    “Okay,” I say slowly. “So... where do sorcerers fall in this spectrum?”

    “Sorcerers are at the top,” Yasmin cuts in, smacking her lips. “They’re the most powerful. They can use magical weapons, incantations, mind manipulation-,”

    “-and Taehyung and his friends are all sorcerers. Better yet, they’re all super loaded.” Sasha her lips. “Perks of being some old, crusty sorcerer family.”

 “Wait, so his parents are sorcerers, too?” I yelp. Mrs. Kim’s kindly face flashes in my mind; there’s no way she could be.... a sorcerer.

    Jade snorts. “Yeah. How did you think they got so rich? You think it was through hard work? Like, this was some kind of American Dream thing?”

    “What the- they used magic to get money?”

    “Kind of.” Sasha rolls her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about this. Don’t you have any manners? It’s not classy to talk about money.”

    “I don’t need your Westchester rules,” I snap. “I’m a bit more preoccupied with the fact that-,”

    An enormous bang! rings through the air. Cloe gasps in surprise. My jaw drops as I see a hole in the side of her neck, profusely dripping blood.

    In the next second, she collapses to the ground in a heap.

    Before the other Bratz have time to react, bullets are fired at each of them. They fall to the dirt without a single sound, their faces frozen in the same shocked expression. The last thing I see before the balls of light hovering around me suddenly melt into the air is the blood spattered all over my hoodie. I stumble backwards in the darkness, my eyes wide in fear-

A flashlight shines on my face.

“Let’s go, Joo,” Dev says in a grim voice, a hunting rifle in his hands.

Lucy and Tom emerge behind him, holding high-powered lanterns and neon Nerf Super Soakers. They appraise the bodies of the four succubi lying in front of us.

“Let’s some more solution on them, just in case,” Lucy murmurs. “I don’t know if they’re supposed to disappear or something when they die.”

“Alright.” Tom says. The two of them spray the bodies with the Super Soaker, and a foul stench begins to rise up in the air. I grimace, cover my nose with the sleeve of my hoodie.

“Gross,” I moan. “What is that? And what are you guys doing here? Oh my god, are you three magical creatures, too-,”

“No, no,” Tom says, flashing me a reassuring smile. “We’ll explain everything in a sec, Joo. Right now, let’s just focus on disposing of these succubi.” He taps his water gun. “Solution #18 at work, ladies and gentlemen.”  

“They’re like... half-melted,” Lucy says, peering down at them. “God, this is ridiculous. I can’t believe we’re taking down our first monsters with Super Soakers.”

“Hey, I shot them!” Dev protests.

“Where did you get that gun anyway?” I ask.

He rolls his eyes. “My dad bought a bunch of rifles and paid for shooting classes when we moved here because he wanted us to go hunting. They’ve literally just been sitting in his study on display for the last few years.”

“New money,” Lucy sighs. Dev shoots her an annoyed look.

Suddenly, Cloe’s arm shoots up. Everyone shrieks, jumping backwards. A gunshot rings from Dev’s rifle. Tom sprays her with a vengeance and her arm slowly melts into a puddle of flesh-colored goop.

“What the hell?” Lucy shouts, glaring at Dev. “Put the safety on! Are you trying to kill us?”

“Sorry, sorry! I got scared!” he yelps. “Jesus, what a mess.”

“This is taking forever,” Tom sighs. “This is a lot more anticlimactic than I expected our first monster kill to be.”

“It’s not like we have any powerful weapons to kill them in one hit,” Lucy mutters.

“Can I remind you that I literally shot them?” Dev says.

“You know what I mean!”  

“I don’t know what you mean,” I pipe up. “Can someone explain. Please.”

    “We don’t have any real magical weapons,” Lucy tells me. “So we have to rely on using human weapons that’ll just momentarily stun them, and then solutions we’ve created that counteracts their poison.”

    “We didn’t think the solution part would work,” Tom says. “We thought it might just disable their poison. But nope, it melts their faces off, too.”

    “So I guess everyone here has known about magical creatures, except for me,” I say.

    “Not quite.” Lucy squeezes the last few drops of solution out of her Super Soaker, and then stands up. “Alright, we’re finished. Now let’s get Joo out of here so we can tell her what the hell is going on.”

Dean Martin plays over the tinny speakers of the IHOP as we dully sit at a booth table, too weary to say anything. We are the only people in this place- understandable, seeing how it is nearly 1 in the morning. The bright fluorescent lights and chipper attitude of our waitress bleakly contrast our downtrodden moods.

“I’ll get you kids some water,” she says in a squeaky, upbeat voice. Her blue nametag reads Sally-Mae. “Anything else?”

“A Funny Face pancake, please,” Tom mumbles. Sally-Mae giggles as she scrawls it down.

“Aw, that’s so cute! I love the Funny Face pancake!” She flashes us a smile. “Anything else? Bacon? Eggs? Cinnamon swirl pancakes? Ooh, our monthly special is a-,”

“That’s fine,” Lucy says, cutting her off. “Just one Funny Face pancake for him.”

“Right-o!” Sally-Mae bustles away. Dev stares after her in wistful nostalgia.

“Must be nice,” he sighs.

“What’s a Funny Face pancake?” I ask. Dev and Lucy immediately groan, while Tom’s face lights up.

“It’s this chocolate pancake with cherries and whipped cream for eyes, whipped cream for its nose, and chocolate chips and whipped cream for its mouth!” Tom passionately explains. “It’s the best thing at this place!”

“Yeah, it’s off the kids’ menu, Tom,” Dev grumbles. “Do you know how damaging that is to your rep? You order a pancake meant for a sugar-crazed 6-year-old.”

“It’s amazing, though! It tastes so good!”

“Who cares! You’re supposed to order the sirloin-pancake-hashbrowns combo. Makes you look macho, but diversified. Attracts all the shaw-ties-,”

I slam my fist on the table. “Stop.”

Lucy, Dev, and Tom look at me in alarm. I am furiously glaring at all of them.

    “I don’t even know where to start,” I say, my voice rising. “First you guys ditch me, then you randomly appear and shoot- shoot four succubi, because they apparently exist-,”

“You were really calm back there,” Dev says. “Why’re you freaking out now?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because all of this is starting to really sink in?! Monsters are real-,”

    “Shhh!” Lucy hisses. “Look, we stopped talking to you because we thought you were a sorcerer, too. When you told us you lived with Taehyung, and were ‘family friends’- well, we thought you were part of some other sorcerer family.”

    “But Cloe scratched me. And they all hate me.”

    “We thought she was getting possessive over Taehyung or something.” Dev shrugs. “I don’t know, some sort of magical spat.”

    “Then when you came to school with that amulet, our suspicions were confirmed,” Lucy tells me.

I narrow my eyes. “Then how did you figure out that I wasn’t? How did you know the Bratz would attack me? And were succubi? And... magic?”

“Calm down. We’ll get to everything.”

Sally-Mae comes back with Tom’s Funny Face pancake and a wide smile. “Here ya go!”

“Thanks!” Tom grins.

I glance at his plate. The pancake really does look as lame as Dev described it.

“We were picking up takeout a few hours ago when we overheard the Bratz talking about you,” Dev says. “Stuff about how a stupid human was ruining everything, how they were going to scope out Taehyung’s party and take you out, blah blah. We were in those woods watching for you for, like, hours.”

“Thanks,” I say, surprisingly touched.

“Yeah, we felt really, really bad,” Tom says through a mouthful of chocolate pancake. “We all just left you!”

“Yeah, sorry,” Dev says. “And we figured out the Bratz were succubi a while ago. We knew they were some kind of magical creature, but we didn’t know what.”

 “Look, Joo. Here’s the deal.” Lucy crosses her arms. “Magic is real.”

    I blink.

    “Well, clearly,” I say. “But technically, it’s not magic. It’s more like... the occurrence of certain subatomic particles and the manipulation of their properties to achieve feats that would otherwise be impossible. I’m just shocked that it exists on this planet.”

    They stare at me in absolute confusion.

    “What the ?” Dev finally says. “Where are you getting this from?”

    “Well, Sasha trapped me inside some library at Taehyung’s house. I found this book called Magical Objects Explained, and- well, yeah. That’s how I was able to make this amulet. Remember when you found me sleeping in the lab that one day?”

    “I’ve found you sleeping in the lab 3 times this week alone,” Lucy says.

    “I mean, like, Monday.”

    Her eyes widen. “Oh, yeah. Wait, you were making the amulet? In the Windsong Lab?”

    “How is that even possible?” Dev breathes. “You- how did you learn how to create magic...,”

    “I didn’t technically create- never mind. Anyway, it took me a hell of a long time to figure it all out. I have a stash of magical matter currently growing in petri dishes right now, thanks to Cloe’s inability to keep her hands to herself.”

    The three of them are absolutely stunned. Tom is frozen, his fork in mid-air as he goggles at me.

    Then he says, “You are a genius.”

    “It really wasn’t that hard, guys. Now will you guys please explain how you guys know about this stuff?”

    “Yeah, of course.” Dev exhales. “My family moved here in the 9th grade, after my dad was promoted. Almost immediately, I felt something off about this city. Do you ever step into Windsong Prep and just feel completely freaked out? Like your stomach’s turned over and-,”

    “Yeah,” I say incredulously. “I feel that every day.”

    “It’s because there’s such a large congregation of monsters in one place,” Tom pipes up.

“Even though Lucy and I weren’t scholarship students, our entrance exam scores were pretty high, so they put us in this special seminar with other scholarship kids,” Dev continues. “That’s where the three of us met.”

“They would give us these really strange projects to work on,” Lucy says. “I scored really high on the biology and anatomy section of the entrance exam, so I was supposed to figure out how to make antidotes for these different poisons using this software stuff. It was crazy hard. Like, something an actual doctor would have to work on. But we’d get only a week for these things, so we were all forced to do it, or we were at risk of getting kicked out. It was awful.”

I lean forward in anticipation. Hearing about Windsong before I arrived here is oddly intriguing- especially this seminar.

“Why did they discontinue the seminar?” I ask.

Dev clenches his jaw. Lucy and Tom look at him uncomfortably.

“There was this girl,” Tom says slowly. “Uh, she was a sophomore. Absolute genius. The crown jewel of Windsong. Well... one day, we all got an email that she’d posted something on our seminar’s online forum. When we went to view the message, though, it was gone. A few hours later, she was found dead in her bedroom. Suicide.”

“We thought he might’ve left a final message or something,” Lucy says.

“So Dev-,” Tom glances at him. “-spent... a really long time trying to access cached copies of the website, find what she had left.”

“She left this essay about how she had discovered magic was real, and everything we had been doing in seminar was to help sorcerers advance their power.” Dev says, his eyes focused on the table. He is trembling with anger. “It was the worst day of my life.”

My eyes widen in shock. “What do you mean, advance their power?”

“Sorcerers are a type of monster,” Lucy says. “Instead of attacking people or whatever, they use their power to gain profit and influence in the world. They manipulate, steal, cheat, you name it. Jimin’s father, for example, runs Templon.”

“What?! The Templon?”

“Yeah. How do you think it was able to get so big? Magic.”

“He took out all his competition, altered his finances, used illicitly gathered information...,” Dev grits his teeth. “Don’t even get me started on everyone else.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Yeah, well, they cancelled seminar after that,” Lucy says. “At least we were able to use all the stuff we’d worked on and created to defend ourselves against the monsters. For example, solution #18, which counteracts succubi poison, is one of the things that I created for a project.”

“Holy ,” I breathe. “I thought sorcerers were, like, good.”

“That’s a myth perpetuated by pop culture,” Tom snorts. “Harry Potter should meet the sorcerers in this place.”

“Windsong just attracts evil beings,” Lucy grumbles. “Oh, real mind game: who came to Windsong first, the monsters or the rich people?”

   “So is everyone here a monster?” I ask.

    Dev scrunches his nose in thought. “I’d say about 50%. There’s no way to find out who’s a part of that 50%, though, because if we reveal that we know about magic, they’ll come for us next. So don’t tell anyone.”

    I snort. Taehyung would be more than happy to slit my throat in my sleep. There’s no way in hell I’m letting any of this get out.

A/N: ugh this chap is so long and awkwardly cut off like i didn't know where to cut it

anyway yea omg im gettin behind on replying to comments sorry guys..... UGH i started this diet yesterday (ive been eating like crap this entire break and need to like reset my healthy eating habits and ) and i literally want to die...... i want CARBS!!!!!!! im so used to eating sweets and junk that my bodys totally craving them but im like @me no

im so tired