Chapter 12: Lobotomy based humor

Kaz crouched lower over the teleportation circle, rubbing a smudge of ash between his fingers like it might whisper secrets if coaxed politely enough. He hummed a little tune,off-key, but with intent,and tilted his head the way people do when trying to listen to something just outside the range of hearing.

Then, with all the gentle reverence of a priest addressing a particularly nervous altar boy, he said:

“Well then, my charming little catastrophe. How’d you like to be drawn?”

Leonor blinked. Once. Then again, slower, in the manner of someone trying to reset their eyeballs to see if the world looked less stupid the second time.

“Are you,” she began, and then paused, because she was a polite girl and this required very impolite language. “Are you talking to the magic circle?”

Kaz didn’t look up. “Mmm?”

Leonor puffed up like a cat in a rainstorm. “Why are you talking to a magic circle?”

He looked over his shoulder, deadpan. “I’m trying to teach it how to be a magic circle.”

There was a silence that could have bottled lightning. Leonor opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again with an audible click.

“That’s,that’s not how magic works!”

“Sure it is,” Kaz said cheerfully. “It’s called sorcery.” He grinned, tracing a looping correction over a particularly sulky rune, with a suspiciously pristine piece of chalk. “That’s the fancy word for when wizards can’t put a piece of magic in a box, so they say it doesn’t count. Oh, sure, some lunatic managed to cast a spell with a radish and a vague feeling of longing, and next thing you know it’s sorcery."

"He twirled the chalk between his fingers like a wand the sort of casual gesture that might worry anyone who knew what the chalk was last Tuesday." “Wizards get so miffed they don’t understand it, they shove all those poor sods over here to the Brindlward, slap ‘em with a probationary robe and say, ‘Go be peculiar in a legally distant manner.’ Even gave us a squat little pinky of a mage tower for our troubles. Charming place. Smells like burnt ambition and cheap lavender

Leonor, who had spent years studying structured sigil architecture, spell-sequencing, and the differential calculus of mana symmetry, was now chewing the inside of her cheek so hard it looked like it owed her money.

She vaguely recalled a tutor muttering darkly about a sorcerer who once summoned a thunderstorm using a sock, a duck call, and unresolved paternal tension.

She’d thought it was a joke. It wasn’t.

“But,why,” she spluttered, waving both hands at the chalk-scarred cobbles like they were personally responsible for this nonsense, “,why would a magic circle need to be taught how to be a magic circle?!”

Kaz turned to her, perfectly straight-faced.

“I don’t know. You go to the toilet every day, right?”

Leonor blinked. “What?”

“Exactly !!! You use it every day, but that doesn’t mean you know how your own butt works.”

Silence.

Leonor’s cheeks puffed out like she'd tried to swallow a fireball and found it deeply insulting.

Kaz grinned. She was trying very hard not to laugh. He could see it, the twitch in the corners of her mouth, the gleam of betrayal in her eyes as her dignity mounted a last stand.

“No one,” she said, struggling for composure, “has ever made a toilet joke in front of me before.”

He raised his eyebrows innocently. “Oh no. You poor thing. A childhood without toilet jokes? That’s emotional neglect, that is.”

She made a strangled sort of noise,half indignation, half not-quite-smothered giggle,and turned her back to him sharply, pretending to examine the nearest rune with excessive interest.

Kaz, seeing the corners of Leonor’s mouth betray her, settled into full performance mode. He lay back dramatically in the dust, one hand behind his head, the other gesturing lazily at the sky like it owed him money.

“You ever played poker at the Weeping Maid?”

Leonor raised an eyebrow..”

“So you’ve heard of it,” Kaz said solemnly. “Excellent. Now picture this: I’m nine, wearing a waistcoat that used to be a curtain, and I’ve just bluffed my way into a backroom game with three career criminals, a retired assassin with a twitchy eyelid, and a man named Uncle Spite who once bit someone for looking at his hat.”

Leonor stared. He grinned.

“The table’s sticky. The stakes are high. One of them has a live scorpion in a jar and calls it his lucky charm. I, meanwhile, am pretending to be a sickly orphan with an eye for card probabilities and a tragic past involving a runaway goose. The limp was award-winning. I even wept once, for effect.”

He sat up, sweeping one arm as if painting the scene.

“Round after round, I win little things,just enough to make them curious. A coin here, a ring there. A meat pie. Half a tooth. A bootlace blessed by someone’s aunt. They’re watching me now. Wondering. Sweating.”

“Then, final round. Tension’s thick enough to spread on toast. I go all in. I don’t have much,just a crust of bread, a button, and a small wooden duck I’ve been passing off as a ‘focus talisman.’ But the others? They match me. Even Uncle Spite.”

He leans forward, eyes glittering.

“And I win. Four aces. Nothing but net.”

Leonor squints. “There aren’t nets in poker.”

“Exactly,” Kaz whispers.

She almost smiles.

“But as they’re staring, stunned and betrayed, I stand up, very calm, very slow, and I say,”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

He straightens his back, adjusts an imaginary cravat, and drops into a deadly serious tone:

‘Gentlemen. It’s only fair I tell you… I’m actually illiterate. I have no idea what cards I just played.’

Silence.

Then Leonor snorts. Loudly. It escapes before she can stop it. A full, uncontrolled, betrayal-of-the-self kind of laugh that bursts out like a spell miscast. She immediately claps her hands over her mouth, but it’s too late. The damage is done.

Kaz watches, delighted, legs swinging like a child on a park bench.

“You,you didn’t,” Leonor wheezes. “You can definitely read, you liar!”

“Oh, sure,” Kaz says cheerfully. “But they didn’t know that. And by the time they figured it out, I was already riding off in a laundry cart.”

Leonor, still caught mid-laugh, tried very hard to summon the proper amount of outrage befitting a princess and possible war criminal in five different kingdoms. Unfortunately, decorum had gone off to sulk somewhere around the “focus talisman” and refused to come back.

“A laundry cart,” she said flatly, wiping her eyes. “You escaped in a laundry cart.”

Kaz nodded, legs still swinging. “Fastest one in the district. Pulled by a goat named ‘Injunction.’”

“You named your goat Injunction?”

“She named herself. I just listened.”

Leonor paused, gave him the kind of look normally reserved for suspicious mushrooms or low-budget prophets, and decided not to pursue that line of thought in case it spiraled into theology.

Instead, she turned back to the chalk-circle etched into the ground, now looking less like a ritual space and more like a badly-researched treasure map. “Still doesn’t explain why a teleportation circle needs a… tutor. That’s like teaching a spoon how to be curved.”

“Oh no, spoons are surprisingly ambitious,” Kaz said. “I knew one in a boarding house once. Wanted to be a fork. Spent its days practising tines in the cutlery drawer.”

She narrowed her eyes. “That’s not how metal works.”

Kaz sighed, wistful. “That’s what I told it too. Broke the poor thing’s spirit. Almost Ended up as a wind chime in a fishmonger’s window.”

But I took her to a Blacksmith, and made her the happiest fork, in Ferenwyld.

Leonor opened her mouth, then closed it again, deciding,correctly,that this was not a hill worth dying on.

“Fine,” she said, arms crossed, expression all determination and residual giggle. “Assuming, just hypothetically, that teleportation circles do need… schooling,what exactly are we supposed to teach it? Algebra? History? Pottery?”

Kaz perked up. “Oh, pottery would be lovely. Teaches patience. Grace under pressure. How not to explode in a kiln.”

“That’s not a skill a magic circle needs!”

He gasped. “Slander! Every good circle needs a hobby! Otherwise they just sit there, going mad, teleporting socks to the wrong hemisphere.”

Leonor pinched the bridge of her nose in the universal gesture for please gods grant me strength before I combust into idiocy. “We are supposed to be researching an ancient transportation network, not reforming the local geometry into a liberal arts major.”

Kaz stood up, brushing dust off his absurdly dramatic coat, which bore at least three unnecessary capes and one questionable feather.

“Leonor,” he said solemnly, “magic is a delicate, temperamental thing. Like soup. Or opera. Or old librarians with suspicious moustaches. You have to talk to it nicely. Let it know it’s valid.”

“…You want me to validate the teleportation circle.”

He tapped the side of his nose. “Exactly! Stroke its ego a little. Tell it it’s got lovely angles. Ask about its runes. Compliment its symmetry. Works wonders. I once got a door to open just by complimenting its hinges.”

“I'm guessing It wasn’t locked?”

“Well sure Cabbage, let's go with that, .”

She stared at him. Then at the chalked circle. Then at her own hands, as if trying to determine at what point in her life she made a wrong turn and ended up spell-wrangling with a pathological liar in seventeen layers of patchwork clothing.

Kaz smiled, sun-bright and shameless. “You know, for someone with a talent for magic and a dangerously precise memory for runic formulas, you’re quite bad at improvising.”

“And you,” she said, “have the tactical instincts of a concussed duck.”

He bowed. “Thank you.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

“Oh, I know. I just like ducks.”

There was a long pause.

Finally, with a sort of resigned grace only truly exhausted geniuses possess, Leonor turned back to the circle, drew herself up, and said, in the most regal voice she could muster:

“You’re a very pretty teleportation circle. I admire your,uh,glyph economy.”

Kaz beamed like a proud parent. “Beautiful. See? You’ve got this.”

The circle, for the record, did not react. But there was a faint shimmer. A twitch of light. A hum.

And deep beneath the cobbles, under the dust and the wards and the weight of several hundred years of extremely poor maintenance decisions, something ancient yawned, stretched…

…and started to pay attention.

Kaz, catching the shift in air pressure like a hound catching the scent of plot, grinned wider.

Leonor frowned. “What was that?”

Kaz held up a finger. “Either magic… or the goat again.”

Leonor blinked. “Wait. What did happen to the goat?”

Kaz looked suddenly evasive. “We don’t talk about the Goat Rebellion of District Seven. Not since the Incident with the Cheese.”

Leonor didn’t press further.

She just glared at him. Glowing red with humiliation, amusement, and the dawning realization that she is, in fact, not immune to stupid boys with clever mouths.

“If you ever tell anyone I laughed,”

“I vanish into legend. A rumor. A breeze. Possibly a duck.”

Leonor turns her back to him again, but this time it’s shaking slightly.

Kaz patted the magic circle like a conspirator.

“Told you she had a soul in there somewhere.”

The circle sizzled faintly in what might have been agreement. Or indigestion. Either way, it was progress.

----------------------------------------

System trivia :

The Weeping Maid is one of Brindleward’s oldest and most structurally resentful buildings. It leans slightly left. So did its founder. Elga Thorne—first owner, barmaid, and local icon of weaponized frailty—earned her reputation by singlehandedly flattening drunkards, thugs, and one extremely aggressive goose, all while looking like she hadn’t slept, eaten, or blinked in weeks. Witnesses often described her as “on the verge of collapse.” None of them could describe what happened next. Not with the same voice.

That reputation still lingers, thick as the smell of spilled gin and suppressed memory. But the system has observed… changes.

[BEGIN SYSTEM OBSERVATION THREAD — ACCESS LEVEL: ROOT]

→ Structural integrity of the floorboards: 63%. Emotional residue saturation: 91%. Density of “held breath” moments: elevated. Air tastes of copper and unfinished thoughts.

→ Incident Log 05: Man attempts to cheat at dice. Hexed fingertip still twitches beneath the bar. No one's moved it. No one's asked to.

→ Incident Log 12: A scream was heard. Not alarming. Scream came from a patron’s shadow. That is alarming. Shadow has since stopped mimicking.

→ System User Detected: Classification... unclear. No teleportation signature. No arcane wake. No divine tether. No origin.

→ User enters at 03:17. Sits at bar. Orders “House Bitter.” Does not drink.

User looks into it. For eleven minutes. Three seconds.

At 06:44, foam on the surface begins to shift. Patterns emerge. Language. Possibly an answer. To what?

User does not react. Neither does the beer.

At 06:46, Elga’s portrait in the back room turns to face the wall.

→ Presence remains in logs after departure. No visual confirmation of exit. Timestamp corruption noted.

User left nothing behind. Except the weight. Still present. Ambient gravitational variance: +0.7%. System clock runs slower here now.

Isn’t that fun?

There are many system users.

But this one?

This one isn't normal.