A small trickster entity was maniacally ricocheting around the hall. It was a fuzzy blue fellow with one gray horn and two weird red feet-pads. Slightly bigger than a fist.

Jasper watched it dance along that trademark college-bland white tile, causing two people to trip.

Of course, they would think they were tripping on nothing.

Instinctively, Jasper reached for one of his three daggers, concealed behind a magic belt. But if he removed one, the belt’s magic wouldn’t work. Meaning the wandering college students here would panic over yet another crazy white man with a weapon. AKA Jasper.

No, he’d have to mutter some spells under his breath to deal with this, without hurting or being noticed by anyone around him.

Jasper slowly walked through the light crowd as he watched a few other students get tripped in the trickster’s wake.

If Jasper got close enough, he’d punt the little fucker. It didn’t know that Jasper could see it, yet. Jasper had ten minutes until class started. Ample time.

The little blue mass jumped about from walking student to talking student, bouncing off the backs of knees and the fronts of feet. Ah, the giant classroom nearby had just let out, filtering loads of people into the hallway. It had more people to terrorize.

“Zut,” Jasper muttered, and his eyesight flickered. Now, the entity had a glow he wouldn’t miss. Miasma vision: what Jasper could see was energy, or what many called magic. Entities were made of curse energy, and they wafted it off constantly.

People in the hall were shouting in oblivious surprises and falling down and getting their shoelaces untied. Bright fluorescent lights above, one in the corner flickering. Jasper was almost near his classroom door, but the trickster was getting closer to him.

Like a sad game of pinball it tackled legs and feet, until it was about to head for Jasper. If this thing had eyes, they had to be drooling at the sight of Jasper’s wide, haphazard, uneven and enticing steps…

It trampolined off the wall right toward him. Bingo.

“Zeyafrul.” Jasper got a weird look from some blonde girl walking past him. The blue monster went for his back foot during the weight change, but he anticipated this.

He shifted his whole body weight forward as the incantation added weight to his feet, and in turn a certain amount of strength. He used every bit of his legs and core and punted that little shitball straight into the air.

“EEEEEE-ooo-keeeEK!” It made outlandish sounds as it shot into the air, knocked in a ceiling panel, then bounced right onto—

“OW! WHAT THE FUCK?”— some random dude’s face.

Jasper almost wanted to laugh, but he was too mortified. That kick should have done in such a small entity. He should be collecting its little core right now, but it was still an active bouncing menace.

And now, it was aware of Jasper.

People were grabbing the tops of their heads in bewilderment as the thing jumped from person to person. What were hair and hats, if not lily pads to jump forth from? The trickster jumped over Jasper and passed him, heading straight for the double doors leading outside.

Oh, god. Seriously? Now, Jasper had to run and push through people and just be all-around obnoxious in order to catch this thing.

“Sorry, sorry. Sorry!” he said as he swam through waves of slow walkers. “Emergency! Sorry!”

He made it back outside.

The trickster was still trampling heads over the brick walkway and around the courtyard trees. It turned to the right when it reached the clock-post, which was exactly where Jasper left—

“CODY?!”Jasper shouted. The guy couldn’t have made it far, and the trickster was headed right in his direction. Jasper was panicking a little, now. It was awful being worked up over something so small. Screaming and running through the masses like this, he had to accept that many people now saw him as a crazy person. In truth, he was.

There were only twelve students admitted each year that could see this shit. And only two colleges in the U.S. had entity fighting or studying programs to begin with.

“CODY, TURN AROUND IF YOU CAN HEAR ME. THERE’S A— THING!” Jasper shouted. Just then he saw a different flash of blue.

Josephine’s hair. She was on her way to the same class Jasper should have been comfortably sitting in right now. Her eyes only perused through Jasper for a moment before locking onto the little trickster above. She was farther ahead.

Honestly, that thing was lucky it didn’t jump too close to her. She started chasing it too, though she was much closer than Jasper. It was a kook fest, them running the way they were, against walker traffic while Josephine was muttering spells and pointing her fingers at the durn thing in air. One of her shots missed and snapped a small tree branch far away. As her and Jasper frantically pursued what looked like nothing to most, she was finger gunning the sky.

“DON’T MIX ACID AND ADDERALL, KIDS!” she shouted as people were learning to clear away from her and her eccentric hands and muttered chantings. Jasper could tell she was using simple energy shots. Everyone else around could tell she was a lunatic. The trickster caught onto Josephine and ducked under, returning to its original mission of tripping people. Fantastic.

They weren’t getting any closer, but the thing wasn’t getting farther away either. It was having fun with them. Jasper internally grunted at the audacity. This thing was practically a great-value Tangela that only knew the move ‘pound.’ Where did it get off doing all this shit?

Jasper and Josephine were running, casting poorly, clearly being freshmen who definitely couldn’t save the world if this is what a bleak spray-painted cotton-eyed Joe did to them.

And that was okay.

No, that wasn’t okay. This wasn’t the time for acceptance-positivity thinking. Bad Jasper. You have to kill the thing. Kill it now.

Jasper was trying to catch the trickster in a stillness incantation, but it was jumping everywhere. And he also accidentally made another student flinch. They might be haunted by that feeling later.

Jasper felt bad, but he had to keep running. He and Josephine weaved through the busy walkway as the blue fluff ball sprung and jumped and demonically laughed and… then it was gone.

Fuck. Fucking fuck fuck. Shit fuck. There were too many people for Jasper to focus his eyes properly. He couldn’t see through anyone, so all he could wait for was to see the entry signature pop up again: the particles of miasma that wafted around it.

“WHERE THE HELL DID IT GO?” And then there was Josephine, who did not give two shits if people thought she was crazy or not. Jasper caught up to her just as they heard another voice.

“I GOT IT!”

Cody. Oh, he wasn’t a useless man after all. There was hope in this world again. The sidewalk opened up considerably larger as they neared one of the main libraries on campus.

Cody was standing there, holding a struggling trickster in his hand. “Smiet vi.” Iron hand. 

As Jasper and Josephine approached, Cody squashed the thing like a claw machine latching onto a prize. Meaning he barely did anything at all. Luckily, entities dissipated as miasma, or energy, and didn’t leave behind any guts or exoskeletons.

All they left was a core. In this case it was a small, bead-sized stone left in Cody’s hands. This one was a pretty mixture of blue and cyan, bright in the sun.

“That was like air.” Cody said, looking perplexed at his fist. “I don’t think I even needed a spell for that.”

“Well, I punted the damn thing with an inertia kick earlier.” Jasper panted, leaning over and holding onto his knees. “Couldn’t believe it wasn’t enough.”

“What the fuck was that, though?” Josephine asked. “A deranged loofah?”

“Don’t know, but we can ask a professor later.” Cody said, then held up the small core to Jasper. “And here. If you already damaged it the most, I don’t want to take credit.”

Jasper brought his hands up in front of him. “Oh, no! You caught it when I couldn’t. It’s yours.” Jasper nearly huffed out the last word when he looked up at Cody. Something was unnaturally off.

Cody gave a slight frown. “How about I keep it instead of using it? The next time we fight something together you’ll get an IOU.”

“Oh, that’s not—”

“What about ME?” Josephine interjected.

“You missed every shot you took. Don’t even try.” Jasper retorted, then looked back at Cody, hiding his uneasiness. “It’s yours. I’m still riding the high from the royal core I got last semester. Honest. Besides, over the next few years we’ll be getting cores left and right.”

Cody flicked the blue core upward, and it glinted in the air until falling back into his hand. “Nah. They’re still special to us now, with what little magic we have. This one’s small, anyway, so I’ll hold you to my promise instead. ’Till we fight something else.”

“That’s boring.” Josephine said, then pulled out her phone.

“Ok, well… thanks for helping! That thing was a real menace.” Jasper said, though it mostly felt like word vomit. He had to bring it up…

Josephine grabbed his arm. “Heeeeeyyyyy… we have one minute to run to class.”

“Shit, Bye!” Jasper shouted back to Cody as Josephine was already yanking him at the speed of an angry alpaca-spitwad. In the next second they were sprinting.

“See you tomorrow!” Cody shouted, startled and hastening off towards the library himself. Jasper wondered what he had going on there that was so urgent.

But Jasper regretted running away, even if it meant making it to class on time. Because what he wondered most was another small, possibly concerning detail he wanted to ask Cody about.

When Jasper and Cody spoke earlier, and every time before that, Cody’s eyes were a dark brown with a reddish hue. Unique, but they still didn’t look too outside-the-norm.

But just then, Cody’s eyes were a pinkish brick-red, like a fiery sunset over a magenta sky. Something beautifully terrifying was gazing at him, and Jasper didn’t know whether to lean into it or run away. Josephine had made that decision for him, unrooting his feet that had grown in weight this whole time.

She mustn’t have seen it, and Jasper knew right away why he saw it. He just didn’t know how to ask Cody for an explanation. Maybe it was better he didn’t.

Jasper was still under his own spell. His energy-seeing eyes were clicked on, and what he saw had to be miasma.

Cody was cursed.