As the Casino was dispelled, Xarxos felt his own magics unraveling the spells cast upon him and his friends. Muscles and fur deflated and receded, and soon…Xarxos was simply Tex, the big, beefy young man who’d hitchhiked his way to Troy’s town. He stared down at his now-human hands, flexing them. He stumbled against the wall towards a couch, feeling suddenly drained and exhausted.
Throughout the entire casino, crashes and rumblings were heard. Screams echoed throughout the building. Xarxos knew there’d be some collateral damage, but he hadn’t been prepared to watch a support pillar collapse on a crowd of fifty people gathered around watching the Maze Game. At least fifteen people were crushed instantly, the rest dying as the ceiling collapsed on top of them.
Dust and debris obscured his vision of the upper floors. People were running around in panic, trying to all fit through the front exit of the casino at once, pushing instead of pulling on the doors. As a result he could see people get crushed and trampled beneath the crowd. One thing he managed to notice during the calamity was that everyone appeared human again.
As more and more sections of the casino collapsed, the magic keeping it together having ceased to exist, all Tex could feel was….tired.
Casting so many Mass Dispels had sucked the energy right out of him, he belatedly realized. Troy-well, he assumed it was Troy-was running towards him. Another young man was running alongside him. That must be…Rusty, if that was his original name. He heard a sharp intake of breath and saw RK, the albino, standing near the couch, staring down at himself.
“Holy shit, I’m human again!” RK grinned at Tex. “Way to go, man!”
Tex just nodded wearily, taking in the scene of complete carnage. Then he frowned. Outside the glass doors of the Casino, massive clouds had appeared on the horizon. They twisted and roiled, fat with rain and tinged an eerie green color. RK seemed to have noticed as well, staring in horror at the clouds that were sweeping towards them quickly.
“What the fuck is that?” Tex asked.
“Foresight!” RK intoned, grasping the Book of Divination.
It must have fallen out of his eyes after the Mass Dispel, Tex realized. RK’s eyes went a cloudy white and they rolled in their sockets. RK’s mouth was slack. It was a disturbing sight. More disturbing was the look of horror and panic on RK’s face when the spell ended.
RK fell to the ground and vomited.
“RK?” Tex asked.
“We’re…we’re so fucked!” RK finally said. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt.
“What is it?”
“Everyone!” RK shouted to the crowd. “Stay inside! That storm is dangerous! Get under a stairwell!”
Most people didn’t even spare him a glance. But many of the employees did, clearly recognizing RK, and pulled themselves back from the crowd. Quite a few civilians noticed them backing away form the doors and stepped back as well. If they were regulars at this Casino, heeding vague warnings was a survival tactic, after all.
“Get back!” A voice called in pure Irish brogue.
Tex turned and saw Dolan hobbling down the stairs. He looked disheveled. Todd and Mark followed him down the stairs as well-both human. Todd and Mark were kinda weedy-looking dorks as humans, Tex mused. He wondered how they’d managed to stay in this world after the Mass Dispel, though.
Troy and Rusty finally pushed through the crowd made it to Tex and RK.
“Hey Rusty.” Tex waved.
“Dustin, actually,” Dustin shot a glance at Troy. “Are you Xarxos?”
“Tex, now.” Tex replied with a smile.
“Guess we’re all saved, thanks to you.” Troy bit his lip. “I just wanted to say that…I’m sorry. Holy shit, I am so sorry! I remember everything now.” Troy buried his face in his hands.
“It’s okay, Troy.” Tex said gently. “I know. It’ll be okay.”
“No, it won’t.” RK interjected. “We’ve got a big fucking problem. Some black chick on the outskirts of town just cast a major spell.”
“Black chick?” Troy said, frowning, then his eyes went wide. “That's Mary Anne! She owned the Book of Nature!” Troy said. “She was a big nature freak in the past and Dolan turned her into a terrorist!”
“A Dolan!” Dolan corrected him, wandering over to their group. “I ain’t that old psychopath!”
“Whatever, she also has the Book of Dreams and Space now. She summoned a massive transformative storm by dreaming it into existence.” RK said, moving towards the back of the casino, the group-and the sizeable crowd of people who’d walked outside, saw the gigantic storm approaching, and turned back around-followed him. “We need to get somewhere that is sheltered from the rain. Anything with natural materials will be broken through.”
“We’ve got tents, boyo!” Dolan called.
“Get bedsheets and we’ll transmute them into tarps.” RK glanced up at the giant glass ceiling. “And we definitely don’t want to be under glass when the storm hits. Get water bottles too. The water table will be contaminated.”
Tex hobbled along behind him, weary as all hell. “Can we Dispel it?”
“No. We’d have to Dispel Mary Anne herself, and she’s outside the city.” RK replied. “She’s lost control of the spell.”
Tex studied the worried look on RK’s face. “There’s more, right?”
“Dreams have nightmares.” RK whispered. “I don’t know if we can escape from the city no matter how many times I reset time. She put herself into a dream and imagined this city as a forest teaming with life, now the books are making that happen. That rain – that mist, they’re going to come from time to time. Anything the rain touches, or anything that breaths the mist in get transformed. Most people will just turn into parts of that forest – trees, animals – both anthropomorphic and not – but like every dream, some of it is a nightmare, and some of the people are going to turn into those nightmares.”
“She has all three Books?” Tex asked. “The final three we need to win?”
RK nodded.
“Then only one of us has to.”
“Then who should be the winner?” Dolan asked, glancing nervously between them. “Who can we trust?”
“Not me. I make bad decisions. I think it should be Tex.”
“Thanks, but…” Tex took a deep breath and handed over the Books to RK. “Go on, then.”
“The Books…?” RK stared at the Books and compressed them into one. “But I’ll win?”
“And?” Tex said. “I know you aren’t evil. Go on and save the world. Make it a happier place.”
“In order to win…Tex, you know I’ll need to-”
“I don’t care what you do. Just win, okay?” Tex said solemnly. “Save us later.”
“Arcane, Mind and Necromancy are missing?” RK said questioningly after leafing through the Book.
“Out there.” Tex jabbed at the parking lot. “He’s waiting for us. Or she. It’s hard to tell with that one.”
“I thought we used Mass Dispel-”
“The Arcane that was in the Casino wasn’t actually OUR Arcane. Or Todd’s. That little arc was a confusing mess.” Tex shook his head. “Well, go on. I’m gonna pass out soon.”
The crowd reached the basement floor. Teams of workers and employees-including the magician and his twin apprentices, who were all human now-aided in walling off the ceiling and floor with sheets that were transmuted into seamless plastic. Barrels of water and emergency rations were wheeled out of storage.
As the crowd of almost three hundred people settled in, Tex found a spot on the floor. The light from the small windows that lined the basement began to dim as heavy black clouds appeared outside. Tex drifted off just as the first raindrops began to fall.