>>5929764“Should we banish it?” Testa asks.
“Like… Do we even need to?” Costelal asks quietly. “Look.”
You all watch as the orb’s shape finally breaks and shatters, leaving only a slowly dissipating mist.
“I don’t want… To go…” a dozen distorted voices whisper from the cloud. “I want… To…”
“…To live,” you finish the thought.
For a moment, you’re that little boy again, in the lab, staring down at a distressed rabbit and a trapped, barely-breathing deer, being asked to sacrifice them in the name of knowledge and progress. You feel the bile rising in your throat, just like it did back then. This thing—whatever it is, part of Zith-ZI or parasite, demon from Hell though it appears to be—is dying, dissipating, because of you. It wasn’t harming anyone, not that you can tell. You might not known its nature… But you want to, to understand. There are answers locked inside it, but even if there weren’t, it isn’t in YOU to let a pitiful creature suffer and expire.
“We’re binding it,” you say. “Quickly, before it dissipates completely!”
“O-okay,” Testa says. “But… How, Tips?”
A few options occur to you. The safest, most conventional one is to find an object that can hold the demonic miasma—perhaps the owl-amulet upon your hat?
The other option, more daring, more DANGEROUS, but also more within your usual magical wheelhouse, is biological: you could clone a body for this thing. Zith-Zi’s body, perhaps? It IS its ‘natural habitat’, as best you can determine.
What will you do?
>Create a body for the dissipating demon>Bind it to your hat-buckle>Write-in 