Elrick found them mid-morning, three days into the exam-results waiting week, with a folded slip of paper pinched between two fingers and an expression far too pleased with himself for what was, ostensibly, just a piece of mail.
"Congratulations," he announced, dropping the paper onto the table in front of Xavier without preamble. "You're adventurers now. Well, provisionally. Try not to die. It reflects poorly on my teaching."
Xavier unfolded it warily. It was simple, as these things went: a nearby town called Larkspur Hollow had been suffering nighttime attacks from what witnesses swore, with total conviction, was a werewolf. The reward was modest. The premise, Xavier had to admit, was at least more interesting than push-ups.
"You're giving us a job? During my regimen?" Xavier raised an eyebrow, and Elrick's grin only widened at the tone.
"Call it the first of the three I promised you," Elrick said, tapping the paper once, decisively. "I did say I'd give them to you one at a time, didn't I? Consider this an easy start, a little field conditioning before I hand you something that actually matters. All theory and no application makes for very boring students, and frankly I'm tired of watching you three sit around waiting for results like nervous cadets."
"And if it's not actually a werewolf?" Bruce asked, with the specific wariness of a man who had learned, through repeated and painful experience, to distrust anything that sounded simple.
"Then it'll be an even better story when you get back." Elrick was already turning to leave, waving a hand over his shoulder. "I'll have a new set of numbers ready for you when you're back, Xavier. Don't get comfortable."
Bruce, for his part, looked almost relieved to be escaping the workshop. Stephan, still nursing bruises from the exam, declared himself "basically fully healed" in a tone nobody believed for a second. Xavier just turned the paper over once in his hands, thinking, with a mixture of curiosity and unease, that if this was Elrick's idea of an easy first task, he wasn't sure he wanted to know what the second and third looked like.
***
Getting a carriage out of the Warrior School's stables meant, as it always did, finding Josh.
Josh was a guard, technically, in the sense that he wore the uniform and stood near the gate and had, at some point, presumably passed whatever qualifications the school required of its gate staff. In every practical sense, Josh was a very tall pile of laundry that occasionally snored. Xavier found him exactly where he always found him, tipped back in a chair against the stable wall, hat down over his eyes, one boot propped on an overturned bucket.
"Josh."
No response beyond a soft, contented snore.
"Josh." Xavier nudged the chair leg with his boot.
One eye cracked open. "...Xavier. Hey, man." Josh didn't so much sit up as slowly renegotiate his relationship with gravity. "You need the carriage again?"
"We need the carriage again."
"Cool, cool." Josh made no move whatsoever to stand. "Rough week. They've had me on gate duty since sunrise. You know they pay me, like, criminally little for this."
Xavier was already producing a small handful of coin, an exchange so practiced by now that neither of them bothered commenting on it anymore. Josh accepted it with the serene gratitude of a man who had long since stopped asking questions about where his actual salary went.
"You're a scholar and a gentleman," Josh said, pocketing it and finally, genuinely standing up this time. "Where to?"
"Larkspur Hollow. There's supposedly a werewolf." Xavier claimed, pointing to a small map Elrick had provided them.
"There's never actually a werewolf," Josh said, with the weary authority of a man who had personally driven several previous parties toward several previous supposed werewolves. "But sure. Hop in, I'll have you there by midday. Possibly with a brief nap in the middle. No promises."
Bruce eyed him dubiously as they climbed aboard. "Is he going to fall asleep while driving?"
"Probably," Xavier said. "The horses know the road better than he does at this point. It's fine."
"That is deeply not reassuring."
"He's never actually crashed us," Xavier said, which was, he privately admitted, a lower bar than he would have liked to be clearing.
Josh, true to form, was audibly snoring within twenty minutes, reins looped loosely around one slack hand while the horses plodded on with the unbothered confidence of animals who had made this exact trip more times than their driver had stayed awake for.
***
The road to Larkspur Hollow ran straight into a forest that swallowed the daylight almost as soon as the carriage entered it, fog pooling thick and low between the trunks until the three of them could barely see ten feet past the horses. It clung to everything. The branches, the underbrush, the back of Xavier's throat through the carriage's open window... A damp, grey, directionless haze that made the whole ride feel like wading through a held breath.
"This is charming," Bruce said, deadpan, batting a curtain of mist away from his face for what felt like the hundredth time. "Really sets the mood for a relaxing little job."
Josh slept through all of it.
Then, all at once, the fog broke. Not thinned, but broke. Like a curtain being pulled back. They stepped out into a wide, sun-drenched clearing at the forest's heart. The town of Larkspur Hollow spread out below in warm, golden light that had no business existing given the wall of grey they'd just walked out of. It should have been a relief. Instead, the trio heard it before they fully processed the sight — a distant, constant hum of laughter carrying across the clearing, bright and cheerful and, the longer it went on, deeply unsettling, all the more so for how it sat there glowing and picture-perfect in a little pocket of sunlight while a sea of fog pressed in on every side like it was trying to keep something in.
"That's... a lot of laughing," Bruce noted, glancing uneasily back at the treeline they'd just emerged from.
Josh stirred just long enough to steer the carriage down into the town square and park it near the well, gave the whole scene one long, unbothered look, said, "Yeah, that tracks," and promptly went back to sleep against the driver's bench, apparently unfazed by manic laughter, unblinking smiles, or anything else Larkspur Hollow had to offer.
It did not get less unsettling up close. The streets of Larkspur Hollow were full of people going about their day with the manic, glassy-eyed enthusiasm of folks who had not slept in several days and had no intention of starting now. A baker was frosting a cake with such intense, joyful focus that he'd long since frosted past the cake itself and onto the countertop, the floor, and a good portion of his own apron. Two grown men were locked in what might have been a hug or might have been a wrestling match, both laughing so hard neither seemed able to stop.
"Welcome, welcome, welcome!" A woman practically skipped over to greet them, eyes wide and bright in a way that made Xavier's skin crawl. "Isn't it just the most beautiful day? Every day is the most beautiful day!"
"...Right," Xavier said carefully. "We're here about the werewolf?"
"Oh, that old thing! Don't you worry about that, dear, everything's simply wonderful here!" She beamed at him with a smile that did not waver, did not blink, did not seem to require breathing. "Would you like some orange juice? Old Tobias makes the very best orange juice in the whole valley!"
Before Xavier could answer, Stephan had already accepted a wooden cup from a wrinkled old man sitting on a nearby stoop, a large basket of oranges at his feet.
"Thanks!" Stephan said, and drank deeply.
Xavier watched, mildly curious, as the old man — Tobias, presumably — reached down, picked up another orange between two gnarled toes, and squeezed it directly over a second cup with his bare foot, juice running between his toes and down his ankle before dripping into the wood below.
Xavier's soul briefly attempted to leave his body for the second time that week.
"Stephan," he said very slowly. "How does it taste?"
"Really good, actually! Kind of earthy?"
"That's foot juice. That is foot juice you're drinking."
Stephan looked down at the cup in his hand, then at Tobias's foot, hovering over the next cup mid-squeeze, and, after a long moment of visible internal deliberation, shrugged and finished the rest of the cup anyway.
"Still pretty good."
Bruce made a small, wounded noise and looked away entirely.
"You're all insane," Xavier muttered, already dreading how much worse this town was going to get before it got better. "Every single one of you is insane."
"Isn't it wonderful?" the woman said again, still beaming, still not blinking, and skipped off down the street to go tell someone else about the most beautiful day of their lives.
***
The only inn in Larkspur Hollow was called, with almost defiant sincerity, the Sunbeam Rest, and its innkeeper greeted them at the door with the exact same unblinking, radiant enthusiasm as everyone else in town. He insisted on carrying all three of their packs himself, insisted on giving them the best room "at no charge, absolutely no charge, your happiness is payment enough," and insisted, twice, on telling them how lucky they were to be alive on such a beautiful, beautiful day.
"Everyone here talks like that," Bruce muttered once the door was finally shut behind them. "Every single person. It's like they're reciting the same three lines on rotation."
"Maybe it's a cult?" Stephan offered, flopping face-first onto one of the beds. "Cults do that. Uniform vibes."
"A cult of what? Extreme hospitality?" Xavier dragged a chair over to the room's single window, angling it so he could watch the street below while they talked. "I don't buy it. Nobody in a cult looks that tired underneath the smiling. Did you see the baker's eyes? He looked like he hadn't slept in a week."
Bruce paused, considering. "None of them looked like they'd slept, actually. Now that you mention it."
"Right. So either the whole town has some kind of chronic insomnia problem, which, sure, weird coincidence-" Xavier ticked it off on his fingers, "Or something's keeping them awake and cheerful against their will. Which sounds a lot less like a werewolf problem and a lot more like a curse."
"A curse that also somehow produces a werewolf?" Bruce said skeptically.
"Maybe the werewolf's a symptom. Or a cover story. I don't know yet." Xavier drummed his fingers against the windowsill, watching two townsfolk below embrace each other and laugh uproariously about something neither of them seemed to actually find funny. "But nobody we talked to today could describe it properly. Size, color, what it actually did to anyone... Nothing. Just vague, cheerful nonsense about how it 'gives the town something to talk about.'"
Stephan sat up, suddenly more interested. "So you think we're not even looking for the right thing?"
"I think," Xavier said slowly, "that whatever's actually wrong with this town, the werewolf's the least of it. If there is one. Let's just watch tonight. See what actually happens instead of what people tell us happens."
Bruce checked his hammer's straps out of habit, glancing once more out the window at the too-bright, too-cheerful streets below. Josh was still down there, parked by the well, fast asleep and somehow entirely undisturbed by the crowd of grinning townsfolk who kept stopping to admire him like he was a piece of civic art.
"Wonderful," Bruce said, with absolutely none of the enthusiasm the word usually implied. "Can't wait."