Hello everyone!
Sorry for the delay, I've been a bit busy.
Here are the 3 chapters, from 20 to 22.
Enjoy them.
Mike.
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Chapter 21: The Cat, the Ghost and the Crooked House
The silence that followed Constantine's revelation was dense and heavy, charged with the smell of ozone, tea, and the mage's stale fear. Zatanna seemed to have stopped breathing, her wide eyes darting from Urahara's calm face to John's terrified countenance. Batman, of course, was a statue, a monolith of silent judgment in the middle of the small shop. He had come looking for a specialist. He had found a cosmic enigma with a terrifying reputation.
Urahara Kisuke, having finished his meticulous tea preparation, poured a cup for himself. The bright green liquid steamed in the ceramic. He ignored the palpable tension in the room with the ease of a man ignoring a bothersome wind. He blew softly on the surface of the tea, took a sip, and let out a sigh of pure satisfaction.
"Ah, much better," he said, more to himself than to his guests.
Batman finally broke the silence. He didn't address Constantine, nor was he fazed by his warnings. His eyes, white analytical slits in the cowl, were fixed on the shopkeeper. "You agreed to help. The world is falling apart. What is the first step?"
Urahara's voice returned to that of the cheerful merchant, but with a nuance of seriousness. "Patience, Batman-san. Saving the world before finishing morning tea is very rude. Rushing into a crisis of this nature is like trying to put out a grease fire with water; you will only make it spread. And Constantine-san," he said, casting an amused look at the trembling mage, "is partially correct. I am a consultant. And the first step of any consultation is... diagnosis. We cannot fight a dream if we do not know who the dreamer is."
Zatanna finally found her voice. She cleared her throat, taking a tentative step forward, looking away from John as if ashamed of his panic. "He's right, Batman. This magic... is a perception infection. We can't fight it in the streets. We need information. We need a safe place to analyze the spell."
"A nexus," she continued, her confidence returning as she focused on the problem. "There is a place... the House of Mystery. It is a nexus of all mystical information on this plane. It exists... between the folds of reality. If we can get there, its library will tell us what is happening, who this 'Doctor Destiny' is, and how they have managed to access the power of Dreams."
"Brilliant, Z. Absolutely brilliant," sneered Constantine, his voice dripping with sarcasm to hide the trembling of his hands as he tried to light another cigarette. "Perfect plan! Ten out of ten! Let's all go to the House of Mystery! There is just one small, tiny, insignificant problem..."
He took a furious drag. "THE HOUSE IS NOWHERE! You can't just take a taxi there, dammit! It moves! It appears where it wants, when it wants! Finding that damn house is just as impossible as getting this guy," he pointed at Urahara with a shaking thumb, "to pay his taxes!"
"Then we will find it," Batman said, his voice a statement of immutable fact.
"Oh yeah? And how do you plan to do that, eh, detective?" John mocked. "Are you going to interrogate the ley lines? Are you going to put a bat-tracker on a metaphysical concept?"
Urahara raised a hand lazily. "Actually, that might wor..."
Tiiin-ti-liiin.
The sharp, discordant sound of the shop's physical door bell resonated in the tense air. The three heroes froze. The sound was so mundane, so normal, that it seemed the most impossible thing that had happened that morning.
The wooden sliding door from Kyoto opened with a soft shhhk. A young Japanese man in a bright blue delivery uniform entered the shop, holding a package wrapped in brown paper. He stopped dead in the entrance, his eyes blinking at the surreal scene before him.
A man dressed like a giant bat. A beautiful woman who looked like a stage magician. A disheveled British man who reeked of cheap alcohol and clearly needed a bath. And the local shopkeeper, smiling at them all.
"Uh...", started the delivery man, looking at his delivery tablet in total confusion. "U-Urahara-san? I have a package for...?"
Mid-sentence, the young man froze.
His eyes, full of confusion, rolled back, turning a milky, absolute white. His body convulsed violently for a second, an electric arc seemed to run down his spine, and then he relaxed completely. He straightened up, but his posture was no longer that of the tired delivery man. It was an agile, carefree posture, that of an acrobat.
The possessed delivery man looked at his own hands, flexed them, and then sighed, his voice now a clear Brooklyn accent. "Whew! What a trip! This guy is worried about his exams, you know? He should relax."
The "delivery man" looked at the gathered group. "Hey! Did any of you order a ghost? Because, jeez, this place is hard to find. Hi Z, hi John. Batman... always a pleasure."
"Boston!" exclaimed Zatanna, her face filling with relief. "Thank Hestia!"
"Fuck, Brand!" growled Constantine. "Couldn't you just knock? You almost scared me to death!"
Batman simply nodded. "Brand."
Urahara, meanwhile, had set down his tea. His face was a mask of pure and absolute fascination. The fan in his hand paused halfway to his face. He was captivated.
While the others spoke, he rose from his cushion and began to walk slowly around the possessed delivery man. He observed him not as a person, but as an impossibly complex Swiss watch he had just found in the middle of the woods.
'Oh, how wonderful,' he thought, his mind buzzing with genuine curiosity. 'This is exquisite. A human soul, but... it is unanchored. Severed from the reincarnation cycle, but forcibly tied to this plane. It is not a normal Plus. It is not a Hollow. It is something completely different. It is... bound. A curse? No, an oath... or an imposed duty. A task. And it can... jump. Like a cricket. From one body to another.'
Deadman (Boston Brand) felt the scrutiny. It was a sensation he had never experienced. Mages could sense him, psychics could hear him, but this guy... this guy was looking at him.
"Hey, buddy!" said Boston, his nervous voice coming from the Japanese delivery man's mouth. He made the body take a step back, but Urahara simply moved with him, his smile bright and clinical. "It's me, okay? Boston. A ghost. Stop looking at me like that! It's creepy!"
"Fascinating!" whispered Urahara, completely ignoring the request. He leaned closer, as if examining a rare specimen. "Is it a sensation of cold, Brand-san, when you enter? Or more of a tingling? Do you feel the host's memories? Or is it more like... borrowing a coat that is still warm from the previous owner? Is the displacement total or is it a conceptual overlay? And who is this 'Rama Kushna' who keeps whispering in your essence? I have so many questions!"
"What...? How do you know that name?!" shouted Boston, now genuinely scared. "Zatanna, tell your creepy friend to back off! He can see me! Not just 'sense' me inside this poor guy, he can see me, Boston Brand! He's looking straight at my soul!"
"Let's focus!" growled Batman, his voice cutting through Urahara's spiritual anatomy lesson. "Brand. The House of Mystery. You can find it, right?"
Boston, visibly relieved by Batman's interruption, made the delivery man shrug. "Sure. Piece of cake. The House likes me. It likes my sense of humor. It always leaves a 'light' on for me in the astral plane. It's... yeah, I got it. Louisiana. In a filthy swamp that not even rats want."
"Excellent!" applauded Urahara, his smile returning to that of the cheerful shopkeeper. "A field trip! It's been a while since I visited a swamp. Analyzing mystical flora is always a pleasure."
He headed to the center of the shop. "Well, let's not waste any more time. The world awaits."
"And what about him?" asked Zatanna, pointing to the possessed delivery man.
"Oh, right," said Urahara. He looked at Boston. "Brand-san, would you be so kind as to vacate the premises? This poor man has a package to deliver, and his cortisol level is through the roof."
With an "About time!", Boston Brand shot out of the delivery man's body. The young Japanese man staggered, his eyes blinked, and then he looked around in total confusion, remembering nothing of the last two minutes.
Before he could panic, Urahara was in front of him. With a quick, invisible movement, he struck a pressure point on the man's neck. The delivery man slumped, fast asleep. Urahara caught him before he fell, sat him gently against a wall, and tucked a generous amount of yen bills into his shirt pocket.
"He will have a small headache, but a good tip for the trouble," he said cheerfully. Then, he turned to the center of the shop and, with a lazy slice of his sword-cane in the air, tore reality.
A portal opened, revealing not a Kyoto alley, but a view of twisted trees, thick fog, and stagnant water. The smell of decay and humidity hit the shop.
"Well," said Urahara, gesturing toward the portal. "The first step in any good story: gathering the party. I love it. Let's go!"
The portal closed behind them with the dull sound of a vault door shutting, sealing the warm and orderly Kyoto shop and leaving them in a world that was its antithesis.
The change was a sensory assault.
The air was no longer dry and tea-scented; it was a thick, humid miasma that stuck to the skin and lungs. The smell was overwhelming: a mix of millennial decay, stagnant water, mold, and something vaguely metallic, like old blood. The ground beneath their feet was not polished wood, but thick, sucking mud that clung to their boots with every step. Gnarled and twisted trees, covered in Spanish moss hanging like ghost shrouds, rose in the mist like the bones of dead leviathans.
"Ugh, brilliant," spat John Constantine, trying to pull his boot out of the mud with a disgusting sucking sound. "I hate swamps. Bugs, mud, Civil War ghosts, and now this bastard in a hat. This is a new low, even for me."
Batman said nothing. He had already adapted. His white lenses glowed in the darkness, scanning the environment, analyzing the air composition, the flora. He was already in mission mode. Zatanna, beside him, shivered, crossing her arms. "The magic here is... primitive. Wild. It's everywhere."
Urahara Kisuke, on the contrary, seemed to be at a theme park. He inhaled the fetid air deeply, his nostrils flared, and a smile of genuine appreciation appeared on his face.
'What a deliciously disgusting change of scenery!' he thought, his inner voice full of an enthusiasm that contrasted comically with Constantine's misery. 'I love it! The rate of decomposition is astoundingly efficient! The concentration of residual spiritual energy is higher than on a Soul Society battlefield! What a wonderfully violent ecosystem!'
"This way, team!" shouted a voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Boston Brand's ghostly spirit, a pale blue aura that only Urahara, Zatanna, and Constantine could see, floated above the mud, doing a pirouette in the air. "Don't get separated. The House likes to play 'tag', and believe me, you don't want to get caught."
They moved through the mist. The swamp was silent, a silence that was worse than noise. There were no birds. Not even insects. Just the sound of their own boots splashing in the mud.
"What about you, shopkeeper?" growled Constantine, walking awkwardly beside Urahara, clearly hating every second of proximity to him. "This is your big debut on Earth. Impressed by the local scenery? Not going to take out your fan and make all this mud go away?"
"And ruin the atmosphere?" replied Urahara with a cheerful smile, dodging a low branch with surprising agility. "No way, Constantine-san. This is history in its purest form. The history of decay. It is beautiful. Besides, getting my sandals dirty is part of the field experience."
Constantine looked at him with absolute hatred, but had no time to retort.
"We're almost there," said Deadman, floating backward. "It likes me, so it's showing off for me. Put on your best scared faces, folks!"
Just as he said it, the mist in front of them parted, not naturally, but as if a pair of theatrical curtains were opening.
And there it was. The House of Mystery.
It was an architectural impossibility, a Victorian nightmare that seemed to have been built by a madman and then abandoned to rot for a century. It stood on a small mound of dry earth, defying gravity. The lines were wrong. The windows were at odd angles, the porch sloped upward instead of downward, and the main tower seemed to twist upon itself, as if frozen in the act of collapsing. It was a house that stared at you.
The front door, a massive piece of dark, gnarled wood, opened with a long, guttural moan. CREAAAK.
It was a welcome and a threat.
"Well," sighed Constantine, putting out the cigarette he had just lit in the swamp water. "Ladies first."
"Shut your mouth, John," said Zatanna, and walked confidently onto the porch. Batman followed her, and Urahara and Constantine entered behind.
The instant Urahara crossed the threshold, the door slammed shut behind them with a crash that shook dust from the rafters. The swamp smell vanished, replaced by a new one: old dust, rotting paper, dry wood, and... fear. A metallic, electric smell of fear.
The foyer was the size of a cathedral. A grand staircase spiraled up into a darkness that seemed to swallow the light, but the ceiling, miles high, seemed to drip a thick black substance. A hallway to the left was as high and wide as a train tunnel, while the one to the right was a hole the size of a child, emitting a faint red light. The geometry of the place was an insult to physics.
Urahara was ecstatic.
'Oh, this is brilliant!' he thought, his gaze sweeping the impossible architecture with the delight of a child in a cosmic candy store. 'Non-Euclidean architecture! Interior design based on psychic manipulation and trauma! How wonderful! Is the power source the nexus itself, or does it feed on the residual fear of its occupants? What a wonderfully efficient and sustainable energy system!'
"Okay, team," said Deadman, now floating nervously near the leaky ceiling. "Rule number one: the House is a lady. A very, very twisted lady. She will try to mess with your heads. Don't let her. And no matter what you see..."
But it was too late. The house had already chosen its first player. As they walked through the grand hall, the wall to Batman's right stopped being rotten wood and became a damp brick wall of an alley. The air grew cold. The smell of dust was replaced by that of wet trash, gunpowder, and expensive perfume. In the distance, the faint echo of an opera was heard.
Batman didn't stop. He didn't even slow down.
Two ghostly figures, a man in a tuxedo and a woman with a pearl necklace, appeared in front of him. "Son!" cried the woman.
Batman walked through them as if they were smoke, his eyes fixed on the hallway ahead. "Boring," he growled, not at the ghosts, but at the house itself.
The illusion shattered, like glass.
Urahara watched the interaction with a smile of pure appreciation. 'What discipline. What control. He has turned his foundational trauma not into a weakness, but into a weapon. He has walked down that alley in his mind so many times that reality no longer has power over him. What a fascinating character.'
The house, frustrated, tried the next one. The hallway in front of Zatanna changed. It was no longer a decrepit hall. It was a warm study, filled with leather-bound books and mystical artifacts. Her father's study. A tall figure stood with his back to them, looking out a window that shouldn't be there.
"Zatanna, my daughter..." said the figure, his voice that of Giovanni Zatara. "...Why did you let me die?"
Zatanna froze in her tracks. Her breath caught. "Da... Dad?" She took a tentative step toward the illusion.
"Don't look, Z!" barked Constantine, grabbing her arm with surprising strength and pulling her back. "It's not him! It's a trick! The house is playing with you!"
The study illusion vanished, but Zatanna was trembling.
The house, now enraged at having been thwarted twice, turned on John himself.
The world tore apart. The hallway was no longer a hallway. It was a sleazy nightclub in Newcastle. The smell of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and sulfur filled the air. The sound of an out-of-tune punk band rang loudly. And in the middle of the hallway, a little girl in a blue dress, Astra Logue, stood, her eyes two black holes of pure accusation.
"John..." she whispered, her voice echoing over the music. "It's cold, John. Why did you let them take me?"
Constantine's bravado evaporated. He gasped, his face turning a sickly white. He staggered toward the nearest wall, bent at the waist, and vomited violently onto the wooden floor.
"Go to hell!" he managed to hiss, wiping his mouth, shaking from head to toe.
And then, the house turned to its last guest. The strangest one.
Urahara had stopped, watching John's torment with clinical curiosity. The house sensed his attention and focused on him with all its psychic might.
The hallway around him melted. It showed him the underground laboratory of the Soul Society, the moment of Aizen's betrayal. It showed him Yoruichi's smiling face, transforming into a skeletal beast. It showed him the silent, absolute void of Xylos, the archive-planet, the embodiment of his loneliness.
Urahara watched each illusion with his head tilted.
He smiled.
He approached the illusion of Aizen and tapped the hologram's cheek. The image rippled like water.
'Hmm. Based on the trauma of memory and regret,' he thought, his inner voice full of academic delight. 'But my memories aren't traumas. They are... completed readings. What a primitive, yet elegant, defense mechanism. But fundamentally flawed.'
He completely ignored the visions. His attention focused on the architecture surrounding him. While the house threw its worst nightmares at him, he walked toward a wall that seemed to breathe, pulsing with a faint purple light.
"Incredible!" he said aloud, to everyone's dismay. He touched the pulsating wall. "It's a bioconstruct! Is the air filtration system also the house's digestive system? What resource efficiency! And the power source is residual fear? It's self-sustaining! I have to take notes on the design!"
The house seemed to growl. The illusions flickered. It couldn't find a fear to anchor itself to. Urahara's clinical curiosity, his total detachment, and his genuine admiration for the mechanics of horror were like acid to its power. It couldn't scare someone who was taking notes.
The walls began to groan. The floor tilted violently. The house was throwing a tantrum.
"Oh, wow!" exclaimed Urahara, sliding down the tilted floor with the grace of an ice skater, using his sword-cane as a balance. "And now it's interactive! How charming! Five stars, without a doubt!"
Constantine, who had wiped his mouth, looked at him with a mix of horror and fury. "Are... are you enjoying this, you bloody psychopath?!"
"It's the most innovative interior design I've seen in centuries!" replied Urahara cheerfully, just as the floor beneath them burst open.
They fell.
The fall lasted only a second, before they landed softly, not in a damp basement, but on a luxurious, dusty Persian rug.
They were in a library. A library so vast it made the foyer look small, crowded with books stacked in precarious piles reaching up to a ceiling that couldn't be seen. Scrolls, artifacts, and leather-bound tomes filled every inch of space. It was a chaos of knowledge. But it was... safe. The house's malevolent presence had retreated.
Beside a huge stone fireplace where a cheerful fire burned, a gray-haired man in an elegant tweed suit stood with his back to them, reading a thick leather-bound book.
"About time," the man said without looking up, his accent ancient and perfectly British. "The house told me we had noisy guests. Especially you, John. You always make a mess."
Constantine cursed under his breath, straightening his trench coat. "Blood. You're still alive, what a pity."
Urahara completely ignored the exchange. His gaze was fixed on the man in the tweed suit, Jason Blood. He stood still, his playful smile replaced by a stillness of absolute and intense concentration.
'Oh...' Urahara's thought was almost a purr of intellectual pleasure. 'Oh, how... how delicious. He is not a man. He is a... he is a container. He is a prison. No, it is a forced symbiosis. A binding contract, sealed with magic of an almost primordial level.'
His senses, which he had been using to admire the house, now dove deeper into Jason Blood.
'A mortal soul. Ancient. Tired. And tied to... oh, by the gods... what a beauty! A Rhyming Demon! A high-class entity from Hell! Tied together like two cats in a sack! What a wonderfully precarious balance! How do they not annihilate each other? Is Blood's soul the cage, or is the demon the one keeping the man alive? I wonder what happens if they both get a headache at the same time! What an incredibly well-written story!'
Jason Blood finally felt the weight of that scrutiny. It was a sensation he hadn't felt in centuries. It wasn't the fearful gaze of a mortal, nor the arrogant gaze of a demon. It was the gaze of an entomologist who has just found a specimen he thought extinct.
Slowly, he closed his book and turned. His tired gray eyes met the bright, curious gaze of Urahara Kisuke.
"And you," said Jason Blood, his voice a low growl. "You must be the new trouble."
The silence in the library was as thick as the dust on the books.
Jason Blood, the gray-haired man with the weight of centuries on his shoulders, studied Urahara with an intensity that would have made a normal mortal crumble. Urahara, for his part, returned the gaze not with defiance, but with the same bright and disarming curiosity with which he had examined the impossible architecture of the house. It was a collision of two stillnesses: that of a soul tired of fighting and that of a soul that had never seen the need to start.
'A binding contract,' thought Urahara, his mind buzzing with delight as he processed the strange and beautiful symbiosis before him. 'Not a simple possession. It is a mutual cage. How elegant! The man is the demon's prison, and the demon is the man's immortality! A living paradox! What a wonderfully complicated and tragic story! I wonder who wrote the terms of the contract. They must have had a wicked sense of humor.'
The first to break the tense silence was neither the scholar nor the bound demon. It was, as always, the Bat.
Batman stepped forward onto the Persian rug, his cape absorbing the light from the fireplace. He completely ignored the staring contest between Blood and Urahara. His focus was singular. "Blood. The fear plague. What do you know?"
The voice, a low growl that seemed to grind gravel, anchored the room back in the crisis. Jason Blood looked away from Urahara, seeming almost relieved by the distraction. He closed the book he was still holding.
"It is worse than you think," he said, his voice a cultivated and grim murmur. "I have been tracking the energy since it started. The ancient magic is... agitated. Boiling. As if something poked the wasp nest of the world."
"People see their worst fears," Zatanna contributed, her voice professional, though her hands were still slightly trembling from the encounter with her father's "ghost." "It is a massive, global hallucination."
"And the insane in Arkham," added Batman, "are singing. About a 'Doctor Destiny' and 'the book of dreams'."
Constantine, who had collapsed into a battered leather armchair in the darkest corner of the library, let out a dry, humorless laugh. "Destiny. Faust. It's always the same old idiots with delusions of grandeur. I bet Felix Faust is behind this, looking for a promotion."
"Felix Faust and his henchmen are just the pawns," said Blood, confirming John's suspicion. "They are the ones who picked the lock, but they do not understand the door they have opened. I have felt their clumsy magical hands all over this." He paused, his gaze turning darker. "But the power they are using... that is something else. It is not theirs. They have broken into a place that was closed to them. They have broken into the Dreaming."
The name fell into the library and seemed to absorb all sound.
Zatanna brought a hand to her mouth. "No. You don't mean..."
Constantine, who was about to light a cigarette, froze. The flame of his lighter flickered, illuminating his pale face. "Fuck. The Dreaming? As in Morpheus? The Domain of the Endless? Oh, we're dead. We are so, so dead."
Urahara, who had been listening with casual interest, suddenly became very still. His lazy smile sharpened. 'The Endless? Here? In this little muddy story? What a delicious plot twist! The chapter just got so much better!'
"The Dreaming?" asked Batman, his voice an impatient growl. He didn't have time for poetic names.
"It is not a place, Batman," Zatanna explained, her voice shaking. "It is... the realm of concepts. The source of all stories, myths, and ideas. And it is ruled by one of the Endless. Dream. Morpheus."
"And Faust and his gang of idiots," continued Blood, his face grim, "have achieved the unthinkable. I am not sure of the details, but they have stolen something. His Helm. Or his Sand. Or worse yet, his Dreamstone, the Dream Ruby. And they are using that power, the power of a conceptual god, to leak pure nightmares directly into reality. 'Doctor Destiny' is not a man. It is a title. The one who holds the stone."
The group fell silent, processing the impossible scale of the problem. How do you fight the concept of nightmares? How do you defeat a man holding the power of a god of stories?
"And how do we get in?" asked Batman, always pragmatic. "Where is that stone?"
"It doesn't work like that," said Blood, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "The Dreaming is not a 'place' you can open a portal to. It is... everywhere and nowhere. And right now, with the Stone in mortal hands, it is corrupt. The fabric of that realm is unraveling. Entering there now, without an invitation from its master... is conceptual suicide. Your mind would dissolve into a billion nightmares in a second."
"So, what do we do?" asked Zatanna. "Is there nothing? Do we just sit here and watch the world tear itself apart by its own fears?"
"We're done," muttered Constantine from his chair. "End of story. The world ends, and I'm stuck in a dusty library with a rhyming demon, a bat, and... him."
In his misery, he finally turned to the wild card. His voice filled with desperate venom. "Well, what's up, shopkeeper? You've been very quiet! Are you going to stand there smiling like an idiot, admiring the book binding, or are you going to pull some trick out of your stupid hat? You're supposed to be the great 'consultant'! The one who knows everything!"
All attention in the room focused on Urahara.
Kisuke, who had indeed been fascinatingly examining a bejeweled skull whispering secrets in Latin on a nearby shelf, turned to them. His smile was bright, almost blinding in the library's gloom. He didn't seem worried at all. He looked like a tourist who had just been offered a ticket to the main attraction.
"Oh my!" he said, his voice full of an enthusiasm that was almost obscene given the situation. "The Dreaming! Morpheus's domain! What a... moody place! I've always found it a bit overrated, too gothic for my taste. Getting in there is quite difficult on a normal day, you know? The librarian, Lucien, is so fussy about visitor passes."
He fanned his face, despite the library's chill; his fan had appeared out of thin air. "But entering there now... while it is corrupt! Full of loose nightmares, with the internal logic completely shattered... Phew! What an absolutely delicious challenge!"
Constantine looked at him as if he had grown a second head.
"Constantine-san, what a great idea!" continued Urahara, clapping softly. "Call a friend! But you're right, a demon is of no use to us. They are too... logical. Too predictable. They have rules, contracts. No, no. This is a mess."
He began to pace the room, his mind working at visible speed.
"The problem, as our hosts have so eloquently stated, is that the realm of nightmares does not follow mortal logic. Order does not work there." He looked at Zatanna. "Normal magic, the kind that relies on rules and words, is useless there." He looked at Batman. "Logic and brute force are less than useless. It is a sea of... well..."
He paused. A slow, sly smile, the smile of a fox who has just found the key to the hen house, drew across his face.
"It is a sea of chaos."
He turned to Batman, his gray eyes shining with a terrifying intelligence and almost childish amusement. "We need a guide. A guide who feels at home in a world where rules do not apply. Someone who is anarchy. Someone who can swim in an ocean of madness and nightmares as if it were their personal bathtub. Someone who hates order and logic as much as the nightmares themselves."
Batman stared at him, his voice a growl. "And do you know someone like that?"
Urahara smiled. "Of course! How lucky we are! In fact, he just visited my shop this very morning! A brilliant young man! A true artist of the impossible! A bit loud, mind you, and has terrible taste in fashion. But he is a consummate expert on the subject."
The team leaned in, holding their breath. Batman was tense. Zatanna was hopeful. Jason Blood was wary.
"Who?" growled Batman.
Urahara clapped once, the sound sharp in the silence. "A Lord of Chaos! I believe his name was Klarion!"
The silence that followed that statement was so deep the fire could be heard crackling in the fireplace.
Jason Blood dropped the book he was holding. It hit the rug with a dull thud. "By the demon... are you crazy?"
Zatanna gasped, backing away. "Klarion? The Witch Boy? He's... he's a force of nature! He's a walking disaster! You can't 'ask' him for help! He would probably join Destiny just for fun!"
But the strongest reaction came, once again, from John Constantine.
He had managed, with shaking hands, to pull out another cigarette and bring it to his lips. He was about to light it when Urahara said the name.
He froze.
The lighter fell from his hand.
The cigarette fell from his lips for the second time that day.
He looked at Urahara with wide eyes, his face a mask of pure existential terror. "Klarion? You want to... invite... Klarion... to this party? Have you lost your fucking mind!?"
Urahara Kisuke, surrounded by a bat detective, a panicked mage, a man bound to a demon, and an occultist on the verge of collapse, simply smiled, radiant.
"Oh, don't worry!" he said cheerfully, putting away his fan. "I have an excellent method of persuasion. It will be hilarious!"
The library, already burdened with the weight of millennia of dusty knowledge, seemed to collapse upon itself in stunned silence.
The echo of Urahara's last word—"Hilarious!"—faded, leaving a void that quickly filled with a mix of horror, disbelief, and pure fury.
Jason, the man harboring a demon, was the first to find his voice, and it was a low, tired growl, that of a man who has seen civilizations collapse and is sick of surprises.
"By the demon... are you crazy?" he said, finally picking his book up from the floor. "Klarion. The Witch Boy? He isn't a 'guide', Urahara. He is a natural calamity. He is a walking disaster wrapped in a Puritan suit. He is the very definition of unbridled chaos!"
"He's right!" Zatanna intervened, taking a protective step back, as if the mere act of naming the Lord of Chaos could summon him. Her voice, usually so full of stage confidence, was high and strained. "Klarion doesn't help, Urahara! He destroys. He is a Lord of Chaos. His very existence is anathema to order. Asking him to help us fix something is like asking a forest fire to water the plants!"
"Psychopath!" barked Constantine, finally finding the will to pull out another cigarette and light it with visibly trembling hands. The cheap tobacco smoke made a poor defense against the smell of dust and fear. "You are completely and utterly insane! I just came from one of your 'fun' visits this morning! He almost destroyed your shop just because he was bored! And now you want to invite him to this party? To the realm of nightmares!? He'll join Destiny in a second, just for the laughs! He'll stab us in the back before we can say 'fuck'!"
Through the barrage of panic and reason, Urahara remained motionless, that same bright, calm smile on his face. He listened patiently, head tilted, like a professor allowing his slower students to rant about why the correct answer is, in fact, impossible.
He let them vent. He let the panic fill the room until it exhausted itself, leaving only a panting silence.
Only Batman hadn't spoken. He was still as a shadow, his mind working, processing his team's reaction. Finally, his white lenses fixed on Urahara.
"Assuming you could contact him," he said, his voice a low, pragmatic growl cutting through all the hysteria. "You couldn't control him. He is an unacceptable variable. He is too great a risk."
Urahara nodded slowly, as if Batman had just made a very good point. "Right. Right. You all have excellent points," he said cheerfully. "Constantine is right, he will betray us. Zatanna is right, he is a walking disaster. And Jason is right, he is a natural calamity. And you, Batman-san, are absolutely right: he is absolutely uncontrollable."
He closed his fan with a sharp snap that made everyone jump.
"And that is why," he continued, his voice losing its playful tone and becoming sharp as a razor, "he is not just our best option. He is our only option."
He walked to the center of the library, his presence somehow filling the vast space.
"How do you navigate a storm, Batman-san?" he asked rhetorically. "You don't do it by building a wall hoping to stop it," he said, casting a glance at Jason. "Your demon is a cage, but the Dreaming is an ocean. The cage will sink."
"You don't do it by reciting the rules of navigation to the waves," he continued, looking at Zatanna. "Your magic is based on order, on words of power. In the realm of nightmares, words lie and rules melt. Your magic will turn against you."
"And certainly," he said, looking at Batman, "you don't try to analyze it logically or beat it into submission. Your mind, brilliant as it is, will break when physics cease to apply. Your strength is irrelevant."
He paused, his smile returning, but now it was the smile of a scholar who has solved the equation. "No. To navigate a storm of chaos, you don't need a wall, nor a rulebook, nor a fist. You need something that loves the storm. You need something that is as unpredictable, as anarchic, and as crazy as the waves themselves. You need something that can ride the lightning."
"We need Chaos to navigate Chaos," he concluded.
"So what if you're right, you damn philosopher!" growled Constantine. "That doesn't change the fact that he'll betray us the moment he gets bored!"
"Of course he will!" exclaimed Urahara, delighted. "That's the beauty of it! That's what makes him predictable! Klarion isn't complicated. He is wonderfully simple. He is a being of pure and absolute instant gratification. He will always, always, choose the most 'fun' option. Our mission, therefore, is not to control him. It is to ensure that the path we want him to follow remains, at all times, the most entertaining option available. We are the directors of a reality show, and he is our chaotic and temperamental star."
Batman stepped forward. "I'm not betting the fate of the world on us being able to 'entertain' a mad god."
"And who said we would?" retorted Urahara. "Entertainment is the bait. But every good fisherman knows you also need... a hook."
The shopkeeper reached into the wide sleeve of his kimono, rummaged for a moment, and pulled out something that made Constantine let out a choking sound.
It was the puzzle box. The dark wooden Karakuri box with Kidō seals he had given to Klarion that very morning.
"But... you gave it to him!" stammered John.
"I gave him a version," said Urahara with a wink. "I always keep a backup. Especially with such... volatile clients. This is an exact replica."
"You're going to lure him with a toy?" asked Jason, incredulous.
"Not just lure him. I'm going to hook him," said Urahara. "You see, I gave Klarion an impossible puzzle designed by a Lord of Order, a puzzle only Chaos can solve. But I also designed it to be... tedious. At this precise moment, that boy is in some dark corner of reality, about to throw a monumental tantrum because his new toy isn't as fun as he thought. He is bored. And a bored Klarion is the most destructive force in the universe. We are going to offer him something better."
"It's still a risk," growled Batman. "He could take the bait and leave us there."
Urahara's smile turned predatory. "Ah. But for that... for that I have insurance."
He reached into another sleeve of his kimono and pulled out the small sealed glass vial. Inside, the single, vibrant orange hair of Teekl sizzled with contained chaotic energy.
The silence that fell over the library was so deep it was as if the world had stopped spinning.
Zatanna brought both hands to her mouth, eyes wide with horror and an admiration she didn't want to admit. Jason Blood simply closed his eyes, as if suffering profound pain.
Constantine... Constantine dropped his lighter.
"You... you... bastard," he whispered, a slow, terrified grin spreading across his face. "You really did it! You took a hair from his familiar! You have an anchor!"
"A hair," said Urahara, weighing the vial. "A conceptual anchor. A direct signature to the source of his power. It's like having the private phone number of his soul."
He explained the plan, his voice now fast and precise. "We won't use it to summon him. That would be rude and very dangerous. We will use it to anchor ourselves to him. And to anchor him to this house. Zatanna, your blood magic is strong. Jason, your connection to this place is absolute. We will use Teekl's hair as the nexus. We will create a... conceptual lasso. An unbreakable thread. Then, I will use the puzzle box as bait, opening it just a crack so he smells his failure. He will come, drawn by the promise of a nightmare playground where he can use all his power to solve his frustrated toy."
"Once he is here," he continued, gazing fixedly at Batman, "we will secure the anchor. He can run all he wants in the Dreaming. He can cause all the chaos he desires. But we... we will be the can tied to his tail. He will be our guide, whether he wants to be or not. And when we have what we need, or when things get too ugly... we pull the leash. And we all come back here, together."
It was an insane plan. It was a suicidal plan. It was a plan that involved blackmailing a child god using his cat as a hostage, to navigate the apocalypse of nightmares.
Batman weighed the options. A: Certain annihilation at the hands of Doctor Destiny. B: An infinitesimal probability of survival following the plan of the smartest psychopath he had ever met.
He always chose the option that, however impossible, gave him a chance.
Slowly, Batman nodded. Once.
"Do it."
Urahara let out a laugh of pure and absolute delight. "Wonderful! I love it when a plan comes together! Now, let's get to work!"
He began barking orders, his energy filling the room. "Jason-san, I will need access to the oldest book on 'Symbiosis and Anchor Bonds' you have. It's probably in the 'Insane Contracts' section. Zatanna-chan, I need you to trace a containment circle, but not with salt... use the dust from those books over there. We need a circle made of 'stories' to contain an idea. Constantine-san..."
"What?" growled John, resigned to his fate.
"Stop complaining, for the love of God," said Urahara cheerfully. "You ruin the acoustics. And watch the door. We don't want to be interrupted."
He knelt in the center of the Persian rug, placing the empty puzzle box on the floor. He unscrewed the cork of the small vial.
"Right," he muttered to himself, as the rest of the team rushed to follow his orders, caught in the orbit of his madness. "We are connecting the line. We are fishing for a Lord of Chaos. And the bait is the only thing in the universe he cannot resist..."
He held the vial over the box.
"...the promise of a toy he couldn't break, and a shiny new place where he can break everything."
He dropped Teekl's hair inside the puzzle box and snapped it shut.
In the silence of the library, a sound echoed, a sound that did not come from the room, nor even from the house. It came from everywhere and nowhere.
A giggle. A childish, malicious, and joyful giggle.
The bait had been seen.
- - - - - - - - -
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