Everyone is an extra—a side character—in someone else's story. But when a person becomes an extra in their own story, that's when reality unfurls. In most cases, the patient is taken to an institute full of really good guessers; for the Rhythm of the Mind was never a normal soul's purview.
Sad part aside, are we really the main lead of our own lives?
Do our decisions truly force the world to spin the way it does?
What if they do?
And what if they don't?
The latter makes our existence feel meaningless, while the former places unbearable weights on our shoulders, like Atlas and the heavens.
So the best choice is to live without expecting the second and without obsessing over the first.
Do what feels right, learn from what makes sense, and leave behind what doesn't while trying your best to find your meaning of life—any meaning—just enough to fool your older self into believing that you mattered.
Welcome to the club, now you're broken!
Klaire's psychiatrist retired the moment she heard this philosophy of Klaire's. Unlike any of her older patients, Klaire had a startling sense of what is, what should be, what isn't, and what she must do, even if her choices leaned heavily toward the supernatural.
Klaire has more sense of herself than anyone sane, the doctor wrote in her file. Perhaps one step away from becoming a monk… a delusional one chasing the supernatural, but still, a monk.
Klaire had a habit of getting herself into prison. The police might claim otherwise, but the truth was she walked in and out of precincts whenever she wished. Police scanners were fine for vigilantes, but those chasing the supernatural needed something fresher, like gossip, rumors, whispered heresy… anything that carried the scent of an unnatural disturbance. And where better to find that than in a precinct full of the innocent and the delusional?
Sure, the cops didn't do much on the supernatural front—you couldn't really blame them—but even with the natural crimes, they were slower than Klaire.
Maybe train them on the streets, Klaire often suggested, baffled that ordinary people hadn't figured out something so obvious. After all, a polished school can never prepare a student for the filthy reality beyond its walls.
Put a thief who steals to eat into one of those uniforms and watch the crime rate plummet. That thief would know more about the mayor's secrets than the guard stationed right outside the mayor's office. This isn't a sense of duty or his need to put food on the table, but the simple, broken urge to know.
Of course, leaving him in this position for long will taint his curiosity, dull his sense, and drill the mundane into his soul.
"I agree he eavesdropped on their conversation—" Klaire argued from behind the bars.
"It's called breaking and entering. And stealing," the detective corrected, rolling his eyes for the umpteenth time.
"Hey!" The thief raised his cuffed hands, offended. "I didn't steal anything! And you can't prove I did!"
"Shut up, Quazy!" Klaire scolded, only for her disappointment to melt into a smile, unable to hold back her amusement. "You made it!" She reached through the bars for a hug.
The detective yanked Quazy out of reach at the last second, scoffing at both of them. "Relax. He'll be joining you soon."
"That's if he committed the crime," Klaire reminded the detective with a matching scoff.
"I'm confused!" Quazy scratched at his messy hair, adding more knots. "What am I pleading against?" he asked Klaire.
Klaire bursts out laughing, utterly baffled at her fellow street folks' insanity, as she scans her dear friend.
Quazy had the kind of face most people overlooked at first glance. He was lean, with sharp cheekbones and a slightly crooked nose that hinted at more than a few bad decisions or unlucky fights. His dark, wavy hair was forever messy, as if he'd either rolled out of bed or slipped out of a tight spot moments ago.
His mismatched eyes, one deep brown, the other a muted hazel, flickered with restless energy; constantly scanning, always calculating. But to a normal folk, it only meant crazy, and someone high on a mixture of illegal narcotics. He dressed like someone who didn't quite belong anywhere: hoodies with cutoff sleeves, layered jackets chosen for utility over style, and sneakers so scuffed their original color was more myth than memory. And yet, there was a strange stillness to him when he wanted there to be, like a shadow that refused to be noticed until it moved.
"Be you!" Klaire said, scratching her head. "The same confused, confusing, old you."
"Just keeping matters straight." Quazy gave Klaire a cheerful thumbs-up.
"So happy you're dumb," the detective muttered, yanking Quazy's wrist and forcing his thumbprint onto a file. "What kind of name is Quazy anyway?"
"The kind you people can never understand," Quazy snickered, successfully distracting the detective from noticing the fading fingerprint.
"We talked about this, Quazy," Klaire warned firmly. "SHUT. UP."
A cop dragged Quazy away and shoved him into Klaire's cell, and when no one was looking, the two immediately shook hands and burst into quiet giggles, ignoring the shattering glass.
"Acting is hard," Quazy said, stretching before flopping down as if preparing for a nap.
"Got you a bed and a free meal," Klaire smirked. "Next time, be early at the shelter."
"Will try, sis…" Quazy saluted lazily. "Got sad news though."
"Hard to get into Triple S," Klaire completed his thought. "I know! The entrance fee, the exam, the dumb rules, and our government officials' glorious ignorance."
Quazy perked up, startled. "How did you figure out I didn't get anything from the mayor's office?"
"I know you," Klaire said. "If you had something juicy, you'd be bouncing off the walls with excitement."
"Ooooh… smart." Quazy beamed, flashing his collection of missing teeth like trophies.
Edon banged the steel bars of the cell with an iron baton, the metallic ring bouncing off the walls and deafening everyone inside. "Get out, girl. We found nothing concrete on you… for now. Stay away from our crime scenes if you don't want any pending cases on you."
"Aww… thanks, cutie," Klaire winked, making Edon blush. "Mind if I head out in the morning? It's too late to get into the shelter."
"This isn't a lodge," Edon snapped. "Get out—" He paused in thought. "—And don't come back." He spun to throw his fury onto Kudo this time. "If he didn't keep solving your cases, you wouldn't be enjoying prison so much! Popping in and out has made this place a joke, and it's all his fault!" He jabbed a finger at Kudo.
"If you actually did your job right, this lodge would be a prison with actual criminals," Klaire shot back, snickering as she high-fived Quazy.
"Say what!?" Edon swirled his finger in Klaire's direction. "You'll regret this day!"
"I'm already out… so maybe another day?" she giggled, stepping past him.
Edon grabbed her arm and shoved her right back inside the cell. "Oh no, you're not. You're in for—" He froze, eyes darting around for an excuse.
"Obstruction of justice," Klaire whispered to Quazy—and the very next moment, Edon yelled the exact clause.
"She's playing…" Kudo hesitated, noticing Klaire properly for the first time, then quickly compared her brilliance to Edon's stupidity and dismissed her again.
Edon's face mashed against the prison bars reminded Klaire of a dog barking from the safety of its gate, yapping at tiny squirrels while the real predators tugged its leash from the shadows.
Determined to shut Kalire up before she tried asserting dominance over him, Edon swallowed his pride and asked Kudo to solve a mystery for him.
Kalire had no weak point, so unfortunately, that dragged her friend right into Edon's crosshairs.
"This crazy idiot keeps slipping into places no one else can. Thoughts?"
Kudo held back a second comment, fully aware that Edon had absolutely no clue about his real accomplishments.
He stepped closer to the gate, pretending to study the mysterious Quazy.
"It's Qu-a-zy, not cr-a-zy," Quazy said, exaggerating each syllable with dramatic clarity.
Edon kept quiet, smirking, satisfied that—for once—the great Kudo was analyzing someone he had accused, unaware that Kudo had solved this particular mystery long ago.
Kudo usually never revealed his process, not out of fear of imitation, but because people would overlook it once they realized how straightforward it was. Quazy was amongst those silent geniuses the streets picked up for nefarious reasons. Kudo's usual process dissected the man from the crazy and kept the pieces within a tight-knit circle to catch bigger fish roaming the streets.
Klaire snorted, utterly confident in her friend's abilities. If Bossy and the Mayor couldn't fully use him, there was no way Kudo had all the pieces to solve the puzzle that was 'Quazy.'
"Paint," Kudo said, yawning; the word stunning Klaire, and leaving Edon muddled.
From simple to simplicity itself, Quazy was a brilliant artist, capable of painting himself into a wall so flawlessly that reality forgot where he ended, and the plaster began. Even if someone chiseled deep enough to draw blood, no one could trace the line between the wall and the man.
Fame found him early in his career, but misfortune followed close behind. Someone high up in the office offered him a role, and out of respect, Quazy accepted. He was wise enough never to reveal his true trick; all his online videos portrayed him as an escape artist, a magician who could disappear into thin air, rather than an actual painter.
In one video, he flew out his first thousand subscribers and challenged them to a game of hide-and-seek. He took four minutes to hide and stayed hidden in plain sight for an entire hour.
After that stunt, his thousand followers multiplied into ten thousand overnight… until the day he witnessed a horror unfold, shattering everything he had built.
The unnamed official murdered their entire family and vanished into thin air, leaving Quazy standing alone amidst the corpses of people he had once trusted.
When the police arrived and demanded proof, Quazy knew they were more interested in uncovering his trick than in exonerating him, so he refused to reveal the trick. And for that one secret, he surrendered his entire life.
A secret he shared only with Klaire, and one Kudo was forced to reveal to a select few, hoping it might lessen the weight of Quazy's sentence.
———<>||<>——— End of Chapter Fifty-Three. ———<>||<>———