Chapter 30
The Boss' Hand
"Today, we observe a rare event in the life of a fascinating creature known as the coffee shop owner. Although normally a stationary creature who waits for his pray to come to him, this particular breed of coffee shop owner called a vampire has decided to take a more proactive approach and has left the safety of his habitat to hunt.
"Watch as he strikes up a conversation with a type of pray called the past customer. It is a tactic coffee shop owners often employ in order to convert past customers to another type of pray called regulars."
"Why are you pretending to be some raspy-voiced nature documentary narrator?" Roy asked George.
"Because it's fun," the lion cub said to the human man.
The unusual pair were currently huddled together behind a tall, green lamppost, watching George's adopted father talk with a stout lady rabbit holding a basket full of groceries. They were too far away to hear what was being said, but they could tell by the smiles that it was nice.
Peggy was not too far behind, staring at the crouching lion boy and the hunched young man. She was just passing by while on a solitary walk around town when she spotted the two familiar faces acting weird.
"What are you two doing?" she asked.
Startled, George and Roy jumped, crying, "YIKES!"
And then they clapped their hands over each other's mouths before glancing over at the coffee shop Owner. The vampire still talked with the lady rabbit as if he didn't notice anything.
George and Roy breathed sighs of relief, and then George put his finger to his lips and went, "Shh! We're following Dad around."
"I can see that," said Peggy. "Why?"
"Dad's been acting really weird lately," George explained.
"You don't say?" said Peggy, thinking he and Roy were being kind of weird themselves.
George continued and said, "Dad's always wandering around during his free time, but lately he's been kind of secretive about it. He never says where he's going, who he's seeing or what he's doing now."
"That is weird," Peggy admitted.
Great, she thought. Now he's got me curious.
Excited to get an ally, George cried out, "Right? So that's why I decided to try tailing him to see what he's up to."
"Well, that explains what you're up to," said Peggy. "But what about you, Roy? Why're you stalking Boss?"
But Roy protested, "It's not what you think. I'm not stalking him."
"It sure looks like you're stalking him," Peggy pointed out.
"Well, I'm not!" Roy shouted, dismayed. "I was just on my way to lunch when I saw George sneaking around. I figured I should keep an eye on him and ended up joining him."
George blinked and then said, "That's not how it went. You and I planned this days ago!"
Roy quickly clapped his hand over George's mouth and forced out a laugh.
"Kids," Roy said. "You never know what ridiculous thing they'll say next."
"Uh-huh." Peggy held Roy with a doubtful gaze with one eyebrow raised, taking note how, like George, the young man wore a trench coat, Fedora hat and pair of black-lens glasses.
Roy could only smile back nervously while sweating buckets, leading to an awkward silence.
But then George tore Roy's hand off his mouth and shouted, "He's getting away! Come on! Or we'll lose him!"
And then he broke away from the others and ran down the street after his father who had moved on after finishing his talk with the lady rabbit.
"Hey! George, wait!"
Peggy and Roy chased after George, weaving through throngs of people going about their day while making sure they don't lose sight of the child. They quickly caught up to him loitering next to a clothing store. He pressed himself against the wall while peeking over the corner.
"George! It's dangerous to run off on your own like that!" Peggy scolded.
George, however, put his finger to his lips and hissed, "Shh! You're going to give us away!"
He pointed over the corner.
Beyond the road, Boss could be seen seated at an outdoor table in front of a mildly fancy-looking eatery. While under the protective shade of the table's white and red striped umbrella, he had taken off both his top hat and his cape and laid them aside. His umbrella was left leaning against the arm of his chair.
"Suspicious," George muttered. "Really suspicious."
"What is?" Peggy asked. "It just looks like he stopped for a bite to eat."
"No," Roy disagreed, "I think George is onto something. Did you see how many cups of water the waitress put on his table? Two. That means he's over there to meet someone."
"What? Like a date?" Peggy said jokingly.
"Or a smuggler here to sell him black market coffee beans," George suggested.
Roy and Peggy looked at him and then at each other.
"Yeah, I don't know about that."
Illegal coffee beans aside, Roy wouldn't put it past the former Trickster to be mixed up in shady business.
Peggy, however, was more convinced that her Boss was on a date. The spot Boss was waiting at was a prime spot for a romantic encounter. In fact, the two other tables beside Boss's were occupied with couples.
"Oh look!" George cried out. "Someone's coming! It's a lady!"
Roy and Peggy turned their heads, and admittedly, Peggy's heart excitedly skipped a beat. True to the lion cub's words, a human lady in a red dress (and a very pretty one at that) walked over to the coffee shop Owner, still flipping through the menu to pass the time. She stopped right next to the vampire and began talking to him.
"Don't tell me it really is a date!" Roy muttered.
Peggy and George hissed at him, "Shush!"
They stared intently at the pair and strained their ears in the vain hope of catching some words. But after just half a minute, the lady waved good-bye to the coffee shop Owner and continued on her way. Halfway down the street, she encountered a man with long ears, an elf, and hooked her arm around his before departing with him. The coffee shop Owner gave the couple a quick glance before returning his attention to the menu.
It turned out the lady was not who the coffee shop Owner was waiting for.
"Well that was a miss," Peggy said, slightly disappointed.
"Say," went Roy, "if it really is a date, who do you think it'd be with? My money's on this town's Head Magus. I see her a lot at the coffee shop chatting with the Trickster whenever I visited. They seemed very close."
"True, they got history," Peggy said.
"Nah, can't be," said George. "They've never had vibes like that, as far as I know."
"Well, you are still a kid," said Peggy.
George frowned indignantly. "Hey! I'm not a kid. I'm a big boy."
Roy cut in with a, "Shh! Someone else is coming! Speak of the devil! It's the Head Magus!"
"No way!" George cried out in disbelief. He and Peggy snapped their heads back to the coffee shop Owner to see a familiar lady in a white dress, cape, and wide-brimmed pointed hat walking up to him. "They really are dating!?"
"I know! Unbelievable, right?"
All three went rigid and hearts jumped out their throats. The last person to speak had used the coffee shop Owner's voice. And sure enough, when the gang turned around, there standing behind them was the vampire.
"Gah!" George yelped. "Dad? But if you're here, then who's there?"
He and the others turned back to see that where the coffee shop Owner and the Head Magus were chatting, there was a lady weasel and a man weasel making kissy faces to each other.
"We were watching an illusion? Since when?" Roy wondered.
"I'd say since I had a short chat with Mrs. Hopper," the coffee shop Owner estimated. "But I actually knew you lot were following me since the beginning."
"Hey, I only joined halfway," said Peggy.
But her Boss replied, "I know. Thanks for giving me the opening I needed to sneak in that illusion spell."
And then he threw his gaze on his son and asked the lion cub, "Now care to explain what you were up to?"
"W-well, uh . . ." George stammered, eyes rolled up in thought.
As he struggled to come up with an excuse to give his father, no one seemed to pay any attention to a big, steel overhead store sign hanging on a pair of aged iron chains. No one seemed to see that one of the chains was worn so thin that it was going to snap until it was too late.
Suddenly, the worn-out chain snapped in half, and the store sign went swinging down.
Roy saw it first and shoved Peggy one way and George the other. But that left him no time to save himself.
He saw the edge of the sign fast approaching. But then black fabric overtook his view.
The coffee shop Owner had leaped in front of Roy with his cape fluttering at his back. He swung his right fist, struck the sign, and stopped the huge slab of metal in its tracks with an explosive bang.
When he was certain the danger had passed, the coffee shop Owner glanced back at Roy and asked him, "You okay?"
In a state of shock, Roy could only nod his head in reply. And then his eyes popped out when he happened to glance at the vampire's hand.
"Trickster! Your hand!" the young man cried out. "Your hand!"
Peggy wondered what got Roy all flustered and took a look herself.
"OH MY GOD!" she screamed. "Boss! Your hand's all obliterated!"
All of Boss's fingers and half his palm were missing, leaving just jagged edges a little above his wrist.
"A hospital!" cried George. "We need to get you to the hospital!"
Boss, however, didn't seem to care all that much and said, "Calm down, you guys."
Peggy shrilly went, "Calm down? Calm down!? How can you be so calm about this? Your hand's-!"
"A fake," Boss cut in. "I lost the real one years ago."
"You did?" asked Peggy.
"So you're a pirate!" George suddenly cried out.
"What?" went Boss, looking at his son funny. "Why would you -? What is going on in that head of yours?"
"Well, you got only one hand," George said. "And pirates only have one hand. But they use hooks where they got no hands. How come you don't use a hook for your missing hand, Dad?"
"Because, Son, it's a lot harder to make coffee when one of your hand's a hook!" Boss said. And then he shook his head, mumbling to himself, "Just who on Emeron did he get his scatterbrain from?"
The owner of the store with the fallen sign soon appeared to check out what was going on. After realizing what happened, the goat man apologized profusely to the coffee shop Owner and offered to treat them to some free ice cream.
It was by no means enough to make up for what could have been a deadly disaster, but Boss was in no mood to deal with anymore trouble than he had to. So he accepted the apology and the free ice cream and herded everyone into the store which was not seeing any business at this hour.
Peggy and George volunteered to pick up the ice cream with the store owner, leaving Boss and Roy alone to wait at their table.
Things were awkwardly quiet between the two men, the both of them avoiding eye contact for a while. But then Roy broke that silence and softly said:
"Thanks for saving me."
"No problem," replied the vampire.
"So that hand of yours, you lost it years ago, right? When, exactly? How?"
The coffee shop Owner looked up thoughtfully and went, "Hmm. I'd say it was when I was twelve years old. It happened just a few months after I met your mother, now that I think about it."
Over by the store counter, Peggy and George watched the store owner get started in making a fresh batch of ice cream completely from scratch.
"I see," Roy said. And then he turned. "Wait, you know who my mother was!? But then that would mean you know who I really am!"
"Of course," said the former Trickster. "Did you really think I wouldn't look into your background when you, an agent of the Royal Capital, suddenly started making regular visits to a coffee shop in some town far, far away from home?"
"B-but I was sure I covered my tracks!"
"You still had to tell the Royal Inspectors where you really came from, and that was enough for me to figure out who you really are," said the coffee shop Owner. "Peggy told me you mentioned the little adventure the Count's daughter had with the infamous Trickster of Ariela. Only someone from your hometown could have known about it, but anyone who did know was forced to sign a magic contract to keep that story a secret by the Count. Except for me, the only ones who could still talk about that incident would be the Count and the Count's daughter herself. And maybe any family of theirs like say, the Count's daughter's son."
He gave Roy a subtle but piercing gaze.
Roy sighed in defeat and said, "I'm impressed, Trickster. You're just as clever as Mother claimed in her stories. That's right. My mother was the Count's daughter who you had an adventure with several years ago. She told me about it many, many times when I was a kid, among other tales of your deeds and escapades. You were a larger-than-life hero in them."
"I was never anything of the sort," said the coffee shop Owner. "I was just an impressionable boy, playing out fantasies inspired by storybooks about gentleman thieves and more honorable criminals."
"But you did save my mother from kidnappers," Roy pointed out. "And you helped out a lot of other people too during the Shadow Civil War."
"Regardless, now I know why you keep showing up at my shop. All those stories your mother told you must have gotten you curious about me and when an opportunity to meet the legend in the flesh came knocking, you took it. It would have been easy for you to use the Count's name to get the Royal Inspectors to put you in the team assigned to meet me at Uncle Theo's house."
"It was," Roy admitted. "I was a bit surprised when I first saw you. You were nothing like in the stories. In the stories, the Trickster was a mischievous imp, someone it was impossible to imagine all grown up. And yet, here you are without an ounce of that childlike spark anymore. What happened to change you so much? Did it have something to do with how you lost your hand?"
The vampire glanced down at the cracked stub his right hand had become. And then he said, "You could say that. There was a huge incident that I and a rival of mine got mixed up in. A powerful magic artifact went haywire and sparked a disaster that destroyed my hand.
"I would have bounced back if that was all I lost, but that disaster didn't just take away my hand. It took away my rival, too."
The coffee shop Owner paused and then shook his head.
"No. She wasn't just my rival," he said. "She was my friend."
"What happened?" Roy asked.
"What else?" the coffee shop Owner replied. "My friend and rival sacrificed herself to destroy the magic artifact and put an end to the disaster before it could hurt someone. She disappeared right before my very eyes in a pillar of light that reached all the way up to the moon along with my hand that failed to grab her in time."
He turned his gaze upward to the sky which had become shrouded in a huge sheet of gloomy clouds.
"After that, I quit the Trickster business. Without my friend and rival around, being a Trickster stopped being fun and I just didn't feel like doing it anymore."
Silence fell over the two men.
Over by the store counter, the store owner had finally finished making a batch of his signature special and was throwing them all into large glass bowls with a performer's flair.
Roy broke the silence to ask a question that had made its way onto his mind.
"Say, you're not going to ask about her?" he said. "You know, my mother?"
To which, the coffee shop Owner replied, "I read the news just like any other grownup. I already know she passed away three years ago because of a sickness. How've you been holding up since then?"
Roy shrugged. "I think I've gotten used to it. My father and grandfather, on the other hand, are still coming to grips."
"I see." That was all the vampire said before Peggy and George finally returned with the store owner and the free ice cream.
"We're back," Peggy said. "Sorry it took so long. What have you guys been talking about in the meantime?"
Roy and the coffee shop Owner exchanged looks.
And then the vampire replied, "Oh, just a little bit about the past."
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