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Chapter 4 by Speng

Where do they find Blake?

In a Potion aisle

"Let's find out."

We head off in the direction Blake left, scanning up and down the aisles, while Sandy fools around with her newly-elongated tongue, humming merrily. There's all sorts of magical paraphernalia lining the shelves and racks: robes, wands, crystal balls, the whole nine yards... Except that if those magic frog-tongue pills were real, there's a pretty good shot that all of this could be real, too. Forget pulling rabbits out of hats, could you really fly around and shoot fireballs like the wizards of legend with this stuff?

"I wonder if I can grab things with this..." Sandy muses, snapping me out of my reverie. She stops in front of a rack at the end of an aisle, and, before I can object, takes aim and snaps her tongue out at one of the wands resting on it. Her aim's dead on-- what looks like a wax seal affixed to the short rod crumbles with the impact-- and, to my surprise, it sticks, zipping back for her to catch in her mouth. She turns, cocking her head and grinning triumphantly with the wand in her teeth.

"Hah! Gotcha--!"

Suddenly, there is, within an entirely uncomfortable span of time, a blinding flash, the feeling of something whizzing past my head, and a deafening BOM, as if someone had just set off an industrial-grade firework inside the store.

"JESUS!" "YEESUS!"

When my vision clears, Sandy's eyes are as wide as saucers, the wand in her mouth is emitting a small trail of smoke from the tip, and there's a large black scorch-mark on the ceiling behind me. Amazingly, it doesn't seem to have actually damaged the ceiling or anything else in the store... except maybe my freakin' heart. Pondering this, I turn, very slowly and deliberately, back to Sandy, who is now sheepishly hiding the wand behind her back.

"Please stop touching things."

A fit of coughing and swearing from two aisles down cuts off any response-- that could only be Blake, and we set off running towards him. The aisle he's in seems to be packed to the gills with glass bottles and vials of all possible shapes and sizes and filled with liquids of all possible colors, barring a section where the explosion seems to have caused Blake to have jerked back into the shelf, knocking several bottles to the floor-- either the explosion or the ringing of our ears must have covered up the sound.

"Blake, are you okay?!" Sandy and I call out in stereo, skidding to a halt near him. He looks up at us, coughing again, before croaking, "What the hell was that?"

"Eeheheh..." Sandy looks away, scratching at her cheek. "That was--" I pause, frowning. Blake looks fine, and the puddle of unknown liquids and shattered glass around his feet looks relatively inert, but he's holding an empty flask in his hand.

"Did you drink that?"

"Not intentionally," Blake responds sourly, "I was just smelling it when that explosion happened."

Sandy and I exchange worried glances. "Do you know what was in it?" I ask, concern leaking into my voice. He shrugs; "No idea, there's no label on it."

"Well, we're about to find out," I say with a grimace, "That explosion you heard was the sound of magic being real."

Blake's eyebrows shoot up. "Wait, what?"

"Check it," Sandy steps forward, letting her tongue loll out of her mouth, hanging all the way down to her bust. "Fwog tongue pillth."

"Holy shit, those worked?" Blake's expression quickly shifts from amazement to worry, "In that case..."

What was the mystery potion?

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