What did she just say?

"W-what did you just say?" Surprisingly... Murph didn't have anything to say about Officer Abbot's most recent comment. He simply retracted into the farthest corner away from John and tried to hide... while the gamer was still too busy repeating himself. Almost immediately, his imagination went wild. He thought about the people who had known that Michel was already dead, considering that someone from the Order or the Flame could have turned him in... and then remembered Gaia's stance on such public outings of magic. They wouldn't have bothered risking their lives or their organizations with something so dangerous and petty. They would have dealt with him themselves if they considered John to be a threat.

The next thing he considered were all of the people that Michel had brought with him. Some of them John had noticed almost immediately and got a good long look at... Others he barely even saw at all. The idea that he had actually been locked in a cage by one of them and not an actual police officer crossed his mind... and he twisted his hands up into fists as quickly as he could. He tried to prepare himself for another fight... and then a second wave of hangover-induced nausea almost knocked him off his feet.

John stumbled back for his bench, and when the back of his knees finally hit it, he fell onto his rear with a hard grunt.

"Michel. You were telling me all about him last night..." she didn't even hesitate to answer him. "Or... trying to. You were a little incomprehensible at the time. Something about how you punched a hole into his chest..." she said, and John froze.

Whatever calm he had left felt like it had been thrown out the window when she said that. That one little piece of information sent goosebumps down his spine and actually made him start to sweat, even in a cold room. He swallowed hard, and when he opened his mouth to speak again, Officer Abbot stepped forward and locked eyes with him, smirking as if she was daring him to let her catch him in a lie.

"It's a..." he paused... he really didn't have anything to say. "It's a video game character," he lied, and a large, white, gentle smile took over her features.

"Oh!" she gasped and grabbed onto the heavy bars with one hand. "My nephew plays a lot of video games, though I must admit I've never seen him act like that over one... Maybe I've heard of it, what game was it?"

"I-it..." he stuttered and paused again. Already he felt like she didn't believe him. The thought that she knew he was lying crossed his mind... and then did it again and again and again, until it felt like it was the only thought he had. "It was..."

"Are you sure it wasn't your coworker, Michel..." she let the sentence hang off for a moment as she reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper to read off. "Michel Vitaly Alexeev? I would just hate to have spent my whole night following up on something that was no more than just a drunk utterance."

"I-I'm sur-" She didn't even let him answer her, she just interrupted him again.

"Because your coworker hasn't been seen since the marathon at the Crescent Meadows Park on Saturday..." Again, Officer Abbot paused as she grabbed the steel cage with both hands and glared down at John. "The exact same day that your friend, Grace, was supposedly shot by one 'Chad Ricken.'" A door opened up from somewhere nearby, and John tried to look as far as he could down one end of the hallway, as if straining for some kind of help. At the rate this conversation was going, he was half tempted to just teleport back to his Kingdom just to get out of talking to her. "His boyfriend, Devon, has been asking around for him... begging for our help to try and locate him. From what little we could learn before you showed up, we found out that Michel had been making plans to propose to Devon-"

Another door opened at the end of the hallway, and Officer Abbot was quickly interrupted as one more cop pushed just barely into sight. A flash of pale, unblemished, white skin peeked into view for a moment as a man with short blond hair interrupted his coworker. Officer Abbot scowled at him briefly for the interruption and then somehow managed to repress the look on her face as the cop pulled out a handful of keys... and then stepped right past Officer Abbot.

"What are you doing?!" she snapped, and the new cop jumped so hard that he dropped the keys. John's eyes followed them to the ground for a moment before he noticed how badly his hands were shaking. Actually, his whole body was trembling like that, he realized with a sudden blink, and his stomach tightened just at the realization.

"Uh... Someone paid his bail," the new cop muttered dumbly... and then pointed right at John. The Gamer blinked hard for a moment and then stared at the man with wide eyes. He was just as confused as Officer Abbot was.

"I haven't arrested him, yet," she snarled, and the cop took a lengthy step back away from the cage. Strangely enough... John could not see the keys on the floor anymore. They just disappeared. "He can't be bailed out because he doesn't have a bail to be paid!" A small whimper echoed out down the hallway as she shouted at her fellow cop for a moment, and then when she seemed to finally stop talking, the new officer tried to explain his situation to her.

"I'm just doing what I was tol-"

"Come with me!" she snapped again and then immediately began dragging the other cop back out of the room. The door opened with a loud creaking noise and then slammed shut again with an angry bang as they 'professionally' left the room for the next part of that discussion. John almost broke down as soon as they were out of sight. His breathing went rocketing out of his control, even with the help of his Gamer's Mind, he failed to bring himself back down from the edge of a panic attack. He started hyperventilating and then... just lost his breath completely, while Murph tried to stay silent and out of sight in the back of the room. His hands latched onto the bench again, and he tried to hold on, but it didn't do as much to help anchor him in place as he would have liked. His entire being felt like it contracted suddenly with a moment now to himself, and with it he was promptly crushed under all the pressure of the past week as it caught up with him.

This wasn't something he could just get out of. Even if he teleported back to his kingdom, when he finally decided to come out, the spell would have just put him back in the prison cell. He couldn't fight his way out without using magic, and if he exposed magic, then he was dead anyways. He was stuck...

...Broken and stuck...

It could all just be a hallucination... A part of him hated the idea that he was still drunk or **** on whatever it was that Mub had given him, but at the same time... it was still a better option than what he thought was happening. He would have preferred to be losing his mind in the middle of a bad high than actually at risk for being charged with ****. On one hand, he thought about just trying to punch his way through a wall to escape. At the very least, then he would have had a chance of breaking out of the police station without revealing magic. If there wasn't a camera around to see it, then he just could have left a lot of unanswered questions and confused cop-

"You've got to be fucking kidding me." The new voice wasn't so unfamiliar, and as soon as John heard it, his breathing stopped almost instantly. The door at the start of the hallway opened up again with another loud creaking noise and then was followed up by the sound of thick, heavy, leather combat boots stomping loudly down the precinct’s yellowish tiled hallway. A comforting vision of a blonde woman with a long, fur-lined, leather coat, dark cargo pants, and a custom-made, black sports bra stepped into John's line of sight and stared expectantly at him. The shaved sides of her head and amber-colored eyes were obscured ever so slightly as she let the top of her mane hang down over one side of her face. Her bronzed, toned body flexed just enough to peek at Murph, and then she ignored him entirely as she bent down and plucked the invisible keys the officer had dropped out of an illusion on the ground. "I come all the way out here to get you, and you couldn't just do this part yourself?" she gave him a brief scowl and then quickly bent over and unlocked the cell door.

The steel bars swung open with an even louder grinding, creaking noise than the last one had, and John winced when he heard it. She didn't bother waiting for him to get up. She just left the room at her own pace, and John was **** to go along if he didn't want to be left behind. He stepped out of the cell hesitantly and watched, waiting for Abbot to return and try to **** him back into the drunk tank. She never came back though, and after standing in the doorway for a good two minutes with Robyn tapping her foot impatiently on the ground in the other room, he finally figured out that the police officer wasn't going to be coming back to finally arrest him.

"I-I didn't know you were trying to help me. I-" he paused. No, that conversation could wait. For the moment he needed to distract himself just to try and make sure he completely forgot about the horrible panic attack he had nearly succumbed to. When they walked out of the hallway and began striding back towards the exit of the police station, his curiosity and what he saw provided his mind with an ample distraction. "What did you do to them?" he asked and stared at the blank frozen faces of all of the people in the police station.

None of them stared back.

Every last officer, civilian, and criminal they passed just stood silently in place, unmoving as if all time had stopped. The clocks continued ticking away up on the walls, and a nearby drinking fountain continued to splash cold water into its metal basin as one handcuffed civilian was stuck holding the button down, but the people didn't react as if any time was passing. The only ones to move were the members of the Frozen Flame... and John. A part of him realized that that may have been why Murph stopped saying anything... he had been frozen too.

The other thing he noticed was just how many members of the Frozen Flame there were with him that day. In the past he only ever noticed about a dozen of them at most, just enough to create a small covert team to conduct and see that certain operations were finished. Today, there were nearly thirty to forty women all dressed up in form-fitting, black battle gear. There was one posted on almost every corner in sight, and while some still held rifles and other firearms in their hands, most had let their weapons hang down their backs while the majority of the soldiers each held up a large, glowing, blue crystal to their lips and whispered into them. The chorus of chanting in the room provided a low and barely audible hum to the police precinct as the majority of them held the paralysis spell, or whatever it was, in place.

Robyn stopped only for a brief moment as one of the soldiers pulled her aside to point at Officer Abbot who had just been questioning John. The soldier slipped off her mask and helmet to talk with her superior, and for the first time, John saw more than two members of the Frozen Flame actually reveal some of their skin, though she was clearly **** to do so when she realized that John was watching. A brief flash of brown hair with green tips fell into view as the soldier's hardened features turned towards Robyn alone and spoke, her cyan-tinted eyes pointedly looking away from John.

"We're having trouble making this one forget," the soldier said and pointed to the blonde Officer Abbot. Even as she spoke, the cop who had been questioning John flinched and twitched while two more members of the Frozen Flame stepped up to her and pulled out another pair of blue crystals. In mere seconds they were chanting with the rest of them. As soon as they started casting, Officer Abbot went completely still like the others. "She seems like she might have some kind of affinity for the Abyss, but it might be too early to tell... or too late for her to safely learn."

"Um, okay... Thanks, Charlo-" Robyn froze mid sentence when she saw the glare that her fellow soldier gave her and then glanced back at John. "Thank you," she clarified and then nodded at one of the other soldiers. "Take Delta with you and take up a post here at the station. If she delves any further into the Abyss or starts looking back into John again, I want to know about it." The two girls nodded at one another briefly, and then Robyn was walking away again. John followed her as she simply strolled right back outside into the sunny streets of Springfield, as if John hadn't even been in the middle of a jail cell only a few minutes earlier.

"Get in," she said and pointed over to the passenger side of a nearby old black car. "We have some stuff to talk about, and it's time for you to meet Eddie."