Hello, hello! Thank you for reading my yuri manga. Support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi, if you're able! It's always a huge help! Thanks again! See you next week!

~

[Transcript]

        “This CONSTANT KNOCKING from you children,” Doctor Zarei growled, throwing open the door of the nurse’s office. “What is it, Halloween? Can’t you try a better TRICK than rinse and repeat when I refuse to TREAT you??”

        The bundle of nerves blinking up at her, however, was not another sickly student... though she was just about as tall as one, and currently dressed like a highschooler hiding a Monday-morning hangover.

        “Oh my gosh! MINA?” gasped Sophie Sybil, tilting down her dark sunglasses. “WOW! NO WAY! This must be FATE!” 

        This was fraudulent fortune teller for “I’ve been stalking you since sunrise.”

        Mina squinted down at her. So deep was her indifferent disregard that Sophie took the utter lack of recognition in Zarei’s eyes as an insult, even though Sophie was well aware that she was costumed like a pop star on the run from paparazzi.

        “It’s ME! Sophie! Sophie Sybil!” She whispered the name in an extra small voice, checking over her shoulder for Death Cultist spies and security cameras. “Y’know! From high school! Your”—Sophie paused for a few telling moments of uncertainty—“friend,” she finished, simpering obsequiously.

        “...Ah,” Zarei said, pushing up her glasses. “Well. How about that.” 

        Mina was not sure how to feel about this unexplained reunion, and, therefore, had defaulted to her comfortable baseline of “annoyed.” Her other childhood bully could at least point to their problematic romance as a less-than-clean break from their previous relationship (though if this change had been an upgrade was debatable). Sophie, however, had just sort of been there in high school: the nervous laugh track in the background of her enemies-to-lovers-and-then-back-again disaster. Any olive branch she’d offered in their teen years had been drugs and alcohol, which Mina only used on ghost amoebas and contaminated test tubes, and they hadn’t spoken since at least two years before Zarei departed Bayview. Sophie Sybil, therefore, had never left the “deadbeat mean girl” category in the Doctor’s unforgiving mental record system.

        “What,” Mina asked, “are you doing here?”

        “Girl, that’s MY line!” Sophie chuckled.

        An awkward silence followed.

        “You were held back,” the Doctor hypothesized, impatiently beginning to present her own theories in the absence of an answer.

        “Ha ha whaaat? Mina, we graduated together! Twice!” Sophie tried her very best not to grit her teeth while forcing a good-humored smile; her dentist had warned her against such exertion, given the adorable size of her overbite.

        “You work here.”

        “No, no. I, um, work over on West Island. In, er... speculative... mineralogy...” 

        This was fraudulent fortune teller for “selling unpolished quartz crystal talismans to superstitious tourists.” Her journalist jobby was too nascent and passionate a pursuit to subject to scathing appraisal from an ice queen like Zarei.

        “You have a child,” Mina theorized. “It’s not here. Perhaps investigate detention.” Any such progeny would have to be, what, five or six? Seven if Sophie’s wild partying had gotten her teen pregnant? Bully for her. That wouldn’t make her offshoot old enough for Biddle School, however... unless they’d skipped as many grades as they’d completed. Genetics truly weren’t a prerequisite for praiseworthy intelligence—

        “Bzzt! Wrong again! Like, WHAT? Girl, leave the divining to ME. You do NOT have the sixth sense for shots in the dark.” Sophie’s own gift for cold reading was telling her that Mina was making some truly out-of-pocket judgment calls behind that furrowed brow of hers, but this was not the time and place to dole out more unlicensed therapy. “Bumping into you is, like, a total coincidence! I just happened to be in the area—”

        “Across the ocean from your workplace. On a weekday. Outside the door of my office. Which you knocked on. The nurse’s office of a middle school.”

        Sophie Sybil took a deep breath through her buckteeth, realigned her chakras, and forced her fakest smile yet.

        “HEALTHCARE, am I right? ROUGH these days! Gotta get it where you can! Can I come in?” She barreled through the doorway before Mina could make the obvious move of refusing her. Unlike the vampires of the Phantom Threat Authority that she was keen to shed some journalistic light on, Sophie Sybil, Ace Freelance Reporter, didn’t need an invitation.

        “A fine milady doth intrude upon my chamber!” Handprince warbled from the corner, but Sophie couldn’t hear him. She whirled on Zarei now that she was inside, suddenly serious and subdued.

        “Listen, Mina. Now that we’re alone—”

        Zarei glanced down at the gallery of spirits gawking up at them.

        “Wait, this room isn’t bugged, is it??” Sophie suddenly asked, succumbing to a surge of paranoia.

        “What?” Mina scoffed. She looked down at the horrible worm she had birthed through mad science. “No.”

        “No. Right. Sorry. Yeah. Sorry. Look, I’ve had a night you won’t BELIEVE... but I really need you to, okay??” Sophie gave a bewildered Zarei the second most awkward side-hug she’d ever received (the first had been from Jean, though she looked back on it with some degree of affectionate amusement). “It’s, like, GREAT to see you, Mina. Really. You look GREAT. So proud of you for getting out of this backwater tourist trap. And, y’know, um... welcome home.”

        Mina eyed the tongue suppressors on her new desk like a block of kitchen knives in a home invasion movie.

        “Trust me, I wouldn’t have risked coming here if it wasn’t SUPER DUPER urgent. I don’t know how much time I’ll have to run around unmonitored. Mina...” Sophie whispered, not quite sure where she should start. “How much do you keep up with local politics?”

        “Does a DOG ‘keep up’ with its LEASH?” Horseplay heckled in a hoarse voice (ha ha) from the corner. “We can all see the strings, sister. Doesn’t stop the puppet show, you feel me?”

        Doctor Zarei ignored her child (Horseplay’s deeply principled anarchism was undoubtedly a phase, given her rapid rate of deleterious mutation) and continued to narrow the aperture of her eyes at Sophie, confirming one stale bias after another. Sophie had always been an impressionable stooge. She had probably fallen in with some sort of con artist agitator. She was probably here to hawk some odd petition or a pyramid scheme. She had probably joined a cult.

        “The mayor,” Sophie probed. “Mayor Spender? Bill Spender? Do you know him?”

        Richard’s awful father. Sure. The one who thought he’d fled the country for a “liberal bastion,” and believed this meant an off-grid island fortress somewhere out in the Pacific.

        “...I’ve encountered his phenotype.”

        “Great. Great. Perfect. Great.” Sophie started fumbling in her pocket for her phone. “And, um, there’s this bigwig business crook who actually runs everything around here—Davy Jones? Do you know him?”

        Zarei had been slowly circling Sophie, preparing to escort her from the office once she’d found her ideal shooing angle. At the mention of Davy Jones’ name, however, the Doctor stopped. Having learned from Boss Leader just this morning that this man, this Davy Jones, was a Consortium deserter, a vampire, and currently the target of an Agent Walker hit squad, Mina made a logical leap to an incorrect conclusion.

        Davy Jones had been discovered as an undercover bloodsucker. Sophie, who had always been too nosy for her own good, had somehow stumbled on him chowing down, or turning into a bat, or something strange and supernatural like that. Seeking a logical explanation, she’d sought the advice of a medical professional... but needed one she knew who might believe the unbelievable. Perhaps Sophie had heard she was a doctor through the grapevine and, not knowing that Zarei had gotten her degree at a literal dream school, had tracked her down to see if—UGH, but WAIT. Had Sophie gone to Mina’s house? Had her PARENTS told her ex-bully that she was at the Biddle School today? That was a speedrun record for flaunting (or fretting about) her infrequent accomplishments. If only her parents knew that this job she had interviewed for was BENEATH HER! She was a SCHOLAR! An unrivaled spectral duelist! She had created LIFE from SCRATCH, for heaven’s sake!

        “...I know of Davy Jones,” the Doctor grumbled. “What does he have to do with the mayor?” Had he bit him? Had he turned him? Were they ha6ving an affair?

        “Um. Well. The mayor is Davy’s puppet, but—or, like, he WAS his puppet. Now he’s someone ELSE’S puppet, and that’s why, um...” Sophie shook her head, scrolling through the photos she had taken on her phone. “Proof first. Pictures! I have pictures—”

        Someone knocked a playful knock on the open door of Mina’s office.

        “Wow! Twice the surprise that I expected. Am I interrupting something, ladies?”

        If Doctor Zarei had kept her eyes on Sophie Sybil just a single second longer, she would have glimpsed an image of unfathomable value. An empty suit with a hook for a hand. The unmistakable face of Fauxbia, severed from her hunchbacked puppet shoulders. Cody Jones. The plans for Dayview. A glimpse beyond the border of the real, where the Great Unknown—the wight that Mina had dedicated her life to defeating—blurred the photo to a phosphorescent static. Instead, a startled Sophie locked her phone screen just a moment after Mina turned to face her awful ex.

        “Hi, Mina!” Miss Baxter beamed, giving Zarei a cheerful little wave. “Long time no see!”