Arcane Coverage

Part 4

The ambiance in the old kitchen is as unpleasant as the ambiance outside. Everything is grimy, dilapidated.

"I need to understand what happened," says Dan.

He's standing next to the door. The scarecrow and his son are seated at the kitchen table.

"Ain't that obvious?" says the son.

"Answer the man," says the scarecrow.

The son sits back in his chair, arms crossed.

"After I left here the first time," says Dan, "you went to that auction place."

The son's eye widen.

"You followed me all the way there?" he asks. "I thought I saw you in the coffee shop but I wasn't sure."

"Auction place?" asks the scarecrow. "Nobody's auctioning nothing of mine."

"I wasn't going there to plan an auction," says the son. "I just heard that they were the ones who processed the bankruptcy for a crypto startup, I wanted to see if they had some GPUs left. Those things are impossible to find on the open market."

"Crypto startup?" asks the scarecrow. "You've got a notion to rekindle that fire that burned through all my moneys?"

He gets up from his chair.

"You ain't right in the head, son," he says.

He walks past Dan.

"Apologies," he says, "I need some air or I'm fixin' to do something my old wife wouldn't want me to do."

He gets out of the house, slamming the door behind him.

"They didn't even have GPUs," says the son. "Such drama for nothing."

"What I see on this property," says Dan, "it's not caused by a flawed crypto currency scheme. What happened?"

The son shrugs.

"What did you do?" insists Dan. "If we don't know what happened, there's no way to undo it."

The son scoffs.

"Just something I tried," he says.

"What happened?" asks Dan.

"It was nothing," says the son. "Not at first. Just some stuff I read about on Reddit. I was looking for ways to get an edge with the crypto thing. Thinking out of the box."

"What happened?" asks Dan.

The son doesn't reply. Dan sighs.

"You made a deal with a demon," he says. "That's what happened. You sank all your dad's money in some lousy business, and your out-of-the-box thinking was to try and solve everything by making a deal with a demon."

"I tried everything else," says the son. "But nothing worked, and there was that guy on Reddit who posted a pic of the Lambo he got out of it, so I figured, why not."

"You read a Reddit post about a guy making a deal with a demon," says Dan, "and you figured you'd give it a try."

The son scoffs.

"I'm not a moron," he says. "I'm not gonna sell my soul just to save the orchard."

"Then what?"

"It wasn't a deal," says the son. "I figured I'd need to be in a better bargaining position, that I'd need something to trade other than my soul. So I did some research on the dark web and shit."

Dan shakes his head.

"You tried to trap it," he says. "Is that it? You made some kind of half-baked warding circle and invoked a demon, thinking that you could force it to do your bidding?"