The Sprite Witch

CHAPTER 8: The protagonist robs a bank

Voir heard a familiar rapping on her door. Setting her cauldron to a simmering heat, she hurried over and flung open the door.

"Laila, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have- Laila?"

Voir looked around the empty glade in front of her house, birds swishing through the canopy of the trees. Glancing down, she spotted a small messily-wrapped parcel on the doorstep. She picked it up carefully and read the scrawled letter or top.

Mentor Voir,

I'm really sorry I couldn't turn up to market day. I think I may have been unconscious at the time.

Anyway, I was looking at that weird potion you were collecting stuff for, and it turns out you missed a really easy solution! You can just replace the weird 'Tri-whatsit' herbs and the unicorn blood with a dragon scale, according to this random book I found in my interdimensional necklace. I don't know what it's called. Something in Latin. You should really do your research before you hunt for magical equines.

Voir smiled and opened the package. The scale inside was a shimmering white she recognised. She had known of the alternate recipe, of course. But... it felt wrong to use her apprentice for nothing other than ingredients.

Voir shook the thought from her head and batted Taffy away from a stack of poisonous herbs. Maybe having a werepire as an apprentice could be a good idea after all.

Then she turned the paper over.

P.S. Can you help me forge a magical crown-thing? I'm going to go steal the plans from a high-security vault now. I kinda need it because I may or may not have severely stuffed up dragon politics. Thanks!

-Laila

---

In the crystalline blue waters of Gya-whatever Town, the festival was going strong. A big brass band (which was probably not actually made of brass due to the fact that they were underwater), was blasting out fast-paced tunes like Tiptoe Through the Tubas.

The protagonist bounded around town, dodging brass instruments and stalls of ware. She couldn't spot Nexie or the Randolph anywhere.

She eventually spotted an airy moustache bobbing along.

"Jyanzken! Have you seen Nexie anywhere?"

The mayor bobbed in place and shook his head.

"She often disappears, but she hasn't come back since the two of you and that squid set off. Give it another week, and her parents might start to worry a bit."

He thus bobbed off to his next meeting, leaving an already-slightly-worried protagonist behind.

How was she going to break into a maximum-security vault in the mermaid capital city without her mentor and her trusty squid?

Why had the Randolph lead her to search for stones in Whisper's Basin?

Was the octopus still in Whisper's Basin?

Was the octopus evil?

And... where was Nexie?

---

Orange irises shone as the mermaid mentor's eyes fluttered open for the first time in days. She was in some sort of underwater cavern, the walls lined with bones, ingrained with the strange rock. In front of her blurry eyes, some sort of black-clothed monster reared up, its mouth lined with sharp teeth.

"About time you woke up, dearie," it growled, "I was just starting to get hungry... and I like my prey fresh."

---

Atlantis was alive with hubbub, with none of the border guards alert enough to see one mermaid change into human form a full second before she passed through the protective pink strawberry-scented forcefield. It was almost definitely magical, because physics would probably die on the spot if it saw said forcefield.

Laila sneaked around to the bank, and luckily everyone ignored her overly obvious antics, as they were under the impression that if anyone was trying to get somewhere in such an overly secretive way, they were obviously bluffing. Besides, there were currently three pairs of young mermaids recounting speeches from Romeo and Juliet on one patch of grass. The Antlantisites were probably used to drama students rushing around causing havoc.

The Coral Bank was a brightly coloured building, and though the mermaids inside looked almost identical to bank managers world-wide (keep in mind that inside Atlantis there's no water, so they even have the right amount of legs), their suits were slightly extremely fluro. Fluro yellow, fluro orange, fluro green, fluro blue, fluro fluro (that last colour being a colour that is so extremely fluro that you can no longer tell what colour it used to be. All that you can tell is that if you glance at it, your eyes instantly die from fluroness).

Luckily for our protagonist, mermaids were not only terrible at recognising potential intruders, but also at electronics. Electronics, of course, including security systems. Well, their civilisation is underwater. It'd be pretty risky to play with electricity in the first place.

And, of course, Laila had a trick up her sleeve that no mermaid would have seen before. She found the vault with the plans of the Coral Crown quite easily (all the security seemed to have been used up to protect the real thing), and all that was left was to get in.

Laila reached up to her neck, and her interdimensional necklace became visible. From it, she pulled several pieces of apparatus; clamps, beakers, matches, lasers, small boxes of powders with skulls and crossbones on the label, a frying pan, so forth and so on.

Within minutes, a complicated scientific construction was pointed at the vault door, and the smell of pancakes wafted through the bank. Just as the managers at the front desk began to get hungry, the sound of an explosion rattled the windowpanes.

When they'd rushed over, the door had a small pancake-encrusted hole in the corner; too small for a human. They looked at eachother in confusion, and one grabbed the keys to unlock the vault, another calling up security. When they opened up the door, the plans were still in place, and an abandoned photocopier lay chirping in a corner.

The door had a small pancake-encrusted hole in the corner; too small for a human, but the perfect size for a bat.