The pity counter was at eighty-seven and Lucien was not panicking.
He was however under his blanket. On his floor. Biting the edge of his thumbnail. In the dark. At eleven forty-three on a Friday night.
That was normal. That was completely normal behavior for a person who understood probability and had done the math and knew that hard pity hit at ninety and he was three pulls away from the thing he had wanted for six weeks and the game could not, statistically, keep doing this to him. Or in other words: A Gacha addicted loser.
He was not panicking. He was conserving energy.
He pulled.
Blue rarity. Eighty-eight.
"Come on."
He pulled again. The little animation played. The light built. The reveal stretched out the way it always did, that half-second of fake suspense that he had fallen for literally hundreds of times and would fall for again right now because hope was a factory defect in the human brain and his had never been recalled.
Blue rarity. Eighty-nine.
Lucien pulled the blanket over his head.
He lay there in the dark, phone screen lighting up the fabric above his face, and had a brief private moment with himself about the choices that had led here. Six-hour shift. Polo shirt finally off. Fridge raided. And now this. This was what Friday looked like. He was going to pull one more time and if it was another blue he was going to close the app, go to bed, and wake up a changed man.
He pulled.
The animation played.
The light built.
He was already moving the blanket when a very large, very loud, very sudden crash came from directly above him and the ceiling came down.
Lucien scrambled back so fast he tangled in the blanket and went sideways. He hit the floor, kicked free of it, got upright. Plaster dust was still falling. A chunk of drywall the size of a dinner plate had landed exactly where he'd been sitting. The hole it came from was ragged, two feet across, punched through from above like something had decided his ceiling was a suggestion.
He stared at it.
"What the hell."
Something moved in the hole. Lucien moved back. The motion wasn't threatening exactly but it also wasn't nothing, and he was not yet at a place in this evening where he was prepared to make assumptions.
A hand came over the edge. Then an arm.
Then a woman dropped through his ceiling and hit his floor and didn't get up.
Lucien stood very still.
He looked at her. Looked at the hole. Looked at her again. Did not move.
Then he looked back up at the hole because he had to, because there was something up there, and what he found was a ring of faces peering down at him through the gap. Three neighbors. Maybe four. Mrs. Pecker from 4B still had her reading glasses on. Someone in a shower cap. One guy he'd never seen before in his life just eating chips.
The chip guy looked down at him. "Yall good?"
Lucien looked at the unconscious woman on his floor and slowly looked back up.
"Yeah," he said. And shrugged.
The faces withdrew. Mostly. Mrs. Pecker lingered for a second. Then she was gone too.
Lucien stood there another moment. Then he crossed to the woman, stepped over the chunk of drywall, and crouched down. Checked her pulse the way his job's CPR certification had taught him, found it, counted it. Breathing present. No sounds from the fall that scared him. He sat back on his heels and looked at the hole in his ceiling and tried to figure out what the correct sequence of actions was here.
He pulled out his phone. Opened his texts.
Ryan you are not going to believe what just happened
Sent. Phone back in his pocket. He returned his attention to the woman, who had not moved but whose breathing had started finding a rhythm that felt less like crisis and more like exhaustion.
"Alright," he said. To himself, mostly. "Alright."
And then she exhaled, just exhaled, just let out one long breath, and the world changed.
Quiet. No flash, no sound, nothing cinematic about it. Just a switch flipping somewhere he couldn't find. Every object in his apartment became present in a way objects were not supposed to be present. The walls had weight. The furniture had texture. She had something else entirely, louder than everything, humming against his perception like a live wire in standing water.
His hands were tingling. He looked at them. Looked at her. Looked at the hole in his ceiling. Looked at his hands again. He shouldn't have touched this lady. Black people don't investigate.
"This," Lucien said slowly.
"This some white people shit."
The tingling was not going away.
Lucien looked at his hands for a few more seconds, flexing his fingers, checking for something visible that might explain what he was feeling. Nothing. They looked exactly like his hands. But underneath the skin, or maybe above it, or maybe in some direction that didn't have a name yet, everything was humming in a way it had not been humming ten minutes ago.
He shook them out. The humming didn't care.
Okay. He'd deal with that in a second. One thing at a time.
He got a pillow from the couch and put it under the woman's head. Got a glass of water from the kitchen and set it next to her for when she woke up. Pulled the throw blanket off the arm of the couch because the floor was cold and she was on the floor and it felt like the right call. He was a gentleman after all. He stood over her for a second, hands on his hips, and did a full assessment.
She was breathing fine now. Color looked okay. No blood he could see, which given she had just fallen through a ceiling was honestly impressive. Whatever had roughed her up had done it before she got here.
His phone buzzed.
bro what
Ryan. Lucien typed back standing in his kitchen doorway.
a lady fell through my ceiling
Three dots. A long pause. Then:
fell through ur ceiling like from upstairs or...
like through the actual ceiling yes
LUCIEN
she's fine i think. gonna wait til she wakes up
call 911 bro
Lucien looked at the woman on his floor. Looked at the hole in his ceiling, which had stopped dropping dust but was still very much a hole. Thought about calling 911 and trying to explain this and everything that would follow from that explanation.
maybe he typed back. give me a minute
He pocketed his phone and stood there in the particular silence of someone who has identified approximately fifteen questions and no answers and is deciding which one to start with. The humming was still there. Everything still had that quality, that presence, the walls quiet and the furniture quieter and her louder than any of it even unconscious on his floor.
He needed water too actually. He went to the kitchen, filled a glass, drank half of it standing at the sink. Actually, he probably needed to lay down as well. Would it be weird if he got under the blanket with her? Spolier: Yes.
He went to the bathroom because it was on the way back and the light was already on and he caught his reflection and stopped.
He stood in the doorway and looked.
The man in the mirror had his face. His exact face, which he had been looking at for seventeen years and had developed opinions about. Same jaw. Same nose his mom had always called distinguished and his boys had called something else. Same broad shoulders from three years of basketball.
Different hair.
Lucien leaned into the doorframe.
His coils were white. Not grey. Not bleached. White, clean and actual, like they had never been any other color, like someone had made a decision while he wasn't paying attention and executed it completely. He reached up and touched the side of his head. His reflection did the same thing. The texture was normal. It just wasn't his anymore.
He looked at his eyes.
Dark, the way they'd always been dark. But they had been a normal, average, brown kind of dark. This was a raven's purple kind of dark. He couldn't believe it was him looking back in the mirror, but honestly he would make a killing at one of those conventions.
He stood there looking at himself for a long moment.
Then he turned off the bathroom light, went back to the living room, and sat in the chair across from the couch. He put his elbows on his knees and looked at the woman on his floor and then back at his hands and then at the hole in his ceiling.
"Motherfucker..." He sighed out.
His phone buzzed again. Probably Ryan.
He didn't check it yet.
She started coming around about twenty minutes later.
Lucien noticed because the humming changed before she actually moved. Got louder, more restless. He filed that away and leaned forward in the chair, phone in hand, watching her run the standard confusion sequence of someone waking up somewhere unfamiliar. Eyes open. Ceiling. Hands on the floor. The slow arrival of the question where.
"Hey." He kept his voice easy. "Take your time."
She turned her head toward him.
She was pretty. Which was not relevant information but his brain had submitted it anyway, unsolicited, the way brains did when they had briefly run out of more urgent things to process. Bruised along her jaw. Lower lip split. Jacket wrecked. Still pretty. He acknowledged the report and moved on.
She sat up. Looked around his apartment with the focused attention of someone counting exits. Then she planted her hands and stood up.
"Whoa, hey —" He was out of the chair.
She stood, swayed, and grabbed his arm to steady herself, which knocked his phone clean out of his hand. It hit the floor screen up. The impact did something to the app, or maybe it was the fall, but the notification sound played and he knew that sound.
Neither of them looked at it.
She had her hand on his shoulder now, looking up at him properly for the first time, and then her gaze moved past him for just a second. He glanced back. The family photo on the shelf behind him. Him at fourteen, his mom, his aunt, a cookout, his hair dark the way it had always been.
She looked back at his face.
She stepped closer.
She looked up into his eyes with an expression like she was confirming something she already suspected, and she was close, and she was pretty even bruised up and Lucien's brain was making its little unsolicited reports again and he was absolutely caught up in the moment and the moment was genuinely kind of something.
She smiled at him.
"You're a mage now, Harry."
Then she opened her mouth and ruined it completely.
It was not a small ruin. It was thorough. It was committed. She spewed blood from her gut. It got his shirt and his forearm and some of the floor and she delivered it with the energy of someone whose body had been waiting for permission.
Then her eyes rolled back and she went down like a sack of bricks.
She hit the floor hard. No graceful collapse. Just down, completely, the impact loud enough that he was genuinely concerned about her but also genuinely concerned about the noise complaint.
Lucien stood over her covered in whatever that was.
He looked at his shirt.
He looked at her.
He looked at his phone still face up on the floor beside her, screen glowing.
Gold rarity.
"Figures..."