Marley pulled her cardigan tightly around herself and took a seat on her worn patterned sofa. Mads was still a little too buzzed from the night’s events to sit, so he stood across from her in the middle of her living room, hands shoved deep into his coat pockets and one foot tapping restlessly. Micidia stood calmly between them and blew gently on their coffee.

“Before you get into it… could you fill me in, just so I’m up to speed?” Marley asked with a tentative little shrug, hiding half her face behind her mug.

Mads nodded, in that overexaggerated way he did when he didn’t quite know where to start. “Alright, so. I see you at the pub. I step outside and, uh…” He paused, looking at his feet as he struggled to focus on what happened next. He jumped to the next thing he could remember and whipped a hand out of his pockets to point it at Cid. “Suddenly I wake up in my bed, and this guy tells me I’ve been attacked, and he’s my guardian angel. Apparently he’s been with me my whole life, and –”

“They’ve been with you your whole life,” Cid immediately corrected. When Mads gave them a confused squint in response, they continued, “Don’t do that, seriously. I’m an ethereal being beyond human comprehension. There’s a perfectly good non-gendered pronoun in your language for this kind of scenario, you might as well use it.”

Mads fell silent and looked back at his feet, stunned by a concept that had never occurred to him. Cid could see the cogs busy working in his mind, so they turned to Marley to take over the recap.

“When I sensed the attack, I could tell it was definitely powerful enough to kill him. But lo and behold, I find this little shit just unconscious and unscathed on the pavement, with a necklace full of demon. I thought it had to be some kind of powerful stone – onyx, or even tourmaline maybe.”

Marley looked from Mads to Cid and slowly shook her head. “Definitely just a cheap synthetic. Like I said, I have loads. I thought it would be cute to give them out at the orientation, let the newbies know about the Mystics department at uni…”

“So…” Cid concluded, “If the crystal is useless, then Mads must be what channeled it.”

They both turned to look at Mads as he lifted his gaze from the floor.

“M-Me? How?” He stammered. “Am I part-demon or something?”

Cid laughed. “Sure you seem like it sometimes, but no. You’re human, as far as I can tell. Humans can be Conduits, but usually–”

“–Usually they study for years to learn it,” Marley finished for them, eyes now wide and her whole body leaning forward off her seat. “You think Mads is a Conduit? Like the master exorcists who can bottle demons off-book? Are there really people still born with that kind of ability?”

"What ability?" Mads interrupted, eyes widened at Marley, having given up on looking to Cid for any kind of comprehensible explanation. She paused when she saw his confusion, and turned to give him her attention.

"So... There are exorcists, and there are Conduits," Marley began slowly. "Exorcists can expel demons from people or objects, but Conduits can trap or release them into objects. Normally both have to study and train for years to be able to do it, but..." She gave him a small smile. "...Sometimes people are born with it."

“Less common, but still a thing apparently,” Cid nodded, looking Mads up and down. “Mads must have never encountered a demon to awaken the power, until now. For a city slicker, that’s bizarre luck. I thought they were everywhere in the underground.”

“Yeah, I–” Marley paused and turned to look back at Cid again. “Hang on, what do you mean ‘Mads must have’? If you’ve been with him all his life, wouldn’t you know that? And on that matter, why didn’t you stop the demon from attacking him tonight?”

Mads honed his gaze on Cid, who was speechless for the first time that night. They opened and closed their mouth uselessly, then procrastinated with a long sip from their coffee. When Mads’ and Marley’s gazes didn’t let up, they let out a huff and leant forward to drop the empty cup dramatically on the coffee table, so they had full use of their arms to shrug and gesture dramatically as they spoke.

“I never said I was a good babysitter, alright?! This job is so boring most of the time, you can’t expect me to hang around and watch his every bloody move, can you?”

Marley let out a loud, accidental laugh of disbelief, before quickly clamping a hand over her mouth. Mads crossed over to the couch so he could fling himself onto it, slouched next to Marley with his head in his hands. Useless.

Mads groaned and mumbled into his hands, “So I’ve got a guardian who doesn’t want to guard me, and some power I never asked for, that could have been passing out at a moment’s notice. This… This semester is going to suck.”

“Hey now,” Cid tried to comfort him. “I want to, it’s just. You don’t do much, y’know?”

Marley, with her hand still over her mouth, simply shut her eyes and tried to control her shoulders from shaking with inappropriate, nervous laughter.

“So… what do I do now?” Mads tried again.

Marley let out a deep breath and combed her fingers through her hair, as Cid knelt down by the coffee table in front of them. They reached a hand out, and Mads dug the crystal out of his pocket to hand it to them.

“First, we’ll take this, and give it to her,” Cid started, by literally throwing the crystal into Marley’s lap. The motion startled her and she only just caught it from landing in her mug.

“Me? Why? What am I going to do with it?”

Cid shrugged, but maintained eye contact. “You’re a witch, aren’t you? Exorcise it for us. Get that nasty bludger out of there.”

Marley swallowed and clenched her hand around the jewellery. “Why can’t you? Too lazy for that either?”

Cid smiled, but it didn’t reach their eyes. “I’m a guardian, I can’t vanquish demons,” they said, like it was obvious.

Mads looked at Marley with uncertainty, but after a moment of staring down at the jewel she nodded her head and put on a bright smile. “Okay, I’m on it. No problem.”

“As for you…” Cid then turned to Mads. “We’re going to need to practise. You need to get better at this. I don’t care if you don’t want to be a cleanser or an exorcist for a living –” they added, the moment they saw Mads’ mouth open in protest, “– It looks like your power is totally involuntary, and is going to sap the energy from you whenever you come into contact with a demon. So we need to get you to a point where you don’t pass out every time you bump into one, or life in a city like this is going to become very exhausting.”

Mads squeezed his hands into fists on his lap. He looked at Marley, who gave him an encouraging smile, then back at his angel. Their eyes bore into him with the same intensity he felt when he faced them floating out of his wall mere hours earlier.

“Alright,” he responded weakly. “We’ll give it a go.”