After a lifetime of being a resident hero, Tiana was a light sleeper. But something about mealberries always managed to knock her out harder than she usually went.

Thus she was in a deep sleep when Crimson kicked her in the shin. Her senses flared awake. The fire had gone out. Crimson was flailing, his hands grabbing at something on his head. A gelatinous, sticky substance covered the ground.

"Formin!" she gasped in alarm before clamping her mouth shut and pulling her shirt over her face. Formin always went for the head-based orifices: mouth, nose, eyes, ears. Judging from the sounds Crimson was making, it was already trying to smother him.

She tried to stand but the formin was on her back, gluing her to the ground. She couldn't see anything in the darkness but she could feel it crawling up her sides, trying to drown her underneath it.

Her arms were compromised, both by the shirt tangled around her head and the formin. Was her energem close enough to her skin? If she activated it, she only had one shot. Both she and her shirt would get burned but it was better than death.

"Flara!" she gasped.

Her energem glowed, blinding her for a second, but immediately faded. It must not be touching her skin. The formin was seeping into her hair now, climbing her scalp towards her face. Crimson's kicks subsided as he lost energy but she could still hear his faint, muffled grunts.

No point saving her breath now; formin was slow-moving but it'd be in her eyes in seconds. "Flara!" she wiggled back and forth as hard as she could. "Flara! Flara! Flara! Fla-ra!"

As the formin slid over her eyebrows and up her chin, the energem activated. This time, it released its power and caught and lit Tiana's shirt on fire.

Struggling through the searing pain, she lurched herself up. The burning shirt tore away from her, still stuck to the ground but she could see the rest of the formin puddle retreating out of the nook. Without hesitation, Tiana grabbed Crimson's formin-covered head and rolled it towards the flame. The effect was immediate; the formin repelled off of Crimson like oil on water.

His eyes were panicked, his skin pale. His head jerked around in every direction as the formin slid away from the fire and into the night.

"Rargh," he bellowed, half a desperate exhale and half a cry of rage. As the last of the formin slinked away on the ground, he unclasped his cape and threw it. It landed squarely on the puddle, enveloping it like a net over prey.

"What are you-" Tiana started but stopped as the cape transformed into beams of ethereal red light. They warped and bent around the formin like a dome before collapsing onto itself with a vibrant flash. She blinked, and the cape was lying lifeless on the ground like a pool of silken blood.

Crimson stepped forward and picked it up. He shook it out with an angry jerk before clasping it around his neck again. There was nothing on the ground. Any trace of the formin was gone.

It didn’t make any sense. As a resident hero, Tiana could detect the powers and abilities of other heroes. Crimson didn't have any, shouldn't have any, magic. Maybe it was because he was from far away, like he kept saying, but how far could he have come from? It's not like there was a giant bird that flew in the sky, transporting people from one side of the world to the other.

But she also didn't think that people could be depicted as accurately as his "photographs" were. Maybe his part of the world was full of new magics that she didn't know about.

She resolved to find out more about his past and where he came from. He seemed trustworthy but also full of mysteries. And there was nothing she loved more than solving a mystery.