Author’s Note:  This flash fiction story was written based on a prompt provided by Justintoonz during a livestream.  I hereby transfer all story rights to them, with the caveat that it remain posted on this blog.  If you would like your own story, stop by twitch.tv/blainearcade during one of my streams and I’ll write it for you live!

Prompt: “A thief finds a mask containing a snarky evil spirit inside.”

Thieving Tom Puts it Back

The book he’d stolen didn’t just contain many magic spells; it also helpfully told him about various artifacts worth stealing. He wasn’t even a thief until he’d found the book and been turned down as a customer. Really, why even shelve the thing if you weren’t going to sell it, Mr. decrepit old hermit in your very brown store that was more dust and earwigs than merchandise?

Ah, he realized in sinking despair, stolen mask in his lap, blood clot of consequences now freewheeling through his morale, because the book wanted to be stolen. It took itself out of storage. Same as this mask that won’t shut up. They all want to be active again. That’s what magic is: eager chaos.

At first it had all gone swimmingly, but now he knew that was just so he would swim out to where the water could easily get over his head. The book, identifying itself on the cover not by an author, only by the title Mishandled Ideas of Undergrowth Gods, allowed him access to so much surreptitious power, feeding him simple incantations and hand motions that allowed him to call objects to his side, cloud the eyes of guards and surveillance equipment alike, and even make people forget that they’d just witnessed him being very suspicious, dragging a giant old book into a restricted area.

He used the magic to steal all sorts of antiques and exhibits that had been hiding their power, sometimes for centuries. His private collection, hugely out of place in an apartment he had not yet managed to magically elevate into a penthouse, contained a full bucket that offered an endless supply of edible fish, an emerald necklace that turned your clothes into the fanciest robes, a bronze statuette of a snarling dog that automatically and invisibly bit any intruders on the hindquarters, and a few other doodads that he wasn’t sure how to sell or otherwise monetize yet.

That was set to come later, after he was done having the time of his life with all the thieving. He hoped nobody would ever learn his name, Thomas, but if they did he liked the ring of ‘Thieving Tom’. If it ever came out of the attractive mouth of a lady newscaster he would hopefully have already taken a magical flight to his private island, dredged from the depths of Atlantis by it didn’t matter what, perhaps an ancient chamber pot.

Unfortunately, he heard the nickname from somewhere else, his latest plunder, sitting in his lap on a bus that was only nearly-empty. The sound turned him to mushy dread as he looked down and examined the features of the mask closely for the first time. It was marble, but thin enough to not weight much. Depicted was the face of a trickster god from a civilization he didn’t memorize and couldn’t pronounce: narrow mirrored eyes that made his own stare more hostile and goading, the thin stiff nose like the beak of a liver-plucking eagle, and the snarky smirk that definitely wasn’t there twenty minutes ago, when he had ripped it from the head of a very large statue.

Ideas of the undergrowth had knocked out the museum’s security, darkened its halls, and even turned his spellbook’s pages into stairs so he could ascend the marble statue’s side and rob it of its face, which the staff hadn’t even known was actually a separable mask. The heist had gone perfectly, until the mask whispered to him on the bus, after refusing to go into the bag, biting its edge every time he tried.

“Hello Thieving Tom,” it said.

“The book owns all of you,” he defended himself. “I’m just returning you to your owner. Now be quiet.”

“Kiss me Tom,” the mask requested, puckering its lips. He refused, but the sound of its kissy face grew louder and louder. Finally he relented, for it was often best to just give magic things what they wanted. Unfortunately this was not an act of affection, but was used to rob Tom of his voice, which the mask then used to alert the other passengers.

“Hello everyone! My name is Thieving Tom! I just stole this mask from the museum! Now I’m going to go home and look at it for hours, for it is so beautiful, and the best thing ever made, and I wish my face looked like this! Don’t you? Have a look! A Look, look, looky-loo!” An old woman, a parent and his child, and even the driver, glanced over their shoulders, but Thieving Tom was also Prepared Tom.

Nothing good lasted forever, magic or not, so he pulled out the best tool at his disposal at the same time he ducked his head under the seat, the mischievous mask babbling all the while. Out of the bag it refused to enter came the book. They were probably collaborating, spending him now that he was no longer that useful, thus it was safe to assume the book wouldn’t cooperate at this point, but Tom had stolen its choice in the matter as well.

What he’d learned, through minor burns and bald patches now hidden under his baseball cap, was what happened when you performed a spell incorrectly. One wrong syllable, one misaligned swipe of the fingers, and something would explode. No matter what spell you botched, it always exploded, though sometimes the smoke and flames were strange colors.

It didn’t matter which page, so Tom wrenched the resisting tome open randomly, channeled his younger self who could never figure out how to pronounce ‘prestidigitation’. He tied his tongue on one more ancient and directed a palsied hand toward the front of the bus, but not at the innocent driver. One of the seats burst into silver flame, and startling pops. All eyes were on it, allowing Tom to bail out of the emergency door in the back.

“Oh how clever Thomas,” the mask chuckled in his own voice. “Everyone look at how clever Thomas is being!” Everyone did, so he had to create a few more minor disasters. A falling traffic light. A burst window. A stubborn little green bonfire growing out of a storm drain. The trail of destruction took him all the way back to the museum.

Security had been restored, and reinforced, but none of them were immune to the oddity of things catching fire in a discordant rainbow, always odder than the mask’s taunting. Once he’d lit a bench in the other part of the statuary he snuck back to the faceless statue, which had changed pose, to irritated hands on its hips.

He tried to tell it he was here to make a return, but his voice didn’t work. Hopefully restoring the mask would make it spit out what it had taken. His now-cantankerous book refused to build the staircase of pages once more, so Tom quickly resorted to throwing the mask at its vacant head.

The marble reached and caught it, reapplied the face. Its seam disappeared and its expression stilled. Tom fled, trying make as few useful errors in spellcasting as possible. All the while he planned. What was he to do now, stuck with a volume that now felt heavier than anything he could carry? He wanted a break, to lay low, just for a few hours, so he could set his mind as straight as the pages that now opposed him.

He got to his apartment door and reached for the knob, already breathing his sigh of relief. Both the gesture and breath choked. No, no time to lay low. Inside that apartment was the rest of his plunder, every piece chosen by the book. That was an army crouched inside, just waiting for him to open the door. Thieving Tom turned his sigh into a deep breath, rotated his wrist to freshen it up, readying it throw bowling ball bombs of badly handled hexes.

“Nobody pulls one over on Thieving Tom,” he tried to say, but his voice was still locked up in the exhibit, plundered in turn. Now he could only speak with his actions, with words stolen and bungled from the kinds of gods that occasionally wrote books.

And so he spoke, with the jiggle of a knob.

The End