Normally Norman would return home to unwind after an experience like he had today. But that`s not what he did. Despite the fatigue and bone weariness, the fight got him thinking. He had an opportunity ahead of him that he couldn`t afford to waste. He could sit at home and smoke himself into oblivion, or he could forge ahead.

　　He checked the time on his phone - which survived the fight with the rycor with almost no damage - and saw that it was just after six in the evening. That meant the dump was closed for the day.

　　That was perfect, it meant he could ride over there and finish collecting rats. With a head full of experiments he could perform, Norman rode his bike back toward the dump. There were things he needed to do and he wasn`t going to let some trumped-up rent-a-cop stop him.

　　As he suspected, the gate was shut and locked by the time he arrived, but the guy manning the booth was gone as well. He wasn`t sure if that would be the case, but it made sense. No reason to stick around to watch the place if it was closed.

　　Norman jiggled the door to the booth but it was locked. So the guard was lazy but not a complete idiot. Norman didn`t allow that to discourage him though. As a younger teen, he had broken into any number of places, some just to prove he could, others to steal stuff so he wouldn`t starve. He wasn`t proud of it, but he did what he had to do after his parents abandoned him.

　　Norman walked around to the other side of the little shack and a sliding window he had spotted earlier. From his experience, most people forgot to lock their windows. As he got closer, he could see the window was closed. There wasn`t any convenient place to grip in order to pull it open from the outside either. Normally he would just use the friction of his arm against the glass to slide the window open enough to get his fingers underneath it, but he couldn`t do that as he still had his armor on. And breaking it was a last resort.

　　Instead, he did the next best thing. Norman worked up a sweat on his hands and pressed the palms against the glass, wiggling them back and forth to squeeze out the air and produce a bit of suction. Then he slowly pulled.

　　His hands squeaked on the glass as they slid, but the window moved as well. Smiling at his success, he repeated this a couple more times until the opening was wide enough to put his fingers into. From there it was easy to pull the window the rest of the way open. It was a generic building. Built for whatever purpose a lonely shack designed for one person could ever be conceived of being used for.

　　You might ask, why go through this much trouble when he could have just smashed the window in and jumped inside? Well, he didn`t want anyone to know he had been here. After the run-in with the rent-a-cop earlier in the day, he would be the prime suspect of any vandalism.

　　Norman hoisted himself through the skinny opening, thankful that his armor wasn`t super bulky, and that it also made him a bit slippery. A piece of his shredded shorts did catch on the windowsill, tearing his poor abused shorts even more. It reminded Norman that he had been biking around with his ass hanging out this entire time. Also that he was probably covered in blood.

　　He glanced down, and yup caked in blood. It probably would have been smart to go home and clean up before coming here. But he couldn`t wait.

　　Luckily nobody had seen his current state of undress. If anyone did spot him, he didn`t even have to lie about what happened. It looked like he had been attacked by a wild animal, and that was the truth of the matter.

　　But Norman had bigger concerns at the moment than a bit of clothing. As his feet touched the floor of the shack, he glanced around. The small room didn`t have much in it in the way of amenities.

　　The first thing Norman noticed was a crooked and worn chair that contained more than one unidentifiable stain on the padding. Norman pushed it away with his foot, not wanting to touch it with his hands. Other than that, there was a skinny counter with a notepad, filled with bored doodles.

　　It didn`t take Norman long to spot what he had been looking for. Hidden under the counter was a small drawer. He tried to open it but it was locked. The desk and drawer were made from thin metal though. All Norman had to do was gently pry the two apart with his pocket knife and the locking lug popped out of the slot. He really wondered why anyone bothered using such cheaply made items to secure anything.

　　The drawer held a cheap-looking flashlight, a pack of playing cards& lube - Norman shuddered - and a set of keys. Now that he looked closer, that flashlight, may not actually be a flashlight. Norman snatched the keys, careful to avoid touching anything else within the drawer of horrors.

　　After snatching up the keys, he closed the window and walked out the door. He left the door unlocked for when he returned the keys later, only because none of the keys seemed to work in the door lock.

　　It only took him a few tries before he found the key to the front padlock to the dump though. He quickly unbolted it and brought his bike inside. Then he relocked it behind him. If anyone came by, Norman didn`t want them to see anything out of place.

　　Norman hunted rats and a few mice in complete peace until the sun went down. He would have preferred just to leave the traps here and come back at a later time but the rats made that pointless. And he had lugged around the stupid live trap for no reason. The rats and mice could easily slip through the bars of the cage and escape and nothing bigger was poking its head around while Norman was running around stomping the trapped rats.

　　Returning the key to the shack and relocking it wasn`t much of an issue. The worst part of his trip to the dump was the disgusting refuse and unknown fluids he was now covered in from chasing rats around.

　　A long shower and a change of clothes were the first things Norman would be doing when he got home. It was a surprise that he hadn`t hurled on the way home from how bad he smelled.

　　The bag of corpses was tossed indifferently into the freezer while he cleaned up. He didn`t need them stinking up his kitchen any more than it already was. And hopefully, the cold would kill off any fleas or other nasties carried by the disgusting things. As well as making them more palatable to work with.Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

　　After a long hot shower, Norman gathered up the clothes he had been wearing during the rycor attack. There was no saving them. The rycor had shredded the shorts and the shirt was so stained in blood that Norman doubted he would ever get it out completely. He carried it to the backyard and a burn barrel he used sometimes when he threw parties. He soaked the clothes in some high-grade alcohol and tossed in a lit piece of paper.

　　Norman wanted to ensure there wasn`t a drop of his blood left. If he could use blood for spells, then surely someone else could as well. And while Norman couldn`t do anything about the blood in the forest, he figured it was remote enough that nobody was likely to stumble upon that scene before the weather and mother nature took care of the mess. The next thing on the list was the bike. Norman rubbed the whole thing down with a generous dose of hydrogen peroxide.

　　When Norman checked the time, he found it was nearly ten. He wanted to work on that new spell tonight but he was also rather wrung out from today`s events. The blood loss he experienced today was still affecting him and now that his adrenaline high had worn off, he was crashing hard.

　　Errors due to his exhaustion could ruin the spell or possibly cause a catastrophic failure. Normally he would just say screw it and push through but Norman decided on the safe approach tonight. It was a marked change in the normal way Norman did stuff, but Orb of Decay didn`t sound like the type of spell you experimented with half-assed.

　　Before bed, Norman made sure to remove his armor. It had felt weird to shower in the bone armor but Norman needed to get clean more than he needed to feel fresh air on his skin.

　　He recalled seeing the gouges and deep scratches on the armor from where the rycor teeth had sunk in. Some of the areas around the bite had even started to crack from the pressure the creature had been able to exert. But his potion had taken care of all that, which was awesome, and a bit disturbing. It meant the armor was literally a part of him when he used it.

　　Norman didn`t want to remember the nearly paralyzing fear he felt when the beast rushed out of the underbrush. Only a feeling that something was off and a quick reaction had saved him from becoming rycor food. It was too close to death and Norman hated that.

　　The instinct to fight or run wasn`t something Norman enjoyed experiencing. He realized it was even worse when the choice was taken away. Norman`s thoughts were spiraling into a dark place, so he cut them off. He was too tired to deal with existential dread tonight as he tromped up the stairs and passed out in his bed. He only hoped his sleep-paralysis demon left him alone for once.

　　***

　　Anna had seen the state Norman was in as she had been watching and waiting for him to return. She managed to muffle her shocked gasp over his disheveled state. It took all of her self-control to keep herself from rushing over to see how he was doing. It wouldn`t look good for her to go flying out of the house to demand to know what had happened to him, especially with Toby downstairs watching TV. She didn`t want to get her brother all riled up tonight. She would have to wait until her brother was asleep so she could slip out and check on Norman.

　　While she waited for that to happen she imagined herself beside Norman as she tracked his progress by the lights he was turning on. First, he entered his kitchen, probably for a quick snack. She smiled, imagining eating across the table from him. After that, she spotted the light in his upstairs bathroom come on. Anna grew hot in the face as she pictured herself in there along with him.

　　After what was probably a shower, it looked like he went out into his backyard. She didn`t have a good angle from her bedroom window but she could see an orange glow from behind his house. She didn`t quite know what that was about. Norman eventually came around the side of the house and entered the garage. She could see in the dim light that he was holding some things in his hands. But it was too dark to tell what they were. She wished those hands were holding her instead.

　　After he went back inside, the lights in his house winked out one after the other, leaving only the one in his room on. Soon that light joined the others, leaving Norman`s house looking dark and foreboding.

　　Anna knew better though. Norman`s house was awesome, mostly because Norman lived there. But also because she had a lot of good memories in that house over the last few years, mostly just hanging out with Norman and even her brother.

　　She daydreamed about those memories until her phone gave a little beep, letting her know it was time. She had set the alarm to go off at midnight. Toby should be asleep by now. Anna tiptoed to her room door and opened it just a crack. She couldn`t hear the TV anymore so her brother had finally gone off to bed.

　　Seeing as the coast was clear she slipped out of her room and down the hall while carrying her shoes. The stairs were the tricky part, there was one step that would squeal bloody murder if you stepped on it wrong. She straddled the edge of that step closest to the wall and with a quiet sigh of relief, she was past the hurdle. She was almost to the front door when the living room light flicked on. She froze in panic.

　　"I knew you were up to something when I found your room empty a few nights ago. I waited in my van until you returned home. And to my surprise, who did I see you with& Norman. I don`t even want to think what you two could have possibly been doing at that time of night."

　　She wheeled on her brother. "We didn`t do anything, why do you hate him so much?" Anna had known for quite some time that Toby didn`t really like Norman, but for whatever reason, they remained friends. She never told Norman because it would have meant she wouldn`t have been able to see him anymore.

　　"I don`t hate him, Anna. I don`t even care about him enough to hate him. I just think you are too good for him. He is a drugged-up loser that thought it would be fun to be a necromancer, thereby fucking up his only chance to become something better. I think that says enough about who the man is."

　　Anna glared at her brother, anger in her eyes. "I don`t care what you think about him. I- I love him!"

　　Toby laughed, he actually laughed at her statement. "Love! You don`t even know what love is." Toby threw himself out of the recliner he had been waiting in and ran toward her, scaring her. "That man!" He pointed towards the front door and Norman`s house, "doesn`t even think of you. He only thinks of himself. Do you know what he did that night we went out?" Hmm?"

　　"Stop! Why are you doing this?" Anna started to cry.

　　Toby shook her, "Answer the question."

　　"Y- Yes," she broke down, falling to the floor as her brother stood over her and crossed his arms.

　　"He came over here to ask me to be a wingman for him, so he could find some slut to bang. All the while he knows how you feel about him. This, this thing you feel for him," he gestured toward the front door again, "needs to stop. You need to stop. It`s not healthy, Anna. I`m sorry, but I care too much about you to let Norman fuck up your life like he has fucked up his own."

　　Toby lifted her off the ground and pulled her into a hug. She wanted to push him away but she was shaking too hard. "Anna, we only have each other. We can`t trust anyone else. They will only let us down."

　　Anna sobbed into her brother`s shoulder, eventually returning the hug. She knew it was the truth, but she hadn`t wanted to accept it.

　　***

　　Toby watched his sister climb back up the stairs to her room. She was still sniffling a bit and he felt bad for being so blunt with her but it had to be done. He had known all along about her late-night outings. Letting her have her bit of fun helped keep her from flipping out constantly, so he never stopped her before tonight. But things were going to start changing quickly in the next few days and he wanted her to stay clear of the chaos.

　　She didn`t need to know the truth, that Norman did care for her, but more like a little sister. Toby could at least appreciate that sentiment. But he hadn`t lied. Norman would never see Anna the way she wanted him to and when she learned that it would break her heart. Better to rip that bandaid off now.

　　With any luck, in the next few days, Norman would be out of his hair once and for all. Then time would erase his stain from Anna`s mind leaving her none the wiser. Then maybe he could get her to someplace safer where she could find a decent boyfriend.