Naivaria didn’t get drunk very often, but when she did… hooo boy. She’d had one glass of wine too many (that was to say, exactly two glasses), and when she stepped into her home studio that evening she looked around and frowned. Something was off. She could feel it when she walked further into the room. Try as she might, though, she couldn’t figure out what it was. nothing seemed out of place… she just got this feeling of wrongness from this room.

She saw it when she backed up to lay her hand on the mage-light switch. As soon as the lights went out, the moon cast a shadow along the wall. It was a man… and it was moving, swaying back and forth like a snake about to strike. She could see the outline of him, too, coming closer in the dark. She turned on the light.

There was no one there.

She turned it off again. The man reappeared, that same shadow lying in wait for her to step closer. Aran was upstairs already, probably reading, and she backed out the door and called to him. “Aran! I think there’s someone he–”

A crash sounded inside. The wind whistled outside the window. In the dark, the man had moved. He’d ducked away from the moonlight and was nowhere to be found. Skeins of thread tumbled to the floor; something tipped and spilled bolts of fabric all over the place.

Drunken rage consumed her. “You get out of there! Get out of my studio!” she bellowed, charging in and slapping her hand over the mage-light switch. Her studio was indeed a mess, and she saw the man shifting over a rack that had held her extra fabrics, which had toppled with its contents. “Get out!” she yelled. She heard Aran coming rapidly down the stairs, but the man was just about over the rack and she knew he’d be out the window before Aran got there. So she grabbed the nearest weapon at hand–a small rotary cutter–and charged after him.

When she leaped over the rack, she stumbled on a body and hit the ground hard, her head thunking against the wall with a sudden crack that brought instant tears to her eyes. And then the body was on top of her and she started screaming. “I will cut you! I swear to the Nether I will cut you!” Where was her rotary cutter? She groped and found it, flailing ineffectively against the man who was now on top of her. It didn’t help that she couldn’t see through her tears.

Aran burst into the room roaring. “What in the h–” his voice cut off and his footsteps stopped, and then seconds later he burst out laughing as she continued to flail. Then he came over and gently lowered his hands, lifting the man off of her. Confusion swept through her inebriated mind. “I think you’ve had enough playtime with your mannequin, Love,” he managed between snickers. “Come on, let’s clean up and go to bed… and take a look at your head.”