“What does that mean?” Maguire asked.

  “It's a fairy thing, a game of sorts that they like to play in the spring. I kinda forgot about it because there’s usually someone else keeping an eye on it. The way I understand it is that it’s a cross between hide and seek and a scavenger hunt, sort of. As I said, never had to deal with it myself but from the looks of it the magic on these stones could be causing the shifting of minds between the people, especially if they got mistaken for eggs.”

  “Fairy magic would certainly explain things. So, we are dealing with a mix of intentional and unintentional.”

  “Exactly. I need to find the source, the place where these all came from so I can figure out what exactly we need to do to get everyone back to normal. Suffice to say, fairy magic plays really weird with humans.”

  “How close is fairy magic to trickster magic?”

  “Granny smith to honeycrisp,” I replied. Maguire nodded.

  I took great care to pick up the plastic egg and cover up the stone, just in case someone else came upon it. The fairies would find it one way or another before the day was done, so long as no humans moved it. Or, at least, that was my hope.

  We would probably have to come back and check, just to be sure.

  “If there was someone keeping an eye on this, does that mean there might be a safehouse or cabin nearby?” Maguire asked as we continued along the trail.

  “Most likely yes. My bet would be in the forest ranger housing. It might actually be easier to find that first, then figure out how to untangle people. Would you mind heading back to the picnic site to keep an eye on things? I want someone there in case things start getting weirder.”

  “Sure. I assume you have a way to find the cabin.”

  “Yep.” I tucked the marbles away and pulled my phone out of my pocket. Maguire watched me curiously as I took out my phone and opened the maps app. I tapped the bottom of the phone firmly on my palm, then blew on the screen. In a matter of seconds, I had a heading for the cabin.

  “I didn't know that's a thing you could do, yet somehow I am not surprised,” Maguire said with a chuckle.

  “There are always more tricks to learn. Now go and let me know how things are going back there. I'll let you know what I find.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Maguire nodded, holding out his fist. I bumped it and he turned, walking back down the path. It felt like slipping back into that long and lonely year, finding myself alone in the woods once more, but I knew I wasn’t. And that made a pretty big difference.

  I followed the trail for a little longer before I had to go off the path to find my destination, going in the general direction of the pin on the map. I probably wouldn’t have been able to find the cabin without it, between the hints of illusory magic and the rustic design of the small building. Upon opening the door, which took me a few minutes to find, I was greeted by the sight of some spiral stairs leading down.

  “Now that’s more like it,” I said with a smile before winding my way down. At the bottom, there was an office-like space with a deck and a bookshelf and a cot pushed up against one wall. The likelihood that the bookshelf also served as a door to another room was high, but I decided to leave that for now. Instead I went to the desk and sat down, and started rifling through the drawers.

  Fortunately, whoever typically used the office was actually organized to a degree, so I found their field journal in the top drawer. Unfortunately, their writing was absolute chicken scratch, so it took some doing to decipher. I flipped through until I found talk about the local fairy population and their activities around this time two years ago, transcribing the scrawl to the best of my ability.

  According to the journal, normally there was a Jack here to make sure that the humans and the fairies didn’t cross paths during these games, but with no one to keep an eye out it happened anyway. There were a few notes as to what to do if a human came across one of the stones but from what I could tell, that was a rare occurrence and apparently, sometimes the fairies like to mix up what the stones do when they were found.

  “Guess I should count myself lucky this didn’t happen last year,” I commented. “Or, if it didn’t, it wasn’t bad enough to make the news…I’m not going to worry about that right now. Focus on the problem at hand, Claudia.”

  I picked up my phone off the desk and called Maguire.

  “Figure anything out?” he asked after two rings.

  “Yep. As I suspected, this is a pretty common thing so there’s documentation on how previous Jacks have handled mishaps. The body swapping thing is new, but sometimes fairies like to change things up. How are things over there?”

  “They are getting weirder, but so far no one seems to be noticing what's going on and I’m not seeing any harmful effects setting in. Not sure how much longer that will be the case.”

  “Okay, well, keep watching and if it starts to destabilize, do what you can to keep people calm. I’m going to gather some stuff and I will be right there.”

  “Sounds good.”

  I hung up and started rifling through the drawers some more, grabbing anything that looked vaguely useful and not super cursed. I could sense more or less what each item had been created to do and used that to start thinking through possible plans for how to fix this mess before it got out of hand. I did a quick check of the bookshelf and under the bed as well, nabbing a few extra odds and ends.

  It did feel strange to be looting another Jack’s stuff, but I had every intention of returning everything once the situation had been dealt with.

  Getting these people’s personalities sorted was my top priority before either the fairies got upset about their stolen stones or any of the changes became permanent.

  I could earn my fellows' forgiveness when I got them back from wherever the hell they disappeared to.