Hunted|Haunted - Chapter 2 - Toy

The family just accepted Toma having a new imaginary friend. At first, Neven was wary of that, but as a couple of weeks went by, it became apparent that having an imaginary friend is one of the few normal things Toma did. One would think that being around a bunch of kids of similar age would help, after all, Grobars all lived together. Rather than construct a non-Euclidean space where rooms appeared as they were needed, like Lowac did, Grobars just built more rooms when they ran out of space to house relatives. Thus, their mansion was something more of a village, where all buildings merged in some sort of horrible transmutation incident. This left Toma living in the proximity of 26 other kids, and Neven never being able to catch a moment of silence.

Truth be told, Toma was somehow way weirder than Krsto. Neven couldn't put into words exactly how, but... Toma would bite a particular windowsill each and every time he happened to pass it. A cousin taught Toma to braid, and he proceeded to braid every single braidable thing within his reach. Except for his hair. Toma wasn't allowed to touch ketchup, as he was caught drinking the thing on more than 3 occasions. The same applied to mustard. He also insisted on turning a rather mediocre painting of a seaside upside down, because “it looked better that way”. Another entertaining regular occurrence was him trying to crawl under the porch, encountering and subsequently losing a fight to a family of hedgehogs, and having to retreat onto the nearby tree. Toma knew about the hedgehogs. He never brought a weapon along. He knew the hedgehogs would fight him on sight. Yet he still did it.

At least with Krsto, Neven understood the logic behind his actions. This child just... did things.
“How the hell did they manage with the two of you there?” Neven occasionally questioned. Mostly when he felt responsible for Toma's safety. Which is, most of the time. Why, though? You were never particularly concerned with other morons in your life. Is it because he's Krsto's? Yeah, it's likely just that.

Teaching the child magic turned out tougher than imagined. Neven was a horrible teacher. Genetics and over a century of practice made it so that Neven never gave the cost of a spell a second thought. This is just a tiny bit crucial when trying to teach someone who can barely manage to produce enough energy for a light spell. Is it normal? Are Grobars just born like that? Did father just push them that hard, that Neven could conjure a bullet at Toma's age? Was that normal?
In times like these, when Neven was suddenly overcome with the need to overthink his life, he would usually turn into a coyote and sort of float aimlessly around the room. This annoyed Toma to no end, especially when Coyote floated past the walls into someone else's room, or outside the house entirely.

— Stop doing that!
— Get me a body, then I might stay in one place
— No, you won't!
— How are you so sure?
— I have a body, and I can't stay in one place!
— Well, if you didn't have a body, you wouldn't run around, so maybe if I had a body, I could sit still?

Looking like an electrocuted chinchilla, Toma sprinted away. Coyote, of course, was joking. No way the kid could make a corpse puppet or something.
The kid couldn't. The mother, however...
The next morning, Toma presented Coyote with a toy. A dog-thing, made of old wool clothes and filled with rock salt and sand. Something a mother would make to help keep the child's magic down at night. Neven himself had a sand-filled cotton carp. Snorks tore it apart, though.

— Here. I asked mum to make you a body!
— That's nice, but how do you plan to put me inside it?
— I... didn't think that far. Maybe you should bite it? Mum said that's how you get possessessed, so maybe that's how you possesses?

Here goes nothing.

A mouth full of sand felt oddly familiar. Then the world turned dark.

Darkness was soft, muffling, and heavy. The smell kicked in first. Salt, and varnish, and wool, and iron, and dried fruit Toma was hiding under his bed. Unpleasant ringing eventually turned to sound, and meaningless stains became sight. It took some time to get the hang of movement, after all, the toy's proportions were way off.

None of this is supposed to work. This isn't how possession works. What the actual fuck.

— Are you okay?
— I… I uh... I don't know? I guess? The hell just happened?!
— ... Wanna play cards?

And so, Neven got a body. Slow, unwieldy, and terribly heavy body.

It took him hours to muster enough strength to move it just about a metre forward. Toma never had the temper for it, preferring to tug him along by his arm. At least, moving hands wasn't that bothersome, and now Toma could follow lessons more easily. He was even able to learn a couple of tricks, like summoning things from his right hand to his left. Oh, right. He's a leftie. That's probably why he struggles with spells so much. Neven was just taught to suffer through discomfort. Well, “taught”. Cane wasn't much of a teacher.

Neven started showing techniques with his left hand instead, and the result was near instant. For both of them, that is. Toma learnt to apply feather-fall to small objects, and Neven's entire shoulder grew numb for the next three hours. This existence continues to be perplexing.

For the longest time, the rest of the family paid little attention to Coyote's involvement in Toma's shenanigans. After all, the tricks he taught him were simple enough that a child could learn them on their own simply by experimenting with the spell parts taught by other adults in their life. Toma was a smart enough kid to try to make his own explosive spells. The troubles started at healing.

Toma didn't think nearly as much before trying as Krsto did, and wasn't anywhere near as sturdy as Imeje. A fragile, curious child often gets hurt, and Neven just couldn't watch him squeal in pain, trying to make his way back home after falling face-first into a tree. So he healed him every now and then, eventually having stopped paying much attention to what he was dealing with. A scratch here, a cut there.

Until he healed up Toma's broken wrist right in front of Imeje's eyes.

She didn't say anything outright, continuing to calm Toma down after his fall out of the tree, but the facial expression alone was enough to put the fear of an unspecified god and newly invented hellish torture into Neven. As soon as the house was asleep, she pulled coyote from Toma's room into the kitchen, and stapled him to a chopping board with nine-inch magic-repellant pure iron nails. The dreaded talk began.