Case Three: Mindbreakers of Glendale. Chapter Three.
After getting in over their heads, Vibes Detectives' Agency finds themselves chased by a demon, and in Glendale. Which is more dangerous?
Vibes is a serialized supernatural comedy. New chapters come out every week. This is the THIRD AND FINAL CHAPTER of this case. If you’d like to start with CHAPTER ONE, click here:
Each case can be read independently, but if you’d like to start with the first case, find it here in the table of contents:
Last Time On: After getting magically portaled to a mall by a yoga teacher, and experiencing a brief existential crisis, Vibes tries to recreate the spell and get back to where the started.
This story is entirely in the first person, and I do my best to treat it journalistically with little to no embellishments, but for the sake of flow I’m going to have to take some liberties. Treat the next bit as purely speculative.
“Great work today,” Ashleigh said to her class as they rolled up their mats. “Heidi, your chaturanga is getting real strong, missy. Keep it up.” She walked with them towards the door. It gave her a lot of joy to be with her students. Leaving her job as a senior customer support specialist for a B2C education startup (perhaps) and dedicating her life to the pursuit of yoga had been a tough choice. She’d been paid well and highly respected at her old job—even winning several awards for the campaigns she’d led—but now she had purpose and pride in her work. She also knew portal magic, which was cool.
“Ta everybody, see you soon, ok,” she said at the door as her students filed out.
She had two hours and fifteen minutes to clean up the studio and eat lunch before her next class. If she worked quick she might have some time to read that new Danielle Steel novel she’d picked up—again, this is an assumption, but a lot of people like Danielle Steel so I don’t think it’s too off the mark.
“Ashleigh,” Kyle said at the door. She groaned inwardly. Kyle was a painfully lonely man. A photographer who took Instagram pictures of comedians for a living, he spent his life out at fun events but never himself having a good time. Ashleigh didn’t need to be able to read auras to see he had a crush on her. (Again, let’s not forget I’m just assuming all of this). “When we did half moon today I felt way more stable than I normally am. I took your note about not gripping with my toes and it really helped.”
“That’s nice, Kyle.” She tried to project platonic warmth as hard as possible, but Kyle never picked up on it. He remained firmly lodged halfway out the door.
“I’m really starting to feel stable in my legs again,” Kyle said, “you know, since the scooter incident… the incident where I slammed hard into someone who slammed hard into me. We were both on electric scooters going too fast and we slammed into each other. Hard! There was blood everywhere but the paramedics told us they wouldn’t help because it was just a ‘dumb scooter accident’ and they had more important accidents to deal with. I told you about that, right?”
A soft, pleasant noise rang behind her. “Good to see you, Kyle.” She smiled as she shut the door in his face and turned, ready for a fight.
“It worked!” Santi yelled, stumbling out of the portal.
“It did,” I cheered, picked back up the narrative and then quickly vomited in a potted monstera. “We did it!”
Ashleigh’s fingers came alive with light and she ran towards us. I cowered behind Santi and then felt bad about it, overcorrected by stepping in front of him, and then jumped away from the charging yoga teacher. Santi and I both threw our arms up defensively but Ashleigh barreled past us.
“Why would you nitwits leave the connection open!?”
“I don’t know that we know how to close it,” I answered honestly.
The noise from the portal grew tense and painful. It set my teeth chattering. A force pulsed from it, slowing Ashleigh’s charge to a slog. A branch of slow-moving lightning grew from the elliptical opening like pining mushrooms, psychedelic quicksilver dripping from its dendritic points.
“Santi,” I yelled over the noise. “I think we may have fucked up.”
“You think!” Ashleigh plunged her glowing hands into the portal. The painful noise grew softer, the ever-forking tree retreated. “This is why you two shouldn’t be messing with—ahhh!”
The fractal mass stabbed out, catching her in the shoulder, driving her back. She screamed as she dug her heels in, fighting to regain ground but whatever that thing was, it had the upper hand. More branches extruded from the portal and then, behind them came a thing that I just knew-based purely off vibes-was an eye. What would have been the iris was instead an infinite generation deep fractal of circular transformations and it saw me and I knew in that moment that I was, in fact, real and not a figment of Santi’s imagination and also, that I was terrified.
“Oh, come on!” Santi griped, “So this thing exists but Bigfoot doesn’t!? Bullshit!”
“Help!” Ashleigh screamed. I grabbed the potted monstera I’d thrown up in and chucked it into the portal. It struck the great fractal eye and disappeared into the opening. The thing blinked at me, confused, bothered, but in no way slowed. Santi, following my lead, chucked in chest-sized buddha statue. I threw in a yoga mat. He threw a chair. I threw in a Himalayan salt crystal/lamp.
“Stop throwing my stuff!” Ashleigh screamed,“Just do the opposite of whatever it was you did to open the portal and do it quick. If this thing comes through we’re all done for.”
I pulled out my phone.
“Ok! To open the portal we focused on elongating the coefficients for the x and y, so we can either work to diminish those, or elongate the z, making the x and y smaller by comparison—”
“Does it always take you two this long,” Ashleigh screamed, trying to drive the thing back into the portal with the strength of her yoga-powered legs.
“Just play the bowl slow, Santi. Make it ring as deep as possible.” Santi grabbed a singing bowl and started it ringing; the surface of the portal warbled like non-newtonian fluid but did not change.
Frantically, I checked my modal. The universe deep eye had pressed itself so far from the opening I could see the round.
“What do we do, Santi?!”
“Stop asking me like I know! I don’t know… oh wait! We’re trying to change the portal when was we need to be doing is break it. Iz, catch.”
Santi threw me the bowl and it slammed into my finger.
“Ow!”
“Sorry,” Santi grimmaced.
“Focus!” Ashleigh screamed.
“Play the bowl, Iz.”
“But I’m not good at it.”
“Exactly.”
I bonked the bowl, producing an awkward tone, then ran the mallet around the edge. The sound was painful, scratchy, like forks on empty plates. The noise of the portal grew harsh, sharp like chipped slate.
“Play it worse, Iz.”
I bonked it again and then circled the edge harder until my ears hurt. Ashleigh screamed, the fractal nightmare of the eye screamed soundlessly into our minds—which wasn’t fun. Santi cheered.
The portal cracked like glass, showering the floor in psychedelic, glowing goo. I turned, but having thrown the potted monstera into the portal, vomited instead onto the floor.
The room settled for a long, long moment.
“That was the biggest one I’ve ever seen. You could have killed us all,” Ashleigh hissed, clutching at the motley bruise on her shoulder.
“Well, so could the BMW that almost ran us over when you sent us to Glendale with your magic—“
“For the sake of argument.”
“Must you, Iz, now?”
“I’ve had a traumatic day. Leave me something.”
“Fair. That’s fair.
“What BMW?” Ashleigh asked.
“The one in the middle of Brand Blvd. where you dumped us.”
Ashleigh grimaced as some heavy thought dawned on her. She pulled herself over to the wall.
Santi pointed at her like a judge. “Did… did you dump us in the middle of the busiest street in the most reckless neighborhood in LA county by accident?”
She climbed the wall with her good hand and limped to the water filter. She had a Hydro Flask next to it and struggled to take the lid off. “I had meant to dump you two at Carousel. It’s a Lebanese restaurant I like a few blocks away from the mall.”
“Well,” I said, “that was a nice thought. Unasked for, on our end, but still, I appreciate the gesture. The thing is I don’t particularly like Lebanese food. It’s not that it doesn’t taste good, It’s more that I, as a Jew, feel challenged by how familiar the flavors are while I still remain clueless to the culture.”
“I like it,” Santi said. “The red paper stuff, muhammara, I think? Delicious. I’m still furious at you though.”
Ashleigh finally got the cap off her bottle and dumped it on herself. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.
“What was that?” Santi asked. “I couldn’t hear you.”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, barely a whisper.
“One more time,” Santi said, “because I didn’t catch that.”
“Santi! Enough ok, you don’t need to rub it in,” I said.
“I’m not rubbing it in, I actually can’t hear her. All this portal stuff has messed with my ears.”
“Oh,” I laughed. “She said she was sorry.”
“She did? Oh! Well, that’s nice,” Santi said. “We all make mistakes.”
“I’m starting to thinking saving you two was a mistake,” Ashleigh said. “You’re reckless. You have no idea what you’re doing.”
“That being the case, wouldn’t teaching us be the logical thing to do? Iz? You’re a logic guy.”
“Ostensibly. And yes, that would make sense. As embarrassing as it is to admit, Santi and I are children here—“
“And we’re going to keep getting ourselves in trouble—“
“We can’t help ourselves—”
“We really can’t. But if we had a teacher…” Santi left the rest of the sentence off, letting the silence hang in the air like a question mark.
“I can’t teach you,” Ashleigh said, “Because I’m barely more than a child myself. I met my guru at a conference three years ago. She was leading a seminar called, ‘Using Insights from Yoga to Create More Effective Relationships for B2B Client Managers—’”
Something in me unclenched then, and for the first time all day I could finally relax.
“—and something in us just clicked. She saw my full potential. I quit my job, followed her around on the leadership conference circuit, learning at her feet, until one day she just disappeared.”
“That’s so sad,” I said.
“I feel for you, Ashleigh, and I’m proud of you for sharing.” Santi touched his heart to show he was genuine. “But you know more shit than we do and I’d really like to not release any more brain demons into our plane of existence. So…”
She pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. “Fine, come back here tomorrow—“
“I hate to do this,” I said, “but I do keep regular hours.”
“Come back here next Saturday morning, 9:00 a.m.. Don’t open any portals until then.”
She ushered us out and slammed the door. It made a comical, cartoonish click as she locked it, making quite clear how little she wanted to do with us.
“You know…” I said, “now that I think of it, Lebanese does sound pretty good.”
“I’m driving,” Santi said. “I want to try that Carousel place and you drive too timid to cut it in Glendale.”
Thanks for reading. That’s it for this case, but if you’d like to be notified when the next case drops:
Or if you’d like to find every case, all in one place, click below:
The visual of them chucking her stuff into the portal had me lol’ing…