It took them hours. The ritual was crazily complex. Chico went to retrieve some books they needed from the Order's library while Vopros and Banshee went to the Magical Objects and Artefacts Division to find rare elements they needed. They just had to blatantly lie about what they needed the materials for, but Vopros's poker face was legendary. Plus, the Order was very loose with what its members could experiment on. The minute they made something go wrong, there were Enforcers for that. And exemplary punishments.

Then, they had to prepare the ritual with the utmost care. Chico checked twice each and every rune Banshee sharpied into the floor, with no lack of corrections, banter and "do-it-yourself-then" moments. But, in the end, they seemed to have gotten everything right. Six hours of hard preparations, and they weren't even sure he was still asleep.

«So, we all have met him, in one way or another. We have his full name and surname. We even have his business card Vopros snatched from him. We should be very well oriented, shouldn't we?» Banshee asked towards Chico, who was as gloomy as November.

«Walking the Oneiron is una cosa seria, are we sure?»

«This won't be the general crappy Oneiron, this will be the private land o' dreams o' Grasshopper, what could go wrong?» Banshee said.

«It is a little more complicated than that.» Chico tried to explain.

«Hey, that's what my teacher said today when I asked him to explain how the fuck did that shitty dimension work!» she protested.

«My God, you actually asked someone for knowledge?» the Mexican was taken aback.

«I didn't want to mess up Fabrice's Oneiron.»

«You're not even friends!»

«He's a human, and Mages would technically be defending humans from supernatural, would they not?»

«No, they wouldn't! That's just some bullshit some mages say to feel better about the fact that they aren't going nowhere with their careers!» Chico was less taken aback. «Mages don't care about humans, at all.»

«Precisely. But we're hardly mages, aren't we?» Banshee pointed out.

«Hey! I aced the Academy with full grades!»

«Aye, then ye sat on yer fat ass for the next years, botching as many spells than us all. So, get down from the pedestal, and let's try to do the right thing fer once.»

Chico sighed. There was no talking back, and he looked at the ritual disposition with an infinite amount of worry.

«We bolt at the first problem, and if this doesn't work, we go and talk to him and if the Nameless Division has to fry his brain, so long.» he said, looking at Banshee with a harsh expression.

Banshee sighed too, but nodded.

They laid down on the blankets they had prepared in the three circles of the ritual, holding hands, and started to chant the focusing words.

They started to visualize the fluxes twisting and turning, and they started to move along them, just like they were going to open a Ripple to the Undertide. Only they didn't need to open a physical Ripple, just one for their minds. They rearranged the fluxes, twitching them into the form they needed, after carefully choosing the right ones, slightly different, less "real", in a way. The Ripple was ready, and they jumped into it, with just their will.

And there they were again. The gloomy multicolored liquid sky, the moist grass under their feet and the diffused sensation of unease and discomfort. Banshee hugged her own arms. She hated that place with all her heart.

They looked around, trying to understand if they had horribly botched their spell or they had, at least, landed somewhere near their target. The answer came after some seconds, in the form of a woman shouting, directly behind a hill not so far from their position.

Without speaking, they tiptoed towards the direction of the shouting, and cautiously peeked over the hill.

There was a brusque change of scenery, as the dreamer's mind itself molded the Oneiron at its will and desire. They found themselves looking at the last kind of view they would imagine would be the scene for a doctor's dream.

They saw tombs. Lines and lines of marble tombs, some in disarray, some well-kept, some with their statues, some with just their tombstone with shiny golden letters. The sky over them was the kind of grey sky someone expects when he must visit a tomb, and a shy little fog covered the ground.

Banshee recognized the place at once.

It was the Boston Cemetery.

There were two shapes standing right in the middle of the scene. One was, quite unmistakably, the doctor. The second was a thin, pale brunette, dressed in a hospital gown and, apparently, screaming her head off, standing in front of a tall, black marble tombstone shaped like a cross with a crown right over it.

«You killed me! It's your fault I died! It's all your fault!»

«Therese... Therese please, it's not... forgive me, I wasn't...»

«You haven't done enough, it's clear! If you have put me in the hands of a better doctor, I would still be alive! But you got it all wrong, and now I'm dead!»

Whereas the woman was a mask of fury, Grasshopper's face was twisted by a heartbreaking sorrow, as he knelt, like in front of an altar, praying for absolution or a chance to atone.

As the scene went on, the air around them started to change. Black clouds started gathering over the graves. The yellowish light started to grow dimmer and greyer, as if all the colors were being sucked in by the woman, who was growing much more defined and colored instead.

If at the beginning they couldn't quite discern her features, with the passing of seconds and the draining of colors from the world around her she became more and more recognizable. Not a face they had seen, but definitely a face you'd remember.

She was attractive, with a delicate freckle-sprayed nose, giant blue eyes and a thin, decisive mouth, open in her accusing voice. Grasshopper, on the other hand, had started fading violently, becoming less and less definite.

Then, something started glowing. On one of the tombs, somewhere they hadn't noticed before, a treble clef shone of a violet light, at first very dim, but growing by the instant.

«What the fuck?» Banshee hissed.

«Another treble clef.» Vopros muttered. «Doctor had one on white coat.»

«This is not good.» Chico said. «Look. Or rather, listen.»

A song.

A heavenly voice started to sound all around, a perfect pitch singing the sweetest, loveliest lullaby. The woman's voice was completely drowned by the melody. Just the peaceful and mellow music could be heard all around.

And the process inverted.

The clouds started to dissipate, the color and definition were being drained from the woman and given back to the world around her, and to the now puzzled form of Grasshopper, who had put his hands down on the grass and was looking all around him. But, soon enough, his eyes started to close, his body to relax. The woman was fading away, just like a well-executed film transition.

«What was that?» Banshee asked, still looking at the treble clef with intense distaste.

Chico had turned immediately serious. «That's a trigger response.»

«Do I have to...»

«Ay de mi, Banshee!»

«The short version!»

«That thing activates with the nightmare. It's clear it must be recurrent. It activates and calms him down, apparently.» Chico explained.

«Well, Fabrice loves music. He's always at the opera, and he loves our choir. Could it be self-defense?» Banshee offered her opinion.

«We know someone who loves treble clefs.» Vopros grumbled, grudgingly.

«It is very rare for a human to manage to change their Oneiron voluntarily. Even for mages, it's very difficult. It's basically some sort of supernatural subconscious...»

Unluckily for Chico, the one time everyone was actually listening to him, a movement caught everyone's attention.

A third figure entered the scene.

The earth of the grave shattered, it opened like the lid of a coffin, and right out of the earth he came, stepping up just like climbing a stairway from down below.

But the trio wasn't particularly shocked. Because they would have recognized that perfect, eerie voice between thousands.

The small, hooded figure of the mage reached the now laid down figure of Grasshopper, knelt beside him and went on singing, as the doctor dozed off in his own dream. Under him, slowly and gently, a bed started forming. And even in that distance they could see that the feet and structure of the bed were made with what was clearly human bones.

Banshee shivered.

«Jesus wept.» she managed to say. «That thing was to summon Staccato?»

«That makes no sense at all...» Chico shook his head.

«Can we talk to him?» Vopros asked.

«No, we can't interact with them in any way. We are just will manifestations, probably they can't even see us.»

The song fell silent, all at once. The air around them seemed to freeze.

They could see Staccato's hood lift towards the hill beneath which they were hiding. And even if they couldn't see his eyes, they felt them.

They woke up with the worst, pounding headache ever.