Hallucination

What Wolfe Fang claims to have seen was Leslie del Mar's corpse.

"H-He was on the stage... I left my cane there. His was floating..... A rope was attached to his neck.... "

But when the friends and the couple went back to the stage to check....

There was no body there.

Everyone went silent for a while. Wolfe's eyes shook in disbelief...

And he screamed.

It was a long, dragging, frustrated scream.

"IT WAS THERE!!!!!! IT WAS JUST THERE!!!!!! I SAW IT!!!!!"

He kept screaming and screaming, and Leon hugged him with a conflicted expression on his face.

Everyone went quiet for a while, the atmosphere very heavy and awkward.

Serafina tried to break the ice, saying what they were all kind of thinking.

"Wolfe..... Have you never checked with a therapist if you have PTSD?"

Taji nodded. "After all, you did saw Leslie's suicide yourself...."

Wolfe shook his head buried on Leon's chest, his voice hoarse. "I know what I saw... And Leslie died of drug overdose.... What I saw was him hanging by a rope....."

"It.... doesn't really make any difference, Wolfe. You should talk to someone." Heath suggested. "His death had not been easy for all of us."

"Leave us alone for a moment, please." Leon said, still comforting Wolfe while gently patting his head.

Cherith agreed. "Leon's right. Let's give the poor thing some space. Whether or not what he saw was real, it had him rattled, and the least he needs was even more confusion."

They all somberly said goodbye to the couple, leaving them just standing in front of the big stage. Wolfe could not stop crying and heaving.

"I don't have PTSD, Leon... It's real..." Wolfe told him. "It's not a hallucination.... I'm not going crazy....."

"I believe you." Leon said, as he had noticed something from the start.

There was something laying on the floor at the center of the stage. Where he assumed the hanged Leslie would have been.

He pointed this to Wolfe, and the agitated actor stopped crying.

They slowly made their way past the theater seats, and walked straight for the stage, still lit up thanks to their request to the staff.

The cane was there, leaning on one side near the opened curtains. But the thing on the floor...

It was a name placard.

Almost a foot long, and 4 inches tall. The plating was made of gold, and the base made of oak wood, giving a fancy and antique feel to it.

The font was in Old English, and the words printed on it was.

'Pinocchio'.

Wolfe was further confused, and Leon picked it up with a serious expression on his face.

"Was this part of your props?" He asked.

"N-No..... I don't think it's part of any other play's props either....." Wolfe said. "There's no play called 'Pinocchio' at the moment, and we're doing Red Riding Hood."

Leon frowned. "I think I know what this means."

He went over to also pick up the cane, and used it to point at the metal bearing where the body may have been suspended according to Wolfe.

Leon can imagine it perfectly, using the pictures of Leslie del Mar in his mind to painting a vivid and nearly accurate image of what Wolfe must have seen.

This was a trait that helped him a lot in the police force. A trait people thought to make him 'perfect' for solving crime.

"They must have placed this placard directly below the body, whoever put it there." Leon explained. "And as for why it was Pinocchio..."

"The original story of Pinocchio is much more gruesome than the Disney child-friendly one, as always. "

"Pinocchio was a menace. He killed Jiminy Cricket with a hammer, made people think Gepetto was abusing him, and many more atrocious things. Eventually...."

"He was hanged as karma for all his misdeeds. That was actually where the story was supposed to end, but the author's editors told him to change it and make him into a real boy like he had always wanted, forgiven for his crimes."

Wolfe was horrified. "So someone took Leslie's body and turned him into some kind of sick tableau for this alternate ending of Pinocchio?"'

"That's what I'm guessing. And they wanted you to know too. Otherwise, they would not have left this placard behind."

Leon gripped the placard tightly. "This person or persons are playing with your mind. And I only know one person who would do something as sick as this."

Wolfe also gritted his teeth, a small growl as he said. "Mickey Xing."

They went home with determined expressions, ready to seek answers from this monster.

Wolfe used the app Xiao Nezha to see where it had been created and encoded . After a while of coding and tapping, which actually took 2 hours.....

There it was, the manufacturer's IP address. He connected to it, and began to hack into the very system that distributed the app.

"Ah, this would have been faster if I had the Alpha with me." Wolfe complained.

But the Alpha needed to be connected directly to the Cave in order to work fast anyway, so he can't even take it with him if he wanted to.

But he still reached it in the end, and found a way to connect and spy into the PC that made Xiao Nezha. He scoured many things, until he found what he was looking for.

A folder marked 'Jade Emperor'.

It was a list of many locations, numbers, and other people. The Xings seemed to be moving around a lot.

It took another hour to find which was the most likely to be Mickey Xing's current location and number.

Leon had bought some donuts while Wolfe was busy hacking. He went to his side at the couch and handed it to him.

Wolfe just ate them while still typing deadly furious at his computer. His eyebrows formed Vs and his hair was messy, one leg up, and wearing gray wolf-patterned pajamas.

This was the Wolfe without the usual grandeur. Even in the house, or perhaps ever since Leon moved in, he still looked like a star.

But now, all that fanciness was taken away and left him bare like this, looking like a normal human.

Yet Leon still found him charming like this, somehow.

He went over to place a donut by his lips, and Wolfe just nibbled on it with his eyes never leaving the screen. He was so focused, it's endearing somehow.

Wolfe had eaten all the way and accidentally bit into his fingers, and Leon winced. "Ow!"

Wolfe turned to him, but not to apologize. He showed Leon that he was calling someone in WeChat.

The call was in the highest volume, and they waited for a response.

A sweet, childish voice answered. "Hello?"

"Mickey Xing. I thought we had a deal."

"Shizi!!!!~ You called!!!! Missed me so soon?"

Wolfe couldn't take it and said with his tone dripping with venom. "We told you not to fuck with us."

"That's true. And I did not 'fuck with you', haven't I? Otherwise, your airplane to NYC should have exploded, haha!"

"Cut the crap, Mickey Xing. We know you're the one that put this Pinocchio placard here." Leon growled.

But Mickey's reaction was quick this time, and genuinely confused.

"Er..... Pinocchio? What Pinocchio?"