The Forgotten Ring

Chapter 5: Félix

Having a fresh start in Paris wasn't as much of a clean slate as I had intended.

I realized very soon into college that I did in fact know someone else here previously.

Félix Fathom.

We met in our ninth grade year of high school. It was at least halfway through the year already, so I had begun to hear about the first instances of the Hawk Moth situation in Paris. It seemed I wasn't the only one interested in the conflict.

I noticed Félix also took a strange liking to the turmoil. I would occasionally catch him watching news footage of the attacks instead of paying attention to a lecture, seemingly lost in thought. Every single video and article I found, he did as well.

It might have been understandable if we were in Paris, but having another person be so interested in the attacks—there couldn't be a coincidence. We were all the way in London.

I could tell the kid didn't have many friends, if any at all. He was cold and manipulative, driving everyone away. There was something up with him, and I wanted to investigate, but I knew I had to be careful.

He was clever though. Astonishingly so. I knew there probably wasn't a stealthy way to go about getting some information about him without appearing suspicious, so I just decided to ask him directly.

I marched up to him and asked him bluntly why he watched so many videos of magical cosplayers in Paris.

He had barely reacted and simply told me that there was a magical war happening in Paris and that he kept up with the news because his cousin lived there. But before he walked away, he told me he knew that I also watched the same footage.

I was stunned. I never watched the videos in class, or anywhere in school for the matter. Had he stolen my phone? Was he stalking me? Was he just that intuitive, or was he bluffing?

I never found out.

Félix talked to no one unless he absolutely had to. But after that encounter, we started making small talk. It got to this weird stage of kind-of-friendship, but he was always so emotionally distant that I could never really tell. The kid had recently lost his father and now only lived with his widowed mother. I wondered if Félix had been a happy kid before then.

One day, he spontaneously asked me to meet at his house. Well, first he asked to meet at a location in London, but I didn't exactly trust him to not trap me. He begrudgingly agreed to go to his house instead. He didn't tell me why he wanted to meet up. He just grunted a time and address and left.

I showed up later that evening. His mother was very welcoming, unlike her son. I met him in his room and he told me why he had called me there.

He knew I was a miraculous holder.

I tried to keep calm, but I knew he would see the panic in my eyes. I couldn't deny it.

Though the boy was a genius, he hadn't figured it out on his own. I was still getting used to using my miraculous, and I wasn't very experienced. No one, not even Félix, would be able to see through the quantum masking, but apparently I had made the mistake of detransforming in an alleyway near his house as he passed by.

Surprisingly, he didn't intend to use the information against me.

He was also involved in the world of the miraculouses, and he decided to tell me that he wanted one for himself. It seemed it was for personal gain, but it wasn't anything inherently bad. It seemed like vigilante stuff to be honest—some kind of antihero Robin-Hood-type action. He thought that somehow I might have connections that could help him acquire one.