Chapter Text
A familiar pair of hands plucks his spellbook from his hands and sets about making his notes legible to people who did not go to the Tev, such as Demodus' boss.
Which is strange, because last Dem heard, Occtis Tachonis was dead.
Hm.
Dem rifles through Occtis' coat, snagging their spellbook in return and flips through it until he finds identify.
He spends ten minutes ritually casting it, because it's not as if Occ's going to be finished with Dem's notes by then, and he silently doodles a Fig in the corner of the page, curled up next to Occtis' doodle of Pin while he waits for the circle to gather enough arcane energy.
Sure enough, they haven't even noticed that Dem's been attempting to figure out who's in front of him for the past ten minutes.
He gets.... Hm. A Wakers Ward is affecting this person who may be Occtis. Because that's not awfully suspicious.
But there's... something else, too. He can't feel out the shape of it, not quite.
He wrinkles his nose as he uses up a bit of his arcane reserves for the day to throw out a detect magic.
No wizard enjoys using up their reserves on a spell that they could spend a perfectly serviceable ten minutes on instead, and the court mage of Timmony is no exception.
And while a wizard arrives precisely when they mean to, the same, alas, cannot be said for the rest of the world.
By the time detect magic would be finished, he'd have to recast his identify, and then he'd be half an hour down and no closer to understanding who or what is in front of him.
So, slightly grumpily, he throws out a detect magic, easily ignoring the multitude of knicknacks in his cool new office that Gus assured him was all for him to use, and focuses his attention on Occtis.
And it is Occtis.
While the Wakers Ward is designed to hide the fact that Occ themself is undead, it clearly doesn't quite know what to do about the magic stitching them together.
There's some horribly mangled arcane working, with the non-signiture of necromantic energy hidden by the Wakers Ward. Except that it tastes like it should have been celestial. Which is a sentence Demodus Blix has never once expected to utter. Celestial isn't a school of magic, after all. A type of magic, sure, but not a school.
Detect magic shouldn't even really be able to pick up on it!
Let's see... The Wakers Ward at their hip; the invisible but looming spectre of Julien Davinos behind Demodus; his spellbook in their hands, their spellbook in his hands; the familiar ring of a nail on glass in the back of his mind that Dem hadn't quite noticed until just now, which is awfully rude of you Mister B, but alright then; and, oh yes, the disguise self in the shape of Occtis' face, and behind that, an artifact with so many schools of magic it was animated by that it's sort of giving Dem a headache.
He focuses his identify on the artifact that the disguise self is hiding, and sure enough, that's Mister B alright.
The ringing glass in the back of his mind manages to sound faintly incredulous.
What? He's seen weirder. Just yesterday he had a chat with a talking bird, which was weird, because he was pretty sure that the Hounds are all, y'know, hounds.