so sickly sweet it burns

Some days later - Dominique isn’t sure how long has passed, or if it is even days, or weeks, or hours - she found herself sitting at the bar of her apartment, mess cleaned up and old gears on. She grimaced, a rare look on her near-constantly smiling face. But she had a job to do, messes to clean.

The weight of her past and future weighed down on her, and she knew if she wanted to have any chance of living her life outside of bars, she had to “find” the killer. Slowly, a smile grew on her face as she twirled a pen around her finger. Her cursed goop finger. But well, she’d failed. She’d had her moment of loveliness. She thought of administering the serum for the rest of her life, but…

That would probably kill her. And Dominique wanted to live a bit longer, if only to make a living hell out of some people’s lives.

It took a bit of searching, but Dominique found her suspect soon enough: someone she had been planning on using as a test subject, in fact. The human had pink goop a similar shade to her own - something that would match up with the goop found at one of her crime scenes. All that was left was a bit of hypnosis, and her plan would be complete.

. . .

“Case closed!” Azrael declared relief in his tone. His announcement was met by cheers of the surrounding knights that had worked on the case with him. “It’s taken nearly two years of this cat and mouse chase, and in the end they just end up turning themselves in. Who would’ve imagined?”

They were behind bars, now. They had just walked into the station and admitted to the crimes, and under further testing, it had been decided they had not been coerced into anything: they truly believed what they were saying. The detail they gave them, too, on how the murders were administered was… frightening. And the entire time - they looked so happy about it. A little smile in the corner of their mouth. A crazy rogue it was, then.

That’s what Azrael told his officers as he eyed their anonymous tip, Dominique Bobezac, sitting in the corner. He smiled.

“The Warp Gate is reopened, the public put at ease. All’s well and end's well, folks!”

. . . 

Walking out of the meeting with a victorious smile on her face, Dominique cracked her goopy knuckles with a sweet smile, thinking of all her polite thanks to the officers in the department. They really had no idea! She truly was brilliant, wasn’t she?

Ordering a sweet from a local stand, Dominique hurried down the street, eager to get to the Warp Gate and leave this town. She wasn’t quite that arrogant: only the Great Dragon, or the humans’ God knew just how long her hypnosis would last past the first couple years. It acted quite similar to her gears: a ring nailed into their ring finger, hypnosis magic ingrained so deeply that they were simultaneously having the best day of their life and confessing to multiple murders in frightening detail every hour. It was some of her best magic work yet, Dominique thought. Regardless, she wasn’t ready to take that risk of staying.

Smiling, Dominique skipped up the steps to the Warp Gate, and then stopped at the third step. Slowly, she ascended the last step, leaning forward to examine the marvel it was: the glorious, shifting blue currents that made up the fabric of the universe-portal. Squinting, she leaned forward more: there was something…

She placed a goopy paw against the portal to initialize the warp, and everything went gray.