Life at the antique shop mostly boiled down to two things: selling and repairing. Today was a repair day. The job? A charming little gold music box with a ballerina which kept on spinning.

The owner had rushed in yesterday, panicked—though, to be fair, people often formed odd emotional attachments to these things. He practically begged you to fix it. So, you said you would.

It wasn’t going well.

For one, the ballerina refused to stay still. She twitched and jittered like she had somewhere to be. And the music—oh, the music—was relentless. Screeching, warped, and constantly playing. It had long passed eerie and landed firmly in the realm of maddening. You could still hear it from upstairs while trying to sleep. Now you were running on thirty minutes of rest, a granola bar, and spite.

And so, naturally, you grabbed a wrench and decided brute force might jog something loose. That’s when the music box coughed.

You barely had time to blink before a figure burst out, knocking you clean off your feet and into the wall.

"Fu—Oh jeez, that hurt." The stranger groaned, clutching his chest. “Really? A wrench?”

You stared. A person had just emerged from the music box. Scratch that. Not just a person—a demon. Black horns, grey-tinted skin, and a very irritated expression.

“Sorry, sorry—where are my manners?” he said, voice chipper as he extended a hand to help you up, smiling like this was completely normal.

“I’m Devon. Devon Law. And you, my accidental savior, have just released the demon who’s been trapped in that gaudy little prison for, oh, about two hundred years!”