Geralt had been a bit more chipper during their first night in Mesquite due to the events leading there. Unfortunately, this attitude faded quickly after he had completed his first show. It was just so droll, doing the same thing night after night with no reward but applause and the sweat of the masses. It was tiresome and boring, and The Magician had decided that he'd earned a night off.

Instead of going and asking for it, as he knew he was above such behavior, he had decided to take some liberties in the following night's show. Once the audience was seated, he'd performed the usual entrance feat, tickled the rube's eyeballs with a little fire show, then slowly began to hypnotize them until their brains had gone...mushy. It was nothing that would harm them, and in fact offered him a little practice at this particular trick, seeing as this was the most amount of people he had attempted to control at once. He simply put them into a more impressionable state and made their neurons fire without him actually having to [i]do[/i] much of anything and had been proud when he realized how successful he was. In fact, it allowed him some time to catch up on some reading he'd been doing, a lovely little erotic anthology called "Carmilla" about a one-sided relationship between a vampiress and her intended, a woman named Laura.

He had just been reading something particularly steamy when Lucien's voice snapped him out of it. It was strange, unlike him to be caught off guard in this way, but he had been concentrating nearly all of his power on maintaining the audience's trance, and the other small percentage of his attention was taken by the book. The Ringleader's voice was stern and loud enough to cause some alarm....The Magician had never heard him so riled up before.

[color=crimson]"Lucien,"[/color] he stated simply as he put the book down, keeping his other hand pointing in the direction of the humans he held in thrall. [color=crimson]"I wasn't expecting you."[/color] In fact, Lucien had not looked in on any of his shows since their second circuit, and he had thought that he'd earned the man's trust. Apparently, he'd been mistaken.