Tide Mice

The Tide Mice are a type of magical creatures summoned by witches for people to grant them good luck, but eventually take their souls and give it to the witch. They play a key role in "Chapter 8: The Tide Mice". They do not appear in the graphic novels, but were created specifically for the animated series.

Appearance
Tide Mice are often seen as small, oval-shaped brown mice with pink striped tails with strange traits such as bright, round eyes and red fur designs. They are usually invisible to everybody except the enchanter that summoned them, unless the enchanter uses the ritual to break the enchantment.

Different tide mice have different looks and traits, depending on the person they are summoned for and what exactly they have to help that person with.

Their excrete tiny gold nuggets, which dissolve after a while.

David's Tide Mouse
The tide mouse that Hilda gave David is oval-shaped and brown. It also has white glowing eyes that have a purple outline. It has circular brown ears, and a long pink striped tail.

David's tide mouse also has a high-pitched singing voice, that it produced a few times after being summoned. This is possibly because it was summoned to help David with his singing.

Johanna's Tide Mouse
The tide mouse that Hilda gave her mother is oval-shaped and brown. It also has white, glowing eyes that have a yellow outline. It has circular brown ears, and a long pink striped tail. In contrast to David's tide mouse, Johanna's tide mouse was silent, and had it's entire lower body decorated in red markings, identical to those on the drawing Hilda used to summon it. This was since Hilda wanted this tide mouse to help her mom get a new graphic design job.

Behaviour and Summoning
Tide Mice are mostly harmless in their behaviour, until they begin to prepare their victim's soul for extraction.

To summon a Tide Mouse, the enchanter must first gather a little hair from the person the mouse is meant for, and make a small net out of it.

Next, they must put a personal object from this person, that symbolizes the expertise the tide mouse should enhance, in this net. For David, Hilda used his whistle, and for Johanna, she used a drawing.

Next, the item and the net are left by the edge of a tide pool, and the enchanter performing the spell chants out these words with vigor:

Huxar fi constuffia

Huxar hasla hagot schluvina

During the enchantment, the sky will temporarily turn cloudy.

After that, the enchanter leaves the item and the hair net until the light of dawn. Then, they run to check it the next morning, and they come across a soggy clump of hair swimming around in the tide pool. He or she will then pick it up, revealing the tide mouse.

Finally, the tide mouse is delivered to the person they were summoned for.

The tide mice will be able to give the person it is attached to good luck in the beforehand selected expertise (singing for David, graphic design for Johanna) for a while. They often rest in different places on the person itself, such as in their hair, in their pockets, or even in their shirts.

However, because of the power of the enchantment, the tide mouse will not be visible to anyone but the enchanter him or herself.

Tide Mice thrive in an environment that is rich in greed, like a big company. When introduced in such an environment, they can multiply rapidly.

Tide Mice can be summoned by humans with no magical experience. This makes the summoning enchantment especially dangerous, as novice enchanters are especially unlikely to appreciate the risk.

Cons and Breaking the Enchantment
Although it may seem like tide mice are actually nice, harmless creatures, tide mice can actually steal the souls of the victims and forfeit them to the enchanter. Side effects can occur as well, including To break the enchantment, the enchanted tide mouse must be returned by the end of a thirty day trial period. To do this, the witch or wizard must first say this chant out loud with vigor, which only works at moonrise:
 * Blanked-out eyes.
 * Occasional growling.
 * Slime drool spilling out of the victim's mouth.
 * A fine mist rising out of the victim's scalp.

Rot cavoya nin feultay

After the chant is said, the disenchantment begins. This disenchantment, however, must be completed within an hour in order to take effect. The tide mice will leave their hosts and become visible to everybody. They must be caught and returned to the tide pool they were originally summoned from. There, the enchanter must place them in the water, and the victims must say this chant twice:

Lo fesi jalvali

After saying the chant twice, a bright beam will emerge from the tide pool, the enchanter's, and the victims' eyes, transferring the soul back to the victims.

Finally, the enchanter must not forget to feed the tide mice a small piece of bread in order for the enchanter and the victims to be left in peace. This final step is tricky, since forgetting about it for even a little while will disrupt the disenchantement. When Hilda, Johanna and David performed the disenchantment ritual at the end of "Chapter 8: The Tide Mice", Hilda eventually gave the Tide Mice their bread, but by that point she had already forgotten it long enough for the Mice to follow her home, and cause more trouble in "Chapter 11: The Jorts Incident".

Tide Mice that are not properly banished can bound with a new host and continue their work to extract a soul for the person that summoned them. In that case, an additional banishment ritual is required. Once Tide Mice are banished for good, they leave behind the hair and object that where originally used to summon them.

Species' Members

 * David's Tide Mouse.
 * Johanna's Tide Mouse.

Appearances

 * "Chapter 8: The Tide Mice" (debut)
 * "Chapter 9: The Ghost" (cameo)
 * "Chapter 13: The Black Hound" (cameo)
 * "Chapter 11: The Jorts Incident" (second major role)

Trivia

 * According to "Hilda's Book of Beasts and Spirits", regular, non-enchanted Tide Mice also exist. These water-dwelling rodents can be found in tide pools along Trolberg's coastline, but are rather unremarkable.