"Swear to Christ, Mask, if- fuck!" I said, flinching back to cover as a peal of rifle fire echoed through the street. "If you say anything like, 'I told you so,' even once, I'll strand you on Earth Zayin."

I turned back to find him glaring at me, eyes low-lidded behind his ornate ball mask. For the time being, he cut an imposing figure, all tall, trim and groomed in his unwrinkled tux, not a single slicked-back hair out of place. Even hunkered down as we were right now, backs up against the rusting corpse of a sedan, he somehow maintained the air of a prince, and anyone else might've been intimidated.

I rolled my eyes, knowing he couldn't see them behind my aviator goggles. He could probably tell anyways. "Sorry. Swear to Christ, Masquerade. How was I supposed to know there'd be scavengers in a nowhere town like this anyways?"

He smirked when I emphasized his cape name with jazz hands. His nod of thanks was as insincere as my show of respect, but his preening was genuine. "Given the track record of our other visits to Bet, I'm surprised that you're surprised."

I tried to peek again, poking my head out a half foot to the right this time. Another shot dented the metal right by my ear before I could see anything new and I dropped back down, swearing. "Yeah, well, this time it doesn't make sense! We're half as far as you can get from any portal, the natural resources 'round here amount to jack and shit, and the only things worth looting are the guns they're shooting us with. You can get guns anywhere. No way folks're already so desperate they need to go to Colorado for that."

"Maybe they're here for the scenery." When I snorted, he said, "No, really! What better place to retire to after the world ends than some quiet, cozy mountain town? A crisp breeze, an intimate view of Pike's Peak, no one to bother you-"

"'Cept us."

"-except us, right. All in all, prime settling down material, if not for us meddling kids. I might even suggest checking the gift shops for a souvenir."

He gestured to my jacket. It was more patch than denim, each faded iron-on marked with the name and sometimes symbol of a place worth going, or at least considered such enough to have a patch. I knew from experience which actually were and which weren't, or rather which had been and hadn't been. Even as one of the most intact places I'd seen on Bet so far, this one ranked in the latter category.

"I'll take a second opinion on that," I said. A stray bullet pierced one of the tires on the other side of the car, making the whole thing tilt. "What say we go grab Polar, see what he thinks?"

He nodded. "Have something in mind?"

"Maybe. Follow my lead." Still crouched, I turned around, raising my hands over my head nice and slow. "Hey, assholes," I shouted, "stop shooting already! We don't want your guns!"

For a moment, there was silence. Then a gruff voice shouted back, "Yeah, and I'm fuckin' Legend!"

I chanced a show of faith, rising inch by inch from cover. There was a familiar flash of warmth at my side, and the bits of ash that followed tickled my nose and almost made me sneeze before they dissipated into thin air. "I mean it! We don't want guns and we don't want trouble! We just need to grab a couple things you won't miss and we'll be on our way!"

Next to me, a shorter girl in a black midi dress mirrored my pose, her wavy auburn bob and feathered mask framing an innocent smile. Supposedly, this mask was supposed to evoke a crow and the other a raven, but I'd never been able to see a meaningful difference between the two. "It's true," Masquerade yelled, her voice a couple octaves higher than before. "We'll be in and out before you know it!"

I took the momentary ceasefire as an opportunity to straighten out, getting a better view of the police station across the street. Despite the hints of disrepair, it had the same happy plainness as the rest of the town, the kind all true North American tourist traps shared. Gentle red roof over manilla walls, inoffensive architecture, lots of wide, simple windows. It would've been inviting if it wasn't so boring, or if the winter overcast wasn't dulling its colors, or if three of the windows hadn't been cleared out and turned into vantage points. With the blinds half-closed, I couldn't gleam more about our attackers than their vague silhouettes, but if I unfocused my eyes I could get a good sense of the wall behind them, which was all I really needed.

After a quiet I assumed was filled with whispered debate on their end, the same voice replied, "Don't think so. Hightail it or- or eat lead!"

"Oh, good," Masquerade said under her breath, "this won't be too boring, then." She tilted her head at me and crooked an arm. "Shall we away, Miss Trip?"

I looped mine through hers. "Let's, Miss Mask."

She leveled another glare at me, much less intimidating in this form, but once I tipped us backwards on our heels, she abandoned it in order to steel herself. I ignored her and shoved my other hand into the pocket of my jacket.

In one moment, we were falling towards the pavement like dominoes.

In the next, we were stumbling away from a stretch of brick-and-mortar wall, upright and doing our best to counteract our momentum. I had an easier time of it; my power didn't make me an acrobat or anything, but it did smooth things over in the balance department. It also eliminated my capacity for motion sickness, which I've been assured was a boon from on high. Given how often my 'trips' forced an abrupt shift in gravity, I didn't doubt it.

Masquerade wasn't as lucky. She staggered over to one of the metal chairs on the café patio we'd arrived at, flopping against it like a blanket tossed onto the back of a sofa. She waved off the look of concern I wasn't giving her. "Oh, I'm fine! I'm fine. One second."

I turned to Polar, who was leaning his stocky frame against the edge of a table, the kind that had to be weighted at the bottom to keep the attached umbrella from catching the wind and riding it. He had his arms crossed over his chest, managing to make the position look comfortable despite his bandolier being in the way. He was probably a good deal warmer than I was, given the head-to-toe black body armor. His weighted gloves, each marked on the back with a bold red N and a blue S for the left and right respectively, had to be trapping heat better than my own beaten leather ones. Though his balaclava only revealed his flat hazel eyes, I'd worked with him long enough to know the rest of his expression underneath reflected the same sedate calm.

"No surprises here," he said. He tipped his head in the general direction of the police station, which was a few blocks away now. "The gunshots?"

I'd already known things had been quiet where I'd left him to play lookout. We had a system for it: two ball bearings, each given opposite 'charges' from his power, pinched the fabric of my jacket's sleeve between them, right by my inner wrist. If he'd needed to signal Masquerade and me, or if he'd been forced to move outside the considerable range of his power, they would have lost the charges that attracted them to each other and fallen from my sleeve.

I dragged the bearings off my sleeve and handed the now conjoined pair back to him. "Scavengers in the station, three or four. Not the friendly type. No capes, far as we could tell, so the usual should do fine."

He nodded. The bearings went back into one of the hip pouches he kept them in. He then retrieved a flashbang from his bandolier and handed it to me.

I held it tight in one hand and faced the wall again, backing up a good few yards. My other hand ran through my short hair, disturbing its styled muss as I mapped out the next few steps. Polar and Masquerade both rose while I prepared myself, coming to stand on either side of me, each at the ready. I thumbed the pin of the grenade.

Without a word, I broke into a dead sprint and leapt at the wall.

A few things happened in quick succession. I tripped through the bricks and emerged from the wall I'd seen inside the police station, still in the air from my jump. I had a fraction of a second to get a sense of the space and gauge the positions of the men inside before lobbing the flashbang, sans pin, towards the portion of the room least cluttered by desks. The one woman who wasn't watching the windows turned and saw me then, but I was already on my way out, letting momentum and gravity tilt me forward and carry me to the ground. When I reached the tile I tripped again, shooting like a cannonball back into the patio area. Polar caught me before I could skid the soles off my running shoes and set me on my feet.

Taking up my position between the two again, I said, "Four, three by windows, one off to the right of the others. Didn't see them wearing anything tough, but I'll eat my gloves if they're not rocking vests under their coats." With an arm around Masquerade's slim waist and another on Polar's back, I barked a steady, "Three! Two! One! GO!" We rushed forward in long-practiced synchronization, each mindful not to outpace the others, and I brought us through the wall.

Our exit point was a different wall in the station, left of the windows, next to the biggest desk congregation as well as the first gunman. His position meant he'd shrug off the disorienting blast first, and he might have gotten to, were it not for Polar. He gripped the guy's ratty jacket and tore it open, sending buttons flying and revealing the tactical vest marked "POLICE" underneath. He tapped the vest with his left hand, no doubt giving it a charge, and gave the glove on his right hand the opposite charge. As a result, his open palm, where the bulk of the glove's weights were, slammed into the man's chest with brutal, instantaneous force. He must have released one or both charges on impact because, instead of staying stuck to Polar's hand, the man fell back onto the ground, winded and stunned.

He landed at the boots of the next panicked scavenger, alerting him to our presence. This one was squinting some and had a bit of tilt in his step as he turned to face us, but he was coherent enough to get a couple lucky shots in, if given the chance.

Masquerade did not give him that chance. She shifted, burning away her Crow form in a burst of heat and ash and emerging from it as a toned, maskless runner in 80's-style green track shorts and tube socks. She sprinted up to him, reared an arm, then shifted again, becoming a huge, burly bouncer worthy of the haymaker he threw to the man's temple. That staggered him without straight-up dropping him, but the distinction became moot when Masquerade grabbed him by the back of his coat, pulled him off his feet, swung him like a battering ram and flung him into the next poor sap, knocking both into a shelving unit in the far corner.

"STEEE-RIKE!" Masquerade yelled, giving an emphatic fist-pump.

Unfortunately, his showboating was loud enough to draw the attention of the last scavenger still standing, the one who'd noticed me first. She'd also been closest to the blast, so she was significantly off-balance, but she found it in her to draw a pistol and raise it in Masquerade's general direction.

Fortunately, I was already in motion, having hopped off the seat of an office chair in order to get higher off the ground. That gave gravity the distance it needed to get me falling faster than my power's threshold required and I tripped from floor to wall, awkwardly drop-kicking her in the ribs. She yelped in surprise and lost her grip on her pistol, and the two of us fell to the tile as it clattered a few feet away. I recovered first and kicked it further, then crouched over her prone form to check for any other weapons while she writhed and groaned in pain. I didn't find any, but what I did find sent a fresh ripple of tension up my spine.

I swore under my breath. "Guys, we just earned ourselves a time limit." I unclipped a medallion from the carabiner on the belt loop of her jeans and held it up for my teammates to see. It was a crude thing, cast in recycled aluminum, hung from a loop of frayed leather, meant to represent the north star framed by a compass.

Masquerade looked up from the downed man whose hands he was ziptying and frowned. "Ah, hell," he said, his voice a scratchy, slurred rumble in this form. "These knuckleheads just hadda be Reclaimers, huh?" He accepted another ziptie from Polar and knelt by the woman I was keeping down. "Anyone wanna guess which settlement they's from?"

Polar, who was pinning the restrained to the floor by giving their vests and the tile opposite charges, piped up. "They're a scouting party, not a scavenging detail." He nodded his head towards an open bag of measuring instruments on one of the desks, the sort that had rods you stuck in the ground or water or what have you and gave a number value to how awful things had gotten. They were necessities for the groups still trying to resettle on Bet; chemical runoff from inert factories and processing plants had made many of the remaining cities and towns incapable of sustaining life.

In retrospect, it made sense that this place was so thoroughly deserted. There were few marks of true industry in the town itself, but those further down the slope had had breweries, meat-packing plants and the like, and most places past that had put large amounts of money into manufacturing. Thus, while the immediate area was itself livable, the only population centers accessible through the mountains were not, meaning there was no good way to bring in what would be needed to kick-start a self-sustaining township, nor good reason to. Of course, the Reclaimers, who had their own means of supply and nebulous ideological motivations, would see only opportunity.

"So we have no way of knowing which cape is in charge of them until they come to check out the gunshots and find us standing over their wiped normals. Great." I groaned, echoing the woman under me. "At least we know they're not a mover, if they're not here yet."

Masquerade finished securing the tie and rose, shifting into Raven form. "Who knows? Perhaps this time they'll be willing to hear us out."

I blew a raspberry at him. He smiled.

Polar came over and touched the woman's vest through a small tear in the back of her coat and she jerked, her torso dropping flush against the floor with a pained, pitiful whimper. "We shouldn't waste time," he said, heading into a connecting hallway, checking out rooms as he passed them.

I stood and followed, and Masquerade fell into stride beside me. "Polar Bear's right. Let's get what we came for."

"Mm." He peeked behind us a moment, then said, a pinch quieter, "Wouldn't want to keep the boss waiting," Masquerade said.

I scoffed, but matched his tone. "Like she would care, long as we get the file. We could be gone for a week and she wouldn't mind."

"Speak for yourself. My winning personality would be sorely missed if I were gone for even an day."

I gave him a light smack upside the head.

"Rude," he said, still smiling.

Polar paused by an open door near the end of the L-shaped hallway before nodding and entering. I felt cramped just looking in; it seemed to have more file cabinets than open floor space, stacked almost to the low ceiling. The lack of both windows and power for the fluorescents meant it was lit only by what it borrowed from the small windows in the hall. To remedy this, Polar pulled a couple small flashlights from one of his vest's many pouches and handed one to Masquerade. He clicked his own on, pulled a drawer open, and started rifling through files. Masquerade took a moment to shift into some cartoonish impression of a cat burglar, complete with skullcap and black-and-white striped shirt, before starting on a different cabinet, flashlight held in her mouth.

I stayed where I was outside the doorway, arms folded, loosely equidistant from either wall so I could take a clean fall at most angles if I needed to. There was no way of telling how far away this group's shepherding parahuman was or how long it'd take them to get back, but they couldn't have been too far, and as getaway driver and default shotcaller both I was more effective standing at the ready than joining the search. Plus, any excuse to slack off was a-ok in my book, and a justified one best of all.

The minutes passed like syrup through a strainer. I tapped my foot. I rolled my neck. I ground my teeth. None of it helped much. Having to stand still so long was hard enough on its own, and doing so while playing watchdog for a cape with unknown powers had me downright agitated.

Despite my faith in our boss' information, I mouthed a quick half-serious prayer that the file we were looking for was actually here - there were few things that irked me more than finding out I'd gone dancing through minefields for nothing. She hadn't steered us wrong yet, but this all felt like a serious longshot. There were, according to her source, a lot of high likelihoods involved, a handful of near-certainties, but when it came down to it, we didn't have absolutes on anything: we couldn't be sure the incident in question had been reported, or if it had happened in this specific town, or if it'd even happened in the first place. If all of the above were true, then by the regulations put in place after the first Simurgh attack there should be multiple paper copies of the report, but even then that didn't mean they hadn't been disappeared after the fact. I'd lived in the shadow of the Elite long enough to know that.

"Mm?" Masquerade hummed around her flashlight, turning towards the both of us as she scoured the file in her hands. "Mm! Mmm-hm!" She relocated the light to her free hand and grinned. "Well 'ere's a spot of luck! Overdue, consid'ring the excitement, but-"

I interrupted. "That fit the details?"

She swayed the light around like a jaunty conductor as she listed them off. "Summer twenny-eleven, body goes missing from th' local morgue, nothing broke, nothing else gone 'cept a keyboard an' half the coffee machine's parts, an' the one guy working that night writes a note 'bout some arse-naked Case 53 did it before he disappears too- sounds all there t'me."

I sighed my relief. "Finally. Alright, let's bounce before that cape gets back."

I'd only just reached the room's threshold when a layer of pale, glassy red spread out in front of me, filling the doorway. Without room enough to react I bumped into it face-first, briefly stunned and unbalanced. On instinct I leaned into the momentum of my rebound, meaning to fall backwards to the floor, but just before achieving horizontality I was intercepted, slamming back-first into something much more solid and much less trip-through-able than I'd hoped for.

My yelp of surprise and pain only just escaped my throat before the new surface vanished out from under me, and another few inches' fall found me properly grounded, except now I didn't have the speed I needed to trip. Another plane of red smeared into existence inches above me in a diagonal strip a foot wider than my shoulders, attached on one end to the wall by the door's left and on the other end to the opposite wall. Two thinner vertical strips on either side of my middle connected floor to ceiling, not quite intersecting the first, and a smile crept across my face.

I recognized those forcefields.

My head lolled towards the bend in the hall in time to see a pair of combat boots I didn't recognize approach with stamping stride. The snow-camouflaged fatigues tucked into them were also unfamiliar, as was the long, open grey utility coat that covered the ensemble. All that was a far sight from the firetruck-red bodysuit with white accents I'd been expecting. The domino mask and shield were the only elements of the old getup left, though the shield, once sturdy tinkertech designed to look like a stop sign, seemed to have been replaced with an actual stop sign, ripped from post and bound to forearm, dented and scratched in places. There was even an offensive weapon to compliment it now - a metal bat gripped tight in the other hand, even more dented, but still a much-needed addition.

Despite all the changes, I knew the face atop it all too well to doubt: dark skin, close-cut hair, ever-furrowed brow, and a handsome boyishness that, apparently, not even the apocalypse could harden. The scowl twisting his lips did its damndest to pick up the slack, but it only accentuated his anodyne tenor by contrast. It deepened when I gave him a shrill wolf-whistle, doubling the effect.

"London, Kelly? Eat your fucking hearts out," I said, cheeks split despite my predicament. "Not even two years after the world ends and here you are, rocking some fresh end-of-the-world chic like there's still runways to walk. Mask, are you seeing this?"

From behind the translucent pane blocking off the file room, Masquerade made a frame with her fingers and held it in front of her face, shifting angles like a professional photographer, tongue poking out the corner of her mouth. She gave him an approving nod and kissed her fingers like an Italian chef. I couldn't see where Polar was.

"Anyways, hey! Blockade! You're alive! Too! Me too. Too." I shook my head. "And you're a Reclaimer now! That's great stuff, really. Are you in it for all the fun rules and responsibility, or are you more one of the weird religious types? I feel like you could go either way."

Blockade scowled down at me, though the red tint and slight refraction through his forcefield made it look funny. Funnier. "I should have guessed it was you, Trip." he bit out. "In retrospect, six seasons without getting screwed over by your nonsense was too much to expect."

"Whoa there, boy scout! That was almost an actual swear!" He tried to cut in but I held up my hands in appeasement. "Sorry, sorry. Eagle scout. But we're not here to do any screwing. Your normals just got eager, played a little rough, so we played too. We just needed a couple pieces of paper, which we've got, and we're out of here. Cross my heart."

He looked over to Masquerade, who was holding up the file with one hand and tracing an 'x' over her shirt's stripes. She could clearly hear me, so she knew his forcefields didn't block sound, but she seemed content with the opportunity to play mime anyways.

He looked back at me. "Do you think I'm still the same gullible kid I was in San Francisco? That I'm still some bright-eyed Ward you can mess with whenever you feel like it?"

Of course I did.

"Well, you're- I'm not! I know you know what you're doing. You know you just made me fail my first trial, and that there's nothing I can do about it."

I cocked a brow. "What, 'cause the other scouts got some bruises and bumps?"

"Because they got taken down by hostiles under my watch!" His arms rose with his frustration. "And now I'm going to get rejected for a leadership position and go back to the bottom of the candidates list! It took me long enough to get to this the first time, and it'll take even longer to get there again, and I'll still have this stain on my performance record, forever, and it's all. Because. Of you." He ground the words out through his teeth.

"Well, you got here on-"

In an unprecedented move on his part, he interrupted me. "But I do get one thing out of this. I got you." He loomed over me, satisfaction dancing in his dark eyes. "After years of making me look like a chump and getting away every time, I've finally, actually caught you. I'm willing to bet you've made a lot of trouble for a lot of people lately." I had. "I'm also willing to bet the Wardens want you somewhere you can't blink out of." Not badly. "So what's going to happen is, I'm going to contact some old friends, they'll come pick you and your new friend up, and justice, however delayed, will be served."

"Listen," I said, making a deliberate effort not to peek towards the records room, "That sounds, like, super fun and all, and I'd love to hang with you and your old scout leaders sometime, but it's almost five and Mom wants me home by dinner, so…"

"Oh yeah?" He gave what I think he thought was a smug smirk. "And just how are you slipping away from this one?"

I showed his sorry excuse for a smirk how it was done. "Like this."

A silent moment passed and neither of us dropped our smirks or eye contact. I almost started to worry until a resounding thump shook the walls. Blockade snapped his head toward the sound like a bloodhound, and I tensed beneath my widening grin, ready to move.

Nothing happened.

A low, muffled sigh came from somewhere in the shadows of the room. Blockade slowly looked back at me, straining to keep his un-smirk from slipping into an uncertain, stress-tightened grimace (not that it'd had far to go to begin with). I gave him a conceding shrug and rolled a hand as best I could while pinned, making a 'wait for it' gesture.

A horrible, weighty clang came next, metal shrieking and groaning against metal in a visceral cacophony, making us both cringe and cover our ears. A breath's reprieve, and then the walls thundered and shook again. Through the open door to the room adjacent to the file room, I saw a clumpy hunk of shiny grey burst through the wall, trailing folders and papers and bits of drywall and making firewood of the conference table it crashed into. It took my brain a second to make sense of the jagged intruder - it was a pair of file cabinets, crumpled and mashed together like two empty soda cans in love.

Polar stepped through the hole in the wall, moving with the sort of battlefield calm that can't be faked. He rounded on Blockade, pulled a handful of ball bearings from a hip pouch and, with all the efficiency of a wild west duelist and none of the panache, splayed his hand palm-forward, gave his glove and the bearings the same charge, and sent them flying in Blockade's direction like hip-fired buckshot.

Blockade reacted just fast enough to count. A foot-wide forcefield from floor to ceiling blocked most of the bearings without faltering and his raised shield deflected the two that went wide, earning a couple new dents. The field disappeared and reappeared, shifted to one side to block the next shot from Polar's other hip. This time, though, one or two bearings got him in the bicep of his shield arm and he let out a pained, "Ah! God, fu- crap! Crap on wheels! Cripes!"

Despite myself, I winced with sympathy. I'd never been on the other end of Polar's projectiles, but I'd seen the bruises they left on others, and while they didn't move as fast as bullets their weight gave them some wicked punch. For all my teasing and his grumpiness, I wasn't keen on hurting Blockade beyond a little hand-to-hand or (ha!) tripping him up. I'd poked fun at him and pissed him off when we were both new to the scene, sure, but more than anything I'd seen him as a great way to practice using my power. He got to try and catch one of San Fran's only independent villains and I would have to find clever workarounds on the fly for a power that should've been a direct counter to mine. I learned how to keep people on their toes, and he...

Well, he learned how to fall, at least. That's important.

Regardless, we weren't getting out of here without someone getting a little hurt, and if it had to be someone, we'd make it him.

He used another forcefield to block the other doorway, but the pain in his arm must have been distracting him, because that surpassed his limit of five active barriers, and the one that I'd run into first made a simultaneous exit, dissipating into the air. An actual, factual knight in shining armor charged out from the file room into the hall, helm closed, suit silvery with elaborate, twining details around the borders of the pieces, bearing a kite shield and a sword. They rushed Blockade too fast for him to pull up a forcefield between them and brought their sword down on his stop sign with a clang and a rousing, "Ha-HA!" Blockade responded in kind with a high swing of his bat but Masquerade brought their own shield up to meet it.

While the two of them clashed, Masquerade pressuring Blockade further away from me with each move, Polar stepped through the hole between rooms and knelt by my side. His eyes darted to the others once or twice, probably to make sure Masquerade was still impeding Blockade's line of sight on us, but otherwise he was looking at me, awaiting my word.

I gestured for him to draw closer before whispering his instructions.

He nodded, then got into position. He squatted over my legs, almost straddling the forcefield above me, and, leaning forward and through the gap between the two vertical ones keeping me from rolling to either side, locked his forearms with mine. They were tensed, like mine, but steady.

I tilted my head towards the fight and shouted, "Mask! H-n-R!"

Just as I gave the call, Masquerade shifted, their motions morphing from a knight's stoic obstinance into something new, graceful and feather-light to fit the ballet dancer she'd become. She flowed under Blockade's swing like water, infiltrated his guard in two steps, shifted, and buried a bouncer-sized fist in his solar plexus.

The blow knocked him clean off his feet and put the first tangible distance between the two. His bat clattered on the ground next to him. In a commendable show of quick instincts, a forcefield appeared between them just as he was able to suck in a breath again, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling and tilted a bit, like a clear red roof over his downed form.

At the same time, the field above me disappeared, and without hesitation Polar yanked me up, through the gap in the other two and to my feet. He followed through on the movement by pivoting so he and I were side by side, his arm over my shoulders and mine at his back, then pulled us both forward in a domino-fall through the file room doorway.

We tripped out of a wall just next to a cloud of dissipating ash. I reached out with my free arm to snag a slim waist from within as momentum carried us forward, then dragged my teammates down to the floor for one last trip. The last thing I heard before we reached the tile was a wheezing sound in the general shape of a curse, and I had just enough time to wish I could stick around to see if he'd actually swear once he could speak again.

The next moment, the three of us tumbled into the middle of what we called the Landing Room, whose floor was layered thick with gymnastics mats and foam mattresses and cushions and pillows. We rolled a good few feet before coming to a stop, tangled and smothered in a pile of disturbed pillows and each others' limbs. By longstanding unspoken agreement, we allowed ourselves a minute of rest without worrying about detangling or talking, filling the space with heavy breathing and the occasional low moan of discomfort or nausea.

A thought occurred to me, and I ended up being the first to break the moment, lifting my head. "Uhh, you did bring the file, right?"

From somewhere within our conglomerate of bodies and cushions a slender hand protruded, clutching an unharmed manilla folder and waving it a little.

"Cool, cool." My head flopped back into something soft and I drained my lingering nerves through a long exhale. "Cool."

Θ

"He wants a very nice, deserted house…"

The old, hunched troll of a man, looking more like a garden gnome gone mad than a real estate mogul, raised a bumpy finger with dramatic languor, directing his subordinate's gaze. The next shot revealed the row of tall, ugly buildings he'd pointed out, each looking like they were about to topple to one side and take half the block with them.

"That house… opposite yours. Just offer him that one!"

This time there was only a very brief shot between the dialogue cards. It was a tad distracting for it, the way a flickering bulb in a dark basement is; it illuminated the living room for a second, the black and white image reflected blurry on the hardwood floor, the vertical blinds that blocked the dizzying view of New Brockton given glow, the marbletop kitchen island visible on the peripheral level. Then it went dark again, and it was just us, the dialogue card's gothic font, and the overbearing pipe organ chords this recording had been set to.

"Travel quickly, travel well, young friend, to the country of ghosts."

Val splayed her hands with unnecessary gravitas and mouthed the words like she was performing them in the silent characters' stead, eyes glued to the screen and legs draped over mine. She'd not bothered to shift out of Crow form, instead opting to simply remove her mask and flats with her power and go right from Landing Room to couch. I couldn't say much myself, though, seeing as I'd only shed my goggles, gloves, jacket and shoes and plopped down right next to her still wearing my costume's tank top and kevlar leggings. It felt like too much work to get up and change right now, so I didn't.

Lucas occupied his usual recliner, draped in loose sweats, crunching his way through a bag of those roasted corn kernel snacks he loved so much. It was a wonder he didn't lose any in the bushy, half-tamed thing he called a beard. As soon as he'd found out we were watching a silent film, he'd disappeared down the hall that led to our rooms, our boss' room, the bathrooms and the study and come back wearing his bulky over-ear headphones. He was probably paying more attention to his music than the movie, but I couldn't blame him.

After too many minutes of not enough happening, I groaned. "Ugh, this is so boring. And so cheesy. And so fucking boringly cheesy."

Val kicked one of my shins, ignored my "Hey!" of protest, and said, "If you're so eager to break our agreement, why'd you agree to it in the first place, hmm?"

I frowned. That 'agreement', that I'd stop whinging about everything Val picked if she'd stop shifting into approximations of the characters she liked most and saying their lines with them, was one of the only reasons we'd managed to keep watching movies together without strangling each other. I still felt like the terms were unfair, though. "Listen, I'm not whining, I'm just saying. You said this was a horror flick but we're like, ten minutes in and it's been all bland weirdos doing bland business and having bland marriage issues, except someone says something dumb and cryptic out of the blue sometimes. That's it."

She sighed. "I swear, Shannon, I'll teach you some patience if I have to gag you and tie you to a chair."

"Is that a threat or a promise?"

She didn't even dignify me with a glare. "This is as classic as classic horror gets! This film is the grandfather of all other vampire films. It invented one of the most important shots in horror there is. You can't appreciate the derivatives properly unless you know where their roots were planted."

I rolled my eyes. "Whatever. I'll stick it out, but I've still got next choice."

The movie did start getting more interesting by the time the protagonist started causing a commotion in what I thought might have been a pub, but around then I began to feel an odd discomfort where my jaw met my neck. I tried to push the feeling aside, but it persisted, so I went to scratch at it. My fingers caught on a thin string of elastic and I hesitated. Following the string up the side of my head led me to a pointed paper shape in my hair, tilted a touch to one side.

"Hey Val, is-"

When I looked over, I found Val was now similarly adorned, perfect auburn locks topped with a cheap, colorful party hat. "Hmm? What's…" When she opened her mouth to reply, the party blower that'd appeared between her lips fell out, and she looked down at where it landed on her collarbone as her mind caught up with her eyes. "...eh?"

I turned to ask Lucas and saw that he had two party hats of his own, each strapped to the outside of his headphones where they covered his ears. He looked like an old-school TV robot and seemed as unperturbed as ever.

I blinked. "What the fu-"

"SURPRISE!"

Between the shout, the lights switching on, and the party popper that blasted confetti into my face, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Our boss was suddenly standing right in front of us, posing under a banner that'd been edited in multicolor marker letters and extended with printer paper:

"Happy B̶i̶r̶t̶h̶d̶a̶y̶ You're Almost Undersiders!"

With enthusiastic jazz hands and a toothy grin, Aisha scanned our reactions. Her grin faded and her hands fell to her side as she took in my exasperation, Val's near-contemptuous disbelief, and Lucas' disaffected stare.

"Well shit, don't strain yourselves getting excited or anything. Sheesh."