"Hey Red. The leaves are turning." Dylan pokes his face in the next morning, the slightest, most mischievous smile across his face. I catch from the undulation of his eyebrows (cut it out, Dylan) that he's already seeking a singular response.

I hold my hands up to my face, sighing, "Oh no." I was stupid enough to think that this might be the year the time-honored tradition would end, but we've hardly had enough years to establish traditions, let alone do away with them. As such, already several of the members of our paltry party are clustered around the door, grinning spitefully and clutching newly fallen leaves. Angel, Adaline and Trace, Alex, Damien, and even an unamused Gillian are at the entry to my hideaway from last night, which was the woven space created by a bush we 'hollowed' a little. Now, it is my tiny prison, and my attackers stand on all sides. Brushing them out of the way as I exit, I proclaim, "You all are ridiculous."

"The trees are dying!" teases Trace.

"I didn't know they were supposed to do that." I mutter under my breath, adjusting my tilted glasses. "You don't have to bring it up again and again until the end of time."

"That's going to be a while," Kali says. She holds a decidedly not red leaf in her hand, and I am confident that she personally plucked it from the branch. "We might as well get some jabs in while we're here."

"Oh! Oh! Speaking of the trees and some jabs... does anyone remember when Gillian first went into her Veritas and wouldn't turn back? There were like, like..." Mary, who has been outside, pauses, counting on her fingers, and then giving up with a flippant wave of her hands, "She knocked over half the forest! The trees went everywhere. I thought she was going to kill someone just by breathing on them."

Do I ever. The first Veritas transformations for most of the group were such debacles that they are forever stained into my memory, along with the twenty-odd times said first transformation ended in irreparable property damage that would lead to suspicion, death of the transformer, death of several other members of the party, or that one time Alex overloaded a power grid. I put my hand to my face again, about to run it through my hair out of recurrent stress, and Dylan smiles, removing it.

"I didn't realize you were aware of your own mortality," Gillian says to Mary, with a cold sideways glance.

Mary laughs. "What? No, I meant that you could have killed Damien."

Damien laughs, too, uneasily. "Next story, maybe?"

"This is where you'd talk about the first time you'd unlocked your Veritas, if you'd ever done it." Mary says. When Damien looks distraught, she pats him on the back so hard she nearly pushes him over. "Don't worry. It's not like you'd have anything threatening, anyways."

"You don't know that," I say. "It's nothing to be ashamed of, Damien. Trace and I are still working this out. Angel, aren't you...?"

Angel nods. "Yes, Trace is... oh, me. I haven't." She sighs. "Yet. Though I'd like to believe this will only heighten whatever epiphany I get out of wielding my truest form."

Those in the clearing who have turned themselves into terrifying monsters are also those who seem to agree with this definition. Even Dylan and Kali, who might be my companions in human form, nod securely in the knowledge that they'd be able to wipe cities if they chose to. In fact, if I had to rank everyone by destructive power, there would be some suspicious lines between my closest allies and the most dangerous members of our party.

(Is... Kali an ally? We've never fought directly, though, so she's at least not in the same bracket as Mary, and 'neutrality' seems like the wrong word for anything involving Kali.)

The whole group is together, now, including Mimsy, who slinks back into the clearing in her own Veritas and deposits a deer on the ground, dead. The horns of her phantasmal form slide back into her face as she drops back into the form of a cat, and then a girl, crouched besides the body of a large, cleanly killed animal.

"And there's breakfast," says Alex. "Today on the Dangerous Abominations Living In The Woods Menu-- deer with a side of more deer."

"You can eat grass." Gillian suggests, glaring at Alex like she wants to put his face into said grass.

"I'm a deer connoisseur, though." Alex objects. "And shift into it, won't you, Gillian? I don't want to see you tear apart some hapless animal with your hands again."

"Why, were you the hapless animal last time?" asks Mary.

Alex flushes red before transforming into a crocodile, which then proceeds to tear off a deer leg. Mimsy ignores Alex's advice and is eating meat chunks with her bare human hands, fixing me with her eyes. I don't think she realizes she's not a cat right now. The others shift slowly and enjoy the meal, including Dylan, who drops an eyeball at my feet.

"Thanks. This is awful." I say, kicking the bulb, which miraculously hasn't broken and has some suspicious flesh dangling from it.

Eye love you. Dylan wags his tail. He's not much of a proper fox, given that he still bares the dual-colored patterns that distinguish him from most beings in most species, but the pigmentation manifests differently every time. If he keeps the black of his 'red' fox to the legs, it almost fades into his socks.

I look over my shoulder, trying to ignore the sound of teeth on flesh. "You all enjoy your deer. Can I have... Elle, what's left?"

Elle ruefully removes the tin of chips from one of our last bags. Between scotch (I can still taste it on my lips, and I never consumed any) and a few unreasonable requests from the middle to younger kids, including the flakes that are supposed to go with milk, we are almost out of food. "I understand your plight completely," Elle says.

"You're in charge of shopping. If you don't think you can hold up to stupid demands, we can place you not in charge of shopping, and you'll never have to deal with them again." I say.

"As much as I'm tempted by not having to deal with impudent requests, this is one of the few activities I derive joy from." Elle says, offering me the bag. "I'll refrain from eating. Take the chips."

"You're not going to be hungry?" I ask, carefully taking a singular curved chip and wincing as the salty flavor hits my mouth. I go through the bag for the liquid-solids you put on these or anything we didn't eat and end up downing half a can of beans. They are slimy and cold, but I'm also no longer hungry, which is enough to put my stomach and I at ease. "Elle, you have to understand that it's a little concerning..."

Elle is sharpening her fingernails with her knife again, perfecting the circular curve she could just as easily shift into--that she does shift into, often. She watches the others with quiet disdain, and when her eyes hit mine, I think the whole world might have stopped. For a brief moment I understand all of Dylan's loathing, then I'm hating myself for even thinking about hating one of our own, and then I need some way to wash the bad thoughts out of my mind--

Take the sharp edge of the can and twist it into your flesh.

This is inconvenient. I breathe, steadying myself, and Mary turns back first. Mimsy is also sprawled back, and then, as the others return around her, she dashes up a tree in the form of a white squirrel. Mary continues, "So, anyways, I was thinking while I was eating, we have to have a lot of good stories--and then I remembered. Do all of you remember when I saved Red from falling off the cliff?"

This was a misstep of mine that involved me restarting several times out of panic following the event, thus preventing me from erasing any instance of Mary saving me from annihilation off the timeline and thusly suffering an even more tremendous swell in her ego.

"Are we going to spend all day blissfully reliving each other's worst moments?" I ask the group.

"We'll throw someone else on the road at some point, just so you don't get lonely," offers Alex.

"I don't want to partake in anything this crude." Angel says with a dismissive sniff.

"I don't want to spend another day walking in near silence until the middle kids go off and do something stupid," Trace fires back.

"Sorry," Adaline says, for her.

"It doesn't matter to me as long as we get walking. Now get," Dylan says, shooing us along. The group collectively rolls their eyes, at the least, the younger kids do so as they are prone to, and I blow Dylan a kiss. He catches it in his hand with a wink, his teeth spreading wide so that I can see his sharp teeth. Don't waste it on your hand, you imbecile, I think, playfully.

Dylan's intense, heterochromatic stare says everything. If you want me to keep it, you better stop making long-distance deposits.

Awful, really. I think I would be dead without him.

(I need to stop.)

"I still want to talk about when Red fell off the cliff." Mary says, from the front of the group. She hits Damien with her wide halo of hair in an attempt to turn, and he ducks a few seconds too late. "I mean, seriously. What were you so preoccupied with?"

"I was honing my power," I tell her, which isn't entirely false (it had been a bad morning, a worse night, and I had restarted so many times that I could feel every organ inside my body buzzing). When she and a few of the other group members look confused, I answer with a smile, "Management."

This lands poorly.

"I have a story," Mimsy says, her pale eyes bright like two moons. "Back when were were closer to the sea on the east, Angel would pour over books for hours, tenderly touching her fingers to the pages from the time the sun went down until it came up over the horizon again. One day she started going into the cities and started coming back late, pacing..."

This isn't a story. It's just a fact. I can see Mimsy's eyes squint upwards a touch as she continues, "That was when you decided I would be safer with your hand around my arm."

"What's the joke?" asks Angel, coldly.

"I think it's funny that you thought you could control any of us," Mimsy says, but someone else is speaking through her. I can almost see the ghost of a person holding her fists shut, an apparition standing behind her back and breathing on her shoulders. Ghosts and the dead are a foreign concept to us, who've never lost a loved one, but we know everything about walking between, and Mimsy is nothing if not a creature of liminal space.

Angel stops. "You should leave, Mimsy."

The whole group has paused, and I catch a few eager grins--this is a bad morning for a catfight, but I doubt I'll win anyone over with that doctrine. I stand askew between them, in the most casual position I can take that might still absorb the impact of a potential confrontation. "Hey now. I think we were all just kidding here. There were some good stories from back in the day. Remember when Angel asked a clothes store about their maternity ward, because she thought that all mothers wore a uniform?"

"That... did not mean what I thought it meant." Angel admits.

"Or when you set off that car alarm." Dylan adds. "Then got into the car, hit the one in front and in back..."

"Human adults instinctively know how to operate cars!" Angel says. "Again, how could I possibly..."

"Remember when we went into our first store and tried to leave without paying?" asks Alex. "Ellllle?"

Honestly, I'm embarrassed about how many of these there are.

"Red explained before I could do anything too rash. It wasn't that amusing." Elle says.

Thankfully, I'm going to get at least some of the credit I deserve today. I seize up, suddenly. Is that a good or a bad thing? They're definitely going to figure something out. I pull at the edges of my trenchcoat, trying to snap myself out of the ridiculous paranoia flooding my head, and manage a quick laugh. "I guess I have some background knowledge."

"Alex didn't get how phones work," offers Mary.

"I may have accidentally killed a few phones before I figured how much charge they were supposed to take." he says, without the slightest trace of regret. "Then for a while, I thought there was a person in there. It's not actually a human. It just sounds like one."

This continues as Mary, Alex, and Damien ramble about everything they've ever done in a city that was either small enough for me to give them or that they managed to do while I had my back turned. Every mention of a human inconvenienced or otherwise ticked off by our actions is like ice up my spine. Dylan has my hand again, which is a comfort, and we're back to moving, even if Mimsy has disappeared back up a tree. Our baggage is low, for better or worse, and we're travelling fast in a direction I can only hope is eastward. It also seems that we're nearing another road. My mind races through procedures, plots, plans, loses the moment... but they're standing so close together, and no one is fighting. It's too rare of a second for me to waste inside of my own head.

If I leave my head someone is going to get killed.

"I heard someone say my name in a crowd, once," Kali says. "I almost went Veritas on them, because I was sure we were being cornered by... it."

(You did. Several times.)

"How'd you even chose your names?" asks Dylan.

"Intuition." Kali says. "It sounds right. I like how it curls when you say it."

"I think we just picked out human names that seemed familiar," Damien says, looking to the others. "R-right?"

"I saw an angel. They're golden women with wings. I wanted to be one." Angel says, her hands twisting, as if withholding herself from reaching towards a light that isn't there. "Girls?"

"I don't know," Trace mutters, defensively.

Adaline nods. "Don't remember."

"I think a lot of our names are pretty standard. On the other hand, Red?" asks Gillian.

"Honest?" I ask, face flushed with my namesake color.

The whole group is watching me with the intensity of circling vultures.

I close my eyes, bringing back to ind one of my first nights in memory, when we had taken a wrong turn down a peninsula and were starving, tired, and lost. The wind had been hot around us, and the coarse sand in my pores and hair alike. It was before any coherent power structure had emerged, so all of us were waiting in the sand for orders or guidance that wouldn't come, and even though we knew they weren't there, we could hear the sirens wailing off in the background. We didn't even know what they would look like, but I usually imagined them with black masks, faceless beings encroaching on us like shadows. It was there, caught between an uncrossable, endless body of water and the dwindling land, that the sun came out from behind storm clouds and began to set in a blaze of red light. I felt its heat on my skin more truly than I had ever felt anything, and I knew, then, seeing its reflection on all of their bodies, that I would do anything to get us out of this.

I sigh. "Fine. There was red light over the ocean. It's one of the first things I remember."

"That's kind of anticlimactic." Kali mutters.

"I try to keep the drama to a minimum," I reply.

No one believes this.