Megan stands in the corner at the Naval Brigade holiday party with a red plastic cup, turning it so the light glances off the surface. She looks up, hopeful eyes framed by her wide glasses, and then looks back down again. She's smiling, but her body language tells a different story. She's resigned and holds herself tight against the wall.

Amanda, on the other hand, is next to me with one hand on my shoulder and the other on an empty mug that once held eggnog. "She's acting really weird."

"My brother's been acting super weird, too. Ten bucks says they made out." I suggest, off-hand.

"Ugh! Gross!" Amanda slams her mug against the table.

"You made out with her when you were dating." I retaliate. "Didn't you?"

"Yes, but it was tactful and your brother is kind of a sleazeball! Not in the creepy way, but... don't you get the impression from him he's condescending to you? Always?"

"Yes." My face blushes a violent shade of red.

Fervently, Amanda whispers, "You could deck him. You're a superhero now."

I'd have to be something more than superhuman to deck my brother, but I don't confide this in her. Instead, I go to the refreshments table and pour myself more eggnog, topping it off with peppermint ice cream. I take a long swig of it, while Amanda continues to eye Megan, and say, "Look. We can't let ourselves get caught up in this."

Amanda slams a hand on my shoulder with such force that I almost fall out of my chair. "Will," she says below her breath, "You have gravely underestimated how petty I am."

"Hey! My internet friend runs some forums, she thinks she's found your webcomic!" Rya yells, rushing over to the two of us with her phone out. "Amanda, is this it?"

I look at a crudely drawn black-and-white comic, just over seven hundred pages, and 'the lizard guy' stares out at me from the phone.

"There's a lot of differences, though. Couldn't even find those two characters you were dressed up as..." Rya continues.

"She couldn't have," Amanda says. "Because we're making that webcomic. It's ours. Our webcomic." She now has me around the shoulder, locked in an inescapable death grip, and I try not to look bewildered as several of the other girls gather around.
"You're doing magical girls and lab rats in one story." Rya says, putting her phone down to give us a round of applause. "I'm impressed."

"You two are making a webcomic?" Megan asks, moving out from the corner. "You didn't tell me! Can I put in a cameo?"

"Can the lizard guy and the bird kid date?" asks Sally.

Amanda continues, "Hell yes they can. Everything's canon. In fact, why stop at one love interest? Someone get another character in there. Leader of the magical girls, lizard guy, bird kid. Boom. Love triangle."

Megan blushes. "Wow. That's- that's..."

"Genius? I know." Amanda winks to me, and I flash her a smile.

"An artist at work," I say to the assembled girls. "You can't interrupt genius."

We spend the rest of the night shouting out ideas, and the entire group gets far too into this ridiculous joke idea. I sketch down characters, take notes, and down half a gallon of eggnog. Fortunately, it also no longer resembles our adventures or the original pitch, and we're working on a comprehensive system of magic as it ties into the mutations of some of our mains when my mom's car shows up, fifteen minutes early and about ten minutes over my never-enforced 'curfew'. I get up, hug Amanda, and say to the girls, "We've got to set up a chat to work on this."

"Absolutely."

I can not imagine this thing getting off the ground, at all, ever, but what a night. I come home shivering from the sugar rush and giddy with the thrill that accompanies inadvertently creating a new universe. I enter the room, where Adam sits like a cat at the desk in the corner.

He looks up from his phone, blue and white light falling on his face like a mask. It reminds me of everything I should be worried about right now. I lean against the wall the way he does when he's at school and put a bare foot against the wall. "Hey. Got home from a wicked party."

"Pick up any chicks?" he asks.

"No." I say.

"Hey, not that you could, noodle arms. No shame in trying and failing."

"Hi, Will, how was your party? Great, Adam, thanks for asking instead of making a frankly misogynistic comment and then insulting my physical ability. Nice chat."

Adam raises an eyebrow. "Do you have to flip out every time I make a joke?"

"You know, one thing about the party? Megan was standing there looking nervous the whole time, and no one could get a 'why' out of her." I say, reaching for his phone. "You're texting her right now, aren't you?"

"Back off." Adam bolts up, an intensity I've never seen before gleaming in his eyes. He has one hand clutching the phone against his heart, while the other is raised to slap my hand.

I draw it away. "Are you- are you sending nudes to her?"

"No, it's just none of your fucking business."

My heart is beating in my wrists and head now. It's been a long time since he's gotten legitimately angry at me. "Sorry-"

"Look. Would you like it if I went through your chat history with Amanda, right now?"

I forget the last time I cleared all the mentions of our superhero status from the chat. I go for my phone, not entirely confident the password will deter him.

"See?" Adam says. "Same deal."

For entirely different reasons.

"Sorry," I say, again, all the leftover confidence and adrenaline washed out of my system. "I'm happy for you, you know. I just wish you'd let me into your life a little more."

"Sometimes you need privacy. It's not malicious, it's not because you don't trust people... we're not the same person, Will. We finally get to live our own lives after years of being stuck together, and it sounds like you're doing a great job. Can you let me live mine, too?"

"No problem," I say.

I kind of miss being stuck together.

----

Some hero teams fall victim to the villain's traps. Others fall apart because of internal conflict. The greatest foe our tiny assemblage has ever faced is scheduling, and vacation scheduling is by far the worst kind of scheduling there is. Amanda and I sit in her house for a while playing video games, getting updates from Shiloh on the continuously vacant status of the Veins, until I put the controller down and forsake Nintendo in favor of higher-adrenaline ideas. "We should go do a mission."

"Just the two of us?" Amanda asks.

"Face it, Karen and Garrett are busy. We don't have to be aggressive about it. I know Karen doesn't like it when I try to reason with him, but we're not beyond that point yet." I get to my feet. "Basement portal?"

Amanda takes me into the back room, where a room full of dusty boxes and a great rip in reality lay in wait. "Basement portal." she agrees. We fistbump.

Shiloh is waiting for us in the Veins with cookies. "No time," I say, rushing through, although Amanda grabs one as we take the exit portal into the woods. It's odd to see it in midday, but no one seems to be around.The dead trees and snow-covered ground are desolate as the houses above, unpleasant to walk over, but I don't feel cold despite my skimpy clothing. Ignatius's back door is left ajar, with a tendril of unseasonal green around the door handle.

"It's a trap." Amanda says, taking another bite out of her cookie.

I close my eyes. The Diosite is nowhere to be seen. "Can't be. He didn't leave the Diosite behind. Is there a chance he just left his door open? It's not like we'd be stupid enough to enter the house just for the hell of it."
"We are that stupid. We're standing outside of his door right now." Amanda says, licking frosting off of her fingers.

I push the door open. "I'm feeling pretty stupid right now."

Amanda brandishes her paintbrush. "Looks like I'll have to protect you."

We descend into the basement. There are plants on the first floor, at least, more than before. Poinsettas sit in baskets, the succulents, no more than dormant houseplants, rest by the window, and there are no less than three separate Christmas trees. There's also a sizeable weed growing through the floorboards from below, but besides that, it just looks like he's very, very passionate about plants.

There's a cup of tea, still hot, on the counter. I wince. "Totally a trap."

There's several petals scattered across the floor. Crumpled paper lines the stairs. I unfurl one to see sketches of large plant monsters, with traces of chlorophyll staining the pages. Amanda leans over, "He's good."

A large thorn pierces one wall, which couldn't have come from any rose I've ever seen. In red writing, it says, I CAN HELP YOU.

"How long would you say he had this set up?" Amanda asks.

My shield glows, I grab her hand, and lead her into the darkness. At the bottom of the stairs, in the basement, which has been cleared to appear almost normal, is a corkboard that takes up half of the wall. One long vine strangles the edge, and the rest is a mess of papers, internet articles, and red string.

"Conspiracy theorist?"

The thing at the center of his board isn't the Illuminati, or lizardmen, or even UFOs. It's a map of the world, with eight pins on it. These lead to dates, pictures, and one or two articles about urban myths or mysterious deaths. In the bottom left corner is a sketch of a long, horned beast with rows of fangs, stylized to look like an eastern dragon, but its collar and eye markings unmistakably identify it as...

"It's a cherub." I breathe.
"Ignatius is trying to find us out. What we are. The source of our powers." Amanda says. "The Diosite tries to conform to your individual wants, right? So either he's trying to get out of this, in some twisted way, or it's warped his desires back in on themselves and the shard is trying to get him to locate more. Maybe even try to contact others like us."

Shiloh is panicking. Breath rushes through my lungs, and I hyperventilate like it's my world falling apart. "We need to take him out. Sooner rather than later. If this gets out-"

"Game over."

Amanda clutches my hand. "We should go."

We beat a hasty retreat through the empty house, the dormant plants waving but the knowledge follows us back. Shiloh stares at us, empty-eyed, as we sit in the lair, and Amanda asks, "Can we tell them?"

"No." I say.

"Will..." Amanda pleads.

My fists clench. Shiloh is watching me out of the corner of his eye. "What if... what if they don't want to do this? Karen is terrifying. Garrett is Garrett. If they quit the team, we're dead, plain and simple, and if they find out Ignatius is trying to track other Diosite holders down... he could be coming after us in our civilian life. I just... maybe we shouldn't tell them yet."

"That's unfair." Amanda argues. "But we'll do this your way. If you really think- Will, we're putting a lot of faith in you."

My heart stops cold.

"Please don't let it be misplaced." 

(A/N: I'm sure a lot of you noticed the Friday chapter was missing. I'll be posting a make up chapter at soooome point. Don't know when yet.)