Dr. Destruction spun on his heel, facing Jason with a scowl on his face. “Now isn’t that rude. I’m up here celebrating my long-awaited victory, and you decide to steal my stuff. I’ll take that back now, thanks.” He held out his hand, and the cane dissipated into smoke, reappearing by his side. In one fluid motion, William kicked the cane up from the ground and into his hand, flipped it around twice, pointed the barrel-end at Jason’s head, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

“Well now look what you’ve done. You took all the bullets out!” William inspected the curved end of the cane, which was hollow and empty, and sighed. “Well that’s one way to poop on a party. What else did you do to it?” As he inspected the various buttons on the metal walking-stick, Jason slowly inched his way backwards in a reversed crab-walk, gripping the fallen cartridge and praying up to heaven that Dr. D didn’t have a spare.

He had a spare, and he shoved it into the end of the cane and pulled the trigger again. Just like last time, nothing happened, and Panin busied himself by angrily flipping switches and pushing buttons to try and fix it.

An arm flung itself over the railing, bearing the weight of the purple-clad man who had scaled the building to get to them. Slowly, it pulled the rest of him up onto the balcony, so as to not alert William, who was busy pressing buttons and recalibrating the settings on his cane. “What did you do to this thing? All of the settings are messed up.” He grunted as his fingers pried up a panel on the side of his stick, revealing many multicolored wires and circuits inside.

Mirage’s boots hit the floor with a loud thump, startling the Doctor into pulling the trigger. A gunshot pierced everyone’s eardrums as Dr. D howled and hopped on one foot, dropping the cane in the process. A string of uncensored profanity loosed itself from under his mustache, it was mostly directed at Mirage, but Jason’s name was thrown around a bit as well. He hopped around a bit, until a well timed chair to the back of the head shut him up, and Dr. D slumped to the floor, a small trickle of blood flowing from the place the chair hit; Mirage stood victorious above his unconscious form, the bar stool still clutched in his hand.

“I’ve always wanted to do that.” Mirage grinned, looking a bit creepy with his mask on, and dropped the chair on Dr. D’s injured foot, which was now leaking profusely and staining the floorboards. “We should probably get out of here before the cops come to their senses. I have a place we can hold him for questioning. After we get there, Optic wants to talk to you.” He nudged William’s side with his boot, smile melting into a face of disgust. He motioned to Jason to help him carry the villain, grabbing his ankles and lifting them up.

Jason took his head, lifting the other half of the body into the air. Together, they managed to carry the doctor not-so-gently down the stairs and out to the street, where Kamille was waiting for them; surrounded by unconscious officers with various 2nd degree burns. Once they had explained what had happened, and where they were going, Kamille joined them, and asked Mirage a very interesting question, “why didn’t you just levitate Dr. D down from the balcony?” To which he replied by stating, “The fight with the Panin illusion has drained me more than usual for some reason. Probably because of that half-finished spell I discontinued.”

As they carried William across the city, several passerby’s had asked what they were doing with an unconscious body, but Kamille spun a story about how they were on their way home from a convention and their friend had drunkenly tripped and hit his head; no one bothered to question her tale, this was New York after all. They had walked about six blocks from their original position when William began to wake up. “whereamI?” he slurred groggily as his eyelids fluttered open. Kamile dropped the arm she had been holding and picked up a flowerpot from the windowsill of a first-floor apartment, “Sorry, but this is on my bucket list and I’m not about to let this moment slip by.” She smashed the pot on the crazy man’s head, covering everyone in a thin layer of ceramic dust and dirt.

William didn’t wake up for the rest of the journey. They arrived at a small neighborhood of apartment complexes, some more cleanly than others, and approached one of the more dingy looking buildings. The receptionist was passed out at her desk with empty bottles of whisky scattered around her chair, so they didn’t wake her. Mirage guided them into the elevator and hit the button for the second floor, as tacky 80’s music began to play from the speakers. Kamille shuddered and took great care to avoid touching the filthy walls, and in the process smashed William’s face up against a particularly stained area of the peeling wallpaper.

The elevator door opened jerkily, and the sound of rusty gears grinding against each other filled the air. Mirage flinched at the noise, and one of his hands strayed up towards his mask for a moment. Jason logged the motion in the back of his mind for later contemplation. They passed several doors on their way down the hall, the smell of meth and marijuana drifting out from below the entryways, and came to a wooden door at the end of the hallway.

“Wait here for a moment, I have to do something first. Optic’s inside, and I have to alert him of our presence.” Mirage dropped Dr. D’s feet, and slipped inside the door before any of them could protest, or see what was inside. A scuffle, and a few choice words, were heard; and a few moments later, Optic opened the door. “Hey. Sorry I had to bail on you back there, but Mirage really wanted to kick his butt, and I wasn’t about to stop him.” He held the door open for them expectantly, and Jason dragged the body inside.

Optic closed and locked the entryway, and went into the next room to grab a chair and some rope. Jason looked around, and was repulsed. The couch was stained and sticky, with unidentifiable slime coating the armrest, and the carpet wasn’t in much better condition. The television was sitting precariously on a cluttered dresser, which used several physics books as one of its legs. Nasty chinese food containers littered the floor, and you had to be very light on your feet not to step in some form of rotten or spoiled food. The lone window was smudged with some sort of sticky, green, opaque substance, and a whole cemetery of dead insects and arachnids had met their demise on the window sill.

Old papers and documents were strewn all over the apartment, but none of them ever mentioned Optic’s name. Kamille checked, and all of the legal papers were stained on the signature, and the schoolwork had a sharpie taken to the upper right corner of every page. The only thing remotely interesting that they had found was an old letter from someone named Ruby, who asked him to invite Super over for dinner at her place sometime; it was sent in 2011 though, so it was severely outdated.

Optic returned from the other room, dragging a wooden chair and a long length of rope behind him. He set the chair down facing away from the window, and worked on kicking a path through the garbage so they could drag Dr. D from the doorway into the seat. “Come on, the faster we tie him to the chair the faster we can all take naps while we wait for him to wake up.”

Kamille tripped over a chinese take-out container in her excitement, spraying rice all over the floor. She didn’t bother to even try picking any of the grains up, this place was a dump as it was, so a few more messes didn’t make a difference.

Jason nodded tiredly and helped Optic lug Dr. D’s body into the chair. After many hilarious fails on the boys’ part, Kamille ended up tying the rope tightly around the back of the wood. They bound and gagged him, and took great care in hiding the pink cane underneath the couch in a puddle of spilled Pepsi. Once they were satisfied that William wasn’t going anywhere, Optic pulled three surprisingly clean sleeping bags out of a closet and laid them out on a space that Kamille had cleared of trash. “You guys can sleep here, if you need me, I'll be through that door.” He pointed to a door that was slightly ajar, where Jason could see the corner of an unmade bed.

Both of the Jugas slipped into the sleeping bags, and Optic turned out the light. His silhouette hesitated by the door to his bedroom for a moment, and he left them with some parting words. “Hey, goodnight and all that stuff...And by the way, my name is Sean. Sean Leelan.” And with that, Sean closed the door and left the Jugas to sift through what had just happened.