***GABE***

The Second 'Verse looks eerie as hell when we return to it. It's daytime, but as the Bay Area takes a lashing from a major rainstorm, you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise. And despite this darkness, there's almost no light on the ground that we can see from our current perch on top of one of the tallest buildings in downtown San Jose.

Almost no light.

But there's an exception roughly to the west-northwest - the shining green circle that is Peppermint world headquarters. Merry Christmas, assholes, that's what they're telling us. They're also luring us in. Me, Fionna, Jackie, Yash, Aditya, and Liz. We're ready to come at them, and they're ready to cut us down the second we set foot on their property.

We barely have a plan, any more than the last time I was on a sneak-in party at this place. But we also don't have time to make one, and everyone else with me accepts that enough to go along with the non-plan to rush Peppermint like we're trying to steal the football from Kaepernick. Okay, bad analogy, because that makes Peppermint sound like the good guys here. No, they're more like Tom Brady.

The one thing we have closest resembling a plan, Liz came up with it, based on her prowess as a light elemental. "Once we're inside," she says, "if they have any powerful sources of light - fluorescent tubes, laser tripwires, et cetera - I can catch them in my hand and use these mirrors" - she holds up one small silvered disc, which she keeps in her pocket - "to help redirect them like banking shots."

I nod, liking the idea already. "Sounds like a Jak and Daxter weapon."

"You're old enough to know those?" Jackie asks.

"My brother and I grew up with a vintage PS2," I explain.

Liz puts her mirror disc away. "No, I kinda got a little inspiration from Brazilian jujitsu. I call this trick-"

"Something Portu-GAY-zee?" Aditya affects a Brazilian accent so high and nasally, it makes his voice break on the last two syllables. Yash coughs, his brown skin flushing a bit at his embarrassment for his brother.

"If only Russell were here," Liz says coolly. "He'd start swearing at you in Portuguese for mangling his mama's ancestral tongue."

"You know Russell?" Fionna asks.

"A bit, yeah. Old friends and all that." Liz smiles fondly at the thought of him - more than he deserves, a small, uncharitable part of me wants to say. "No, but I didn't give it a Portuguese name. I call it the Romanian Reflexion."

"Why?" I ask. "'Cause of the banking? Doesn't Romania have one of the twistiest hairpin roads in the world?" The facts I've picked up from Alex picking them up in the first place, you wouldn't believe.

"That's true, but it's actually a linguistic joke," Liz says. "Romanian uses tons of reflexive pronouns. You can say 'Nous nous aimons' in French, say, but in Romanian you can say 'Noi ne iubim pe noi înșine.'" Her Romanian flows very well, and she underscores it by talking with her hands as effectively as any Maltese or Italian. "Like...'We ourselves love for ourselves in and of ourselves.'"

"Loosely," says Fionna.

"As one of the Bay Area's few Romanians, I take my Romanian pride seriously," Liz says with a wink.

I tap the toes of my Chucks on the edge of the roof. "Listen, I hate to be that guy, but time is of the essence, and I got a cousin and a cute boyfriend among those we gotta save, so...maybe we should get moving?"

"Yeah..." Fionna stretches the wings in her suit, which she stole from Harlan's lab along with those of Yash and Aditya, plus two prototypes for Liz and Jackie. It's so weird, me being the only one in this party with naturally working wings. When was the last time that ever happened? If I spent time searching my memory banks, I'd likely just stay up here while everyone else flies on ahead to Peppermint HQ. And, because of Murphy's Law, they'll all get shot down and leave me with the kind of survivor's guilt I think Alex still feels for me. I mean, I felt it myself when Fionna died, but that was pretty much only when I was still alive in Prime...

...and there I go, already wasting time while everyone else takes off. I need to talk to myself a little less.

By now, Fionna and Yash are the best wingsuit users, while Aditya lags behind only because Yash wouldn't let him use them until maybe a month ago or so. Liz and Jackie, they're totally new to it, but they still manage to fly better than Aditya. Probably because they're both bigger and less prone to letting the wind and rain buffet them around.

Harlan still wants me to try the wingsuit myself one of these days, I think, just to see how well they work with an already be-winged one. After all, Preston Holly outfitted his scriv soldiers with wingsuits, but Harlan's been having trouble reverse-engineering the armor. Annie needs to not be withholding the guy's funds, because it's seriously hindering his innovative capacity. Although if she stops withholding his funds, she might withhold enough of mine and Harris' to leave us all but broke and dependent on her. I wouldn't put it past her for a second.

Though, of course, if we don't get Harris back, we won't have a chance to be young, broke, and in love together anymore.

Just like when we came up to Peppermint the first time, today there's no outward indication of them sensing an intruder. I'm thinking that's just typical of them - they pretend it's okay to just sneak in, then spring their trap with sadistic glee. Or whatever feeling Alicia Wahlberg derives from her attacks, because that sadistic glee is more Penner's thing, and now, Penner's dead.

I think.

Leave it to him, of course, to live in some form or another. He probably downloaded his brain into the nearest computer at the very last second. And probably left a little bit or ten of it behind, like the parts that govern whatever limited sense of mercy he's got. I fully expect an AI Penner to be far worse than the original, so my sincere hope is that none exists.

Wait a minute.

Do they even need to make an AI Penner?

Do they still have more of those time-travel-viewer meteorites? If so, they could make more than just another Black Mirror. They could probably use them to power an actual time-travel device, one that opens the windows into the past wide and lets them fully step through.

Alicia could make a wormhole to the moment of Penner's death and pull him to safety. She wouldn't even have to worry about the safety of the venture, either. It's recent enough that any ripple effects on the present would be minimal - but what about the future? She could easily deviate us all from the timeline nature intends.

"So what's the plan?" Fionna asks. "If any."

I start as I realize she's talking to me, then pull my hood off as we come up to a window, which Yash is already time-warping so it falls apart with accelerated age. "Kill Penner again, if we have to."

"You seriously think he's gonna be back?" asks Aditya.

Jackie raises his eyebrows. "This guy sounds like a damn zombie."

"Funny you say that..." I look into the building, seeing a single figure running our way through the lobby just as Yash makes a five-foot circle of Plexiglas disintegrate. Tall, skinny, and practically glowing white every time he steps under one of the lights.

Oh wait, no, it's not Penner.

It's that Kaden guy, or whatever his name was. The one who was wearing the Hawaiian shirt before, but now he's in a lab coat, which explains the all-over glow, not just on his snowy-complected face. By which I mean the kind of snow you gotta beware because it's spotted with yellow and maybe a little red. Here there be wolves, except wolves would be insulted to share any kind of connection with this jackass. Bears, maybe?

Anyway... "Ready to kick nerd ass?" I hate myself for voicing this question, because we geeks shouldn't be so quick to throw our nerd brethren under the bus, but desperate times, exigent circumstances, etc.

Liz holds up her mirror in one hand and shines some light into it, angling it so it reflects the light right at Kaden's face. He screams as it hits him, but only for a second. Liz's light, he absorbs it into his skin, concentrating it in his forehead. Then he shoots it back at her, like Combustion Man but with less heat and explosion.

Liz throws up her mirror to block the light, banking it into the nearby coffee cart. There, it bounces off everything inside it, making a cacophonic orchestra out of the cash register, minifridge, and espresso machine.

"There's that Romanian Reflexion for you," I say as I ready my own ice attack. While everyone else prepares to fight Kaden - and whoever else comes out here, drawn by the noise of the coffee cart's destruction - I approach Aditya and ask him, "What are you gonna do?"

"Get to a computer terminal and hack the shit out of this place," he says, "if someone'd be cool enough to cover me."

"Can you hack it?" I ask. "Literally."

"I could use a copilot." He turns to Jackie, but Jackie's already busy drawing a pistol and firing it faster than anything I've ever seen that wasn't ten times longer and heavier. His bullets, I can't see them, nor can I see any muzzle flashes. "Shit," Aditya mutters. "I'm on my own, aren't I?"

"I'll cover you." I don't think I'm quite ready for full-on offense. Defense, though, I can handle a little better while I continue to recover from my oversleepage. "Wait a minute," I add as that oversleepage finally fails to keep out one particular thought. "If the internet's down all over-"

"Not here, obviously," says Aditya. "Those privileged Peppermint assbutss, of course they'd keep what they're taking away from everyone else."

"'Privileged,'" I repeat with a chuckle.

Aditya raises his eyebrow at me. "You should know."

"Why, just 'cause I'm white?"

He hunkers down behind the counter, pulls his laptop out of his backpack, and opens it up. "Yeah, and didn't you go to boarding school? Very privileged, man."

"Only 'cause this one rich guy with a major guilt complex paid for it...but you know what, we can discuss this later."

"That's how it always is for you white people-"

"No, I mean it!" I jump above the counter line just long enough to spear another guy with my ice, a pig-faced white guy in a security guard's uniform. "You gotta work, don't you?"

"I can work and talk at the same time," Aditya says, demonstrating exactly that. Or so I assume, not looking at the screen to make sure he's actually coding and not just playing a game. Or maybe that's how he'd do it, play a game and use it to crash the company's servers or something. What's the term for that - denial of service? But I'm probably wrong about it, being a complete computer n00b.

"What do you wanna talk about?" I ask while keeping an eye on the battle going on about twenty feet beyond the counter. Kaden's rounded up several of his friends to join him, and they're all pretty evenly matched with my friends. Except against Liz, whose Romanian Reflexion trick is working very well. Maybe a little too well, though. Her light beams are bouncing all over the place so much, they keep almost hitting Fionna and Jackie, who are closest to her. Luckily, both have very good reflexes themselves.

"I dunno." Aditya's keys click for a moment. "Okay, no, wait...I wanna know, how do the bodies work?"

"What?"

"When you die and they bring you back."

I put my hand out over the sink to my right. Deep in the pipes, I feel water churning, waiting for me to put it to use. "Shit, I couldn't tell you."

Aditya scoffs. "Some dead Primer you are. That already gives you a ton more experience than I've got, and you don't know shit?"

"I've only been here six months," I remind him. "You've had, what, fourteen years of life?"

"Nice going for the guy who forgot it was my birthday back in October."

"You're still not letting that go? I didn't even know!" I smack my palm on the side of the sink, and the pipes gurgle dangerously in response. "Hold on a sec..." I feel the pipes again, and the water starts flowing from the faucet without me even turning it on. I'm not talking about some little leak or teensy trickle. It's babbling like a bloody brook.

A repetitive click sounds above our heads. Not the sound of Aditya's keyboard, but the fast-paced, pissed-off tick-tick-tick of a stun gun, no doubt light-elemental-powered. "Hands up, shitheads!" cries its owner.

Alicia Wahlberg herself.

I press my right thumb to my palm as I obey her orders, allowing myself to maintain some level of elemental grip on the water still pouring from the faucet.

She reaches for said faucet herself. "Turn that shit-"

I pull the water and it blasts the faucet straight up into the air, spraying Alicia and making her accidentally shock herself with her own weapon.

I haven't felt this good since the first time I successfully jerked off. Never mind that I was thinking of Sara Lance at the time because I subconsciously wanted to conform to compulsory heteronormativity back then, it's still a damn good memory of my twelve-year-old days.

"Aditya, keep going!" I cry as I vault over the counter, summoning the water and forming a ring of rapidly spinning ice. That ring nearly cuts Alicia's hand off as she weakly reaches up from the floor, no doubt to try and grab my ankle or something. Dick move. Shithead. As it is, I think she might have just lost a finger. Or maybe just the nail. Whatever she's lost, it's far less than she deserves as far as I'm concerned.

The ice spins around most of me, but it doesn't go higher than my shoulder level. I'd make it go higher, but for some reason I can only give myself about five feet of coverage, only about eighty percent or so of my body. So which twenty percent do I cover? My head or my feet? My head, logically, should be it, but Alicia's closer proximity to my foot makes me wonder, as does the fact that covering myself at head level would make it harder to see bullets or other fast-moving threats incoming.

Then I have other distractions to worry about, like my friends being awesome. Take, for instance, Jackie. He has a tag team of Peppermint plants coming at him, both tugging on what looks like a vine they just lifted from a potted ficus, ready to swipe his ankles not unlike how Alicia tried to do with me. He's too good to fall victim to their slow, amateurish clothesline attempt, though. No, he turns the tables on them beautifully, spreading the mechanical wings from his suit at the very last second and cutting both his opponents down at the ankles themselves. Not literally, that is - the wings aren't that sharp - but they lose their vine, and their dignity, as they hit the floor crying.

"Someone call Oliver Queen!" I call out to Jackie. "He could use you on his team!"

"What'd be my code-name? Angel-Bot?" he quips.

"Better than mine," I say as I finally bring the snow tunnel up to my head. "They'd call me Snowstorm!"

"Isn't there already a superhero with that name somewhere?" asks Aditya.

"Probably," I admit. "Don't steal my thunder, man. Stick to what you're good at."

Inside my snow tunnel, sound is mostly muffled from the rush of ice around me. An exception is music playing close by - someone's elemental attack might have hit the jukebox near the coffee cart and started it playing all by itself. Light elemental, then, I'm guessing. Probably Alicia's. But whoever's elemental it is, it keeps hitting the jukebox and making the song change every ten or twenty seconds. It's an eclectic arrangement of songs too. Foreigner, Thirty Seconds To Mars, Sara Bareilles. Hell, even ChronoWulf.

Why the hell does ChronoWulf have to be so cool that even the bad guys have a taste for him? I mean, seriously. It's like Peppermint wants to ruin him for me. They probably don't pay his royalties either, those corporate pond scum.

I stand still, not daring to move, waiting to see who tries to come at me next. And fail.

And ignoring the weird but sharp pain clawing its way through my cheek. A toothache from gritting my teeth too much? No, it's my facial skin and muscle hurting.

Why?