***GABE***

I can't be inside my snow tunnel much longer, not without making myself super vulnerable. So I need to get rid of it and take an enemy out at the same time, if at all possible. Can I do this without incapacitating my friends too? That's a challenge I'll just have to see if I can meet without waiting to scan all future timelines for all future consequences.

I could use an Eye of Agamotto right about now.

Or maybe those damn time-viewing space rocks. I could use one of the white ones, especially. The future ones. Even if they give me nightmares about Alex dying all over again.

So, with that in mind, I make my decision.

I throw ice all over the place, blasting Alicia Wahlberg backwards and making her fly into the coffee cart. She's so lucky that little obstacle didn't give her a concertina spine. Just a broken arm. Sorry, lady, but I value my well-being far above yours, so my sympathy's got to stay limited.

Behind the coffee cart, Aditya reaches up to the jukebox and shuts it off. In the middle of a Devo song, no less. Oh well, nobody's perfect. He pokes his head above the surface and asks, "Is it over?"

Alicia jumps back to her feet, lightning spraying from her good arm while she cries out and clutches her broken one close to her chest.

"That's a no," Aditya says.

"Code!" I order him. "Wait, what are you supposed to be doing again?" Seriously, I've already forgotten. Maybe I'm a little too focused on keeping my own person safe above all others. Well, after I all but left Alex to face Elijah alone once - I'm still convinced Fionna died because I wasn't there to help - or the time I jumped onto Leah Cabrera without thinking of the lethal consequences, I've grown a little more self-concerned.

"I shut down all the doors coming in here!" Aditya calls out to me.

Alicia swipes at me with that one lightning arm of hers, and in response, I spray out more ice until she's trapped and frozen. Now she can't get to me, and she's gonna get a little time to heal as well, so that's good for her, I guess. I rejoin Aditya behind the cart, taking the time to run my finger through a little tub full of coffee grounds (why the hell wasn't it cleaned out after business hours ended?) and then lick a bit of espresso dust off the tip. Instant rejuvenation, even if it's just momentary. "Shut the doors?" I repeat. "No, don't do that! What if they-"

"Flood the vents with poison gas until this room has no breathable atmosphere?" Aditya stares at me through narrowed eyes.

"Erm...yeah, that." Note to self - make sure to clarify whether or not this kid really is telepathic.

"I am, and yeah, I already thought to stop them from poisoning us." He looks up for a moment of silent reflection, during which time I see him picture a complex schematic of tubes and vents. "Or whatever it is they'd gas us with. Maybe not poison. Maybe just sleeping gas or some shit."

"Not that it's really important, but did you see which kind it was?"

"No, it didn't say."

I look back over the top of the coffee cart, where Alicia stays, mercifully, still frozen. Further out, Liz and Jackie are still using their unique methods to fight, while Yash and Fionna are forming an unlikely tag team. She burns a guy, and he uses his time powers to trap him in a loop of getting the initial burning over and over and over again.

"He better not sneeze," Aditya says.

"Who, Man on Fire?"

"No, my brother." Aditya's fingers fly across the keyboard. "I think he's been fighting off a cold lately, and if he sneezes, it might end that loop. Probably before the fire-" He stops typing, then curses as he realizes he's made a mistake.

"Hey, can you open individual doors?" I ask as I remember, again, my incredibly risky and stupid idea.

"If I can get back to that part of the system...and I'm there. Which one do you want me to open?"

"The one that leads down to the basement."

"There's a shit-ton of doors that match that description-"

I seize his laptop, ignoring his cries of alarm, and navigate to a map of the lobby. Jesus, I knew this space was massive, but it's so big that to show any details, I can only have about ten percent of it actually on the screen at a time. It takes me a while to locate our current position - the coffee cart isn't marked on this map, which doesn't help. But the good news is, we're roughly in the center of this space, which covers about...let me see...a twenty-degree arc of the circle that is this building. So now I have to scan up one way - north, I think - until I find the door down which the Parks led us last time we were here.

"There." I hand Aditya his laptop back and point to the spot on the screen.

"Thanks for smudging me up," he says.

"Clean that laptop up yourself," I retort. "I know it's dark, but when I can see the dirt you got on your keyboard-"

"Let me do my shit in peace, why don't you?"

"I usually do. I don't watch you on the toilet."

"There's probably some guys you do do that for."

"I'm gay, not a pervert. We're not all the cast of Call Me By Your Name."

If there's one sport Aditya could win a silver medal in in the Olympics, it'd be spoon-gagging pantomime. Harris wins the gold medal every time, of course. "Get outta my space before I really do release the poison gas."

"You wouldn't."

He winks. "I've been building up a roaster of a fart."

"That's not what 'roaster'...fuck, you know what? Never mind." I jump back onto the cart's counter, then fly out over the lobby. It's a hard urge to resist, flying over my friends' combat zone, and resist I fail to do. All of them, I help out a little along the way too. Liz isn't as good at Romanian Reflecting ice as she is with light, but when her own light sufficiently charges the ice up, it makes a pretty good little shaped flash-bang that disorients the nearest crop of Peppermint plants but good. More of those plants come at Jackie, but he's still able to trip them up with his wings, which I ice up to make them a little more deadly.

"That's pretty cool!" Jackie calls up to me as I fly past him. "But it makes it harder for me to open the wings up again." He does so, with a loud creak that makes me wonder if maybe he's not going to get his deposit back.

"Sorry!" I say. "Didn't realize it'd be so impractical."

"Haha, nah, that's all right." He pulls one wing closed again, syncing the movement up to a flexing of his arm. "It's kinda like strength training, you know? More resistance, more better!"

"You could do with a little more strength training!" Fionna cries.

"Who, me?" Jackie and I ask simultaneously.

"Both of you!" she says. "Your arms need work! Especially you, Gabe. You only work out your core anymore!"

I wink at her from above. "I knew it! I knew you checked me out in the gym!"

"Stick to picking up guys. It's what you're good at."

As Jackie descends to the floor again, I move on to Fionna and Yash. "Pick you up, Fionna? With these arms you just insulted?"

Yash flexes a little himself. I'm ashamed to admit it, but he's got better biceps than mine. Tennis practice will do that to a guy, I guess. "Never too late to get a little swole for the winter, man."

"Right in the masculinity with that cut-down," I say, fake-pouting. "Fucking hetero bro-hell!"

"I'll put those words right back in your mouth," Yash says. "Bro."

"Yash!" Fionna waves him over. "Put your bloody dick away and help me out!" She does more burnings of Peppermint plants, but these plants, by now, have started to pick up on our attack moves. They're wearing these jumpsuits that they can just tear away when they catch fire, with next to no damage to themselves in the process. Luckily, Yash can snap his fingers a couple of times and set up another loop to trap them, but if they can't endure independently of his concentration very long (as is the case with pretty much everyone's elemental powers), they're no good as a long-term strategy, no matter how effectively they can convince Peppermint to bypass the war and come to the bargaining table.

Okay, if I make another Doctor Strange joke, have Yash lock me up in the longest loop he's capable of making. Twice that length if I make another Thanos joke.

I do, however, leave Yash with some ice spikes to load into another loop, which he runs alongside the latest flame loop with Fionna. Burning and stripping Peppermint plants to his left, impaling them to his right. That's got to be some brutal shit, but by now I'm not really caring all that much. I have places to go, people to see, space rocks to pick up and put to use.

And I have to break Yash's ice-spike loop just long enough to reach in and relieve one of the Peppermint plants of his gun. A light weapon, judging from the pale blue sparkage that rises up from the business end when I pick it up. This thing could work just as well as a Taser as it would a rifle. I might just put it to both uses before I'm through.

Leaving behind more ice spikes for Yash to reload his loop with, I glide over to the door I need to take. And I can't open it. "ADITYA!" I yell across the lobby. If he responds, much less hears me, I don't hear it myself, but the light above the lock blinks from red to green within a couple of seconds. Not losing even one more, I speed through the door, take a moment to catch my breath, then jump into the elevator.

An elevator which was already open when I got here, as if it was waiting for me all along.

How many Peppermint plants are waiting for me at the end of this elevator ride?

How many people with those same green leaf tattoos on their wrists just like Harris and TJ?

I saw another one of those on the guy whose gun I just stole. Maybe that's why Yash had to reset the loop - I hesitated a second at the sight of those leaves.

None of us should be delighting in hurting these guys. Even killing them, as much as said killing isn't really sticking thanks to Yash's tricks.

I keep calling them "Peppermint plants," because that's pretty much what they are, and yet it's not. Marked by corporate before they could even wake up in this 'verse. These asses are property of Scoville and...whoever Scoville's herby-named business partner was, Mintyface or some shit...instead of the plants' significant others like nature intended.

Speaking of Mintyfresh, where the hell has he been all this time? As I think about it, there's no way this guy could be so out of it all, unless that's by Scoville's design. Might he be a more important quest object than the asteroid crystal balls?

The elevator dings open, revealing a hallway ahead full of Peppermint plants. Men and women and enbies, in all sizes and colors and wing varieties and elementals. Say what you will about Peppermint, like how they're a soulless corporate money-grubbing capitalist machine worthy of Philip Reeve and they ought to be destroyed. But they clearly commit to their diversity and inclusion initiatives, so they can't be all bad, right?

So yeah, I'm about to be equal-opportunity whaled on, and I can't just jettison that line of thinking even when it's life or death. Okay, maybe not death. Not when I can just freeze them into incapacitation the way I did for Alicia. Speaking of which, is she unfrozen yet? Unlikely since I'm the only water elemental on our team at the moment, and I doubt Fionna would be willing to personally flame on to melt her.

The Plexiglas door opens. It's the same one behind which Alicia tried to trap us and drown us in foam last time. Now, it's about to unleash a new flood, one which I'm foolishly trying to take on all by myself. Even for a water elemental like me, this is a terrifically sucky idea.

But if it ends in me finding my people again - and especially if I can bring Harris home and really get sucky with him, out of relief more than anything else.

And I still need to give him a better Christmas gift. How long do I have now? Only a day or two, I think.

But no matter.

I make myself two ice blades, the one in my right hand longer than the other. Whoops, that kind of symbolism isn't quite meant for me. I'll just pretend the real symbolism is that I've got one hand stronger. The one I've honed from years of jacking off, of course.

Sorry, I'm distracting you from the action again. Let's get back to the fun.

The Peppermint plants stay away from me, most of the time. They may be brainwashed, but they're not exactly self-sacrificing. They don't want to offer themselves up to my blades, and I'm not willing to cut them down either. Unless they really open themselves up to that, or get particularly aggressive.

Please don't get aggressive. Please don't get aggressive. Please don't get-

The one nearest to me, who must be the one guy here who's whiter than I am, creates a dark blade even longer than the longer of my two ice blades. Then he swings his blade, the very tip cutting through my shirt. I jump back, throwing the long ice blade forward and sending a lot more of his friends scattering, cowering to one side or another of the corridor. With my now-free right hand, I slip two fingers under the new tear in my shirt, pulling them out with drops of blood.

Shit, that's how Steve Walker died. Granted, he got hit with a lot more dark energy, and in a more concentrated amount, too. But still, I can't take any chances.

If Alex were here, he'd point out the Kylo Ren-ness of my next move. Even he, who bizarrely loves Kylo more than anyone else in the Star Wars sequels, thought it was ridiculous when Kylo kept pounding his bleeding side in that one lightsaber duel against Finn.

But he wouldn't be laughing if he were to see me now, pulling the light gun I stole earlier out of my waistband. Powering it up. Jamming the sparking end right into my own shoulder. For a split second, I'm paralyzed by this voltage, and I almost hit the floor. As it is, my knees buckle, then reset within another split second. It leaves me feeling weak, but looking down at the twin burns glowing black above my heart, and the white dots slowly fading as they trace the paths of my veins under my skin, I'm okay with it. No death by dark poisoning today.

Incidentally, if someday I grit my teeth and bear it through the extra-painful process of getting a chest tattoo, these little burns can be the eyes to start out a Baymax design that'll cover my whole heart. I almost want this even more than the Supernatural anti-possession design. Though that last one, I'll still need to do some more intensive working out to get my body ready to display that one the way the Winchesters would.

I turn the gun towards the crowd, yelling, "Stay back!" For the most part, they get the gist, between the light gun and my ice blade. But there's still that one super-corpse-y-pale white guy with the dark blade. He's not going down without a fight, is he? Persistent little piece of crap.

I throw the shorter blade at him, but then fire the light bullet into the ice, shattering it in a blast of lightning and snow. The blast sends him and anyone close to him falling down, if they're not on the ground already.

There's not a lot of room to fly through this corridor, not literally. But figuratively? Running at the greatest speed I can manage, deep into the heart of Peppermint's research basement?

Challenge accepted.