***GABE***

We're about halfway to the next-nearest movie theater, I think, when Aditya finally stops in the middle of the sidewalk and blurts out, "Okay, this is really friggin' bugging me, guys. TJ, how the hell did they get into your head?"

Harris scratches his head and peers up at TJ with a sympathetic look on his face.

I step between TJ and Aditya. "Look, dude, if you don't wanna talk about it, that's okay."

"Yeah..." Fionna reaches out and takes his hand. "You don't gotta worry. It's not like you're the first one here to be possessed, somehow. You're among friends."

I look at the way she gazes up at him. I've only ever seen her look at Alex like that. Well, maybe Kensi, but those two have a way of being more affectionate in private than in public, I think. And maybe me too, back in the days when I was closeted and we were a short-lived couple. I wonder, maybe she's giving TJ the same kind of look because he reminds her of Alex, somehow? I can see a bit of a physical resemblance, maybe. And personality, too.

And I think TJ warms up to her because of this openness on her part. "Can we...can we go back to my place?" he asks. "Uh, well, it's the same building we all live in-"

"Not us," Yash says, gesturing to Aditya.

"Oh, sorry. Refrain from assuming, huh?" TJ pulls out of Fionna's grasp so he can facepalm.

"All right, let's go, then." I crane my neck until I spot our building somewhere in the distance. I think. There are two ten-story green buildings to our north, both in pretty close proximity. I think the more westerly one is ours, but until we get closer, I can't say for certain. If we could fly, that'd be better, but Fionna doesn't have her wingsuit. Harlan's taken it from her for "maintenance," or so he says.

Which now makes me wonder, how did she and Kensi still manage to beat me, Harris, and TJ to the theater? We didn't spend that long talking to TJ before taking off, did we?

When we get to our building after half an hour of walking (mostly in silence), we see Harlan and Annie rush out a door at the end of the hallway on the fifth floor. "Did they..." TJ scratches his head at the sight. "They were in my apartment!"

"There you are!" Harlan waves us over. "TJ, come here! We gotta check you out!"

TJ bristles. "Is he kidding? What's he gonna do, probe my brain?"

"Yeah," I mutter, knowing full well Harlan can hear all this. "How'd they even know to come here anyway? Nobody told them-"

Aditya clears his throat and waves his phone in the air.

TJ frowns down at him. In his thoughts, he grumbles, You little snitch.

"Dude, don't worry!" Harlan spreads his arms as he keeps on walking towards us. "We're not gonna do anything invasive! Not, uh, not without your permission..."

TJ crosses his arms. "I've already been invaded once today. Not again."

Annie pushes past Harlan and has him stand back so she can talk to TJ instead. "You do realize who did the invading and why, right?"

"Sort of." TJ scoffs and talks more to the wall than anything - or anyone - else. I'm not even sure he's actually talking instead of thinking, but I can still see his jaw move a bit from this sort-of side view from behind. "The Peppermint Corporation? But...but I thought a lot of their top people got arrested after-"

"Yeah," I chime in. "Alicia Wahlberg? And...and Penner? I thought you guys had 'em locked up. Or am I wrong?"

Annie glares at Harlan. "You said you were gonna tell them!"

"I..." Harlan's face is on fire.

"This is why I took your weed away! But...but...gah! You got it back somehow, didn't you?"

Harris nudges me. Whatever's his secret for getting contraband, I need it so we can make our own Mintee Mochaz again.

I nod solemnly. Ask him later, buddy. When he's not doing Annie's bidding.

I promise I will. You haven't even had a Mintee Mocha yet, have you?

I did. Once. Thanks to you. And I need another ASAP.

Harris covers his mouth so nobody hears him chuckle. Before Christmas. Again, I promise.

I'm about to give him the "Don't make promises you can't keep" line from The Amazing Spider-Man, but my thoughts get scrambled when I hear Fionna call Harris' name and mine. I've been so busy thought-chatting with him that I haven't noticed everyone else disappearing into TJ's apartment.

Annie waits until Harris and I come in before closing the door and locking it.

"You couldn't let me do that myself?" TJ sits in front of the TV, squatting with his hands on his kneecaps and looking a bit like L from Death Note, especially now that he's removed his hoodie and is wearing a plain white tee and blue jeans.

"It's okay." Annie holds up her hands placatingly. "We just wanna ask you a couple of questions about what happened." She looks around until she sees Harlan in the kitchen, opening and closing the cupboards. Snapping her fingers at him until he abandons this pursuit, she continues, "You understand, this is a whole new phenomenon we're talking about here. There's a lot of powers that technology can't replicate yet, but if Peppermint's stumbled on something like this-"

TJ clears his throat to interrupt her. "It's not that important, is it?"

I kneel in front of him. "Hate to say it, man, but it kinda is."

He lowers his head and shakes it, and his glasses look like they're almost ready to fall off. "What's to talk about? How some weird static electric charge went up my finger and into my brain? Sure, it doesn't happen every day, but-"

"Exactly," says Annie. "It's all right, TJ. Tell us exactly what happened. Everything you remember."

TJ gestures vaguely at the rest of us. "They were there. They saw it."

I take a deep breath because it's clear to me that he doesn't want to talk at all, and Annie won't stop until someone tells her what happened, so I'm going to be his shield. Turning to Annie, I say, "The tablets at the box office were glitchy, so he depowered them...and one of them carried whatever mind-control virus let Penner into his brain."

"Yeah." Kensi nods fiercely. "I actually tried to depower that same tablet myself and it shocked me."

TJ's gritting his teeth the whole time. "Listen, I know you guys mean well, but I just don't wanna talk about this, okay? Seriously. Can't you respect that?"

Annie looks down at the floor, blushing furiously. "I'm sorry, TJ. We're not here to make you uncomfortable, we just want-"

"No. I don't wanna do this. I-I-I need some time to process this, okay?" He jumps to his feet and storms out the door. Five seconds later, he comes back in, jerking his thumb at the doorway he's leaving open. "This is my place. You leave."

The lightning crackling off his fingertips shows he means business, so we all make like trees and leave. "Jeez," Harlan says as he and Annie go down the hall ahead of all of us. "You'd think he'd be eager to help."

Yash raises his eyebrow at Harlan's retreating backside. "I dunno about you guys, but I'm kinda glad he's not the leader of those two. I'm not liking what I see of his ethics."

"He's a genius when he wants to be." Fionna awkwardly tries to scratch her back. "I mean, have you seen the wingsuits he's designed?"

"Not as good as what you can get with Terminal tech-" Aditya begins.

Yash physically covers his little brother's mouth. "I'm not about to let his junkie ass in my lab."

Aditya winces hard enough to make Yash let him go, probably because he thought he bit his hand or something. "Isn't that a slur?"

"What? 'Junkie?'"

Fionna nods. "I think so. Then again, I haven't been on the social-justice warrior section of the internet for a while."

"Is that even a thing in Hell?" Kensi asks with a small shudder.

"Oh, you'd be surprised."

I'm about to hear some words from Harris - probably having to do with his all-too-brief time on an experimental pro-social-justice social network just before his death - but even as I know he's bringing them up, my attention goes elsewhere when my phone buzzes. I check to see who's texting me, and wonder who it could be. Everyone in this 'verse who has my number is right here in this building, and if any of those not within visual range wanted to say something, they could just as easily come back to me.

I slide my thumb over the screen to check the full message, which is from TJ. Huh. Did I even give him my number? I probably did at some point in the last hour or two, but I honestly can't remember.

I read his message at last, and my heart stops with the last word.

"hes in my head help"

"What the fuck?"

Harris looks over my shoulder at the text. "That's from..." I turn around to see him turning around as well, gazing at TJ's closed apartment door. "Wait, what? I thought he was fine! I thought Penner was gone!"

"Guess not." I turn the phone around so the others can see it. "Any of you get the same message?" Everyone else checks their phones and shakes their heads no. "Just me, then. Okay..."

Fionna crinkles her eyebrows. "Dammit, burning him didn't work?"

"It's an Indiana Jones thing," Aditya says dryly. "Of course it didn't work."

"Well, we all thought it worked at the time, didn't it?"

Yash, despite being the tallest of us by far, stands on tiptoe and looks over at TJ's door himself. "If he's still possessed...you think this might be a trap?"

Ice forms on my knuckles. "Trap or not, I'm thinking we need to do all in our power to save him before Harlan tries to cart him off to his lab."

Aditya eyeballs me nervously. "What are you gonna do?"

"Uh...well, remember when Alex and I froze Michael?"

Harris grabs my wrist and holds me back. "Dude, fire didn't work. Why would ice?"

"We gotta try everything until we find something that works."

"Throwing spaghetti at the wall?" Kensi chuckles and rolls her eyes. "See, now, that's a strategy."

I storm forward, undoubtedly leaving a trail of frost in my wake. "And I'm pretty sure I'm gonna be the spaghetti that sticks."

"Just..." Harris keeps holding on to me, and I'm dragging him as I move, probably building up static electricity on his shoes. "How much are you gonna freeze him?"

"I'm gonna, you know...freeze him."

"That's no answer," Harris grumbles. "That could be anywhere from 'frost on the rooftop' to 'OMG liquid nitrogen!'"

"The longer we dawdle, the longer it's gonna take to get Penner out of TJ's head," I say.

"What, you think his hold on the guy's brain will strengthen over time?" Yash asks.

"Makes about as much sense as any other theory at this point," says Fionna. "Sure, like I said, I've been possessed before, but never like this. Not digitally, and it was meant to be temporary only." She glares at an invisible enemy - probably the face of Elijah appearing to her in the texture on the wall for a second. "Not that that makes it any better-"

"That's it." I pull away from Harris at last, then run down the hall and through TJ's door, where he sits on the chair in front of his TV, flipping through the channels.

"Hey, guys." He points at the screen. "You ever watched Legion? What a trip, man."

Once again, he's sounding a little less like himself and a little more like Penner. "Hey, TJ," I say in the same overly pleasant cadence. "Now that we got Annie and Harlan out the door, why don't we head back down to the movies?"

"You sure?" He looks over at the door I've left open, where everyone else gathers outside, but nobody else dares come in. "We're really gonna go see that movie?"

"They kinda promised us," Aditya says. "And you know I'm gonna hold you guys to that, even if this-" He stops himself, realizing he's running his mouth off too much.

TJ narrows his eyes, then takes off his glasses. "Whoa..." He blinks rapidly, then puts his glasses back on again. "Whoa, sorry. Just felt a little, uh, dizzy for a second there-"

While he's busy adjusting his glasses - God, don't strike me down for this cheap shot, okay? - I hit him fast and hard, covering him with ice pretty much everywhere except his head.

He actually screams for a second when the cold hits him, then he growls at me. "Dammit...he must've locked me out for a second. How'd he get you to help?"

I wave my phone at him.

"Text. Of course. Shit. Oh well. At least he's got an elemental I'm familiar with, no thanks to me and my team." He starts shooting light through the ice covering his fingers.

"Nope!" Harris races to my side and puts down a layer of Dark energy on top of my ice.

"Thank you!" Aditya runs in, brandishing his phone.

"For what?"

"Keeping him still."

TJ pulls his head back as far as his half-frozen neck will allow him. "Don't think I don't know what you're up to, kid," he whispers. "How do you even know about-?"

"I'm not from around here." Aditya puts the bottom of his phone - the charger-port end - on TJ's temple. But he doesn't put the phone directly onto TJ's skin - on closer examination, it's clear he holds it a couple of millimeters away. That allows a small line of light energy to travel from TJ to the phone, making the screen go white for a moment.

"Okay, that was...interesting," says Fionna. "There's an app for that?"

Aditya winks. "There's an app for everything."

"Yeah..." Yash takes hold of Aditya's hand and pulls him away from TJ slowly. "But that's not really an app so much as a virus, and you've just let it onto your phone..." He slowly, carefully extracts his own phone from his pocket, lays it down on the nearby side table, then takes off running.

"Where are you going?" I ask.

"To the Terminal!" Yash yells back. "We gotta get this thing quarantined!"

"How?" I find myself stepping into the hallway, trying to get a good glimpse of the Patels before they round the corner.

"How do you think?" He keeps on running, unwilling to take the risk of Aditya's foolish actions infecting anyone else's Wi-Fi on this floor.

I run back to the apartment and find TJ shivering violently as he de-ices himself clumsily. "Shit," he groans, dusting off the chunks of snowy powder that cling to his arm hair. "I'm not much of an ice person myself. I'm better with liquid water."

"My name's Snow for a reason," I quip.

"So you're back to normal, then?" Harris asks as he and Fionna walk around TJ with their hands on fire to warm him up. We could all do with a bit of warming up at this point, I think - as the sun shines more brightly, I feel a chill creep up my spine. Then down when it has no more spine to travel on.

"I...I think so." TJ reaches for the remote and shuts the TV off. "I dunno what that guy was making me watch, but it looks weird. Too much weed and Pink Floyd kind of weird."

"Speaking from experience?" Kensi asks.

"I'm from Oregon, so...yeah. A little bit. Not 'cause I'm a Pacific Northwest stereotype or anything, but 'cause my friends and I were just too chill like that."

I raise my eyebrows. "Are these the same friends of yours who you said were going on some twenty-four-hour pub crawl?"

"No, no, no." He shakes his head. "Those are the friends I've made in this 'verse. But that's part of why I'm not joining them on their pub crawl. I don't wanna feel too much like I'm replacing my old friends." He sighs softly, exuding a more comfortable aura that'll probably turn dark and spiky the second any of us attempts to change the subject back to his possession. So, while I can't really speak for the others, I'm not at all inclined to bring that side of him out again. Even though I can't even say at this point whether or not his extreme reluctance to talk earlier was him, or Penner trying and failing to deflect suspicion.

Tires screech on the street below. We all go to the balcony and look down to see Yash and Aditya running, still hand in hand, across the street, not even bothering to go for the crosswalk.

"They're going back to the Terminal, right?" asks Fionna.

"Yeah," I say. "Probably. Which means they're gonna go under the school, I think."

Harris nods as the brothers make a beeline for the school's front door. "Talk about a Hellmouth, huh?"

"I just hope they manage to keep Penner under control."

The rest of us turn to TJ, and I ask, "How'd you know his name?"

He taps his forehead with his index finger. "He couldn't help but broadcast shit like that. His full name, his place of employment...I might as well have downloaded his whole résumé." He coughs a couple of times. "Not, uh, that I would have...unless maybe it would've helped us figure out how to stop him?"

I lay a hand on his shoulder. "Don't burden yourself that much on our account. Hell, you should feel sorry for Penner, almost. As soon as Annie and Harlan find out the extent of his control over you-"

"You say that like he's still in my head-"

"They're gonna raise holy Cain on his ass like nobody's business."

He chuckles to himself before backing away from the balcony and returning indoors to warm up again. His arms are still noticeably paler than normal, and if I'm not mistaken, his fingers are blue at the tips. I'm sorry, I think to myself, hoping he picks up on it.

"No worries," he says. "You did what you thought had to be done, and it helped, right?" He sits on his chair, again crouching like L, and asks me, "So demons say 'raise holy Cain' more than 'raise holy hell,' huh?"

"We think our dimension's a little more humble than quote-unquote 'holy,'" Fionna says.

I click my tongue. "Couldn't have said it better myself."

Kensi's about to leave, but then TJ says, "You guys wanna stay a little longer? I mean, just in case I have some other mind-control episode?"

She exchanges glances with Fionna, who shrugs and then nods.

"Couldn't hurt," says Harris.

"Yeah," I say, closing the balcony door and locking it too. "I mean, everyone else is doing all the work, so at least we can say we did something too, right?"

TJ reaches for the remote. "Anyone else in the mood for a little Star Wars?"

"When are we not?" Fionna laughs.

Harris rubs his stomach. "Where's the popcorn?"