Fox was working at her desk with Emika across from her, sure that things couldn't possibly get any more complicated, and then Juggernaut walked into her office. She was in the midst of yelling that he was supposed to be at a meeting when he slammed the door closed behind him.

"Shut up," he snapped, pointing at her. "I did something stupid."

Fox's eyes narrowed. "Explain."

He paced around the room, replying in a tone that got slower at the end, "I may have, sort of, given Lady Marvel the slightest impression that the circumstances of me being here aren't necessarily what they seem."

"Is she suspicious?"

"It's Lady Marvel," he said dryly. "Is she ever not suspicious of something?"

Fox adjusted her glasses, thinking. "Well...regardless of how suspicious she may be, there's simply no chance of her ever figuring it out."

"True," he mumbled, taking the chair next to Emika. "True."

Fox's eyes narrowed again. "Do you think this is a serious concern?"

"No," Juggernaut said, flapping his hand dismissively. "She despises me. She probably chalked it up to a joke, or, at the very least, she won't be thinking about it for too long."

Fox liked what he was saying, but she wasn't sure she liked the way he was saying it. He seemed to honestly not be worried anymore, which was good, but he was also slumped in the chair and staring blankly at her desk cactus. Emika was nervously bouncing her leg up and down, obviously trying to figure out when to tell him that he was supposed to be on the other side of the country right now.

Instead, she looked at Fox. "There's been some unrest."

"Why?" Fox asked distractedly, too aware of the seconds ticking by.

"There's an underground informant who people aren't too fond of," Emika explained. "She goes by Mask, but they've taken to calling her River 2.0."

Juggernaut laughed. "River's going to hate that."

"Is this Mask a problem?" Fox asked.

"Not necessarily." Emika shook her head. "The people who have a problem with her are the type of people we're responsible for putting in jail, so she's not actually acting against us. The concerning part is that she's not affiliated with us like River is, and she doesn't work like River does."

"What do you mean?"

"She only has a few connections, but that's not where her information seems to come from. Mask spies, and she's good at it. Scarily good. It's making people nervous."

Juggernaut tilted his head. "Well, that's not good."

"You're supposed to be in Georgia," Fox interrupted before he could throw the rest of his schedule out the window in favor of other things.

"About that," he said. "Can you calm down with all the anniversary prep? It's getting overbearing, and I don't know if you've noticed, but there are four dead supers, and we still don't know what happened to them."

"But that's not where your focus should be, now is it?"

Juggernaut raised an eyebrow. "You'd rather have me deal with useless PR details than the murders?"

"I know that the anniversary is meaningless to you," Fox said, undeterred, "but it means something to a lot of other people, and, like it or not, we're the ones running the show. As for the murders, it's not as if you've gotten anywhere, and the police are on it. I think you can afford to take your attention away, at least until the anniversary is over and done with." Fox turned to Emika. "We'll leave Mask alone. Unless she interferes with River's business or spies where she's not supposed to, she's not our problem." She turned back to Juggernaut. "It's too late for Atlanta, but don't miss Chicago tonight. And remember what I said about focusing."

He rolled his eyes and then stood, heading for the door with a sarcastic, "Whatever you say."

Her anger flared, and Fox cleared her throat loudly.

He turned around.

"You work for me," she said coldly, "not the other way around. I can fire you. Remember that."

Juggernaut stared at her. "Fox," he said quietly, so calm that it was terrifying, "I have been here for a long, long time. If either one of us is replaceable, believe me, it's you."

Fox's eyes twitched toward her top left desk drawer in fear. Luckily, Juggernaut was already out of the room and didn't notice, but Emika did, and she looked away like she was embarrassed to have seen it.

"You should stop doing that when he's around," Emika mumbled, clearing her throat right after to sound unaccusing.

Fox never actually reached for what was inside the drawer, and it was only in moments of weakness did she even glance at the handle. But since she and Juggernaut were on rocky terms as of late, those moments of weakness were happening more often. Not often enough for him to notice, but enough for Emika to, apparently.

"Don't you have a schedule to fix?" Fox snapped.

________________

Vidya was starting to realize something: if an opponent wasn't superhuman and didn't have a gun, then they were ridiculously easy to apprehend. It had gotten to the point where all she had to do was encase their hands in ice like she'd done with Tala Turan, and that extra weight made it impossible for them to escape. It was...simple. She liked that it was easy and that no one had to get hurt, but to make it more entertaining, for her own sake and for the idiots she was up against, she'd taken to more artistic approaches.

Like today, at the convenience store. When she'd received the assignment on her pager about a robbery, she'd assumed that the perpetrator would have a gun. What else would they rob a store with? So, Vidya had gone through the back door, knowing that the best way to combat a gun was with the element of surprise. If she messed up and didn't react fast enough, then bam! Bullet in her chest. She snuck through an aisle carefully, floating a few inches off the floor so she didn't have to make any noisy steps.

And when she got close enough to poke her head around the aisle and see the front of the store, she almost laughed. The perpetrator, a tall woman wearing a poorly fitted ski-mask, was aiming a meat cleaver at the register. The cashier was shoveling money into a plastic bag. The only other patron, an older man who stood still by the slushy machine, was biting his lip. Both of them looked scared enough to take this seriously, but Vidya could tell they were just as judgemental as she was of the woman's choice of weapon.

Vidya let her boots touch the floor and cleared her throat. The woman twisted around at the waist, the cleaver swinging with her. Maybe she had amazing aim and was skilled enough so that a cleaver could do the job? Still, Vidya fought hard not to laugh.

"Don't come any closer!" the woman warned, brandishing the (dull) blade in front of her.

"I don't need to," Vidya said.

With a flick of her hand and a pretty swirl of frost aimed at the floor, a patch of ice formed under the woman's feet. She swung the cleaver at Vidya, but Vidya raised her hands, creating an ice shield that the blade got stuck in. She threw the shield to the side, and it took the cleaver with it, yanking the handle out of the woman's grip. Vidya grabbed both of her wrists, forming cuffs of ice around each, and then she fused them together.

And violá, handcuffs! They didn't look too bad, in Vidya's opinion. Her craftsmanship was improving.

The woman slipped on the floor ice and fell to her knees. Vidya left her there and picked up the cleaver, presenting it to the cops waiting outside. When she finished relaying the details of the one-minute battle, she flew up to the roof and walked alongside the street, going from rooftop to rooftop. Now that she knew what she was doing, missions weren't the stress-inducing big events they used to be. Within minutes, she was back to enjoying her day, but a voice below called out her name.

Vidya flew down to be face-to-face with the woman who called her. She looked to be in her twenties, smiling from ear to ear, hands shoved deep into her pockets.

"Can I help you?" Vidya asked.

The woman slowly took her hands out and raised them to stick out at her sides, palms up to the sky. Her smile didn't falter one bit. "You're an amazing girl, Frostbite."

There was something...stilted about the way she spoke, like there was an inside joke Vidya wasn't getting. "Um, thank you?" she replied, puzzled.

"I'm afraid, however," the woman whispered, "that your talents are being wasted." She held out a hand. "Come with me, join us."

Vidya took a step back. "Who's us?"

"Your people," the woman said quizzically, eyes wide with fascination. Or were they wide because of drugs? She sounded high. "Us. The people nature chose to bless with gifts."

Oh. Vidya had heard of the crazy, Alter-hating group of superpower purists before, but only in passing mention on the news. They didn't seem to be worth much more than that. It took her a few days to even realize that they were who Phase was warning her to stay away from at the ASPA fair.

"You're a New Human?" Vidya asked, just to be sure.

"Come with me," the woman repeated softly.

"No thanks, I'm happy where I am."

"Where you are," the woman said, "is not where you belong. You shouldn't be working for freaks of nature, you're above that!"

Vidya shook her head. "I said, no thanks."

The dam broke.

"You'll be punished!" the woman screamed, but she didn't make a move as Vidya flew back up. "How could you stand alongside them? How could you?"

She kept shrieking, but Vidya tuned her out. The initial outburst had caught her by surprise, but there was nothing here to fight against but words, and she couldn't care less about what she had to say.

_______________

The window was slick with rain that blurred the view, but Lady Marvel stared hard at it anyway, her mind elsewhere. She was on the couch in the common room, as usual, so irritated that her hands were getting sore from being clasped so hard.

"Hi, Marv," said someone behind her.

Lady Marvel turned her head only until she could see Phase out of the very corner of her eye, and then she turned back to the window. "Hello."

He came over and stood next to the couch. "Are you alright?" he asked, sounding so genuinely concerned that it made her sick.

Lady Marvel turned to him with a look that was apparently cold enough to make him blink and take a step back.

"What's wrong with you, Phase?" she asked. "Do you ever get tired of being so sickly sweet? You're like a two-dimensional side character who only exists to make the rest of us look bad by comparison."

Phase stared at her and smiled, tight-lipped like he was trying not to laugh. He looked up at the ceiling, then down at the floor, behind him, and to his sides.

Lady Marvel blinked. "What are you doing?"

"Looking for the fourth wall," he joked. "If I'm just a character, then there's got to be one, right?"

Lady Marvel closed her eyes and opened them with a sigh. "This is exactly what I'm talking about," she said, shaking her head. "I was just horrible to you for no reason, and you're not even mad. You're laughing."

"Please," he muttered, sitting down on the other end of the couch. "If you think what you said was harsh, then you should hear what Flamethrower says behind my back. And to my face."

Lady Marvel laughed. She'd heard those things, and they weren't nice.

They fell silent, staring at the rain. Lightning struck once, then twice, and then, two minutes later, again in the same spot. Lady Marvel guessed that Strike and the Golden Four were on a mission right now.

"I don't mean to be pushy," Phase said, "but seriously, are you alright?"

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"I heard things didn't go well at the barn."

Lady Marvel raised an eyebrow. "From who?"

"From all the staff who noticed that something's off, and who are now treading carefully for fear of setting something worse off."

"Things went exactly how they've been going for a while," Lady Marvel said. It was true, and she was usually at peace with it, but...it felt worse now. Something about the argument at the barn was just more damaging than their usual disputes.

Lightning struck again. Kennedy was going to be exhausted.

"We're good friends, and I trust him, but I've been bothered lately," Lady Marvel said quietly, "by the simple details I don't know about him. Family, motivation, little inconsequential things. It's like there's nothing about him outside of the Marvels and Celestro."

"Nothing that he's told you," Phase pointed out.

"That's just it, though." Lady Marvel shrugged. "We've been at each other's sides for eight years. If I don't know anything, then who does?"