"Something's going to go wrong again today," Amanda says. "I'm dead certain of it."

Karen, who seems to have swapped places with Amanda today, says, "Something always happens. So what? We can't keep holding this off forever. We started above him in terms of power, we only lost because we didn't want to go the distance. I know it's disarming to break into the house of a..."

"You can't bring yourself to call him a nice guy, can you." I ask.

Karen rolls her eyes. "He's proven quite a few times that he's not." When she sees the way I'm frowning, she adds, "No need to defend him, Will. Are you taking tea with him behind our backs again, or what?"

I frown. "Okay, now you're just being unfair."

"I don't think that she is," Garrett says.

Shiloh looks up lazily from the corner, or lazily as his body language can intone given that his facial expression never changes. I shoot him a quick look, suggesting help me with this one with as many mental daggers as I can shoot in his direction, and Shiloh is silent, suggesting only pick your battles next time.

"I mean," Garrett clarifies. "We need to be able to trust each other, and you did that without consulting us. You could have been killed."
"Exactly," Karen says. "We're going to go, right?"

We're already halfway up the hill near the house. Amanda looks back past the others, to the forest behind Ignatius's house. The forest is sparser than normal, and something indiscernible burns in her eyes. It's not quite a CMYK thing, but it's not an Amanda thing either. It's someone else looking back over the woods, from behind her, and simultaneously, another being, scorning her from the damage. Her mouth twitches, like a provoked dog.

Tesla and the Phantom Loop (going to call him Phantom, just for convenience) pass her up the hill, reciting powers back and forth.

"Invisibility," Phantom suggests.

"You wouldn't be able to see anything, either," Tesla explains.

"No, but they're bullshit powers," Phantom says. "Don't think about it too hard. It's a good power. Add invisible tools to the list and you have a strong offense, too."

"Right, right. I still think that there are better things to have if you have the option. For instance, the ability to manipulate the elemental composition of items in your environment? Completely overpowered."

"You screw up once and you kill someone."

"Don't screw up," suggests Tesla.

They're almost up to the back of the house, which, beneath the shadowless grimness of the gray-hued day, looks like it's sagging on its own foundations. I have my hand around Amanda's shoulder. "They're going to leave us behind," I tell her.

"Maybe I don't mind," Amanda says. "I was thinking of turning around."

"We need you," Shiloh says, through my mouth. I let his influence pass through me, sense him watching from behind my eyes, ready to intervene if necessary. Intervene. As if we can't be trusted to handle ourselves, not really, like we've just been let out on a leash he can draw back, like some pet owner jerking a small dog back to their side when it stops to sniff the plants.

Her face twitches again, this time near the temples. "I know I'm needed," she says. She begins walking a little faster than I can keep up with her.

The two of them are still discussing powers at the house. I've never actually seen Karen or Tesla smile before, so I'm tempted to say this is a positive development. "He's not home," Tesla informs us. "We're going straight to the basement. Phantom, can you portal us in?"

Garrett inhales. "Just to put this out there, I really wanted to bust down his door. Just to let him know we were here, you know?"

"Wow," Tesla says, and I swear there's a trace of affection in her voice. "Absolutely not."

"We busted his door down last time," Garrett says.

"Yeah, 'cause we didn't want to portal right into a trap. Can you get us in or not?"

"Probably a trap this time," Garrett says, already drawing his fingers apart. As he catches it in his mind's eye, or whatever it is in there that triggers it, the door hollows out to a gray void. He bows to the rest of us. "After you all. Cee-- Cimk... you know what, I'm just going to call you 'C', but you should go first, assuming it is a trap."

Amanda's eyes are dim. "That's generous of you." She steps through anyways, then pounds the door from the inside. Before Karen can walk through, Garrett's concentration is interrupted by a door thrown off its hinges and through another, impromptu portal Garrett must have made on pure adrenaline, which causes it to rematerialize and fly off ten feet into the woods, where it lands in a leaf pile.

"That could have killed us," Garrett states as Amanda stares us down from within the house. "Geez, what were you thinking?"

Amanda shrugs. "How's that for a trap?"

"I... don't actually feel that great about property damage," I admit. "Can we try to keep collateral damage to a minimum?"

Karen says, "Seconded, and if you pull shit like that again, I swear, we're portalling you out."

"Seconded on that," Garrett adds.

Amanda just stalks away to the basement, opens the door, and descends the stairs.

"The hell is that about?" asks Karen.

"I... honestly don't know," I say. "Can we just try to keep up with her, please?"

Both of them are watching me like I'm supposed to have a handle on her, and Ignatius, and while we're at it, probably Shiloh, too. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and when I open them, we're still standing in a stranger's house, around an even more frantic set of notes. Ignatius hasn't colored anything in this room in in weeks. He's concepting, best I can tell, for some sort of post-apocalyptic game. Huge, sketched-over structures of organic matter clutching or wearing down metal and stone and glass loom from every corner, vast, beautiful, utterly fictional... I hope.

"Still feels like a trap," mutters Garrett as we leave the cities for the stairs, trailing just behind Karen and I as we jostle for space on the steps. "It's dark. Ominous."

"Are you five?" asks Karen. "It's not that scary, it's someone's basement. Furthermore, it's always a trap. You're not going to wimp out of it the second something taps you on the back, are you?"

"I don't know, are you going to electrocute everything indiscriminately until we end up in jail, charged for manslaughter?" asks Garrett.

I wait for Karen to turn around and deck him, but instead she laughs. "Like we're going to jail."

"Fair enough," says Garrett.

"We're also not killing anyone," she follows up.

"Right," Garrett says. "If that extends to not letting anyone die, maybe we should catch up with ah-- 'C'."

The steps let us out onto a landing where a normal person's basement would usually spread to reveal, I don't know, old CDs or memorabilia or old clothes or books or any number of things. Ignatius's smells like putting your face in the soil by a river, rank and dirty and wild, and vines drape from the ceiling. There are no light switches to be seen, the few light bulbs in the room have been punched out or taken out, and something is moving around a wooden desk in the corner on the right. On the left is a boiler room, too dark to see into even as my shield lights up with my own fear, and it makes the whole place hum with a primal heat and an even more unsettling grinding noise.

"It shouldn't have gotten this bad this quickly," whispers Shiloh.

"Will, did you say that?"

I don't want to be here right now. I can't be here right now. I recede into myself, trying to step up the stairs, trying to remind myself to be brave. "I didn't say anything," I say.

My shield lights up even brighter, until it almost passes for room lighting. Unfortunately, the moonbeams fall on several busted bulletin boards, which have either fallen from the walls or never been hung there at all. Red string tapes reputable articles about the state of the earth to less reputable articles to scrawled plans on... I can't read anything in this light.

"Mass sterilization," Amanda mutters as she bends down to read one."That would be one of the less implausible plans on here to save people from themselves? He's really, really, really a misanthrope, and I don't entirely blame him, because this entire board is filled with things like 'human kicks last Harp Seal puppy into a meat processor'. Not that that's one of them, but it's mainly scummy things humans have done in the last fifty years. You know, like the fact that we speed up species extinction almost a thousand times over by nature of our massively irresponsible lifestyle."

"Shit," I say.

"What, you were wrong?" asks Karen.

"No," I say. "He hasn't talked to people in forever, and you know the only news--"

"--is bad news," Karen says.

"We suck from a distance, huh?" Amanda asks, sounding oddly vindictive about it. "Not that hard for someone being psychologically manipulated to come to the conclusion, once he's detached himself from people, that they're not worth saving."
"Not bad," Karen says. "Amanda, have you looked into a career doing villain speeches?"

"Screw that," Garrett says. One of his two halberds cuts through a row of vines in the corner of the room, which now leads to a bored-out tunnel descending into a muddy, murky abyss, occasionally crossed by supply lines. "We came down here for a reason, and that's to find him and take the Diosite back. I'm not going to come to some revelation about what a bad, bad person I am and feel guilty about all the eeevils of humanity, okay?"

"You could afford it," Karen suggests. "On occasion."

"Are you arguing for or against him?" asks Garrett. "Seriously, what is your deal?"

Something slinks up behind us, from the tunnel. I can barely make out what it is in this lighting, save for that it's old, that it should have died a long time ago, and that it possibly has died, many times over, and grown atop itself-- imagine the smell of rotting plant matter, magnified by the smell of dead animal matter, which is in turn echoed by bad breath, just juxtaposed atop itself until it seems to be seeping into your body. The thing lumbers towards us, tendrils creeping out of the walls around it, and Amanda steps away.

Tesla steps right in, yelling, "You wouldn't mind turning some of that pent-up aggression on someone who actually deserves it?" Electricity arcs around the room, hitting the thing, which does not stop for a second. Tesla draws her hands together and starts generating a ball of plasma. "Screw it, someone get me cover!"

"Do you want me to burn the house down?" yells Amanda. "Do you want to go down with it?"

The thing disappears behind a wall of gray. "This is only going to hold it a minute, what's the plan?" asks Garrett.

"What's the plan, Luna?" asks Tesla. "I have no goddamn idea."

"You were the one who was just going to shoot it!" I say. "How long should it take to charge that?"

"Longer than an effing minute!" she says.

"Hate to bother you all, but there's something on our other side," says Amanda. "Looks nasty, crawling out of the boiler room now, no, it is not Ignatius before a cup of coffee."

"Time to step down?" asks Garrett. "Looking like we're sandwiched--"

"No," say the other three of us, at once.

"Why are we even here?" asks Karen, the ball still charging between her fingers. "Hate to break it to you, but I'm not seeing Ignatius, just his pets--"

The ball of lightning goes flying through the air as something hits Karen from behind, sputtering out harmlessly against the darkness Garrett created. Sure enough, there is also a massive lily hanging from the ceiling, the inside of its mouth not reinforced with the usual plant reproductive organs, whose names I would remember if I wasn't thinking about this in school all day, but strange, almost unplantlike structures that resemble flexible teeth. I can only imagine they're actually some repurposed plant part and Ignatius did extensive research, which, I mean, kudos to him, but I still don't want it to kill me.

"Is she out?" I ask. "Shit."
Tesla staggers onto her feet, her hands crackling with electricity. "You don't effing say--"

"That's it, we're leaving," Garrett says.

I drag him back from a shaking, unstable portal with my hand, but then the other beast is upon us.

"Cee," I say, if you're going to do anything, now would be the time--"

"I can't," Amanda yells.

"You literally have to! We would have taken care of both of them if you had just--"

The lily-esque thing hits again, the beast in the tunnel lunges, one of them tastes Amanda's brush guided by Karen's hands, the other one hits my shield. I can feel clarity clanging through me with the resounding sound of metal on matter, and I can hear all of their breath. Usually this is where I drown in the situation. I have been drowning for near half an hour

beneath the group of them, and now, I'm still underneath a waterfall, but it's just water falling off my shoulders, no more dangerous than rain. Beneath my eyes, the light of the Diosite blinks in the distance. We've been our own worst enemy in letting him get away, and as a result, here we are, stalled in a basement.

I don't have the opportunity to screw around. With ice in my veins, and I yell, "Portal under the bigger one, now! Put the second one in the ceiling over it!"

The thing is still staggering back from a brush with purple paint when Garrett drops the floor under it. I'm a little less worried about its safety, given that I'm not sure Garrett's portals are holding out (I do not know if we would have gotten home through the last one he set), but it does appear in the ceiling and proceeds to fall endlessly, unable to move. Bits of organic matter flake away. On my right, the lily strikes again and hits the shield a second time.

CMYK's still staring up at me. Tesla says, "More like it."

"It's all yours. I can only block," I tell her.

She blasts it to a crisp.

"We're going to need to burn this thing in one go," I tell the group, about the remaining... you know what, we're still going with thing. "And unfortunately, I only know one person with that kind of firepower."

Amanda closes her eyes, which really should not be a good sign, and at last, of her own accord, sets it on fire. It burns brilliantly, which should light the rest of the room on fire at once, but it is completely enclosed by a sphere of darkness. Garrett faints directly onto my shoulder, and I struggle to hold the man up. Tesla and CMYK, the firebrands, are still standing, and we're down to just a creepy basement.

"No one's dead," I say. "That's... we're going to call that a success."

"Did we lose the signal yet?" asks Karen. She already knows that this mission is way past the point of salvaging. I already know that this mission is past the point of salvaging. "Where is he, Will?"

I stare down the tunnel. The red light that was there is gone. "Clean getaway," I say.

"Should've evacuated. Garr-- the Loop-- oh, I hate that name-- had a good point for once in his life," Tesla says. "Phantom? Hello there?"

"Think he passed out," I say. Yeah, I 'think'. I'm struggling to hold him up right now.

She walks up and lifts him right over her shoulder. She inclines her head towards the tunnel. "You two wanna... go?"

"Yes," Amanda says. "Please."

The tunnel smells worse, but it's still surprisingly stable, architecturally, given that it was made by a half-mad man who has been living out of his house, writing up conspiracy boards about true shit that sucks more than any actual mad ramblings about the end of the world and concepting for a lovely looking video game as a side hustle. I stop worrying about it collapsing on us about a few meters in, but I'm still speedwalking out of here.

"So," I say. "You and the Phantom Loop have a good mission?"

"You have a bad one?" Karen asks.

Amanda nods. She's barely visible from my shieldlight, vivid as it is, and she's got her brush dangling at her side.

"That was shit," she says. "We actually do better as two separate groups then as one bigger one."

"No wonder," I say, squinting into a distant glimmer of light. "I mean, two different schools, two different... relationships going on there..."

"We're not together. Are you together?" asks Karen.

"I'm a lesbian," Amanda says.

"Oh. Good. Never mind. Good sounds wrong. But--" Karen pauses. "He's a moron. A privileged, generally obtuse, terrified-of-his-own-shadow idiot. Don't get any ideas. Okay?"

Those are bold words coming from someone who is taking great pains to keep him comfortably secured on her shoulder. I decide not to share this sentiment aloud.

"Do you really hate him that much?" asks Amanda.

"What? No. He's honestly not even bad company, and we had fun a few days ago, it's just that-- what's that?" Amanda and I grimace as Karen pulls out into the light of a half-burned forest. The air is still, burned trunks encircle us, and many of the trees have lost leaves, others have toppled over. "Did something happen here already? Did we miss it?"

"By a while," Amanda says. "I... burned all of this down."

Karen pauses. "Oh, that kind of bad."

"Yeah," Amanda says.

"You could have killed civilians. Really irresponsible," she chides.

"Yeah," Amanda says.

"We need to communicate better, don't we?"

"Definitely," Karen says. "But we can. No, we will."

"I agree," Garrett says.

Karen drops him off her shoulder. "How long have you been awake?"

"Not... that long?" asks a stunned Garrett, shielding himself on the ground. "Figured I'd say something when we got back to the Veins."

"You're a moron," snaps Karen.

"That's not good communication, Karen, now is it?" asks Garrett. He struggles back onto his feet, which he's only able to do with Karen's help, anyways. She stomps back into the Veins, and he tries to follow, although his steps are still unsteady. "Karen!"

"We should go after them," I say as Garrett practically falls into the Veins. "They're both injured."

Amanda looks up at the trees. "Yeah."

"Thinking about something?" I look after her.

"I'm gonna hurt someone no matter what I do," she says. "Won't I?"

"Don't take it that way," I say. "You know what the right thing is to do, and you just... do it. You don't have to second-guess that."

She nods. "You're right. I should be following my heart."

"That sounds cheesy," I say. "So, so cheesy."

"So it's honest," she says with a smile. "Come on, Rosenbloom."

"Where's your heart going?" I ask her.

"Home!" she says. "I mean, hopefully nowhere, right? I need it in my chest."

I missed her smile.

They're happy to see us in the Veins, and we talk while Shiloh fixes them up, and even though Karen gripes about having Shiloh lick her better, and even though Garrett is only there because he's almost unable to stand up straight, we have a pretty great conversation about powers, wherein we decide that yeah, telekinesis is broken, because it technically contains all the other -kineses anyways, and we are pinecones spreading our seeds in an ash-coated forest, full of rich soil, and I want to believe that we can do this before things start getting worse.