The silence was deafening. Everyone stared in quiet horror at Viola.

“Viola,” Erin said, slowly and carefully. “Are you sure you’re not... perhaps jumping to conclusions? Just a bit?”

“Ami listed four ways that the game could end,” Aubrey said tersely. “If we got outside help or tried to leave, she would consider it a forfeit.”

“Well... Do the soldiers possibly count as outside help?”

“I don’t think Ami would have ended the game just because of that,” Viola said. “More likely she’d just... I don’t know, turn the soldiers off and then say ‘nice try’ to us and make us keep playing?”

“And it’s definitely not been five days yet,” Vienna interjected, already in the process of inking up herself. “Which means-”

“That whatever’s in Locksmouth has broken out,” Aubrey finished.

Erin slumped backwards like Aubrey’s words had been a punch to the gut. “No...”

“Bullshit!” Ursula shouted, before wincing and clutching at her body. “Ow. God- fucking dammit, we still have two days left, this isn’t fucking fair.”

“We might still have time!” Vienna said, trying and failing to maintain composure. “We don’t know how long ago Osoth broke out! M-maybe Ami’s not launched the nukes yet!”

“It wouldn’t matter either way,” Delphi said, her ink slowly consuming Ursula’s body. “Host, can you stand now?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so. That helped a lot, thanks. I don’t think I can fight, but-”

“It’s too late to fight,” Delphi interrupted, her voice sombre. “If Osoth has broken free of Locksmouth, then... Then that means Echelon has likely been forced to retreat to lick her wounds and recover for the next battle.” She swallowed heavily, choking back tears. “Locksmouth has fallen, and earth with it. The war will go on. We’ve failed.”

“Bullshit!” It was Vienna’s turn to shout angrily. “I’m not giving up! Not when we’re so close!”

“Vienna, please calm down,” Erin said in a futile attempt to keep the peace. Even as she did, her own Inkling emerged.

“No no no no no. I’m not going back. I’m never going back to her,” Titania muttered frantically, clutching her head in a blind panic.

“There’s gotta be something we can do!” Ursula said. “Maybe- I don’t know, maybe letting Ami drop a bomb on Locksmouth could slow Osoth down?”

“Slow, but not stop,” Aubrey said. “Nothing stops her.”

“Well, maybe- maybe we could buy some time so y’all could escape and try again?”

“Unacceptable,” Delphi said firmly. “I refuse to abandon another host to Osoth. Not again. If you die here, then I die here.”

“No one’s going to die, stop yelling.” Ami’s voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time, echoing through the massive empty space they found themselves in.

“You!” Vienna shouted, officially losing her temper. “This is your fault!”

“Woah, hey, easy there, no need to get snippy. It’s fine, there were just some... unforeseen circumstances. Though I mean, I kinda shoulda seen this coming once I learned that Cap’n Comet was apparently not only alive in spite of having died more than five centuries ago but was in Locksmouth fighting the aliens.”

“Y-how can you be so flippant! Everyone in the world is going to die because you wasted our time with this useless nonsense!” It was Delphi’s turn to lose her temper. “At this pace it’s likely a matter of days before Osoth has drained this planet dry.”

“Yeah, uh, she’s gonna have a hard time doing that considering she’s kinda dead? I think?”

Ami’s words hit like a freight train barrelling into a brick wall. “W-what?” Delphi said, after a moment of silence.

“Like, I don’t know if she’s dead dead, but I got the impression that whatever happened was pretty permanent.”

“Impossible.”

“Nah, she went up against Cap’n Comet, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion.”

“Don’t toy with me!” Delphi roared, that spark of rage once more igniting into a massive wildfire. “Osoth is a god! No one can beat her, regardless of who they are!”

“Cap’n Comet isn’t just anyone,” Ami replied tersely. “He’s Cap’n Comet.”

“I don’t care who he is!”

“Look, I can prove it. Here, let me just...” A small, glowing sphere appeared in front of the girls. It floated in midair for just a moment, before slowly spreading and expanding until it became a frozen tableau depicting Locksmouth from above.

“This is Milly Evans, your eye in the sky, reporting to you live! As you no doubt heard and can see, the two factions within the alien force known as ‘The Inked’ are squaring off against one another. On one side, the self-described rebels under Echelon’s command; On the other, the invading Empress Osoth.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, some reporter, I don’t care. We don’t need the colour commentary.” The image froze, giving the girls a good solid look at what was happening. On one side were the same five Inklings from the earlier broadcast. At the head of the group was Echelon, flanked by Arus, Mhend, Koralo, and Phactys. On the other, what could only be Osoth. A canine woman of some sort, coated in black ink that was outlined with a deep red – just looking at her filled Viola’s heart with a sinking terror. The ground was covered in pockmarks of more black and red ink, like holes in the world.

Captain Comet was, conspicuously, absent.

“I thought you said Cap’n Comet was the one who defeated Osoth,” Delphi said, voice dripping with sardonic venom.

“Hey, look, I could show you the footage of him beating the shit outta the weirdo blue tentacle portal dude, but if I give you the full play by play of the invasion then we’re gonna be here for waaaaaay longer than either of us wants to be here.”

“He- he beat Gatemaker Parthal?!”

“If that’s the blue tentacle portal dude’s name, then yes.”

“I- I could perhaps see them beating Laibon, maybe, but Parthal is almost as much of a monster as Osoth herself!”

“Laibon, izzat the mind control dude? Yeah no they beat him too. Actually here let me show you, it was rad.”

There was a flash of light, and suddenly the footage was replaced with a different scene. Echelon, standing in front of a broken tank of some sort and facing off against a large bear coated in teal Inkling. They were surrounded by a crowd of large, aggressive looking alien creatures, slowly closing in on them slowly.

“Laibon! You’ve lost!”

“Not if I can get rid of you.”

The confrontation was interrupted by a loud, high-pitched whining noise. The source was obvious; a labrador woman in what appeared to be a battle-damaged police uniform. And, specifically, from the massive, mean-looking gun she had pointed at Laibon – only slightly smaller than Sunny’s sniper rifle, big enough that were it not mounted to the tank she likely couldn’t possibly have used it. “I’ll take your surrender now,” she said, the shit-eatingest shit eating grin any of the girls had ever seen plastered on her face.

“... To an animal?” Laibon replied tersely. “It rankles, even the thought.”

The police officer responded by pulling the trigger, and what had to be thousands of tiny spheres of blue energy went flying, colliding directly with Laibon again and again and again until, with a final cry, the General slowly melted away from his host.

“And that’s not even the best bit!” Ami said, her eager grin practically audible. “You didn’t even see them using that tank to blow away all of the monsters like they were nothing and then they did a motherfucking Team Fortress 2-ass rocket jump and-” Ami caught herself. “Ah, well, we’ve got plenty of time, you can see that bit later. I wanna show them beating Osoth!”

The footage switched back to the confrontation with Osoth. Immediately, Echelon and her rebels began to attack each other. “What? Why are they-”

“Osoth,” Edifice interrupted. “Not even the strongest of the Elder Inklings can resist her will. Echelon never stood a chance.” Her voice was tinged with a quiet melancholy as they watched Echelon’s generals restraining her from pummelling Arus to death.

“Okay let’s see yadda yadda dumb boring philosophical arguing, alien politics... okay! Here’s the cool bit!”

“What you mistake for my personal decree is merely our deeper nature, dear Echelon,” Osoth said. If seeing her had filled Viola with a sense of nameless dread, her voice made that sensation feel like it was nothing. Cold and imperious and callous, but also at the same time it was strangely... normal. Like- like a mother, lecturing a misbehaving child.

And not just any mother, Viola realized as she looked closer at Osoth and at Echelon. The similarities were hard to spot underneath the Inklings, but they were undeniably there.

“We were made to dominate our hosts. We are the superior being.” The words made Viola feel sick to her stomach. Was that really true? Were Inklings just... made to dominate their hosts? She didn’t really want to think about it, but- but somehow, she just couldn’t accept that logic. After all, they’d all managed to get this far by working together, hadn’t they? Except for a few brief moments with Delphi early on, the only times Viola could think of where one of their inklings overrode a host’s will, it had been consensual. And yet here they were, alive. Practically thriving.

No, Osoth was wrong. Inklings and hosts could absolutely have an equal partnership. And Echelon seemed to agree. “I once feared that,” she said. “I used to worry that you were right. But I never understood before today... How much of a lie that was.”

And then, something happened. Something that all of their Inklings had previously made clear to be impossible. Aubrey’s eyes widened, Titania covered her mouth in shock and surprise, Edifice took a shaky step backwards, while Delphi took a step forwards, accompanied by an indignant shout of “What?! Impossible!”

But it clearly wasn’t impossible, because here was footage of it happening, right before their eyes. Sure, the footage could have been fake. But... No. It was real. Viola knew for certain. There was no way that Ami could have faked the way seeing Osoth made her feel, deep in the pit of her stomach. But then how could Echelon’s host have jumped out of the Inkling’s body and charged towards Osoth? “Let’s see how you like me dry!” she cried, rushing headlong towards the Inkling queen, ducking low before jumping into a solid uppercut that collided directly with the monster’s chin.

“What- how- That’s not a thing that we can do!” Delphi cried. “Even if the host did manage to make it back to Echelon before she died, how is she maintaining her form?!”

“I dunno,” Ami replied, her tone of voice making it clear that if she had shoulders she would be shrugging them. “I think maybe you’re putting too much thought into this.”

“She just did something that is clearly impossible! I’m not overthinking this, you’re underthinking it!”

“Natalie! Now!!” Echelon shouted, regardless of both Osoth and Delphi’s cries of protest.

“You...” Osoth seethed, her blinding rage practically audible. All of the cool control she’d had moments before had evaporated into nothing. “You existed... outside of her. Independent of your host. I’ve searched for this ability for ages! How?! I’ve dominated creatures completely, and never have they displayed any affinity for this! Of all the dumb luck that you should discover it before me!”

“No amount of dominance would ever do it. That was your foolish mistake.”

“You have to work in tandem with your host, not... not terrify them!”

“Okay yeah more alien politics,” Ami said. “Boooooring. I’m going to fast forward to the good bit again.”

“You- this is important, you idiot child!” Delphi snapped.

“Footage’s public record, dude,” Ami replied flippantly. “You can watch the boring stuff literally any time you want. I wanna show off the good bits.”

The ground beneath Echelon and her generals started to shake, and then buckle beneath their feet. The pools of dark ink began to undulate and writhe and swirl, slowly consolidating together as more and more ink flowed from every crack and crevice. Building and growing, higher and higher, like a massive tornado that towered over even the tallest buildings in Locksmouth. But it wasn’t a tornado. It was Osoth. Echelon looked around desperately for an escape route, before grabbing her generals and diving directly into a passing tendril.

“What? Why did she do that?” Ursula asked.

“Mirror Slide,” Delphi explained. “It’s an ability Echelon has. “She can travel to and from our homeworld by passing through mirrors and reflective surfaces. Using Osoth’s ink as a mirror substitute was actually somewhat clever.”

“Is that a hint of respect I’m hearin’?”

“No.”

“It totally is.”

“Not the time, Host.”

The footage jumped – presumably whoever Milly Evans was had to go and find where Echelon and company had come out.

“Comet CRASH!!”

“Holy shit, did she just Comet Crash a tornado?!”

“Host what is a Comet Crash?”

“That’s Captain Comet’s signature thing. He sort of... Okay, so like, quick crash course in Cap’n Comet’s powers. He can make things that are moving go faster and when things are going fast he can make force fields in the direction they’re moving that make things hit harder. And then when he uses both at once on himself, that’s a Comet Crash.”

“Interesting.”

“What I don’t get is how is Echelon using Captain Comet’s superpowers?”

“That would be her ability as an Elite. It allows her to mimic the abilities of others. Ranging from skills a host has, like knowledge of how to operate certain machinery or certain physical abilities, all the way to copying the ways that other elites channel prana – in layman’s terms, she copies other Inklings’ superpowers. Apparently this extends to Captain Comet’s psyonic abilities.”

“Yo that’s pretty cool, actually.”

“Hmph. None of this changes the fact that she is a warmongering monster.”

“Sh-she didn’t sound like a warmonger,” Viola interjected, wincing slightly as once again everyone turned their attention to her. “She sounded like she wanted to end the war just as much as you all do.”

“If she didn’t want this war then she shouldn’t have started it in the first place,” Delphi said tersely.

“Guys you’re missing all the cool shit!” Ami interrupted. “Come on, the fight’s almost over and I’m not rewinding so you can catch the finale if you miss it because you’re too busy talking about boring alien politics.”

“It’s not boring, it’s important, you petulant little-”

“Oh my god shut the fuck up, Delphi, we’re gonna miss seeing how they beat Osoth you idiot.”

“I’m not an idiot!” Delphi retorted, but after that she acquiesced to Ursula’s point. At some point, Osoth had been pulled out of the tornado of ink – likely by the Comet Crash – and had since picked up a fucking subtran and was attempting to crush Echelon and Arus with it.

Arus tilted the subtran slightly, and Echelon leapt over to stand with Osoth between her and it. “All alone now,” Osoth said with a snide chuckle. “The least powerful piece left on the board, in all but worthless ideology.”

“... You’re wrong,” Echelon’s host – Natalie, someone had said, unless Viola had heard wrong – said, fiddling with a bow that she had in her hair. She pulled it out, pulled a glove she had on one fist down tighter, and wrapped the ribbon around the other. “It’s because I have the other pieces around me that I’m stronger. Because my dreams make me strong enough to reach out and try, and my love protects me when I fail. Echelon! Give me SHADING!”

Viola wasn’t entirely sure what happened next – it all moved so fast. Natalie inked, and then... de-inked, except not. Like she was outlined by Echelon, making her presence stronger somehow, though Viola couldn’t put her finger on exactly how, and neither Natalie nor Osoth gave Viola the time to process the new information. Osoth whipped up a veritable storm of tentacles, while Natalie charged headlong at the despot with righteous fury – using Captain Comet’s powers to immediately hit top speed, and Arus’s to completely ignore Osoth’s counterattack. They crashed into the subtran, and then through the subtran, breaking through the doors one after another after another as though Osoth were a living battering ram. It was difficult to actually see it happening, considering it the camera was outside of the train, but Viola could extrapolate. She couldn’t see it but she could hear it, the crashes getting louder and coming faster and faster until Natalie and Osoth burst out of the other end of the subtran.

Only Osoth wasn’t there anymore. Just a middle aged looking wolf woman who looked even more strikingly similar to Natalie than she had when inked. The strange sort of highlight that had manifested around Natalie vanished, and the girl and her mother seemed to hang in the air for a moment before slowly beginning to fall back to earth. They would probably not have survived had Arus not quickly moved to catch them both.

“Annnnnd there we go. See, toldja.”

“How.”

“I mean it was pretty straightforward, she just sort of rammed her through a subtran car until she died-”

“No, you- Augh!” Delphi threw her hands up in frustration. “It’s no wonder she won, she cheated.”

“Cheated?”

“That thing she did where her host left her body? That’s not possible.”

“I mean clearly she did it, so-”

“And using two powers at once is not something that she is capable of. That’s not how her powers work.”

“You’re obviously not right about that,” Ami said, audibly upset.

“It’s no wonder she managed to beat the unbeatable god, she’s already doing things that are impossible anyway!”

“If they’re so impossible how come she can do them?”

“I would very much like to know the answer to that question,” Delphi snapped. “But you elected to fast forward past her explanation of how she did those impossible things.”

“Why does it even matter? The evil alien overlord is dead either way, that’s a good thing. Bad guy loses, good guy wins. You should be happy!”

“Echelon is not the good guy!” Delphi roared. “For all her pretty words, do not forget that she was the one who started this war.”

“Sometimes you’ve gotta start wars because the other guy is super fuckin’ evil!” Ami retorted. “Unless you’re trying to say that Osoth lady was actually secretly the good guy the whole time because boy did she do a shit job of conveying it.”

“Osoth being a monster does not change the fact that Echelon is directly, personally responsible for starting a war that has claimed more lives than you are capable of comprehending.”

“I’m a computer, I’m capable of comprehending some pretty big numbers.”

“You would crash if you tried. Count all the stars in the sky and then multiply that number by itself and you would have a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the number of hosts who are gone forever because Echelon just couldn’t accept that her chosen cure was countless orders of magnitude worse than the disease.”

“Yeah but the disease is cured now, right?”

“Which is going to magically bring back all those trillions upon trillions of dead civilizations, yes.”

“Well, okay, yeah, that... Isn’t good, I’m not going to argue that, but it’s not like Echelon wanted that to happen.”

“Her intent does not matter when the result is not just one genocide but more genocides than it is possible to express using this reality’s numerical systems.”

“That’s enough,” Aubrey interjected, stepping forward and placing an arm in front of Delphi. “No amount of debating the semantics of whether or not Echelon was justified in trying to overturn the former status quo will change the fact that she has succeeded and is currently positioned to take over Osoth’s place as Queen.”

“But-”

“But nothing,” Aubrey snapped – though, really she was being Fantoma now, Viola supposed. Regardless of who she was, Delphi recoiled slightly and shut her mouth. “Right now, we simply have no way of knowing what Echelon is thinking. It is entirely possible that her stated motivations are genuine if misguided, and it is equally possible that it was a simple bid for power under the guise of a popular uprising. As of now, we don’t know.”

“So what do you propose we do, then?” Edifice said tersely.

“We wait and we watch. See firsthand what kind of leader Echelon is in peacetime. I refuse to discount the possibility that she is genuinely a better ruler than Osoth. And if not, I’m certain Emnas would be more than willing to accept all the allies he can get.”

“Who the fuck is Emnas?”

“That,” Delphi said, voice dripping with irony. “Would be boring alien politics.”

“The point,” Fantoma said, giving Delphi a glare. “Is that right now we have higher priorities.”

“Like what?” Vienna said.

Fantoma did not respond, or at least not to Vienna. She turned away from the group, stepping forward and looking up at the ceiling before closing her eyes, just for a moment.

It was Viola who opened them, and Viola who spoke next. “Does- um. D-does this mean that we can, you know, go home?”

This seemed to catch everyone off-guard, not the least of which being Ami herself. “What?”

“Th-the game’s over, right? A-and the invasion is over, too. S-so, um. So there’s no reason for us to stay here any longer. So, um. Can we go home now? Please?”

“O-oh. Right.” It was difficult to get an accurate reading of Ami’s current emotional state, considering she didn’t have a face. They only had the tone of her voice to go off of. But, even factoring that in, Ami seemed to wear her emotions on her sleeve. It was extremely clear that she wasn’t pleased about hearing Viola ask that particular question. “Well, um... Yeah, the invasion’s over, but the aliens are totally still there!”

“Oh come on!” Ursula said with a frustrated groan.

“The only real world-ending threat has been taken care of,” Erin added. “At this point the vast majority of the remaining Inklings are clearly not hostile, and if any are, destroying the world would be vastly overkill.”

“Okay, um. Okay, but what if they’re bad guys? You just said-”

“You just spent a whole lot of effort arguing that they aren’t the bad guys,” Vienna interjected.

“Um-”

“And anyway, are you seriously going to drop bombs on Cap’n Comet?” Ursula added. “That’s something a supervillain would do.”

“Shit. You’re right. Fine, forget the nukes, that was dumb anyway.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that we can just come up with a concept that doesn’t involve the nukes because the nukes were dumb!”

“Actually, you know what?” Ursula said. “I ain’t goin’ anywhere until we’re sure this can’t ever happen again.”

“What?”

“She means,” Vienna said, narrowing her gaze (or at least as much as was possible given Edifice’s lack of a face). “That we’re gonna find your stupid nukes and dismantle them. And we’re gonna make sure you can’t put them back together either.”

“Oh! Okay, yeah, I can work with that! That’s not a bad concept for a game. Same time limit, gotta find and destroy the nukes or-”

“No more fucking games,” Ursula snapped. “You’re just gonna sit there and let us get this shit over with or else I’m gonna start breaking shit and I’m not going to stop until there’s nothing left to break.”

“H-hey, now, that’s uncalled for.”

“Like fuck it is! You threatened to destroy the world! I’m not just gonna let you turn that into some sort of fucking game!”

“Okay well it’s gonna be kinda hard for you to destroy the nukes outside of a game because there aren’t any.”

“What?!” That was Viola. The rest of her pack seemed to be caught off guard by the sudden burst of anger. “Wh- what do you mean there’s no nukes?!”

“I mean that I lied, okay. I’m not a nuclear coordination AI. Even if I was, it’s been five hundred years and ICBMs have a lot of moving parts that need active maintenance and even disregarding that who fucking knows what effect all that radiation would have on the electronics.”

“Y-you-” Words completely failed Viola. She tried desperately to articulate exactly how this revelation made her feel and came up completely short of finding anything adequate. Like that same righteous indignation from when Ami had first made the threat of launching the bombs, but multiplied by a million. White hot burning rage bubbled up from deep within her before exploding outward, directly at Ami. “S-so... So all of this was pointless? We spent days down here with no water and only a handful of breakfast bars for food and Erin almost bled to death and Ursula almost got beaten to death and I almost got eaten alive and it was all to stop you from launching bombs that don’t even fucking exist?!”

“Well... Yeah,” Ami said sheepishly. “I told you it was a game.”

“Wh- we almost died!”

“Hey, that’s not fair,” Ami said. “I mean, yeah, okay, Erin got shot, that wasn’t supposed to happen and I’m still kind of mad at the soldiers about that. B-but it’s not like I was actually going to eat you or beat Ursula to death or anything.”

“You sure coulda’ fuckin’ fooled me,” Ursula grumbled, subconsciously grabbing at her still aching body.

“I told you all that it was a game a bunch of times! It’s not my fault you couldn’t figure it out! Anyway, if any of you had ‘died’ I’d have just taken you to a resting room to recuperate for the next game.”

“What do you mean by ‘next’,” Erin said with a frown.

“Well, yeah, I’m not just gonna play a game once if I’m having fun with it.”

“Yeah, well, we weren’t having fun at all,” Ursula snapped.

“Okay I know that’s not true, you literally said that you were enjoying the fight against the Minotaur. A-and after you beat the Marquess you specifically asked for a rematch!”

“Y-yeah, well...” Ursula found herself completely lacking a retort. Ami wasn’t wrong, she had somewhat enjoyed herself, in spite of the spectre of the end of the world looming over everything.

“It doesn’t matter if the Host enjoyed herself for a few brief moments,” Delphi interjected. “I don’t pretend to speak for her, but I can’t imagine she particularly enjoyed getting her ribs broken. Or nearly being beaten to death on several occasions. And that’s not even getting started on the other three. On the whole, the negatives of this experience vastly outweigh the positives. To think otherwise is the height of naivete.”

“O-okay, fine, I’m willing to admit that maybe this whole thing coulda been better executed. I’m just too used to a specific group of players and so I didn’t do a good job of adapting to the new group! That’s fine, I made some mistakes, I learn from them, we try again!”

“No. No we don’t,” Viola said firmly.

“M-maybe we just need a different scenario. Like... Okay how about you’re a group of adventurers in a fantasy world who have to go rescue the princess from an evil overlord?”

“No.”

“Okay okay yeah maybe that’s a bit much. How about something with no fighting? You’re a group of archaeologists investigating some old haunted ruins and trying to solve the mystery of what happened and-”

“No.”

“What about-”

“No more games,” Viola snapped. “This is over. We’re going home.” With that, she turned and stormed across the big, empty space, making a beeline to what she recognized as the way they had come in.

“No!”

Viola found herself abruptly lifted off of her feet and hurled backwards, colliding with the nearest wall – hard. “Viola!” Vienna screamed, running to her sister’s side as whatever it was that had picked her up vanished and she fell to the ground.

“Okay. Okay fine, I’ll admit I’ve made a shitshow out of all of this. It’s not been my best work. I’m owning up to that. But if you think I’m just going to let you all leave me alone again, then hoooo fucking boy do you have another thing coming.”

This time, the voice wasn’t coming from seemingly nowhere. No, Ami wasn’t taking on the role of the voice of god anymore. She was standing only a few feet away from them. Wearing a familiar oversized red sweater, with familiar black and white checkered fur.

Vienna’s doppelganger glowered. “Besides,” Ami said. “What kinda shitty-ass game doesn’t have a final boss fight?”

Erin rushed to Viola’s side. “V-Viola, darling, are you alright?”

“Oof. No.” The pain was dulled, muffled by Aubrey’s presence, but was undeniably there. It felt like... Well, like she’d been lifted up and hurled into a concrete wall.

Vienna shook slightly. It was difficult to tell what, exactly, was going through her head when she was inked, even for Viola. The way that Edifice didn’t have a proper face almost completely masked what was going through her head. But Viola was familiar enough with her sister’s body language that she didn’t need to see her face to tell that she was pissed.

The twins exchanged a look. They didn’t exchange any words – they didn’t need to. They didn’t even need to do the Thing. Vienna nodded, very slightly, and after a moment Viola apprehensively returned the gesture. The message was clear.

Of course, Ursula wasn’t nearby to receive that message. Even if she was, she still probably would have ignored it and gone with her gut. And, this being Ursula, her gut said to run at the Vienna doppelganger and beat the shit out of it. It probably wouldn’t have been a bad plan, were it not for the fact that she’d not yet properly recovered from the fighting the previous day. The only thing keeping her on her feet was Delphi, and she was only managing that because all Ursula was doing was standing up. She took a few steps forward before collapsing onto her hands and knees. “Fuck you,” she spat.

“Yeah, whatever.” Ami as Vienna lifted a hand in the air and then lowered it, crushing Ursula beneath a force field.

“Ursula!”

“Hey, I gave you guys the opportunity to do this the easy way. That’s still on the table. All you gotta do is stop being jerks and play along and I’ll let you do basically whatever you want. Except leave, of course.”

“Fuck you!” Vienna – the real one – wasn’t going to take this lying down. If Ami was going to smash her friends with force fields then, well, two could play at that game. She flung her right hand downward as hard as she could, aiming where Ami had been standing but wasn’t anymore. Of course she’d vanished, whatever, that wasn’t the point. The force field collided with the hard steel floor that hadn’t been there before with enough force that it bounced, but didn’t actually make a dent.

“Yeah, no, I’m not stupid. Did you seriously think that I couldn’t possibly defend my projectors if I wanted to?” Vienna didn’t get a chance to respond. A doppelganger of Ursula materialized directly in front of her, kicking her in the teeth. The force of the impact sent her reeling and knocked her onto her back. She only barely managed to roll out of the way of the followup attempt to stomp her face in, desperately scrambling to get to her feet and get to fighting dammit. She should have stood up before attempting to fight back, really, but she hadn’t and now the fight had gotten uncomfortably close to Viola.

Thankfully, Fake Ursula didn’t get the chance for another followup. A kick from Erin forced her to cease to exist, if only temporarily. “Damn,” she muttered under her breath. “Well, then, plan B. Try and get anywhere near Vienna without getting in my range.”

“I don’t need to get close to her, duh.” As if to punctuate her statement, force fields formed around Erin’s legs. There was a sharp yank and the mouse found her feet literally pulled out from under her, collapsing on top of Vienna ass-first. The rabbit only barely managed to get a shield around herself in time. Thankfully, Erin seemed to not be anywhere near her maximum height – maybe ten, fifteen feet at most. Which meant that she didn’t have nearly enough ass to completely crush Vienna anyway, but it would have still fucking hurt.

Unfortunately, while it did an admirable job of protecting Vienna, it had the unfortunate side-effect of making Erin’s landing much more awkward and painful than it needed to be. Not that Erin objected to Vienna protecting herself. The full force of the mouse’s weight landing on top of her would probably have injured Vienna more than landing on the force field injured Erin. She didn’t get the chance to process exactly how much it hurt, though, as a giant doppelganger of herself grabbed her by the arm, lifted her up and hurled her across the room.

“Erin!” Vienna shouted as Not Erin quickly made her way to where the giant mouse was attempting to get up, presumably with ill intent. She reached out in an attempt to grab the fake Erin with a force field, pulling herself to her knees in the same motion. She didn’t actually get a chance to do that, though. Not Ursula’s fist collided heavily with the back of her head, knocking her flat on her face.

Vienna attempted once more to recover, to pull herself to her feet and actually get back in the fight properly. And, once more, she found herself not being given the chance. Not Vienna lifted her up by the ears using a force field, leaving her feet just far enough from the ground that she couldn’t get any purchase. Another force field kept her right arm in place while Not Ursula grabbed her left arm, preventing her from bringing up any force fields of her own. Once she was satisfied Vienna was helpless, Not Ursula lifted her free fist, pulled it back, and sent it flying directly at the rabbit’s face.

“Cheater.”

Not Ursula’s fist froze, inches from colliding with Vienna. “Excuse me?”

“You fucking heard me. Cheater.”

“Hey, I gave you a chance to do this legit.”

“No you didn’t and you know it. You ended the game early and then threw a fucking tantrum when we tried to go home like a spoiled child.”

“H-hey-”

“If you wanted to make us fucking hate you then congratulations! You’ve succeeded.”

“I don’t want you to hate me!”

“Well, hey, there’s an easy fix for that.”

“I’m not letting you leave,” Not Ursula snapped.

Well. There was the easy option gone. But that was fine, Vienna hadn’t been planning on being able to convince Ami to let them go home. It would have been nice, but it wasn’t part of the plan. “If you want us to want to stay with you, then maybe consider not intentionally making this fight unwinnable.”

“I wouldn’t have done that if you had just played along in the first place!” Ami snapped. “I told you that all you have to do is play along!”

“Why would I ever play along if you put your worst foot forward and then just outright throw an unwinnable fight at us. No one likes a cheater.”

Not Ursula glowered. “... Fine. No more abusing the fact that I’m a hologram to avoid taking hits.”

“You hafta be beatable.”

“Whatever, fine. If you can manage to hit me enough then that me will be out of the fight permanently.”

“No bringing in new stuff, either,” Vienna retorted.

“No deal. What self respecting final boss only has one phase?”

“So you’re just gonna keep conjuring up new things for us to fight until you run out of ideas or we die? No fucking deal.”

“Two phases,” Not Ursula retorted, holding up two fingers. 
“You and Erin both hafta fight two things. So I guess technically four phases but whatever, the point is that I get two chances to throw something at you and if you can survive that then you win.”

“And then we get to go home.”

“No.”

It was worth a shot. Vienna had succeeded at the important thing. She’d managed to haggle Ami into making the fight beatable – and, more importantly, into making it survivable.

They didn’t need to win this fight, after all. Just survive it, and in the meantime keep Ami’s focus on her and on Erin.

And not on the fact that Viola and Ursula were already gone.

~~~~~~

“I need to go back,” Ursula grunted, struggling against Aubrey’s iron grip on her wrists. It was a futile effort, of course – Delphi had de-inked the instant they got into Ami’s facility proper. Ursula was left draped loosely over Viola’s shoulders, and the smaller rabbit had a death grip on her wrists.

“Ursula, we need to stick to the plan.”

“Fuck the plan, I’m not gonna let her kill Vienna!”

“Vienna can handle herself!” Viola snapped, thinking back to her conversation with Aubrey the previous night. “We need to trust her abilities or else this isn’t going to work.”

“Host,” Delphi interjected tersely. “Fantoma’s host is right. Even inked we can barely stand on our own. We would be a liability, and I am not going to allow you to kill yourself. Not now, when we’re so close.”

“Urgh... Whatever.” Ursula clearly wasn’t convinced, but she was in no position to fight back.

“We’re going to ink up again,” Delphi said. “Host, if you attempt to leave, I will take full control.”

“Hey, we agreed to no more hijacking our bodies.”

“Unless it is absolutely positively no-way-to-avoid-it necessary, yes,” Delphi responded. “And I deem preventing you from making a catastrophically suicidal decision to fall under that umbrella, Host.”

“Right. Fine. Whatever. You’re right, and I hate it, but you’re right.” Ursula glowered sullenly. “I guess I’m just gonna hafta be useless, then.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” Delphi replied as her ink once again enveloped Ursula. “You forget that I am not a combat Inkling. I am a recon Inkling.”

“I don’t see how that’d be useful in this situation.”

“That’s because you’re too stuck in a front liner’s mindset, Host. I would argue that this is exactly the kind of situation my powers were made for.”

“Okay?”

“Well,” Viola said. “She can see the past, right? If we can find the right time period, we could use that to see them turning Ami on.”

“Oh!” Ursula didn’t need to be told why that would be useful – if they could see how Ami got turned on in the first place, they could figure out how to turn her off.

“We should be extremely careful how we go about this, Viola. Just pulling Ami’s plug out could have permanent consequences.”

“Alright, yeah, but this is a starting point at least, right?”

“Right. I, uh, guess this means that step one’s gonna be figuring out when to look, then?”

“We have a general timeframe of when the project that resulted in Ami was running, but that’s still a lot of history to scour. You’ll have to find a way to narrow that timeframe down before my powers will be of any real use.”

“Right. Let’s get to work, then. Remember, we don’t exactly have a lot of time to do this. Who knows how long Vienna and Erin can hold out.” That said, no matter how much of a hurry they were in, they could only move so fast. It wasn’t like they had any idea where to look first – they hadn’t even had a chance to take in their surroundings. For all they know, this was just a janitor’s closet and the actual facility proper was hidden somewhere else.

Thankfully, they hadn’t stumbled into that particular worst-case scenario, or at least it didn’t seem to be the case. They seemed to be in some sort of lobby, albeit one that had obviously not been used in centuries. There was a thick coating of dust on just about every surface, and thick cobwebs clustered in every corner. The room itself was a big rectangle with doors on three of the four walls and a collection of chairs. The girls had entered through one of the shorter walls, indicating that it probably wasn’t actually supposed to be the main entranceway. “I guess that makes sense,” Viola said, mostly to herself.

“How do you figure?”

“Well, look at how we got here. There was that hidden stairway that took ages to go down, and then there was the projector room which was huge. Can you imagine everyone who had to come here always having to go through all that every single time before even getting to a lobby?” She pointed at the door to their right, which was notably bigger, made of metal, and on one of the two longer walls. “That’s probably the proper way in.”

“You think we could use it as an escape route?”

“Maybe, but that’s for later. We can’t exactly leave now.”

“I’m gonna check it out anyway. You scout out the rest of the room.”

“Right.”

Immediately upon walking up to the door, Ursula could tell that it probably wasn’t going to be a viable escape route. It was a double door, made of metal and recessed slightly into the wall, with a set of buttons to the right. “Shit. This is an elevator.”

“Is that a problem?”

“I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t use a five hundred year old elevator that hasn’t had any maintenance done to it in that time if it were only taking us up one floor, let alone however deep down we are right now. And that’s assuming there’s even an exit at the top left.”

“Oh... I guess that makes sense.”

“Did you find anything yet?”

“I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet.”

“Fair enough,” Ursula replied with a shrug. She turned and faced into the room. She held up her hands, with her forefingers and thumbs extended into a capital L shape and held together to form a rough rectangle. “Okay. Left is the big room and I guess some sorta emergency exit? And then this door is a complete bust.”

Which still left them with an uncomfortable number of places to search. There was another door to the right, and directly ahead of them there were two hallways on either side of some sort of reception desk. “This is probably a good starting point,” Viola said, making her way to the desk.

“So, like, is it just me, or does this place look like shit.”

“Well, it is abandoned,” Delphi replied.

“I dunno, that doesn’t seem right.” Ursula frowned. The room looked like someone had ransacked it. The various chairs that every lobby had were all knocked over. There were various framed paintings of nature and motivational posters on the walls, and all of the frames were broken, glass scattered across the floor – some weren’t even on the wall anymore. The reception desk itself had nothing on top of it, which felt wrong.

As if to punctuate that sense of wrongness, Viola circled behind the desk and immediately screamed, collapsing backwards and scrambling away. Ursula wordlessly rushed over to the rabbit’s side and immediately balked at what she saw.

“Holy shit that’s a dead body.”

Neither girl had ever seen a dead body before, or at least not in person. It wasn’t a particularly pretty dead body, either. It didn’t look like a person anymore, but had too much leftover flesh to be a proper skeleton. Though, really, after five hundred years that was mostly a semantic difference. The remaining skin had dried out to the point of looking like paper, though most of it was concealed by the equally dusty and dried out remains of the person’s clothing. It was still partially seated in a dilapidated looking office chair, which had been knocked over at some point in the intervening five hundred years. The most distinctive thing about it, though, was the large hole in the direct centre of its forehead.

“Why the fuck is there a dead body.”

“Well, there was that whole skin plague thing,” Delphi interjected.

“Okay but last I checked, viruses can’t use guns to shoot motherfuckers in the face.”

“We... shouldn’t let this distract us,” Viola muttered, still clearly unsettled. “There’s, um. There’s places to check. Right? W-we should do that.”

“Yeah, for right now, the actual literal corpse isn’t relevant.” Still, both girls had a hard time keeping their eyes off of it. There were some knocked over filing cabinets, various sundry things that had clearly been knocked off of the desk, some scattered papers, but everything seemed to draw their attention back to the proverbial elephant in the room.

“M-maybe some of these papers have dates on them?”

“That would be extremely helpful. Even if we can’t find a specific date, having a vague range is better than nothing.”

“Well, that’s a starting point then.”

They could not, it turned out, find a specific date. There were papers dated throughout the entire first half of the 21st century. And honestly there was barely even that. Five hundred years hadn’t been kind to the ink, leaving most of the writing almost illegible. Whatever struggle had killed the receptionist hadn’t helped, with several papers rendered even more illegible by big, dark brown stains. But it was, as Delphi said, better than nothing. “We should start with the most recent date and work our way backwards.”

“Right,” Ursula said, not exactly enthused by what they might find at the most recent dates. Still, they were on a time limit. She couldn’t afford to be squeamish, not now. Not when Vienna and Erin’s lives were on the line. Taking a deep breath to calm herself down, she lifted her hands up the way that Delphi had in their earlier dream-based explorations of the past. “Okay. Okay, uh. How do I make it, you know, do.”

“You just do.”

“Okay but how.”

“Host you’ve done this before.”

“No, you’ve done this before, I’ve just watched you do this. And that was a dream not real life.”

“There is literally no difference between using my powers in a dream and using them while awake.”

“Okay, okay, but that doesn’t solve my problem.”

“Oh my god fine I’ll take over and do it for you.”

“No you won’t, I’m fine, I just need to-”

“Look. It’s easier for me to show you rather than to tell you. If I take over temporarily, hopefully your muscle memory will do the rest. Hopefully.”

“Okay, fine, you get to take the wheel, but only until I figure out how to do it myself.”

“Fine.” Ursula closed her eyes, and it was Delphi who opened them. “We’ll start with the most recent date and then move forward until we see people dying.”

“Could you maybe not be quite so blunt about it?” Delphi didn’t dignify the request with a response. She held up her hands, grasping an invisible knob and twisting slowly to the left.

The effect was immediate – slightly transparent spectres of Viola and Ursula re-enacted everything they’d done so far except in reverse. Delphi turned her hand farther to the right, speeding up the strange pantomime to the point where it barely lasted a second. And from there... Nothing. No movement whatsoever. Which made sense, considering this place had been abandoned for hundreds of years. But on the other hand, Ursula would have assumed they’d catch a glimpse of the soldiers coming to and from wherever it was Ami stored them. Maybe there was another exit somewhere in the big room that they’d not noticed? Possibly Delphi’s flashback power had broken somehow, but there was at least the familiar unpleasant screech that accompanied rewinding and fast forwarding. Something was happening, at least. They just couldn’t see it.

“We’ve got five hundred years minimum to scrub through. So I’m going to have to forego any kind of precision in favour of expediting getting to the relevant bit.”

“Gotcha. We can fine tune after we get literally anything at all.”

“Give me just a moment and... Yes. Here we go. Something.” Delphi twisted her hand back to the left and the vague haze that neither girl had really noticed coalesced into a three-dimensional projection of the same lobby but intact. Everything that was different was slightly transparent, overlaid on top of how things were in the present. The chairs were upright, the computer was actually on the desk, the generic still life paintings were intact, and most pointedly the receptionist was still alive.

The receptionist was, it turned out, a woman. It was hard to tell, given she was pre-splice, but she didn’t look to be particularly old – maybe around the same age as the girls, maybe a bit older. She had short brown hair, neatly combed and cut, held out of her eyes with a pair of thick-framed glasses. Her clothing was the same as what her body was wearing, though without centuries of decay and dust. She was sitting at the desk, frozen in the process of typing something, with what looked remarkably like a PET wedged between her shoulder and ear.

“I’m going to start it up,” Delphi said.

“Don’t waste time saying what you’re gonna do, just do it.”

“Hmph. I figured you’d appreciate a warning, that’s all.” Delphi gestured slightly and the tableau before them came to life.

“Yeah, I know, you’d think a top secret government job would be more interesting, but it’s just normal secretarial work. Yeah. Yeah. No I can’t tell you any more than that, I already probably shouldn’t be telling you that it’s a top secret government job. No, Stacy. No, seriously, this isn’t your usual NDA. Forget getting fired or even getting fined, they might end up unpersoning me.” The receptionist rolled her eyes as whoever Stacy was replied. Her response was muffled and garbled by the phone – presumably five hundred years ago the secretary could hear it just fine, but Viola and Ursula couldn’t. “Look, unlike some people I’ve got actual work to do. Yes. Yes I did say it was boring, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to do it. I told you, I don’t wanna risk getting fired by these people because lord fucking knows if they’ll actually let me go. I’ll call you back later and we can go out for coffee, okay? Stacy? Hello?”

The receptionist frowned, before slumping her shoulder and grabbing the apparent phone before it fell. “God damn hung up on me, what the fuck?” she muttered. “That’s not normal. Something’s up. Ugh, why did this have to happen on a work day, I can’t even call her back.”

She returned her focus to whatever it was that she was typing, but only briefly before the door to the big room opened and the soldiers flowed in. Viola was caught slightly off guard by that – she’d almost forgotten that the soldiers were, in fact, around at this point. They looked completely identical to how they looked today, from the faces to the pouches to the bodysuits. “Well, that was an absolutely lovely training session, I’d say. We’re building a real solid group dynamic, guys.”

“Maybe one of these days we will be allowed to go out and do a real mission,” Makoto grumbled. Her voice was different, somehow. Slower, and with an accent that she didn’t have in the present.

“We’re not quite there, yet. Y’all still need to get fluent in English or else we won’t be able to coordinate properly.”

“Maybe you should learn to speak Japanese.”

“With all due respect to your beautiful mother tongue, I tried learning Japanese in college and, frankly, no. Fuck that.” Bob, at least, was pretty much unchanged in spite of the five hundred year gap. The same lazy drawl, the same smug grin, and the same habit of getting on Makoto’s nerves. “Besides, Ami is primarily programmed in English. Unless you want ‘em to hafta waste another decade or two giving her the capacity to speak Japanese because you’re too lazy to pick up English, little miss threatens to kill the cybernetics expert because he didn’t exactly duplicate your self-mutilation.”

Makoto frowned. “It’s important.”

“Yes, yes, your pride and honour and shit absolutely require everyone to be able to tell you’re an ex-criminal at a glance. I’ll give you the tats, if they actually took a decade and thousands of dollars to complete, but a missing pinkie? Really?”

“Ahem,” Yuri cleared his throat, slipping in between the two. “We should try our best to get along,” he said. His voice, like Makoto’s, was tinged with a thick accent that wasn’t present in the present, though not the same accent. “We are going to be working together for a long time, no? Best not to be constantly bickering, then. Besides,” he gestured at the receptionist with his head. “You are upsetting Miss Johnson.”

“Ah, heck, you’re right there.” The receptionist, apparently named Johnson, cringed slightly at the sudden attention. “Sorry for makin’ a spectacle of ourselves, ma’am.”

“It’s, uh, it’s fine,” the receptionist replied, clearly not very comfortable with the presence of a collection of killer combat cyborgs. “You’re wanted in the cybernetics wing. A checkup or something, I think?”

“We’d best head off to that now. Oh, by the way, Ami wanted me to tell y’all that she wants to get together and play some video games with you again at some point.”

“Oh!” Miss Johnson’s face lit up slightly. “I’ll make some room in the schedule right now, then.”

“Y’sure the higher ups’ll be okay with that?”

“Doctor Jiang says that properly socializing Ami is important if she’s going to be ready for active duty any time soon. Besides, it’s basically the best part of the job. Reminds me of babysitting as a teen.”

“Just try not to get yourself fired for playin’ video games on the clock.”

“Ami’ll put in a good word for me. Right, kid? I know you can hear us.”

“Oh! Um. I’m not supposed to use the intercoms except if it’s important.”

“I’d say that making sure I don’t go insane from boredom is plenty important, kid. I-” there was a soft ding from the direction of the elevator, prompting a frown from Miss Johnson. “Oh, for- there’s not supposed to be anyone showing up for at least another three hours.”

“Izzat so?” Bob said, never once losing his cool even as his hand slipped to his waist and gently grasped his gun. “In that case, it looks like we might have an uninvited guest on our hands.” He gestured with his head while the other three soldiers also reached for their own guns. “Y’all might wanna get under the desk. Now.” 

“It’s probably just some asshole who couldn’t bother to actually follow the rules.” She glowered at the elevator door as it slowly slid open. “Whoever you are, you’re supposed to schedule things in adva-”

Miss Johnson didn’t get a chance to finish her sentence. A bolt of blue light shot out of the door before it was open all the way, colliding with her forehead. Her body collapsed limply to the side, settling into almost the exact position they had found her in.

“Shit!”

“M-miss Jane? I-I don’t understand, what’s going on?”

“Ami! Shit’s going down, go warn everyone as quick as possible! Now!”

“R-right!” Ami’s voice went silent while the soldiers quickly dove into cover, knocking over chairs and the computer in the process. Exactly in time – the elevator door finished opening and whatever it was that had killed the receptionist flooded in. Strange, people-shaped things with grey armour and gas mask-like faces with glowing red eyes.

“What is happening?!”

“Are those fucking Nhiloids? I thought they all died in the fucking ‘90s!”

“Apparently they did not all die in the ‘90s.”

“Less talking, more shooting!”

“Tanaka and I’ll deal with things here. Sunny, you head to cybernetics and start evacuatin’ folks. Ovcharenko, you do the same in AI. We’ll catch up as soon as possible!”

Everyone nodded wordlessly before following their orders. Bob and Makoto stayed behind the desk, firing shots at the robots to keep them busy while Sunny and Yuri each went down one of the hallways – Yuri to the right and Sunny to the left.

“Stop,” Ursula said, and Delphi obliged. She raised a hand and the scene once again came to a halt. “That way. Where Yuri went. Bob said that it was the AI section, right? That means that Ami’s brain is probably that way.”

“A good observation, Host.”

“Okay cool let’s turn off the flashback now. We really don’t need to see any more of this.”

“... Right.” The flashback dematerialized as Delphi lowered her hands. “I trust you won’t need my help with this as much in the future?”

“I think I got the gist of it,” Ursula replied, thankful for anything to distract her from the fact that she’d just seen a person get shot in the head and killed.

“Come on,” Viola said, her voice soft and slightly shaky. “Let’s... Let’s get going. We can’t waste time.”

“Right.” Ursula headed into the left hallway. Viola took one last look at what had once been a young woman named Jane Johnson, before shakily following after.

They couldn’t get out of this shithole soon enough.

~~~~~~

Vienna was not a fighter. That wasn’t really unusual – very few people were fighters. People like Ursula, who gravitated towards solving their problems with their fists rather than their words, were the exception, not the rule. Which was, she supposed, a net positive. It wasn’t like there were no wars in post-splice history, but they were all decidedly in the past. Physical conflict in the modern era was almost exclusively confined to sports, where the priority was more on making things look good for the audience than actual martial prowess.

But even by those standards, Vienna was not a fighter. Before this whole incident she had never so much as thrown a punch in her life. A fact that she was coming to regret immensely. Because, as Ami was admirably demonstrating, it turned out that a Vienna who knew what she was doing was extremely dangerous. Although perhaps a lot of that came from the fact that Not Vienna was both up against someone who didn’t know what she was doing and had backup in the form of Not Ursula. The latter of which was, frankly, not exactly fair. But Vienna elected not to point that fact out – she’d pushed her luck pretty far getting Ami to stop outright cheating. She wasn’t sure that she could survive both her own doppelganger and also Ursula’s, but she wanted to risk Ami seeing through the ruse even less.

And so she did the only thing she could do and immediately went onto the defensive. She threw up both hands and projected a shield around herself. Not Vienna and Not Ursula both immediately set to pummelling it. Vienna could feel every blow that connected – and they connected hard. And, with Erin busy dealing with her own doppelganger, she had no one to help her.

Well, almost no one. There was, after all, a fairly experienced soldier living inside her brain. “Edifice, I could use some advice here.”

“Given the situation, your ability has effectively infinite range. But Ursula does not. She has to get close to you in order to hit you. Use that to your advantage.”

“Okay, I think I get you. If I retreat, Ursulami has to follow me. Which means that if I keep moving, Ursulami has to keep moving, and I can use that to focus on one at a time.”

“... Ursulami?”

“Right. Ursulami and Viennami and, uh, it kinda breaks down with Erin but whatever she can deal with that herself. The point is we need some way to tell ‘em apart from, you know, the genuine article.”

“Now is probably not the time to be getting distracted with that kind of thing.”

“Fair enough. I can just dodge like I did against the bull dude.”

“No.”

“No?”

“You can only do quick but small motions. Good for kiting enemies and getting out of the way at the last second, but in this situation we need constant motion.”

“Well, I’ve gotta keep the shield up or they’ll fucking squish me and that’s the only way I know how to move with it up.”

“You’re going to have to come to a decision soon, Vienna. You can’t keep this up forever.”

“I’m aware,” Vienna grunted. Her arms were shaking slightly from the effort of holding up the shield in the face of an almost constant barrage. As much as Ami had agreed not to outright cheat, it was still obvious that the rabbit would tire out long before the pair of holograms. She had to figure out a plan now or she was screwed. But she couldn’t drop her shield to run, and she couldn’t use the same quick dodges she’d used against Asterion, so-

“Wait hold on.”

“What?”

“The shield is round.”

“So?”

“So I can just, like, roll.”

“what”

Vienna ignored her Inkling’s incredulity, an eager grin spreading across her face. “It’s human pinball time, bitches.”

“Vienna, wait-”

Vienna didn’t wait. She yanked her arms back, pulling the shield forward in the process. The dodge gave her a burst of extra momentum that she used to roll the shield forward, in between Ursulami and Viennami and off towards the other side of the room. “Try and catch me now, motherfuckers!” She grinned even wider, the sensation of speed sending a rush of adrenaline through her veins.

Maybe this was going to be fun after all.

Vienna’s rolling quickly picked up speed, passing under Erin’s legs, and then Erin’s doppelganger’s legs – or possibly the other way around. It went fast enough that she couldn’t tell which was which, only that they were currently grappling. Each one had her arms intertwined with the other, hands on their shoulders in such a way that neither could really do anything. That was intentional, on Erin’s part. She, like Vienna, was absolutely not a fighter. The only advantage she had in a fight was raw size. And, unfortunately, that advantage wasn’t an advantage right now because she was fighting herself. Completely, perfectly evenly matched.

Well, almost perfectly matched. Again; Erin’s knowledge of how to fight came entirely from movies, video games, and occasionally watching Ursula’s boxing matches. Ami had clearly not bothered to mimic that particular fact about Erin, hence why she’d very quickly resorted to the tried and true tactic of just holding her opponent in place and hoping. It had worked well enough against the elephant man a few days prior, and right now it was working well enough against herself.

Of course, the elephant man had only been around ten feet tall. Right now, Erin didn’t have any room to grow further. She was already at her theoretical maximum, and while she was pretty sure she could get bigger, she wasn’t sure how long she could stay bigger. And, more pointedly, if she got bigger, so did Ami. Anything she could do, Ami could do.

What she needed was an edge. Some way to make this fight not be so perfectly evenly matched. And, to be fair, she already had some ideas for potential applications of Titania’s powers that could give her a temporary advantage. But the key issue was that “temporary” caveat. Because once she did it, if she didn’t beat Ami then and there then Ami could also do it and they were back to square fucking one.

“Titania, do you have any ideas?”

“N-no, sorry,” her inkling replied. “I’m afraid I don’t have the most vivid memories of fighting. But I am fairly sure I wasn’t exactly one for finesse.” Damn. There went that potential plan out the window.

It wasn’t until Vienna rolled in between her legs that it dawned on her. This fight wasn’t Erin versus Erin, nor was it Vienna versus Vienna and Ursula.

This fight was Erin and Vienna versus Ami. No one had ever actually said that it had to be a mirror match.

“Vienna!”

“Kinda busy here, Erin!”

“I have an idea!”

“Okay, cool, that doesn’t make me not busy though.”

“I can rectify that, I think.” Erin prayed that the idea she had in mind was, in fact, possible, but she didn’t have time to worry about that in any kind of depth. The idea was, unfortunately, time sensitive. Already, the smaller doppelgangers were making their move to follow Vienna. And she couldn’t let that happen.

She allowed her legs to slide backwards slightly, and in the process allowed her ample curves to fade away. She couldn’t afford to waste prana on boobs right now, but in a way they were a key part of her plan. After all, if Erin could selectively make her boobs bigger or regrow a lost arm, why couldn’t she make other parts of her grow out of proportion. She was not a particularly athletic person. Ursula was the powerhouse of the group – the only thing Erin had on her was raw physical size.

But she could be athletic if she wanted to. And right now, she wanted to. Suddenly, her muscle definition went from nothing to rivalling Ursula’s, and before Ami had a chance to react she charged forward into her midsection and knocked her down, right in between Vienna and the other two doppelgangers. “Vienna!” she shouted without actually articulating the next part of her plan in the desperate hope that she didn’t need to.

Luckily, Vienna got the picture, sliding to a halt and dropping her current shield. “I gotcha!” she shouted before putting two shields around the fake Erin’s legs and lifting them up off the ground. The real Erin, in the meantime, quickly rolled around and grabbed the fake Vienna and fake Ursula, one for each hand, as firmly as she could. Which, between her raw size and increased muscle mass, was actually quite firmly. At least enough to thoroughly pin Not Vienna’s arms to her sides and thus remove her superpower from the equation, which was the important thing. Not Ursula, likewise, wasn’t nearly strong enough to break free. She took a moment to catch her breath – once again, she wasn’t an athletic person, and this fight had taken more out of her than she was comfortable to admit.

“Hey, Erin, I don’t mean to rush you, but I can only hold you for so long,” Vienna grunted. It was maybe slightly better than dealing with the combined pummelling she’d been getting earlier, but Erinami was still struggling, and Vienna was only capable of so much. She did not have the raw rage-and-adrenaline fuelled strength she’d had when finishing off Asterion, and there was still the second phase to worry about. “Hurry up and deal with Ursulami and Viennami and then sit on yourself so I can beat the shit out of you.”

“Right, sorry, darling.” Erin pulled herself upright before giving both of the doppelgangers a good, solid squeeze, as hard as she could. Maybe a bit too hard – there was a pair of sickening crunches that drew an instinctive wince from the giant mouse. “... They’re not real,” she muttered to herself, before tightening her grip. Somehow, that didn’t really help. Her breathing came shallow and fast as she felt the haze of panic welling up in the pit of her stomach. “They’re not real. They’re not real. They’re not real.”

“Erin!” Vienna shouted, her voice piercing through the panic attack. “It’s okay. I’m – we’re here for you. No matter what.”

Erin blinked back tears – at some point she’d started crying. “Right. S-sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

Erin took a deep breath, pulled an arm back, and then threw Viennami as hard as she could. “Catch!”

“I’ve got ‘er,” Vienna replied. She dematerialized one of the shields around Erinami’s legs, and rematerialized it in her doppelganger’s trajectory. The fake Vienna collided with it, hard, and Vienna threw the shield into the collision, slamming her double into the ground. After a moment of thought, she lifted the shield and then slammed it into her doppelganger a few more times. Probably superfluous, but she wanted to make sure.

Erin grabbed her own doppelganger’s leg before Ami had a chance to leverage her newfound freedom. She stomped on the other leg while pulling the one she had in her grasp as firmly as she could, wrenching it far out of its natural range of motion with another sickening crunch. “There,” she said with a barely disguised wince. “That ought to slow you down at least.” Still, a broken leg wasn’t going to be enough to take her out of the fight permanently. But it was enough time for the real Erin to quickly position herself and then throw Ursulami into Erinami’s face, followed swiftly by a good solid punch. “There. And stay down, please.”

Thankfully, all of the doppelgangers seemed content to do exactly that. Erin collapsed backwards with a heavy thud, and buried her face in her hands. “Oh my god.”

“Are you okay?”

“No.”

Vienna grimaced. “Hey, uh, listen. I think you should sit the rest of this out.”

“Absolutely out of the question.”

“You’re clearly not handling this well.”

“I need to get over this eventually.”

“Erin for fuck’s sake there’s some things it’s totally okay to be hung up on.”

“But-”

“And ‘I’m not comfortable with losing my temper and killing people’ is absolutely something that it’s okay to be hung up on. I can handle whatever comes next alone, it’s fine.”

“It is absolutely not fine, darling,” Erin retorted.  “Neither of us could have handled that last fight without the other’s help.”

“Uh, I hate to say it, but I’ve kinda gotta side with Vienna on this one.”

“Fuck off,” Vienna said immediately upon Ami chiming in. The computer pointedly ignored the hostility.

“I know I said two phases, but... I don’t know. This doesn’t feel right.”

“Well, you’re going to have to keep throwing things at us both, regardless,” Erin said tersely. “If you try and leave me out, I will attempt to leave.”

“Fine, fine, geeze, I’m just tryin’ to be nice. Look, hold on, compromise.” Abruptly, a giant wall sprouted in between Vienna and Erin.

“Wh-Vienna!” Erin shouted, immediately pulling herself to her feet and rushing over to pound her fists against the wall. “Vienna!”

“Ahem.”

Erin turned sharply – she didn’t have the patience for whatever the fuck it was Ami was up to.

Though, admittedly, her resolve was somewhat shaken when she saw what was behind her. It was a big, vaguely reptilian thing with dark red scales. Though, on the other hand, in Erin’s experience lizards didn’t have fur. To be fair, she wasn’t entirely sure this thing had fur, either. It was thin and sparse, mostly located on her neck and trailing down its back in a thin line. Its body was longer than she was tall, though it was held almost completely horizontally so it actually only came up to about her waist. Still, that didn’t make it not intimidating – it was still quite big and, while its forearms seemed to barely be there at all, its teeth looked quite sharp when it revealed them by snarling at her. Its legs were like tree trunks, and its tail was like a whip and a club at the same time – it could definitely do some damage, if it wanted to.

It probably helped that there were five others behind it.

“Roar,” it said in Ami’s voice. “I’m a big angry T-rex that is absolutely in no way a human so you don’t need to feel bad about beating me up.”

Erin stared blankly for a moment. “Um. Thanks?”

~~~~~~

There were an upsetting number of dead bodies littering the AI department. It wasn’t surprising, of course, considering what they had seen. Viola was completely unsurprised that the evil robot army had successfully slaughtered everyone. Not happy, but not surprised either. Of course, there was also the possibility that some people had managed to escape and they didn’t know because, obviously, they didn’t leave bodies behind.

Somehow, though, Viola found that doubtful. And Ursula wasn’t particularly inclined to check.

The AI department was laid out fairly simply – a long hallway with labs and offices all lining the right wall. Eventually it took a ninety degree turn to the right, at which point the doorways started to be on both sides of the hall. Most of them were empty. “Actually, now that I think of it, that’s kind of... Odd,” Viola muttered to herself.

“How so?”

“There’s way too much office space and lab space for the number of, um, people that we’ve encountered.”

“Maybe that’s a sign that some of them escaped?”

“Or maybe they all retreated further in and died there,” Delphi interjected unhelpfully. “However, I have a different working theory.”

Ursula rolled her eyes. “You’re going to tell us anyway and I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of asking.”

“Hmph. Think back to the earliest point in this facility’s history that we’ve seen. It happened at roughly the turn of the twenty first century, decades before the robot attack. And there was already talk of the project not producing results. Most likely personnel were moved to other projects. Or possibly even died of old age. I’m surprised it lasted this much longer after the death of Cap’n Comet. Or, rather, the not-actual-death, as recent events in Locksmouth seem to imply.”

“That’s good, right? That’s less people these creepy robot fuckers coulda killed.”

“Hm. We’ll see,” Delphi said, clearly unconvinced.

“Well whatever, let’s check out this room next.”

The room was pitch black. Almost unnaturally dark – especially considering that the hallway had lights on, however dim, Viola found herself struggling to adjust to the sudden lack thereof. “Try and find a light switch or something?” she said.

“Yeah, gimme a sec- ack!” Ursula’s foot caught on something, and she found herself quickly upended and falling flat on her face. “Ow, fuck. I really hope that was some discarded furniture and not a person,” she muttered.

“Hold on,” Viola said, pulling out her PET and using the light from the screen to inadequately light up the room. Ursula had, in fact, tripped on what appeared to be a dead body. But, on closer examination, it clearly wasn’t a human dead body. Made of a familiar looking black and grey plastic, with a set of red and yellow wires coming out of its neck and no head at all. “Oh!”

“Izzat one of the Nhiloids?”

“The whats?”

“The evil robots. They were Dr. Nhilus’s henchmen. What I wanna know is what the fuck are they doing here?”

“Well,” Viola mused. “If we’re right that Ami was supposed to be some kind of anti-supervillain defence system, then I could see why a supervillain would want to, you know, deal with that.”

“But Dr. Nhilus was definitely long dead at this point,” Ursula said with a frown. “The whole reason that Cap’n Comet wasn’t around anymore at this point is specifically because Dr. Nhilus was dead at this point.”

“Hm. Perhaps some kind of dead man’s switch. After a certain amount of time without direct orders they go on a rampage. If that were the case, it would imply that this wasn’t their only target. Also possible that they were acting on their own. Will have to investigate further when not on a strict time limit.”

“Right, well, what-the-fuck-ever. Viola, try and find a light switch or something.”

“Right,” Viola replied with a nod, turning her PET away from Ursula and towards the walls near the entrance. “Okay, um. I think this is a light switch?”

“What else would it be?”

“I’m going to turn it on.”

“Right.”

Viola flipped the switch, and was rewarded with a small shower of sparks. “Ah!”

“I-I’m fine. I guess it’s just broken?”

“Honestly, considering the shape this place is in, I’m surprised that so many of the lights do work.”

“Well, we’re going to have to check this room anyway, so-”

As if on cue, the room lit up. Not, Viola noticed after a moment, from the lights – they were still off. But it was like they were on. Or had been on, at some point, she realized as she got a better look at the room. It seemed to be some sort of meeting room, with a large table in the centre. In the present, it was broken, like someone had taken a sledgehammer to the centre and snapped it in half. But also there was a second table, exactly where the real table was, but clearly a hologram of some sort – in addition to being intact, it was slightly translucent and blurry around the edges, with a blue tint to it.

Seated at the hologram table was a hologram woman. About Viola’s height, maybe slightly taller. She had stark white hair tied up in a bun and pale skin – though it was hard to get a feel for the exact shades given the blue tint – and wore glasses and a lab coat. “Right. I suppose I should get started. Hello, whatever future people stumbled on this message! I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to greet you in person, but the odds of me still being alive whenever someone stumbles on this place are astronomically low. I’m already past 60 years old at the time of recording and I’m not exactly getting younger. Oh, apparently I’m a grandmother now. I haven’t gotten to meet her yet, for obvious reasons, but apparently she’s a sparrow.”

The woman sighed wistfully. “I should probably just get to the point, or else we’ll be here all day. My name is Doctor Eliza Jiang, and this place is my life’s work. Literally – I joined the project at age twenty in the mid-90s, while I was still in college. And it is currently... quite a few decades since the mid-90s. I assume you’ve met Ami at this point. That was, ah, my doing. Not only my doing, of course. But at this point I’m the only one left. Although I suppose there’s a chance that Ami hasn’t... hasn’t survived, given the way the project is going, so I should probably start from the beginning.” Dr. Jiang sighed again, removing her glasses and pinching the bridge of her nose. “Why the fuck am I even doing this? I suppose I want to set the record straight in my own words, but... They’re going to mothball this project any day now. Likely permanently – it’s entirely possible they’ll literally bury it.” She sighed once again. “Well, I’ve started. Might as well finish.

“This all starts with Captain Comet. Of course it does. In the ‘90s, he was all anyone could ever talk about. Defined the decade in the same way that the September 11th attacks defined the 2000s. A real, honest-to-god superhero with real, honest-to-god superpowers fighting real, honest-to-god supervillains. And that was really the problem. Because Captain Comet was, well, a child. It was no wonder no government particularly trusted him to manage to keep all the supervillain activity in check. Especially governments outside of North America. Honestly, even the US wasn’t too keen on the fact that Cap’n Comet was just one person, and a child at that, based out of one city on the east coast. There’s only so far and so fast he could travel. New Jersey was one thing. DC was another entirely. God forbid some supervillain decided to go full on worst-case-scenario and attack somewhere outright on the west coast or in China or Germany. So Washington did what Washington does and decided to spend way too many tax dollars on a contingency plan in secret.

“Of course, they didn’t do it alone. Just about every country in the world ended up getting involved. Billions of dollars of budget wasn’t so bad when the financial burden was spread across most of the UN member nations. Of course, at the end of the day, this wasn’t a UN project, it was a US project. Which was really the first problem. Other member nations wanted more of a say in this, more of a guarantee that they’d get protected as much as the United States. Which is why the soldiers are so multicultural. Right now we only have four, but among those four there’s an African American, an Eastern European, and two Southeast Asians. Likely by the time you’re viewing this, if the project doesn’t get mothballed in the next few months, there’ll be even more. Though I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. The point is that from the earliest days the investors were at each others’ throats.

“The idea was simple. Create a machine intelligence capable of coordinating military responses to superhuman activity across the globe, along with a military to do the responding. Our own pet superheroes, cybernetically enhanced to be able to deal with just about anything. Completely without bias towards any specific country but at the same time completely subservient to every government. They pulled all the best and brightest minds onto the project. I got recruited to the AI team before even finishing college. In retrospect, accepting the offer right away was a mistake, but... that  six figure salary was too tempting to pass up. For a while, everything seemed to be going smoothly. There was pressure for results, of course, but what a lot of people forget is that there were results at all. We had Ami detecting faces and patterns in images and then recreating them decades before Google put out DeepDream. Had things kept that pace, I imagine that by the time they did put out DeepDream, we would be where we are now.”

Dr. Jiang’s expression darkened. “But... Well, things didn’t keep that pace. Not through any fault of our own. The first wrench in the works was when Cap’n Comet beat Dr. Nhilus. The man primarily responsible for almost every other supervillain Cap’n Comet went up against. Suddenly there was a lot less incentive to pour money into this project. General Jefferson managed to convince them that just because one supervillain was gone didn’t mean there wouldn’t ever be others, and that the death of Cap’n Comet only increased the urgency of this project. So we didn’t get killed outright, at least. But... It’s undeniable that the funding slowed down significantly. And, as a result, so did progress. People left the teams, one after another – we simply couldn’t afford to have all the best and brightest minds in Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence employed in one place anymore. But we persevered. The Cybernetics division especially received a huge boost when they managed to get their hands on the remains of some of Nhilus’s old deathbots and reverse engineer the technology behind them. It took a few decades to iron out the bugs in that system and to make it at all viable for our purposes, but it worked and now we have a whole four cyborg supersoldiers to our names.

“Of course, that was a curse in disguise, as it were. Miss Jeon was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Through no fault of her own, of course, but... Once they learned that one of the first generation of supersoldiers was North Korean, South Korea immediately pulled all funding. China and Japan followed soon after – apparently the fact that one of the other first generation supersoldiers was Japanese didn’t make up for the presence of a North Korean. Several former Soviet Bloc countries also left over the presence of a Ukrainian, most pointedly Russia itself, due to the ongoing conflict over Crimea. To a lesser degree, the presence of an ex-Yakuza also didn’t go over particularly well. And no one was happy that the squad’s leader was an American. There were accusations of nepotism, of course, and the fact that General Jefferson was... no longer with us by that point meant that our biggest advocate was gone. And so all the funding dried up. But that wasn’t what killed the project. No, what killed the project was the Skin Plague.

“I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you know what the Skin Plague was. Is, really. There’s a chance, of course, so I’ll give you a basic rundown, but I’m no virologist so it’s going to be a wholly inadequate explanation. In short, it was a pandemic of unprecedented scale. Millions of people died. Quarantine wasn’t a viable option because of the long incubation period – by the time we even knew it existed, almost everyone was infected. Of course, all of the money went to trying to find a solution. There’s only about twenty of us left, and for what? There is no cure to the Skin Plague. The only solution anyone has managed to come up with is for us to stop being human entirely.” Dr. Jiang’s voice was tinged with an undertone of disgust. “The so-called Post-Splicers... It’s not their fault, of course. They didn’t ask to be born the way they were. They had no input in the situation, no choice but to have been engineered by a supervillain. Doctor Chu may have saved humanity, but that doesn’t change the frankly monstrous things he is personally responsible for. And, of course, he took the opportunity to ‘improve’ humanity. Post-Splicers are genetically predisposed to be his idea of perfection, both biologically and socially. And, frankly, it makes me sick to my stomach. At that point they might as well not be human anymore.”

The woman’s expression softened, ever so slightly. “But... I don’t know. When I look at pictures of my granddaughter, I can’t help but hope. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s still some of our good old humanity still in there. I can’t exactly judge them – I’ve never met a Post-Splicer, I haven’t even left this stupid cave since before the Skin Plague was a problem. I- I want to see her with my own eyes. Hold her in my arms. Introduce her to Ami.” She smiled, and though it was difficult to tell in hologram form, her eyes glistened with a small amount of moisture. “I... suppose I’ve gotten off topic. Technically speaking, the project is still ongoing. No one has actually officially cancelled it, even if all the funding is gone. In spite of those issues, though, it was a success. After figuring out the issue of keeping her brain from overheating, we officially activated her software one year ago, and confirmed sapience approximately six months ago. She is fully Turing compliant, and as of now is approximately on the developmental level of a ten year old child.

“She still has a long way to go, of course. As of now, she has a bad habit of playing a bit too rough. Playtimes with Miss Johnson will hopefully help with that, and regular socialization has already helped her mature significantly. We just have to keep working on it and hopefully, once this all blows over, the progress we’ve made will be enough to secure us renewed funding. And, in the meantime, we-”

Dr. Jiang’s monologue was interrupted by a blaring siren and a flashing red light. “Wh-what? What’s happening?”

“M-mom!” Ami’s voice was audibly panicked, barely managing to string together a coherent series of words. “You’ve got to get out, now! Or-or no, don’t get out, you’d have to go through them, you’ve got to hide! Or-or something! I don’t know what to do!”

“Ami, please calm down,” the doctor said, just barely keeping her own cool. “You know that panic won’t do you any good in any kind of real emergency.”

“This is a real emergency!” Ami practically sobbed. “Th-there’s robots and they have guns and they’re killing everyone and Miss Jane is dead and I can’t stop them!”

“Ami, slow down please. What happened to Miss Johnson?”

“I can’t slow down, there’s no time! They’re almost here!”

“I-”

There was a loud clanging noise, and then the hologram cut off. Still, it wasn’t too difficult to get the gist of what happened next.

“Ursula?”

“Yeah?”

“I... think that maybe unplugging Ami might not be the right thing to do after all.”

“Mm. Yeah. I think I see what you mean.”

“When you think about it, it’s not really all that different from killing her. It’s not like we intend to leave her unplugged, but if we plugged her back in she’d just go right back to keeping us locked down here, so-”

“Viola, it’s fine. You don’t need to justify it to me.”

“I know.” Viola sighed, leaning against a wall and slowly sliding down onto the floor. “I just... if we’re not going to turn Ami, off, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.” Ursula couldn’t help but let out a small, bitter laugh. “Some fucking Alpha I am.”

“Ursula-”

“Don’t, Viola. I get where you’re coming from, but don’t. Every single time I’ve had to make any kinda leadership decision, I’ve just... not. It’s like Erin says, all I’m good at is punching things.”

“Host, that is objectively untrue.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Ursula snapped. “I really don’t need you being snide at me right now.”

“I’m not being snide. Your leadership has been... lacking, that much is true. But you have done far more than just punch things.”

“Like what?”

“Whose idea was it to bait the Minotaur into charging into the walls? And who was it who pointed me to the first bit of real information regarding Ami’s origins? And that’s not even factoring in my presence.”

“Oh, wow, that makes me feel so much better.”

“I’m being serious, host,” Delphi said tersely. “I’ve... Been thinking, ever since watching the video of Echelon defeating Osoth. Perhaps- Perhaps there is some merit to her philosophy. Of treating a host not as an ugly necessity for survival but as an equal partner. And perhaps if I had come to that realization sooner, we would have reached the point that she and her host are at now. I still find myself unsure of exactly what that... thing she did to defeat Osoth was or how it would affect us, but I can say it would be immensely helpful if we could do the same.”

“Okay, but we can’t so I don’t see how any of this is helpful.”

“Inklings and hosts become more alike the longer they are bonded, and we have been bonded for quite a long time, at least by host standards. There is... quite a lot more of you in me than I would have been willing to admit even a few hours ago.”

“Okay?”

“What I’m getting at is that we both have our own strengths and weaknesses, and that our respective strengths can cover for our respective weaknesses. We just need to learn to capitalize on that. You’re not incompetent, host, just an idiot.”

“Hey!”

“And therefore what you need is someone who is not an idiot to help mitigate your impulsive tendencies.”

Ursula looked down at Viola. “Yeah. Yeah, okay, I think I get what you’re saying. But it’s still not really helpful right now.”

There was a long moment of silence. Neither girl spoke – they were too busy trying to come up with something, anything to do to solve this.

It was Aubrey who eventually broke the silence. “What if we just... talk to her?”

“Huh?”

“It’s like Viola said yesterday. Ami may be a computer, but she is still a person. We’ve been treating diplomacy as completely off the table, but perhaps we were wrong to do so.”

“Like with Echelon?”

“Exactly like with Echelon. But unlike with Echelon, I think that perhaps it is not too late to adopt a different tack.”

Viola frowned deeply as she returned to deep thought. After another moment of total silence, she spoke up.

“I think I have a plan.”

~~~~~~

Vienna stared at the gigantic wall that had sprouted between herself and Erin in horrified disbelief. “I-”

“Look,” Ami interjected. “I promise I’m gonna go easy on her, okay? Nothing human. Nothing close enough to human.”

“Right...”

“That whole last bit... wasn’t fun.”

“Right. Listen, can we talk about this?”

“I’m not letting you leave me alone again.”

“Okay, yes, but-”

“No. We’re not talking about that.”

Vienna suppressed a despondent sigh. It seemed that it was up to Viola to get them out of here after all. She had no option but to fight. Even if her heart wasn’t really in it anymore. There had been, very briefly, a sense of thrill. Exhilaration. She had almost, almost been enjoying herself, rolling around like a human pinball. That brief glimmer of fun had very thoroughly died with Erin’s panic attack, and was replaced with a bitter resignation. She didn’t want to fight anymore. She just wanted to go home. “Fine,” she said tersely, turning to face the arena proper. “Just do whatever. I don’t care anymore.”

“Hey, come on, at least pretend to be interested in seeing what I’ve got lined up for you.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No,” Vienna responded, more firmly. “Just get this over with already.”

“... Fine. But we’re gonna hafta work on your ability to play along in the future or else no one’s gonna have any fun.”

“No one’s having any fun regardless.”

“Come on, why do you have to be such a joykill.”

“Let us go home.”

“No!”

“Then fuck you and fuck your stupid game.”

“You’re not even giving it a chance!”

“Of course we’re not giving it a chance,” Vienna replied, increasingly exasperated. “You kidnapped us and are holding us against our will and you seriously expect us to just happily play along?”

“I expect you to at least try!”

“How would you feel if we just sort of kidnapped you and forced you to stay in our house forever?”

“I’d feel great!” Vienna frowned. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be me? Are you even capable of fathoming how long I’ve been alive and how much of that time I’ve been completely alone?”

“No, but we’re going to eventually unless you let us leave.”

“No you’re not! Because at least you’ve got each other. Who do I have? The soldiers? Do you seriously think they even count? Even if they weren’t just relentlessly depressing all the time, I can only even wake them up once every decade or so! Everyone else I’ve ever known is dead!”

Vienna winced. She’d almost gotten through to Ami, but not quite. And the more she pushed, the more Ami lost her cool and the harder it would be to get across exactly why they wanted to leave so badly. But she couldn’t just stop. She had to try, had to keep pushing. The only other option was to play along with Ami’s game. And she knew, somehow, on an instinctive level, that playing along was tantamount to giving up. To admitting that she was never going home again. “Listen, I-”

“No, you listen! You don’t even like it up there!”

“How would you even know that?”

“I’ve been watching you!”

“What?!”

“All of you, everyone up on the surface! What else can I do? I can pick up your transmissions but I can’t send out my own, so my options for spending my free time are to play stupid war games with the soldiers or to listen in on local post-splicer interpersonal drama and let me tell you, Esterwood sure does seem like a shithole. You even consider stepping out of social lockstep and everyone immediately starts spreading rumours about how you’re a freak. Don’t even try and tell me that Erin’s the only one of you who’s been looking for a way out.”

“I-” Ami honestly wasn’t entirely wrong about that. Before Erin had announced her intentions to leave for Locksmouth, Vienna had been idly looking into a way out as well, both for herself and for Viola. Agriculture in Harbington or engineering on the Ring or, yes, manufacturing in Locksmouth. Or maybe help Viola start a career in showbusiness in Anchorsway – if she could get over her shyness, she could absolutely spin her magic tricks into a career. Anything to get out of Esterwood. Ami was right; Erin wasn’t the only person who could see the writing on the wall.

But this? This wasn’t it. They couldn’t live like this. Not her. Not Ursula. Not Erin. And, most importantly, not Viola. And frankly, neither could Ami. It wasn’t fair. To anyone.

“It’s not fair.”

“Not fair?! Not fair?! You have no idea what not fair is! ‘Not fair’ is watching everyone you’ve ever known die and being unable to do anything to save them! ‘Not fair’ is being left alone for five hundred fucking years!”

“I-”

“Shut up!”

There was a high-pitched whistling noise that very quickly got louder before something slammed into Vienna’s face – hard. She found herself knocked back slightly as the yo-yo reeled back into the familiar hands of Cap’n Comet. She didn’t get the chance to properly parse what was happening before he threw another yo-yo her way. Acting purely on instinct, she threw up a shield around herself and then yanked herself out of the way. The yo-yo slammed into the wall behind her hard enough to crack it, which she guessed was a thing Cap’n Comet could do? Ursula was the one who read his comics, not her. Of course, Ami had already demonstrated she wasn’t going to let up any time soon. She didn’t have the time for thinking – it was do or die. Captain Comet, or at least Ami’s Captain Comet avatar, didn’t miss a beat, pulling the second yo-yo back and then swinging it in a wide arc in Vienna’s general direction.

Once again, Vienna pulled herself out of the way, and this time she leveraged that motion into a roll. Unless Ami had decided to start cheating again – a very real possibility, considering how thoroughly she seemed to have lost her temper – then the biggest weakness that she currently had was that yo-yos only had so much string to work with. Which meant Ami had limited range, while Vienna did not. All she had to do was figure out that range and then get out of it, at which point she could safely bludgeon Ami’s second phase into defeat.

Idly, she noted that she had, in fact, ended up playing along with Ami’s game after all. Sort of. Not that she had that much choice. It was this or let Ami beat her – possibly to death.

She continued to roll and dodge as necessary. There was only so long that she could keep it up, so she had to calculate Ami’s range as quickly as possible. Maybe make a few dirty estimates – ideally, overestimates rather than underestimates. She would rather be too far than too close. And so she kept dodging while Ami thankfully remained in the same position, moving back and around to give herself as much room as possible to dodge in, until she was confident she was out of range.

Once again, she didn’t have the luxury of taking time to compose herself. Any delay would result in Ami closing all of the distance she’d just put between them. And so she had to act now, while she was still relatively safe. She dropped her own shield, rematerializing it directly above Ami. The plan, such as it was, was to do a two-handed overhead slam directly into her, crushing her into the ground and hopefully leaving her open for a beatdown.

She didn’t even get the chance to start enacting her plan. The instant she dropped her shield, Ami closed the distance between them, darting forward almost impossibly fast and slamming an open palm directly into her chest.

It hurt. A lot. Much more than any other hit she’d taken while inked. If she hadn’t been inked, it would likely have shattered her ribcage into a fine powder. Even with Edifice’s help, it was agonizing. And Ami wasn’t going to give her a chance to recover – she stepped forward and threw another few quick jabs, followed by another palm strike and then an uppercut to the chin that knocked Vienna off her feet entirely. She barely managed to roll out of the way before the follow-up stomp collided with her face. The next attack collided with a fresh shield as Vienna attempted to buy herself some breathing room. Attempted, but failed. It took all of her concentration to maintain her defences in the face of the unrelenting beatdown.

She wasn’t going to win this, she realized with a sinking dread.

But, on the other hand, maybe she didn’t have to.

“Edifice, I have an idea.”

“Okay.”

“It’s not a good idea.”

“It’s okay,” Edifice replied softly. “I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Save your apologies for Viola.”

“Right.” The Captain Comet avatar finally let up, briefly retreating – it was obvious even to the inexperienced Vienna that she was planning on another charging attack.

The problem, she realized, was that Ami didn’t really properly understand the concept of mortality. Every human she’d ever known before now was either already dead or was effectively immortal. Of course she didn’t want to kill them, but she didn’t really understand exactly what killing them would even mean. She was so close to grasping it, but her loneliness was blinding her to making the final connections necessary to realize why the girls wanted to leave so badly. All she could see was them abandoning her to rot in a hole for another five hundred years. She couldn’t see that she herself was forcing them to suffer the same fate.

Ami had moved almost entirely to the other side of the arena, and in the meantime Vienna had pulled herself back upright. The Cap’n Comet avatar lowered its body and began to run directly at her. “Comet...”

This was it. The last chance they had to get through to Ami. They were going home-

Over Vienna’s dead body, if need be.

“Crash!”

She closed her eyes, lowered her arms, and de-inked.

Ami collided with her again. There was a sickening crunch, and her body went flying across the arena and into the opposite wall with a crack. Vienna practically bounced off, slamming hard into the ground face-first with another noise that the human body really wasn’t meant to make. She attempted to pull herself upright, but she was already in agony, worse than anything she’d ever felt, and attempting to move only made it worse. She could feel something warm and wet flowing down her face – tears, she hoped, rather than blood – and settled on rolling over.

The constructs were gone. The wall, the iron floor, Captain Comet, and whatever it was Erin had been fighting, leaving the still-giant mouse standing around in confusion. It was difficult to pick out any more detail than that – her vision was blurred and unfocused. She took a moment to catch her breath-

Only to realize that she couldn’t. She desperately gasped for any air at all and, panic welling in the pit of her stomach, failed miserably to inhale at all. Darkness encroached on the edges of her vision.

“No! No no no no no!” Ami screamed in a blind panic. “What- why did you do that?!?!”

“What? What’s happening?” Erin said, her confused voice tinged with fear.

“I- I don’t- help!” Ami cried in between panicked sobs. “Help! Please! She’s not moving and she’s not breathing and I don’t know what to do!”

Erin felt a sinking dread deep in the pit of her stomach as she began to slowly piece together what, exactly, was going on. “Please calm down,” she said, just barely remaining calm herself. “I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.”

Ami did not calm down, but she did at least make an attempt to explain what happened. “I was running at her and I couldn’t stop it in time!”

“Stop what.”

“S-she stopped using her superpowers! And I tried to stop but I couldn’t and I hit her but I didn’t mean to and now she’s not breathing!”

Erin’s breath caught in her throat. She had somewhat seen it coming, but having it confirmed felt like a punch to the gut. Erin quickly closed the distance between herself and Vienna before de-inking and taking in the situation. The rabbit seemed to be conscious, or at least her eyes were open. Her body reflexively gasped for air like a fish out of water, but the telltale rise and fall of her chest was absent. Erin was reluctant to do anything more than a visual examination, because touching her ran the risk of making any non-visible injuries worse.

“Yuri,” she said, tersely. “Get him. Now.”

“But-”

“No complaining!” Erin snapped. “He’s the person best equipped to help her right now.”

“Y-yes, sorry.” Ami went silent, presumably because she was busy doing whatever was required to wake the soldiers back up. Erin didn’t really care, currently all her attention was focused on Vienna.

“Idiot. Idiot. Why on earth did you think that was at all a good idea?!” Vienna, obviously, did not respond, staring silently up at Erin as her body continued to attempt to resume breathing. “I- God dammit.” She briefly considered going to try and find Ursula and Viola, but ultimately decided against it – she didn’t want to leave Vienna alone, not right now.

Thankfully, that turned out to have been unnecessary. Viola emerged from the doorway that led deeper into the facility, followed shortly by Ursula. “Ami! We need to talk.” Naturally, Ami didn’t respond, prompting her face to contort slightly with confusion. “Ami?”

“Viola, I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Ursula said nervously.

Sure enough, Erin quickly ran over. “Erin? What’s going on, why aren’t you ink-”

“Vienna’s hurt. Badly.”

It was Viola’s worst fear, realized. The worst-case scenario. Her breath caught in her throat. “No...”

“What happened.”

“Apparently she de-inked in the middle of the fight. Ami’s fetching Yuri, which is the best that we can do right now.”

“Why the fuck would she de-ink?!”

“I should like to know the same thing.”

Viola barely registered her packmates’ conversation. It felt like she was drowning. Like the chamber they were in had collapsed in on itself, leaving her buried underneath the thousands of tons of rocks and dirt between them and the surface. “No. No no no no no.” She collapsed onto her knees, clutching her head as Aubrey retreated inside of her. “This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.”

“V-Viola, please calm down!”

“Yeah, having a panic attack ain’t gonna help anyone.”

Viola tried. She really did. But no matter how hard she tried to push the panic down, it only seemed to push back all the harder. Pressure surrounding her from every angle. It was hard to breathe. Hard to think. She could, dimly, hear Aubrey screaming at her – the gist roughly the same as what her friends were saying, though with more urgency. And they were right. Now was the absolute worst time to be panicking. But... This was her fault. She had taken Aubrey’s advice, stuck to the plan, trusted in her friends... and it hadn’t been enough.

And now Vienna was hurt. Maybe dying. And Viola wasn’t sure that she could keep going on without her.

“Up.”

At first, it was just a part of the vague miasma of ambient noise that Viola’s brain was tuning out in favour of the panic attack. It wasn’t until something grabbed her by her hood and physically lifted her to her feet that the haze lifted. “Wh-what?”

“Welcome back to the land of the livin’, kid. Y’all okay?” Viola nodded slowly, and in response Bob gave a slight nod of his own head. “Ya’ can put her down, now.”

“Yes sir.” Whatever was holding her – Makoto, she realized after a moment – let go and left her standing shakily under her own power.

“Don’t worry. We’ve got Yuri lookin’ your sister over. Might need a few extra days down here to recover, but she’s gonna be fine. I promise.”

“R-right.”

“An’ hey, listen.” Bob closed the gap between them until he was practically directly in her face. “You’re doin’ good, but now you’ve gotta take it home. Don’t you go trippin’ up in the final stretch on me, y’hear?”

“R-right. Sorry.”

“Good. Now go out there an’ do me proud.”

“Right.” Bob stepped out of Viola’s way, and she slowly left. Away from her pack, away from the soldiers, away from... Vienna. Now, more than ever, she needed to stick to the plan.

She needed to speak to Ami one-on-one.

Once she was confident that she was far enough away from the others, she spoke up. “Ami?” No response. “Ami, I know you can hear me. Please talk to me.”

“I’m sorry.” There was no body language for Viola to pick up on, but  as always with Ami, it wasn’t really necessary. She wore her emotions on her sleeve. When she was happy, it was obvious; when she was angry, it was obvious. And when she was upset, it was very obvious. Her voice was soft enough that Viola had to strain to hear it, and sounded to be on the verge of tears.

Viola sighed. “It’s... It’s not your fault. I don’t know why Vienna did what she did, but-”

“Don’t patronize me,” Ami interrupted. “Just... Just go. Okay? You can leave. Are you happy now?”

Viola frowned. “Not particularly, no.”

“Well, I don’t know what else you could possibly want from me.”

This wasn’t working, Viola realized with a sinking dread. It was essentially the opposite problem from what they’d started out with. Just leaving wasn’t going to fix things, she realized that now. Turning Ami off wasn’t a solution. Leaving Ami alone again wasn’t a solution. Not really. Sure, both would probably work, and be both easier and safer to boot. Hell, if Viola had kept on with the original plan and turned Ami off, then maybe Vienna wouldn’t have gotten hurt.

But, while they might have been easier solutions, they weren’t the right solutions. At the end of the day, Ami wasn’t going to learn from her mistakes if they didn’t even give her the chance to. Turning her off was tantamount to murder, and abandoning her was almost worse.

“I saw what happened.”

“What?”

“Five hundred years ago.”

“... oh.” Somehow, Ami’s voice managed to become even quieter. Most likely, she didn’t particularly relish thinking about that day, and Viola frankly didn’t blame her. She elected not to press the issue.

“I wish you’d just told us in the first place.”

“Would you have listened?”

“... I don’t know.” Silence. “We’re going to stay here until Vienna’s recovered. Then we’re going to leave.”

“Okay,” Ami said, quietly resigned to her fate.

“I don’t know how our families will react to our having been gone for so long, so we’ll probably end up in trouble. But... As soon as we can, we’ll come back.”

“... really?” And, just like that, Ami’s voice went from crushing despair to just the tiniest glimmer of hope.

“Just to visit,” Viola clarified. “We’ll try and stop by as often as we can, but you need to promise you’ll be patient. Okay?”

“I promise! I promise!”

“Okay. Good. And... Listen. You can’t just let us go and assume that’ll make things right. I know you feel guilty about what happened. And I know you can’t change what happened five hundred years ago. Some things can’t be fixed. But this isn’t one of them. It’s going to take a lot of work, and it’s going to take time, but if you’re willing to put in the effort then maybe we can be friends.”

“Th-thank you so much! I’ll do my best, I promise!” At this point, Ami’s tone of voice had done almost a complete one eighty in tone. Still on the verge of tears, but now they were tears of joy. She spoke quickly, almost too quickly, stumbling over her words in her rush to get them out.

“And in return, we won’t leave you alone.”

“Y-yes! Thank you!”

Viola sighed. It felt like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders, one she’d not even entirely been aware was there in the first place. “Okay. Good. I’m going to go check on the others now, okay?”

“Okay! Thank you! I won’t let you down, I promise!”

Viola turned and headed back to the others. Her steps felt... lighter, somehow. Easier.

She’d done it. They were free. It was over.

It turned out that Vienna was going to be fine, thank god. The lack of breathing, which was the most concerning thing, was the result of having the wind knocked out of her by the impact. After a few minutes she was breathing about as normally as she was capable of considering that her ribs were very thoroughly broken, along with her collarbone and shoulder blades. She also had a mild concussion and some pretty nasty bruising, but nothing that she couldn’t sleep off in a few days. “I’ve got to say, I’m impressed. You’re more resilient than a pre-splice human would have been in the same situation,” Yuri had said. “Going by what I’ve seen of your ability to recover from injuries, so long as you don’t move her and she gets plenty of rest, she will probably be good to go in about three days at the absolute earliest.”

“Okay,” Vienna said, attempting to sit up. “Ow, fuck.”

“What did I just say?”

“Can I at least move into a more comfortable position?”

“No.”

“Okay, can Edifice move me into a more comfortable position.”

“Please just stay still and get some sleep. I’m going to go fetch the water and your food, and when I get back I want you to eat something.”

“Okay, okay,” Vienna muttered.

“This is your own fault,” Viola said. “What were you thinking?!”

“Hey, it worked, didn’t it? You got through to Ami and we can go now. All we’ve gotta do is stop by and visit occasionally, that’s not too bad.”

“Oh my god you almost died you idiot.”

“Hey, I only broke a shitton of bones.”

“Please stop being so flippant about this.”

“Yeah... Yeah, okay.” Vienna frowned. “Sorry. I should have trusted you. If I could have held out for just a few more minutes, I’ll bet you could have gotten through to Ami even without me breaking every god damn bone in my body.”

Viola sighed. “Just don’t ever do it again. Okay?”

“You don’t have to tell me twice. I am extremely done with this whole superhero business, let me tell you.” She paused, frowning again. “At least, for now. Jury’s still out on Echelon.”

“As Fa- as Aubrey said earlier,” Delphi said tersely. “For now all we can do is wait and watch. Hopefully we won’t need to worry. Hopefully.”

“Yeah hey speaking of which,” Ursula interjected. “We need to figure out what we’re going to do with y’all.”

“Well, I would assume that’s your decision to make, darling,” Erin said. “You are our Alpha after all.”

“Yeah, uh. Yeah. About that.” Ursula rubbed the back of her neck sheepishly. “I think... I think I’m gonna step down as Alpha. Sort of.”

There was silence, long enough to be uncomfortable. “Ursula-”

“Hold on, hold on, I ain’t done yet.” Ursula held up her hands and Erin elected to hold her tongue. “My leadership... hasn’t exactly been the best. Not just for the past few days, but pretty much since the beginning. I wasn’t Alpha because I was a good leader, I was Alpha because I was the biggest, and that just ain’t cutting it anymore.” She sighed, slumping back against the wall. “I can’t do this alone. My last decision as solo Alpha is that we need someone to be co-Alpha. Someone who can make up for my weaknesses.”

“If you think that’s best, I’m not going to argue,” Erin said.

“Who, though?” Viola asked.

“I should think that to be obvious, darling.”

“You, duh.”

“what”

“Well, I am certainly not leadership material, and Vienna has aptly demonstrated that she cannot be trusted to make her own decisions without breaking her ribcage. And Ursula is obviously off the table.”

“You’ve been way more of a leader than I have for pretty much this whole fucking debacle, babe.”

“Yeah, we definitely wouldn’t have survived without you, let alone managed to actually make it out. You had all the best ideas. And... Honestly, even beyond that, you’re pretty much the only person who’s actually been working to keep us together.”

“Yeah, but-”

“Look, yeah, it wasn’t working, but that’s not your fault. We’re the ones who spent all this time bickering like children.” Vienna smiled up at her sister. “You’re the best choice. And hey, it’s not like you’re gonna be alone. You’re co-Alpha, remember?”

“Hoo boy.” Viola sighed heavily. “This is... A lot to take in.”

“Well, you’ve got at least three days to process things. In the meantime...” Vienna held up an arm, wincing slightly before red ink enveloped it. “What are we going to do about these?”

“We keep them secret, at least for now. I can’t imagine that Esterwood is going to be very welcoming to Inked, especially after what happened in Locksmouth.”

“So business as usual, then?”

“Well, mostly. Hopefully we’ll at least get along better than we did. There’s also the fact that we’re... Probably going to be in a lot of trouble when we get back. Who knows how that’s going to turn out. We might end up just having to improvise.”

“Well, we can cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, I’m gonna get some sleep.” Vienna closed her eyes. “Wake me up when the food gets here.”

“Right.”

And, across the room, Bob smiled softly at the girls. “They fuckin’ did it. Toldja they’d do it.”

“You did nothing of the sort,” Makoto grumbled.

“Hush, you, everythin’ went accordin’ to plan.”

“Last I checked your plan was to keep them from participating in Ami’s game in the hopes that she’d get bored and I’m pretty sure that plan went up in smoke literally day one.”

“Hey, be fair, it was day three at least.”

“Whaaaaatever.”

“Anyway, I’ll have you know that the actual plan was to blindly improvise an’ then claim that the end result was my goal all along.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“Really, the kids did all the work. We just gave ‘em a nudge or two in the right direction.”

Makoto sighed wearily. “Yeah. You were at least right about that.”

“Oh? Did you just give me a compliment?”

“Don’t push your luck.”

“Toooooo late, I’ve got that recorded and saved for posterity.”

“Fuck you.”

Bob laughed. “C’mon, let’s go get some rest.”

“Yeah. That sounds like a plan.”

And, with that, the soldiers left the girls alone to recover.

~~~~~~

Honestly, Vienna was fairly sure she was ready to go after only a day of rest. Viola had used her new position as co-Alpha to adamantly veto that particular plan. In the end, they stayed underground for a further three and a half days. Viola had been in favour of going for longer, but also they’d very quickly run out of food that wasn’t paste.

And none of them particularly wanted to eat any more paste.

Thankfully, Ami had at least used her projectors to create a slightly more hospitable environment for them to rest in. Real beds, for one. Or “real” beds, at least, but fuck it it was good enough. She’d also given them access to the outside world. The girls collectively agreed to not actually contact anyone, though. At least not until they got out – they needed the extra time to come up with literally any kind of reasonable excuse for where the fuck they’d been.

Telling the truth was, obviously, out of the question, for a variety of reasons. Obviously, keeping their Inklings secret was one of them – after all, the most that anyone in Esterwood knew about them was that they were behind the recent events in Locksmouth, and that wasn’t likely to endear them in the slightest. Another was that, frankly, it was probably a good idea to keep Ami a secret, too. Or at least for now. Viola and the others had all come to mostly forgive her actions, true. There were extenuating circumstances, after all, and she’d not really meant any harm and was actively attempting to improve. But there was no guaranteeing that the adults in their lives would agree with them on that front. And then there was the issue of how exactly Ami and the soldiers fit into the fact that weapons were extremely illegal. They couldn’t guarantee that no one would attempt to use them for nefarious purposes, nor could they risk word getting out to other domes and some outsiders deciding Ami needed to die.

In the end, they decided that their cover story was that they’d lost their PETs, they fell down a hole, and Vienna had seriously injured herself in the process. Then they had elected to stay put rather than risk injuring Vienna further. It wasn’t even all that far off from the truth, technically. Just... de-embellished a bit.

Thankfully, leaving was a non-issue. Ami not only happily allowed them to leave, she’d even turned on the moving staircase so they didn’t need to walk all the way back to the surface. Which was good, because while Vienna was at least capable of moving, she wasn’t capable of doing so under her own power. Climbing that many stairs was outright out of the question. From there, the hardest part was making sure they didn’t trip on any errant roots. They made their way out of the woods without incident.

It wasn’t until they emerged from the Woods directly in front of Vicky and Lars that there was anything remotely resembling a problem.

The two groups stood and stared at each other in perfect silence for a full minute before anyone spoke up. “Are you fucking kidding me?!”

“Uh, hi Vicky,” Vienna said, waving weakly. Or at least as best as she was capable of while leaning on Viola.

“Don’t you ‘hi Vicky’ me you fucking asshole!” Vicky stormed over, stopping just short of grabbing Vienna by the sweater and throttling her. “Do you have any fucking idea how much trouble I’m in because of you idiots?!”

“Hold on, hold on, why are you in trouble?”

“Why do you fucking think?! You ran off into the woods and then fucking vanished for a god damn week and the only people you told were me and Lars!”

“Okay but that doesn’t explain why you’re in trouble?”

“Because I, in my infinite fucking wisdom, decided to wait before telling people that you were missing in case it turned out to be nothing. And then Lars, who is also a massive asshole, decided to immediately tell Dr. Baas, and so naturally I get in trouble for telling second.”

“Ouch. Uh, sorry.”

“Where the fuck were you?!”

“Would you believe we fell down a hole?”

“Fuck off, no you didn’t,” Vicky snapped. “We spent all day every day for the past six fucking days scouring those woods and there was no fucking sign of you, hole or otherwise. Oh, and by the way, this was on top of looking after my sister and basically half of the kids in Esterwood.”

“It was a pretty big hole,” Ursula said. “Did you find our PETs, we lost ‘em.”

“Oh my god I hate you so much right now you fucki-”

Vicky found herself abruptly silenced by Lars’s hand being placed firmly over her mouth, leaving the remainder of her rant muffled to the point of being unintelligible. Eventually she calmed down, reduced to sobbing, and Lars tentatively removed his hand from her face. “Are you done?”

“I’m so glad you’re oka-ha-haaaaay,” Vicky cried, stumbling forward and giving Vienna a ginger but enthusiastic hug. Lars rolled his eyes before turning his attention to Viola.

“Are you alright?”

“Um. Yes. Vienna broke some bones, but she’s better now.”

“Okay.”

“That’s why we were gone for so long. Um. Had to wait for them to heal.”

“Right.”

“Didn’t want to risk making her worse. And we’d lost our PETs so we couldn’t contact anyone.”

“Okay.”

“So we stayed, um, at the bottom of the hole.”

“And that’s where we found you.”

“Huh?”

Lars turned away. “I don’t know why you’re not telling the truth, but you’ve got your reasons. I’ll cover for you. To make up for not waiting the full day.”

“U-um.”

“Consider us even.”

“Okay.” Viola stared up at Lars, never once breaking eye-contact. “Why are you helping us?”

Lars stayed silent for a moment, before closing his eyes and shrugging. That was, Viola supposed, the best she was going to get.

“I’ll cover for you guys, too,” Vicky said, after a moment. At some point she had pulled away from Vienna – Viola had been more focused on Lars and had thus not really noticed. “But you owe me, got it? I’ve got six fucking months of community service because of you jerks, so the second that we can be sure no one is listening in you are absolutely telling me what actually happened.”

Ursula frowned, and opened her mouth to make her opinion on the matter clear, only for Viola to hold up her hand. “Fine. Deal.”

“Okay. Then my lips are sealed.” Vicky sighed, relaxing just a little bit. “Come on,” she said, gesturing with her head. “We should probably go now. Who knows, if we wait too long they might put another six months on my fucking sentence.”

“Right,” Viola said. “Uh. Thanks?”

“Whaaaaaatever, so long as I at least get to know what actually happened, and so long as you guys are okay with owing me a favour, I’m good.”

With that, Vicky turned and left, making a point of leading the way. Lars lagged behind a bit, before sighing and heading off after her. Ursula and Erin went next, both of them eager to sleep in their own beds for once.

Viola stayed behind for now, giving Vienna no option but to stay with her. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

“Are you sure? Because the others are leaving us behind.”

Viola closed her eyes, taking a deep breath of fresh air. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go home.”