There was something oddly comforting about learning that The First– the mightiest hero our world had seen in the short decade we had superheroes– was almost painfully human.

  While I had tried not to interrupt him while he went through the entire history of the system, there were more than a few times I wanted to ask him just what the hell he had been thinking. I mean, I knew I was holding onto a lot of paranoia, something that was apparently just a side effect of being Augmented, but even without that paranoia I couldn’t imagine I would ever be that trusting.

  Though… then again, I did have a bad habit of just telling people things I really shouldn’t either, so maybe I was being a hypocrite judging him for the snap decisions he had made. Regardless, there were more than a few things that seemed to click into place almost instantly after Christopher finally told me just what had happened the night I had nearly died.

  No matter what anyone said, it both was and wasn’t my fault that Axio had taken a turn for the maniacal. I couldn’t blame myself, that much was clear. But if Christopher would have just let me died… well… a lot of things would be different.

  The world might not have been on fire, thousands of lives in New York City would have never been put in danger, and Hydramental… well Hydramental might have been the one to find his brother…

  In a lot of ways… maybe that would have been worse. I knew now with near one hundred percent certainty that it was my power to rewind things that had broken Hydramental’s brain, just as it had corrupted Axio in the moments before he could finally discover just what his actual prime directive was. But knowing that didn’t erase the fact that Hydramental did have mental health issues and seeing his brother in that state? Well… maybe it was wishful thinking, as disturbing as that thought was, but it was entirely possible that he would have broken just as spectacularly, only to be trapped by TechWarden anyway.

  Was a life of imprisonment better than no life at all? It couldn’t be… right?

  I felt heavy by the time I left the Common Ground to return to the Squad Base. Wondering once again if I was on the right path where it came to Hydramental. I had made a promise to Miss Mist and the rest of the squad and logically I knew that he needed to be permanently taken off the board, but no matter how much I tried to justify it, there was an annoyingly vocal part of myself that still insisted that there was another way.

  It was like when you had a brand new puzzle you had been working on over a long weekend only to discover you couldn’t complete it because a piece had gone missing. It nagged at me almost incessantly, to the point that I must have looked distracted when I walked back into the squad base from my bedroom.

  “You okay, Loopie? You look like you’re about to vomit or something.”

  “Oh no… I just got comfortable, please don’t tell me there’s some crazed badger and his pal Jim destroying the Empire State Building. I’m a boar, not a puma damnit!” Pinky groaned. I looked up, my head tilting to the side in confusion as I tried to figure out what the hell she was talking about. True to word, she was wearing a matching pajama set, complete with pink and white fuzzy slippers, and was seated next to Freak down in the pit. Her feet were up on the center console, a steaming cup held in a single hand, and the other just opening up a loot box that was sitting on her lap.

  Glancing around, I noticed she wasn’t the only one opening loot boxes, with DuskBreaker and BrainCraft both sitting over in the corner on matching overstuffed beanbag chairs and… did the place look… cozier… or had they just dimmed the lights? I couldn’t contain my curiosity and activated my Area Sense. It didn’t take long to find that, sure enough, there was a 90% Vibe Zone engulfing the majority of the room. I tried to isolate just what was causing the effect before Pinky cleared her throat, distracting me from my search.

  “Earth to Loophole… did something happen?”

  “What? No… sorry,” I said quickly, snapping out of it as I realized how quickly I went from letting myself overly fixate on a problem I was ill-equipped to solve to something that relatively speaking didn’t really matter.

  While I had been gone, someone had clearly realized that I wasn’t going to be using my Luck Bomb just to increase our chances at stuff on this particular night. I needed to have it available for if… when Hydramental showed up. And with the possibility for who knows what to happen in the morning? Well no one was going to sit on some extra possible loot that could help just because they didn’t have my specific ability.

  “How did you guys make this place a huge Vibe Zone?” I asked, deciding I could ignore my bigger problems for at least a few more minutes. I did have my own loot boxes to open and Jon could wait a bit longer before I dragged him back into our apartment to talk under the cover of a Dead Zone.

  “Well you did transcribe your Level 6 Spatial Resonance Theory book in the brief bit of downtime we’ve had recently. I decided to give it a look while you were gone and even the Level 3 knowledge provided a wealth of information to go off of. I managed to do a quick modification to one of my other devices and voila,” BrainCraft said with a smile, his hand making a theatrical sweep as a glowing device materialized.

  “Not just voila, Brain. What about all the work Swanny and I did?” Pinky said, looking over her shoulder at him. “I raided my entire blanket closet for this!”

  “Shouldn’t everything be more… pink then?” I asked and she stuck a tongue out at me.

  “I like more than just pink, you know! And like, maybe I took some of my little sister’s extras too…”

  “It’s got to do with more than just comfort though. Lighting, scents. Even just the general mood that everyone is in. Feng shui is about catering to all of the senses,” BrainCraft explained, pointing toward different nodes on the device that were each glowing with slightly different shades of blue. “Regardless, if the Vibe Zones work as my device’s ability describes, I think most of our luck should work well enough to save your Luck Bomb for more… important purposes.”

  “I… yeah thanks,” I said with a nod. “Tomorrow is going to be… a lot…”

  “Oh boy, Loopie are you getting ready to give us the big, we can do this, speech? Isn’t that a lil bit cliche?” Freak said with a smirk.

  “Hey, sometimes cliche is a good thing,” Pinky nudged him as she settled back into her seat.

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  “I wasn’t going to monologue,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Just… I don’t know… I’m not used to planning things and I guess I’m just… trying to account for everything…”

  I trailed off as I felt a hand slip into mine. I looked over and found Swansong looking up at me, her eyes soft yet unyielding.

  “We’re with you…” she said softly, her eyes piercing into mine as I felt things seemingly slow down like I was using Timekeeper’s Control. Pinky cleared her throat again and I snapped out of it, as I looked over at her. She held a finger up over her mouth as her voice entered my mind, our precautionary communication method taking over.

  “What I think Swanny’s trying to say with all the eyes she’s making at you… is we know there’s no way tomorrow is gonna be as simple as you getting to kick Hydramental’s ass and we also kind of already know you’re going to be hyperfixated on it. You don’t have to account for everything on your own.”

  “We’ve more or less got a running bet as to when that last egg is gonna hatch and while I think we all agree Hydramental is probably gonna try to use it to distract you, we’re gonna really just need you to trust that Pinky and I can handle whatever the hell hatches out of that thing,” Freak added.

  “And after we handed off Barracuda and Skim, I took some time talking with Lt. Nester," BrainCraft chimed in as the new device dematerialized back into his B.E.L.T. "Thanks to him I have access to most of the traffic cameras in Hell’s Kitchen. I’ll be on hand here in the base watching for any potential distractions. If we could convince Silver Wrangler to let Duskbreaker bring him over, we’d have all the firepower we need to handle things, but apparently they are dealing with some sort of– I can’t believe I’m saying this– zombie attack and probably won’t be able to lend us a hand again.”

  “Well that’s unfortunate,” I mumbled, bringing a hand up to my chin before I thought about it. “But… thanks. That does at least cover some things. How’s Miss Mist doing?”

  Jon perked up at this and held a hand up, waggling it side to side.

  “She’s feeling cooped up but she still is refusing to leave the crystal. There’s no movement or anything in the base but as of now, she’s planning to stay in vapor form until you tell her to break it,” Jon explained, seemingly a bit nervous. Now that I was looking at him, he was actually a bit more… fidgety than normal and I raised an eyebrow curiously. “Think you can come back to the Safe House for a minute?”

  “Umm…” I started to say, briefly looking around before Pinky rolled her eyes.

  “Codex told us you’ve been given some super hush hush information, don’t worry about it, we don’t think you’re secretly plotting to kill us all,” she explained before another loot box materialized onto her lap. “Oh but hurry back, we want to drop our last three tokens in, and Freak and I got another bet going on what kind of loot box you’re gonna get for passing two hundred thousand.”

  Feeling slightly railroaded but not wanting to let it linger, I just shrugged, squeezed Swansong’s hand once, and then headed for my door just as Jon headed through his own. As soon as I walked out of my bedroom, I couldn’t help but say the first thing that came to mind.

  “Dude what the hell? You told them I was doing something they weren’t filled in on?”

  “Well we did sort of agree that secrets were what caused all the paranoia in the first place, and I didn’t say anything about the…. Err… maybe you should activate your Dead Zone.”

  “Oh come on! Not again!” Angie complained just as I materialized the device. “You just had me blocked out a few hours ago!!!”

  “It’s just for a few minutes Angie… trust us… okay?” Jon said before he gestured for me to pull the device out. I obliged though I didn’t immediately activate it.

  “Hopefully we won’t have to do this forever Angie, just… this is important,” I said.

  “No no, I get it… I just get lonely is all,” Angie said with a fake sniffle. “Go on, have your little chat.”

  I rolled my eyes and activated the device, telling it to fill the room as Jon walked over toward the open kitchen.

  “She’s a bit of a drama queen,” he said, reaching into the fridge and tossing me a bottle of water. “So as I was saying. I didn’t tell him about the key, but when you were talking with The First I uh… decided to test something. I had Brain bring one of his extra devices over by the Command Room and activate it… I told him I wanted to see how it affected me being in the room since it’s not like the helmet and gloves I had to equip suddenly disappear just because I’m in one of these zones. Hell, look at how Barracuda didn’t turn back into a human, the Dead Zone isn’t exactly a perfect Dead Zone… but that’s uh… that’s getting off topic. It’s just what I told him I wanted to test…”

  “If you didn’t want to test that… did… Shit Jon… please tell me you didn’t…”

  “I didn’t even open the folder up, I promise,” he said, raising his hands defensively. “I just… I needed to know that we knew where it was just in case.”

  “Dude that’s… that’s one hell of a risk…”

  “A calculated one. You told me that the last time I apparently accessed it, you were in a Dead Zone. I waited until you were in one again and then even put myself in one so that Angie didn’t overhear anything. It’s been an hour and a half since I found where The First hid the Administration Key on your system and nothing bad has happened. Axio doesn't suddenly know where it is as far as I can tell. I mean, I was just surprised it was sitting at-”

  “Stop,” I said, holding a hand up and shaking my head. “Just… don’t tell me where it is.”

  “Huh? Why?”

  “Come on man… you know me. I’m not about to sit here and pretend like I’m not impulsive… If I know where that key is, it’s only a matter of time until I make the stupid decision to try and use it to fix something,” I said, falling down onto the couch and diverting my gaze to the ground. “Like…. I don’t even know how to fucking code, if I touch that thing, I’m bound to blow the fucking world up…”

  “Yeah I uh… I actually thought about that part,” Jon said and my head snapped over to him.

  “Really?”

  “Well you did mention how TechWarden tried to tempt you with Level 9 Coding Knowledge. I had been trying to figure out why he would do that when it sort of clicked into place. Tell me something, you went to talk to The First to ask him about what TechWarden and Factory might be after, right?”

  “Yeah… he ended up filling me in on pretty much all of their history. TechWarden has always been a pill apparently,” I said.

  “But he’s been around the development process from nearly the beginning then, right?” Jon asked and I nodded my head. “Then he has to know the key exists, or something like it. I think he thought he could corrupt you and give you the exact tool you’d need for him to either create one of his own since your power lets you do whatever the hell you need to do.”

  “That’s… a bit of a stretch… but I can see how that might have been the end goal for him.”

  “Well let’s just say it is. What if you have coding knowledge and the key? I bet you’d be able to-”

  “Jon… I don’t want to use the key if it means Axio is going to be able to send things further into chaos,” I said, cutting him off with a bit of a frustrated sigh. “Look, I know you must have been buzzing about the key ever since you found out it’s how I got added… but Christopher told me the only way someone gets added into the game is if they are basically mortally wounded. It’s not exactly a reliable way to get you superpowers.”

  “If you can change the code-”

  “Jon!” I said, my voice raising as I stood back up. “I get it, I do… you want superpowers, it’s been a dream of yours for years and I would love nothing more than if you had them, but is this really the time?!”

  “I… okay yeah sorry…” Jon admitted. “All I’m saying is that you should at least be prepared in case you have to use that option… I can even keep it to myself until you absolutely need to know where it is, sound good?”

  “Uh… sure I guess, but how am I supposed to prepare to use it? I swung through the book shop, there weren’t any coding books in there.”

  “Nate… buddy… you have a tech genius on your squad…” Jon said, looking at me with an amused expression, a wide smile spreading over his face as he finally got around to the point he had been trying to make. “The dude’s got Level 9 knowledge and I just made him transcribe a Level 3 one for you while you were gone… how do you think he noticed the Spatial Resonance book he absorbed?”

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