"No… no… how the hell am I supposed to fit two people into two hundred square feet!? No, no, not only no but hell no, that building hasn't been renovated since the twenties…"

New York apartments. They were like shoeboxes. No room, no amenities, no nothing. Just trying to cram as many people into as small a space as possible. Hell, their hotel room was roomier than any of these apartments would be, and that's without adding in the fact that some of the apartments didn't have in-unit restrooms! What was it, a converted boarding house?

Actually, wait. Noah clicked back through the description… yup, that's exactly what it was. A converted boarding house. He sighed, pushing his glasses up so he could get at the bridge of his nose and rub his eyes. This… was frustrating.

Good news: their bank cards worked. All of the money that had been in his name—and all the money that was owed to him—sat in an account. That meant inheritance money, Bar'Mitzvah money, graduation money (high school and undergrad), his federal retirement account, his other federal retirement account, his scholarship money, and all the student loans that had been coming his way. Which added up to a fairly decent chunk of change!

The bad news?

THIS IS A LOAN. THE REPAYMENT PERIOD BEGINS ONE YEAR FROM… OH, THIS VERY SECOND. ADMIN D

Nearly three hundred thousand dollars to work with. And while it should have been his, it wasn't now. It was just a loan. Collateral. A bond, to be repaid.

Which meant that he needed to be judicious with the funds. He needed to be miserly. He needed to be stingy.

He needed to be… Jewish.

"Oh, if I were a rich man," he murmured. "Tevye, you old bastard. You had one hell of a point…"

The sound of the hotel room door unlocking drew Noah's attention, but he relaxed the moment he saw that it was just Cross, carrying the pair of canvas sacks he'd taken to using to haul their mass-orders of water over his shoulders and a massive, shit-eating grin on his face.

"Got more ammo for us?" Noah inquired, not looking up from the little cheapy laptop's screen as he continued his search. Hang on, this one had potential… whoop, no, never mind, that was not a part of town two white guys wanted to be in. Nothing wrong with it, just that they wouldn't be very welcome there. Point of fact, they'd be about as well-liked as a fat noble during a famine. So what next—

CLACK!

Noah's browsing was interrupted by Cross slapping his hand down on the laptop and shutting it so that he could shove his grin in the Frost-Man's face.

"Oh, quite a bit better, my friend!" Cross giggled, almost literally…no, no he was literally simmering with anticipation, steam leaking off of him like a miniature geyser. Or a very hot theme park mister.

"I was working on that," Noah groused halfheartedly.

"And if the fact that you didn't clock me with this thing is anything to go by, then you were getting nowhere at lightspeed, so let's take a break and work on what I just discovered instead, hm?" Cross tilted his head with a hum that clearly said that Noah didn't really have much choice in the matter.

"Alright." Noah tossed the laptop onto the pillow. "I'll bite. Whatcha got."

"So!" Cross clapped his hands and righted himself contentedly, ringing his hands in eager anticipation. "Just to alleviate your concerns, first off, yes, I got us our water, and yes, I used a different store, and yes, I saved the receipts. That all to your satisfaction?"

"Perfectly so, continue?"

"Well now see, the interesting part comes from right after I walked out of the store, with my bags in tow! As you can see," Cross waved at the canvas he'd been hauling. "The bags are, as always, substantially heavy, so I was more focused on carrying them than where I was going… so I didn't notice I was right behind someone's car until they accidentally blasted me with their exhaust."

Noah winced. "One, yuck. Two, ow. Three, that must've stunk to high heavens."

"Yes to one and three…" Cross crossed his forearms with a bark of laugh. "But no to two!"

"... hold up." Noah held up his hands in the universal symbol for a time-out. "Details. Now."

"You're right, that backblast stank like the rest of this street looks… but in terms of temperatures?" Cross chopped his arms out with finality. "It. Didn't. Hurt. It was like a breeze of normal air. When really, it should have been hot. Boiling hot," the Steam-Man crossed his arms with a smirk. "I trust you can deduce the direction my thoughts then took?"

"Let me go get some ice." Noah stood up and started to make for the door.

Only 'started', though, as Cross stuck his hand out and caught him before he could make it more than a foot. "Way ahead of you," Cross reassured him, digging through one of his bags and bringing out a zippo and a plastic cooler. "Lighter for me, dry ice for you. Let's see how much climate-based punishment we can take, shall we?"

Noah hopped up, clapped his hands, and rubbed them together in anticipation. "Well, if you insist…" He closed his eyes and held his hands out. "Hit me."

The only 'hit' he got, though, was the cooler being plopped down in his hands.

"Hey, I only know that I'm good with heat, you're the one potentially going through frostbite," Cross scoffed as he started flicking his zippo's wheel. "Now grab that chunk of carbon death and potentially sear off the top layer of your palm's skin."

"Sounds about right." He sighed to himself and flipped open the cooler. Inside, a small layer of misty carbon dioxide settling on top of it, was a brick of dry ice. Like, almost literally a brick. If he'd taken this and tried to shove it into masonry, it would fit long enough to apply some mortar and lay more bricks atop the damn thing before it sublimated into nothingness. Right, he was trying to avoid doing this. Gotta do the thing. Alright… three, two, one—!

Noah's hand came into contact with the dry ice, and… nothing. Oh sure it was chilly, but it was a nice chilly. Comforting, really. He grabbed the dry ice brick and popped it on the back of his neck, sighing blissfully as the chill coursed down his spine. Oh yeah, that was the stuff.

"This. Is. Great!" he said, looking at Cross.

"Ditto on that, this feels awesome!" Cross sighed blissfully, even as he ran his lit lighter up and down the length of his arm, with nothing more than a contented grin to show for it. "Man, I've seriously got to pick up some lighter fluid next time I go out and really light myself up! This is cozy!"

"Still, just for the sake of science, you gotta try this." He held the brick out to Cross and, with a nervous grimace, Cross held his own lighter in turn, and the two started to hold out their fingers towards each others' elements.

As Noah's finger approached the flame, he could feel the heat (too hot too hot TOO HOT) and before he even noticed what was happening, a small shell of ice sprung up around the tip, dousing the flame before it could begin to scorch him.

"Sunnova—!" Cross hissed in turn, jerking his finger back and waving it out with a frantic blast of steam before he could even make contact with the actual ice. "How are you holding that thing?! I can barely feel my fingertip!"

"Uh… you may need to turn the lighter on again." Noah pulled his finger back and bent it, letting the ice crumble away from the tip. "I didn't even notice. I just… I dunno. I saw the fire, and I just did not want it near me."

"Son of a—you're telling me we have opposing elemental phobias?!" Cross demanded, steam starting to roil off him irritably. "Damn it, Blue Seas, can't you give us one blessing that doesn't double as a curse?"

"Nope." Noah shrugged, tossing the brick of dry ice up and down as it slowly sublimated away. "Because being us is suffering in some way."

"Hilarious," Cross scoffed, digging out a water jug from his sack and starting to warm it with a palmful of steam as he sat on his bed. "Well, anyways, now that we've figured all that out, let's get down to business. I've got intel, you've got intel, let's mix it up."

Noah nodded in agreement as he sat down as well and started to chill his water. "Agreed. Feed me knowledge, and I will give you analyses."

And so they began to download their accumulated knowledge.

[==V==]

Over the course of the past week, Noah and Cross had been accumulating as much data on recent parahuman activity and Earth Bet in general as they tried to get a better grasp on their current situation.

"Alright, major groups and cities first." Noah unfurled the map Cross had bought and spread it out on the table, a pad of sticky notes in his right hand, a pen in his left. "Teeth and Accord in Boston, ABB and Empire in Brockton, Adepts here in the Big Apple, Elite may as well have staked a claim on the whole West Coast at this point, Fallen down south…" he listed off as he stuck notes thusly labeled on the map. He then glanced up at Cross. "Any word on MIRIS and NEPEA-5?"

"First one's getting gutted more and more each day, second's already come and gone," Cross replied. "NEPEA-5's been around a decade, there's nothing we can do to change that without enough money to make Scrooge McDuck jealous… and even then we'd still need the devil's luck. As it is though…"

"Got it, no trips to Hollywood for a bit then. Until we have the firepower to make a difference anyway." Noah took a red pen and hash-marked the entire west side of the country. "Slaughterhouse?"

"They just lost Winter, grabbed Chuckles recently." Cross bowed his head sorrowfully. "They already have Riley."

Noah sighed. "Alright, so much for that one. CUI, about fifty members at the moment, and I think they just lost Lung recently, so he's still heading stateside. New Wave is still a thing, Fleur is still alive, but Allfather definitely isn't. Purity is still with the Empire, so I think we can assume she doesn't break off from them until she gets pregnant, and that's not for… what, two years?"

"About," Cross agreed. "How old was Aster at the start of it all, one?"

"I think so, which means that if we went to Brockton, I'd still have a massive target on my back from the second strongest Blaster in the country." Noah frowned. "We're going to have to steer well away from Brockton unless you want to go down there solo. It's not safe enough for me to go there yet… fuck."

"Fuck," Cross agreed. "Alright, uh… what next?"

"Where were the most recent Slaughterhouse and domestic Endbringer attacks, did you get that much?"

Cross sighed in relief as he took a note of his own and stuck it in the top left of the map. "Well, that was Leviathan drowning Seattle in '03, but for the Americas in general?" A new sticky slammed down onto what should have been Canada, but was instead more of the Atlantic Ocean. "Newfoundland in '05. Dragon's already spread her wings and Saint has his mitts all over her choke chain. Luckily though, in lighter news, we don't need to worry about waking up in twenty pieces…" he placed down another note in the middle of the map. "Because last sighting places the Slaughterhouse somewhere in Tornado Alley. I guess Crawler wanted to test himself against a twister or something.

As for overseas, Sleeper's got a twenty-mile demilitarized zone around him, the Three Blasphemies cross borders like they're on tour, Gesselschaft and its cells are like the European equivalent of ISIS, and not only is Ash Beast fucking off somewhere in the middle of the Sahara, but the non-defunct governments have a rolling roadblock around him to keep any would-be warlords from trying to direct him anywhere. So, overall…" Cross clapped his hands with finality. "World's a shitfest, nothing new."

"Yeah, and if we want to make a splash in this shitfest, we're gonna have to go and knock somebody over." Noah sat down in the desk chair and clasped his hands together, leaning his chin on them as he looked over the map. "We have some funds, but that'll quickly disappear if we aren't careful, and we need some form of revenue stream to make sure we can pay back the fucking loan when it comes due." He looked at the map, breathing slowly as he contemplated.

Cross loomed over his shoulder with a pencil, and started drawing lines across the map. "A car wouldn't be too expensive, yeah? How about… I dunno, a great big road trip cross country, taking out every villain we find until we've made a name for ourselves?"

Noah shook his head. "I see a few flaws with that immediately. One, we cross jurisdictional lines to do stuff, that means the long arm of the law is after us. Which probably means Legend, relativistic speeds and all. Two, it'll work for a town or three, but then it'll just be obvious unless we swap car and outfits every time, and that's just impractical and asking for us to be mobbed. Three, breakneck pace, burnout imminent. And four, how exactly are we gonna get a reputation taking out D-listers? And even if we hit a few B to low-A, that's still only local names." Noah erased the line and looked back at the map. "We need… a big name. Something people know." He paused, looking up as he tapped on Boston. "What about the Butcher?"

"Besides the fact that he/she/whatever would most likely chew us up and spit us out?" Cross asked sarcastically, before letting the snide tone drop as he shook his head. "I remember reading somewhere that the whole 'killed to killer' transfer is a fiction. In truth, it's the closest Parahuman period. Meaning that not only would we not solve anything, but they'd most likely find out about us. And trust me, letting on that we're not actually parahumans?" Cross snorted. "Yeah, dissection sounds great. And not necessarily by the government either."

"Right. That's a no-go on Boston then, since Blasto isn't big enough and we are definitely not gonna be able to stop Accord with just two people." Noah frowned and started to tick off his fingers. "We need to narrow things down by criteria first. One, bogeyman. Two, within our relative means. Not necessarily current means, but something we can accomplish within the next few months, to a year at most. Three, we can't just leave a power vacuum behind, because that's just leaving things worse than when we got there." He wrote them down. "So someone people know, someone we can take, and someone we can excise without complications. Any thoughts?"

"Mmrgh…" Cross groaned with uncertainty, starting to chew on his thumb as he looked the map over. "I'm trying to think of someone, but nobody springs to mind. Honestly, if I could I'd say we go for Teacher or String Theory, but they're both—tch!" Steam suddenly vented off of Cross as he went white, his nail nearly snapping as his jaw locked up.

"You have an idea?" Noah deduced.

Cross slowly looked back up at Noah, his expression painfully blank. "You're going to hate it," he informed his friend in an emotionless voice.

"...why?"

"Because it's a bad idea."

Noah gave Cross the flattest look he could manage. "How bad."

Cross's expression remained blank as he turned a finger on himself. "I hate it."

Noah maintained his flat stare for a bit longer before waving his hand with a defeated sigh. "...fuck it, we have nothing else, and maybe I won't hate it too. Tell me."

And so Cross told Noah his idea. It took all of half a second for Noah's expression to mirror Cross's.

"I was wrong, I hate it too."

Cross nodded in solemn solidarity. "And now, I have to say the six words I hate most of all right now."

"Which would be?"

Cross slowly leaned forwards, his eyes wide in miserable desperation. "Do you have any better ideas?"

Noah stared at Cross blankly for almost a full minute before slamming his head down on the map and groaning. "Alright, fine. Shitty idea it is, then."

Cross's head joined Noah's on the desk in short order, letting out a groan of his own. "This is gonna suck."

"Eeeee-Yup."

And with that they groaned in miserable chorus.

[==V==]

"Okay, so!" Cross belted out an hour later once they'd both managed to snap out of their despair, pacing agitatedly across their room as he clenched and unclenched his hands in numb panic. "We are going on a suicide mission. That is a fact we have determined! Our next logical course of action! Now, we just need to go about deciding how the fuck we actually go about going on said, and I cannot stress this point enough, suicide mission! Thoughts!?"

"Well first thing's first, you're turning the hotel room into a fucking sauna," Noah snarled as he waved his hand in front of his face and chilled the blistering fumes that came into contact with him.

Cross blinked as that statement broke through his mild panic, and it was with no small amount of surprise that he noted that yes, he'd been seeping steam behind himself as he'd walked. "I-I, that, uh… huh?" he uttered numbly.

"Sit down, have a drink, and get your head back in the game." Noah ordered tersely, pointing at his bro's bed.

Once Cross sat down and hauled his steam back from 'volcanic' to merely 'simmering' as he started to drink, the Frost-Man continued. "Think about it, man: we got ROB'd, it was always a suicide mission. This just… brings it into sharp relief, if you want to be poetic about it." Noah sniffed. "Which I do. Now!" He tapped the notepad next to him. "If we're going to do this, we need training, and we need gear. Training we can technically do anywhere… so long as it's somewhere where we're not likely to be scooped up by any one of the dozens of faction looking to pick up parahuman muscle, but still. For now though?" he held up his hand and solidified another chunk of the balmy fog in his palm. "You just flooded our room with steam because you freaked out a bit."

"Suicide mission!" Cross hissed, a fresh blast of steam following the statement.

"Stow it!" Noah snapped right back with a frozen cloud of his own that immediately fell to the floor. "We. Need. Control. We have no idea what we're doing, and until we can figure out just what we're capable of, we're as much a threat to ourselves as we are to anyone else. Understand?"

The Steam-Man stared at him blankly for a bit, but ultimately, Cross took a deep breath and exhaled a stream of steam as he stopped the leaking from the rest of his body. "Okay… okay. Sorry about that, it's just…"

"I know." Noah put a hand on Cross's shoulder, and sat him down on the edge of the hotel bed. "Just, think of it like… like the Normandy."

Cross gave him a funny look. "D-Day?"

Noah smirked a bit. "SR-2."

That got a surprised snort out of Cross, but that then transitioned to a bark of laughter. "Git gud! Fine, fuck it! You've successfully awakened my inner gamer, my head's back on straight." He started rubbing his hands eagerly. "So! How we do?"

"Get off our asses and practice. We've got Devil Fruits, Cross!" Noah held up his hands, rime coating his palms. "We haven't even scratched the surface of what we're capable of, and if what we've seen so far is any hint, there is some serious potential under there. Like… uh." Noah snapped his fingers. "Like… fuck, what was it…"

"Luffy and pretty much anything he does?" Cross offered with a snicker.

"Fair enough," Noah nodded as he conceded the point. "Point is, we need to grasp our powers, and break them like a party of professional D&Ders in a good campaign. We have the most munchkin-friendly powers in anime outside of Stands, so we need to get our asses in gear and munchkin."

Cross slowly tilted his head to the side. "Did… did you just use 'munchkin' as a verb?"

"Yes," Noah said with a perfectly straight face. "You're goddamn right I did. Now be a nice subject and do the verb."

"Alright, alright," Cross nodded, slowly laying back against the wall behind the top of his bed. He raised his hand in front of his face and started letting out a relatively small spout of steam from his palm. "Where… to…" he frowned as a thought struck him, and cut off the steam so he could wiggle his fingers thoughtfully. "Alright, that's as good a place as any."

Cross closed his fist and pointed his index finger up. With a little concentration, steam started whistling out the tip of the digit. Then, Cross opened his fist and pointed all his fingers upwards, and he started blowing steam from each of his fingertips one after another.

The Steam-man grinned successfully. "Alright! Looks like hyper-precision is a go-go—GAH!" Cross cut himself off with a wince when his entire palm started blasting again, and hastily cut it off. "Alright, correction, precision with concentration only. I'll need to practice that."

"Yes, yes you will, Stanley Steamer. Now let somebody else try something out." Noah quirked an eyebrow. "Or, you know. Specifically try to point that in one direction. Like, say, the air vent in the bathroom."

"Wup, right, sorry," Cross winced, standing and walking for the restroom… before pausing in the doorway as a thought struck him. "Wait, direction—!" he raised his palm and loosed another vent of steam. Then that vent started moving across Cross's body, the steam migrating up Cross's arm, over his shoulders and down into his opposite hand. "HA! Suh-weet!"

"What did I just say about steaming up the room!?" Noah yelled out, raining on Cross's parade again… literally this time as he iced the cloud of haze that had filled the room, slamming the mass of snow on Cross's head.

"GAH! DICK!" Cross yelped, wincing as he blasted the snow off with a blast of steam from his shoulders before ramming the switch for the restroom vent. He shivered as he walked back to his bed. "Alright, alright, truce. Now, anything from you?"

"Yeah, actually." Noah went into the restroom and filled a cup with tap water, which he then lifted and began to slowly pour out into the sink. He brought one finger to the small stream of water leaking out, and after a moment's hesitation, plunged it into the stream.

The water he touched froze. The rest of the water in the cup froze.

And then the cup shattered, because the water froze so instantaneously that it expanded out instead of up.

"Shit!" Noah yelled, flinching away from the frag grenade he'd accidentally turned the cheap glass cup into. "Too fast, too fast!"

"Nooo, not fast enough!" Cross cackled, clapping appreciatively. "Again, again!"

"No, not again! Now get in here and steam up the floor so I can… huh." Noah kneeled down where he stood, and in the process, a thin layer of frost flaked off from most of his body, tinkling on the floor to mix with the glass. While that certainly wasn't helping, it did have some interesting implications. Namely?

He turned to Cross, pensive. "Was there ice on me a second ago?"

"Eh?" Cross blinked, cutting himself off mid-laugh as he looked his friend over in confusion. "Uh, no, no there… wasn't, but now you look like discount Aokiji," he leaned back and crossed his arms with a smug grin. "Guess you're as bad as I am when it comes to instinctual activation, huh?"

Noah snorted dismissively, holding up a shard of glass. "Yeah well that's a good thing because it just stopped me from becoming a sieve. Look."

And so Cross got up and looked… and observed with no small amount of surprise that the shard appeared to be imbedded in— "Your frost stopped the glass?"

"That 'instinctual activation' is actually 'instinctual armor'. And that's so damn handy I think you need to work on something similar," Noah waved his hand over the floor as he composed a glove of frost over his hand. "Now, start steaming so we can get sweeping."

A minute later, the mess was cleaned up and they were sitting back down… until Noah was given pause by the sound of his shirt crackling. The Frost-man looked himself over contemplatively, and he gave Cross an intent look. "Hey, Cross, I just noticed… think you could blast some steam from your chest?"

"Eh? Yeah, sure, whatever," Cross shrugged, casually letting out a few puffs from his gut. "Why, what's the point?"

"The point is that you're actually right. I do look like discount Aokiji…" Noah held up his arm, indicating his frosted over sleeve. "Clothes and all. And you just vented your steam through your shirt. Good news for us, Oda's clothing-immunity is alive and well."

"Okay good, no ruining our clothes due to moisture or anything," Cross sighed in relief.

"Not what I was getting at," Noah murmured. "More, 'we can wear body armor and still use what the rest of this world would consider a Striker ability'. But still!" He held up a fist covered in hoarfrost. "Nice! Now," he laid back and waved Cross off as he started concentrating intently on his fist. "You go ahead and do whatever. I'm going to see how thick I can pack this stuff on."

"Yeah yeah, got it. Just don't complain when this place starts getting muggy again," Cross scoffed as he started letting out puffs of steam from his hand. He examined the venting vapor thoughtfully for a bit before cocking his eyebrow as a thought hit him. "Actually, make that really muggy, because you're actually onto something. I've only ever turned the dial down. Let's see how high this can go."

So saying, Cross pointed his hand at the wall, scrunched his face up in concentration, envisioned throwing a lever as far as it could go—

FWOOM! SMASH!

"GYAH!"

And then promptly yelped in both panic and pain alike when things suddenly got really fucking blurry and ended with his head head suddenly hurting like hell.

"A-ha-haow…" Cross moaned, bringing up a hand to poke at the throbbing at the rear of his skull. "What… the fuck just—?"

"Well…" Noah stood up with a laugh, pointing down where Cross used to be. "You did a rather nice impression of a bottle rocket, I'll say that much. Though maybe tone it down, we can't… really… well, shit."

"What? What shit?" Cross looked up to see Noah pointing with each hand as the steam started to clear. He followed Noah's fingers to see… holes. Holes in the walls. Holes in the walls on opposite sides of the room that didn't belong there. "... well, shit."

"Well shit, indeed." Noah dragged a hand down his face until it slid off the end of his chin, then put his glasses back on. "Looks like your steam made one of those holes and… well, you literally made the other. Come on, let's pack our bags. Looks like we gotta find a new hotel."

"You just don't want to pay for damages."

"Exactly. Now get off your ass and let's move!"

"Ooor…" Cross waved his hand dismissively as he sat back down on his bed, wincing as he rolled his throbbing shoulders. "You could cool your jets, we hold off for a bit, and practice some more? Seeing as I doubt anyone will be around to check on us any time soon and we can bail well before then?"

Noah paused, then sank back onto his bed with a defeated sigh. "Fuck it, you got a point. But if we end up having to pay for any of this then I blame you, got it?"

"We'll leave a treasure IOU, now shaddap and practice."

Noah rolled his eyes and started to build up the frost on his fist again… then frowned when, for some reason, even though he could feel the frost building up like it was supposed to, his makeshift gauntlet didn't grow in the least.

Cross, meanwhile, was rolling his shoulder with a grumble. "Alright, note to self, don't go full blast again until you've built up some damn muscle, because the recoil on this shit is—!" Cross's voice died mid-sentence, his gaze locked on absolutely nothing as his train of thought slammed the breaks, turned 90 degrees and then blasted through the sound barrier.

Noah glanced up at his partner when he suddenly fell silent. "I trust that that's a good shocked silence?"

In lieu of a verbal answer, Cross slowly raised his arm, his forearm sticking up at a right angle. He then loosed a burst of steam… and his arm snapped back as a result.

Cross slowly turned his slack expression on Noah. "I have recoil," he breathed weakly. His expression then became positively euphoric. "I have recoil! I have an equal and opposite reaction to my jetstream-grade steam! I can beat heads in with Newton's Third!"

Noah gave him a half-bored, half-impressed look. "Nice."

Cross's manic grin took on a fierce gleam. "You are unimpressed. That is an error. Allow me to demonstrate!" He cocked his arm back, readying himself to throw a punch.

The Frost-man immediately pegged onto his opposite's intentions, and promptly sucked in a worried breath. "No, wait, I see what you're doing but—!"

"FALCON!" Cross belted out, throwing his fist forwards in a punch as he discharged a squall of steam from his elbow—!

FWOOSH!

"GWAGH!"

And then the world blurred out and everything became PAIN again… only this time, Cross was dizzy as all heck, flat on his back on the floor and his head was spinning like he'd ridden in a washing machine.

"Agh…" Cross winced miserably, slowly pointing a finger in the air. "At… the risk of repeating myself… the fuck?"

"Don Quixote called?" Noah quipped. "He wants his windmill back."

"...at the risk… of repeating myself…"

Noah rolled his eyes with a put-upon sigh. "Throw another punch, a normal one, and this time, follow the direction your elbow is pointing throughout the motion."

Cross slowly complied, weakly raising his arm to his side… and letting out an embarrassed groan as he straightened his arm out. "Fucking… well that's gonna suck to fix."

"Eeyup," Noah replied, popping the 'p'. "Practice makes perfect, so better get used to it." He looked down at his own ice-encrusted hand in frustration, brow furrowed. "And now I'm confused. I can feel more ice under there, so why can't I see it?" He tensed his jaw, tried to push more ice out and—

CRACK!

Noah blinked at the crack in the veritable gauntlet of ice on his hand. "How did that… oh shi—"

As it turns out, two things cannot occupy the same space. And when he tried to create even more ice underneath the ice already there, well… the only way it could go was out.

And as it was, the crack alone wasn't enough to alleviate the pressure the topmost layer was under. It was with a resounding crack that the ice shattered into dozens of pieces, flying out with surprising speed, but very little force due to how relatively light said ice was at the time of detonation. And while the blast did knock Noah on his ass from the shock, an instinctive layer of frost prevented him from being perforated… though the same could not be said of the room's already-ruined walls.

"The fuck was that!?" Cross demanded as he crawled out from under his bed, pointing an accusatory finger at Noah.

"... oops?" Noah offered with a sheepish smile as he slowly got to his feet.

"Oops? Oops!? That was not an 'oops', that was a shrapnel bomb!"

"...regenerative armor with a shrapnel mod?"

"...fuuuck that is some badass Borderlands shit," Cross admitted with a defeated sigh, shaking his head before holding his hand out to Noah with a grin. "Well don't just stand there, help me up and throw a snowball at me so I can try using my steam as a flame-mod shield!"

"Well that sounds like a damn good time." Noah reached out to grab a hold of Cross's arm.

They regretted the action almost instantly, on account of how at the time both had had their powers running at full blast.

The effects were, to be concise…

KRAK-THOOM!

SMASH!

Dramatic.

Once more everything became a painful, painful blur for the two, and when they recovered their wits, they realized that things were… not good. Their room, to put it generously, looked like a bomb had gone off in it. And not a metaphorical 'clothes everywhere, food strewn about' after-party mess bomb, but a literal C4 and shrapnel bomb. The beds were devastated, the walls and ceiling were badly damaged, and a pipe had almost certainly burst in the bathroom.

Miraculously, the Devil Fruit Users were unharmed… or at least, as 'unharmed' as could be allowed when one was halfway embedded in a wall. As it was, the pair were dazed, aching, and found that their right arms were positively killing them.

Slowly regaining his wits, wits, Noah worked his non-dead arm out of the drywall and shakily held up a finger. "So… three things…" he wheezed miserably. "Number one… our abilities do not play nice together."

"No shit, Sherlock?" Cross spat… or would have spat if his mouth didn't feel like it was stuffed with cotton, meaning the best he could do was moan.

Noah took that as an indication of understanding, and raised a second finger. "Number two… we desperately need to find a real place to train our powers… and by 'we', I mean the one who actually walks outside, meaning 'you'."

"'Uck 'oo…"

"And number three… we need to get the fuck out of this burrow before the manager or the Protectorate finds us. Clear?"

"Gweehhh…"

"Perfect."

[==V==]

Finding a new place to stay was surprisingly easy. When you've paid with cash at a seedy hotel, it's very easy to just dodge, duck, dip, dive, and—it bears repeating—dodge out of there before they get a chance to actually see the damage done to the room. And that same cash means it's rather easy to just shake a wad of it in somebody's face and get a room elsewhere, few questions asked.

Unfortunately, that same cash was doing absolutely zero favors for either of them when it came to finding something to work with. Training was eminently doable, yes… if either of them wanted to end up outed and press-ganged into the Protectorate. Noah'd had the bright idea of waking up well before the ass-crack of dawn to go train in Central Park, but all it had taken was a five second internet search for Cross to point out that the New York PRT had collared no less than five 'fledgling villains' that way, with the dates lining up suspiciously well with the debuts of multiple new Protectorate and Ward heroes.

Which left the both of them still stuck on square two: where to get some training in, and some equipment to actually work with.

"Find anything?" Noah asked when the hotel door closed again. Cross, despite being taller, was much reedier and, in Noah's words, "in desperate need of about five cheeseburgers" to fill out his frame. Was that a somewhat passable reason to sit on his ass and send Cross out to scout for training locations and acquire rations every time they needed something? Yes.

Was it also an excuse to keep sitting on his ass and banging his head against this problem, because while he was frustrated as hell with it, he wasn't about to give in?

Also yes.

"Well there was an abandoned warehouse down near the Brooklyn Bridge," Cross began, dropping bags of junk food and jugs of water as he went. "But by the time I got back there, two Wards were going through it. And a similar one on the other side of the bridge was crawling with druggies, crooks, and either an Adept or a discount Satanist, depending on the purpose of those symbols on the wall." He grabbed a can of cream soda and popped the top, downing half of it in one go. "How about you?"

"Toss me one of those." Cross reached down into the bag to grab another can, and—"Don't shake it."—and gently tossed the thing at Noah, who grabbed it, popped it open, and took a swig of his own. "Well we've got about fifteen grand invested into just as many stocks, a thousand bucks apiece. Figure I'll compare how they do with what's projected, and endlessly curse the fact that I can't just make my twin the accountant do it for me, and then we'll decide what to do with it from there." He turned the cheap little laptop towards Cross, and then clicked onto a different window. "Also found a few possible apartments that aren't the size of a shoebox, though half of them would require some form of revenue stream before we actually do something about it. So we've got that going for us. Which is nice."

"And as for gear?" Cross asked. "Find anything we can actually use for our little—"

"Don't say suicide mission."

"…fool's errand?"

Noah sighed, a long, slow, and frustrated sigh as he moved his laptop in front of him and opened it up, scowling at it irritably. "I've been trying to find something, but every, single, fucking, link, is, DEAD!" Noah capped off his impromptu rant by slamming his head down onto the keyboard in frustration and just lay there, groaning with his nose sliding the cursor around on the screen. "Who knew it'd actually be hard to get a good raygun in fucking Worm!?"

Cross blinked in confusion over his can, and hastily drained what remained so that he could look over his partner's shoulder. "I'm sorry, did you just say you were trying to buy tinkertech weaponry online? Who the hell would be that freaking irresponsi—!"

"WELCOME TO TOYBOX!"

The two of them both jumped in shock when Noah's laptop nearly blew out its muted speakers with a deafening fanfare as its screen suddenly started flashing with shapes and colors.

Cross blinked again, this time trying to clear the ringing from his ears. "Well. Asked and answered I guess."

Noah stared for a little bit himself before scowling at the screen as realization hit him. "Those sneaky little shits…" Wisps of frost misted off of him as he clenched his fists, trails of rime creeping across the desk where his hands lay on its surface as he stared into the camera. "Let me guess: you sons of bitches are watching us right now, aren't you?"

"WELCOME TO TOYBOX!" the computer parroted helpfully, but even though it was the exact same message, there was definitely a cheeky tone to the electronic voice.

"So you're tracking activity, and once it hits the point of frustration, thereby indicating total dedication… let me guess," Noah snarled. "Cranial."

"WELCOME TO TOYBOX!" it blared out once again.

"I have three hundred grand ready and waiting to pour into your pockets, and I am walking away with my three hundred in three, two—" Noah started to count down, slowly reaching for the laptop's lid.

An instant later, an address flashed on the screen, and a new window with a map on it opened up. It pointed to the middle of an alley with absolutely nothing else in it.

"Well," Cross stated, hastily snapping a picture of the map with his phone. "That was easy. Maybe lead with that in the search bar next time instead of the guessing game?"

Noah glared.

"Just saying!"

"WELCOME TO TOYBOX!"

"Oh shut up," Noah snapped, slamming the computer shut and frosting it over for good measure.

[==V==]

Three blocks south, one and a half west, and then some indeterminate fraction back north. The map provided to them had been very specific: underneath the fire escape ladder in the alley, in between two dumpsters. It reeked to high heavens, nobody was coming, and against all odds, absolutely zero windows had a clear view of this absurdly specific part of New York City.

"Well, this is the place!" Cross leaned in closer to the bare wall, poking it, prodding it, tapping at the dumpsters, and generally making a nuisance of himself. Or he would be, if anybody other than Noah were actively watching. "Hello? Anybody there?" Nothing. "Open Sesame!"

"Somehow I don't think that's going to work," Noah commented wryly, watching Cross try to find the door that both of them knew existed.

"Then what will?" Cross knocked a pattern on the wall, and even tried the Diagon Alley brick sequence. Still, nothing. "Damn, really thought that last one would work."

"Yeah, well, it didn't." Noah took his own step closer to the completely and utterly nondescript wall, taking a look and trying to see anything special. "How exactly is this supposed to work anyway? Do we just say 'please let us in', and suddenly some great big sign pops up saying welcome to Toybox or somethi—"

"WELCOME TO TOYBOX!"

"Motherfucker!"

Even as Noah's shocked exclamation rang out through the alley (and absolutely nobody turned to look, because the acoustics of the alley meant nobody on the sidewalk actually heard anything), the brick wall in front of the two shimmered and changed. Gone was the boring brick, faded from bright red to a ruddy, bloody crimson by decades of inclement weather patterns. In its place was a majestically large wooden door with a simple doorknob, painted bright white, with what looked like a toddler's letter block toys set into the frame. WELCOME TO TOYBOX, it spelled out.

And in the center-top of the door was an old-fashioned bronze knocker.

Cross looked at Noah. Noah looked at Cross.

"You do it." "No, you do it." "Rock paper scissors?" "Do it before I punch you." "That works too!"

Cross grasped the knocker with a rictus grin, raised it… and paused with a doubtful glance at Noah. "For the record, I can't help but feel I've seen this bit before."

"Just do it already."

"Alright, alright…" And with that, Cross rammed the knocker down, the echo of the thud echoed out…

Click!

Before that damn noise sounded out beneath them.

Noah gave Cross a look. "You just had to jinx it, didn't yoOOOOOOOOHSHIIIIIIT!"

The once-solid bottom of the alley dropped out beneath the two's feet, and they plunged into a tunnel that clearly hadn't existed just a moment before. They fell into the tunnel, which closed up behind them, choking the sound of their screams before anybody on the street could even tell somebody was in any kind of distress. It was clearly just a person realizing a rat had run over their shoes, and nothing to be worried about. Just another day in New York City.

Back in the sudden tunnel to possibly nowhere, however…

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!" / "WOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOO!"

Down the tunnel they went, strobing lights replaced with a rainbow of color, straight into a journey through the endless cosmos beyond the Earth's horizon, until eventually… it stopped. The fall ended and firmly planted their asses on… something, though at the time they were a bit too rattled to determine what.

"AAAAAAAAAHHHHH—oh thank God we stopped." Noah looked over and stared Cross dead in the eye. "That was terrifying."

"I actually found it rather enlightening!" Cross replied, the biggest, most manic smile Noah had ever seen on his face.

"Oh fuck you." Then Noah blinked, because Cross was sitting in a massive, overstuffed armchair, and so was he. "Where did the chair come from."

"Two words." Cross held up his fingers, and ticked them off as he spoke. "Tin—"

CRACKATHOOOM!

The two of them flinched in their chairs when a bolt of literal lightning crashed down in the center of the otherwise perfectly featureless, seemingly dimensionless white room. Both of them flinched at the sudden noise and slammed their eyes shut, the brightness still managing to sear itself into their retinas. When their eyes opened though, they saw that the two of them were no longer alone.

There was now a woman standing in the middle of the room, directly on top of the rapidly-fading scorch mark from the lightning bolt.

"Cross," Noah whispered. "Psst. Did that woman just ride the lightning in here?"

"That's about right I'd say," the woman said, the odd emphasis on 'about' outing her as Canadian. Noah flinched back into his chair. "Also, that woman would like to bid you two gentleman a good day. And again. Welcome to Toybox."

Cross's brow shot up intently. "Well fuck, I guess the Canadians are officially smarter than we are."

"Indeed." A snap of her fingers, and where before there had been nothing, a chair and desk appeared behind and before her. She sat down, and with the shock… somewhat gone, the two got a good look at her.

She wore more or less casual clothes, really. A TARDIS t-shirt with a feminine-cut blazer over it, clearly more for style points than any kind of formality, covered her top. She also paired dark-wash skinny jeans with pristine high-top Chuck Taylors, drawing Noah's gaze as she crossed one leg over the other under the desk. A clearing of the woman's throat sent his gaze upwards to join Cross's on her head and face, which also displayed the only two concessions to being a cape. One, the domino mask with pitch-black mirrored lenses perched on the bridge of her nose, and doing just enough to obscure the shape of her cheekbones that, ordinarily, one would have difficulty being confident in identifying her face without it.

And the second concession promptly blew that out of the water, because the woman had what could only be lines of circuitry running from beneath the collar of her shirt up to her left temple, and from there back along her head, somehow augmenting her partly-buzzed hairstyle in a very aesthetically pleasing manner.

"Cranial, I'm guessing?" Cross spoke up, to which the woman smiled.

"Yes indeed," she said, picking up and shuffling some papers that were not there a second ago. "Well, gentlemen—"

"Really?" Noah interjected. "Cause I was thinking she was more of a Morpheus myself."

Cranial stopped shuffling the papers, and looked up at Noah.

"Oh damn, you're right!" Cross added in, slapping his hand to his forehead. "White room, armchairs, all that's missing is you being Laurence Fishburn and offering red and blue pills!" He brought a hand to his chin. "And maybe a Hugo Weaving to go with it…"

Over at the desk, Cranial stood up, put the papers to the side, and promptly pushed them off the desk. Instead of hitting the featureless white ground, they simply disappeared. "You know, despite having done this particular setup for several years now, you two are the first clients I've introduced to actually pick up on that. Fans of Aleph cinema?"

"Yes," Noah said, in a tone that brooked no argument.

"Wonderful! We may just get along then." Cranial sat back down in her desk chair and flipped open a laptop that hadn't been there just three seconds prior, making both Noah and Cross double-take for the fifth time in as many minutes. "So, gentlemen. I understand that you have approximately three hundred thousand dollars at your disposal, and the desire to acquire some serious firepower from this organization."

"That is the long and short of it, yes," Noah conceded, holding a hand up Cross's way and giving him a glance. A look shared between the two, and a shrug indicated Cross' consent: he'd let Noah handle this one. "I was under the impression that if we had funds, the Toybox would sell to us. Is there a problem with that scenario?"

"The first problem is that you," she pointed at Cross, "should still be in Florida, and you," this time her finger went to Noah, "should be in D.C. There's no airline tickets, no train tickets, gasoline receipts, car titles in your names, rental car information, none of it. You also have the most bog-standard social media presence to ever exist, all of your grades seem to be perfectly middle of the road, health and medical histories are about as cookie-cutter as an extra on a bad hospital drama, and there is exactly zero common ground that I could find where the two of you would have met in the first place." She paused. "The fact that you instantly cottoned onto an Earth Aleph reference does raise some interesting questions, as did the scans we took on your entrance. So," she crossed her arms and leaned forwards over the desk as she gave them a flat look. "What happened, a bad encounter with some Haywire tech and the spooks tried to smooth it over?"

Noah did his level best to stare straight into what he assumed were Cranial's eyes and not cybernetic implants replacing them, and opposite him, he assumed Cross did the same. The two very pointedly did not look at each other. Not even when the chairs they sat in both shifted inwards to facilitate looking in each other's direction.

"Or something, then." Cranial typed away at her computer for a moment, then looked back up. "And yet, you're still looking for weaponry, not some way to get back home, wherever that may be. Hence the third degree." She leaned forward, hands clasped on the desk. It was a very businesswoman-esque look, only slightly marred by her casual attire. "Which begs the question of why, and for what ends."

"Let's get this out of the way first," Noah said. "You know we have powers." He held up a hand to forestall Cranial from saying anything the instant he saw her mouth moving. "You were using the laptop's webcam for an indeterminate amount of time after we started searching for ways to get in contact, it is all but guaranteed you saw one or both of us using our powers, and given the circumstances, fuck the 'unwritten rules'. We're not exactly intent on playing the double-life game anyways. Plus, with an outside perspective? At this rate, Earth Bet is fucked."

"Are you going to write me a manifesto, or actually get to the point," Cranial interjected, inspecting her fingernails.

"Chief Director Costa-Brown is Alexandria." Cranial froze, then stared straight at Noah with deadly intensity. "I used to work for an eye surgeon. No matter how good the prosthetic, it just doesn't react like an actual eye does. And the same eye is visibly different in every broadcast after the Siberian took a chunk out of her. Two people who have nothing to do with each other don't both suddenly have a prosthesis in place of a normal eye. You people just never had any reason to consider the possibility, let alone look for it. Clearly the Chief Director of the PRT can't be a Parahuman. But to us?"

"Why leave it to chance that the person in charge of your org's oversight is on the same page when instead you can make sure they are?" Cross added, leaning back in his seat with a 'what can you do' shrug.

"We have powers," Noah continued. "There's reason to believe some conspiracy or other is involved with the organization responsible for people with powers. Toybox is independent of that organization. We want to be independent of that organization too." He grinned. "And if we were able to ferret that out in a couple of weeks, imagine what happens if we actually have resources."

"Fascinating," Cranial drawled, though her posture said the opposite of her careless tone. "Now we'll need to update our security. You still haven't answered the question: what is it that you want, and what is it that you're going to do with it?"

"We need tools," Cross interjected, leaning forwards intently. "Preferably some form of a power rig or exoskeleton, custom-made for our usage," he started spinning his index finger, a trail of steam following the digit. "As you know, we have powers, and in our opinion they're good powers… but the fact is that, in the grand scheme of things, they're not quite good enough. Or rather, we can't get the working good enough within our optimal timeframe. If we want to draw out the maximum potential possible from our abilities, then our best chance is to enhance our effectiveness via a form of weaponry compatible with what we're capable of. And our best option for getting the tools we need… is you and yours."

"We've come to you with an offer." Noah leaned forward now, hands clasped, chin resting atop his fingers. "Power of acceptance is yours. Three hundred thousand is on the table now, with more to come should things go as planned. And if things don't, you still get the money."

"Mm…" Cranial folds her hands together and taps her index fingers against her lips thoughtfully for a few seconds. "Three hundred thousand is a fairly decent chunk of change, yes…" her masks' eyes then flick up to stare at the pair emotionlessly. "But Toybox has clients who regularly dole out payment in the millions. And that's just for the warranty fees." She tilted her head to the side, a panel of her mask raising in lieu of an eyebrow. "For what you're asking, the amount you've offered is just the down payment. So, gentlemen!" The Tinker stood up and clapped her hands together, the sound echoing almost deafeningly in the too-small room. "Unless there was something else you had in your back pocket, then I'm afraid that negotiations are over."

Noah's hands gripped tighter onto the armchair, and beneath his fingers, the first traces of ice crystals forming beneath his fingertips as he grit his teeth. Cranial's eye-frames started to narrow, and both were about to say something they would undoubtedly regret—

"Double or nothing."

Until the pair was brought up short by a non-sequitur from the third man in the room.

"What was that?" Cranial inquired, staring at Cross curiously.

Cross leaned back in his seat, his fingers tented in his lap as he slowly donned a confident grin. "You say that you're regularly paid in the range of millions? Then let's arrange matters in an irregular fashion and make things interesting. I say we put this all down to a wager, where the stakes are, to repeat myself, double or nothing."

Cranial stared at him silently for a few more minutes, her mask twitching minutely the whole while, before slowly leaning back against in her chair, her expression carefully neutral as she crossed her arms. "...go on."

"The stakes are simple enough," Cross started as Noah sat back, starting to chew his thumbnail. "We came to you for gear because we're planning an…" Cross waved his hand in search of a word, glancing at his comrade in askance. "Operation?" Noah nodded tersely. "An operation, with a not inconsiderate risk/reward ratio, and the only scenario where we walk out alive is with your tech. The terms are as follows: Toybox bets its craftsmanship and builds us the gear, and we undergo the operation. If we succeed, then we walk away with the technology and don't owe you a dime."

"And, what, if you lose we get your 300 grand?" Cranial scoffed, her demeanor shifting to all but scream 'unimpressed'. "As we've established, that's not worth much."

"No," a cold voice interrupted, and the Tinker's attention turned back to Noah, whose head was bowed solemnly as he grit his teeth. "Not the 300 grand. Our lives."

That statement apparently served to crash Cranial's train of thought, and she actually blinked at them in complete shock for a bit as she all but literally rebooted herself. "I'm sorry, I must need to recalibrate my audio drivers," she finally managed to get out. "I could've sworn I heard you say you were offering your lives as collateral."

"Oh no, trust me, you heard the man perfectly well," Cross jabbed his thumb at Noah even as he donned an even more vicious grin. "As I said, double or nothing. We're putting our own necks on the line for this. Our lives against your product. I wasn't kidding when I said the operation was dangerous; one misstep, and 'dead' will be a generous fate for us. If we manage to take your tech in and come out alive, then we walk away with all debts cleared, and prove that Toybox can take a nothing and make them something. But if we fail…" Cross's grin didn't waver as he raised his thumb… and then inverted it with impunity. "Then we're done for. As I said… simple, no?"

"Simple? If you separate it all out, sure." She drawled in a mocking tone as she raised her hands and started counting off. "Let's see, you'll want some exotic materials for Gramme, possibly Little Miss Mengele too, something to protect from knives—"

"And there's the first misunderstanding," Noah interrupted with a dismissive wave. "We aren't going after the Nine."

"Even though that would be so much simpler." Cross sighed wistfully.

"Okay then," Cranial said lightly, leaning forward with a smile. "Now I'm just dying to know. Tell me, then. What exactly is it that you have planned?"

So they did. Noah and Cross talked. Cranial listened. And by the time the two men were done talking, it was clear to everyone involved… that she desperately needed a drink.

"You two are insane," she breathed weakly, gaping at them in numb shock.

"And you willingly shoved schizotech into your own skull, let's not throw stones here," Cross replied in a snide tone.

"But—stop. This still doesn't make any sense!" Cranial waved her hands in protest, visibly trying to regain control of the situation. "I've humored you two, but enough! That's it, this is where I draw the line! For god's sakes, think about what you're saying! No matter how you cut it, there's still no motivation for us to accept this! If we win, we gain nothing!"

"But at the same time, you lose nothing," Noah pointed out frigidly.

"If we stole your tech and ran, then yes, you'd be screwed over but good," Cross nodded sagely before rolling his eyes with a scoff. "But as it is, the mere phrase 'screw over a Tinker and steal their tech' is an oxymoron so long as GPS exists. And if we die in the process of this grand feat, then all you'll have truly 'lost' from this would be a pair of intensely exclusive pieces of technology, good for none but the two of us, worth significantly less than whatever fortune you'd charge us for them, especially since now you don't have to worry about maintenance." he started weighing his hands with a faux-contemplative expression. "Compared to the, and I quote, millions you make on every deal, that's not even a blip on your organization's bank account."

"And don't forget the publicity aspect," Noah remarked idly. "If we fail, it's still a positive mark on Toybox's record. 'Look how confident these two idiots got because they had Toybox tech!' Sort of like a moron who thinks he's a better soccer player cause he's got Adidas on, or some shit. Your brand would be legendary."

"Yeah, once we washed your liquified organs off it," Cranial snorted with a sharp glance to the side.

Cross's expression fell into a decidedly unimpressed deadpan. "Do you actually want to bullshit us about your morality and how the world sees you, or can we continue talking seriously?"

Cranial's only response was a tired groan, and she started massaging the bridge of her mask's nose, muttering wordlessly for almost a straight minute as the room lapsed into silence.

Finally, Cranial stiffened and looked over her fingers, glaring piercingly at Noah. "You said that upon your defeat, we 'lose' nothing," she recited, her voice cold and analytical. "If that's the case, then what do we gain from your victory? Besides," she cut Cross off with a sharply raised hand when he started to open his mouth. "The obvious results."

"You're not so dense as to not have already figured that out for yourself," Noah all but spat back, his chair icing over a bit more as he started to get well and truly . "If you really want me to spell it out for you, though? The world will know that it wasn't be just any sword that felled the monster, it was a Toybox sword. Everyone and their grandmother who wanted to do anything would also want a Toybox sword, since they've conflated the deed with the supplier, and nothing will ever undo that." He snorted. "It's the world's most lethal advertising campaign."

"And beyond even that?" Cross spread his arms with a massively confident grin. "Once we emerge victorious, it'll just be the start. You'll be ahead of the curb, because you'll have front-row tickets… to whatever the hell we do next."

The 'eyebrows' of Cranial's mask slowly rose up, her body involuntarily reacting as realization swept over her. "So… let me get this straight," She breathed deep, looking the two in the eyes one by one. "You… you are suggesting a mission so dangerous, so foolhardy, so suicidal, that not even the Triumvirate are willing to sanction it. And you want that to be your audition?"

"Not an audition," Noah clarified. "We want a pilot."

"You two are insane."

"And to reiterate the earlier point: Skull, schizotech, stones," Noah deadpanned.

Cranial leaned back in her seat, massaging her temples miserably with an aggravated hiss. "Fffff—Higher investment for exponentially larger potential payoff, but meanwhile grgghhh…"

Cross cocked an eyebrow as he oh so subtly leaned closer to Noah. "Do you think we 404'd her?" he 'whispered' for the room to hear.

CLUNK!

And promptly winced and sat back down as Noah rapped an icy knuckle on his forehead. "Broke even, got it, shutting up now."

Still, the exchange did manage to snap Cranial out of her thoughts, as her hands promptly flew across the top of the desk in a blur, and an instant later, a door shimmered into existence. It had a similar look and feel to the one that hadn't led Cross and Noah into the Toybox proper, and it just… stood there, in the middle of the room. Both would-be customers leaned to the side of the door so they could see Cranial, glares accusing, but she merely raised her hands and shook her head. "It's an actual door this time, not a trap. That's the waiting room; if you two… if you two wouldn't mind, I need time to confer with the rest of the Toybox, especially for something on this level." She favored the two of them with a smile, though the effect was ruined by the panels of her mask twitching and spasming erratically. "It's not exactly a one woman operation here, don't you know?"

"... if this one opens a trapdoor under us, I will drop your asses into a literal iceage," Noah warned as he and Cross stood up and walked to the door.

"You would try!" Cranial teased back, hands carefully clasped on the desk as Cross bit the bullet and opened the door. It actually was a door simply standing in the middle of the room, and it actually did lead somewhere else. And this time, no, there was not a trapdoor waiting to open beneath them.

Instead, the two entered… well, more or less a normal room. Smooth angles and soft white lighting, but it didn't feel like a UFO.

"Is it just me," Noah asked aloud, "or does everything we've seen from them basically feel like it's 'architecture, by Apple'?"

"Eh," Cross waffled, crossing his arms behind his head. "Feels more like less murder-y Aperture Labs to me. Until I hear shit about a cake and lemons, I'm good."

"Uh-huh. Now if only we had somewhere to—" Noah couldn't even finish what he was saying before a pair of bean-bag chairs fell from the ceiling… or whatever passed for a ceiling in a room basically carved out from a gap in space-time… and landed on the ground, followed by holographic monitors appearing in front of them. They sat on opposite sides of the room, or about as opposite as it could be in a room with no visible walls, and the room itself may have looped back around on itself at some point, and this line of thought was making both Cross's and Noah's brains start to hurt. All they needed to know is that one of the bean bags was red, the other blue, and that was enough of a signal to say whose was which.

Cross and Noah shared a look. Cross was the one who shrugged and went to the red bean bag chair first, flouncing down upon it without a care in the world. Noah walked carefully up to the chair, eyeing it, prodding it, and eventually sitting on it.

"Good afternoon, valued customer, you may call me Pyrotechnical," a voice emanated from the holo-monitor in front of Cross. His tone was warm, excited, although the exact voice was a bit hard to parse due to the electronic reverb that dominated the speakers. "I'll be handling your order today.

"Glace," the one by Noah spoke. Her voice had about as much emotion as her tone; that is to say, none. "Let us begin."

"With?" Noah asked, his own voice just as frosty.

Glace sighed, and Noah could practically hear her rolling her eyes as though he'd just asked her to explain '1+1' to him. "A baseline, genius. You want custom tech, you need to give me something to work with."

Back with Pyrotechnical, Cross grinned. "Great! Alright, so what're we gonna do?"

"Well," Pyrotechnical responded over the line, "give me an idea of what you're after. What can you do? What can't you do? What do you want to do better? That sort of thing, you know?"

"Well… for starters?" Cross grinned eagerly as he held up his hand, steam roiling from his palm eagerly. "If you really want me to show you my max, you're gonna have to offer us some refreshments first."

"How much?" Glace asked, her tone analytical as though she were recording every word spoken… which honestly wasn't that much of a leap.

Noah snorted and started to roll his shoulders, loosing a resounding number of cracks as he shattered the frost covering his back. "The better question," he shot back, "is how much you got?"

And that, in essence, set the tone for the next few hours.

[==V==]

"Alright, that's enough time!~" A button press, and two holes in the floor appeared beneath the bean bags Cross and Noah sat on. Before either of the Parahumans(?) could so much as holler, they fell down yet another endless chasm, and then promptly popped up out of a pair of new holes in front of Cranial's desk, the holes closing up beneath them before they could fall back iin and allowing them to land on the ground. A different desk than the last one, too: art deco, instead of clear glass.

Cross had a manic grin on his face, puffs of steam leaking out with every breath, while Noah and his beanbag chair were currently stuck inside a block of ice.

"Do it again!" Cross whooped, shooting his fists in the air with twin blasts of steam.

"No!" Noah also yelled, coating himself an his seat in a brand new coat of frost.

"Well, it's been wonderful having you two here today!" Cranial clapped her hands, and another door appeared behind the two. "You sir, please chisel your friend out of his Titanic-killer there, and then the door is behind you. Don't call us; we'll call you."

"And what's the verdict?" Cross asked as he got up, while Noah simply wrenched himself free of his arctic seat with minimal effort, brushing the rapidly melting fragments off of himself and onto the irreverent Tinker's floor without remorse.

"Like I said." She waved a hand, noncommittally. "We'll call you." The door behind the two men swung open, the sounds and smells of Manhattan drifting in through it. Cranial nodded at the door, and apparently, the two of them got the message. With but a single look back from the short, frosty one, the two exited.

Cranial hovered her hand above the door's button… and paused as she donned a vicious grin. "Oh, and by the way?" She called out, snagging the pair's attention. "You're going to want to reset the clocks on your phone, by my estimate they're running about two hours fast."

The Parahumans(?) blinked for a second, then promptly fished out their phones and looked through them for a bit before looking up at her in shock.

"Hey, what the fuck did you—!?" Cross started to holler…

SLAM!

Right as the door to Toybox slammed shut in his face and disappeared.

Cranial pushed back from the desk, which disappeared back into whatever ether Dodge's tech stored stuff inside. The chair beneath her morphed into a chaise longue, and she lounged back, pulling the mask from her face and retrieving the memory card stored inside of it. A panel on the arm of her chaise opened up, and she slid the card inside, uploading the new data to every other member of Toybox.

In an instant, holographic displays lit up around her, each of the individuals on-screen helpfully identified only by the names written along the bottom. Pyrotechnical. Glace. Big Rig. Bauble. Toy Soldier. Dodge… and the boy's mother, who was surprisingly supportive of the eight-year-old Tinker savant, and speaking for him as he concentrated more on playing with the latest n-dimensional Rubik's cube he'd developed than the meeting itself, as he was wont to do.

It helped that his mother was a financial analyst, which made keeping her around even more useful than simply as a stabilizing influence for the blessing that was Dodge.

"Everyone get the data packet?" Cranial asked. A chorus of affirmatives sounded from the monitors. "Alright. Pyrotechnical, Glace. Thoughts? Impressions?"

"I'm going to be frank?" Pyrotechnical began, his expression somewhat obscured as he puffed out a cloud of smoke from the two cigars he was chewing. "I'm a little disturbed. I mean, that Cross guy was funny as all hell if he was a bit odd, sure, and I won't lie and say I'm not looking forwards to seeing this thing in action, but…"

"But none of that matters," a soft, yet stern woman's voice rang from Dodge's screen. Dodge sat next to his mother, playing with something that could best be described as a Rubik's Mobius strip, while the woman pointedly set her gaze just far enough that she couldn't see it out of the corner of her eyes and give herself a migraine. "Ignore their personalities. Ignore everything subjective, impressions, statements, all of that. Given what we know, and what we were told, does anyone here well and truly believe they intend what they've stated?"

Cranial took back over. "Ordinarily, I would have said no. I wouldn't have given them the time of day, and they'd have been lucky if I only dropped them on their asses in a dumpster instead of selling them out to the PRT. But if you all check the data, as always I scanned them from their computer. And it's because of what I found that, even if we weren't going to sell anything, I still wanted them down here for a more comprehensive scan." She shifted on her chaise and sat up straighter. "I know the rudimentary scan has a chance of both false positives and negatives, but three scans all returned the same result: neither of them had a Corona Pollentia."

That got everyone else sitting up straighter. Even the eight-year-old Dodge paused and looked up from his… thing, although his hands never stopped fiddling with it.

"I repeated the scan once they actually entered, and I confirmed it," Cranial continued, answering the unanswered question on her group's collective minds. "Despite clearly displaying powers, neither had a Corona Pollentia. Not even an inactive one. Which means, ladies and gentlemen, that we have living examples of powers from a different source."

"What about a Trump's work?" Big Rig asked, sitting in what looked like the cabin of a truck. "Temporary powers from a Trump wouldn't show on a brain scan."

"They wouldn't show a Corona, no," Cranial admitted. "But they'd still show abnormal brain activity. As it is, nothing truly changed in them, even while they were doing their best Yellowstone and Hubbard impressions. And even if that were the case, I watched them for a straight week without their knowledge. If they do report to someone higher than them, then they're the best damn actors I've ever seen."

"Hm… Alright, let's move forwards under the parameters that Cranial's data is accurate," Bauble interjected, erratically adjusting the lenses on her glasses. "Why does that even matter? Why not just take their three hundred, slap something together in half an hour, and send them off to do whatever? No skin off our noses."

"Because we can't risk it!" Cranial yelled, snapping at the other woman. "We can't take the risk that they're just a couple of madmen, because damn it all, but they were right." She tapped away on the display set into the arm of her chaise, and brought up multiple images and scans. Each was of either Alexandria or the Chief Director of the PRT, Rebecca Costa-Brown, with dates in the top-left corner. "I had to slow the footage down to catch it, but they were right. Pupillary reflex, fixation, saccading, all of it. And before you ask, it's not constant. Since the Siberian appeared, there have been times when Director Costa-Brown has two perfectly normal eyes…"

She brought up another image, this time of the iconic Brute shaking hands with the head of all Parahuman law enforcement in the nation.

"And that's only when she and Alexandria are in the same room."

A slew of censored cursing roared through the room's speakers as the Toybox went nigh-on mad… well, madder than usual.

"—OUT OF YOUR—!"

"WE ARE SO—!"

"—YES I BEEP!DAMN SAID FIFTY MORE IN TEN MINUTES, THE PROTECTORATE IS GOING TO COME DOWN ON OUR HEADS LIKE A—"

And that was as far as Cranial was willing to let things go. As such, she disconnected her auditory nerves, slammed her fist on the arm of her chair—

BWAAAAH!

And waited patiently as the airhorn stopped blaring throughout her comrades' locales, effectively shutting them all up. She cocked her brow and gave the rest of the Tinkers a flat look as she recovered her hearing and they did the same. "You done yet?"

"BEEP!ing hate Nautilus for giving you that damn thing…" Glace groused as she dug a finger through her throbbing ear.

"Ahem," Dodge's mother cleared her throat loudly, jerking her head to the side. "Language."

"That aside!" Toy Soldier spoke up now, drawing attention. "Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Yes, they were right about this. Yes, they're apparently not normal parahumans, but for all we know their Coronas are elsewhere in the nervous system. It's a precedent only in some of the odder Case 53's, true, but it's still possible. So what proof do we have that they're not just… fearless madmen who got stupid lucky?"

"I think they're scared."

All murmuring stopped. Cranial looked to Dodge's screen, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw everybody else's attention turn towards Dodge. The little boy, the youngest, brightest star among them, hadn't stopped fiddling with his 'toy'... but the fact that he was talking at all was cause to listen.

"They sound scared. Like they found a monster sleeping under their bed." He looked up to his mother. "Mommy, can you make sure their monster isn't under my bed tonight?"

"O-of course Morty," his mother smiled shakily, giving him a light, one-armed hug. "I'll even use that flattener of yours to make sure there's nowhere for anything to hide. But… you were saying?"

Dodge shrugged as he looked back at his… shape, if the two-dimensional thing could be called that. "I remember others who weren't scared, but they didn't ask for help. They said they were big kids, and big kids don't need help. They just did whatever. But those two…"

"Asked… for our tech…" Big Rig completed slowly, blinking as he started to put the pieces together. "They… don't want to die, but they're willing to risk that anyways? That doesn't make any sense—!"

"Unless they know something we don't…" Cranial finished softly, her knuckles white as she clenched her fist in front of her mouth. "The monster under the bed."

"What kind of a monster is scarier than guaranteed death!?" Pyrotechnical demanded incredulously.

"...and so we take the bet," Glace filled the uncomfortable silence that followed the question, swallowing heavily as she looked at Cranial with new respect. "And so we double-down, even if they don't know it."

"Because if they do win," Cranial nodded, leaning her head back and staring at the featureless ceiling. "I'd rather be at the eye of their storm than on the fringes. And if we lose… then we're grabbing Gramme and I'm forcing him back to sanity, damn the consequences, because all of a sudden I think that living on this planet just doesn't seem that smart anymore. Agreed?"

The vote was unanimous.

[==V==]

"Well!" Cross proclaimed as he vaulted onto his bed, snatched up their laptop and flipped it open, starting to browse aimlessly. "I'd say that went well, wouldn't you?"

"Mmph, no, I wouldn't," Noah grunted dismissively, for his part starting to pace back and force in their room, a trail of arctic mist following him.

"No?" Cross glanced over the screen of his computer in askance.

"I'm not saying there's any guarantee that things are going to go bad, but right now?" Noah raised his hand and held it even in the air. "We're in limbo. They didn't say no, but they didn't sign a contract either. No guarantee they'll take us up on this, no guarantee they won't sell us out to the highest bidder, no guarantee we'll hear back from them period."

"Mm," Cross murmured, his own steamy meandering joining Noah's frosty contemplation. "Alright, let's assume we don't get access to Toybox tech, and that we're right back where we started before today. What else could we get our hands on that would help us just as much?"

"Already on that," Noah replied, pointing at the computer. "Look at the other window."

Cross complied, clicking as directed and cocking an eyebrow at what he saw. "Dojos and self-defense courses… smart, get strong inside, get tech outside, both bases are covered."

"Mmph, smart in theory, but in practice? Not so much," Noah shook his head in denial. "All those options are ones I've dismissed. They're just not… good enough, you know? I mean, if we try that while the only thing we know is how to clock a mugger, then…"

"Yeah, 'chunky salsa' would be generous…" Cross started idly spinning up a disc of steam with his finger as he thought. "So we need training, but we need it to be something extreme, but where the hell—?"

An instant later, Cross stopped his finger-spinning and the steam dissipated as he stared at nothing.

"Uh, Cross?" Noah asked, poking him. "You okay there?"

"Alright, Plan B." Cross started typing furiously on the laptop, steam starting to waft from him like a lightweight chimney as he grinned madly. "Pack your shit, we're heading south to D.C."

"... what." Noah, stopping cold. "Why!?"

"Because we're heading for the Pentagon."

"And we're going to the Pentagon why exactly?" Noah prompted.

"So we can meet with a General, Admiral or other," Cross replied. "Obviously."

"Don't get cute with me," Noah growled. "Answers. Now."

Cross sighed, looking up from the computer again. "Two things. First, we need to make sure the Protectorate and PRT can't just swoop in and snatch us up if we make one mistake, and that is infinitely harder in New York City, the seat of the Protectorate and hometown of Legend, than anywhere else on the Eastern Seaboard. Hell, I saw him doing a grid pattern every hour, on the hour, every single day we've been here so far. Only a matter of time 'til he finds us and we become blips on a dozen radars we don't want to be on." Cross paused. "Almost anywhere else would be safer."

"Almost anywhere else?" Noah asked, already dreading the answer.

"Brockton," Cross answered, as if that explained everything. And by Noah's shudder, it did. "And second, think about what the other major equalizing factor is. The first is powers, the second is equipment, and the third is, as you pointed out, training. The PRT aped US military doctrine for training its personnel, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that in the almost three decades parahumans have been around, the military, however much it's been gutted, has to have come up with some way to level the playing field," Cross grinned malevolently as he jabbed his thumb at his own head. "I say we get a piece of that action."

Noah's jaw slowly dropped open as he finally pieced together the direction of Cross's thoughts. "You want to join the United States Military!?"

"Or, at least, get training from them and become a literally certified badass," Cross shrugged indifferently. "Honestly, that sounds more likely than actually getting enlisted, but hey, I'll take what I can get. By the way, what sounds more badass to you, SEAL, Delta or Green Beret?"

"Uh, whichever, Delta I guess—wait!" Noah held his hand up begging for a pause to collect his thoughts. "Cross, I don't know if you've forgotten or you're willfully ignoring facts, but Parahumans can't serve in the military! Not the US military anyways! And even if we can pass being scanned for Coronas, we still won't be training our actual abilities!"

"Which is why we're not exactly truckin' down to the enlistment office, is it?" Cross cocked his head oh-so-innocently.

"... you want to find a stagnant higher-up and make them an offer, don't you?" Noah asked.

"Runnin' through military headlines from the past decade or so, pickin' up and chuckin' out names as we speak!" Cross confirmed with a nod, his typing not slowing down in the least.

"Alright, alright," Noah started pacing again, tapping his finger in his palm. "We need somebody who was on the fast track and a major rising star before parahumans and the PRT really started to take hold and get a stranglehold on power and capitol in this country. Someone who's an opponent of the PRT, or maybe had negative contacts with parahumans. And if one of them had negative contacts with parahumans, they became outspoken against them, and ran their own career into a wall thanks to them." He held up a list with his fingers. "One, at least an admiral, preferably a general, two or more stars. Two, outspoken against the PRT and/or Protectorate. And three, negative personal contact with a parahuman, but not traumatic because I don't want to re-enact the Suicide Squad. Got it?"

"Mrgh…" Cross stuck his tongue out the corner of his mouth in lieu of answer, mumbling intently to himself as he scrolled. "No, no, maybe, no, fuck no, oh fuck no, oh maybe—dead, of course, why wouldn't he be, no, n—GWEGH!?" And then, out of the blue, Cross out and out froze, a blast of steam blasting from his skull as he nearly swallowed his tongue as he stared at the computer in… honestly, a whole bevy of emotions.

Noah looked at his partner in concern. "Cross?"

"Uhh… yahtzee?" Cross choked out, slowly looking up at Noah in wide-eyed confusion. "I think I found… something, I found something," he weakly spun the computer around for Noah to take in. "See for yourself."

Noah looked, and began to scan. "Three stars… lieutenant general… served three tours in—wait, he lost his eye doing what!?" He looked to Cross for confirmation, who could only nod, scroll to the top, and point. This time it was Noah's turn to almost choke on his own tongue. "C-Cross… tell me that isn't who I think it's supposed to be."

Cross shook his head in denial, but Noah knew he wasn't denying what he wanted him to. "I wasn't even that familiar with him," he whispered weakly, "and even I recognize him."

"Bullshit." Noah wanted to close the laptop, look away from the face staring back at the two of them. "The odds of this actually happening are slim to fucking none." He stopped for a moment. "Knock-on effect from getting ROB'd? I mean, they're random omnipotent beings, not omniscient. You can't just drop people into a world without some… aftershocks, I guess, from casually breaking the multiverse like that."

"Noah, whatever the cause or reason is, there's a bigger, badder question we need to face…" Cross bemoaned as he massaged his face in misery.

"What?!"

"We are trying to overturn the entire status quo, which is, in effect, going to war with the entire fucking world. Can you think of anyone, anyone else you'd want in your corner…" Cross pointed at the screen. "More than him?"

"...fuck."

"Fuck indeed."

And so the two of them found their next target… for better or for far, far worse.

[==V==]

Over two hundred miles south from the pair's location, within the walls Army wing of the Pentagon, a man stood before a door… and was distinctly annoyed.

"Again?" He murmured, looking from the coffee cup with napkin in his hand and to the nameplate on his door. The dusty nameplate, as compared to all of the other, clean nameplates on every other office door on the floor. He ran the napkin over his office's nameplate, simultaneously satisfied and annoyed when he pulled away a small, but visible layer of dust.

It wasn't perfect, but it was clean enough. Clean enough that he could see himself in it—as much as he could see with but one eye—but more importantly, he and anyone else who came by would see his name. A name that had stood strong in the walls of this building for years on end, and would remain strong for years to come.

"I'm not done yet, damn it…" he growled, more to himself than anyone else, as he opened his office's door and marched inside.

The door slammed shut behind him, and the nameplate resumed its silent vigil once more, proudly announcing the name and rank of the man within for all to see, whether they wanted to or not.

Lieutenant General Slade Wilson