Should be the last of the funny layouts, thank God (if anyone is really wondering what's happening down there, it's supposed to signify Penny flickering in and out of consciousness, only hearing things are scattered fragments that eventually converge into coherent dialogue. How well that comes off depends on your patience for this kind of thing) . . . this also starts a very long sequence where Tristian basically has a side adventure while the rest of the crew get into a nice discussion. Honestly, this all has something to do with the plot. I swear.

* * * * *

When Penny was a kid, her best friend lived far away. Which, when you're a kid, means "not in my house." Even the next farm over was miles away and although they'd talk on the phone for hours, it wasn't the same as having someone to grab onto when the joke made you laugh so hard that you almost fell over. It was the giggles that always gave her away, when she'd take the cordless phone under her covers late at night and try to stay awake until the battery went dead. Like a little private hideaway, where the dark could help you pretend your best friend was in the same room. Just unseen, with a weight behind the voice.

.........."Listen"......................................................................."you have to"

But sometimes Cassidy would come over and Penny would sit on the fence at the edge of their farm, staring down the road, squinting so hard that the muscles of her eyes would start to ache. Sitting there waiting for the horizon to disgorge her friend. Just a tiny dot, barely even moving. Hovering in the distance, hesitant and far.

"just stay"............................................................................."where"........................................................................."me"

And she'd never know for sure, so would start waving, waving like a madwoman. Can you see me? I'm right here. Waving until her shoulder hurt, until she thought that she might take flight from flapping her arm, waving at this tiny flickering dot that might be her friend, willing it to come closer.

....................................................................................."to"................."listen"................................................................."have to"

It wouldn't now. She kept waving her arm so hard and the dot kept hanging back. Cassidy, can you see me? Why won't you come closer? It was getting dark now, or maybe it had always been dark. Even the stars hadn't come out, hiding shyly behind opaque cloud covers. The painted radiance on the sky of nearby cities, missing. But she shimmered, candles as distant flares. Her best far friend. You know I can't leave.

.........."listen"........................................................................"what I'm"........................................................................................."just stay"

One time she had decided to try and scare her, play a little joke. If I go, I won't want to come back. There was a bundle of hay on the outskirts of the farm, put there for the horses so that he had something to feed them out in the fields. Then I may not see you ever again. So you have to come nearer. Please. Penny had crawled under it, wincing as the dry strands scratched and tickled at her skin, hollowing herself out a little nook to sequester herself, curled on her elbows and knees, watching the road.

...................................................................................."its important that you"....................."listen and"........................................"stay right"

Crouched in the sweet dry scent of old grass and doing her best not to laugh and give herself away. The hay like a jungle, a weight without mass surrounding and covering her. The secret sudden place. Cassidy, if you don't come I'm going to have to leave. Waiting for the dot to come closer, increments by inches and following rigid inertia. Wanting to remain at rest forever, with the ground under her and the hay-weight over her and her far friend nearer than far and still not here. And if I leave I'm not going to be able to

........................."right here"........."just listen you"................................................................."have to"..........................................."Penny"

..........In a way, she had never felt so safe. Staying just like that, at rest.

"Penny"............"don't just"........"listen you".........."have to"

..........On the ground of the floor

........................"listen to me just".........."Penny you have"

..........of the floor of the dark of the dot

...................................."to listen to me" "stay just" "stay" "just"

..........of the day of the floor of the hard floor the hard linoleum

"just listen and stay"....."you have to"....."Penny just"

..........Wait. Wait.

"stay right here and" "Penny listen"

..........Cassidy, dammit, why didn't you tell me?

"Penny, listen, you have to" "stay right" "here and"

..........I'm on someone else's floor again.

"don't move." The voice was the moon come down, still and tidal. "You're okay, but you need to stay down for a few minutes." Right in her ear, how the crickets would hum in invisible inches. "The bounty hunters are sweeping the area and we're staying out of sight." He was a weight over her that was trying not to be a weight. There was a taste in her mouth of salt and blood and old beer. "Just stay where you are. It's not you they're after." The pressure from above and the pressure of below. Her face against the floor and his breathing on the back of her neck, a steady quiet surge of ocean air. "To them, you're just a means to an end. I'm sorry." He sounded genuinely sad over it. Cassidy, I think its the first time a guy ever apologized to me and meant it. You need to be here for this. But the dot never came closer. Maybe it was because the world was constantly pulling away.

"Don't worry." Or maybe it was her, tracked on a receding course. "We've got this." Under the dark and the weight and the promise. "We won't let anything happen to you." Wait, but I never had the chance to explain. I never had a-

The constant drone shimmered, changed pitch just as the weight suddenly lifted away, a tent yanked upwards by a tornado. The hay torn away. Here I am, Cassidy. Can you see me? Her tank top was exactly why she was cold. I never went anywhere, I've been here the whole time. I wasn't hiding, I was waving. Can you see me? Can you see-

The dot flickered, maybe in farewell, and was gone. Or maybe Penny opened her eyes. The result, regardless, was the same.

* * * * *

He had left them behind and it didn't matter. The first pulse had taken out the light switch and that was enough for one room. It didn't matter. Brown was already running, doing his best to stay one step ahead of the surge, counting out the steps in his head and calculating how much time he had and realizing that it wouldn't matter. Already it was going off as cancerous flashbulbs in his brain. In seconds, maybe. The device clutched in his hand already on the proper setting but it wouldn't matter if he wasn't in the right place to set it off, all of them would be

"Tristian! They've changed the freq-"

Muscle control went first and that was his only warning as the room went funnel-shaped, the edges melting into a thickened center as an airstrike got called in to obliterate his view. His legs went or maybe the floor leapt up to hug him, it was hard to stay as his brain suddenly found it impossible to process anything resembling coherency. His last conscious thought was silly sips sicken the sodden sad sisters before words lost all meaning as well. Flowers of ineffable brightness clenched in barren meadows, foaming as solid balls that kept sitting on the railways of his neurons, elbowing each other out of the way and jockeying for a center that didn't exist, extending and stretching up toward distant vaults, pressing down with mass that shouted the floor wasn't enough, that there had to be a place lower. Every cannon misfired, facing the wrong direction, holes appearing in simple air, in fascist transparencies, in the dodging of digging of the invasion, the troops were landing on the shores, the shores were made of constant grains with grit and the grit was in the works and the gears and the gears were jamming not like rock stars but the stoppage was speeding and falling and speeding and

.....no

.....it doe

...........s

...........n

...........'

...........t

.............matter

........................as highways rerouted, all the brake lights flaring up at once in the road that was shaped just like a bow-tie decided on a different form entirely and became a snarl of outreached crystal, a solar prominence, the lightness of running up a distant hill in the finest throes of summer, in the breath and the air and the sweetness of it, the new path near and all obstacles avoided. The flashbulbs tried to blind him again, in the dark of the back of the dome, but part of roaming was discovering ways to adapt and that's what he was doing. You. You man. The blankets that threatened to smother, poked with holes that the stars could be seen through. You're a man of. And that was fine. As long as he could see a place to go, as long as the promise of a destination lingered, he would always find a way. You're a man of constant

His finger spasmed and the dim became dark, with barely a whimper.

Brown coughed and tasted dust on his tongue. A man of constant what? One of his arms was uncontrollably twitching, all the tendons becoming ropes wrapped around an escaping bird. Oddly, it didn't hurt. Yet.

He banged it against the floor. I was going to say surprises. A few more synapses interlocked with a non-audible click and just like that it stopped.

Yeah, sure you were. He coughed again, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth but found it didn't really get rid of the taste. Dust and plastic and the vegetables his mother used to feed him, the ones that she'd always overcook because she thought his father liked them better that way. Rubbery and rough. Son, his father once confessed to him, in one of their few unguarded moments, I can't stand them either, but I'm afraid she don't know how to cook them any other way. And I don't know how to make it stop.

"Arguh," he said, quite formally. He spit the rest of the nonsense out, a little comforted to find himself on the floor and not dangling out a window. A headache was gradually forming somewhere right behind his forehead, despite the emergency regeneration. Some things it wouldn't fix, oddly. Nobody had any real explanation for it. Little spasms were still erupting in various muscles but he could feel his body hunting down those last twitches and exterminating them.

The room was completely dark, all the lights having been extinguished. The device was still in his hand, clutched so tightly that the corners of it were beginning to mark their own territory in his palm. He had to almost pry his fingers free from around it, so locked were they into the cause. Whatever, it had worked. It was all off. Stupid, stupid, he berated himself. You're getting distracted, you should have seen that. You let them press an advantage.

Enough, then. He got to his knees, resisting the urge to spit out a meal that he had never devoured. Light induced seizures, cycling through frequencies that forced the brain to misfire. They were learning, they didn't know this much about people when they had come here. Experimenting. That bothered him more than he wanted to admit. And you didn't see it coming. Everyone else was probably safe, he had gotten the lights out in the bedroom before anything permanent had happened. His own brain would have treated the attack as an ongoing lesion and adapted accordingly, explaining why he wasn't currently attempting to bite off his own tongue.

All right. He shook off the last splinters of the refracted fog that had been crowding his brain, tucking the device back into an inner jacket pocket. Let's do this properly then and actually go on the offensive. He cleared his throat, throwing off the image of a wall made of corrugated blocks, letting normal reality assert itself. As normal as his life got. Their lives, really.

"Okay, Tristian," he said as he got to his feet, "we're done with the games. What I need you to do is . . ."

His view cleared the counter and he could see a body shifting on the floor of the kitchen. As his eyes adjusted to both the gloom and seeing the world without chaff clouding his view, he saw it was a body with blond hair and more curves than he remembered Tristian having.

At the sound of his voice she picked her head up abruptly, blinking against the brightness of the dark. There was a slight quirk of disappointment to the edge of her lips upon seeing it was only him, a trait that came through even in the shadows.

"It was the bounty hunters," Penny said, somewhat dully. "Isn't that what you said . . ." she twisted so that she was lying on her side, addressing a person who in her mind could only be near.

Except he wasn't. "Oh."

His legs still a little wobbly, Brown staggered to the counter and took hold of it, doing his best to make the motion seem perfectly natural.

"He was right here," Penny was saying, almost out of his view. "Just a second ago, he was telling me . . ."

Brown said nothing, merely looked to the wide open door that led out of the apartment, and the ever-present hum of a weapon that had been taken out of the silo. "Of course you're already on it," he muttered, shaking his head and instantly regretting the motion. "Why discuss any kind of plan? You'll just handle it by yourself."

Penny's head popped up over the side as she stood up. Her gaze was cautious and guarded, searching for any kind of face that wasn't his. "What's going on? Why the hell are all the lights out?"

"Just an extra layer of realism," Brown said cheerfully. "An attempt to capture the gritty authenticity that a situation like this demands." He rapped the top of the counter. "Just wait until you see how we pull off space docking procedures. You'll feel like you're really there."

Penny just stared at him warily. "I was thinking that this is a strange game," she said slowly, "but I'm starting to wonder if it's just you."

Strange? Brown only smiled charmingly, but the open door loomed wide in his peripheral vision. Honey, you don't know the half of it.

* * * * *

There were maps opening in his head like endless unfolding fractals, guides triggered to every possible solution, the dance steps for all the rhythms that could be conceived. The first time the lights had flickered in their split-second strobe cadence, a part of him had known exactly what it was and was already compensating for him, hissing out a harsh sibilant scream that could only translate into kinetic movement.

Glimmers had hammered at the sideways doors to his vision, attempting to find a way in, sneaking through cellars and partially ajar screen doors, tapping at windows like lost children, all the while carrying stamps shaped as knives and the ability to rewrite all the pathways, to send every impulse crawling off the wrong cliffs. It had all been swept away now, grooves in the sand now smeared over with the intention of finding new forms of handwriting. That was his brain now. A constant stable source of motion. The ignition that never ceased.

Possibilities intersected in a flow chart as big as the world, every action he took sealing off one branch but opening up a thousand others. The stairs barely creaked as he crept down, the curvature of their descent acting like an arrow pointing in the direction he needed to go in. The building was silent and that was what had sent him out of the apartment. The realization that had come to him in the seconds after the lights had gone out and instances reasserted themselves not as a series of photographs seen through glass slides but a continuously flowing sequence of events, fraught with consequences. As his mode shifted from protecting the people nearest him to considering the larger implications of what had just occurred.

If they can do this to us . . .

A realization that had sent him rocketing from the room.

. . . they can do it to the entire building.

The lights were steady as Tristian made his way down to the next floor, placing each step carefully before finally settling down, almost walking on the balls of his feet. But they held no trace of the insidious flicker that had infested them before, he could stare at them without feeling the klaxons in his head going off. He had switched off the sword once he had left the apartment, not wanting to scare any of the neighbors away, especially those who might not be as apt to buy the Star Wars explanation as readily as the people upstairs did. Plus it gave him away too easily, the red glow a shouted beacon that could be felt or even sensed from a distance. They were already afraid of him or they wouldn't have acted like they just had. No reason to spook them entirely. There was still a chance of getting out of this without bloodshed.

But it was too damn quiet. Glass-like and frozen, each apartment door sealed shut but with no hints or traces of other lives lurking behind them. The cool rasp of a television show, the patterned thumping of running children, the soft sighs of closeted arguments or the louder peals of laughter creasing out beyond hearing, into places he wasn't sure he could go yet. But he was learning. I want you to come back, because it's you. Her voice was the legend in the map, marking out the miles. One inch was all it took. Not with a story, or an adventure or a gift, but just you, being back. The rest will just be. In a way her absence was the spaces between the notches in his spine. He still held together but without the cushion the press of gravity was that much worse. But until the you had the buffer you just went on thinking that the sensation was all you would ever feel. He knew different now and it was wonderful. But there were consequences. Ones that he couldn't think about now.

"Hello." He didn't speak loudly, but conversationally. Talking to empty corridors and blank faced doors, the only difference being the numbers, lives stacked next to lives. The quieted sword was still in his hand, his finger never leaving the switch. But they wouldn't dare attack him directly. "Is anyone there?" Each door held a story and he didn't have time for stories, only resolutions.

Nothing. "Wouldn't anyone like to see what the strange man wandering around your building is up to?" A distant burble erupted from somewhere deep below, but it was merely the opening movement of a symphony lacking any accompaniment. The floor had gone hermetic, worse than a museum. At least an exhibit held some sense that it once proposed a purpose. Here, it was just stoppage, the discarded strings of a striking show littering the ground. "Anyone?"

His ears caught a fragment of a tiny noise and almost immediately his body responded, snapping toward the source of it like magnetic radar. It took everything he had not to ignite the sword. No. No, wait. We play this my way for once.

It was . . . a whirring? That didn't make any sense, unless someone had left on an oscillating fan. Still, he crept closer to the wall, running his fingers along the old paint and reading the Braille underneath of the building settling. Regular and running, with his ear near to the wall he could hear it better. Not a voice, though. The Nirtorian hive didn't have proper voices, however they spoke they stole. Maybe they had a language borne of the charged whirlings of electrons, poetry spoken in the loss of spin and shifting states. He had no way to communicate with them but they still had to understand. This course was only going to end in their elimination. That had to be clear and he wasn't sure he had the words.

"Come on," he said, doing his best to trace the source. He was in between apartments, doors on either side of him beckoning like the prizes to a demented game show. "Leave the rest of them out of it. You don't have to do this." He was getting closer, the whirring never altering its pitch but seeming to respond all the same. He wasn't even looking to where he was tracking, letting instinct become the trail.

It ended at a door, much like he had thought it had. The numbers of it stared blankly back at him. Perhaps they meant something, as integers, as variables. The boys upstairs probably could have gone on for hours about it. But in the end it was just a door and only distinguished from the other doors was a set of numbers. It was really that simple.

Tristian placed one hand flat against the door. The wood was cool to the touch but that meant nothing other than the temperature of the floor was slightly cool. The noise continued beyond, as constant gears. On some level it was a noise he could relate to. Some nights it was the last thing he heard before he finally let himself fall asleep.

He pushed on the door lightly. It responded to his pressure just a tad and he saw that it was ajar. Of course. Might as well avoid the guesswork and get this over with. He closed his eyes briefly and said, "I suppose there's no chance that we're all going to decide to be reasonable about this, is there?"

A few seconds without answer were all he needed. "Thought so," he sighed, opening his eyes. Even with a forced calm, his heart was still quickening. The sword was an extension but of what he wouldn't dare say. A tiny push was all he needed to get in. It shouldn't have been necessary. "I suppose we're going to have to see this through."

Within the same moment, he shoved aside the door and went in.

* * * * *

"Stop looking at me like that."

"Why, Deckard Jones, that's entirely the wrong response. What you're supposed to say is . . . oh my gosh, ADS5S5, you were right again. I can't believe I ever doubted you."

"Sheldon . . ."

"Just like that time in the Tantros Spiral when you insisted that despite all my readouts telling us otherwise, we were perfectly concealed in the interport ductwork. But, no, it was simply dust getting into my circuits and we rely more on your human intuition."

"I'm serious, Sheldon-"

"And I guess you were right, they didn't find us in there. But that was because they had cleared out in order to start the monthly decontamination procedures. We got out only because I was able to tap into their schematics and even so, there is a scratch from the sulfuric acid that refuses to come out no matter how many times I get it newly polished-"

"Sheldon-"

"Don't take that tone with me. And what's with the new name? Are we undercover now? There's very little point to that if they already know who you are."

"We're not playing the game right now! That was only so Penny didn't think there really were aliens in the building. So you can stop pretending to be a snotty android and go back to being just a regular snotty human being."

"Well. I suppose we can call a break. Although the nice thing about our current discussion is how no matter what guises we don, it does not change ultimate fact about me being right."

"Jesus. Is this the kind of thing you really want to be right about? Seriously? I swear, you're the only person I know who would be smug about predicting an asteroid hitting the Earth. It'd be like Krypton exploding and instead of launching the baby in a rocket, you'd be standing there going, I told you so."

"Oh, please, bragging is lost on people who don't understand the concept to begin with. Besides, shooting the rocket into space would have been pointless . . . the proper thing to do would have been to fire a larger version of the rocket at the planet, thus boring a hole to the center and venting the internal pressures that were tearing it apart. Jor-El really went about it all the wrong way."

"Yeah, for a fictional character, he was fairly clueless."

"I mean, I found the flaw in his calculations in seconds and this man was supposed to be one of Krypton's geniuses. I beg to differ, if you look at the equations he's written on the Scarlet Jungle Blackboard Beast in his laboratory in Superman 119, they're just absolute gibberish. Clearly, he had no idea what he was doing and was just dazzling the scientific community with fancy words and concepts. They're lucky he ever figured out the planet was going to explode before the fissures opened up in the surface."

"You know, I really can't tell if you know this stuff isn't real and just like to pretend that it is, or that you really think that every fictional scenario you ever read is true somewhere. And I don't think I want an answer to that."

"I wrote to DC Comics about a much more accurate proposal on my part, where Jor-El actually had a clue and stopped the planet from exploding. Thus his child grew up and was able to make a more lasting contribution to society than plowing fields and plucking people out of the air who fell out of buildings."

"But that's what people want to read."

"Sadly, yes. Nobody at DC really was interested in my pulse pounding concept of Kal-El, Ace Mathematician. Although my first draft where he single-handedly proves all rational semi-stable elliptic curves are modular literally sent integral chills right down my spine."

"That's part of the proof for Fermat's Last Theorem."

"I know. But apparently the idea that people like stories based on tales ripped from today's headlines just isn't true at all. I mean, when was the last time you read in the newspapers about someone punching an intelligent comet? It's just absurd."

"And yet, here we are, sitting in our dark apartment while a bunch of aliens we've never met just tried to give us epilepsy. I think I'd rather get mugged."

"We could always leave the room, you know."

"Oh, no, I think we're okay right here. The novelty of this is kind of wearing off."

"That really wasn't a suggestion, Leonard. If we're not playing right now then this isn't the auxiliary loading dock we're hiding in, but my room. And you're not really authorized to be in here. I made an exception due to the extenuating circumstances and the fact that since we became deputized, the Commander actually outranks us . . . but he's not here now and thus that makes me the ranking deputy officer. So . . . get out."

"Wait, why are you the ranking officer? We were both enlisted at the same time!"

"At the same time, sir. Because the corps prefers to promote based on merit and not vague hopes and dreams. And they recognize natural leadership ability. Which you can contemplate in your own room."

"Nobody promoted you, this . . . gah, why am I arguing over this with you? Sheldon, there's no corps, we are not part of anything. Whatever the hell these people are doing, its nothing we can handle and they don't want our help."

"Don't want our help, sir."

"Stop that!"

"It seems to me that what rankles you the most about this whole situation is that you expected some kind of crazy adventure to somehow evolve out of this. That we would engage in our usual madcap and zany antics with a wildly escalating series of misunderstandings that would eventually culminate into a neat and pat resolution. But we are not following a sitcom plot here, Leonard, this isn't a very special episode of Friends. This is real life. And real life can get messy."

"You're not actually going to lecture me about real life, are you? Because I will really leave the room. And lock you in here."

"Not until I'm finished. You keep expecting Star Trek, where the heroes grab the glory and the aliens always speak English and everyone has their part to play."

"But instead we're in Starship Troopers."

"No. That's not it at all. You miss the point entirely. You're used to being the starring role in your own life, but there are times when you are merely part of the supporting cast. You wanted to be Captain Kirk in this scenario, didn't you?"

"I . . . yeah. Of course. And you'd be Spock. We've talked about this."

"But, ah, here, we're not. Neither of us are what we hope to be. And it's not an easy feeling to get used to."

"I don't like it when you make sense. It's like a madman suddenly becoming lucid."

"Or maybe you're just finally starting to listen to me."

"It's . . . okay, I thought it would be like you said, like all those television shows we watched. Where the people who aren't involved get caught up in the action and wind up being an integral part of the day being saved. Or that the spotlight would be on them and they'd become the heroes. I like to think that, okay? That I'm secretly some kind of hero and that in the right situation, I would rise to the occasion. What's wrong with thinking that?"

"Luke Skywalker Syndrome."

"They have a name for it?"

"Oh, you could call it any number of names but it all boils down to the same basic criteria. A boy from an ordinary life secretly believes that he is destined for greater things and that when he reaches the proper age those will be revealed to him, embroiling him in a series of situations that will eventually lead him into the exciting life that he always felt he should be leading. But it's never going to happen because unless you're a genius in theoretical physics, you are probably never going to amount to anything important. But nobody ever wants to believe that about themselves, so they wind up putting together the pieces of their lives in such a way as that the only way it can fit together is that they are secretly the son of galactic royalty or the last of a line of space knights hidden in their humdrum lives as bookkeepers."

"I don't believe that about myself."

"Well, you're only in Stage I, which is generally marked by mild delusions and otherwise harmless fantasies that only come to bear during times of great stress or under intoxication. The key phrase of a Stage I Luke Skywalker is what if? They are constantly trying to contemplate the shape of lives that they will never lead."

"I can't believe there's stages to this."

"Oh yes, Slan Monthly devoted an entire issue to it last year. I was a contributing editor, I can't believe I never told you. Anyway, it progresses to four stages in total, where Stage II Skywalkers are distinguished by a need to act our their fantasies in private, or online, hence the number of people in World of Warcraft who take their names from characters in Firefly."

"I think that was more in the hopes that they'd impress Summer Glau. Come on, you've been there."

"More accurately, I've watched you go there. And fail. But Stage II Skywalkers can often hide their fantasies by engaging in role playing games and pretending it's all part of the scenario. This way they can have the best of both worlds. It's all still fairly harmless, if silly, but by the time you reach Stage III it's started to bleed into their everyday life, where they begin to see everything in terms of the filter of the life they've been denied. They begin to rank their friends in terms of which ones would be most likely to attempt to steal the One Ring from the, or contemplate leaping to the top of the corporate ladder through the time tested Klingon method of assassinating those above them."

"I think you and the contributing editors were starting to reach there a little bit."

"Am I? Do you remember Sheer-CON IV and Jimmy Dufsman?"

"Jimmy . . . oh! Duffy the Vampire Slayer. Yeah, I remember him. He kept wandering around the convention floor saying that the hot dogs were so bad that they must have crawled through a crack in Hell. Come to think of it, Howard got sick off those."

"That wasn't the only thing Duffsman did."

"I warned him not to eat them but it was the only kosher food there, I guess. What else did he . . . right, the staking. He was walking around with those impaled hot dogs for hours. Raj said he looked like a Boy Scout searching for a campfire. Until the squad of people dressed like Predators took them away because they were hungry. Which was . . . wait, so you're saying . . ."

"Classic Stage III, Leonard. Utterly classic. They crave the adventure of their favorite shows or comics and decide that if they mimic it as close as costumes and local ordinances will allow, that adventure will come on its own. But it's not true. And that's not an easy thing to learn."

"So what's Stage IV, dare I ask?"

"Oh, complete and total break with reality. Instead of emulating your favorite characters, you become them and start to enact their stories. Its a manifestation of a wanting that's so acute that the separation between reality and fiction isn't good enough anymore. You're in the movie of your life but you never bothered to check to see that the crew never showed up to film."

"But you go on with the script anyway."

"Precisely. We've never actually noted any in the wild, although reports have been filed. Nothing was ever confirmed, however. Still, we have several action plans in place in case the circumstance ever arises."

"The best plan would involve tranquilizer darts and a giant sack weighted with rocks, if you ask me."

"That is one, as a matter of fact. Most of the other plans involve rigging up fake distress signals from the Justice League or applicable heroic group that they need to go undercover in a local fast food establishment. Once there we either let them be in the hopes of getting their employee discount or if we think we can save them, we deprogram them to return them into society."

"You take this all very seriously, don't you?"

"People dressing up like Batman is no laughing matter, Leonard. It distracts the real one from his vital work. We're lucky that no one has ever progressed that far."

"But . . . do you think I could?"

* * * * *

It was dark inside but Tristian could tell the room was cream colored, painted the bland style of someone who had wanted the walls to be different than what it had been but didn't feel like putting the imagination into personalizing the apartment. A simple couch and television were set up in one corner, the television screen showing nothing but a dead signal. Its pale light bled a shimmering square onto the dull carpet. A quiet insistent hiss from the blank channel underscored the scene. Most of the other corners were taken up by boxes with various knickknacks stacked haphazardly inside them, indicating someone either in the process of leaving or not quite ready to feel like they lived there. He could see no one, though.

To his right he could see a kitchen, with dishes stacked in the sink and a simple table with various open boxes of cereal spread across it. There were crumbs all over the place. Tristian also noticed there were no pictures at all inside the apartment, no family or even of the person who lived there. Someone who lived alone, perhaps, without kids.

"Hello?" he called out softly, rapping his knuckles onto the doorframe. No answer. This is a dead end. They're just not home. But something compelled him to seek the further insides of the apartment.

He went left. The next room was probably a kind of guest room but held nothing but more boxes all still in that vague state between packed and unpacked. And shelves as well, lining the walls. Most of them contained toys of some sort, action figures and robots of all shapes and sizes, staring down at him with dead eyes. A couple airplanes and a few medieval looking toys, catapults and the like, rounded out the set. Tristian stood there and regarded them for a second, taking one off the shelf and turning it over. All the writing on it was in Japanese. A collector, then. That made a little more sense. Maybe he really wasn't home.

Then his ears caught the whirring again, definitely closer and definitely inside the apartment. Like a tiny buzzer pointing out the wrong answer again and again, until you were sick of being wrong. It was coming from the room beyond this one. Looking ahead, he expected the door to be closed because that was how these things always went for him. But he could see quite clearly inside and all he saw at first was the edge of a bed, planted against the center of the far wall. A table with a lamp and maybe a smaller block that could be a book on the nightstand. He still kept the sword close.

The first thing he saw when he entered the room was the outlet near the door. Something square was plugged into it, with some small cylindrical objects scattered about near it. Casting a glance to the other end of the room to make sure nothing was sneaking up on him, he crouched down to examine the object.

Tugging on it, he found that it came loose from the outlet easily and once held close he could clearly see it was a battery charger. Which meant the objects strewn at his feet were more batteries. That's interesting. The charger was warm to the touch which suggested it had been in use recently, even if it presently contained no batteries. But that wasn't the source of the whirring.

Setting the charger down, Tristian tilted his head to the side, listening closely. It was nearer, in this room somewhere. It was . . . wait-

Spinning around, Tristian faced the bed and for the first time saw the pair of feet sticking out from behind it.