Hey y'all long chapter here hope you enjoy :)

"Sooooo….were you being serious when you said you wanted to go to Arkansas?" asked Dex.

"Yes," said Arian, completely seriously.

"And were you being serious when you said you wanted to try actual human transport?" Dex asked again.

"Well, we are at the airport," said Sophie, "so I guess. Besides, it might be kinda fun. The problem is, we don't have tickets anywhere yet."

"Arkansas!" Arian said wayyy too enthusiastically.

"Look, no offense to everyone living in Arkansas, but there's nothing to do there. Also, there aren't any huge cities, like the ones we've been going to. And...just….WHY?" Sophie stared at Arian, bewildered and a little irate.

Arian shrugged. "It alliterates with my name?" he offered.

"I thought it was a great suggestion," cooed Merea. Lia punched her.

"I KNOW WHERE WE SHOULD GO!" Keefe yelled, running over to them from where he had been standing, gaping at the departures board. "BOSS-TOWN!"

"Uh…. what?" Sophie arched an eyebrow.

"Boss-town!" he repeated, grinning. "It says so right there on the glowy thing!" He pointed.

"Your translation contacts need a recharge," Fitz said with a roll of his eyes. "That says Phoenix."

"What? No, you idiot. I mean the one above that one."

Fitz squinted up at the board. "Ohhhhh yeah! Boss-town! Sounds lit, fam."

Sophie stared at her boyfriend. "What did you just say?"

He shrugged. "I dunno. I heard some other people say it by the bathrooms."

"Boston," said Sophie flatly.

"Yeah, see? Boss-town." Keefe said triumphantly. Lia grabbed Sophie by the shoulders to stop her from running away and smacking her head against a wall.

Sophie finally calmed down enough to say "Okay, yeah. I've always kinda wanted to go to Boston. And I might see snow for once in my life… stupid California."

"YEEEESSSSSSSSS!" Keefe yelled, tearing around the group with a luggage cart. His screams were amplified by Biana's as she clung to the luggage cart to keep from falling off of it.

"Um, excuse me, sir," an airport worker lady said to the manic Keefe, "your luggage item is not regulation—OHMYGOD IT'S A HUMAN! SECURITYYYYY!" She ran for the hunky airport guard standing broodingly a few feet away.

"Hey, come back! You were cute!" Keefe called after her. Biana tottered dizzily out of the now-stationary cart and managed to kick him in the shin, hard.

As Keefe rolled around on the floor, wailing dramatically about the "massive bruise that's going to mar my beautiful, muscular legs!", the guard approached Biana. "Excuse me, we can't have these kind of shenanigans in a public setting. Please take your teenage drama outside, children." He frowned threateningly (whatever that looks like).

"Did you just use the word shenanigans with a straight face?" Dex asked. Merea elbowed him into shutting up.

"I'm going to let you lot off with a warning," the guard said, then stumped away, back to the airport worker lady.

Sophie peeled her face off the wall. "So! Now that you guys are done with all your teenage drama, we can buy tickets. Okay? Okay! Let's go! And DON'T OPEN YOUR MOUTH!" she said to Fitz, who had been about to say something. "YOU EITHER!" she said to Arian, who froze with his mouth hanging open. "It would actually be great if NONE OF YOU SPOKE TO ME EVER AGAIN!"

They followed her meekly, Arian leaning over to Merea and whispering, "She seems a little passive aggressive, don't you think?"

Merea rolled her eyes. "I do, actually, now that you mention it."

"That security dude was hot," said Biana.

"Tell me about it," said Lia.

"I'm right here," said Dex grumpily and a little too loudly. Lia glared at him, and he looked away hurriedly.

They bought tickets (first class, with a bit of nudging from Keefe and Biana) without much of a problem, except for the fact that none of them except Sophie knew how a Visa Gold Card worked, so they were all extremely nervous that it would suddenly self-destruct or something. Security was fine, since they'd checked all their bags and literally had nothing except their "passports" which Arian had Conjured from some people at their hotel, copied, and then got the Vanished Merea to put them back in their purses or backpacks. The pictures on the passports looked only semi-similar to them, but when Merea put her hair up, Lia walked around with a stern expression, and Dex wore a hoodie, the exhausted security officer waved them through.

"We have...three hours until the plane takes off," said Sophie.

"SHOPPING!" yelled Biana.

"But airplane shopping is crazy….expensive," Sophie trailed off. Biana had already run off to an expensive purse shop.

"Look!" she squealed. "Gootchy! Versatchy! Channel! Yeeves… yevees…. Y…"

"Yves Saint Laurent," said a crisp, British-accented voice from behind her. "Are you interested?" a (male, attractive) salesperson swept a hand toward a ton of bags hanging off of wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling racks.

"Depends on what you're talking about," Biana replied, fluttering her eyelashes. The salesperson laughed and led her over to the bags. Keefe just stared in shock.

"What?" Lia grouched. "Why does Biana get all the hot guys?"

"I knoooooow," said Merea. Arian did not hear.

Dex tapped Lia on the shoulder. She turned around, saying, "What?"

He gestured frantically to himself and made a face like, ahem?

Lia rolled her eyes, smiling, and took his hand. He brightened up after that.

"Sooo…..did you give Biana the Gold Card?" Sophie asked Arian.

"No - wait," he said frantically, patting down his pockets, "I didn't give it to her, but I don't have it."

A maniacal laugh was suddenly heard. Biana had moved on to another shop, which sold fancy British shoes, with a new purse on her arm, Keefe at her side, and her hand waving a small flat gold rectangular very-similar-to-a-Visa-Gold-Card thing in the air.

Sophie glared at Arian. "Sorrysorrysorrysorrysorry!" he said hurriedly, backing away from her and standing behind Merea as a shield, even though he was a solid six inches taller than her and therefore not hidden.

Sophie smacked her forehead and chased after Biana. Fitz followed her. Merea dragged Arian over to look at some stuff and try to pretend that she didn't know who Biana was.

"Who do you wanna follow?" asked Dex to Lia.

"Sophie is yelling at Biana in a shoe store, and Merea and Arian are dangerously close to playing 'pass the gum' in that souvenir shop," said Lia sarcastically, "so either one is equally not ideal."

"I mean, there's nothing wrong with playing pass the gum," Dex said cautiously.

Lia looked at him sideways. "Uh, no, I guess not."

Silence reigned for a minute.

Dex spoke again. "Y'know, we could just… go over there…" He tugged at her hand.

"Uh, yeah, I guess we could..."

The two drifted away but didn't end up doing anything other than talking because they were quickly recalled to the scene by Biana/Keefe/Sophie's screams.

The cashier cleared her throat to get Merea and Arian's attention, but they were too busy trying on different sunglasses in the mirror and telling each other "No, you're the cutest!" so quietly that they thought no one could hear them — a.k.a not quietly at all. She eventually threw some boxes of mints at them to get them to go away because the incredible adorableness of their relationship was making her feel sad about being a single Pringle.

Merea and Arian beat a retreat to the shoe store, where chaos was rampant. Biana had evidently tried to walk out wearing a pair of the store's heels, which wasn't really that bad. Except she hadn't paid for them, and she had left her smelly old Asics ("they're so hideously chunky!" wailed the saleslady as she held them aloft and pinched her nose) on the shelf in their place. The security beep thing went off and there was now a posse of guards gathered around Biana, who did the logical thing: two minutes later, every guard was screaming and pointing as a pair of red-bottomed Louboutins walked away apparently of their own accord. The entire security team fainted while the elves escaped and the whole thing was later put down to a mass hallucination, though they were at a loss to explain the six-hundred-and-seventy-five dollars—in pennies—which seemingly had rained down all around them.

"HOW EXACTLY DID YOU MANAGE TO WASTE TWO HOURS AND FIFTY-FIVE MINUTES TERRORIZING THE AIRPORT SALESPERSON?!" Sophie yelled at Biana as they all ran as fast as they could toward their gate. "DON'T ANSWER THAT! IT WAS A RHETORICAL QUESTION! RHET-OR-IC-AL! NO, NOT VICTORIA'S SECRET! ARE YOU DEAF OR JUST PLAIN—"

Thud.

Sophie had lost track of where she was going and smacked face-first into an airport directory sticking out of the ground. She slid to the ground in a crumpled heap. Everyone else stopped running and Fitz dropped to his knees at her side, cradling her head in his lap.

"I'm sick of losing brain cells by whacking my face into stuff," Sophie sobbed. "At this rate, I'm going to end up like Biana! One brain cell"

"Shut up, Sophie! You wish you could be like me!" Biana sniffed.

"Stop poking at the crux of my existential distress!" Sophie wailed in response, which confused everyone for a minute.

Lia pried the tickets out of Sophie's hands. "It says our flight is at gate 86A," she said crisply, straightening out everyone's boarding passes.

"...and we're right next to gate 2B," Merea said.

"Or not 2B, that is the—" Merea slapped a hand over Arian's mouth before he could finish.

"How are we gonna reach?" Keefe moaned as Fitz hauled Sophie to her feet but she flopped sideways and knocked him into an overflowing trash can. "Do you think they'll come get us?"

Just then, a suave voice came over the loudspeaker. "Will Lia Caverly, Dexter Dizznee, Sophie Foster, Arian Iver, Merea Jemen, Keefe Sencen, and Biana and Fitzroy Vacker please come to gate 86A? This is a final call." They heard the PA phone click.

"She totally murdered my name," Keefe grumped. The lady had called him "Keefie."

"Hey, isn't that what Biana calls y—"

"Guys. Shut up. We need to figure out how we're gonna get there that fast. I don't think we can (transport or teleport or whatever their weird thing is called) here cause there aren't any crystals," Lia said anxiously.

"We can use the moving walkways, maybe." Sophie, who had recovered and was standing up, pointed ahead. Fitz walked up next to her, brushing off bits of trash from his jacket. Arian plucked an old luggage tag out of his hair.

"Ooh, good idea!" said Merea appreciatively. They all jogged onto the closest walkway and it gave them an added burst of speed. "Dex, any chance you could make this go faster?" she asked, looking back over her shoulder.

"I don't think that would—" began Sophie, but the walkway under them suddenly sped up a ton and rocketed them forward to land on the next one, which also sped up and in turn deposited them onto the next moving walkway, chucking poor innocent pedestrians left and right.

After being hurled to five or six of these turbo walkway things, Biana pointed a desperate finger. "There!" she screeched, pointing at gate 86A a few hundred feet ahead. The last belt they were propelled onto shot them out in a heap right at the boarding assistant's feet. Lia held up the crumpled mass of tickets while everyone else extricated themselves from the dogpile. The attendant approved them, and they all rushed into the tunnel to the plane. Arian, rubbing a fast-developing bruise on his chin, muttered something about them needing another Technopath just to fix Dex's brain, because it was obviously defective. Dex glared at Arian instead of throwing back a biting retort because it hurt to speak. There were grooves matching the tread of the moving walkway imprinted on his face.

They limped to their seats, which were not ideal: Lia was sandwiched between the Vackers, and Merea had to deal with Keefe and Dex arguing across her. Arian and Sophie were together and behind the others' row, frantically searching for the Gold Card.

"I found it!" yelled Fitz ALAP (as loudly as possible). The two hundred other people on the plane all shushed him.

"Shut up," said Lia, elbowing him.

Fitz had the aisle seat. He handed the card across to the lady sitting one row behind and across the aisle. "Can you pass this to my friends back there?" He pointed. "Thanks."

"Hey, doofus, you could've just passed it to us," said Dex.

"Oh. Yeah. Forgot you guys were over there."

"Only has eyes for Soph," said Dex, rolling his eyes so hard they may as well have popped out from the back of his head.

"And you only have eyes for Lia," stage-whispered Merea right in Dex's ear.

Now his eyes nearly popped out of the front of his head. "How do you- Shut your mouth!"

"I hear you guys talking about me," called Lia from across the row. Dex hid behind the airline safety card, furiously red and shooting an extremely evil look at Merea. "Actually I heard something-something-Lia-something, but that still counts."

"We were just talking about how -" Merea began, but then Dex interrupted her.

"-how there's a great movie playing on this flight that Merea thought you would like! She was trying to convince me, but I thought nah, there's no way Lia would like that-"

"They're playing Space Fighter Jets XIV," said Lia, confused, twisting around awkwardly to look at them past Fitz's head. "And then after that, they're playing this weird rom-com except it's animated and for seven-year-olds and I think involves space and fighter jets."

"Uhhh…yep! You seem like the person who wouldn't be into weird, crazy stuff like that."

"I wouldn't be so sure about that," whispered Merea, all seriousness. "She's into you."

Dex was dead by now. Merea smiled evilly to herself and decided to let them alone for a few minutes. Dex started plotting his revenge. He pulled out his phone and texted a group chat from which he had artfully eliminated the members of Merian:

I NEED TO GET REVENGE ON MEREA! SHE IS EVIL. IDEAS?

Lia's pocket buzzed and she pulled out one of the phones that Dex had stolen procured. She replied: Arian?

D: What do you mean?

L: liek,,, we could embarrass the two of them together or smth

D: Yes, but how exactly?

K: we dont know this was your stupid idea -_-

D: Wait. How did you do that?

K: do wut

D: The face! It's so cool.

F: uh u just type it

D: …

D: :P

K: good job ok DO YOU HAVE A PLAN

D: Right. Okay. So what I'm thinking is that, um… uh…

"Wait. Are you guys texting each other?" Merea said, looking back and forth between the two boys around her.

"Yyyyyep," Keefe said, typing furiously.

"You're like two feet apart."

"I'm not good at face to face interaction," Dex said with a shrug. Keefe rolled his eyes.

"You're telling me." He pressed send and Dex's phone dinged.

K: no one texts with filler words dex and why is ur grammar and stuff so good

D: It's because I hooked my phone up to my brainwaves so that it types whatever I think, kind of.

K: oh

K: of course you did

D: What? Yeah, of course I—wait. Why'd you say that?

D: Where is everybody? Guys?

D: Hello?!

"Um, excuse me?" asked the flight attendant who had suddenly appeared in the aisle. "Please put your phones away, we're about to take off. Once we're in the air, you can purchase WiFi for only $36.95 or £25.95."

"Why," stage-whispered Dex after the flight attendant had left.

"Why do you need to put them away or why do they charge an arm and a leg for WiFi?" asked the Merea, blissfully ignorant of her impending doom, in return. "I mean, I'm pretty sure you can use it if—aaaand you've already hacked the server. Why do I take you anywhere?"

"Because I have magical Technopath powers that can do everything," answered Dex smugly. He stared at his phone for a little while longer ("stop being such a screenager!" Biana hissed at him), before his eyebrows shot a mile up his forehead and he spun around in his chair to stare at Lia. He conveyed as much of his plan as he could with eyebrow raises, gestures and she nodded slowly, a little confused, so he turned back around, plugged in and put on his headphones, and settled in to watch Space Fighter Jets XIV. He giggled like a little kid.

"Lordy." Merea thunked her head against the seat in front of her.

Meanwhile, Lia was having a little problem. Fitz was asleep and his head kept leaning precariously toward her shoulder. His head would dip to the side, hair falling into his face. Then he'd move back a little, murmur something in his sleep, and reach up to brush the hair out of his eyes. Then go to the beginning. And repeat, over and over.

Lia whispered "what do I do?" at Biana, who wordlessly leaned over and slid a pillow between Lia's shoulder and her neck. Her brother put his head on it gratefully. Lia tried not to move, but with Fitz's newly-spiked hair poking at her cheek and the cloying smell of his papaya-clove-scented hair gel (which was just as horrible as it sounded), she felt pretty sure she couldn't keep this up for long.

Without turning her head, Lia snuck a peek at Biana, who had the animated version of Space Fighter Jets XIV playing on her screen and was idly flipping through the airline's shopping catalogue. Her finger trailed down the page, faltered at a watch, and came to a stop at a cool pen case. She scanned the flip side, which had wallets and belts. She checked the price of each one, then turned to Lia. "Do you know how much is on the Gold Card?" she asked.

"Um? No, I don't. Still a lot, I guess. I hope. Why?"

Biana's eyes flicked over to where Keefe was aggressively playing in-flight mahjong, then down. "No reason. Nevermind."

Lia's eyebrows decided that they were in love with her hairline. Was Biana thinking about getting a present for someone else? That was definitely new.

Merea didn't want to say that Dex was acting weird, but Dex was acting weird. He kept muttering to himself, tapping his screen, and bending down pretending to have lost something. Except she definitely heard him messing with stuff down there, so. That. It was probably nothing, though, so she looked away.

When he bent down and came up with a sizable chunk of the bottom of the seat of the elderly man in front of him, she didn't comment.

She didn't say anything when he made some truly horrible drawings of her and Keefe sitting in their seats, even though they looked more like prototypes for voodoo dolls. And were those equations he was writing next to them…?

Finally he sat back in his seat and tapped at it a little more so that the attendant call light dinged on. A smiling attendant walked over and asked what she could get for him.

"Do you have tomato juice?" he asked. Merea wrinkled her nose. She'd hated tomatoes since she set foot in that fancy French restaurant.

If the flight attendant thought this a strange request, she didn't show it. "Of course. We'll bring it by in a few minutes." She left.

As promised, a flight attendant came walking down the aisle toward them soon. Dex tensed visibly, and Merea saw him reach forward and kick at something with his foot. There was the sound of sliding metal, then, without warning the flight attendant tripped and the tomato juice went flying.

Merea saw it approaching in slow motion. A red drop was flung wide, then another, then two more—

The cup landed upside down on her head and Merea yelled.

"Oh my gosh, I am so, so, so, so, so, so sorry!" the attendant said. Merea spluttered an "It's okay." The attendant gave a curious wail and ran back off to the kitchen, returning moments later with napkins which she used to sponge off the shoulder of the elf's shirt. The attendant gave Merea a few more with which she scrubbed morosely at her hair.

"It's really okay," Merea said to the attendant, who was hovering nearby. She bit her lip and nodded, then said "I'msososososososososorry!" before running away.

As soon as she left, Dex proceeded to go into silent fits of laughter, and realization dawned. "You—that's what you were doing down there! You made a tripwire!"

"Yeah, pretty much. Except with a heck of a lot more math because I didn't wanna get juiced, so I had to figure out the right angle and then build it. Anyway, it worked. Revenge is mine!" He tried to evil-laugh but it was really lame.

Merea stared.

"Why didn't you just ask for a cup of tomato juice," she started slowly, not taking her eyes off of his, "and dump it on my head?"

"What's the fun in that?" He fumbled in his pocket for his dinging phone.

K: dude. ur so extra. but that was lit 🔥

"Ladies and gentlemen, we will be commencing landing shortly. Welcome to Boston! The weather's awful. Hope you enjoy your stay."