A miniature tornado of paper erupted inside the office, like an invisible hand had switched on an equally invisible wall-sized industrial-strength fan. My senses went haywire as inexplicably rigid sheets of loose-leaf and printer paper batted my bugs in every direction. More than a few were caught between two sheets of paper and splatted outright. Beside me, Lisa swore violently. I could barely hear her over the whipping of the paper vortex. . The paper flying in every direction completely obscured my vision beyond a few inches in front of my face. I flung a squadron of flies at Lisa in a crazily corkscrewing pattern. A few lucky survivors proved evasive enough to slip through the fluttering deathtrap and alight on Lisa's collar and cuff. If we were under attack, I didn't intend to let anyone grab her without me noticing.

"What-" Lisa grunted as she swatted at paper. "Oh, this is just perfect! I knew that this book case was no good. Rare book collector, my ass!"

I ducked across the room towards her and slid behind her desk, where she'd taken cover from the storm. "So, you think it's related?"

Lisa shot me a derisive look obscured only briefly by another cluster of paper. "C'mon, Flutter, you don't need to be a Thinker to figure that one out!" she said. She snatched a rogue piece of printer paper out of the air and brandished it at me. "Animated paper! It's like they're beating us over the head with it. I must be the world's biggest sap."

Her deliberate switch into our cape names didn't escape my notice. Prudence demanded that we assume our unknown assailant could hear our every word.

"Point taken," I said. I swerved my surviving bugs in the room through the storm, but found nothing but paper. Outside our door, the air felt perfectly calm.

"It's localized to our room," I said. "No sign of the cape controlling this. Can you tell us anything else?"

Shamus squinted at the paper for a moment. "Whoever's doing it doesn't want to seriously injure us," she said. "That paper's been transformed to be as hard and sharp as a steel blade. They could have crucified us right at the start if they'd wanted."

Well, that was a pleasant thought. I tried not to dwell on it. The insanity still swirling around me helped. Shamus grabbed another piece out of the air, glared at it, and groaned. "They're using my dossiers, too! I'm never going to get all this shit organized. God, just kill me." She jutted out her chin and raised her voice. "Because if you don't, I'll cram every last sheet of this down your throat, and that's a promise!"

Suddenly, all of the paper whirled together and crested over us like a tsunami. The sheer force of it swept me away from the desk and into the far wall, where it glommed up to me like a spiderweb, pinning me against the wall and rendering me completely immobile. The paper swept Shamus along and deposited her on the wall beside me. Another sheaf of paper slapped across my face and clung to my goggles like a saran-wrapped blindfold, completely obscuring my vision. The muffled curses from next to me told me the same had happened to Shamus. Fortunately, the adrenaline surging through my veins kept me from dwelling on the indignity of it all.

As paper continued to rustle beyond my occluded vision, I could have sworn I heard a voice faintly saying "Oh, I'm terribly sorry!". Maybe the shock had made more of an impact than I'd thought.

After about a minute of squirming up against the wall, the paper went slack and dropped away, like a marionette with its strings cut, and Shamus and I thumped to the floor. My impromptu mask fell away as well, to reveal a bureaucrat's worst nightmare. Dossiers, files, and brand-new printer paper lay strewn over every square inch of the floor, piled like fresh snow. I could barely even see my desk under the heaps of white.

"What a nightmare," Shamus said. "I shouldn't even bother hurrying to the door, should I?"

"That's a no," I said. "Sorry, but I'm getting nothing on my radar." I'd set my exterior bugs to performing sweeps as soon as the raid had started, but they'd produced no results beyond some obvious pedestrians. Bugs could only cover so much space at once, so a cape, especially one with a mobility-assisting power, had plenty of opportunities to slip through my net, given some good luck.

Shamus leapt as though she'd been prodded with her own stun gun, and whirled back to her desk. She shoved heaps of paper left and right onto the floor with wild abandon to reveal a bare desk.

"Dammit! They took the book. Of course they did. What kind of bullshit did I get us involved with this time?"

"It's certainly turning out to be pretty unique," I said. "Animated paper's a new one. Maybe a new trigger?"

Shamus shook her head. "Too competent. Whoever blindsided us like this had to be a pro."

I wasn't sure whether that was her ego or her power speaking.

"And no, it's not my ego," she said with an eyeroll. "C'mon, give me some credit."

Power, then.

"If it's any consolation, my own ego's pretty bruised right now," I offered.

Abruptly, I stiffened. One of my bugs had just brushed against what felt an awful lot like a paper chain dangling against the building's exterior.

"There's paper going up the side of the building," I said, nearly stumbling over my words in my excitement. "It has to be them."

"They're going up? Maybe we've got a chance of cutting them off. C'mon!" Shamus scrambled for the door, waving at me to follow.

We burst out of our basement door and charged up the recessed stairwell to street level, then whirled into the lobby of the apartment building above our office. My bugs converged on the roof as we rushed up the stairwell. Eight flights of stairs and some quicker breathing later, we threw open the rooftop access door and hurtled through, only to see that we were too late.

Two blocks away, and about a hundred feet up, a paper plane the size of an SUV hurtled through the air. A figure sat perched atop it, their long coat whipping in the wind. Due to the angle, I couldn't get a good look, but the long hair flying out behind them suggested our assailant was a woman.

"Well, we almost got her," Shamus sighed. "I'd feel bad for the client if I didn't know they were a snake. Maybe it serves them right for lying to us, huh? But still, I don't like losing."

"Me either," I said. We'd been thoroughly trounced. Granted, we hadn't even known there'd be a fight, but that hardly felt like an excuse. I thought again about what might have happened if our opponent hadn't been pulling her punches, and shivered. I still didn't quite share Shamus's faith in the binding power of the unwritten rules she had explained to me.

We made our way back downstairs with considerably less energy than our charge upwards. Shamus didn't seem to feel much like talking, and I figured it'd be best not to interrupt her thinking, as we'd need her to pluck a pretty impressive deduction out of the air to find our mysterious paper master. As we stepped out into the fading afternoon sunlight, though, she still seemed flummoxed.

"I don't have much," she said, tugging at the brim of her hat. "They're an out-of-town cape, obviously, but I won't win any sleuthing awards for that one." Her brow furrowed for a moment. "They're here working on behalf of some group, I think. It doesn't feel like a solo operator. No clue on where she's gone yet, though. I'll need to do some serious legwork later for that. Oh joy, I can already feel the headache."

"So we're going after her? It seemed like you might be willing to let the client get burned on this one. You did get a bad vibe from them, right?"

Shamus raised an eyebrow. "Have you met me? The day I let someone pull one over on me is the day I eat my fedora. No, we're going to pin this paper chick to the wall, and then we'll turn the screws on our weaselly excuse for a client. How's that sound?"

"It sounds like it'll keep me busy, so I'm in," I said. "I don't have much homework this week, anyways."

We stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, contemplating our next move. As we did, our second unwelcome surprise of the day greeted us.

"Hey, you chicks!" a voice sneered from behind me. Shamus's eyes narrowed and flicked to a spot past my left shoulder. I turned to follow her gaze.

About ten feet away down the sidewalk stood someone whose shaved scalp and conceited smirk suggested membership in Empire Eighty-Eight.

Well, that and the huge "SS" tattoo on the side of their neck. Probably not one of the brightest members of the organization, then.

Shamus tilted the brim of her hat down over her face, slid her hands into the pockets of her trenchcoat, and gave a low chuckle. She sauntered forward a few steps.

"If 'Herr Kaiser' sent you here to threaten us, boy, did they ever send the wrong guy," she said. "Please tell me you don't seriously expect us to feel even the slightest bit threatened by a powerless jag-off like yourself. You couldn't be that stupid, right? No, no, don't answer. That was a rhetorical question."

A vicious sneer remained on the man's face, but despite the six inches or so he had on Shamus, she seemed to be looming over him. I stepped up beside her and scuttled a clutch of particularly large and juicy centipedes out of a nearby building into a writhing heap at the thug's feet. His sneer grew brittle, but he persisted.

"Consider this your only warning," he said. "Kaiser doesn't like to hurt his own people 'cause it sends a bad message, but for you he's about willing to make an exception. Stick your noses in Empire business again and they're gonna get cut off. Literally, like."

I didn't care at all for the idea of being one of Kaiser's 'people'.

Shamus's own sneer put the skinhead's to shame. "On behalf of both me and my partner, take that racist garbage and shove it up your own ass posthaste," she said. "We go where we want and do what we want, and it'll be a particularly cold day in hell for Hitler before we take orders from a reeking piece of human refuse like you."

The thug seemed to be searching for a retort. That wouldn't do at all, so I rushed my battalion of centipedes forward over his feet and up his legs. He yelped, swatted at them ineffectually, then took off yelling as they swarmed up into his underwear.

Shamus stood watching him go for a moment, her expression surprisingly serious. She then turned to me with a smile. "I think that drove the message home nicely, Flutter. C'mon, let's get inside. I can't take any more excitement for now."

We retreated back into our office, which remained in a state of complete and utter disarray. Shamus took one look at the state of her files and slumped onto her desk with a groan.

"I'm never going to get this mess cleaned up," she said. "Months of organizing, and what do I get for it? A kick in the stomach from the universe."

I murmured sympathy before raising the issue which troubled me.

"How serious is the Empire?" I said. "I know we've been a problem for them, but do you think that they mean business about coming for us?"

Shamus drew her eyebrows together above her mask, her expression sober.

"Unfortunately, yes, I think they do," she said. "It's mostly my fault, I suspect. Kaiser doesn't like the idea of a rogue Thinker who's not handcuffed by PRT red tape running around. That's far too much X-factor for someone trying to take over a whole city. The Empire mostly observes the unwritten rules when it comes to non-villains, so they won't be out to drop our bodies in an unmarked grave, but they wouldn't blink at the idea of a little bodily harm." She pulled off her fedora and tossed it onto the desk, brushing out her hair. "Sorry, I know that was pretty heavy. I should probably start thinking about taking out some insurance for us against them getting really serious."

"Insurance?" I asked, trying to imagine what would be potent enough to freeze the mighty arm of a massive parahuman syndicate.

"Well, as you've seen, one of the perks of my power is that it's very good at taking A and thirty-two and putting them together. Which might come in handy, for example, if you wanted to piece together the secret identities of a bunch of noxiously racist powered goons."

My breath caught as her words sunk in. "You mean…"

Her teeth gleamed with wicked glee.

"Oh, I mean. It's a nuclear option, admittedly, but I may need to start putting some brainpower that way."

I felt a little faint. The consequences of openly defying the strongest gang in the city, repeatedly, hadn't fully registered with me until today, but to think about going after information that sensitive was a brand-new level of alarming.

My brain took a moment to process before getting back up into gear.

"Is that safe?" I finally asked.

"Honey, we're capes," she said with a sympathetic smile. "Nothing we do is ever really safe. I get the concern, but you know I'm a pro. I don't screw around with this stuff. If the day ever comes, I'll break the news to him very tactfully."

I tried, and failed, to picture Shamus doing anything tactfully when it came to someone she didn't like.

She smirked. "Yeah, yeah, I know."

Despite her confidence, I didn't feel completely sanguine about the plan.

"I don't know much about cape business, but blowing somebody's identity is as serious as it gets, isn't it? Won't that make them feel like they have to squash us before the information gets out? That's all I could think to do if my back was up against the wall like that. Plus, Kaiser can't be seen to knuckle under for a couple of teenage girls. It'd shatter his entire image."

"All very good points," she said with a nod. "Which is why we'd only ever use it if he's about to go way too far. With Panacea in town, that line's pretty far, and the Empire plays by the rules for now anyways. But if we end up needing an ace in the hole, better to have one than not."

I thought about it for a moment, then nodded. "I trust you on this," I said. Shamus could be a smidgen too enthusiastic in taunting her enemies for her own good, but we'd gotten through enough together now for the words to spill forth with real conviction.

"Please, you'll make me blush." She kicked at one of the many drifts of paper piled up against her desk. "Welp, time to spend the rest of the night cleaning up this disaster, I guess. How many ants does it take to lift a piece of paper?"

"Oh, sorry, but I've got somewhere to be," I said. "This isn't too much for you to handle on your own, right?"

She uttered a resigned groan. "That's fine," she said with the air of the condemned. Suddenly, her eyebrows shot up.

"Wait, are you screwing with me? You are, aren't you? Hah!"

I grinned. "You got me," I said.

"Nice one. We'll make a wisecracking detective out of you yet."

"But no fedora," I said with a laugh. We got to work.