May. Finishing the year with a bang, but having to leave town for a while p.1

"I'm telling you this is so unnecessary," Gar was telling Victor, his voice pleading as his friend went through his math textbook. "I was gonna skip anyway. I'll just skip and then I won't have to do the homework."

"And I'm telling you, I'm not letting you do that," Vic said calmly, and pointed to a line in the textbook. "Here's the formula you need. Get cracking!"

Gar sighed and began working on the math problem slowly, dragging his metaphorical feet. Halfway through, he looked up. "Just let me skip, Vic," he said, giving his best puppy-dog eyes.

Vic wordlessly pushed Gar's head down towards his notebook.

Kori sat on the other side of Gar, supporting Victor's goal. "Mr. Bill cares greatly about attendance, Gar. He said so to me when I arrived to this school."

When Gar finished the problem, Vic indicated what he needed to do for the next one. Such was the problem with math: it never seemed to end. Kori smiled when Gar turned to her. Raven was reading, unaware of the world, and Dick was doing whatever on his phone—no one would speak up for him. Gar looked out the window in dejection before diving into the task. It was so warm and flowery outside, going to class seemed sacrilegious.

A knock on the clubroom door made everyone go quiet. Before they had time to regroup, a girl with long blond hair and thick glasses peeked in. "Hi? Is this the Project Club?"

Dick jumped to his feet. "Yes. Come in."

He drew the extra chair to the table, as Kori, Vic and Gar cleared the table of Gar's homework and Raven shoved her book in her bag to join the group. The girl observed the five shuffling from their previous occupations with dismay.

"Okay, what can we do for you?" Dick asked, all business.

The girl closed the door behind herself but ignored the chair, staying by the entrance. "You guys really do jobs for people?" she asked. "My friend told me she heard Jenny Hex talking about it… Was she joking?"

"No, we're really…" Dick trailed off. "Um, we're trying to be a club that helps people… and stuff."

The girl didn't look too convinced. "Okay… Well. I don't know if you can help with this… I-I don't even know if this is what you normally do, or…"

Dick met the girl's uncertainty with cool assurance. "Why don't you sit down andtell us what it's about, and we'll see what we can do about it?"

The girl finally acquiesced, and took the chair. "It's just my sister's driving herself mad with this," she said as introduction, and launched into the story.

Her older sister Miranda had been working for a medical research non-profit. Miranda had been seeing money go missing for months now. She'd gone to management several times and had been sent away. Meanwhile, the donation money for research funding was a fraction of what it should have been, and no one was doing anything about it. Management had told Miranda that unless she had proof and a suspect, they could do nothing about it. "That's screwed up, right?" said the girl. "I mean, they should be the ones investigating. It's like they don't care this money isn't going where it needs to."

"Yeah. They should be," agreed Dick. "Okay, great. We're on it."

The girl opened her eyes wide. "Wait, really?"

"Yeah," said Dick. "We'll do some digging and see if your sister's on to something, uh… what's your name?"

"Itziar," the girl said. She looked at all of them in turn. "Did you really save the school back when those two kids tried to blow it up?"

Dick nodded gravely, thinking it inappropriate to let her in on how thrilled he still was that that incident had happened. "Yep, that was us."

"And principal Blood really asked you for help with the graffiti a while back?"

"That too."

Itziar seemed to look at them differently now. She picked up her notebook and wrote something down. "Well, here's the address for the Foundation. And I'll give you my number, 'case you need anything."

After she left, Dick looked at the piece of paper with satisfaction. "I know we decided to keep the Thunder and Lightning thing a secret, but maybe it's better that it's out in the open, you know?" he told his friends, letting himself smile now their new client was out of sight. Who knew Vic's ex-girlfriend would come in handy this way? Now word was getting around about them, and that was exactly what they needed. Missions would pick up from now on.

And then he turned to look at his friends, who were being uncharacteristically quiet. The four of them exchanged glances between themselves with a gravity Dick didn't like. None of them would meet his eyes.

"Okay, what is it?" he asked them.

The four looked at each other, and seemed to decide Gar would take the floor. He stepped forward.

"We've just been wondering, Dick, like…" he started, scratching his hair. "If we should keep… doing this."

Dick felt a twist in his gut. "This being?" he asked. He knew, but he wanted to hear it.

"The running around playing at being superheroes," Vic snapped. "Or, heroes, I guess."

Dick frowned at all of them. "Why?"

"What'd you mean, why?" retorted Gar. "Last month, we ran straight into a supervillain plan and got swept aside like bugs, by the real heroes trying to do their real job!"

"Fine, so that was a mistake," said Dick. "But what aboutthis mission? This is right down our alley!"

"Is it?" asked Raven. "Do we even know what our alley is? We've just been sticking our nose into different situations that did not need us."

"Yeah, and I mean, how much are we really helping?" asked Gar.

"It's not like we've been useless," argued Dick. "We kept the school from being destroyed for fuck's sake!"

"And what if that was a one off?" asked Vic. "What if there's never anything big like that again?"

"We had no business going to the lake," said Raven. "If anything, we were a hassle for the real heroes."

"And we got lucky no one found out about that," said Gar. "Imagine if this gets out of hand to and we really get embarrassed."

Dick frowned to himself. In his head, he had answers for all his friends –Yes, this is right down our alley Raven, I know because it's a student asking us for help, asking us to look into something that would go fly under superheroes' radars. We're gonna keep getting big cases, Vic, if we just keep doing the work. And who cares about what people think, Gar? Let them try to embarrass us for trying to do the right thing.- but there was no point to saying any of them. This wasn't a debate. If they didn't want to do the work, he couldn't force them.

He just asked them, "You all feel this way?" And he asked this looking at Kori, because she hadn't spoken up yet. She was actively avoiding his eyes.

Victor answered him. "This was always a pipe dream. We should quit while we're ahead."

"Look, we'll find some other front for the Club, okay?" said Gar, trying to smile.

"Yeah. Sure," muttered Dick.

He left the clubroom. Five minutes ago, he'd felt excited for the future. They had gotten a request—a real one this time. He felt like they were finally getting somewhere. But unbeknownst to him, his friends had already backed down.

He went to his locker and got the books he needed for first period, moving in automatic. He felt the irrational sensation that there was no point in going to History, no point in to coming to school, now he didn't have the Club. Like school was already his daily obstacle he dealt with in between missions. What would he occupy his brain with while slacking off in class, if not looking for missions, working out problems, looking forward to the next task?

Back in the clubroom, the others lingered in guilt after Dick slumped away.

"We weren't bad, right?" Gar asked the others. "We were just honest."

"At least it's done and over with now," said Vic.

Raven turned to Kori to say something along the lines of Big help you were. But the redhead looked so distraught already, Raven held his tongue.

"I wish I hadn't told Jen anything," said Vic. "We might have never gotten another mission if I hadn't."

Kori heaved a big sigh. "I fear we have committed a terrible mistake."

Gar turned to her. "Come on, Kor. We discussed this. We all agreed."

Kori said, "But he seemed so down, and it seems so awful to put down someone so… idealistic like him."

And in that the others couldn't help but agree.

Dick had always been good at compartmentalizing; he ignored the issue for the majority of the day. He got home, had dinner, went to his bedroom, and only when he had finished all his homework did he look up from his laptop to think about it again.

The room had darkened around him while he finished working, though the sunset outside was still burning in the sky. He sat on his bed, watched the rectangles of fire projected on the wall opposite to his window, and sincerely wondered why he cared so much.

When he thought about the Club, his brain was forever fixed in the moment after they got Jade to return the SAT's to the school. That lunch period, as he sat with his newfound group of friends, as they all savored that triumph, felt to Dick like the beginning of the rest of his life. It was the moment his life had fallen on the right path, and in his new goal he'd found the person he wanted to be.

After that things had somewhat deviated. They had ran around looking for the next thing, and Dick had tried for them to stay on track. But maybe Vic was right, and the Thunder and Lightning thing had been a one-off, and really the SAT's thing had been them righting something they themselves got wrong. Perhaps people got a quota of heroism in their lives, and that had been theirs. Well, regular people. People who weren't born with powers or got transformed by a lab accident. People like them.

Maybe they should quit. Maybe with the forest supervillain his friends had woken up from a dream, and Dick should follow suit. Maybe he was just being too stubborn about it.

And why should it be a huge deal? What was wrong with him, that he needed to have a huge hero project to feel like he wasn't wasting his life? Why shouldn't he be normal, and mind his own business like the rest of the world?

Right there and then, Dick decided to quit. When he did, he felt like he was shrugging off a load that, once gone, left him empty.

And when the moment was over, his brain started thinking about the mission again. What could be happening at that nonprofit and how could he go about finding out and who would fix it if not him. It was useless—he couldn't quit. It wasn't in him to do it.

He opened his laptop again and began investigating the nonprofit.

Dick scoured the Foundation's website, contrasting any piece of information against state laws. After a while of twisting his brain on taxes and laws, he decided to get help. He knocked and then popped his head in Bruce's office. "Bruce? Can you help me with a school thing?"

Bruce waved him in. "Come in. Give me a second to…" he trailed off as he typed in his computer. Dick drew a chair close to him and waited until Bruce wrapped up his work and looked up at his charge. "Do you want to go to the study, or…?"

"No, I just have a couple of questions," said Dick. "Are all nonprofits supposed to be government funded?"

"No," Bruce answered. "There are several types of nonprofit and not all of them get government grants."

"What about a medical research charity?"

"I'd say those usually get grants. If you let me check…-" he moved to the computer.

"So what happens if they're government-funded also ask for membership dues?"

Bruce focused on him. "What do you mean?"

"Well, you can't have both, can you?"

"Yes. Why wouldn't they?"

Dick nodded, trying hard not to look disappointed.

"A nonprofit can have government grants, require membership dues, and get donations," Bruce went on. "All at the same time."

"Right," said Dick. He wanted to kick himself for feeling let down. Of course the charity was okay after all. He'd just been seeing things because he wanted a mission too much.

Bruce was peering at Dick. "They're teaching you about taxes in school?"

"Yeah, we have to make up our own nonprofit," lied Dick.

"I guess I stand corrected about public school," muttered Bruce. "But why are you looking for fraudulent activity?"

"Oh, one of the exercises is judging the legality of what other students come up with." Dick scared himself sometimes—he'd come up with that on the fly.

"Well, in real life, the first sign of fraudulent activity is tax evasion."

"But you'd never find out. Tax records are private, right?"

"Not for public government-funded nonprofits they're not." Bruce moved to his computer, and this time Dick let him work. "The 990 forms are public record. You can look them up on the IRS website," he said, and Dick quickly wrote it down on his phone. "You got all that?"

"Yes. Thanks, Bruce!" Dick jumped up from the chair, heartened.

"Good luck with the project," Bruce said, delving back into his own work.

Much to his disappointment, when Dick found the Foundation's taxes easily—it would have been too easy to take them down for not making their taxes public. It looked like… an okay list of taxes. Since he wasn't actually being taught about taxes in school, all he could attest was that their 990 form existed.

So he changed his tactic; he looked up the taxes for a bunch of other nonprofits and started comparing them. That was when things started coming out.That was when he started taking notes. And then it occurred to him to run the recurring names trough social media, and that was when he really started going down an investigative rabbit hole.

It was well into three a.m. when he started printing.

The next day, Dick made a beeline for his friends' lunch table, sat down and looked at then earnestly. "Hear me out."

He was met with knowing, dreading faces.

"Just—just hear me out," he insisted. He pooled his findings on the table and pointed at one paper. "This is the charity's website main page. Remember what Itziar said yesterday about there being members who pay dues? No word of that in the website. So it's shady right off the bat."

"That's grasping at straws," retorted Raven.

"I looked through other charities' pages," Dick went on, paying them no mind. "They all explain what kind of nonprofit they are and tell you whether or not they ask for dues. This charity gets government grants, member dues, and donations, but it only asks donations on their page. It hides everything else."

"Maybe they had a bad web designer," said Gar.

"So I went looking for their tax forms." Dick pulled up the relevant papers. "Looks fine, right? Now compare it to these taxes from the other charities." He waited a few moment to let them get to their own conclusions.

"Okay, it looks pretty bare in comparison," Raven admitted. "But-"

"But it could still be a mistake, right?" guessed Dick. "But look at the lines I highlighted. Look at the difference between researchers' salaries and their total assets. Now compare them to the other nonprofits."

He leaned back and waited for their eyes to widen.

"There is no comparison," Kori said.

"The assets are astronomical for a nonprofit," Dick agreed, unable to hold back. "And the salaries are way lower than those of other charities. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. You see the president of the charity, Stan Deering? He's the son in law of this guy," He put forward the printing of a LinkedIn profile. "Henry Allard, billionaire. He's the family patriarch. Through the years he's put his family in different spots of power. And these," he put up a bunch of other papers, "are news articles of different charities he's had open and close through the years. All of them crashed and burned after a few years. Eventually a new one opens under another family member's name. And all of these people? They don't advertise having worked at any of those charities on their social media. Like they're always trying to keep it under wraps as much as possible."

His friends were quiet now. As they studied the papers and Dick waited with baited breath, Jenny came by their table.

"What are you Titans fanclub losers working on now?" she asked.

"All requests are confidential, Jenny," said Dick, deciding that right then and there. It sounded logical, anyway.

Vic shrunk on his seat, trying to pretend he wasn't there.

"Hey, we at the cooler table have a bet going on," Jen said, motioning to where Gizmo and Mammoth were sneering at them. "Settle it for us, will you?"

"No," said Raven.

"Here goes," said Jenny. "Would you say you made this club as a desperate cry for attention, or are you really deluded enough to think you're gonna help anybody?"

As she asked, she grabbed at some of the papers and examined them.

"Give that back, Jennifer!" Dick said as he grabbed the papers, with enough force that Jen was actually discouraged from bothering them any further. Annoying Dick was high-quality fun, until it wasn't.

She walked off, muttering, "Why does everyone always think my name is Jennifer…"

Dick watched her walk away and made sure she was gone, then turned to his friends. "Well? What do you think?"

Vic said, "Let's say you did find shady stuff. What I don't see is a reason why we should take care of it."

Dick said, "Because we were asked to. And because we can."

Victor gave him a hard gaze. "If we do go digging deeper, and we do find something big, what are we gonna do with it?"

"We give it to the police," Dick replied. He'd already come to the conclusion it was the only thing they would accept. "There's not much we can do, except bring them a ready case."

Raven was leafing through the papers, undecided. "You're saying we'd be like… reporters, if anything."

"Yes." Dick would have said yes to anything anyone came up with at that moment. He could have done this without them—but he really preferred to have them with him. "Raven, are you in?"

She looked at him, and Dick thought she looked surprised at being singled out. But it had been instinctual on Dick's part: she'd always been on board with the Club since the start.

"People are giving to this charity thinking it's gonna help people," she said, almost to herself. "This organization is taking money and not helping advance medicine. Screw it, I'm in."

Kori spoke. "You have already found something no one else has found," she told Dick. "It should be a shame to let it pass."

Dick smiled at them in gratitude.

Vic set down his sandwich. "Are we really gonna give whatever we find to police?"

"Yes," said Dick, nodding profusely.

"Are we gonna duck down and not bring attention to ourselves at any moment?"

"Yes, yes."

"And after this is over, are you gonna want us to take more missions?"

Dick stayed silent. He couldn't promise Vic otherwise; they both knew it would be a lie.

Vic started to smile. "Fine. Let's go, you… you activist boy wonder."

Gar smiled. "Let's go, future reporters of America club."

That afternoon, they parked near the address Itziar gave them. The NHT Foundation was across them. It was a simple building, three stories tall, but it might as well have been a fortress to the five. They watched real-life people coming in and out of the building, and the gravity of the situation fell on them for the first time.

"Okay, here we are," Vic said. "…How are we gonna do this?"

"How do people do this in the movies?" Gar asked.

Dick thought back really hard to the last things he'd watched. "They like, cook up a reason I never pay attention to to enter the building. Then they just, go down the wrong hallway."

"Avoiding all the cameras because they know where they are," added Raven.

"Or someone escorts them into an elevator, then they beat him up and go wherever they want," said Gar.

"Or they split up and some of them distract the secretary," said Vic.

"Which one do we do?" asked Kori.

"We can't go around beating people up," said Vic.

"Absolutely not," said Dick. He leaned forward on his passenger seat to look at the whole length of the building. Thick clouds covered the sky—the day had started out sunny and quickly deteriorated towards the afternoon. He knew they were waiting on him to decide what they should do.

"What were you hoping to find here, again?" Raven asked Dick.

"We need more info if we're gonna trace where the donation revenue's really going," Dick said mildly. In reality, he knew they needed more data, but he didn't know how he was picturing getting it. Every movie scenario they could come up with sounded too much like forced entry for his comfort; and they might run into sensitive information while they were digging.

"But Dick, will we find it?" asked Kori. "Why would they keep the proof of their misdeeds in their building?"

"I asked Bruce the same thing. And he told me they might, because the accreditation system isn't perfect. There's a high chance they'll never get caught even with the proof on them. The proof could be in plain sight and nothing would get done. I mean, the taxes are just online and I found something weird there."

"Doesn't your uncle get suspicious you keep asking really weird questions?" Gar asked.

"No. I was asking weird questions long before I started hiding things," said Dick.

He looked at his friends in the car. It would be so easy to turn back now, but no one wanted to be the one to suggest it. Vic was so nervous he was still holding the wheel; he seemed to be going through worst case scenarios in his head. As he looked at them, Gar and Raven did something weird. Gar was scratching his head, then when he brought down his hand, he accidentally touched Raven's arm, and jumped, and sent his hand behind his head and then down to his lap. Raven just glared at the space ahead as all proof that anything had transpired. Dick wondered if they had fought or something; Gar had been really jumpy around Raven lately, like he was scared of her all over again. Kori alone was the same as always, focused. Dick breathed and tried to calm his thumping heart. Even worse than being about to do this was being the reason they were all about to do this.

Dick turned back to the building, as if he would gain more information just from observing it. "Maybe we'll be lucky Itziar's sister will be at the front desk," he said, and wished he could take it back immediately. The best he could offer them was a wane hope?

"And we'll be like, whaddup we're the teen detectives your sister hired, and she'll show us to the financial room?" Gar said.

"There is no financial room," said Vic, and Gar curtly informed him he had been kidding.

While they bickered, Dick observed the building, and built himself up with courage he didn't really feel. "Here's the plan," he said, cutting the other boys off. "We're doing a school report. On how nonprofits work. We ask uncomfortable questions on where revenue goes and try and find things out from that."

"We're gonna talk to people?" Vic questioned.

"Anything else verges on law-breaking," said Dick, and almost convinced himself he was as confident as he sounded. "We know management doesn't care about the problem, but Itziar's sister can't be the only one who's noticed the oddness and wants things to change."

"So we ask like, the ways people donate and where it shows up on paper?" asked Raven.

"Yes," Dick decided. "Exactly. Everyone got it? Okay, let's go."

He herded them out of the car before anyone could get second thoughts.

Thought the glass door, they saw a middle-aged woman who probably wasn't Itziar's sister was at the front desk. They rang the doorbell, and saw when she looked up at them and pressed the buzzer to let them in.

"You're here early," she said.

Dick staggered. "Ma'am?"

The woman peered at them. "You're the teen group for the research study?"

Dick kept a straight face. "Yes. Yes we are."

The woman produced five forms. "Fill these out. Did you get the consent forms on email?"

"Of course," said Dick, taking the forms.

"Sit wherever you want. The doctor will be with you at six. Hopefully," she grumbled.

She went right back to her work, and Dick signaled his friends to go down the hallway to her left.

They came into another waiting area, which contained no people. There was also a receptionist's desk, but this one had no receptionist. Dick turned to his friends. "Okay. Find people and ask."

Kori said, "It is five thirty-three. We have twenty-seven minutes until the doctor arrives."

"And the real group of teens," said Vic. "Let's move it."

Dick picked a door and peeked in. It turned out to be an office; there were rows of desks with desktop computers and only one woman sitting to one; she looked up at Dick with a supremely bored expression.

"Hi," Dick started, and came halfway through the door. "I'm doing a school report on nonprofits and I was wondering if I could ask you some questions?"

The woman looked as if she'd woken up from a daze. Finally she got up from her desk, her mouth pressed into a disapproving line. As she made her way over, Dick said, "I'll only be taking a minute of your time…" But when the woman got to him, she closed the door without a word, pushing Dick outside.

Back in the hallway, Dick saw his friends were gaining similar results to him. Every person they saw looked stressed out or pissed off. Clearly the morale in the building wasn't great.

A man in a lab coat suddenly rushed through the hallway. Kori tried to talk to him, but the man ignored her and kept walking.

"Let's try the second floor," Dick decided.

The second floor was mostly lab spaces. At either side of a long hallway were small rooms where the windows saved them the need to try every door. The first adult Gar saw was a woman who sat inside a lab on her phone; she went out to tell Gar they shouldn't be here, focus groups were handled on the ground level.

They regrouped near the stairs.

"Where the hell are people?" Vic whispered.

"I found a janitor," Raven said. "I asked him if this place is always so deserted and he said yes."

"It is five minutes to six," said Kori. "We should leave."

"The receptionist talked like the doctor was always late," said Dick, who had already made for the stairs to the third floor.

"You heard the lady, time's up." Victor told Dick.

"But there's another floor," protested Dick.

"So be it, if we stay we get caught."

"We have to at least peek at the third floor."

"No more peeking!" Victor forcibly pulled Dick's shirt down the stairs and onto the first floor.

When they got to the first waiting area, Vic peeked around the corner. The lady at the front desk was on the computer, with full view of both the main door and the hallway they were escaping from. The group decided they would wait until she left to get coffee or something.

Then a group of seven teens walked in. The five froze, but when they receptionist acted like all was normal, they realized the study must contain a lot more kids.

They waited some more. Some fifteen minutes must have passed, and there was still no sign of any doctor. The moment the woman left her post, the five went out of hiding single-file and power-walked out of the building. Dick even permitted himself to put the forms she'd given them back on her desk, unfilled.

"That was… cool I guess," said Gar, once in the car. "Bit boring at the end with all the waiting, but still."

"I think we just snuck through a building for no reason," Raven droned.

"We know there's definitely something weird going on in that building," Dick. "It was deserted."

"Didn't the forms you found include a bunch of key employees?" asked Vic. "Where were all those people?"

"I was thinking the same thing," said Dick. "Let's go somewhere I can spread their 990 form."

Vic drove them to a nearby park. They set camp around a fountain and Dick pulled out the papers from his backpack.

"Here we go. All directors, trustees, officers and key employees. All people listed as working full-time who weren't there today."

"Wait." Gar picked up a profile. "This is the woman on the second floor. I remember."

"So at least we know these people exist," said Raven.

"This is a good lead," said Dick. "Let's look up these people online."

They split all the names they had and set to googling them in silence. An elderly couple strolled by them and the man made a comment about teenagers always being on their phones, to which his wife shook her head in agreement.

"Do you get any people who mention the Foundation on their social media?" Dick asked after a while.

"Nope, and people mention other places as their current jobs," said Vic.

"Here too," said Raven. "I googled Miranda Ricou and she does have the Foundation on her LinkedIn."

"What was the receptionist's name?" Gar asked. "Denise Yeh, right? I'm gonna try her."

"If you are a researcher working full-time for a foundation, you would list it in your social media," said Kori. "And how can they keep more than one full-time jobs?"

"The receptionist mentions the Foundation too," Gar let them know.

Vic put his phone down. "Hey. Remember the researchers' salary was so low? It was comparable to the admins. That's Itziar's sister, and if she works there part-time…"

"What are you thinking?" prompted Dick. "They could be declaring people as full-time, but paying them for part-time, just to show up for a little while or not at all? Just to look like a real place?"

"That's a good angle!" Vic said, finally getting excited."If a charity is shady in its presentation, that's not prosecutable. If they have more assets than what they pay employees, that's just tax evasion. Nepotism is run of the mill. But if no one's actually working in that place…"

"That's it!" exclaimed Dick, jumping to his feet. "Okay, we need hard evidence of this. We need to keep digging—get our hands on clock-in records and prove no one actually works there…" Dick stopped, looked at his friends, saw the look in their faces, and backtracked. "I mean. We need to give this to the cops, because… this is enough for them to open a case … and that means our job is done."

"That's more like it, man," said Victor, hacking Dick's shoulder a bit too hard. Dick did not wince. "Now let's go get some pizza!"

Dick pulled out his phone as he followed his friends. "I'm calling Itziar."

Hello again! Sorry there was no chapter last week. I graduated a few days ago! :o And the thesis defense kicked my ass!

But real life aside… We're near the end of Year 1, folks! There's two more chapters to go but this is the last 'month' of the fic. Like I said before this is a 4-part series, spanning all of high school, and I decided it takes place during the school year and I skip the summers. So after this we're gonna see the team again in 'September' on Year 2! (To be posted as soon as I can! ^^)

PenJunior: Glad you're on board with how I handled Gar and Raven's after feelings/rationalizations! And yess, the team had to have their first big setback, which they've started to deal with in this chapter. (And hey, don't worry about leaving short reviews! You're not obligated to leave long ones! All feedback is great and I super appreciate you reviewing so much!)

Steeeveee: Welcome haha! Thank you so much and I hope you continue to enjoy the story!