"Okay, let's get this started. The sooner we lay down the rules, the sooner I get to gloat over Lily," Eda said. She, Lilith, and King were all standing outside the Owl House, and Lilith was giving that same look of overconfidence she always had when they were about to get into something, the look she wore when she thought her victory was assured. Breaking it would be especially fun this time around. "According to Lily, the way this whole Swindle thing works is that a relic is put out in the open somewhere and everyone tries to steal it. Don't have anything fancy lying around here, but this seems like a good thing for us to use." Eda reached into her hair and pulled out what she had chosen as the objective of the Swindle

"The Grudgby ball from our last championship match," Lilith said.

"Yep. Had to bounce it off of Odalia's big nose to score the winning goal. Look, you can still see some of her blood."

"Her nose was not that big, Edalyn."

"Yeah, I guess smacking her in the face did take a few inches off of it." Lilith was fuming the way she always did when Eda teased her about Odalia, and it was still fun to watch like always, though Eda didn't know how she felt about that still working after so many years. "Anyway, this is the most valuable thing in the house that the both of us care about, so this is what we're gonna try and steal. As for where we have to steal it from? Hooty!"

"Yyyyyeeess?" Hooty asked as he stretched out of the door. For some reason, he had a pair of novelty mouse ears taped to his head.

"Here. Play with this." Eda tossed the ball to Hooty, who then proceeded to bounce it off of his head and roll it across its elongated body.

"Yeesh. Way to ruin a perfectly good blood ball, Eda," King said.

"Oh, boy! I am all about this! I could do this forever, hoot!" Hooty said, wrapping the ball around his slimy body.

"You have until midnight. No matter what, do what you can to keep Lily and me from taking that ball, but you can't do anything if we actually do manage to take it," Eda said.

"Can do!"

"Any complaints on your end?"

"Only that you think me to be a fool, Edalyn," Lilith said. "I'll admit that the idea of having to wrestle the Grudgby ball away from this disgusting creature is less than ideal, but it is hardly the deterrent you planned for it to be. If anything, the fact that victory will be attained by wrestling it out of the grasp of something like this will make it all the more sweet and savory upon my tongue."

"And all this bragging you're doing will just make you all the more salty and bitter when I win. Exactly what I'm going for."

"I don't know what any of this is, but I'm just happy to be included!" Hooty said.

"And with that, it's Swindle time!" King said.

"Hey! You don't get a say in this, King," Eda said. "But yes, it is Swindle time. I'd say we have a little over five hours until midnight, so until then, may the better swindler, which is me, win, which is what I'm going to do."

"You wish. I've lived here for a few months now, so I believe I know all the strengths and weaknesses of this beast. Plucking the Grudgby ball from him should be as easy as plucking a petal from—"

The second Lilith tried to take the Grudgby ball from Hooty, Hooty hissed at Lilith and headbutted her into a tree.

"Saw that coming from a mile away," King said.

"This is all according to plan, mind you," Lilith said, dusting herself off and approaching Hooty once more. "I needed to get hit to confirm the scope of his abilities. Now that I have, I am more than free to—" Hooty slammed Lilith so hard into the ground that she left an imprint in the dirt.

"Well, have fun with that, I guess. Me? I'm going inside," Eda said. "There's a bottle of apple blood that still has a cork in it, and it would just be a shame to leave it like that all night." With a mocking stretch, Eda went back inside the Owl House, King following closely behind her, and the door was shut just as Lilith was smacked by Hooty a third time.

"You know, as incompetent as Lilith might be, you still need to figure out a way around Hooty, yourself," King said.

"Please, I got that covered. Now, then," Eda reached into her hair and pulled out a bag of chocolates, "go have fun with this, why dontcha?"

"Don't mind if I do!" King took the chocolate right out of her hands and ran over to the couch. He'd probably spend the whole night like that if left alone, munching away as he remained as blissfully unaware about everything as Lilith. Lilith, who was probably asking herself the same question King just asked her about what Eda's plan for dealing with Hooty was. The answer to that, of course, was a simple one: she wasn't going to deal with him at all because she didn't need to deal with him.

And she didn't need to deal with him because the championship Grudgby ball was with her the entire time.

Oh, Lily, you naive little idiot. So caught up in your supposed victory that you didn't even bother to inspect the ball, Eda thought. What Hooty has with him is nothing but a convincing fake I prepared when no one was looking. Meanwhile, the real championship Grudgby ball never left my side, and it's going to stay at my side until midnight when I will be crowned supreme swindler, or whatever we're using for this thing. I forget, but the point is that you lost before this even started.

Eda took a long sip of apple blood straight from the bottle. The kind of sip that only true winners took when they had a glow of victory to bask in. It was sweet.

An hour into the Swindle and everything was still going according to plan. Eda had retired to her room and Lilith was still making foolhardy attempts to steal the fake Grudgby ball from Hooty, completely unaware that the real one never left Eda's side. The only things to happen that were even slightly interesting were King running outside to conscript a firefly into his army before it spontaneously combusted and Luz posting a picture to Amity's Penstagram account of the two of them at the dance with a caption about the fireworks going off soon.

"Oh yeah, people do fireworks at this thing. Wonder if Lily wants to check some out," Eda said. As if on some sort of cue, Lilith was thrown into her room through an open window, her face slamming right into a wall. "Hey, you wanna go check out some fireworks?"

"Fireworks, Edalyn? Don't patronize with something as ridiculous as that," Lilith said, dusting herself off. "And don't get too comfortable here. I'm going to work my way around that monster eventually, you know."

"No, you're not!" Hooty shouted out of sight.

"Yes, I am!"

"Nope." Lilith let out a growl and stomped out of the room in frustration. Eda laughed; it was almost too easy, when she really thought about it. With how much Lilith had been boasting, she had hoped for a semblance of a challenge, but it appeared that that was too much to ask for.

As the thought left her head, an explosion sounded off that nearly surprised her enough to send her head clean off her body; it didn't, but it did knock her out of her bed with how loud and sudden it was.

"What the hell was that?" Eda asked no one as she picked herself up. "Not being burnt to smithereens, so it wasn't a bombing. Probably one of those fireworks. Have they always been so close to here? I oughta fly over and teach them what happens when you mess around on someone else's property that they technically don't own." Eda picked her staff up off the floor and got ready to fly out, but she stopped herself when a single question came to mind.

Her staff was supposed to be in her hair, so what was it doing on the floor?

I must have hit the ground harder than I thought and knocked a bunch of crap loose, Eda thought. Wait, if my staff fell out, then that could mean— Eda dug a hand through her hair and quickly confirmed that the Grudgby ball was, indeed, no longer in her hair. That was certainly annoying, but it was a simple matter of just picking it back up and returning it to its rightful home.

"The ball is gone!" Something like that would be an obvious obstacle, of course, and it was the obstacle Eda was facing after five minutes of fruitless searching. "The ball is gone! There are no balls to be found here, title of Lily's sex tape, but where is it? How could it just—" A gleam from the windowsill made its way into Eda's eyes. She stepped to the side to better walk over to it and get a look at the offending object, discovering it to be a glimmering white feather. The kind of feather that only belonged to one bird that she knew of.

"Crowley." It appeared that Eda had the challenge she was looking for, and she wasn't happy about it, in the slightest.