"The jig is up, Edalyn, you conniving harlot!" That was what Eda heard when Lilith barged into her room all of a sudden; she heard it three times because Lilith tried to kick her door open, only to fail miserably twice.
"Do you know that you have a bra hanging off your ear and some carrots on your nose?" Eda asked while sprawled out across her nest.
"I don't need you to tell me that." Despite that, Lilith still made an effort to brush it all off. "What I do need you to tell me is what you did with my championship Grudgby ball!"
"Your championship Grudgby ball? Even if I wasn't the one who scored the winning goal, and I was, last I checked, neither one of us had managed to take it from Hooty yet."
"Enough with the act, Edalyn. We both know that I took the ball and hid it away after taking it from you, who had it from the very second this Swindle started!"
"You know you're supposed to pretend like you don't know anything about that, right?"
"We both know I don't have the patience to do that twice in one evening! More importantly, I demand to know what you've done with my rightful prize!" That was when Eda finally willed herself to sit up.
"Okay, even if I did take the ball back from you, why in the world would I tell you where I put it?" Lilith stared at Eda looking completely dumbfounded, and in an ideal world, Eda would have said that it surprised her.
"Th-The point is that playtime is over! You've pushed me too far with that last trick, making me think that we were under attack, and now you shall feel all of my unbridled deductive powers! Prepare yourself for the ultimate reckoning!"
"I'm shaking in my boots with anticipation."
"Anticipation, and fear!" Lilith glared at Eda and almost gave off the impression that she had something devious up her sleeves, but Eda knew better than to expect anything of the sort from her sister. Sure enough, she was proven right about not overestimating her when Lilith's unbridled deductive powers turned out to just be her digging around through her closet for the Grudgby ball.
"Feel free to color-coordinate my socks while you're at it," Eda said as she stepped out onto her balcony.
"If I do that, it's because I want to, not because you told me to do it!" Lilith said, still making an even bigger mess of Eda's things. Lilith appeared to be fully distracted, so Eda pulled her staff out of her hair and flew down to the base of the Owl House. Then, after taking another look around to make sure that the coast was clear, she whistled out and signaled for her partner in crime to come to her with her rightful prize.
"Good boy, King," Eda said as King ran over on all fours with the Grudgby ball in tow. "Could have done without the slobber, but a win's a win, I guess."
As Eda took the Grudgby ball from King, she took a moment to laugh to herself about Lilith's stupidity. Credit where credit was due, it was clever of Lilith to use Crowley to take the Grudgby ball and then force her into a situation where she needed to go out of her way to perpetuate the illusion of a fair game, but she got too ahead of herself and didn't even bother to take precautions to defend herself; something that reckless was an Eda move, and only Eda had what it took to pull off something like that. As such, it was easy for her to conscript King into keeping an eye on Lilith for her with a bribe of additional chocolate. All he had to do was take the Grudgby ball from her the second he had the chance and wait for her signal, and that chance came about when she left to investigate the weird stuff with Hooty she said she was responsible for, for some reason. Eda still didn't get it, but the big takeaway was that she had the Grudgby and was on her way to victory, meaning all was right with the world.
"Wait a minute." As it turned out, all was not right in the world, as evidenced by the lack of nose blood on the Grudgby ball King gave her. "This isn't the championship Grudgby ball. This is just some common Grudgby ball! King, what are doing bringing me—"
King's skull fell onto the ground, revealing it to just be a mask for an otherwise normal dog, which definitely shouldn't have been the case for King.
"Hey, you're not King. You're just some common bitch!" Said common bitch barked at her without a care in the world, as common bitches were known to do. "I guess I have to give Lily a little more credit than I thought I did. Never expected her to go so low as taking King right from under my nose; a move right out of my own playbook. If I'm going to counter this, I'll have to match her with a move out of her playbook and actually put some thought into my next move."
The move Eda came up with after putting thought into her actions amounted to tackling Lilith in the hallway and demanding that she hand over both the Grudgby ball and King, most likely in that order; it was briefly interrupted when the two of them fell down the stairs, but it quickly continued right after that, with neither of them making much progress against each other. The two only stopped tussling with one another when Luz entered the Owl House with a cheery "Hello!" and Amity asked what they were doing; Eda and Lilith stopped fighting and stood back up, with Eda getting one last punch in because of course, she did.
"Wait, this is still going on?" Luz asked.
"Little under an hour left in the day, so of course it is, and that's just great," Amity said.
"No, it is not great, Amity, because Edalyn is stubbornly denying me my victory with her lies!" Lilith said.
"You're the liar, liar!" Eda said. "You're lying about what you did with the Grudgby ball, and almost as importantly, you're lying about what you did with King!"
"Wait, what? What happened with King?" Luz asked.
"Nothing. He's right there," Amity said, pointing to the dog dressed as King who, for some reason, had gotten into the house and sat down near Eda.
"This bitch? Please," Eda said. "Watch." Eda bent down to the dog's level and asked for its paw, a command it was happy to comply with. She then told it to roll over, and after a few seconds, it did just that. "See? This thing's way smarter than King, which is why I'm not surprised that Lily was able to take him when she was taking the Grudgby ball."
"Again, I did nothing of the sort. Stop trying to gaslight us all to hide the fact that you have stolen the championship Grudgby ball," Lilith said, making Eda want to smack her in the teeth. "I mean, first you fake an attack from the Emperor's Coven, then it's this nonsense with King, and now—"
"Wait wait wait, back up a sec," Luz interjected. "The Emperor's Coven attacked? Why didn't you call us?"
"Because it wasn't a real attack. Just something Lily faked in a convoluted scheme to try and lower my guard," Eda said.
"No, that's what you did!" Lilith said.
"Okay, I'm getting real tired of all this—"
"Hey!" Amity shouted, swinging her luge bat between the both of them. "If both of you think that the other person did it and is lying when they said they didn't, did you ever think that maybe, just maybe, it could be a real attack?"
"Yeah, sure. And why would they be doing that?"
"I don't know, maybe they figured that their highly competitive ex-leader would be doing her own Swindle with her equally competitive sister and are waiting for you both to tire yourselves out before going for the metaphorical kill?" Eda was ready to laugh it all off, but instead, she found her eyes widening with disbelief, and she could see Lilith's doing the same.
""Shit,"" they both said together.
"Understatement of the night, people!" Amity said.
"Okay, we can get through this, no problem," Luz said, doing the best job she could not to fall into a panic. "Okay, Eda, you and Lilith stay here and set up some defenses: draw up a bunch of glyphs, pull out the weapons, get Hooty to stop playing with ants, whatever! Amity and I will go out into the woods to look for King in case he just got lost. Or, if he did get captured like we're all not trying to think about, so we can spring him and prevent a Mexican standoff-type deal."
"What's a—"
"Nevermind, let's save my Boo-Boo Buddy!" Luz grabbed Amity's hand and ran out of the Owl House with her in tow.
"So, I guess we're preparing for war, then," Eda said.
"It would appear so," Lilith said. "I suppose it would be good to call for a ceasefire. Temporarily, of course. Hopefully, we'll be able to beat them back fast enough for us to continue the Swindle and for me to showcase my superiority over you."
"Likewise, except with me lording over your pathetic state, of course."
"You wish, you infernal troglodyte."
"Says you, you whatever is worse than that."
After several more barbs were traded between Eda and Lilith, they got to work preparing for the eventual battle. Eda pulled all of her good swords, maces, and miniature trebuchets out of storage, Lilith drew up glyphs for the two of them to use, either as weapons or as traps spread around the house, and even though they got hurt in the process, they got Hooty to stop messing around with ants and focus up. As midnight inched closer and closer to reality, Eda and Lilith stood out on the balcony, waiting for trouble to come to them.
Waiting to punish the people who ruined their Swindle.
"We couldn't find him!" As they stood guard for the oncoming attack, Luz jumped up to the balcony stop a pillar of ice. "Amity and I looked everywhere for King, but we couldn't find him! What if the Emperor's Coven really did take him? What if King develops Stockholm syndrome or something? What do we do if that happens?"
"Then we give him a pill to eat, or whatever you use to cure that," Lilith said. "What is that, by the way?"
"Argh, it'll take too long to explain!" Luz was still freaking out, so Eda did the only sensible thing she could think of and snapped her suspenders against her chest. "Okay, I think I calmed down a little. Stinging pain is good for that, apparently."
"I certainly hope so," Eda said. "Don't worry, kid, we're all gonna get through this, especially King. A scrappy guy like that can handle a bunch of bozos like these without breaking a sweat."
"Well, maybe a bit of a sweat," Lilith said.
"In what world are you helping?"
"Fair enough. Let's just all try and remain focused."
"Right," Luz said. "We're gonna beat up all those guys who are coming after us, then we'll rescue King and we'll all celebrate the end of the Samhain Festival in style, however people do that. Maybe with food, some music, a little Grudgby, whatever."
"That's right, just focus on the positives and—" Eda stopped herself short as the entirety of Luz's statement sunk in. "Grudgby? To celebrate the Samhain Festival?"
"Yeah, I mean, why not?"
"Didn't you say this reminded you of a human holiday where people dress up in racist costumes? Where would a sport fit into that culture?" Lilith asked, looking as perplexed as Eda.
"I don't know, but it could still be fun," Luz said, the smile on her face growing wider by the second. "We've got plenty of space for it, so all we need is a good ball, right?" Eda didn't know what Luz was getting at, but she didn't like it, regardless. "I said, all we need is a good ball, right?" With that said, now all Eda was feeling was confusion. "Amity, that was your signal!"
"Sorry, hold on!" As Eda sunk further into confusion, a giant Abomination arm shot up outside the balcony, and standing in the palm of its hand was a very smug-looking Amity. Eda's eyes almost jumped out of her skull, both literally and figuratively, when she saw Amity holding what certainly had to be the source of the smugness.
""The championship Grudgby ball!"" Eda and Lilith cried out in unison.
"Yep. With my mom's bloodstain of authenticity," Amity said, jumping off the arm and onto the balcony. "So gross, but what this ball represents outweighs all of that."
"And do you know what it represents? A couple of kids showing their teachers a thing or two by screwing them over hard!" Luz said, her smile now clearly one of a smugness matching Amity's.
"Title of our sex tape!"
"Oh, Amity, no."
"Yeah, regretted it as soon as I said it. The point is, we just won. B! Did I do that right?"
"Yeah, that was perfect!" These were the people who somehow managed to outsmart Eda; Lilith she understood, but her getting beaten seemed inconceivable.
All in all, there needed to be a good explanation for it all.