"It's been a long time since we last met."

"Agent…" Eileen took a breath. "Three."

I could tell Eileen wasn't at her best. Not that I'd have blamed her. She hadn't met with any of the NSS since Sharktown, and… Well, it was pretty clear what the issue was here.

I had to guess Agent 3 was far better in these types of situations than Eileen. At least, he looked more composed than she did. But then again, I didn't know him that well…

Eileen had asked me to accompany her during her little talk with him. I wasn't sure how much it was really doing, but I understood why I needed to be there. What I didn't understand was why the rest of the NSS was hiding nearby, on some roof or another. Sure, the pasture around that bench wasn't the most crowded place in the city, but it wasn't like we weren't in public.

I scanned the area. I was a bit lower down the hill, only a few steps from the dropoff, but I could still hear their every word. They were standing on opposite sides of the bench, Eileen farther away and Agent 3 closer to the sea.

And as for Rose and her gang, I couldn't spot them. I only knew they were around since Rose had so kindly informed me they'd be lurking not too far from us. A courtesy that I assumed she didn't extend to Eileen.

"Let's not use the titles," Agent 3 suggested. "Call me Simon."

I spun around. Did he just—

"Okay…" Eileen muttered. I could tell from her face that she was only a little less surprised than I was.

"Hey, we know your name. It's only fair that you know mine."

I was pretty sure he was the only one here that took fairness into consideration when it came to that. Did it really not faze him to so readily give his name away to someone outside of the NSS? To Eileen, of all people?

"Simon." Eileen opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. "You… did not kill my sister."

"Annie?"

"Yes. She's alive. Wait, no, she—" Eileen pressed two fingers to her forehead and looked over at me.

I smiled and waved.

She turned back to him. "She goes by Sky now."

"Oh." He blinked. Then blinked again, furrowing his brow. "Oh."

"I thought you killed her," she said, "because you survived and she didn't. But she did survive, and wanted to lay low, and… You even saved her life, didn't you?"

"Then almost killed her again…" he said.

"That wasn't your fault! You didn't do anything… She's fine now." Eileen looked at me again, and I nodded back at her. "Better than she's ever been, really."

"That's good," Simon remarked. "We haven't talked much since escaping the metro, so it's good to hear she's doing well."

Sheesh, I was right there. It wasn't like I was out of sight. But of course, I wasn't going to stop them.

"I don't usually hold grudges," she said. "But my sister was gone… and I didn't know what to do. You can't just… forget that." She wrapped her arms around herself. "But it was never your fault to begin with. So, uh… Sorry. I'm not sure what else to say."

Simon crossed his arms, staring at her, and for a moment, he kept silent. Across from him, Eileen shuffled in place.

Then over the waves, he spoke again. "Did you know I have a younger sister too?"

"You do?"

"I wouldn't lie about that."

"Um— Uh, of course."

"Her name is Morgan," he said. "She was one of the Inklings captured for Hypno-Shades testing."

Over his shoulder, I saw Eileen look down, eyes wide.

"To this day," he said, stepping forward to sit on the bench, "she's still recovering from it. She was lucky enough to have escaped the attack on Inkopolis, and I don't want to know what would have happened to her if she didn't."

Eileen stepped back, Simon now slightly closer.

"I doubt I'll ever be able to forgive Akash Octrope."

She looked back up but didn't quite meet his eyes.

"The other day," he continued, "Two told us something we all suspected—that none of you, save perhaps Akash Octrope himself, knew there was a peaceful way to reach the surface. I won't put this lightly, but whether it was from him or from circumstance, you were brainwashed, and it's reassuring to see you're overcoming that."

Cautious, Eileen stepped forwards. "You… But I…"

"You don't blame me for acting under Tartar's influence," he said, casually leaning back, "and I don't blame you for acting under your father's."

"Oh…" Eileen breathed a sigh of relief. "I'm sorry, I…" She grabbed onto the armrest and put her weight on it.

Simon turned to her. "I'm not going to pretend what you did and what I did are the same. You can look around and see what the attack on Inkopolis has done. But in terms of intent…" He stopped to think. "Let me put it this way—as soon as you knew we didn't need to fight, you freed everyone, didn't you?"

Eileen stood up and then averted her gaze. "You knew?"

"At Sharktown, we stole a pair of shades to listen in," he said. "And luckily for us, Two speaks Octarian."

"Oh." She shut her eyes. "She heard me, too."

Another moment passed, and I had to try my hardest to keep still. I couldn't guess what either of them was thinking. I couldn't imagine much of it was what the other was expecting to hear.

Sighing, Eileen swung around and fell into the bench, still a short distance from Simon yet far closer than before. She rubbed her eye. "That's a weight off my chest," she remarked.

"Sure is." He stretched his arms and faced the ocean. "You know, Sky won that day, and then she spared me."

Ah, that. That was that dream from a while ago. I could always tell it was a memory, but it was still off-putting to hear someone else talking about it.

"I'm not surprised she did," Eileen said. "It was her first mission, and it wasn't even planned. She happened to be in the area, so our father… You already know."

He shook his head. "I had to put some thought into what I was in the NSS for. I'd joined on a whim— No, actually, I was recruited out of nowhere. I'd never considered what I was fighting for until then. Nor had I realized what I was doing to the people underground." He crossed his arms and stared at his feet. "I took a job looking into Grizzco to… take a break, if you could call it that. But even that ended up leading me back to Octrope.

"The next time they needed me, they'd recruited Four, and she doesn't have a malicious cell in her body. If someone like that could be in the NSS…" He grinned and looked up. "There's no reason I couldn't."

I held back a laugh. He'd perfectly summed up how I felt about Rose. Not a drop of malice in that smile.

"Your sister," Eileen said. "How is she?"

"It's getting better." He shut his eyes. "Course, I wish none of that ever happened to her, but I get to see her smile and laugh more often than before she arrived in Inkopolis. I can only hope she's not faking it."

She nodded. "Mm."

"Huh," he said, "we're more similar than I thought."

Eileen blinked at the ocean. "If you say so…"

And then, they stopped. I sat down on the grass, back turned, and stared at the ocean. Even when I strained my ears, there wasn't even a whisper. They had said all they needed to say, and now they were silent.

It had gone better than I was expecting. This couldn't have been easy for them. I knew Simon just well enough to know he wouldn't have held much against her, but she was, not very long ago, his enemy. And on Eileen's end… there was too much to put into words.

"Hey," said a distant voice calling to me. "Hey, Sky!" I only barely heard it, but I knew that voice too well to mistake it for someone else's.

I turned towards the sound, which came from somewhere over the sea. And when I looked up, I saw the distant silhouette of Rose herself, frantically waving from one of Hammerhead's beams.

"That's where you were?" I yelled back. Looking closer, I discerned two others, standing on either side of her. It didn't take many guesses to figure out who they must have been.

Rose jumped over to me, and I stepped aside to let her land. Soon after, her colleagues—One and Two—came after, still just as masked as the last time I'd seen them.

"Memorized her signature already, huh, Four?" Two nudged her, but she paid it no mind.

"Wait, they're here?" Simon said. He didn't know either? At least that made him seem even more genuine than before.

"Hi, Three!" One said.

I glanced at Two, and she shrugged. Wasn't she supposed to be the acting captain? Why was she just letting this happen? "We're not butting in, are we?" she said. "I tried to stop her, but…"

I spun around to check on Eileen, and she was shrinking into the corner of the bench. And Simon looked more tired than anything. This did seem like a typical Rose move, and he probably had to deal with her more than me.

"No," said Simon, "we were just finishing up. Is that all, Eileen?"

"Ehm…" She nodded, clearly on edge. "Sure."

"I swear this is related, but Sky," Rose said. "What's your team called? Stellar Chain, right? You came up with it?"

I supposed the name was a reference to her constellations, but was it that obvious?

"Yeah, that's us," I said. "What about it?"

"Then," she said, a grin creeping onto her face, "since we've resolved all our differences now…"

That was a remarkably optimistic way of looking at it, but it wasn't entirely baseless.

"Let's have a battle sometime! Masked Mayhem versus Stellar Chain. How does that sound?"

It wasn't until halfway through writing this chapter that I realized I accidentally wrote a load of parallels between Eileen and Simon. Funny how that turned out.