Richie stayed in the hot pink bed for a good while after Francis had fallen asleep. Partly because he was tired from everything that happened in the past what? five, six days? His body was a mess and so was his mind after all of that. BacPac already had his instructions, he could prep for what Richie needed to do all on his own. And partly because Hotstreak was a… more interesting lover than Francis had ever been in the past and Richie could practically feel "I can't believe it's not" sunburns forming on his chest and hips and thighs. It was rude to just ditch someone immediately after shagging them. If there was anything his mom and aunts had taught him during The Talk, it was to be considerate to your lovers' feelings. To an extent.

Besides, he wasn't in a hurry and Francis was comfortably toasty.

Eventually, though, he did have to go home. If only for a decent rest in his own bed. And he had chores he'd been neglecting which needed to be done before he started cutting himself open. With practiced precision, Richie slipped out from Hotstreak's grasp and left the older Bang Baby spooning with a pillow and gave him a kiss goodbye. Quickly he pulled his clothes back on ignoring Hotstreak lazily watching him with sleepy eyes and left the pink room and went back downstairs to the club area.

The clock read 4:20 am. And the place was pretty dang empty. The bar was locked down, cleaned up and the twins gone home. Bast, who went by Anubis now Richie reminded himself, waited by the door on a stool reading a book on human physiology. The other patrons long gone, meaning that the only reason Anubis was still sticking around was that management was still around. Richie was almost outside when he heard the door to the Tri Corner's leader's office creek open.

"Twinkletoes, good to see you're back." Richie froze at the sound of the boss's voice. Wise Son hardly looked like he changed in the past two years. Still tall and decently solid with that cool cap covering short cropped hair. Sure there were a few more scars standing out against his dark skin but those were the kind that added character to a face. He was also still wearing those cool reflective shades. The biggest difference was the clothes, at some point he'd started dressing like Blade in business casual. An… interesting choice, Richie'd never pegged him as a leather daddy before.

"Hey, Wise... long time no see." Richie said nervously. He didn't get a chance to say anything else when the boss raised a hand and signaled him to shush. And he did. Because unlike pretty much every other member of the Tri Corners, Wise actually took the gang thing seriously.

"Next Friday. Five thirty p.m.. My office." Wise Son stated as walked behind the bar and pulled a root beer from the fridge. "And ya lily white ass better not be late. Shirkin' work ain't good for ya health."

"...Sure thing, boss." Richie left with a new worry on the pile. He returned the wristbands to Anubis, said his goodbyes, and started walking.

The way back to the Gas station was nice, late enough to not run into anyone but the occasional sleeping homeless person and pleasantly quiet in the way that a slumbering metropolis was. The motor on his scooter gave a gentle hum as he left it idle outside the Abandoned Gas Station of Solitude. BacPac had finished the clean room prep, making use of the basement of the gas station that Richie himself hadn't known existed before and copious amounts of scavenged and sanitized plastic. The basement probably didn't exist before, but... Dakota was a strange city if you paid close attention to it. Things had a habit of showing up even when they shouldn't. Like the local mountain range right in the middle of the plains or the secret basement of the Tri-Corner Chartreuse out on the docks. It's best not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Satisfied with the progress on project "Never Again", Richie turned his sights to home and trying to get a decent amount of sleep before the operation. In the final stretch, he turned off the motor of his scooter and went manual. He didn't need Buddy to hear him coming and get excited and wake up the whole house again. Scooter safely docked by the garage, Richie climbed the tree in the backyard up to his balcony, forever happy that his parents let him claim the easiest room to sneak into and out of.

"Sup, boyo," Richie froze with the sliding door to the balcony in one hand and a foot in his room at the random Scottish voice in his room. There weren't any Scottish people in his family, dad's side was Irish and mom's were Swedish and Norwegian. And why was there even someone in his… "Down here boyo."

Down there on his bed was his adorable little white...Scottish… terrier, Buddy. His dog can talk. Sure, why the fuck not? His best friend could fart thunder, he just fucked a dude who could breathe fire, and he'd been possessed by an alien computer program for a week. A talking dog was practically tame in comparison.

"Yer ma wants ta have a go at ye and is waitin in the kitchen." Buddy yipped. The Scottish accent still didn't make sense because Buddy was born in Idaho just like him. "I wouldn't keep yer waitin if aye was ye."

Resigned to his fate Richie left his room and snuck downstairs to the kitchen. The lights were off but his mom had a single candle lit on the table. His thoughts batted back and forth about the dog and how much trouble he was in and reasons why.

Maggie Foley calmly sipped hot tea in her plain pink nightgown, red hair allowed to fall wildly around her face without her usual headband to hold it back. For some reason, there was a birch stick on the table. She didn't look up as he approached but she pointed at the seat opposite her own. "Sit, Richard, let's have a talk."

"Heeeey… Mom, how are you?" Richie said hesitantly as he sat down.

"I'm stressed that my son has been keeping secrets from me and concerned that he apparently spent a week possessed by an unknown entity that was clearly hurting him." Maggie replied, taking a sip of her tea. "How are you, son?"

"Um, I'm… better than I was." Richie said finding his own cup of tea rather fascinating. It was honey and rose flavored, the sort his mom liked to drink after arguing with his dad. She'd always said it had calming properties. He shrugged, "Found out that Buddy can talk, so that's a thing."

Maggie sighed and put down her cup. "Ok, Richie I know I said that you could tell me anything, that there's no need for secrets between us."

"Like the talking dog?"

"Or the robot that I see on the back of one of the local superheroes in the news having a charging port in the living room."

"I kinda dropped the ball hiding that," Richie mumbled after a sip of tea. "So, um, I'm a superhero. If that's what this is about."

"Thanks for the confession." Maggie smiled. "But this is more about the possession and you feeling like you could talk to me about it. And also...it doesn't really feel fair to tell you to spill all your secrets and not let you in on any of mine."

"Sorry. It's just being a superhero is well dangerous and I kinda didn't want you to worry. I mean, it's different than dad being a cop, he's got back up at least. And doesn't have to fight like world-ending threats."

"When did you and Virgil take on something like that?"

"Um… well see the Watchtower, that space station that the Justice League uses, kinda got its batteries drained so they asked Static for a jump and we kinda ended up running into uh Brainiac while the League was out."

"Doesn't Superman fight Brainiac? I remember hearing about it on the news a few years back."

"Yeeeah. He wasn't in that day and it was pretty much just me and Static fending off killer robots and the station itself trying to kill us. And we did pretty well, even got congratulated by the League. Unfortunately, no one, including me, considered that the super infectious alien computer virus might infect my robot (his name is BacPac by the way). And then… well, Brainiac infected me by way of BacPac."

"Possessed by a computer bug is not something you hear every day." His mother said, nodding sagely and giving his hand a reassuring squeeze. She pulled a thick, aged, handmade and heavily annotated book onto the table. "So, let's work on stopping that from happening again, ok? And while we do that I'll teach you about our real family history."

When it became clear that the boy wasn't coming back downstairs for quite a while, the bandaged man decided to leave. He paid for his meal with money given to him by the very generous client and even left a tip for the mutated bartenders. Then he stepped out of the warm bar into the chill of the Dakota night, he'd learned everything he needed to know about the target.

Near the water, he spotted the client smoking under a lamppost and talking with a small well-dressed woman. The man approached quietly, invisible as any other ninja in spite of his bandages and injuries from a recent tangle with some angry teenage nature gods. As he approached he amended his thoughts, the woman was not at all small she only appeared so next to the potbellied viking in a suit. She was otherwise a beautiful Black woman only a few inches shorter than himself at best (and he was not a small man himself) and rather muscular in her own right.

Neither of them were actually smoking, the thing in the big man's mouth looked far more like a lollipop stick than a cigarette and it certainly wasn't lit. The man simply exhaled thick black smoke while the woman inhaled it. Right before he dramatically revealed himself the smoke turned and looked at him with a bright red eye before dissipating ominously.

"Mr. Wilson! How nice of you to join us." The client said with a goofy grin, taking the candy out of his mouth and bowing flamboyantly. "Have you met my friend, Mama Benu? She's the best witch this side of the Mississippi."

"I've not met many American witches," Mr. Wilson said, politely bowing and kissing the woman's offered hand. He ignored the way her eyes glowed like a cat's "My magical knowledge is limited to that of the Orient."

"Oh, you one of dem ninjas?" The woman called Mama Benu gave him a predatory look over. Then she gave a dismissive snort, apparently not satisfied by what she saw (something Wilson narrowed his eye at) and said, "I've heard folks like you are tryin' ta dig in on the coasts. Will we be workin' together?"

"I'm afraid not." Mr. Wilson said politely. "I'm flattered by your offer but the target is… not up to my standards for tutelage, even if he wasn't out of practice a dancer is not the same as a martial artist. Not to mention that the boy seems to have a tremendous amount of bad luck and in my industry luck is something that counts."

The pair of supernatural beings (really the client didn't make much of an effort to hide his fangs in that doofy grin) watched him silently for a few heartbeats. Then the client cut the tension with, "Ah, that's cool. And you don't have to return the leftover cash."

"Oh?"

"Wasn't mine to begin with and I've got plenty more. If ya ever do wanna take up shop in Dakota after you finish your thing in Jump City I'll mail yer manservant Mama Benu's card. There's a lot of superpowered youth in the city to corrupt if that little bird never comes around."

"I'll keep that in mind."

And with that, the witch erupted into a cloud of nightjars that scattered over Lake Dakota and into the darkness. The client bowed and melted into a cloud of black smoke that flowed towards downtown before becoming too thin to see. Mr. Willson for his part put his hands in his pockets and started heading back to the hotel he was staying at.

A black mist hovers over the main lab of the Alva Industries company in the wee hours of the morning at the tail end of the late night shift. Slowly and deliberately it seeped into the building through the air vents to a hidden computer room. There the mist coalesced into a hefty blond man in a white suit and rose-colored glasses. The man stepped over the tubes pumping the purple fluid leaking from the central supercomputer to sit at the helm. Thick fingers flying over the keyboard he typed:

CODE XANA

The computer flared to life and the man quickly pulled back his hands to avoid the crackle of red lightning that flashed through the keyboard. A glowing red eye filled the monitor and stared him down. Eventually, the lightning stopped and a message appeared on the computer screen.

EXPLAIN

Call me Wirewolf, I am a friend. From the future. I have a business proposition for you.

Done typing the man pulled back his hands just in case the computer tried to electrocute him again. He knew how fickle and homicidal this ai could be. After a few moments, it responded.

CONTINUE

With that invitation, Wirewolf typed his out his plot and the benefits to a curious machine.