Delta's breath expelled into a sharp snort as she stepped off the monorail, running a hand along the inside flap of her Custom F-3. Hips swathed in white fuzz pivoted into a clean turn and she didn't even need to glance at the station's map before marching towards Flounder Heights. Two days had passed since that harrowing night with the Lightfisher, two days had passed since Ares had escaped police custody, and now Detective Alex was on his way to interview Marie a second time. Cap'n Cuttlefish wanted the whole NSS to be there for what the investigator had to say; it would've been the first time that Delta had seen the cousins since—Marie's protege had felt guilty for not visiting sooner, but apart from fruitlessly searching for their attacker, something had just…stopped her. The former centerfielder had a tiny suspicion that it was fear.

The agent's Moto Boot hit the landing before the Squid Sisters' apartment; she stared at the door for another moment before her eyes closed with a steadying breath. What would she find on the other side? How had Marie fared after the hospital? The Inkling could still feel the ever-familiar flutter of anxiety in her belly. But fear was the crucible in which a warrior was forged in—and so a determined fist raised to the steel door, knocked three times, and the Inkling braced for the oncoming air that she was expecting to catch.

…Except, nothing happened. All Delta got in response was a louder, emphatic voice muffled through the door before it died back down into silence. Agent 4 uneasily fiddled with her collar for another minute or two, then knocked again after there was still no response.

"…HIIII!" The apartment door slammed open with a loud bang as an excited Callie launched from the entryway, snatched Agent 4 into a big bear hug, and swung her inside. "Sorry, sorry, I kinda…" she released the hug and bashfully poked two fingers together, "…forgot that you were out there."

Delta steadied herself against the kitchen counter, repositioning the pilot goggles that had nearly flown off her head. "It's…good to see you too, Callie."

"But I'm glad you're here!" The pink squid excavated the doorknob from the ever-growing dent in the wall. "We're gonna have so much FUN today! Hey, Marie," she cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted towards the living room. "Look who I found!"

Agent 4 turned a shoulder towards the corridor, where absolutely no one had appeared to investigate.

"Oh for carp's sake, she's not gonna get up…" Callie grumbled, ushering their guest further into the idols' apartment. "C'mon, c'mon, we've gotta go to her."

Delta had finally laid eyes on her mentor in the living room. Golden irises peered back at Agent 4 through bruises that had since flourished over the past couple days, painting bright blue rings along her face where Ares had once pistol-whipped her. The ever-so-slight turn of her chin had produced a side profile of Marie's face, where fresh butterfly stitches crisscrossed a still-healing cut along the side of her temple. A more traditional bandage had been glued to the center of her throat, where most of the swelling had pooled—though not as much as what could've been, considering the pill bottle on the cocktail table and the ice pack nestled in the crook of her multimillion-coin robe. The singer hoisted her head from the pillow propped against her back, tipped her nose into a simple-but-genuine "sup," then turned back to the TV show that she was watching on the big screen.

"Hey." Delta could feel her shoulders relax at the sight of her recovering mentor. "How're you feeling?"

But Marie didn't open her mouth. She instead pointed to her chest, swiped upwards, and continued gesturing in a string of unfathomable motions.

Agent 4 simply stared back—that was…completely unexpected. The Inkling blinked at her sheer incomprehension of Marie's movements and turned quizzically to Callie for help.

"She says that she feels great, never better, don't know why you'd think otherwise." The pink star answered plainly, hands on her hips. "She also says that I didn't find you, Gramps called you, which is SEMANTICS!" Callie shouted the last word at her cousin before stomping off into the kitchen.

Delta watched her leave, still thoroughly confused. She turned back to Marie, who smirked at her protege's utter befuddlement, until the bathroom door clicked open and Quinn calmly strode out, coffee mug in hand.

He stood beside the subsequent agent with a knowing sip of his coffee. "First time?"

"I…" she blinked back at him, "apparently yes, explain."

"Back when they were doing the Splatcasts," Quinn nudged his mug towards the currently-available Squid Sister, "they would give those weekend-long Splatfest concerts, and it was pretty common for them to lose their voices afterwards. So they learned sign language to make communication easier after each festival."

"You try singing for twenty-four hours straight!" Callie called from the kitchen—which, Delta had to admit, was an incredibly fair point.

"You should see them get mad at each other and argue in it." Quinn took another sip of his coffee, eyes nostalgic. "It's like you're in a muted version of Pearl's rap videos."

Marie began gesturing again; Delta glanced expectantly at Quinn.

"Pfft, don't look at me." Agent 3 backed into the kitchen table with an awkward grin. "I have no idea what they're saying. Only they do."

"She wants the TV remote that's literally two feet in front of her." Callie reappeared with an exasperated sigh, setting a plate of freshly-made, half-eaten food on the table. "I'll go get it."

"…Yeah, she's taken this opportunity to be as Marie as possible." Quinn smirked, watching Callie circle around the sofa and nearly chuck the remote at her cousin. "She's thoroughly enjoyed everyone waiting on her hand and foot; we had to pick her up off the bed and carry her to the couch for this interview." He huffed with a knowing shake of his head. "Her legs work fine."

Agent 2 slowly, lazily stretched her arms behind her head with a comfy yawn, and the smug grin on her face didn't need a translation. She saw this as an absolute win.

"Speakin' of interviews, the detective should be here pretty soon." Callie tidied up another of Marie's blankets and stepped towards the bathroom's medicine cabinet. "Two says that this guy likes 'ta show up on the dot, so we've got abouuuuuttt…" the pink popstar squinted at the clock as she walked past, "…six minutes."

Delta ground a fang against her lip as her eyes skipped from the clock, then to Agent 1 behind the half-closed bathroom door, then to the other two squids in the living room. Marie's protege had still wanted to check in on how the attack had affected Callie, but it wouldn't be long before the apartment would flood with guests—and she knew how the older agent loved to put on a brave face. If Delta had wanted Callie to feel like she could answer honestly, now would've been the only time to catch the pink squid alone.

The centerfielder snuck into the bathroom and quietly closed the door behind her. "Hey. How've you been holding up, with all of this?"

The ex-prisoner froze as she was rifling through medicines. She slowly, cautiously, set a couple bottles on the shelf and laid her hands on the sink's porcelain edge, eyebrows scrunched in deep contemplation.

"The whole thing has made me feel…" golden eyes glanced at the blue squid, confused, "…better?" She bit at a lip, distant eyes drifting away. "Like…happier. Lighter. More free than I've felt in a long time, maybe a year."

"Free?" Delta's own eyebrows began to furrow. "Why?"

"I don't know…" Callie's gaze returned to the sink in front of her. "It's like a huge weight's been lifted off my shoulders, but…I'd never even noticed it 'till it was gone." She pushed her hands off of the porcelain and turned back to Delta, concern scribbled across a pursed frown. "Is that a bad thing?"

Delta scratched at a tentacle, just as perplexed by Agent 1's answer as she was. She could see how the emotional reaction had confused the idol—it was certainly unusual for a cousin's attempted murder to leave someone feeling "better." Agent 4 wondered if it was partly because Callie was the able-bodied rescuer, and therefore had more agency over the situation, but then what was this "weight" that had already existed before the incident? Where did it come from? Why had it combined with Marie's attempted murder to create a reaction that was simply "better," rather than "not as shaken?"

"I mean…" Agent 4 crossed her arms with an unsure shrug, "it's hard for better to be a bad thing, right? And you were rightfully ticked off at the time," she swept a hand at the memory of Callie's irate fight against the Lightfisher, "so regardless of circumstances, I'd rather it be 'better' than 'worse.'"

Agent 1's eyebrows had knitted into thick knots as she stared at the bathroom tile, slowly nodding to herself. "Yeah. I guess you're right."

Delta's ears picked up the sound of a distant knock, and both Inklings turned towards the living room.

"That's probably him." Callie's fingers curled around the acetominophen bottle as she brushed off her pensive attitude, donning her usual cheer in impressively record time. "C'mon—let's go say hi!"

The two stepped out just as Quinn was walking the detective to the couch. Alex's eyes instinctively snapped towards them and he had to do a double take at two girls leaving the same bathroom, but a glance at the pill bottle in Callie's hand let him relax. Half-rimmed glasses returned to his interviewee on the composite couch.

"Good afternoon, Marie." Detective Alex began with a courteous, slight bow; Delta heard the front door close once again. "I hope you're feeling better, and recovering well. Thank you for agreeing to meet with me today."

"The doc wants her on vocal rest." A somewhat protective, elderly rattle called from the entryway. Cap'n Cuttlefish aggressively wobbled his cane inside; his brown eyes nodded to Callie as he stood behind the detective. "Agent One'll translate."

Gavin slipped into the living room behind him, grabbing an empty seat at the kitchen table. He wasted no time producing his novel-thick composition notebook and hastily clicked his pen.

"Of course—whatever makes her comfortable." Detective Alex raised a conceding hand as he pulled a chair to the edge of Marie's L-shaped sofa, while Delta and Quinn took the other seats at the table. "Now—I won't trouble you with recounting everything from the beginning again, but could you tell me if you saw anything…unusual, just before it happened? Any propped doors, things where they shouldn't have been, hidden cameras, strange lights…?" the detective trailed off as he kneaded his hands with a wrinkled frown, carefully studying Marie's reaction.

The idol pondered his question for a moment—which was the most amount of effort that Delta had seen from her that morning—then glanced at her cousin to sign her response.

"'Not terribly, no.'" Callie translated. "'Our studio hand wasn't in for the day, but that was expected. He'd called that in a month ago—some wedding or something.'" Marie pursed a lip to herself, then signed again, throwing an emphatic palm over her shoulder. "'There was a brief clatter from somewhere outside the studio's walls, but I'd thought that was just something that the company next door was up to.'"

Detective Alex had listened intently, until he leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms with a deep, pensive frown. "…Hmm."

Cap'n Cuttlefish narrowed somewhat suspicious eyes at the official. "What's this about? What's got yer panties in a wad, squiddo?"

The forty-year-old Inkling awoke from his thoughts and shifted in his seat, likely processing the fact that he was just referred to as a child. "We've been trying to ascertain how the incident had even started in the first place. We reviewed the security footage for the entire building: no one walks through the main entrance, until Agents One and Four enter and…" he coughed awkwardly, "…display a minor show of violence."

The whole room—grandfather included—had turned to stare at Callie, who bashfully glanced away with a tiny "oops." There was no way that she wasn't getting reprimanded for that one.

"There is one Octoling," Detective Alex continued, "matching Ares' description, who only appears on the fourth floor—not the third or fifth or any other level in the building. He appears around the corner and marches straight into the storage closet, approximately two minutes after the victim herself enters." His eyes bounced across the NSS agents, lips pursed. "Like he knew exactly where she'd be."

"Okay…" Quinn pointed a concerned, almost creeped-out finger at the detective, "…how. Her office was right next door—even if he had inside information, you'd think he'd check that first. But no, he makes a beeline for the storage closet of all things? How'd he know that she was in there?"

"We don't know yet," Detective Alex glanced sideways at the Inkling, "however that's not the only dissonant piece of the puzzle." He leaned forwards, resting his elbows on each knee. "We took another look at Ancho-V-Games yesterday afternoon and found that it was broken into very specifically: a tool was used to unlock the door from the inside, and the alarm's wiring was gutted in one fell slash—likely to access the respawn pad in case any of them were caught."

"Right." Delta politely nodded along. "We've known this. I remember noticing that the door was already open and the alarm system was sabotaged, right when I walked in."

"But did you know…" Detective Alex gently tapped a finger in her direction, "…that there were two more buildings which were also broken into that night?"

Delta slowly stopped nodding along.

"After we'd reassessed their intrusion at Ancho-V-Games," the detective continued with an ever-so-slight, knowing smirk, "I went ahead and sent officers to investigate the buildings surrounding the scene of the crime. Turns out that yes, there were other locations with reported break-ins that matched this exact methodology. The first was the building where the sniper was perched—which, makes sense: they had to gain access to the roof somehow."

"But the other was the building directly behind the radio station, and…" the middle-aged Inkling slowly shrugged, as if he were weighing invisible scales between his palms, "…we're not quite sure what that one was used for."

"Wait, directly behind the radio station?" Callie echoed back at him; she pointed a querying thumb over her shoulder. "You mean, the one that's literally right across the parking lot? Those windows face both Marie's office and the storage closet."

"Indeed," Detective Alex tipped his head into a sharp nod. "Again, however, we'd only learned of this third location a day or so after the attack; there had been far too much foot traffic before we'd even thought to secure it as a relevant crime scene. It's possible that the building was used to deduce Marie's whereabouts by watching what lights turned on in what room, maybe more if the trespasser had a scoped charger—but this speculation is meaningless without concrete evidence. Whoever was positioned there, as well as any other clues that they might've left about the Lightfishers, remain a mystery."

Delta's eyes widened as realization hit her like a flying Cohock. Previously, the team had treated the Lightfisher murders like any other homicide: the crime had occurred in one room and one room only, and so they'd cordoned off the immediate area and processed it for evidence. From there, the investigators had expected to find every relevant clue at the scene of the actual crime, and reverse-engineered the murder according to those clues. But if there was more than one Lightfisher…

…Then there was also more than one crime scene.

If what Detective Alex had insinuated was true, then there were actually four different locations that were implicated in Marie's attempted murder. The central radio station might've been where the attack had actually occurred, but there was another Lightfisher—in another building entirely—that had been spying on their quarry and delivering live updates of her whereabouts. Not only that, but the northeastern sniper's perch was positioned to whisk Ares from custody, and the eastern Ancho-V-Games was already waiting to respawn him along his escape route. That was a total of three different satellite sites in the buildings surrounding the scene of the actual crime—and when they were considered in tandem with the storage closet, they hinted at a much, much larger picture of how the Lightfishers actually managed to kill their targets. Hunting down and cordoning off these satellite sites was crucial to understanding what that picture actually was.

…Except they'd never once thought to canvass the buildings outside of Elizabeth's living room. Valerie's suite. Duncan's apartment. They'd never considered it for the past eleven murders that the Lightfishers had conducted together—because an investigator would never think to check some random, seemingly unrelated building almost a block away. Delta's mind reeled at the sheer amount of evidence that they'd missed out on, simply because they'd just…never thought to look for it.

A series of husky, frantic coughs roused Delta from her thoughts. Six heads snapped towards the couch with lightning-fast speed, where Marie was catching her breath after a failed attempt to drink her smoothie. The Inkling rubbed at her tender throat before signing back to the crowd.

"…Are you sure that you're okay?" Callie slowly replied, arms poised to jump in at any second.

Marie nodded gingerly, settling back into her pillow nest with a minor wince.

"Okay…" Callie slowly turned back around, but not before giving her cousin another sideways glance.

"Well, I don't want to push her past her limit." Detective Alex mumbled as he rose from his chair and swept his jacket from its backrest. "This conversation has been helpful—but for now I'll leave you to your rest." He gave a slight, courteous bow before grabbing his hat on the way through the corridor, and the apartment door closed with a final click.

There were a few moments of silence before Gavin leaned back in his chair, palms stretched over his face with a groan. "Are you guys…thinking what I'm thinking?"

Quinn took a slow sip of his coffee, green eyes still staring into space. "If you're thinking 'holy carp, that's a lot of evidence that we've missed out on,' then yes."

Callie glanced between them with suspiciously narrowed eyes, fingers slowly curling around the pink water bottle beside her.

"Yeah. We could've learned so much more about these Lightfishers than we actually have." Gavin's hands dropped into his lap with a heavy huff. "Oh, geez…we know so little about this group, and we're in such a bad—" a flying water bottle beamed the Octoling straight across the face, almost knocking him off his chair.

"Ow!" Gavin rubbed his cheek with a wince and glared at the assailer. "What was that for?!"

"Your attitude!" Callie's hands went to her hips with a stern pout; Quinn heaved a knowing sigh and Cap'n Cuttlefish chuckled mirthfully. "I mean it! All this doom an' gloom is gettin' us nowhere!"

Gavin slowly plucked the dripping pink bottle from the kitchen table, studying its lid with mild disgust. "You drank out of this…"

"Look." Callie ignored him; she snatched a blank sheet of paper from Delta's end of the table, then had to double back for a pen, then had to spin it rightside up. "We might've gotten turned around, we might've been blindsided by the fact that there's more than one killer, BUT—" she held up a cautionary finger, "that doesn't mean that everythin' we've seen and heard rolls out the window. Think about everythin' we've learned up 'till now; Ares isn't the only suspicious cephalopod-or-whatever that we've met." She lowered her finger with a concentrated purse of her lips, pen back on paper. "Who are the top creepers?"

Quinn stared at the table with his chin propped on his hand, thinking hard. "Yuri."

Callie began scribbling with her tongue sticking out.

Gavin rubbed at the bluish welt on his face, then returned to the conversation with a sigh. "I…always thought that Tyler guy was weird."

Delta's eyes bounced between them. "Who?"

"Just some scientist we met at JAMSTEC." Quinn answered with a sideways glance, then dropped his hand at the Octoling. "He said that test tube was filled with water, though."

"Yeah, except that could've been a complete lie." Gavin scoffed back. "We never actually tested the liquid, and yet we're just gonna take his word for it that his suspiciously clear substance is just water?"

"Well did you expect us to confiscate it when we're posing as tourists from a record label—"

"Okay I'm bored of this already." Callie swept the freshly-drawn list of suspects away from her as quickly as possible. "Movin' on! We've also learned thingies about the murders that require certain abilities and backgrounds outta the Lightfishers." The bright-eyed idol reached over and snatched another page, eagerly swinging her legs under the table. "What're those?"

"Um…" Gavin blinked, clearly trying to process the hard left in conversational topics. "Well, the poison is a big one. The murders can't happen without it—and only a scientist from Cephalon Labs knows how to make it."

"…I think I see where she's going with this." Delta tapped a finger against the table with a slow nod. "We might not know very much about this group, but we do know that at least one of its members has previously worked at Cephalon Labs."

Callie nodded along as she kept scribbling, tongue still sticking out…except this time was just a tiny bit more tense.

"Okay, so…" Quinn's gaze eagerly bounced around as he tried to think of more ideas. "Each murder has also used a custom weapon from the black market; so at least one Lightfisher knows how to make stuff like that—or has access to the finished product."

"And isn't the callsign tied together with sailor knots?" Gavin tilted his head, flipping his first binder all the way to the 200th page. "We were talking about that back at the second briefing—one of them could be a sailor."

"Also," Quinn raised a finger, "the shot that splatted Ares came from another building entirely. That's a pretty impressive distance, even with an E-Liter. I wouldn't be surprised if that Lightfisher mains chargers."

Delta internally scoffed at that one. She could think of a few charger mains with painfully absent morals.

"…See?" Cap'n Cuttlefish's eyes gleamed brilliantly with pride. "Lookit what happens when ya try! You've now got four different backgrounds that hafta be part o' the group: one's gotta be a weapons dealer, one's gotta be a scientist tha' once worked at Cephalon Labs, one's a sailor who can tie sailor knots, an' one's a sniper who's skilled wit' chargers. Now tha' could cover more than four Lightfishers, that could cover less, depending on how the roles overlap—but ya know that has 'ta be some of 'em." The aged captain turned to his granddaughter, delighted. "'Atta girl, Agent One—tha's some good leadership right there."

"Thanks, Gramps!" Callie happily beamed back with a mouthful of her ninth sandwich, only to start pawing through the nearly-empty plate for her next bite.

That was when Marie began waving her arms from the couch. Callie paused mid-sandwich-snatch to stare at the commotion, but her eyebrows knit into a furrowed line as she watched the injured squid's signing.

"'But here's a really weird thing,'" Callie began translating, slowly, eyes narrowed in concentration as she kept watching. "'We now know that there's more than one murderer, which explains why each homicide happened slightly differently than the others. Some scenes are a complete mess, some are nearly undisturbed, some show that the place was broken into while others suggest that the killer was allowed in—even the victim's head trauma seemed to vary from murder to murder. That was probably from different Lightfishers performing their own personal spin on things.'"

"'But when you look at the bigger picture,'" Marie kept signing, "'you'll find a mindset that never changes. Every victim is thoroughly studied beforehand. Every victim is attacked at the very end of their night. Every victim is shot with an unregistered weapon from the black market. Every victim dies to an obscure poison designed to kill and kill quickly, and every victim is deprived of any scrap of evidence that would incriminate the killer. Regardless of the variance that we see between Lightfishers, when you look at the broad strokes of their behavior as a whole, you can still see one consistent, careful personality throughout the majority of their actions.'" She gingerly shrugged, careful to avoid the swelling around her neck. "'Why is that?'"

Marie's signs—and Callie's words—hung in the air over the other agents. The bright-eyed actress stuffed a contemplative sandwich into her mouth while Delta pursed a thoughtful lip.

"…Huh." Quinn leaned back in his chair, absently scratching the back of his neck. "Yeah, that's a little concerning—especially because the stuff that the overall paradigm pulls is…pretty impressive." He rubbed a hand across his mouth, thinking hard. "I'm not really sure why that would be."

"I guess we'll just hafta wait an' see." Cap'n Cuttlefish's pride had swelled so much that Delta thought he was about to burst. She didn't need to peer that closely to see the grin peeking through his beard; but it wasn't long before his gaze had hardened back into business. "'Cuz we're gonna need 'ta learn a lot more 'bout these Lightfishers 'fore we can put 'em down. So if Ares is still at large, then I wanna hear ways that we can track another one o' these guys in real time. Start talkin'."

"Track one?" Gavin echoed back, eyes incredulously wide. "In real time?"

"Wait, okay hang on." Agent 3 raised a hand to placate the NSS captain. "We might be getting ahead of ourselves here; I don't think that we can track one at all without even knowing who they are—let alone exactly what they're doing at any given moment. If we could, then we'd have caught them already."

But Cap'n Cuttlefish sternly shook his head. "No excuses. A good general never lets his enemy operate behind closed doors. An' with an opponent like the Lightfishers, the best place fer that kinda foreknowledge is wherever they conjure these insane concoctions. Gimme as close 'ta real time as ya can get, but we're followin' somebody there an' that's final."

Wide, golden eyes curiously peeked over the couch at the sound of generals and strategy. Agent 4 pretended not to see them, but it didn't escape her notice how the idol's grandfather had effortlessly implemented an idea that Marie had struggled with for weeks on end—incorporating military strategy into law enforcement. It had made sense that his example had drawn the secret nerd's attention.

"…Well, then," Quinn smacked against the back of his chair with a dejected exhale. "We're gonna need a way to locate one of these members throughout the whole city, when thousands of inhabitants travel its streets at any hour of the day."

Delta's blue eyes began to knit into introspection. Something about this conundrum felt awfully familiar…

"C'mon," Cap'n Cuttlefish encouraged, "there's all sorts'a newfangled techie thingamajigs these days tha' can help ya: credit card trails, wiretaps—an' what did the guy call 'em? G-P-S trackers? Surely somethin' out there's gotta work."

"Wait, trackers!" Callie snapped an excited finger at her grandfather. "What about those?"

Gavin shook his head with a disapproving frown. "They're useless if we don't know who to plant them on. Tracking every single denizen in Inkopolis defeats the purpose of singling out one Lightfisher, and it's not like we can simply guess at Ares' comrades—getting it wrong would confuse the heck out of us."

Delta ran both hands through her tentacles, racking her mind like a shoplifter at Arowana Mall on Black Friday. She'd encountered something like this before, she knew it…

"Well," Quinn scratched at his forehead, uncertain, "I'm pretty sure there are security cameras watching the city's streets. We could try those."

"Except A: they only cover portions of the city," Gavin opened a hand to count from his thumb, "and B—even if we catch a Lightfisher on film, how are we going to pick them out from the crowd? We're back to the same problem as before: how are we going to track these guys when we can't tell the difference between a Lightfisher and a regular civilian?"

Delta's mind snapped back to the tiny gadget she'd seen on Ares right before he was splatted from custody—and that itch in the back of her mind finally clicked into place.

"Wait!" She'd never slammed a table harder in her life. "The earpiece. We track their earpiece."

The Inkling was met with silence as the entire room gawked at her reaction; Delta vaguely registered that she'd never shouted nor slammed a table at all in front of them.

"That's what the Octarians did to us last year." Agent 4 quickly explained. "They didn't know who we were. They didn't know where to find us. But they tracked us to Cuttlefish Cabin using the radio chatter—" she pointed to Marie's old radio by the wall, "that was coming in through my earpiece. We can do the same thing to the Lightfishers."

Gavin hadn't shut his mouth yet.

"That…" Quinn scratched at a chin, "wait, that just might work. We might not know what these guys look like, but they have to wear the earpiece if they need to coordinate with each other. And it's not like some random civilian's gonna be scheming on the same channel with them—so if we trace the earpiece, then we'd have to wind up with a Lightfisher and no one else. That's…" the Inkling's eyes began to widen, "…pretty ingenious."

Delta cracked a proud smile, but she knew that she couldn't take all the credit. The Octarians had come up with an incredibly smart move back then.

"Except…one question." Quinn raised a tentative hand. "How does one track an earpiece?"

Five pairs of eyes glanced at each other, followed by shrugs and head shakes. It wasn't long until most of them settled onto Gavin.

"Whoa-ho, don't ask me." The only Octoling in the room pushed his seat away from the table, hands raised in overwhelmed surrender. "I wasn't even in the Canyon for that, let alone remember how they pull squit like this off."

Cap'n Cuttlefish conceded with an understanding tsk. "I s'pose Sheldon oughta know 'bout these kinda doodads."

Callie piped back up with a bounce, eyes eager and wide. "Who wants to ask him?"

Not a single cephalopod raised their hand.

"…Screw it, let's just ask Marina instead." Quinn shook his head with a shudder. "She's an engineer who used to work with the Octarians, anyway."

Cap'n Cuttlefish gave a tiny, thoughtful nod, until his shoulders slowly rose into a cheeky shrug. "Well…don't let all o' ya go swarmin' her, now." He beamed like a proud papa at the room's chuckles, then turned to the other two boys. "Three an' Eight—you two go an' ask. Visit Pearl's place on the 'morrow, you'll prolly find her there; an' tell the princess' papa tha' he still owes me from poker night—the big ol' stiff."

"Sure thing, cap." Quinn nodded supportively while Gavin quietly groaned, likely from the prospect of even more questioning after an entire two days of shadowing police interviews.

"Awright, tha's enough yappin' outta ya squiddos." The cap'n waved his agents away and wobbled his cane towards the door. "Go do somethin' useful…" he yawned voraciously, "…'cuz it's time fer a nap…"

A/N: Hello, hello! I'm back earlier than last time! I think it only took 3-4 months to make this chapter while the last one took 9? Wait am I doing that math right? Did I really just shave 5 or 6 months off of my prep time? Let's GO, my new strats are WORKING, i THINK

Anyways, sudden popoffs aside, this chapter is slower than I'd like but hopefully you guys still enjoyed it. I'm not a fan of two slow chapters back-to-back especially in a spot like this, but here I think it was unavoidable. Given what I'm trying to build towards right now, I think it's best that I go about it in almost a step-by-step procedure, but the downside is that it turns this chapter into a weird-ish housekeeping thing when my instinct is to move along. The good news is that the next chapter is already shaping up to have the drive and the movement that I was looking for, so tldr the good stuff is coming, I promise. And this chapter should've still been fun anyway.

It's late (as usual) and my brain is dead from final revisions so I'm just gonna leave it there, here are the notes for this chapter:

-Sign language (naturally) has its own grammar rules, which apparently include changes to the sign when emphasis is used. That's why Marie throws a very OOC "emphatic palm over her shoulder" and totally didn't leave me looking up 3 different videos just to italicize one word

-Glow Pikmin are the best thing on earth. That's not related to the chapter at all, I just wanted to say it

-I love the fact that Quinn just casually strolls out of the bathroom with a coffee mug. That was originally where the bottle of acetaminophen was supposed to go, so that it would be at least somewhat half normal, but then I gave it to Callie and Quinn was just sitting in there with a random mug. I thought it was so funny (and so Quinn) that I kept it in

-I can't tell you why yet, but some parts of this chapter are just straight-up awesome

-I usually try to avoid direct references to things that are clearly human, but in regards to the Black Friday mention I just didn't think that I could get around it. Nothing else really connotes the same kind of kleptomaniacal chaos that it's known for, not even "a big sale"