After wandering around and eventually being picked up by Cassandra, I spent the evening, night, and early morning gaming. It was a strange coincidence that the character I'd been building played in a similar way to Von Jackass's method of fighting.

Flickering through the entire map at mach fuck you, with maxed attack speed, blowing up an entire screen of enemies as I zigzagged through them—yeah, this would be pretty fun in real life too. I think.

The main reason I chose to play this archetype was because it cleared through content better than almost anything else. Sure, it was a bit of a glass cannon, but holding down a single button to wipe a path of destruction to the other side of the map in three seconds was what I liked to call 'poor man's evasion rating.'

I was actually proud of that one. I hadn't heard any streamer or forum joker use it before.

Unfortunately, I did manage to get myself banned from gamechat again, and I wasn't even using any slurs or profanity this time. That was disappointing, but at least I could still play.

I intended to wait for a bit before I dared to check the news. I was honestly a bit nervous to see the reaction in the media and online to the stunt I just pulled.

It was one of my weirdest quirks, at least in my own opinion. I'd always had this little anxiety about observing the outcome of uncertain events, even if all the possible outcomes were good. David would certainly remember my reluctance to open any of my christmas or birthday presents.

Seeing the way the masses reacted to my Kaiju incident was similar, but I would face it eventually.

"Hey Mom," I grumbled as I stepped into the kitchen area, "you're up early."

Cassandra was sitting at the counter with her laptop open, browsing through a folder of papers and sipping on a steaming mug of coffee. She looked tired.

"I'm not your mom," she said without looking up. It sounded like she was barely aware I was there or that she was replying to me. "Shouldn't you be asleep?"

Snickering, I started filling a pot with water that I would boil to make tea. The thought of a hypothetical European seeing me and calling me stupid for not having an electric kettle pissed me off a little—okay, wow. Getting mad about fictional scenarios about things that nonexistent people didn't do? Bitch, get real.

"I don't need to sleep, Mom." Continuing to tease Cassandra put me back in a better mood as I set the pot on the stovetop and turned the heat up to maximum. "What are those documents by the way? Criminal secrets? Can I take pictures of them to sell on the dark web?"

Cassandra frowned. "No. Don't do that."

"Drat! Grrrrrr…" It was by this point trivial for me to produce a cartoonish growl. "Foiled again…"

"And these aren't anything interesting. Just tax documents."

Oh really? Now having nothing other to do than to wait for my water to heat up, I slipped around the counter and sidled up to her side. I tried to peer over her shoulder, but was still too short, despite going to the trouble of providing my Vonnie form with a couple extra inches of height. Maddening.

"I feel like that might be valuable though. Tax documents? Boring. Organized crime tax documents? Now that's gotta be worth something. I mean your whole thing is making money from illegal esoterics. Isn't that how they got the prohibition guy? Al Calzone or whatever?"

"No. Shoo." Cassandra had the absolute gall to gently shove me away like I was some kind of oversized cat trying to get in front of her keyboard.

Sullenly, I returned to the stovetop and watched my water begin to boil. You know—I kind of wonder what it would be like to drink it.

Drinking boiling water didn't sound dangerous. I proved early on that I could drink household bleach without too much issue—and sure, that didn't mean it was pleasant, but I was stronger now than I was then.

Also, bleach was a toxic, corrosive chemical. Boiling water was just mildly hot water. Snacking on metal hot enough to glow would be like chewing soft taffy, so hot water surely couldn't hurt.

I was feeling confident, so I decided to just go for it.

As I wanted to drink boiling water and not just hot water that had been recently boiling, I didn't bother pouring it into a mug. I lifted the pot straight to my lips and took a big gulp.

Eugh. No, not a fan of that one.

The problem wasn't that the boiling water hurt. It didn't, because why would it? My body was now comfortable in a far larger temperature range, although interestingly, it still felt just as hot as it did when I still thought I was a regular human.

Just as hot, but with none of the discomfort—interesting stuff. However, what I didn't like was the bubbling. The water hissed and fizzed as it went down, because, you know, it's boiling, and I wasn't a fan of that.

I didn't care for sparkling water either. I liked carbonated sodas but hated sparkling water, so it made sense in retrospect that I wouldn't be a fan of drinking it while it was boiling.

But by the same analogy—would I like it better if it had sugar? For a normal person, trying to drink boiling syrup was an even worse idea than drinking boiling water, likely much worse. For me, though—I think I want to try it.

I also wanted to try cooking pasta in my stomach. Not because it would taste good, but because it would be funny.

No, wait—that wouldn't work. The idea fell apart when I realized that things didn't sit around in my stomach like that anymore. The dry pasta would vanish into who knew where before I drank the water. Even if it didn't, it would definitely happen before the pasta had a proper chance to cook. Damn.

Still, I was getting excited. This was the sort of thing that I'd started doing at the beginning, but I'd since forth neglected it. But what else should I try? I looked around the room, and my eyes landed on a different kitchen appliance.

Ooh…

"Vonnie?"

My gaze flicked over to Cassandar, who I'd forgotten about. "What?"

"You look like you're up to something."

"I'm always up to something."

"Mhm." Cassandra gave me a good long look before returning to the stupid tax documents she so cruelly hoarded from me. "Don't do anything reckless."

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

I rolled my eyes. "Yes, Mom. I'm not planning anything reckless." Which was true. I genuinely wasn't planning anything exceptionally dangerous or stupid, the only thing I was planning was to try tinkering with a magnetron and microwave transformer when she wasn't looking.

Something we'd discussed the day before—night before? I'm not sure—was that I would skip attending any classes today. I was fine with that. The bad part was that I didn't get the whole day off. I was supposed to do more combat training with Mr. Bones, meet up with Katherine, meet up with my deadbeat Star Guardian dad, and later hang around at a different club the Bouquet operated.

One called the—the something pile? Something hole? I'd already forgotten it.

A busy schedule, and I wasn't looking forward to any of it. Let's see—get beat up by a sadistic Guardian who I have no hope of killing, deal with her, get grilled by an emotionally callous Star Guardian who I have no hope of killing, and then mingle or some shit. Fucking brilliant.

At least one of them was optional. Sorry Katherine, but you're not that important.

Katherine "Nekomata" Legato

"I feel like this is going to be very important." Katherine fiddled with the spoon still sitting in her coffee cup. The four of them were seated at the corner booth of a nostalgic, cornerside diner—Luna, Maria, Katherine herself, and Tim.

"We have to be very careful about how the Bouquet perceives our interactions with her, unless we just hope we're able to not get caught."

"Which is unlikely," Tim added. "So I agree."

The three women were discussing their plans with Tim Hallison, of all people—rock star, pop star, something in between—it didn't really matter. He wasn't the biggest music celebrity, but that didn't mean he wasn't famous and successful, the kind of success where he had a decent chance of walking into a shop or cafe and hearing his own work at some point.

Katherine had even been to a recent live performance, one of the local open air ones that were frequent but irregular, drawing a crowd but not requiring tickets or being announced with enough prior notice to require a large venue.

He was also the Tier 3 Guardian who accosted them on the water. That was unexpected—Tim Hallison wasn't supposed to be a Guardian.

But a quick look was all it took to find that the internet was filled with speculation and jokes about the popular indie guitarist and songwriter leading a double life as a rogue hero in bright swim trunks.

At first, Katherine was confused, and for multiple reasons. First, she'd been to one of those open air events and she didn't recall anyone onstage having the spiritual signature of a Guardian, let alone a fairly powerful one.

Also, if they really were the same person, how was it not simply a known fact? Why the speculation? Search his name and you would get a thousand different high quality, close images of his face. You could even look up his exact height.

There were also plenty of photos of his Guardian identity, many of which showed his face in an acceptable level of detail—and yes, they looked the same. He wasn't exactly hiding it, since his Guardian 'outfit' was more lack of outfit than outfit by surface area.

They looked exactly the same, they operated primarily out of the same city, both were public figures with a large online presence, and hell, Tim Hallison the musician even quoted the old surf rock genre as one of his major style influences, and even used the same kind of colorful pastels for his clothing and guitar.

And so it was natural for Katherine to wonder—how did he fool my power, and how is it not already accepted knowledge?

There were two separate answers to that. The first was that he used the exact same technique Alex had used to mask his true spirit. The difference was that it worked much better on regular Guardians than it did on true Star Guardians or Anathema hybrids.

Just a few minutes ago, after he'd explained it and showed her the small vials of liquid, she confirmed it by giving one to Luna. She tried to give the other to Maria, but her other teammate wasn't keen on downing a strange vial of mystery liquid provided by a man that had threatened her during their first meeting and that she'd since known for less than a day.

Still, when Luna drank the vial—more like ate it, actually—the immediate effect on her spirit was the same as what Katherine felt from Alex when she was pretending to be 'Vonnie.'

She didn't get to compare that to the effect it would have had on Maria, but she did get to see the effect on Tim. As the Tier 3 explained it, the so-called 'elixir' either lasted for a few hours at most or would immediately fail as soon as you used any of your abilities.

Tim demonstrated this by cracking open a fresh elixir, breaking the masking effect by using the slightest amount of anima to make the surface of his water glass ripple, and then downing the new elixir.

While the effect it had on both Luna and Alex was to create an extremely fake, opaque facade, the effect it had on Tim's spirit was much more natural. Katherine had mixed thoughts on the new information.

It's concerning to know that powerful Guardians could make themselves seem like regular people to me—but at least I know that if they can't fool me while also secretly using esoteric abilities.

Also, it would be good information for the next time she encountered that same kind of super fake and flat spirit. At least I will know how to interpret it more accurately.

As for the answer to the second question—how was it not obvious that Tim Hallison and Surfer Dude were the same person—Tim explained that leaning into the similarity was a calculated strategy.

"Think about it," he'd said, "I'm already under a lot of scrutiny and crazy theorizing by the media, fans, and so on. I wanted to keep my Guardian life separate, but that's hard, you know? I was trying to make it in the music business first, and when I became a Guardian, I had to really think about how to handle that.

"So I sort of got this idea into my head—like hey, if people are probably going to notice things anyway, and there's also a lot of crazy shit people say about you in a career like this—I mean why not just lean into it?

"The idea is basically—so the point is to be careful about keeping your activities separate, so there's not all this solid evidence that it's you. Like—what you still don't want is a phone booth costume change thing where people can think huh, so you see Tim run into a bunker and then Surfer Dude pops out ten seconds later.

"So you have to be real careful about that stuff still, but then the idea is to play up the pure coincidence aspect. Turn it into a running joke among your fans, fuel the fire a bit without making it look like you're doing it on purpose. Ironically, refusing to discuss it in interviews and stuff helps there, because—well, it doesn't really matter.

"Point is, I did it on purpose, but I still have to be careful about how I handle all of it. I was actually the one to start the whole thing. I have a few different social media accounts I use that have promoted the 'conspiracy.' That way, I actually got to control the initial direction the whole thing took, and I think I was pretty successful in setting it up as a sort of community joke."

To Katherine, the whole thing felt like something Alex would do, though she couldn't articulate why. It just did.

Luna's reaction was that the whole idea was genius, and Maria said it was 'probably just luck' that he'd gotten away with it.

Tim wasn't the only one to confide secrets. Katherine had confided everything to her team and to Tim, the rules of the more powerful Star Guardians be damned. The one thing she didn't tell Tim was that Luna was like Alex—she waited to see what Luna thought of it.

In the end, the other girl was fine with revealing that as well. 'I need a small group I can be open with,' she'd explained, 'and my real dad and the others don't really count.'

Now, they were planning on what to do next.

"I have a suggestion," Maria said, drawing everyone's attention. "I think that no matter what, we should feel things out a little. Not actually do anything, just—okay, I'm not sure how to explain this."

"Go on," Tim said, "We're listening."

"Okay, so an example might help. You know how you told me about Club Purple?" Katherine nodded. Tim and Luna had also heard about that, and Tim said he already knew that the club was more than it seemed on the surface.

"Well it wasn't the only one. What I'm thinking is like—we should start going to one of those, but just treat it like a club. Don't go out of our way to do any investigating, don't try too hard to network with regulars—just go. Get a feel for it."

"You're absolutely right it's not the only one," Tim muttered. "I'm curious how you found them, though."

Maria shrugged. "It wasn't that hard. We have the internet now, you can just keep looking things up. Don't know what something is or how to interpret a possible connection you found? Just look it up. Honestly, it's not that hard if you just keep digging."

"Oh yeah, for sure." Tim nodded. "But uh—which one specifically?"

"I was thinking of one of the grungier ones. Ever heard of a place called the Trash Pit?"

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