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It wasn’t long after the Fall that the new Houston Spies began to suspect they were being pranked. Nearly everything the previous team had left behind was locked away, hidden, disguised as something else, and/or written in code. That was to be expected. Most of it was more of an interesting mystery for the players to chip away at in their free time than an urgent problem; none of them had been contacted by the Agency yet, barring the possibility that the communication had been so subtle they hadn’t noticed it, and it was unclear whether it was interested in the new team at all- or even still existed.
They did need to get some of these doors open if they wanted to play blaseball in their actual stadium and not the parking lot outside, though.
Without really meaning to, Margarito Nava had ended up acting as de facto captain, so xe was the one to pull xir phone out and try to get some answers. Almost the entire team was standing around curiously in the hallway, and between them, they had most of the old roster’s phone numbers. (Which was lucky, because nobody had been able to find the player records that should’ve told them that sort of thing.) Xe dragged all the ex-Spies xe could into a group text for the sake of efficiency, since they were probably all too suspicious to answer calls.
hey guys its margo
long time no see hope ur all good etc
where the fuck is the key to the locker room
Xe shouldn’t have been surprised, but all xe got in reply was some coy emojis, code phrases that meant nothing to xem, and long black rectangles of redacted text. Xe wasn’t sure how they were even typing those. Xe sighed, showing the screen to the people standing nearby, and was thinking about a Plan B when the landline in the empty office next door suddenly rang.
“I got it,” said Ivy, who had been standing back from the crowd with Vert and was the closest. They ran into the other room, followed by everyone else, and put the phone on speaker. “Hello?”
The person on the other end was obviously disguising their voice. It kind of sounded like they were doing a Batman impression into a jar of peanut butter. “You are not prepared for what awaits you ahead,” they said slowly and ominously. “This is your warning. Look out. Look… up.”
Margo glanced at the ceiling. One of the tiles was slightly askew.
“Thanks, Chet,” Ivy replied cheerfully, and hung up the phone. Vert covered their mouth and tried not to laugh, but the mood was already pretty much ruined.
“Here.” From the desk chair, Rivers Javier tossed rains cane to Margo, and xe used it to poke the ceiling tile further out of place. Finally, it tilted enough for something to fall down.
It wasn’t the key to the locker room. Instead, there was just a small piece of paper, folded in quarters. Rivers unfolded it and laid it flat on the desk, revealing a series of printed symbols.
Ivy looked over rains shoulder. “It says, ♥☼¶♪♣☺☼♠↨§♦,” they somehow said with their mouth.
There was a brief silence.
“Hey, I just had an interesting thought.” Esme Ramsey came forward, and instead of looking at what was presumably some kind of coded message, she set a small leather case on the desk. When she opened it, it was revealed to be full of lockpicks. “Actually, fuck this.”
Rivers and Ivy looked at each other and shrugged. Rivers folded the piece of paper back up and tucked it in rains pocket, in case, presumably, rain ever got bored enough to try and figure out what it meant.
“Y’know, if I knew you could do that the whole time, I would’ve asked about fifteen minutes ago,” Margo said with amusement, leaning against the wall back in the hallway and watching Esme work on the locker room door.
“I didn’t want to stop you, it seemed like you were having fun.” Esme’s voice was deadpan, but she was smiling a little. “Team bonding exercise.”
She stepped back and turned the handle, and the door swung open. Margo’s eyebrows went up when xe looked inside. “If that’s what that was, I guess we’re all about to get real fuckin’ close.”
“Hey, Howell?” Esme called. “It doesn’t normally look like this in here, right? Just checking.”
Howell Franklin leaned around the two of them to get a better look and sighed. “No. No, it doesn’t.”
Margo was pretty sure xe knew what Chet Takahashi had been talking about on the phone now. The locker room was- and there was really no better way to put this- full of escape room bullshit. And both the door to get into the equipment storage room and the one leading out onto the field were locked, not with the regular sort of lock Esme could easily could take care of, but with weird fancy electronic locks. The equipment room at least only required an access code, but the other door seemed to want some specific objects, which obviously were nowhere to be seen, to be placed in a certain order.
Everyone was looking at Margo, because… of course they were. “Okay,” xe said slowly. “Time to… figure out what this is about, I guess. One second.” Xe stepped into the hallway and got xir phone back out.
nvm about the key we got in
theres something wrong with all of you
Not everyone was particularly excited about going through a puzzle-themed hazing ritual set up by their predecessors, which was understandable. Actually, the weird thing was probably that some of them were excited about it. Ivy was, for one. Since their first experience as a Hard Boiled detective in season 20, they had barely had any opportunities to investigate mysteries that weren’t silly and low-stakes.
This was… well, it was still kind of silly and low-stakes, since they already knew who had done it, and if they got stuck they could always call Chet back and ask nicely for another hint, but… well there was still the question of why, right?
No one else seemed to think that was a mystery, or that it really needed solving. The going assumption was that it was just the Spies’ idea of a joke, or possibly a bizarre security system, or a distraction from their real secrets. Ivy thought there was more to it than that. They had tried to ask Vert, and they’d looked sort of nervous and claimed they didn’t know what Ivy was talking about, which was basically proof positive that something else was going on here.
So they were doing a little bit of independent research. Officially, they were working with Yuniesky and Conditional on a piece of the puzzle, another coded message. In actuality, Conditional seemed to have the cipher-solving handled, so after getting the computers in the big open-plan office sort of thing in the basement unlocked and functional, Ivy and Yuniesky had left it to the expert and settled in to work on their own side projects, doing different things at different desks in the same room. Ivy was pretty sure this was how making friends worked, at least when you were both Spies.
Yunie hadn’t exactly come here to socialize. There were more pressing things on their mind at the moment, like the concerningly unstable (according to Conditional’s analysis) state of the new universe they’d recently been spit out into, and the suspicious seeming-absence of the Agency from which they were still waiting for some sign of interference, and all the people who were still missing. Both they and Ivy had practically barricaded themselves in with extra monitors borrowed from the other workstations before sitting down. They assumed the plan was to ignore each other and hyperfocus on their respective screens until someone- probably Conditional- forced them to take a break.
It was just… Ivy was making themself pretty hard to ignore. They kept talking to themself out loud, although they were at least trying hard enough to be quiet that Yunie couldn’t tell what they were saying. Of the half-dozen screens they had set up around them, three were playing different videos- sound off, subtitles on- and the odd thing was, they didn’t appear to be paying attention to any of them. One was clearly an episode of some kids’ cartoon, not related to whatever research they were doing over there at all. Off to one side of their desk, they had a book propped open, which they weren’t reading. Occasionally, they would glance over at it just to turn the page.
Honestly, Yunie wasn’t going to say anything about it. Ivy was a little weird, but their best friend was a monolith, so whatever. But then Ivy went to turn another page of their book and caught them staring, and perked up and smiled at them like they thought Yunie was about to say something to them, so they gave in to their curiosity and just asked.
“So, uh… what’s with the book? And the…” They gestured around at their own multi-screen setup. “How are you watching all that?”
“Oh, I’m not,” Ivy explained. Or… didn’t explain, more like. They tapped the screen directly in front of them. “I’m just using this one. Everything else is for the ghosts.”
Yunie had no idea what they were talking about. Ivy said it like it was supposed to make sense, though, so they didn’t want to admit their ignorance. “Right,” they said. “The ghosts. Sure.”
“Midnight says hi, by the way,” Ivy added. They nodded their head in the direction of seemingly nothing.
Yunie understood slightly more now. They did their best to guess what spot Ivy was trying to indicate and waved in the direction of it. “Uh… hey.” Behind them, Conditional flashed a quick HI (: on the monitor they’d set aside for it to communicate with them.
They did remember “Midnight” Mason from back when they were in the Thieves’ shadows, but they hadn’t known the kid very well or for very long. …Neither had anyone else, to be fair. Except, evidently, for Ivy, who could apparently see ghosts, or at least the dozen or so of them who were also named Wyatt Mason. Maybe they did have a weirder thing going on than Yunie did.
“Can I ask…” they started, but they didn’t get as far as the actual question before Ivy jumped like a startled rabbit at something they couldn’t hear, switched off all their screens and ducked under Yunie’s desk, flattening themself against the side of Conditional.
“I’m not here,” they hissed, making stern eye contact.
Yunie was confused, but nodded. A second later, Nanci Grackle walked in. He was clearly just passing through on his way somewhere else. He had his arms full of what looked like a bunch of random junk, with even more stuffed in his pockets. Yunie wasn’t going to ask. He barely acknowledged them when he walked by, they pretended to be too focused on their work to notice him in return, and that was that.
As soon as he was gone, they scooted their chair back to leave Ivy more room to get out and gave them a quizzical look. “Why are you hiding from Nanci?”
“Because,” Ivy groaned. “Ever since we got here, he keeps wanting to study me like I’m a weird bug or something- no, I know, I’m not being mean to weird bugs, weird bugs are great,” they assured someone Yunie couldn’t see. “I’m just saying. Every time I see him, he tries to scan me with some kind of device without me noticing. Or else he’s trying to convince me to be his assistant or minion or whatever even though I already told him like fifty times I’m not interested in unpaid internships. It’s so annoying.” They patted Conditional in a friendly way. “Thanks for the hiding place.”
Conditional displayed a knife emoji and a question mark.
Ivy shook their head. “It’s fine, he’s not dangerous. Not to me, at least. Maybe to his general surroundings, and… random bystanders.” They sat back down at their own computer and slowly spun their chair around in thought, eyes narrowed. “He is up to something, though. And I want to know what it is.”
They put their foot out so that the edge of the desk stopped their rotation and looked at Yunie. “When he came through here just now, he was carrying a bunch of stuff. We saw him doing that back in the locker room, too, picking up random things and just taking them- well, I didn’t actually notice, but they told me about it.” They gestured vaguely at the air around them. Yunie made a mental note to never do anything anywhere near Ivy that they wanted to be secret.
“They have to stay pretty close to me to maintain a connection to this plane, though-” that was a relief, although Yunie tried not to make it obvious- “so I still don’t know what he’s doing with it all. Have you noticed him doing anything else weird when I wasn’t there?”
“Uh… not really,” Yunie admitted. “I didn’t know anyone was going to ask me what he was doing, so…” They trailed off. Conditional’s screen had suddenly gotten very visually cluttered. Security cam footage from odd angles, pages of dense scientific literature, Nanci’s emails- “Condie, why do you even have that shit?”
It didn’t say anything, but Yunie was still picking up a distinct aura of smugness.
Ivy, meanwhile, lit up, apparently not having any pressing ethical questions about what they were seeing. “This is perfect! Can you send it to me?”
The mess on the screen was replaced by a single check mark, and at the same moment, a notification chimed on Ivy’s computer.
“Thank you!” they called, already opening the first video file. “You guys are the best!”
Conditional was certainly pleased with itself. Yunie gave it an unimpressed look, and it just responded with a :) face. They weren’t exactly the foremost expert on forming bonds with other people, but they were pretty sure there were better, easier, less legally questionable ways to befriend a coworker. Then again, maybe this was just how it worked, when you were both Spies.
Sometimes Ivy forgot it was weird, the thing with the ghosts. It had been happening almost their entire life. Since the first day of season 15, to be more specific, when they had traveled to Tokyo for the first time. As soon as they wandered close enough to the stadium PsychoAcoustics, they were surrounded by staticky, incorporeal spirits, visible only to them: not only the Lift’s own Wyatts, Jasmine and Quitter, but also Wya77 and Vi, stranded too far away from their own teams’ PA systems to know how to get home.
Ivy had offered to take them when they realized they could work as the same kind of anchor point, and then they’d ended up taking everyone else who’d exploded into static in the wrong stadium. And then it turned out that doing that unlocked a sort of fast travel system for the ghosts, letting them dissipate back into the static and reappear next to any PA system they’d been near before- or next to Ivy. As nice as it was to know they weren’t actually gone forever, Ivy sometimes wished they hadn’t given a dozen of their echo-clone-siblings (and Quitter, who should have been more mature but really kind of wasn’t) the ability to jumpscare them at will.
They had picked up more after landing in Houston. Addison Rosemthal, Link Rodriguez, Jorge Gottwald, Feridad Zest. …NaN and Sixpack Dogwalker, who hadn’t had any trouble finding their way to an anchor they had known for years.
It was a good thing the ghosts didn’t need to be with Ivy all the time, or all at once. They were sure they’d be picking up another group of Static Charges every time they played somewhere new this era. It was going to get really crowded if most of them didn’t go back to their own stadiums afterward.
The ones they had now were distracting enough as it was. As eager as Ivy was to uncover Nanci’s secret and probably nefarious plans, it was a long process actually getting back to their research, and most of that wasn’t their own doing. The problem was, all the videos they had up at the request of other people hadn’t stopped playing when they turned off the monitors, and now they needed to get them back to where they had left off. Which was difficult when no one who had been paying attention to those screens was capable of pressing buttons.
“It was a little further back,” said Wya77, sitting cross-legged in the air with its chin in its hands and staring intently at the screen while Ivy slowly backed up the show it was watching on their collective Nletflix account. “No, a little bit more than that. A little…”
They were getting suspiciously close to the beginning. “Lucky?” Ivy interrupted under their breath.
“...Yeah?”
“Are you just trying to trick me into letting you watch this episode twice?”
It made a face at being caught and halfheartedly protested, “Only once and a half.”
“Okay, well… don’t? Because you’re supposed to be taking turns.” Ivy wasn’t very good at sounding like they were in charge, but they were still the only one who could physically use the computer. “Where was it at, really?”
“Uh…”
“It was like fifteen minutes in,” said Midnight, who was, in fact, supposed to have the next turn.
Wya77 gave them a betrayed look. “Mean to me!”
“Am not, you’re the one who lied!”
“Well, how do Ivy and I know you’re not lying, too?”
Midnight was overdramatically offended, but also a little bit offended for real. “Because- because I’m not, and I will not stand for your libelous accusations against me!” They weren’t standing at all, in fact; they were lying across the back of a nearby chair like an oversized cat. “Ivy-”
“Ivy-”
“Stop arguing,” Ivy said, raising their voice to be heard over both of their protests. Yuniesky slowly turned to look at them. “Not you,” they clarified sheepishly, and went back to a near-whisper. “See? You’re distracting my teammates.”
“Huh? Us? They can’t even hear us, you’re the one distracting them,” Midnight pointed out.
“Yeah, but I only had to be loud because you were being loud!”
“But you didn’t have to say anything, you could’ve… I don’t know, waved your arms at us or something!”
“How would that be any less distracting?”
“Then just wait for us to stop so you can talk normal,” said Wya77. Ivy didn’t think it even cared whose fault it was, it just liked being a part of things.
“That never works. You wouldn’t stop, you’d just keep arguing forever. And then you’d drag me into it and I wouldn’t get anything done.”
“...Ivy?”
Ivy turned their chair around to face Vi, who was sitting on the desk next to the book they were reading, their legs tucked up and limbs folded into a weird pretzel. “Sorry, are you waiting on me?”
“N- well, yes, but that isn’t what I was going to say.”
“What were you going to say?” Ivy prompted, turning to the next page for them.
Their attention was immediately, visibly tugged away from the conversation, but they did at least finish their sentence first. “That that’s already what’s happening right now.”
“What’s…” Ivy covered their face with their hand. “Oh.” The problem with being in charge, even on a technicality, was that they were not actually any more immune to bickering with their siblings than the rest of them. They looked at Wya77. “Okay, were you really fifteen minutes in or not?”
“Um, I think it was more like fourteen,” it tried. “They weren’t paying that much attention.”
“Sure.” Ivy ignored whatever Midnight had to say about that and started playing the episode from there. “...Is there anything else, or can I spy on my teammate now?”
It was risky to ask a rhetorical question like that if they didn’t want more problems to materialize out of nowhere just to make them look silly, but fortunately for Ivy, nothing ironic happened this particular time. They exhaled and settled in at the desk, which is to say that their posture got worse, and resumed spying on their teammate. Or sorting through what Conditional had gotten by spying on their teammate, at least. There was no need to reinvent the wheel.
“Do you have any idea what he’s up to?”
NaN hadn’t been in the room a few seconds ago, but now they were leaning over Ivy’s shoulder to look at their screen. Ivy didn’t count this one as an interruption. NaN had been a Spy before, too, and they were more invested in the mysteries at hand than several actual members of the current team, even while dividing their time between the Undisclosed Location and nearly every other stadium in the league. No one could see them in any of those other places, but… NaN just liked to check in on their friends.
Ivy shook their head and whispered, “Not yet. There’s a lot to go through. Do you wanna help?”
“Sure!”
All of Ivy’s monitors already had dibs called on them by someone else, so rather than designate one for NaN, they opened two smaller windows side by side on their primary screen. “If you watch the hidden camera footage, I can start reading his emails.”
NaN just looked at them for a second or two. Their facial features were sort of hard to comprehend visually, but their eye shape changed in a way that suggested a furrowed brow. Then, whatever they were thinking so hard about, they clearly decided it wasn’t worth saying. They gave Ivy a thumbs up. “...Okay! You do that!”
Hours later, when Conditional started threatening to shut down the computers if the two people in the room who were arguably mortal didn’t stop and get some lunch, Ivy and NaN knew very nearly everything Nanci Grackle had done since arriving in Houston. They were still working on understanding why he was doing what he was doing, but Ivy felt like they were getting close. They weren’t happy about being forced to take a break.
“I still don’t think it’s fair that we can’t get a pizza delivered here.” They were sitting alone in the Undisclosed Location’s generic office-building cafeteria, but they were talking to Yuniesky anyway, who was also sitting alone at the adjacent table a few feet away from them. The food in front of them was bland, but inoffensive, although where exactly it came from was unclear. There should have been staff for that sort of thing, in theory- NaN said there always had been before- but Ivy had yet to see a single person in the building who wasn’t on the team. And yet.
“Technically, we could,” Yuniesky deadpanned without looking up from their own food, “but once we told the delivery person how to find us, we’d have to kill them.”
Ivy blinked at them. “Oh. Really?”
They still didn’t look up; they seemed determined to speedrun their lunch. “Yup.”
Walking by their tables, Howell Franklin caught that bit of conversation. “No we wouldn’t, Ivy, we don’t kill people. Don’t tell them things like that,” he said to Yuniesky. “They’re young and impressionable.”
“Yeah, I’m young and impressionable,” Ivy echoed, sounding serious enough that they had to be making fun. Yuniesky gave them a look, finally, to make sure they knew they weren’t buying it, then went back to their single-minded focus. Ivy ignored their doubt. “You can sit with me if you want,” they told Howell.
“You don’t mind? Thanks,” Howell said. He realized slightly too late that it was embarrassing for a grown man in his own place of employment to need to be offered a seat in the cafeteria by a teenager. “Uh. Do I look that lost?”
“Yes,” said Ivy matter-of-factly. “Wait, not that seat, NaN’s sitting there. The one next to it is open.”
“Oop, sorry, NaN.” Howell moved over, now sitting at a diagonal from Ivy. “So, how’s your… puzzle thing going?”
“Huh?” Ivy glanced at Yuniesky. They had kind of forgotten all about that. “Oh, right. Conditional took care of it. What about yours?”
Howell winced. “Oh, y’know. It’s just… not very exciting? Yeah. I was really hoping to hear about what you guys have been doing, Ivy!”
“Actually…” Ivy looked around the room, which was half full of their teammates, and lowered their voice. “NaN and I have been looking into what Nanci is doing in that lab he moved into downstairs. Conditional gave us some leads.” In fact, Conditional gave them basically everything they had on the guy, but Ivy preferred to call it leads.
Howell raised his eyebrows. “You’re spying on him?”
“Why do people keep looking at me like that’s weird? We’re spies.”
“Well, I guess that’s true, but… aren’t you like fourteen? I just don’t know how I feel about you being able to…”
“I’m sixteen.” It was a very important distinction. “...I think.” Ivy’s attention briefly shifted, focusing on empty space. “And Lucky says you’re embarrassing it.”
“It’s here?” Howell attempted to look in the same direction, but of course, he couldn’t actually see anything. He still tried. He always tried to look; that was another thing it said was embarrassing, but Ivy thought it secretly appreciated it, so they hadn’t said anything to him about the fact that it was never going to work. So he kept doing it, and he smiled at where he was guessing it was. “Hey, kid, how’s it going?”
Ivy made eye contact with the air again, then looked back at Howell. “It says-” The next words out of their mouth were in its voice, not theirs, and sort of crackly, as if they were playing back a recording on an old phonograph. “Uh- fine, I guess, except Ivy’s been on the computer all day and they said not to distract them too much, so it’s been kinda boring.”
“I think it’s still annoyed that it had to get off the Nletflix and let someone else use it,” Ivy added in their own voice.
“Oh, yeah?” Howell’s tone was instantly recognizable to Ivy as that of a dad trying very hard to show interest in the things his kid is into. “Were you watching that cartoon you like with the green hedgehog, uh… Speed Cinnamon?”
“Howell, it’s Speed Cimino,” it groaned, echoed through Ivy after a brief pause for them to listen to it. “And he’s blue. He’s just from Green Hill.”
Howell put his hands up in surrender. “Right, right. Sorry.”
“...But yeah, that’s what I was watching. It was this one episode where Krzysztof Robotnivic had…”
Ivy stopped in the middle of its sentence, looking over at it. “Wait. You know I can’t eat my lunch and tell him the whole plot at the same time, right?” They paused for a second. “Because both of those are things I do with my mouth. I only have one.” They paused again. “It is not a skill issue!”
“Lucky, let your sibling finish their food,” Howell interjected, guessing from Ivy’s expression that it hadn’t given in yet. It was hard to aim a stern look at someone invisible, especially when he wasn’t all that good at looking stern in the first place.
There was one more pause. “Okay, fine,” Ivy echoed after a moment, “I can tell you about it later, when they’re not busy. But don’t let us forget!”
“I won’t,” Howell promised. “Hey, once we get all this puzzle stuff taken care of, maybe you guys can come over and we can watch it together. How’s that?”
“Yeah! I mean, uh…” Ivy watched the spot where it was expectantly for a few seconds. “Only if you can be cool about it, okay? Like, you can’t keep saying things are historically inaccurate, it’s not supposed to be accurate, and also we get it, you’re old.”
“Ouch,” he complained, putting a hand over his heart in faux-offense. “I can be cool. I’ll be so cool you won’t even recognize me.”
“Well- you don’t have to go that far, I mean, then you wouldn’t be my dad… Uh. Don’t repeat that, Ivy- hey, I said don’t- Ivy! Stop it!”
Ivy, of course, was repeating all of that, and increasingly failing to keep a straight face.
Howell shook his head at them, not wanting to be amused. “Both of you, enough. We can watch the show later, and I’ll try not to annoy you too much, sound good, buddy?”
“Okay,” it agreed. “Fine. You can eat now, Ivy, I’m gonna go hang out with somebody that won’t be mean to me.”
Ivy watched it leave the table. “It’s not really that mad,” they assured Howell. “It’s just… oh, it’s on the floor playing with Sixpack, I didn’t see her get here.”
“Oh,” said Howell, obviously wishing more than before that he could see any of this. “Well, that’s… good to know.”
Ivy just nodded, since they were now attacking their lunch with a similar intensity to Yuniesky. Speaking of whom, they were already getting up and leaving. Ivy watched them walk out and sighed. “I knew they were going to get back before me.”
Howell tilted his head at them quizzically. “Why does that matter? I thought you said Conditional solved your thing already.”
“Because if they’re already in the middle of something by the time I get down there, then they have a better excuse to get out of doing the next part.”
“It has multiple parts? Oof.”
“Well, it isn’t supposed to,” Ivy explained, stabbing their fork into their salad with more force than was necessary. “I mean… kind of, but not this much. The solution Conditional found told us to collect some specific items planted around the building. Normally, we would just need to go find them, and with all the camera feeds we have access to now, that would have been easy.”
“...But?”
“But now Nanci has all of it! He’s using it for some weird project, I guess, so someone has to ask him for it, and Yuniesky doesn’t want to, and I can’t do it because we’re enemies, obviously.”
“Wait, you are?”
“Yeah,” Ivy said as if this were normal. “So he wouldn’t want to give it to me, which means I need someone else. Actually, do you think you could…?”
“Of course,” Howell agreed surprisingly easily. “I would be happy to help you find someone who wants to do that.”
Not exactly what Ivy had been about to say, but… well, as long as they did find someone, right? “...Okay! Thanks. It’s just- everyone is busy right now, so it’s hard to… approach people.” Never their favorite thing to do, to be fair, even at the best of times.
Howell made a sympathetic sound. “You’re not the most outgoing, right? But don’t worry,” he said with a level of confidence that, in fact, made Ivy a little worried. “You won’t have to approach anyone at all if I do this!”
“Wait, what are you…”
Before they could finish asking, he stood up. “Hey, is anybody not doing anything right now?”
Everyone in the room was now looking at him, and, by extension, Ivy. They cringed, doing their best to send out vibes of not actually being with him, and looked around for Wya77 in order to make pained eye contact. Any previous conflict between them was outweighed by the need for solidarity in the face of an embarrassing dad.
“Um… I don’t have anything urgent going on,” Rivers Javier offered. Ivy jumped a little; rain wasn’t especially loud or anything, but they hadn’t noticed rain was there until rain said something. “Why do you ask?”
“Great!” Howell lightly patted Ivy’s shoulder, both indicating them and trying to be encouraging. “Ivy here has something to ask you.”
Rivers didn’t mind at all doing a favor for a teammate who, evidently, was a little too introverted to be comfortable asking people for things. Nanci could be sort of intense, so if Ivy had been shy about talking to Rivers, rain could definitely understand why they wouldn’t want to go and talk to him.
It was just… the part rain didn’t understand was why they kept talking like he was a supervillain. Sure, he was kind of weird, and he spent most of his time alone in the basement working on mysterious projects he didn’t want to explain to anyone, and he hadn’t been much of a team player so far with regards to the locker room puzzle, but none of that meant he was evil. …And at least the first part of it was also true of Ivy themself. Rivers really wasn’t sure why they had such a problem with him.
Whatever it was, maybe they would get past it once they had more time to get used to him. Rivers wasn’t going to keep worrying about it. Rain got off the elevator in the basement and made rains way to the door of the lab Nanci was using.
“Hello, anyone home?” Rivers knocked on the door. It took a good few seconds for Nanci to open it. He was disheveled and clearly in the middle of something, but Rivers didn’t know if it was possible to catch him when he wasn’t in the middle of something, so rain didn’t feel too bad about it.
“Depends.” He eyed Rivers. “What do you want?”
“Sorry to interrupt,” rain said mildly. “Some of us have been working on the locker room, and I wanted to ask if you’ve seen any of these things we’re looking for.”
Nanci glanced at the list rain showed him and pretended to think about it. “No, sorry, can’t help you.” He started to close the door, but Rivers had been expecting that to happen at some point, given how uninterested he generally was in being helpful, and rain was already standing so as to be in the way.
“Are you sure? Ivy thought they saw you holding something that looked like this one earlier.” Rivers’ tone didn’t get any less pleasant, yet it was a little more pointed now.
“Well, they must have been wrong, because I don’t…” Nanci trailed off and narrowed his eyes. “Ivy put you up to this? I should have known.”
“They didn’t have to try very hard, to be fair. I would also like to be able to access the part of the stadium where the games happen. …And this kind of attitude is probably why they were too nervous to ask you about it themself, you know.”
It wasn’t clear if Nanci heard that or not. He was busy muttering darkly to himself, too quietly for Rivers to make out. “Oh, all right,” he said at last. “Fine. Come in.” He opened the door wider. “I… might be able to help you after all. But I’m not doing it for free. Give me what I want, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Rivers went in and took a seat, but raised rains eyebrows at him. “Aren’t you already getting something out of it? You’re on the team, too, remember. Do you want to play blaseball in the parking lot?”
“Maybe I do,” Nanci insisted, although Rivers suspected he was just being a contrarian. “Think of the home field advantage we’d have if we got used to it… and the looks on the other teams’ faces.” He laughed.
As he was talking, he wandered over to his current project, which Rivers could now see clearly in the middle of the room. It wasn’t obvious was it was for, but it was big and complicated-looking, and Rivers had to wonder how he had built it in such a short amount of time.
“If you say so.” Arguing the point was unlikely to be worth it. “What do you want, then?”
“Lots of things, but let’s start with this.” He adjusted something on his machine. “If anyone asks you what I’m working on in here…”
“I can keep a secret.”
Nanci imitated an incorrect buzzer sound. “Good to know! Not what I want. If they ask, tell them what you actually saw and then throw in as many outrageous lies as possible. Keeps ‘em guessing.”
Rivers was starting to think the main thing rain would be telling people about this was that Nanci had been more than a little rude about it, but nodded. “I can do that, too.” It wasn’t the strangest request, for a Spy. “But I assume that’s in exchange for letting me see it in the first place. What else?”
“Well…” Nanci sighed, thinking about it, or maybe just getting increasingly distracted by whatever he was doing over there. “I would ask for information, but you don’t actually have the first idea what that kid’s been getting into in their free time, do you?”
“...You mean Ivy? What are you talking about?”
Nanci rolled his eyes. “Exactly. You don’t know, and if I told you to find out you’d probably ask them. Moving on.”
He walked around to the other side of the machine, where the controls appeared to be. As he moved, Rivers caught another bit of movement in rains peripheral vision. When rain looked in that direction, nothing stood out as the location of a hidden camera and/or listening device, but rain suspected there was at least one other person paying attention to this exchange. Rain thought about saying something, but… well, first of all, it was probably just a teammate, and second of all, if Nanci cared that much about his secrets and didn’t notice it himself, that was his problem.
“It just so happens,” he continued, “that I could use your help getting my hands on a certain part I need to make this work. It’s technically finished, but as you can see…” He pressed a button to turn on the machine. It made quite a bit of noise as it came to life, and it seemed to be building up to something. Before it could get there, though, it started emitting smoke, and almost instantly, a surprisingly precise fire suppression system activated and smothered it in chemical foam, leaving Nanci, Rivers, and the rest of the room untouched.
Rivers nodded slowly. “I believe I see your problem.”
“It’s not the smoke,” Nanci explained irritably, beginning to clean the stuff up. He’d clearly had plenty of practice. “There’s supposed to be smoke. It’s that whoever installed the smoke detectors in here made the damn things impossible to turn off. The part you’re getting for me is going to help circumvent that.”
Ideally, that would have been a joke, but he was being completely serious. Rivers sighed quietly and folded rains arms. “I’m not sure I should be helping you get around the thing making sure your side project doesn’t destroy our headquarters, Nanci.”
“Oh, come on, I know what I’m doing,” he huffed. “I won’t destroy anything I don’t intend to destroy. Besides,” he pointed out, “if you don’t help me, I’ll find another way. This is just the easiest. It’s just that it’s a niche item, there’s only one store that carries it, and I happen to not be allowed in said store.”
Rivers just looked at him.
“It’s Ivy’s fault, not mine! The brat prank-called them a few dozen times using my voice, and now I’m the one who’s banned for life.”
“...Really? Ivy did that? That doesn’t sound like them at all.”
Nanci rolled his eyes so hard it looked like it hurt. “That’s what they want you to think. Look, believe me or don’t, I don’t care as long as you get me that part. Do we have a deal?”
“Yes, alright, we do.” It wasn’t as if it was that big of an ask, assuming it wasn’t outrageously expensive or anything. Rivers just hoped this wasn’t the beginning of a chain of almost completely irrelevant errands rain was going to have to do for various people in order to get back with the one thing rain actually needed.
Rivers sure had been gone for a while. Howell noticed this idly, but he didn’t think much more about it than that. He was a little too busy trying to figure out what the hell he was currently looking at. He had lingered in the cafeteria as long as possible, but eventually he was the only one in there and it became obvious that he was just procrastinating, so he had been forced to return to his assigned section of the locker room puzzle.
Well… return was a strong word, in this case. He’d told Ivy that it wasn’t interesting enough to talk about, but the truth was that he hadn’t actually looked at it at all until just now. It was… well, it was something. It had some buttons with symbols on them, which were presumably meant to be pushed in a certain order, and then there was a piece of paper someone had found in a completely different room and somehow deduced to be related, which had something on it that looked like a hand-drawn sudoku, except it didn’t have any numbers in it.
Howell stared at both things for a few minutes, turning them this way and that. Then he put them down and called Comfort Septemberish.
In lieu of saying hello, his former teammate greeted him with a very accurate imitation of the ringing sound their phone had just been making. “Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. Just kidding, it’s me.”
Howell wasn’t fooled, since this was how they answered the phone every single time anyone called them. “Hey, Comfy.”
“Hello!” they chirped. “What can I do ya for?”
“Well, I’m trying to do this thing with all these buttons, and a blank sudoku, and…” He put as much as possible of the headache he was getting into his voice in hopes of gaining their sympathy. “Can you just… give me the answer?”
Comfort hummed in thought for a few seconds. “Okay!”
By the time Rivers finished doing a chain of almost completely irrelevant errands for various people and finally got back with the one thing rain actually needed to make the trade with Nanci, the rest of the key items had already been found- one in the box Howell had “figured out” how to open, one hidden in a drawer of files among dozens, if not hundreds, of identical filing cabinets, and so on. Now, all they needed to solve the puzzle was the final piece.
It wasn’t any of the things Nanci had taken; those were just slightly unusual-looking versions of everyday objects that might be found in an office. But there was a strangely shaped depression in a certain floor tile, which seemed like it had to be for something. Abu-Zaid was the one to realize that if all the items were combined in an unintuitive, apparently random order and configuration, they could be used to make something that exact shape. Putting that… thing… in the hollow in the floor produced a soft click, and then the tile flipped over. On the other side was the last key.
Which meant there was just one obstacle left: the series of “keyholes” by the door didn’t give any indication as to which item was supposed to go in which slot. Margo had some small hope that this was because it didn’t matter, but xe knew that was a silly idea even before the first order they tried didn’t work.
Xe sighed and made a quick note of the one option that could now be ruled out. “Anyone know how long it would take to just… guess until we get it right?”
“Well, there’s eight things, so…” Esme entered something into her phone’s calculator app, then held it up for xem to see the answer: 40,320 possible permutations. “Now, I don’t know if we have time for that, but I sure as hell don’t.”
Margo didn’t think xe needed to agree with that out loud when the “yikes” face xe was making must’ve said enough already. Unfortunately, the rest of the team seemed to expect a little more from xem than an expression that said what they were all thinking. “Cool,” xe sighed. “Well, let’s… split up again, I guess, and see if we can find anything we missed, or…”
“Hmm… Excuse me, do you mind if I say something?” Rivers didn’t speak loudly, but rain had everyone’s attention anyway. Rain took out the coded message rain had pocketed back when everyone still thought the challenge was getting into the locker room and unfolded it. “I finished solving this earlier out of curiosity. When we found it, I assumed it was about the location of the key we were looking for, or at least the next clue, but what it actually says is so cryptic in itself, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Do you think it could be relevant here?”
“It’s like one of those code phrases people use when they’re meeting up with someone in movies,” Ivy observed with interest from too far away to have read it themself. Rivers wondered who was invisibly looking over rains shoulder.
“Actually, we found something like that, too,” said Yuniesky.
Ivy frowned. “We did? I don’t remember that.”
“That’s because you already stopped paying attention. When Conditional got into the file that told us what we needed, I was surprised at how straightforward it was about it, but it was all phrased kind of strangely- here, I have it on my phone. Tell me if you think this is supposed to have a double meaning.”
Rivers nodded. “I think you’re right. Anyone else?”
It turned out to be more like everyone else. Cryptically worded sentences weren’t in short supply in a puzzle designed by Spies; it was less a matter of finding them and more a matter of figuring out what any of them meant and which ones were important. Margo- who would admit xe hadn’t been that involved in all this, if only because it had absorbed most of the rest of the team and someone still needed to deal with the regular kind of annoying puzzles, like League paperwork and trying to find out what happened to that mysterious Agency that Howell told xem about- mostly just watched from the sidelines and tried to keep an eye on the vibes. So far, though, it didn’t seem like xe needed to worry.
Xe had expected xir teammates to be more frustrated about discovering a whole other layer of work they had to do, but as xe watched them crowd around a table to share what they’d all found and discuss their theories, it looked more like they were having fun. Nanci was even joining in instead of going back downstairs and leaving it to be someone else’s problem, if only because he couldn’t resist telling other people they were wrong. Ivy had been avoiding him up until then, but as soon as he started having opinions, it seemed like they couldn’t resist arguing with them. Margo… chose to believe this was a step in the right direction, even though it might have actually been the opposite of that.
Esme had gotten sucked in, too, but she pulled herself away when she made eye contact with Margo for a second and realized they were both thinking the same thing. “Hey. Did we just get tricked into doing a fucking team-building exercise?”
While the key to finally get the door open came together, Conditional watched from a distance, using one of the many, many hidden cameras it had gained access to in the Undisclosed Location. It was way too heavy for it to be practical for Yunie to keep moving it around to where the action was, and besides, as long as they were there, it felt like it was a part of things by proxy anyway.
And, to be fair… sometimes it didn’t mind a little distance from the others. It made it easier to keep things to itself when necessary. It hadn’t told even Yunie about all the recordings it had come across earlier while searching for their clues. Recordings from the previous era, left behind by the old Spies team. They had somehow made it out of the black hole intact, but Conditional got the feeling the team hadn’t planned on anyone seeing them, and… well, that didn’t stop it from snooping, but it didn’t see the need to show them to anyone else unless it had a reason.
There was one particular section of one particular camera feed it had replayed several times before making the decision not to tell anyone about it. It was dated to season 24. Much like the current team, the Spies in the video were gathered around a table, discussing their next moves. Unlike the current team- and Conditional was still keeping half an eye on that feed, too, so it could be sure- their expressions were grim.
Fitzgerald Blackburn spoke first. “I think we all know what this meeting is about.”
“The fact that the world is ending?” Aoife Mahle supplied.
“Yes, that.” They sighed. “Before anyone says anything, I know we all know our contingency plans, we’ve only gone over them a million times. But I also think we’re all aware of the chances that they won’t matter. Whatever comes after this… if anything comes after this… it’s very possible none of us will be there to see it. This is going somewhere, I promise,” they added. “I’ve just been thinking, assuming any of this will still be here-” they gestured to the room around them, and by extension, the rest of the stadium- “how do we make sure whoever finds it is prepared to pick up where we’re leaving off?”
At that, there was some dissent. Not everyone liked the idea of leaving all their works-in-progress to an unknown stranger who might finish them wrong, or of preserving the stress and pressure that came with this job just so future generations could have the same experience. …No one liked assuming they were all going to die, either, presumably, but no one argued with that part. It was important to plan for the worst-case scenario. With that in mind, the team soon reached the consensus that Blackburn was right. There was no guarantee that the end of the world and of themselves would be the end of the Agency, or the end of the League. Anyone getting tangled up in either organization, with no veteran teammates to guide them, was going to need all the help they could get.
“Just leaving messages for them won’t do it,” they continued once everyone was on board. “Even if we knew they would survive intact, which we don’t…”
“It’s too risky,” Becker Solis summed up. The nature of their face made it hard to tell, but they seemed to look a bit annoyed with her for cutting them off. She went on anyway. “Not a lot we can say openly, especially if we’re leaving it out for the first person who finds it.”
“That’s why my actual suggestion is to let them learn by doing. We need to get them to teach themselves… everything we would be training them on, if- if we were around to do it. We can’t presume they’ll even have records of our existence.” Blackburn was no longer as composed, emotionally or physically speaking, as they had been at the start of the clip. They stopped talking in order to pull themself together.
“Well, you’re the one who called the meeting,” Chet pointed out in an attempt to help them refocus, “so I’m guessing you’ve got some ideas?”
They had. Enough to cover the table with the messy scribbles of preliminary brainstorming. Judging by the amount of paper they had gone through, they hadn’t been doing much sleeping. “I’m hoping it will be a team,” they explained. “If not… then I’m hoping to give them enough work that they’ll be forced to assemble one.”
“...I’d say you have that covered, yeah.”
“Good. If it is a team, they won’t need everyone to be able to do everything. The important thing is that they can do it all as a team.”
Given enough time to decipher what was in front of them, other members of the team had started adding their own notes, contributing ideas or fleshing out other parts of the plan. Mohammed Picklestein was already sketching a blueprint. Blackburn stood back and watched, for the moment.
“If this turns out to have been unnecessary, we can call it some extra security. I hope it’s unnecessary.”
“And if it’s not…”
They deflated slightly. “Then I just hope it’s good enough.”
There wasn’t much that could be said to that. Conditional watched the planning continue in near-silence for a few more seconds, then shut off the recording and turned its attention back to its own team. As it watched, Faye made some sort of breakthrough, and the room erupted in barely-restrained excitement from the rest of the team.
It thought they were going to be fine.