The visit that I expected from some armed thugs that night never happened. However, the next morning when I returned to Bea’s shop, the two men were standing at the counter with her, talking in low voices. They turned around and I was pleased to see new, puffy bruises colouring their faces. I was even more tickled to notice that Knife was still wearing the coat I had sold him the previous day. It went well with the cuts on his face from where the chair had splintered against his skull.

Neither of them looked happy to see me. Bea didn’t either, for that matter.

I walked up to the counter as though nothing had happened and grinned at them all. It didn’t fit with my cover as a simple farm girl, but at that moment I didn’t care. It was too amusing watching all their faces turn from solemn righteous anger to confusion at my cheerful attitude.

“Hello Bea, gentlemen,” I said, nodding to each of them in turn. “I don’t believe we have been properly introduced.”

“This is Kni- Neal,” Bea said, gesturing to the man in the coat. She didn’t quite bite off his name in time. If this man’s name was Neal, I would eat his coat. What I had yet to discover was why he was called Knife. He hadn’t pulled a knife on me when he was bringing me in for questioning, although he did have that nasty scar on his face.

“Pleased to meet you, Knife,” I said, holding out my freshly bandaged hand to be shaken.

He stared at it as though I had just offered him a live bomb. There was an awkward lull in the conversation until he grasped my hand and shook it, just a little bit too firmly. I resisted the urge to shake out my slightly crushed fingers afterward, and bit my tongue to prevent a small yelp of pain.

“And this is Abe,” Bea said, gesturing to the ape. I grinned at the similarity of his name to the creature I imagined him as, and held out my hand again. I was prepared for my fingers to be broken in half, since his grip looked even stronger than Knife’s, but to my surprise he was gentle on my bandaged hands. His hand held mine in the lightest of grips, and he shook the offered appendage as one might shake a particularly delicate puppy.

“Very nice to meet you both,” I said, turning on my heel and heading back to the front door. “I’ll let you get back to whatever you were talking about now though. I don’t want to intrude.”

“What?” Bea blurted out. I paused, and turned back to look at her. “I mean, wait, come back here Delphi. We need to talk to you actually.”

“Oh?” I said, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes,” Knife replied. “We all know what this is about, so you can stop playing the brainless happy fool any time now.”

“Oh, you mean you want to talk about yesterday?” I said, smiling brightly, exactly like the brainless, happy fool that I was. “You want to talk about how you kidnapped me, tied me to a chair, threatened to torture me, then told me you would have to kill me and held a gun to my head? Until I took matters into my own hands, of course. Is that what you wanted to discuss?”

“You did what?” Bea asked, turning to Knife with fire in her eyes. Obviously she had not received the full story before now, and was not happy with the omissions. This was getting better and better.

Knife looked away from her uncomfortably, and his eyes settled on me, the cause of all these problems. “And you can stop pretending to be an innocent girl from the country, all alone in the big city. No way does someone just untie herself and knock people out like that unless they had some previous training!” He snapped.

“I was on the football team,” I deadpanned.

“The football team.” Knife repeated. The words were calm, but I could see his hands clenching in fists at his sides.

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Careful, I cautioned myself. I had pushed him over the edge once already. I didn’t want to do it again, at least not right now.

“Yeah,” I said, with a casual shrug. “Have you ever been the only girl on a football team with a bunch of guys over six feet tall and weighing twice as much as you? You learn how to defend yourself, or you end up in a training incident that leads to the hospital. After being in the hospital one too many times I decided to go with the first option.”

The last part was true enough, which increased the odds of it sounding believable. Although did normal high schools even have co-ed football teams?

“Wait, hold on a minute,” Bea said, putting a halt to the staring contest between me and Knife by stepping in the middle. She glared at Knife and he took an uneasy step backwards, bumping into the counter. “You kidnapped her? Why?”

Knife shifted back and forth on his feet uncomfortably, glancing at Abe for support. Abe merely stood there with his face stony and unreadable.

“I just wanted to make sure she wasn’t going to mess everything up,” he said. “You’re the one who let her in here without looking into her background. Abe told me that you even got her to help load up the boxes! Have you lost all sense? This isn’t a candy store we’re running!”

“I’ve got more sense than you apparently, kidnapping some random girl because you don’t like the way she talks to you,” Bea retorted.

“I was just protecting our operation!” Knife protested, holding up his hands in front of him as if to ward off Bea’s evil eyes. “Which is something that you don’t seem at all worried about, I might add. Someone has to take the initiative before we all wind up dead, or worse. Sure, you might be able to pretend you didn’t play a part in all of this, but the rest of us won’t get off that easily.”

“Protecting the operation doesn’t have to involve an innocent girl being kidnapped and threatened with death!” Bea shouted, leaning forward to jab him in the chest with one pointy finger.

I stepped forward and inserted myself between Bea and Knife.

“Look, I agree that I’m not happy with what this gentleman did,” I said to Bea, looking at her and forcing her to stare into my sincere and calm eyes instead of at Knife. “But it’s all in the past now, and I have forgiven him for telling me that he was going to murder me. I understand why he thought that he needed to do it, but since I so kindly prevented him from making that mistake, I hope that we can all forget about this and pretend that it never happened, or at least that it was not as big a deal as you clearly think that it is. I am touched, truly, over your concern for my safety, but I don’t want to see you continue to argue over it.”

Bea was silent for a long, tense moment, as was Knife. The sound of heavy breathing was the only thing that could be heard in the electrically charged air of the room. Finally, she gave a terse nod, and turned her back on me and Knife. I turned to Knife with raised eyebrows, and he returned my look with an odd combination of confusion, fear, and outrage.

“Well, now that’s all settled, why don’t we all go discuss this calmly over a nice piece of pie?” I said, clapping my hands together. The impact sent a shooting pain up my wrists, but at least it had the desired effect of making everyone else in the room jump.

“Pie?” Abe said, the first word I had heard him speak. I admit I was slightly shocked at the deep voice that came rumbling up from the depths of his massive chest. I had almost convinced myself that he was incapable of speech, for one reason or another.

“Yes, I happen to know that pie is extremely good for solving arguments,” I said. In fact, I knew nothing of the kind, having never even eaten pie. But an advertisement in a storefront window down the block had convinced me of this fact just yesterday, and I was inclined to believe them. Pie looked delicious. My parents had held a firm belief that sugar was tantamount to poison, and we had never had a bite of it. And supervillains-in-training weren’t treated to the best of food.

“I don’t think there will be any pie for me,” Bea said. “I have to look after the store.”

“That’s too bad,” I replied, shaking my head and putting on a properly mournful expression. “Abe? Knife? I mean, Neal?”

Knife looked at me piercingly when I slipped up with his name, but made no comment, only shaking his head as well. “No pie for me, thanks. I need to get going soon, but not before you and I have a proper conversation. We have things that we need to discuss.”

“Well those things can just as easily be discussed over pie as anywhere else,” I said cheerfully, walking out the door. The bell tinkled a merry farewell behind me. Pausing on the front steps, I watched the second hand of my watch tick onwards. I had the suspicion that they would follow me if they really wanted to get this sorted out, and I would prefer this discussion occur in a public place. That way there was less of a chance that I would die by the time the talking was over. It was a self preservation technique that had come to my attention after foolishly allowing myself to be abducted the previous day. Sure, I could use my superpowers to get out of most situations, but not without blowing my secret identity.

The second hand only made it through ten seconds before the door to the shop swung open once more, the tinkling bell ushering out my scowling soon-to-be minions.