A plan is very much like a novel in that it is often overly complex or overly simple, it reads from back to front in a logical order, and in many cases, it does not work out for the planner, or likewise, the author. In my experience, no one enjoys the plan as much as the planner, similar to how no one enjoys a book—at least, in the early stages—as much as the author. In further relation, in the same way that a book cannot be completed in a day, neither can a plan. At least, not a good plan.

As the sympathetic and awed reporter that I am, and as that someone who has dedicated the most sleepless nights and days on the run and powernaps in bushes to investigating the acts of Tobias MacClain, I do believe that Tobias's plan was good, and that is why it progressed and developed over the course of a strange and confusing week, and did not roll perfectly from his tongue on the same day it was conjured.

Because a plan—like a recipe for the perfect almond croissant or a set of instructions on how to mold and apply a realistic prosthetic nose—is difficult to swallow, I intend to do you the courtesy of not sharing it as it was spoken. I will not write out each step, nor describe in painstaking detail the intricate mechanisms behind each motion, or the arguments that ensued the most difficult proposals. Let us not waste other's time, dear reader.

What you need to keep at the front of your mind to follow the progression of the week is that Dr. Tobias MacClain gained his honorary doctorate for groundbreaking work in genome sequencing and applied use of it at a prominent university in Central Benediction; the doctor never had the chance to read the e-mail sent by Viola Mae on his birthday, which explained how excited she was to return to Team Defiance after four years of recovery—which she was afraid to bring up after Tobias's accident; and finally, Powerful Real Estate's shifty and volatile business.

In this chapter, the calm before the storm, you will see the incentive for Dizzy's determination, you will warm at a few small offers of assistance that serve a great help, and we will glimpse the dangerous and exciting initiation of the great plan; destined to go wrong.

On the first morning in the strange new hideaway, Tobias quietly slipped out of his guestroom with a hushed click of the door and a soft thud from his prosthetic foot. Despite the yearning to wear his comforting robe and slippers, he had not been able to bring himself to risk embarrassment before the new cohort and dressed instead in the one set of clothes packed in his bag that were normal for him, not bought as part of a disguise. In his collared button-up and tan pants, he crept down the hall. An accidental glance through an open doorway stopped him. He paused, startled beneath a furrowed brow, jaw open.

He rubbed his eyes, aggravating his blurry morning vision, and after a prolonged and uncomprehending tarry, carried on towards the stairs with his head in his hands. The green walls of the room had been covered in green and gold merchandise and memorabilia and his symbol, all which made him uncomfortable, as if he would be expected to shake hands and sign photographs and attempt to entertain.

He leaned heavily on the railing during his laborious descent. Viola Mae and Teddy's one-story home had not prepared him for the challenge of descending a stairwell on a false foot. The downward limp to the warehouse floor was lengthy and by the end of the climb, he wanted to do nothing more than sit down. Alas, there were people about, and he reluctantly accepted that sitting quietly by himself was not in his cards.

"Mornin', Doc!" Dizzy greeted loudly from the kitchen, waving. "I left that pot of coffee from last night on the counter, here, if you want to heat it up."

"Good morning," he returned wearily. "Thank you."

To his great relief, the kitchen was not cordoned off from the stairs by boxes and he was able to limp there directly. He filled a mug with coffee, found the milk in the fridge to add to it, and placed it in the microwave oven. It spilled slightly in his perpetually trembling hands, and a thin snake of cold coffee dribbled down his palms, around his wrists. He quickly closed the microwave door and snatched a paper towel from nearby to stop the coffee before it could stain his sleeves, then pressed the start button.

While he waited, he leaned against the counter and stared disdainfully down at his peg leg.

"Mom," he heard Dizzy say, gently, "this is George. He's a cousin on my birth mother's side. He's going to stay in the spare room a little while."

Tobias looked up. The teenager pushed a sickly-looking woman in a squeaky and ragged wheelchair, stopping at the open end of the kitchen. Tobias met the woman's cloudy grey eyes and felt his heart sink in a second.

He extended his hand towards her and stepped near. Her skin was sallow and gray, lined with veins, though she looked no older than fifty. Though she wore a healthy plumpness, she appeared deflated and starved with sagging jowls and sunken eyes that flickered with only the faintest spark of consciousness.

Her cold gray hand rose to his and took hold, much firmer than expected.

He did not shake her hand; merely held it between both of his and gave a small squeeze. The microwave beeped behind him, but he did not so much as blink. "It's nice to meet you, ma'am."

"Did Ellie do your makeup?" she croaked warmly, creases lifting at the corners of her eyes.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Tobias looked uncertainly to Dizzy, who nodded tellingly, mouthing Hiccup. Tobias in turn nodded to the woman. "She did."

The woman's entire face lit with beaming pride, warm and flushed and wrinkled in all the happiest and most loving places. She squeezed his good hand; and though the action was kindly, it only made him shiver. "Oh, she is so talented. She is getting to be so good with those brushes."

Tobias smiled back at her, discretely hiding his missing fingers in his trouser pocket. "She certainly is."

"And you know who else is talented?" Dizzy asked. She bent to brush her foster mother's thin, graying hair behind her ear and said, "You, mom. George is looking for an update to his old costume, which some nasty people on the streets tried to burn. Can you imagine?"

Tobias recoiled and regarded the girl questioningly. His one thick eyebrow lifted.

Her foster mother's eyes widened, revealing only more thick fog, almost as dense and white as if she were blind, but not quite. She slid her hand back to just hold his fingers in her firm, stony grasp and gave him a sympathetic but fierce look that he tried to appreciate, despite feeling so out of place.

"There are some awful people out there, George." She pursed her lips and rubbed his fingers comfortingly. "But, you're in the right place, now. I'll help you with your costume."

Tobias tried to smile but it felt more like a grimace, forced by a lie. "That's very kind of you."

"Have you seen Fishfingers?" she asked.

He frowned. "I'm sorry?"

"Mom," Dizzy muttered, pulling the wheelchair back out of the kitchen. They slowly trundled away, turning a corner and disappearing into the maze. Her voice carried behind the clutter, "Fishfingers passed away, remember? Almost two years ago?"

"Fishfingers!" the woman called, clicking her tongue and making kissing noises. "Here, Fishy! Here, kitty!"

Tobias lingered in the same spot, too puzzled to move. The dots were starting to connect, as Dizzy had promised. That woman was not all there. As much as memory loss and confusion were common in the world, he was not convinced that her condition was Mother Nature's doing, especially after their conversation the preceding night. His suspicion was correct, for the kindly foster mother of the children had been a victim of an unfortunate hypnotism accident on her third NDA signing. What she was supposed to sign for that day, and what she signed for the previous two times, no one would ever know, for she had forgotten in the same way that she so frequently forgot how to walk that she had resorted to a wheelchair, and in the same way that she forgot the names of her children almost every other day and had to read them off a bulletin board in her bedroom every morning to remember.

"We have to say she has dementia," Milk Chocolate announced, clambering onto a bar stool at the nearby counter. "Your face is pretty scary, mister."

"Shush up, Milk. How he got those scars is pretty scary." Hiccup slumped next to her, yawning. She leaned on the counter and dragged a box of sugary cereal towards herself. "Even if she doesn't remember too much anymore, she does remember how to sow. She'll make you the best new costume—she used to make them at Headquarters, before they did... I mean, before she got dementia. Milk will help you design it. And I'll do your make-up. You can't go out in that mask again, so I'm gonna make you a whole new face. We'll mold it today. Maybe based off someone from your university. Dizzy says we might get to break into your lab."

Tobias rubbed his jaw and drifted towards the microwave, lost in thought. "A new face? A new costume? What do you know about my lab? I'm unfathomably lost."

He pressed a button to reheat the drink once more and hung his head while he waited. Both offerings were necessary for the future but had not crossed his mind before then. A plan, like a novel, requires a great deal of revision, and from this moment, throughout the week, Tobias's scheme was bound to change a great deal.

"How would Dizzy know about my lab?"

By the end of the week, hours before he was due to catch the metropolitan high-power bullet train from the center of the east district to the busiest square of the central district, he leaned over Dizzy's shoulder, feeling butterflies in his stomach. He was confident in their plan. Though nerves tingled through his damaged body, he felt, deep down, that it would work out. Even if he was wrong, his bravery was admirable.

The teenager threw a can of soda carelessly behind herself, where it joined the sea of aluminum littered over her bedroom floor. She pulled a card out of a slot and handed it to him without taking her eyes from her central monitor screen.

He fingered it uneasily, turning it over in his hands. It was simple plastic, imprinted with the logo of a nearby hotel that was missing its forty-second room key by no coincidence. "Are you sure this will work?"

"Yeah, yeah," Dizzy said, waving a hand. She dragged a black window of buzzing green text from the top left-most monitor of her jumble of five, down to her central screen, squinting over reading glasses. "At least until your lab. You said it was restricted access?"

Tobias paled and fumbled with the former room key. He hastily slipped it into his khaki pocket before it could jump from his shaking fingers. "Is that... Is that a problem?"

"It's not a problem to get in. The key will open it."

"Then, what is the problem?"

She shrugged and lazily turned in her swivel chair to look up at him, pulling the rectangular frames off her face. "Alarms. This keycard will open any door in that building, you can be sure of that. But, that door has a higher level of security, being restricted access, classified... etcetera. Right? Opening the door with the wrong key—as in, not the I.D card and eye scan of the few nerds with access—will set off alarms, but we don't have the time to troubleshoot that on the key card itself."

Tobias grimaced uneasily, shifting his weight from peg to foot. "That is a big problem, Dizzy."

He started to push up his glasses but stopped himself, remembering that they were not there. Hiccup had told him to avoid touching the prosthetic face and to put in his contact lenses to discourage his frequent habit of fiddling with his spectacles. He wore his blue lenses, his golden glasses folded safely in a case in his pocket, where his nervous fingers could not meddle.

Dizzy opened a fresh can of pop and smiled at the satisfying hiss of gas escaping. "I looked at the blueprints and a few of the building's security system codes. There's a keypad inside the door. You can manually input the code one-eight-seven-seven-six-two-A-C, and it will shut off the alarms. If you do it within ten seconds of unlocking the door, then the alarms won't go off at all."

He shook his head anxiously, running his hands through his hair. "Yes, I know the code."

"Then why are you worried?"

"Because, I also know that if that alarm goes off, a signal will be sent to HQ in seconds, and I know exactly—exactly—which team will be called."

Dizzy grimaced. "Good luck."