Exhaustion gripped poor Tobias that night, mistaken by the updated Team Defiance as patience, maybe shock. He offered tight and bittersweet smiles to them as he waved them out of his laboratory, watching as the laboratory door swung shut. Through the tall, narrow window on the door he squinted to see them file out from the locker room and crowed ruefully to himself as Mr. Might pulled up the door he had foolhardily broken.

"Oh, Benjamin..." His eyes rolled lethargically. "Always with the entrances." Arrogant.

He looked to the window, eyes stinging and dry, to watch large vines recede from around the glass panes and slither downward. Down the side of the building, over the sidewalk and across the road. The thick green plants spiraled through an open manhole and disappeared into the shadows. A few small tendrils snaked out to pull the cover over and the campus street, after a few moments of rattling and splashing, was restored to normal. Quiet, empty, peaceful. The perfect working environment.

Tobias flopped over his desk, stretching his arm as far as he could to reach his earpiece. His fingers drummed uselessly against the table until he tilted in his chair and the device came just into reach. He dragged it back and fit it into his ear, adjusting it absently.

"Dizzy?" he rubbed his eyes. He rubbed them harder.

"You left me blind and deaf, Doc! Not cool."

One contact lens popped out, dry as bone. The second followed with a little more encouragement from his slightly trembling knuckles. He tossed the lenses into a bin under the bench and rolled his shoulders. "Change in plans, Dizzy. I'm spent."

"Talk to me," Dizzy urged. "There are no camera feeds from that lab. I don't know what's going on."

"Plan A failed. One virus is ruined. I need to synthesize a failsafe for the other because, thinking in the long-run, I can't have this spreading in Benediction." He unzipped his coveralls and reached into the pocket of his plain jeans, fishing out his hard glasses case. "I have a better idea than the other. A more satisfying plan."

"Are you all right? Can you tell me what happened with them? Did you fight? Did you win? Did you lose your temper with Mr. Might? Did you kiss Spectre? Did anyone recognize you?"

"Dizzy!" Tobias barked. He sighed and pinched his brow. The prosthetic stung, pulling on his skin with the same invasive, sticky grab felt when duct tape was applied to a mustache. Groaning, he lowered his hands and pressed them to his neck instead, laying his elbows on the bench. "I'm spent. I need to rest for a moment. Perhaps I can tell you about it another day, but for now, I need you to focus. Plan B."

The earpiece crackled. He heard the three girls talking all at once, an overwhelming buzz that was overridden quickly by a loud and forceful, "SHH!"

Dizzy answered, "Yes, sir. What can I do?"

"Can you hack into a bank account?"

There was a pause, in which Tobias slid his glasses onto his nose. He swallowed and opened the web browser to the fateful ad from Powerful Real Estate, flashing its price in bold white text over shifting red and orange graphics.

"You want to steal money?" Dizzy asked eventually. "We're supposed to be the good guys, Doctor. Unconventional good guys, but, good guys."

"In my will, I asked for half of all of my money to go to Viola Mae," Tobias explained quietly. "I need you to take just a couple hundred thousand back and put it into a property."

"A property? Like, a house?"

Tobias smiled to himself. A house. Indeed. "Can you do it?"

"If you give me the property, I can have it done by morning. But, what's it for? The plan was to make them powerless with your science magic, have them go on duty and fail a mission, then put up our prerecorded broadcast when their lawyers are scrambling. They'd be ruined. Are you changing things? This late?"

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"The Nature Calling Inhibitory Virus is denatured. I can't salvage it." He shook his head angrily, palm smacking against the damned incubator. It wasn't fair. But, perhaps, he thought, there could be a silver lining. Oh, indeed, there could be a sweet, satisfying silver lining! It was a curious feeling at the back of his nape that told him so. A small tickle of glee as light and teasing and pleasant as a lover's lips. He smiled wearily, his gaze tangling in the plumes of smoke in the distant bay.

"So, what—" Dizzy's voice brought him back into focus.

"That plan is not doable," he continued firmly, rubbing his eyes. "Besides, it would cause too many casualties to impair two over-confident hare-brains on duty. I have a better plan. The property I want is currently for sale. All I need you to do is take the funds from Viola Mae's bank account and make the deposit. I have the number for it."

"What's the property? And why do you need it? What's the 'better' plan?"

Tobias sighed, draping himself over his desk. He drummed his fingers over the smooth, sterile bench and purred in thought. He found himself staring at the volcano again. It was entrancing, as leads always are. Watching the volcano to him was like finding the MacClain files in the HQ archives for me. It promised him: if he had this one volcano, he'd have everything he needed to finish his case, to be content, to move on. This was it.

"Two weeks ago," he began, cheek pressed against his shoulder on the bench, "I very nearly died on the central volcano because Benjamin Jones chose to leave my life to chance and Poppy Tris... well, she's always in the background, supporting him and his pranks and his cruelty to me, which he always found so goddamn entertaining. Both of them did." He raised his eyes to the ceiling. "I want to leave their lives to chance. I want them on that same volcanic island. I want them to know what it felt like. I want to be satisfied. I don't want to watch from a distance." His voice was low, close to monotone. "I want to smell the sweat on their brows when they look at me. I want to see the guilt on their faces when they realize that I survived what they did to me. I want the island. I want the volcano. I want them alone."

There was a pause, in which a small ball of lava spit from the volcano and trickled down its side. Tobias could feel the heat as if he were there again. His eyes widened to draw in the light, the heat. The volcano was powerful.

"He sounds pom," remarked a smaller voice in the background.

Tobias sat abruptly upright and smacked his hand over his earpiece as if it would make him better heard, "Don't say that. You know what I look like now, Milk Chocolate. Annie. You know what I've lost and what they have done."

Keys clacked through the earpiece. A soda can opened with a hiss. "I see where you're coming from, Doc," Dizzy said, "but that volcano is dangerous. It's supposed to erupt within a week, according to a lot of sources. I'm on the web, right now. We don't want to kill anyone."

We don't want to kill anyone. He almost had to think about it. Blinking rapidly, he pulled both arms away from the bench. His latex-coated hands squeezed over his blue mask, pinching a sudden burning sensation that prickled through is nose. In his pale reflection off the window, he watched a tear trickle over the prosthetic face of his unfeeling half. It dodged the ridges of his marked black scars and dived into the red and pink craters until his sleeve raised to lift it away. "No," he murmured, unsure of himself, unsure of anything, "we don't want to kill anyone."

His gaze raised to the window and he stared at the volcano's light through the faint image of his former coworkers face. He slapped his cheek.

Stop it, Tobias.

Why was it so hard to just be himself? He wove his fingers through his hair and pulled. He tore the wig from his scalp and dropped it down his shirt, then ripped the remaining flue from his brow. Then, his fingers dug into his brown curls and he pulled harder and harder until it hurt enough to awaken some sense in his scrambled brain. He pulled hard enough that it burned long moments after and reminded him that he could feel. Somehow his back remembered that it was on fire from the brutality of Vine Voodoo and Mr. Might. How? Where had his feeling gone?

"I need to sleep," he announced thickly over a gob of uncertainty in his throat. "My stamina has run out. I can make no use of my powers, I'm struggling to keep my eyes open, and I am... in pain. While you were blind, I was thrown very hard against the floor and it is bruising."

"Wait a minute, Doc. Doc! You can't just have a nap. Are you out of your mind?"

Tobias buried his face in his arms. "Twenty minutes. Then I will edit my remaining virus with a failsafe primer, freeze it with liquid nitrogen, and you may direct me out. It won't take too long. I prepared the primers months ago."

"You can nap when you're here, Doc!" Dizzy whined. "In the van!"

"Dizzy! I can't work like this. That is how mistakes are made. I only have one shot and it is a very delicate process. Wake me in twenty minutes."

"Oh, by the powers!" she moaned. "What am I supposed to do, give you a shake?"

"Shout at me. Put a high frequency in my ear. You'll figure it out."

She sighed. "Okay, Doctor. I sure hope you know what you're doing."

He chewed his lip. Me, too.