Mission Report: Day One

Advocatebackers.com

Okay. For better or worse things have started. I’m sitting here, in the cold, typing away on my tablet because things have started. I wasn’t supposed to be in the cold. We were supposed to be in a hotel, with all the cold contained in the fridges, the ice machines, and the pool outside that was a little too small for even kids to get excited about.

I can post this as soon as I finish because we haven’t reached our destination yet. The other reports will likely go up a day or two after so our plans don’t get spoiled. I can’t tell you what hotel we were supposed to be in, but I can tell you it was one tiny pool and a gym away from being a motel rather than a hotel. Cocoa Solid had made these arrangements for us. The other Backers and I don’t live close to each other, so we were to rendezvous and plan at this hotel the night before the mission started.

I was the first to the room. We were on the ground floor, close enough to the gym to hear the stationary bikes spinning their wheels. There weren’t supposed to be any pets, but I wouldn’t be any good without them. They were all in my duffel bag, with extra air holes of course, and after I kicked off my shoes I set it gently on the bed and unzipped it. My friends hopped out and spread across the room.

Of my seventeen pets, these were the ones who weren’t afraid to join me on what I told them was a dangerous journey. They are the bravest… with one exception. Vincent Van the beagle, named such because of the ear his owner sliced off, immediately hopped off the bed and started smelling the feet of everyone who’d ever crossed the carpet. Vince makes a great scout and fetcher.

Saintly the cat is anything but. In fact, if anyone says christ around him he flips out and becomes a claw tornado. His owners said christ whenever he dared to oppose their kicking with his claws. He made himself comfortable on the windowsill. Saintly watches out for everybody else; I think he has a death wish.

Next are my two birds: Ernest and Bridget. Ernest is an African gray parrot and my sound mimicking expert. Bridget is a parakeet. Aside from her yellow head she’s bald. The poor girl gets so nervous that she always plucks herself clean. She can’t fly as a result, but she’s small enough that Ernest can carry her everywhere. She’s really good with puzzles and she even knows simple math, so between the two of them they can fly up to a door and enter a security code or something like that. They both found a perch on the flexible metal neck of the bed’s reading light.

Last is my squirrel Tracy, recognizable by the acid burn on his shoulders. Tracy has seen things. He doesn’t like jokes. He only blinks when he’s confident nobody else is looking at him. He’s skilled when it comes to sneaking things from people’s pockets without them catching on. He silently crept under the bed and watched the crack under the door. Tracy is the one who I wouldn’t call brave, but he needs me. I’m afraid if I went anywhere without him he would have fits in his little rodent heart and croak.

They’re my crack team, they’re my best friends, and they’re my super power. Together we are Advocate. All told though we’re only one third of the new Justice Backers. I didn’t have to wait long for the other two to show up. First was Telephony. Since the three of us and my animals are sitting here in the cold, I might as well hand the tablet over and let them tell you about themselves. They know it’s important for Justice Backers to be honest with their readers and donators. Okay, they’re agreeing. This next bit will be Telephony telling you all about himself.

…

Hello Advocate fans. My name is Telephony. Advocate told me she wrote a piece earlier for you about her powers and how she realized she had them. I should do that to. Fair warning: everything with me gets awkward.

Okay so… where to start. I’m a guy. I’m a teenager. I’m straight. Kind of fat. And I have the world’s worst superpower, unless somebody out there has something like a tongue that smells like a skunk or the ability to get pulled over for speeding even when on foot. Before I say what it is I’ll tell you where I was when it first showed up.

It was Valentine’s Day and I was in grade school. It was just young enough that you could get away with pulling down your pants as a joke. Never did that one myself of course. My public shame takes a very different form. Worse.

We were all expected to spend part of the day filling out a valentine for each of our classmates. Once all seventeen were complete we were to go down each row of desks and drop the valentine into a little paper mailbox each person had. Some people’s parents went to the trouble of hand-cutting the valentines from construction paper while others, like mine, opted to buy pre-made ones with cartoon characters or candy all over them. Mine were car-shaped. I didn’t have the heart to tell my Mom that people only watched that old Diamond Car show ironically. Even at that age I knew about the fodder for hate-watching.

I did as I was told and I did it sincerely. Nobody in those seventeen had wronged me significantly. I wrote to Jeremy that I liked his haircut. I wrote to Susannah that she was really good at four square. I wrote to Nisha that the cinnamon apple sauce her mom made and brought in the other day was sublime. I actually used that word. Heard it on a cooking show the night before.

The teacher rang her little bell and like good little subjects we started moving up and down the lines of desks and dropping off the cards in their corresponding boxes. When it was over we immediately sealed the boxes so we could open them and read them at home. When I pulled the tape off mine and put it in my backpack it was worryingly light. Sneaky teacher. She really wanted us to open them at home so she wouldn’t have to deal with situations like mine. I forgive her. I wouldn’t want to tell the chubby little tater tot with a quetzalcoatlus on his tee shirt that he was a loser. That of all the people in the world he was the least likely to soar like a quetzalcoatlus.

My mom was watching when I sat on my knees on the family room carpet and dumped the red paper mailbox out of my pack. She encouraged me to open it, a real smile on her face. If it was possible, she had more false hope than I did. I popped the tape latch off. Four valentines drifted to the carpet… four. We both stared at them in stupid shock, like a bomb had gone off and blown up the family dog. I picked up one like a dismembered leg. I might’ve thought something about one of them confessing a love for me so deep that it made up for the missing thirteen.

“Well, open them,” my mom said, quickly recovering her smile. She was scratching nervous lines into her nail polish. I did as I was told. Three of them were fair and nothing more. They had my name and a non-specific nicety, like I was good at sharing or some other nothing statement. The fourth was unsigned. You stink, it said. My mom ripped that one out of my hands and discarded it immediately, hoping the memory hadn’t formed yet. At least that person thought something of me so strongly that they had to speak up about it. The rest…

I was a loser. There was nothing else to say. Still am. Still nothing to say, so I won’t appreciate any comments to the effect of ‘I’m sure you have some special talent that makes all the dumb looks on your face and all the fatness worth it’. I’ve heard it all before. I do have that special talent, and it bites at me more than anything else.

“Were… were a lot of people out sick today?” my mom asked while we were still staring at the cards. Her smile was so strained it was practically cracking. Bless her for trying. I shook my head no and immediately went to my room. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do but sleep. It’s the only way to forget you’re not very good at the general ‘person’ stuff, you know?

When I woke up I felt a little better. Better than I should have honestly. It was just a feeling though, and I didn’t yet know what my feelings could do. I ate my usual granola-heavy breakfast (my mom tried to disguise the fact that she had me on a diet by putting cinnamon and apples in it and calling it ‘dessert oatmeal’), got on the bus, and arrived at school.

I knew something was wrong the moment I sat down. Everyone was looking at me. The teacher wasn’t in yet and there would be another tortuous two minutes before the bell that made her late. A boy, a large boy, and not in the same way I was large, appeared standing beside my desk. He thrusted a cellphone into my face so fast that the tip of my nose left a smudge on the screen.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked me. A few others echoed his question. Some of them had phones at the ready too, half-pulled out of their sweater pockets like they were flashing pistols. I squinted and looked at the screen closest to me to see what he was talking about. There was a text message.

Hello Kevin. I’m sending this to let you know you really hurt my feelings yesterday when you didn’t give me a valentine. I didn’t get many. It made me feel worthless. Please stop.

I was about to ask why he was showing me that when I saw the number above it. It was my cell number. The dumb look that struck me at that moment was no help. Kevin shoved my shoulder a little. A girl nudged him out of the way and showed me her phone. If his message was mortifying, hers was devastating. My body felt like Chernobyl, like it was going to be impossible to live there for the next two to four decades.

Hello Noelle. I’m sending this to let you know you really hurt my feelings yesterday when you didn’t give me a valentine. Most of the class didn’t, but yours hurt the worst because I like you. I thought that if I weren’t fat in a couple years I could be your boyfriend.

My number again. The only thing that saved me was the teacher coming in and calling everybody to attention. I sat there in my flop sweat for hours, ignoring everything said about photosynthesis, and tried to deconstruct what just happened to me.

Somebody sent messages in my name. I would later find out one was sent to every kid that didn’t give me a card. The obvious answer was that someone faked my number and sent them out because they didn’t like me. I was a loser, so the reason they didn’t like me was already provided. There was one problem though; this person somehow knew exactly what I thought of everyone in class.

I really did have a crush on Noelle. She was a little chubby so I thought I stood a chance with her. She had bright blonde hair, so bright that it practically flashed like a lighthouse whenever she turned her head and sent some of it swinging around to her pink lips. (Obviously I changed the names for this story so as not to mortify her. I’m the one who gets to feel that.)

Maybe I could have written that off as someone seeing me stare at her, but most of the texts contained similar nuggets that perfectly summarized my thoughts of that person. I’d never told anyone these things. I didn’t have anybody to tell. It only added to my confusion when, after school, my mom told me she’d gotten a call from me earlier. I was in class. My phone was off.

“I know it’s rough sweetie, but in a few years none of this stuff will matter to anybody,” she told me. Whoever called her had a voice so like mine that my own mother couldn’t tell the difference. “But you can’t call me when I’m at work anymore unless it’s an emergency. I have to get things done while I’m there.”

Dumbstruck, my natural state it seems, I locked myself in my room. What on Earth was happening? Was someone slowly taking over my life because I had done such a lousy job on my own? Was I going to be evicted from my own body and replaced with someone more capable? Someone who wouldn’t shove nachos into it every chance they got?

My phone rang. The phone was really just for emergencies since I didn’t have enough friends to justify its purchase. It wasn’t empty, but it certainly wasn’t overflowing. I wasn’t used to hearing it, so it startled me right off my chair as its vibration danced it off the edge of the desk. I caught it before it hit the carpet. I looked at the screen. It was my number… calling my number. I didn’t think that was possible. I hit the button.

“Hello?”

“Hello.”

“Who is this?”

“I think we should be called Telephony,” the voice said after a moment. My voice. Exactly.

“What do you mean we? Why do you sound like me?”

“I am you. We’re the same person. I’m your subconscious,” my other voice proudly declared.

“This isn’t funny.”

“Your favorite color is brown. You’re embarrassed because you assume everyone else naturally likes the prettier colors. You only ever hear blue, red, green, yellow… Your favorite food is nachos, but only when they’re from the movie theater and only when the guy with the eye patch is the one making them. He’s the only one who drowns them in exactly the right amount of cheese. You have a crush on two different girls right now and one…”

“Alright!” I yelped at myself through the phone. “You… we… sent those texts about the valentines?”

“Yes. I was tired of bottling it up. They needed to know. Everyone needs to know how we feel.

“You called Mom?”

“Yes.”

“Why!?” I asked with a squeak. “I don’t want this! I don’t want people knowing how I feel!”

“Well I do,” the other side of me insisted. How do you argue with that? I didn’t know either, so I just listened for a while. “We never tell anybody anything,” the voice went on. “We have things to offer. We need to stop letting people think that we don’t.”

“What do we have to offer anyone?”

“This. This isn’t normal.”

“Yeah, I know that Mr. Subconscious. What is this by the way?”

“Well it’s an ability. You know what they call abilities like this. Super powers.”

“This is definitely not a super power. I’d call it more of a psychotic break.” You’re probably noticing something odd in my retelling. When I’m talking to myself I sound quite a bit older than the age where valentines are the social currency. There’s a reason for that. I don’t know exactly what it is, but the best way to explain it is just to say that I’m smarter when I talk to myself. It’s a confidence thing. My brain had absorbed nearly everything it heard on TV, phrases like psychotic break, and felt fine using them when there were no stakes. My subconscious wasn’t going to yell at me for misusing a word.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“It’s a super power,” the other me insisted.

“So how super is it?”

“I can communicate with a large number of electronic devices. I can make myself heard through them. Phones. Internet. Radios. Our brain naturally taps into their wavelengths.” If you had asked me to explain wavelengths I would’ve looked at you like an opossum forced into a lab coat, but the part of me that had watched too many cop dramas after bedtime was certain we had a grasp on it.

That’s that. That’s my power. My subconscious has a will of its own, or just a will I’m not strong enough to suppress, and it talks to other people whenever it thinks I’m not communicating well enough. I bet Advocate gets messages from it all the time, but she’s nice enough to pretend it doesn’t happen. To pretend I’m not violating her privacy and my own. I appreciate that. With all these electronic admissions comes the ability to set up secure communication channels and access restricted ones. I can listen in on bad guys or make our communication undetectable. That’s what Telephony has to offer. It’s not much, but it is something.

I’m going to be the weird loser. It’s my destiny in a number of agonizing overlapping ways. If I’m going to be that person I have to be the most important version of him. I have to do something to make myself tolerable. Being a Justice Backer is the way to do that. I know it’s the right thing to do because my other self hasn’t gone ahead and posted my secret identity all over the internet. He wants it too. I’ll get around to setting up donations soon, but for now I’m just piggy-backing on these guys. So yeah. I guess I’m done. Hopefully I’ll hear from some of you on the other side of this mission. Wish us luck.

…

That was Telephony everybody. I like to think of him as the little voice in the back of the team’s head. He probably said some terrible things about himself, but I want you to know that there’s no human I’d rather have watching my back in real life or over the wi-fi. Next up is the Fastest Food. She’s the one you really need to buckle your seatbelts for. Okay. Fingers crossed she doesn’t break my tablet with the hyperactive poking she calls typing.

…

Finally, it’s my turn. I know exactly where to start. My name is THE FASTEST FOOD and I’m a TERRORIST. That’s what they call me anyway. This is the first mission for these guys, but I’ve been pulling solo missions for years now.

Advocate has her animals and Phony’s all about embarrassing texts or something, but my cause celebrat-y is food. Yeah. A food terrorist. You don’t have to figure it out because I’m going to explain it for you.

Basically, everything you eat every day is nearly pure poison. It’s circumstantial poison, but that doesn’t make it any less volatile when it’s squirming in your guts and dropping your life expectancy faster than a rat dropping a turd on one of this country’s ten bajillion meat conveyor belts. Every bit of processing, every bit of packaging, every phase of its transportation… all of these things degrade your food. It should be ground, to sink, to table. We’d all be living to 105 if we kept it that simple.

Instead we populate our streets with colorful little landfills that wrap their garbage in cartoon character paper so you can’t tell what it is. Fast food restaurants. The worst of the worst and my absolute favorite targets. They’re the ones I TERRORIZE. I’m not afraid to use the word. If you’re wondering how a superhero can be a terrorist too, this is how. Every time I go out and take one of these places on I’m grabbing the poison out of a fatty’s hands before they can shove it down their gullet.

“NO PLEASE LET ME EXPAND MY WATER BALLOON STOMACH WITH THIRTY GALLONS OF SODA!” say the helpless dying lardballs of the world. I tell them no, just as all decent people should. Just like a parent pulling a dead bug out of their dumb toddler’s mouth. Obviously I can’t do this directly and have much impact, so I make a show of it. Gadget style.

I never leave home without my anti-poison utility belt. I’ve got a pepper foam sprayer that can pump out a harmless, but foul-tasting, foam at high pressure. Usually that’s my go-to. I’ll bust into a Dandy Donuts or a Captain Fishery’s and shout something like, “I’VE GOT A BOMB EVERYBODY RUN!” While they’re panicking I vault my way over the counter and start spraying all the food so it can’t be consumed unless you’re the most dedicated trans-fat FUCKHEAD the world’s ever known.

People need to talk about it though, and the foam doesn’t have enough flare to get those goddamn mouths going. My frozen chicken nugget CO2 gun gets a lot of attention. I made it out of a modified paintball gun with all those obnoxious safety measures stripped out. It fires frozen hunks of breaded machine-meat at any employees or security in my way to discourage them. Minor welts at worst; I’m no killer. It’s just a good way to give them a taste of their own handiwork. Why make a gun that shoots chicken nuggets, you ask? Because they’re POISON! Every bit as dangerous as a bullet. That’s why.

Whenever I’m out stopping diabetes from sexually assaulting people I also keep condiment bombs on me. Ketchup is the most visceral shit there is. When people see it, they react worse than if it’s actually blood because they KNOW it’s worse.

It took ME to put this mission together because most other people in this world are afraid to act. They’re afraid to commit the way I have, to a life of only the purest fucking food and the purest fucking motives. People say I go too far, but they stopped saying that for a while when I put my surveillance footage up of what went on at a couple meat processing plants. Then all of a sudden I was like QUEEN WIKILEAKS for a day. Then some of you called me a hero.

The best heroics are the commitments though. I haven’t had a spot of refined sugar since I was eleven. I hate my parents for ever giving it to me. We don’t speak anymore. Feeding goddamn poison to a fucking pink-cheeked baby as cute as I was. Practically murderers. Anyways we’re going to do a real number on thi dkd sldnd kosommf34u 55

…

Okay, now that I have wrested control of my tablet back we can move on. As you can see The Fastest Food is… excitable. She’s bold though, which is something our team would definitely lack without her. Now that everyone has been introduced I can tell you how we wound up out in the cold in the middle of the night rather than in the hotel room.

All three of us were hanging out in there, spread across the bed and the two chairs, and getting to know each other. We’d talked a lot online, but it was the first time we’d met in person. Telephony and I didn’t bother wearing masks, since we were going to be a team, but I don’t know if The Fastest Food ever takes hers off. Whenever she’s out exposing food safety violations she dons the face of the innocent victims: a cow, a pig, or a chicken. Today it was a rubber cow mask. She was at least polite enough to fold the snout up over her own nose so we could hear her better. She still put her hand up though; she didn’t even want us to see her skin tone.

Both of them got along well with my animals, which was actually my biggest worry about this whole thing. We could all die on this mission and I would care less than if my fellow Backers and my best friends didn’t get along. That would be me failing before I even got to try.

We went over some details that I can’t really give you guys yet regarding the plan. Everyone was nervous, but things seemed to be going well enough. We decided to order room service. I went for a salad, extra croutons, and Telephony opted for chicken tenders. Before that he adorably whispered a question in my ear.

“If I order chicken will it upset your birds?” I told him they wouldn’t mind. None of them were chickens after all. Both Food and I are vegetarians, but she’s vegan and doesn’t eat anything she hasn’t prepared herself. I was surprised she didn’t launch into a lecture about how we shouldn’t eat whatever we were ordering, but I guess in person she reins it in a little. As long as nobody tries to make her do anything she doesn’t want to… Everybody knows that person.

While we waited for our room service she opened up her duffel bag and brought out her own dinner. She had three baggies, all of them that green color that suggests biodegradability. In one was a pile of seeds I didn’t recognize, but that my birds ogled intensely. She was nice enough to share a handful with them. Another had granola squares with dried fruit that I presume were homemade. The third was a selection of raw vegetables. As spicy as her personality is, I’d die of boredom on a diet like that. I need cheese, eggs, and chocolate that comes in wrappers.

She muttered something to herself about forgetting to bring some water. Telephony mentioned there was a vending machine with bottles down the hall. Food scoffed about never drinking water from plastic because of some three-letter acronym for a chemical that escapes me. She didn’t want the tap either because she was certain it contained, in her words, ‘brain-nuking amounts of lead’.

Then Telephony mentioned the ice machine. Food stared at the door, vaguely in the direction he was pointing, and contemplated the idea for what felt like two full minutes. Eventually she brought out a filter from her bag and said there was time to melt some of it.

“I’ll go get some,” Telephony said, eager to continue with the positive first impressions. Even online that’s how he is. I imagine it’s because he’s trying to make up for whatever E-mails or texts his subconscious has sent in his stead. He probably didn’t need to; Food seems like the kind of girl who appreciates brutal honesty. She might not even mind somebody running a machete straight through her as long as they weren’t lying while they did it.

Food let him go. He grabbed the copper-colored ice bucket, it wasn’t a nice enough hotel for it to actually be copper, and headed out into the hall. We sat in relative silence, each of us stroking one of my pets. I tried to read her mind. I didn’t think I could, but you never know where super powers might take you. She was wearing an animal mask after all, and with her behavioral issues I kind of just assumed there was some form of abuse in her past more significant than ‘Mom gave me French fries’.

What separates abused people from abused animals and makes them inaccessible to me? No idea. My best guess is because I’m a human myself and my mind doesn’t think I should need any more help communicating with others. Food though… She’s less of a communicator and more of a forty-five minute song with a lot of screaming in it. You can either listen and wince or try to shut her down.

My phone beeped. It was supposed to be in silent mode. I felt Food’s eyes through the black spots on the cow mask. I bet we both had the same thought of my phone beeping during the mission and getting us caught. It wasn’t my fault though. I checked the message.

Something going on in hall. Might need help.

It was from Telephony… or other Telephony. Not super sure. It seemed when he needed to he could override some of the settings on a phone. I flashed the message in front of the Fastest Food. Without hesitation she pulled her mask back over her mouth and sprang to the door. Trying to match her preparedness, I issued a low whistle. All my animals turned to me and entered formation. I’d prepared them for this kind of situation. They would wait on the tips of their toes and claws for another signal from me.

Food didn’t pick up her nugget launcher, which was a wise move considering it looked a little too much like a real firearm. She leaned up against the door while I took up a position on the other side. The door creaked as she slowly opened it, one of her shoulders extending with it out into the hallway.

Telephony was standing there, his back against a corner, about ten feet away from us. The full ice bucket was pressed against his shirt. His fingers were pink from the cold and there was a wet spot on his pant leg where he was balancing it on his knee. He urged us forward with his eyes, but didn’t say anything.

We crept up to the corner across from him and looked down the hallway he was clearly trying to keep his eye on. There were two people, standing just outside their room, having some kind of argument. There was a girl and a guy, who seemed to be together. He was about five inches taller than her, and taller than any of us. His shirt had an internet meme on it, and I won’t dignify such clothing by saying which one. Definitely one of the ones you associate with douchebags though. That narrows it down to about thirty-seven from this year.

Meme-douche had one bony arm pressed against the door of their room, hanging over the girl like a gutter overloaded with muck. She was shrinking under him, and there was only so much room to shrink against the door. Here’s the thing: this was not a super easy situation to read. Telephony showed the appropriate amount of restraint in saying there might be a problem.

This girl did not have any obvious bruises. She didn’t look so much scared as uncertain. I’ve seen my fair share of similar looks though; it could easily have been uncertainty over the ‘is he going to hit me or grab me again?’ question.

“I think I lost the key,” she said, just loud enough for us to hear. It could’ve been quieter. Did she want us to hear it?

“Come on,” Meme-douche pushed, “you just don’t want me to come inside. You’re afraid of what we might do together.”

“I’m not afraid of what I would do,” she said plainly. At the moment the implication seemed pretty clear to us. It got that much clearer when he grabbed her shoulder. The Fastest Food marched straight down the hall towards them. We couldn’t have stopped her if we tried, but we didn’t try so… yeah. Both of them turned to her. Her mask creeped them out and probably gave them the impression they were about to be mugged.

“So were you born a fucker?” my cow-faced teammate asked the guy in a chilling whisper.

“What are you mooing about, freak?” he asked right back. If all she was going to do was argue, he probably had a hundred different pointless memes to defend himself. His best weapon was probably a derisive chuckle.

“I asked if you were born a fucker… or if it grew inside you slowly, like athlete’s foot? You don’t look much like an athlete…” Telephony looked at me like he was about to be hit by a semi-truck. This wasn’t part of the plan.

“What do you want?” the guy asked Food.

“I want you to leave her alone.”

“She’s a big girl,” Meme-douche said. He took his hand off the door and backed up a step, as if giving her room to run away was proof he hadn’t done anything wrong. “She doesn’t need your help. Right babe?”

“I can handle him,” the girl said with a thin smile. Man, this one was hard to read. The Justice Backers had it easy. All their bad guys wore masks or had giant robotic hands or something.

“You want to go inside,” the Fastest Food said, kind of ignoring her. “You want to go into her room and then you want to go right into her.”

“Woah…” the girl said, suddenly backing up from everybody. “Look, I appreciate your concern but he was just leaving.”

“I’m not leaving until…” Meme-douche started to say, but Food heard ‘not leaving’. She got up in his face with her rubber cow nostrils. He pushed her, but she barely rocked backward. As soon as he took her bait, as soon as his fingers hit her shirt, a peaceful solution was out the door. She took a wicked swing at him and broke his nose on the spot.

He collapsed against the wall and shouted, trying to kick her away. Food had a practiced combo for that, like some kind of fighting game character. She pulled on his leg, elbowed his thigh, and threw three more punches into his ears. That’s when Telephony and I got to her and tried pulling her off of him. Things only got worse from there. The guy from the desk downstairs, drawn by his shouting, showed up wielding a big black flashlight like a club. He was thicker and taller than Meme-douche. We were trying to call ourselves superheroes, but this ordinary big guy scared the piss out of me.

He grabbed Food and tried to pin her arms to her sides. She was practically frothing at the mouth as she shouted something about Meme-douche being a rapist through her bovine muzzle. The shit was already pretty ground into the mechanism of the fan, so I had to make a drastic decision. I whistled.

My troops came bounding out of our room and helped get the odds back in our favor. Vincent Van’s barking kept Meme-douche and the girl at bay. Ernest and Bridget swirled around the hotel guy’s head, convincing him to loosen his grip on The Fastest Food. Once she had an inch she stomped on his toes, lunged at Meme-douche for one more punch, and then took off running down the hallway. We barely had time to snatch our bags from the open room.

We followed her, Telephony setting the full ice bucket on the front desk, gently, as we blew by it. We ran until we were certain no police car would bother searching that far for the weird kids that attacked the nice young couple. It was kind of cold and we had nowhere to go, but Saintly was on it. He meowed from behind a bush to get our attention and led us away from the main road.

He had found an abandoned tree house in a strip of woods far enough away from the highway to make the honking of the trucks sound like the distant call of an owl. We all climbed up into it and took a crooked wall to lean against. There were no blankets. That’s it. That’s how day one of our mission turned into us seeking shelter from the biting wind. Opinions on the situation varied.

“We fucking did it,” The Fastest Food declared. “We stopped a sexual assault.”

“Maybe,” I said aggressively.

“What do you mean maybe?” she shot back. “You saw that guy. He grabbed her. He said he wasn’t leaving. He was going to rape her with his tiny green imp cock.”

“She said she could handle him.”

“I didn’t see anything super about her. I don’t think she could have.”

“And you’re the judge? You’re wearing a cow mask. You look like a home invader who likes blackmailing the owners into sticking their fingers in a blender.”

“I think I’ve seen that movie,” Telephony mumbled. He was trying to change the subject, which was foolish. The wind was in our bones, so the subject was too.

“You can’t fly off the handle like that,” I told our terrorist. “It just looks like you beat the snot out of a guy for no reason. That’s bad publicity for us.” Vincent Van whined; I was rubbing his neck a little too hard. I whispered an apology to him and put him in my lap to keep him warm. “We’re a team now. We’re supposed to vote.”

“If we took the time to vote it would’ve happened,” she argued. “Then that girl would have it inside her forever. She’d never be rid of it and she’d wind up with scars like those.” She pointed a gloved finger at my arms, at the scars I couldn’t pass off as cat scratches because of the way they lined up perfectly. God, that bitch knows how to get people going and how to shut them down. I needed people to stop being around after that, so I just focused on my animals.

Tracy dropped something in my lap. I picked it up and opened it. Hotel guy’s wallet. Great. Now I had to mail that back. We’re supposed to be thieves on this mission, but classier thieves than that.