Thankfully, with our false starts, we had gotten pretty good at coordinated breaking-and-entering. Akane had whipped up an absolute masterpiece as far as infiltration vehicles went, and we were sitting in it now, ready and waiting for the drop.

Our infiltration vehicle was, in the end, actually pretty simple. Skinner's base was on the edge of the Mojave Desert, about a hundred and fifty miles from Phoenix, Arizona- where this year's Super Bowl will be hosted, the Sunday after next- as the crow flies.

Or, in our case, as the raven flies. We were being carried by a perfectly ordinary, wild-captured raven- common in the Mojave, and likely something that'd flown over Skinner's base a few times before- that I had controlled telepathically.

We sat inside a mole machine Akane had built, which had been actually rather spacious to start with, before she shrank it down to be smaller than a mouse, so that the raven could carry it without being suspicious, or even particularly visible from the ground.

"Finally," Lisa said. "A use for that shrinking ray you came up with."

"It's hardly my fault nobody has a macro or micro fetish," Akane said primly.

"Also, remember that time she shrank someone's truck?" Nicky added.

"I remember it like it was a few months ago," I said. "Because, well. It was."

"Smartass," Lisa said.

"...You've met me, right?" I asked.

Now, unfortunately, being a hundred and fifty miles from Phoenix, and being carried by a raven- who generally flew at around twenty five miles an hour- meant that we had a long flight to our destination, but fortunately, when you stuffed three lesbians and their bisexual girlfriend into an enclosed space, they found ways to occupy themselves.

Such as argue about the finer points of The Simpsons lore, or workshop my demonsona transformation- which I had been wearing for most of the flight because it wasn't like I had anything better to do- or watch the Spanish dub of Mobile Suit Gundam.

"Once or twice," Lisa said with a shrug.

"Anyhow," I said, shaking my head. "We're half a mile out. Drop is in thirty seconds."

"Here we go," Akane said, adjusting her harness before gripping the controls.

"T minus ten... nine... eight... seven... six... five... four... three... two... one... the raven has dropped its payload, and is free and clear."

We dropped at a good clip, our mass not being completely shrunken in accordance with our volume, and hit the ground with significantly less of a hard thud than we should've- after all, the Mojave was not a particularly sandy desert, and in fact was mostly covered in dry, hard, solid earth. However, Akane's mole machine had a little aura around it that temporarily turned hard rock into soft sand, letting it tunnel through at an alarmingly fast rate.

Well. Alarmingly fast for tunneling. We were traveling at an ordinary jogging pace, of around three meters per second. Still, that was a lot faster than we'd be going through rock.

"Alright," I said, checking my gear one more time, mostly on autopilot as most of my attention went towards our scanners. "Adjust heading... twelve degrees clockwise on the horizontal plane, and forty one degrees downward. Activating anti-teleportation field projectors now."

"Twelve degrees clockwise, forty one degrees downward," Akane parroted back as she made the requisite adjustments. "How close are we?"

"Breakthrough in two minutes," I said. "If anyone has to pee, now's your last chance."

Thankfully, nobody had to, and two minutes later, we pierced through the upper corner of a fairly mundane-looking storage room, made of concrete and lit by a reddish-tinted lightbulb, and landed on the floor. Disembarking was easy; the door popped open, we stepped out, and swiftly grew back to normal size, slowly enough to take a few more steps away from the craft and clear the way for the next person. Then, Akane simply picked up the mouse-sized craft, stuck it in a little compartment holster in her forearm armor, and we were on our merry way.

Honestly, Akane had changed the most for this hunt, having created our entry vehicle, but also having revamped her armor, turning it from a simple compression jumpsuit that happened to be well-armored into a (somewhat) low profile suit of power armor that, in all honesty, looked very reminiscent of the Varia Suit from Metroid, and in fact the whole thing did in fact look like she was visually name-checking Samus Aran, except with a lot more red.

(While everyone else was learning Spanish, I was learning Japanese, and one of the bits of trivia Akane had bestowed upon me personally was that her name was the Japanese equivalent of the name Rose, being as it referred directly to both a shade of red as well as a plant known for being a source of the color red- granted, a rose simply was red, whereas common madder, referred to in Japanese as "deep red" or akane, was a plant whose roots were used to make red dye.)

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

(I'd mentioned that this explained why Akane's favorite color was red- not that this needed to be explained- but had expressed confusion as to its relevance at the time. And she'd informed me that she also knew my favorite color was red, and that I had, for a brief time, gone by Rose before switching to Roxanne.)

"Alright," Lady Venus said, taking point, an upgraded hammer in hand, courtesy of Akane. "Everyone ready?"

"Ready," Akane said, her arm cannon unfurling and deploying around her left forearm. She'd been studying weapons as of late, and had easily surpassed my, admittedly, very cursory abilities in that field.

"Let's do this," Red Fox said, her jumpsuit shifting into strategically-placed armor plating as her sexy foxgirl form shifted into a hulking mass of fang and fur.

"Take it by the numbers," I said, drawing my own weapon, my unassuming-looking revolver.

Lady Venus threw the door open and darted through, with all of us following close behind her, as we entered into a large chamber.

"Ah, there you are," 8-Ball said, turning to face us. "I have to admit, designing this place around the fact we didn't have a specific entrance we knew you'd be coming from was tricky, but I think I managed just fine."

"Huh," I said, blinking as I took in the sight of my old cult buddy turned self-proclaimed nemesis, back yet again to blight my existence. "Aren't you supposed to be in jail?" And, also, missing a suit of armor. This one looked a lot different though; bulkier, yet also more refined. 8-Ball had likely improved their grasp on the principles of armor.

"Oh, I got out months ago," 8-Ball said dismissively. "The good Doctor sprung those vampires, too, although she admitted she didn't know what else to do with them. Replaced us with some Control-empowered props that tricked people into thinking they were the real deal, and nobody knew we were free and clear. And now, we can finally settle thi-"

"I'm going to stop you right there," I said, holding up my empty left hand to stop them. "I do not care about you. If I was so invested in hating you as you are in hating me, I would've just killed you when I had you at my mercy."

That brought 8-Ball up short.

"...what?" 8-Ball asked.

"You heard me," I said simply. "You do not matter to me. Doctor Skinner is my nemesis, not you. You're just another one of her minions."

"But-" 8-Ball began. "We're equals and opposites, you and I! You took after the master but then betrayed her, whereas I took a different path but still served her loyally!"

"No," I said. "We aren't equals and opposites. Now stand down, or be made to. I really do not have a preference in the matter. "

"I'll enjoy wiping that smug look from your-" 8-Ball snarled, before a squealing electric whine overtook the room, the burnished steel of their armor turning into ordinary, unbrushed aluminum.

"Being made to it is," I said, as Akane lowered her arm cannon. Turns out, while anti-transformative armor is totally possible, it's rarely considered worthwhile, just because near-masters of transformation like Akane were so rare. Regular armor was usually quite enough to protect one from an amateur trying to turn you to stone, but Akane? Akane knew exactly what she was doing. "C'mon, guys. Let's keep moving before Skinner gets away."

The anti-teleportation field projectors, while better than nothing in terms of preventing her from simply stepping through a door here and exiting in Milwaukee, weren't super strong in any given area, to compensate for how wide of an area I figured we might need to cover.

We kept scanning as we went, descending deeper and deeper into the complex of concrete and reddish lights, following the conduits of power and data that seemed to connect all the security cameras (which, naturally, were all now disabled) to a single centralized location.

And then, finally, we arrived at that centralized location.

"She might be in the bathroom," Lady Venus said hopefully, as I looked over the desks.

"No, she isn't," I said, as one of my tentacles darted out to grab a sheet of paper that literally had my name on it. "'To the inestimable Doctor Roxanne Updyke. You've done well to divine my plans and trace me to this base. However, I finished my preparations months beforehand, and have nothing left to do but wait for the big day to arrive, and occasionally pop back to put out fires. In the meantime, I hear the beaches on Earth C-192 are nice at all times of year. Graciously, Doctor Skinner.'"

"Ah," Lisa said, intelligently.

"Alright, we are in a failure state," I said simply, gripping my gun tightly. "A recoverable failure state, but still a failure state."

"We really do have to just... wait for her to show up, on Super Bowl Sunday," Nicky said.

"Wait, if she's not here," Lisa began, "how did the spirit bullets point to here?"

"Last location on this plane, probably," I said. "She portaled out of this room, probably in a mole machine, and then burrowed to the surface on a new world." I sighed. "Alright, well. Let's go home, I guess."

"Would it make you feel better if we blew the place up behind us?" Akane asked.

"Not really. Let's just... let's just leave."