"Hey."

I grunted wordlessly, not opening my eyes, as Akane walked into my room, carrying something that clinked with the general cadence of a tray, laden with food and drink. It'd been a bit of a routine for us, whenever someone in the house was getting particularly deep in their beakers. I'd been compelled by oath to do this for Lisa during one of her longer rites, in fact. And since we all lived in the same house, using the same stuff, I'd gotten to recognize the sound of the one single serving tray we had, laden with some of the plates from the one big set of dishes we had.

"You okay?"

I'd made some upgrades to my living arrangement, at the insistence of these nosy weirdos who "loved" me and "cared about" my "health and well-being", for some reason. Right now, I was seated in the recliner I'd bashed together along the same lines as that one I'd made for Lisa when she first moved in, except this time, since it was for me, and I knew precisely what kind of weirdo I was, I'd integrated it a bit more with the general modular furniture ecosystem that it'd been designed with, plus the ecosystem that grew up around it as time went on.

Mostly, this amounted to my room having a loft bed with a quartet of bespoke, adjustable four-foot-cube workspaces underneath it, where one such workspace was in fact a recliner, which reclined back into what was, in fact, a storage space where I hung up clothes up top and stored miscellaneous crap at the bottom.

I grunted wordlessly again, and Akane sighed, before unlatching the fold-up table from the wall and setting the tray down on top of it.

"Eat," Akane said, unfolding a chair and taking a seat.

"In a bit," I said, my eyes still closed.

"You know the rules, and so do I," Akane said. "When someone interrupts your work with food, you have to reach a stopping point and eat."

"...Did you just fucking rickroll me?" I asked, finally opening my eyes so I could give her the appropriate look of dismay.

"What's 'rickrolling'?" Akane asked.

"Oh don't play the ingenue," I said, mentally tabbing over to Wikipedia. "You know what it..." I blinked. "...Holy shit you guys don't have Rick Astley here."

"Who the hell is Rick Astley?" Akane asked.

"I'll send you the dossier," I said, before shooting a packet over to her own Virtual Machine.

"...This is just a music video of a mediocre 80s love song," Akane said, ten seconds into, apparently, having been rickrolled for the first time in her life.

"Hang on," I said, sending the same packet over to Nicky and Lisa, with the header 'Akane and I enjoying a moment together.'

Five seconds later, Lisa told me to kill myself, and five seconds after that, Nicky informed me that being rickrolled on-stream was going to spawn some obnoxious memes, and that if she had to see them, so would I.

"Did you vandalize Wikipedia for this prank?" I asked, marveling at Akane.

"Nope!" Akane said, grinning. "I just set up a local spoofing server and hooked it up to our router."

"I'm impressed," I said.

"Thanks!" Akane picked up the teapot and filled our teacups- it was then that I noticed she'd brought lunch for two, which was an uncommon variation of this maneuver, but one that I'd sprung on her once or twice before. "So, what were you working on?"

"It's... complicated," I said, frowning.

"So complicated that you, a woman who's generally quite good at communicating when she so deigns to try, can't explain it to me, even though pretty much the only thing you would actually be working on is trying to find Doctor Skinner, using techniques of mad science that I also specialize in, and am in fact very nearly your peer in?" Akane said. "Or are you just marinating in despair and don't want to talk about it?"

"...When the hell did you get perceptive?"

"I always have been," Akane said, shrugging daintily. "It just doesn't seem like it because I'm also optimistic, enthusiastic, and friendly, so that plus looking like this-" She gestured at her body. "-means that people, including you, end up with the unshakeable feeling that I'm a naive bimbo, instead of an intelligent young woman who sees the world through clear eyes and just isn't being a jerk about it. That's probably part of what tripped you up about me for a while, actually, back before we started dating."

"...Fair enough," I said, because, well, what could I really say in response to that?

"Although, maybe I'm being a little unfair," Akane continued. "You, Nicky, Lisa, Mom, Silas... All of you are traumatized, in ways that I'm just... not. I didn't grow up with shitty parents, nor did I get recruited into a cult. I'm lucky, in ways you aren't."

"A bit," I said. "I'm just... Mmmn. Honestly? I'm worried about our chances of stopping Skinner."

"You've kicked her ass before, haven't you?" Akane asked.

"Not comprehensively, no," I said. "The time I got closest to killing her, I took her by surprise by betraying her confidence. Every other time, I thoroughly ruined her plan and managed to injure her, but... well, if I'd managed to kill her, like I'd been trying to each time, then obviously, we wouldn't be in this particular mess. Plus, this time I don't have Jason Thronebreaker helping."

"Instead, you just have some of the most powerful half-spirits living on this planet, and also me," Akane said.

"This world is different, in ways that favor her more than me," I said. "On A-510, the supernatural underworld was thick and dense with people who've been living in this cultural underground their entire adult lives, which, in the case of like a quarter of them, could legitimately be hundreds of years. People like Skinner made waves, wherever they went. Waves that I could track her through. But here, on B-944... it's a lot thinner. Supervillains just aren't used to dealing with the sort of subtle, insidious threat that even a neonate vampire can pose."

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Speaking of vampires-"

"We've set up a tracking station for vampires. There's precisely two of them outside of Skinner's fairly limited aegis, and they're both in cold storage. We can't rule out the possibility of a specific and finite number of vampire agents working on Skinner's behalf, or the legitimately very terrifying possibility of an elder vampire who's got enough blood magic to hide their presence from us without Skinner's help. But! Vampire blood magic has limiting factors and is really hard to learn, generally taking on the order of entire human lifetimes to get good at it. So, uh. We are, currently, fairly confident that a vampire apocalypse isn't in the cards."

"Okay, that's good," Akane said, nodding. "Plus, vampire elders are pretty easy to keep track of through other means, I've been told."

"...By who?"

"By people on A-510 who know things you don't," Akane said. "Apparently you didn't really spend much time dealing with vampires. Nobody who knew you thought that letting you do that was a good idea. One manipulative cult leader was enough for you to deal with."

"That's- okay, getting back on track," I said, shaking my head. "The fact of the matter is, yes, I have beaten Doctor Skinner before, but it was always with the aid of a wider culture and specific individuals produced by that culture, which simply do not exist here. B-944 isn't Urban Fantasy World. It's Superhero World, and Superhero World is less equipped to deal with the more insidious type of threat that Skinner poses.

"That's the thing- as much as I might've given the impression that I do, I really truly did not work alone. I worked with Jason Thronebreaker or Gravestone or Io The Robot Lesbian-"

"Sounds like you knew some interesting people."

"-and relied on the skills of others that I don't have, and which nobody on this planet has. I'm on the other side of a nigh-impenetrable wall, far away from the people I'd usually ask to help me. And so... I am worried. I don't think it's impossible for me to succeed. But we have left the realm of expecting, and entered the realm of hoping. And as one of the more grounded mad scientists, that absolutely terrifies me."

"I see," Akane said, nodding. "That's... honestly, I'm a little worried about it, too. But. Do you want to know why I'm less worried about it than you are?"

"Because you don't know what Doctor Skinner is capable of?" I asked.

"Possibly," Akane admitted with a careless shrug. "But I think it's because you don't really know what Valiant is capable of. Do you remember Hordemaster?"

"Another mind-controller who worked big crowds, and wanted to try taking on Valiant to prove he was the best," I said. "And then was such a sloppy chump that Valiant never laid eyes on him because he instead got rolled like a burrito the moment a bounty hunter decided she needed some money."

"So," Akane said. "While Hordemaster isn't the best example, because you never got to find out what happened when he did fight Valiant, you at least already know that plenty of mind-controlling villains have tried to fight Valiant and prove that they're better over the years. And do you want to guess how that ended, every single time?"

"Valiant politely ignored them while someone else quietly kicked their ass?"

"No. Valiant let them hit him with their best shot, and then proceeded to kick their asses up and down the street, time after time. Here's something you might've forgotten about- remember how House Vega has the hereditary power of Gravitas, and how that also manifests as an aura of social pressure and respect? Because Valiant is also immune to that, even when it's coming from members of House Vega who have a lot more metaphysical power than Nicky does."

"So..."

"So," Akane said, "I'm in agreement with you that Doctor Skinner is a threat. But. In my mind, which is, I think, in the territory of 'well-informed layman' at the very least thanks to, y'know, who raised me and what my social circle has been like, growing up... Doctor Skinner is, ultimately, just Yet Another Mind-Controller, who will inevitably become Yet Another Headstone In The Graveyard Of Arrogant Psychics."

"That's..." I paused, hesitating. "...ultimately, fair. It is, on the balance, not a super-strong possibility in my mind that Skinner succeeds, and conquers both this world and the old one. But, that still leaves in my mind the fear that we won't succeed either, because our goal isn't just to make Skinner fail, but to stop her from causing massive amounts of damage in the first place."

"Ah. Okay, yeah, that's... definitely a major worry," Akane admitted. "Valiant is usually pretty good about cleaning up after these villains, but there's always at least some permanent damage that he can't fix, and... well, none of them were outside-context monsters like Skinner is."

"Yeah," I said, sighing. "So, that's what I've been worrying about."

"And has that done anything useful?"

"...Prompted this air-clearing discussion about my worries with my girlfriend?" I hesitatingly suggested.

"Fair enough," Akane allowed. "Buuuut, since we've had- or at least started- this discussion..."

"Yeah, a distraction would be nice," I admitted. "So, your most recent thesis- that was on mad science pedagogy, right? What is your thesis on that, anyhow?" I picked up the chopsticks, at long last, and popped a gyoza into my mouth, now that I was the passive participant in this conversation. There was a reason I wasn't a social eater, and that reason was that the hole where the food went was also where the words came from, and it was not built for two-way traffic.

"So, it's about reconciling the fact that mad science is an inherently personal art with the desire to teach this art, and mixing in some pedagogical techniques from the arts to find an approach that's more likely to work than just giving up and expecting the student to figure it out themselves. And that has led me to my most recent project, which is an experiment along those lines with vehicles, and..."