*Earlier that evening in the factory*

Her confusion about meeting Ramiel in this place was total, but she listened to the angry man.

Safora flew to the hole in the wall, her eyes welling with tears because of all the smoke. Just as she almost passed through, someone else collided with her.

After clearing the escaping smoke she found herself struggling with the man that caused all the explosions. The man that had maimed and murdered all those people she saw scattered in the factory.

‘Screw you, I will throw you right in front of the police cars,’ Safora thought.

They struggled midair and Safora was stronger than the man holding on to her.

They were over the river when she punched him in the mouth. In response, he snapped his fingers and Safora closed her eyes from the sudden bright light.

Next thing she knew the man was falling feet first toward the river. Diving into it and vanishing without a trace.

Safora was angry at first then she realized that her jacket, pullover, pants, scarf, and hat were ripped apart by the explosion, and she squeaked the most embarrassing squeak ever squeaked.

“God damn it! You didn’t just! YOU DIDN’T!” Safora shouted to the night sky trying to somehow fix her shredded clothes while covering herself with one hand. “Screw this!”

Looking down, Safora yelled at the river, “AND SCREW YOU, YOU DOUCHEBAG!” Then she flew away in a hurry, back to her dormitory.

Her cheeks ran hot with shame. She did not doubt that her head was as red as a tomato. ‘I will rip that guy's head off!’ Safora raged on the inside.

Tears welled up while she was flying. This was some bullshit. How would she beat his butt black and blue without him doing this again?

She began incoherently cursing. To an outsider, it probably sounded like a mixture of a sailor and two wild cats screaming at each other. Such was her fury that Safora had trouble quieting down before flying down to the school district.

Reaching her window she climbed into her room and looked right at the dressing mirror on the wall. Her clothes were ruined and still smoking! Before she could touch down someone to her left coughed.

Safora yelped when Laena turned on the light on her nightstand.

“What the hell, Safora?!” Laena sat there mouth agape. Then the smoke alarm in their room went off.

“I-I can explain.” Safora sputtered.

Footsteps were coming down the hall, and Laena’s eyes grew even bigger. “You can't be seen like this in our room. Back out now.”

“Wait, I need new clothes first!” Safora tried to protest again her shoving friend.

“What you need is not being here, when the hall mother and security get her. Out! Now!”

Safora quickly floated outside cursing.

“Go up to the roof, before someone sees you. And wait there till I come to get you, you screw-up.” Laena verbally kicked her on her way out.

Safora flew up to the roof, still with her major wardrobe malfunction. The shame was just too much. She sat on the roof atop the staircase exit hiding her bare assed self behind a ventilation shaft.

‘Laena better not take too long,’ Safora thought, burying her face in her pulled-up knees. She could feel her face still running red hot with shame.

----------------------------------------

Laena turned around in time to see the dormitory mother open the door accompanied by the night security. Now she had to come up with an excuse quickly.

She was pulling blanks from her mind. There were no candles in their room, so that wouldn’t fly. She needed an excuse that didn’t get her into a world of trouble. The world appeared very slow, but all the extra time in the world made her troubles only worse.

‘One cigarette!’ Laena thought with panic. She knew that this dormitory mother was a smoker. Maybe getting away with trying one smoke she got from an older student was in the cards here. Laena had to play it cool.

Trying to look ashamed she put her hands behind her back and looked down.

“Where’s the fire?” The dormitory mother asked, and Laena shuffled her foot on the carpet.

“No, fire, ma’am. I-I did something stupid.” Laena said in a quiet voice pretending to tear up a bit.

“Franky, could you turn that off, please? And send the nosey ones back to bed. I will take care of this.”

The security guard looked back and forth between the two women in the room and decided that it was indeed best handled without him and turned off the alarm at the door with his key. He threw one last scolding look back at Laena and went out closing the door behind himself.

The dorm mom sniffed for a second and looked over at the open window.

Laena tracked her eyes and spoke up. “So, one of the older girls gave me a cigarette and I stupidly tried it out.”

“You know it’s only a confession when the other party hasn’t figured it out yet.” The woman walked to the window looking down. “Well, it landed probably somewhere on the pavement. No fire hazard.”

She turned around to Laena. “I realize that smoking near the dorms makes me not the ideal person to tell you this, but you’re too young to smoke. But I remember being your age once. When my mother caught me smoking in the kitchen, she asked me what was going on. I had snuck one of my father’s cigarettes from his pack and lit it when I thought everybody was gone. My mom came back and asked why she smelled smoke.”

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Laena was a bit intrigued and asked of her own accord. “So what happened then?”

The woman laughed like she was reliving an embarrassing memory. “I lied and said I didn’t know why it smelled like that. The next thing I knew was getting two slaps on each cheek so fast I only realized in the evening that my face was still burning.”

Laena wondered why that was a laughing matter, but the woman continued with her tale without Laena having to prod her.

“Yeah, it turns out feigning ignorance while holding a still-lit and smoking cigarette behind your back isn’t very convincing.”

That cracked Laena up, but she didn’t waste the ball she got passed. “I thought you had thrown the cigarette out as I did.”

The dorm mom laughed with her. “Nope, my mother came home so suddenly I barely had time to turn to the door and hide the cigarette behind my back. To be fair I was younger than you were today.” She paused and pursed her lips. “And not honest about what I had done. This won’t happen again, right?”

Laena nodded eagerly. “Yes, it won’t happen again. Sorry, about that.”

Then came the question she dreaded.

“Who gave you that cigarette? I would like to have a talk with them.”

Laena looked down. “Well, she was from a different county, so I didn’t know her name. We just hung out behind the library today.”

“Hm, I see. You’re lucky I am not your mother right now. But I understand that tattling on another student is different from coming clean for your deeds. Let’s leave it at that.” That remark stung more than the dorm mom could know. As an orphaned child, she missed her parents dearly.

The dorm mom walked to the door, and Laena held her breath after she closed the door and waited for her to walk away. She was so lucky that this wasn’t one of the disciplinarian dorm mothers or one of the extremely religious weirdos.

She walked to Safora’s closet and got her some training pants and a shirt and put them in her gym bag. Then she looked at the door of the dorm and swung out of the window and began to climb up the facade of the dorm. Nimble like a spider, Laena would have enjoyed her climb if not for the catastrophe she would have had to listen to once she reached the top.

Once upon the roof, Laena put her hands on her hip. Looking around for her friend.

‘Just wait till I get my hands on you, Safora.’ She hissed as quietly as possible. “Hey, dunderhead, where are you hiding? Come out.”

Safora’s voice rang out just as silently as Laena’s, but with an attitude that made Laena purse her lips. “I am naked over here just throw me some clothes first, will you?”

Laena crossed her arm “Not with that attitude, I’m not. How about, thank you for saving me from being caught smoking in the remains of my former clothes, Laena? Sorry, I’ve been doing something crazy behind your back again, Laena. How about you try that on for a change, 'cause right now I am thinking about just climbing myself back down to our room, closing the window, and just cozying into my bed while you figure this out as you chose to go about it.”

She paused for a second so that her friend could start her excuses routine that Laena just knew was coming.

“Well, you see-”

“On your own! Cause that’s how you wanted to do this, right?” Laena cut her friend's weaseling off. Safora was pouting. Laena knew it without seeing her friend.

“Sorry, I flew out without you,” Safora said after a long pause. Her voice sounded shaky.

“Yeah, I bet you are. Did you fly like that all over the place?”

Safora shrieked affronted. “Hey! Alright, enough is enough. You can question me when I have some clothes on and we aren’t sitting on the roof.”

Laena walked up to where Safora’s voice was coming from. “Okay, show me your hands.”

A pair of hands popped up from the spot above the staircase.

Laena readied an easy pass and said, “Catch.” before she threw the bag gently up to Safora.

“Thank you,” Safora responded in an unusually mousy tone. “Erm, d-did you see my hair? Was my hair okay?” Her friend said while she began changing her clothes in a shaky voice.

Laena leaned against the wall and looked at the night sky. “Well, your hair looked normal but I could have sworn…”

Her friend’s head popped over the edge panic in her eyes. “What? What is it!?”

Laena tried to stay very serious and said in a played reluctant manner. “So…um the thing…the thing is that your eyebrows…they’re gone.”

Safora’s face went from adorably red to white as a bed sheet. “No! You’re joking, right? This can’t be real…Nonono! Monday is yearbook day!” Her face went from shock to breaking into actual tears in a matter of seconds.

Laena suddenly felt horrible for teasing her friend. “I was just kidding. Hey, don’t cry! They are all there and not singed just like your hair, everything’s fine. Come on, don’t be a baby. Don’t cry over a little joke, okay.”

Safora looked so relieved that she didn’t even get angry and throw something at her friend. Rubbing tears from her eyes and sniffling. “Thank, god.”

Then she was gone again and getting off her tattered clothes.

“I was about to ugly cry,” Safora said, her voice still trembling.

Laena wanted to know what happened to her friend and what she had been up to recently. “So you’ve been going out on your own every Friday, or are you going to tell me it was just today?”

Safora’s head popped over the edge again. “You see when I skipped on the first Friday in the library I was sitting in our room going up the walls… literally. I was bored out of my mind…so I took a little trip outside. And everything was fine. I didn’t do anything crazy.” Her friend made a face and continued, “That was… erm until today. There was a fire in the industrial district on the other side of the river. Just the day before there was the news about the pyromaniac bombing and burning of the warehouses’ dockside. So I thought I could catch this crazy person.”

Laena watched as her friend once again vanished. Stopping her tale in the middle was just rude. ‘You were just about to tell me about the sensational part, weren’t you? Ugh, who tells a story and just stops when things were about to get interesting?!’ “Well?”

Safora responded confused. “Well, what?”

Laena got irritated, “Are you going to tell me the rest of the story, or what?”

Her friend looked over the edge again. “Well, yes, once we’re inside. It’s a bit difficult. Oh, I met Ramiel today, by the way. Erm, he says hi.” Her face vanished again quickly.

Laena felt her left eyelid twitch, and her temples began to throb. She was just about ready to jump up there and spank her friend until her behind matched her formerly red face. It felt like she was about to pop a vein.

“That’s what you get for saying my eyebrows were gone,” Safora said from beyond the edge.

“Oh, that’s it! I’m coming up there!” Laena was fresh out of patience with Safora, even though she might have deserved that.

They began bickering while Laena chased the now once again dressed Safora around the staircase mantle sticking out from the roof like a chimney.

A few hours later, Laena lay in bed, the explanation cluttering her mind. At least they would finally get back in contact with Ramiel, Laena thought. Her friend laying beside her had decided that she had the right to move in with her after a shower to rinse off the ash and fire smell. Her bed was overwhelmed by an extra pillow, another blanket, and all the extra pillows that came with the average Safora nest.

On top of that, her friend fell asleep as soon as she had told her all the relevant facts and details. Leaving her alone with her thoughts. But that wasn’t where her troubles ended. Safora was having some kind of nightmare and was snuggling up to her clambering like a little kid.

‘Ugh, this is going to be a terrible night’s sleep.’ Laena resigned herself to pushing off the thinking and worrying till morning. She pulled up her blanket over Safora and herself. Laena put her blanket up to her nose making Safora stick out only with the top of her head. Leaning on her friend’s forehead with her chin she closed her eyes.

_________________________________________________________

*Meanwhile in an empty house in the Suburbs*

A man was bandaging a cut on his shoulder, closing the superficial cut with a special compression and bandaging technique. Doing this to himself felt awkward, but he was well-versed in the art of patching himself up.

In his head, the attack on the factory played out over and over. The entry was clean, the initial attack perfect, and he destroyed a lot of their resources. He had been reckless and distracted. It should have dawned on him sooner that the people in the factory didn’t run like they usually would. Many of the Swaddies were older men. They merely played for time, sacrificing themselves to hold him there.

When the big men came, he quickly learned that they were like him, stronger than normal men. He stood his ground and found that they weren’t nearly as strong, well-trained, or explosion-proof as he was.

The man who came to his aid when one managed to get behind him entered the scene in his memory next.

He had taken a man out easily. The issue was that he then saved the same man from being finished off. The man also dropped in just the right spot where moments earlier he had stood which made it suspicious.

Had he been followed by that man?

The scene moved on and he found himself in the thick of it when a shadow above him made him look up. The swaddy man with two axes fell toward him, and once again the man intervened, kicking the swaddy mobster out of the way.

The floor around him was drenched in water. The swim in the river had thoroughly soaked him. His potential ally was catapulted away only a blink after saving him by the flying woman who didn’t intervene in the rest of the fight otherwise.

Were they enemies? Was the guy that saved him twice an ally of his? Also out for revenge on the mafia terrorizing his City. The same people who killed his daughter and grandfather out of pure greed. Fighting like dogs over who got to exploit honest people.

That made the flying woman his enemy then. While he whittled down the gangsters the Axeman managed to slice him in the shoulder. Just barely, but he couldn’t dodge the attack.

When he made his escape through the hole in the upper floor, he got swooped into the air. She had attacked him while he tried to escape. He remembered her big green eyes. There were no tattoos on her temples yet, a girl he concluded. His hatred had led him to use his powers on a child. The punch she gave him the moment he attacked her made his nose bleed. Thankfully it wasn’t broken, but the power of the girl had surprised him.

He remembered the fall toward the water and the subsequent dive through the river. swimming upstream and making it back home to treat his wounds. It wasn’t easy, but he had worse during the pacific campaign.

And with the powers he had now, he was more lethal than he was at any point in his service.

Getting up after fastening the bandage properly, he made his way to the master bedroom. His footsteps made a wet slurping sound echo through the empty and cold home. He walked past his daughter’s room. The small embroidered name on the shield.

Tears welled up in his eyes, knocking on the door like he used to. “Just wait. I’ll get them all, baby girl.”

A moment passed, and he hung his head. There would be no one knocking back anymore. He stumbled his way down the deserted hallway of his barren home.

It was his tomb, and he was the residing ghost.