Dan picked up a fresh bag of flour before heading home. He reappeared in his pantry and shelved the heavy sack, before wandering into the kitchen and finding Abby making coffee. She was in a loose t-shirt and pajama pants, pretty much what she'd been wearing all day. She'd stayed home, waiting for him. She looked up as he entered, smiling softly.
Dan closed the distance and hugged her tight. His ribs creaked as she hugged him back. Her hair tickled his nose. She smelled like lavender soap and home. He pulled away after a lifetime had passed, and he smiled back at her.
"You're on television," she told him, booping Dan on the nose. She used the motion to turn his head towards the TV, visible in the living room beyond the kitchen counter. The local news was on; Dan could vaguely recognize the logo of the channel. Talking heads narrated the collapse of the Evo Church, while a cut-together video of the raid played in the background. Most of it was shaky-cam quality, recorded by distant civilians watching the action. There were a few scenes, though, clearly taken from the body cameras of officers on scene. That this story was already being picked up as far as Texas was not a great sign.
"Hoo-boy," Dan murmured. "Carver's not gonna like that."
There was video of the hypnotized civilians. It was taken from what appeared to be a distant high-rise, but even then it was obvious something was amiss. The crowd milled like animals waiting in the butcher's line. They moved as a herd, swaying hypnotically in the breeze. Their attention was fastened on a point in the distance, somewhere inside the church, and their backs were to the camera. They looked more like mannequins than people. It wasn't great, but it could've been explained away as an orderly gathering.
Then the screen changed to a view on the ground, and any hope of delaying the truth was killed in its crib. This was video from a body cam. There were officers standing around, shifting uncomfortably. This close, the faces of the civilians were clear. The crowd was sideways to the camera, each and every face directionally synced. Their eyes were vacant. Their jaws hung loose. It was incredibly creepy.
It was also not the plan. Carver's press statement was meant to be the primary source of information on this event, but someone had leaked body cam footage early, before the feds could take control of the narrative. Now, with clear evidence of civilians acting strangely, the whole world was free to speculate on the cause. The news headline banner read 'Church of Infinite Evolution attacked by villain?' and the correspondent was currently positing the federal presence was due to this villain attack. No other information was given; Carver's statement was clearly still being composed.
"The Church looks like the victim in this," Abby observed. "I'm guessing that wasn't the plan."
"No," Dan agreed with mounting horror. "That wasn't the plan."
Abby led him by the arm to the couch and sat him down. Dan found himself holding a cup of coffee without ever remembering accepting it. He sipped at the bitter beverage, eyes never leaving the screen. He was waiting for a correction, or a sudden shift in story focus. He was waiting for the fed's press statement to be read. Carver must have set her keyboard on fire by now, seeing all this.
He checked his watch. Three hours since the beginning of the raid. Almost half that time was spent standing around while Carver negotiated with the Elder and scavenged the basement. Everything relied on the strict information control that was standard in Dimension A. The press generally didn't push too hard for information on police raids, and even less for federal ones. They would obviously report on whatever information was available, but would generally keep it fact-based until they received some kind of official word. Apparently, body camera footage was considered official enough to unleash the hounds, and now five different correspondents were spinning increasingly insane tales about what could possibly be happening within the church.
"How long has this been going on for?" he asked.
"'Bout an hour since the police footage first appeared," Abby replied.
Dan swore. This was either a terribly clumsy attempt by the DCPD to do... something? Or, more likely, the Church had someone inside the department who figured this was the best way to mitigate the damage. The first story dictated the narrative, and now the feds would be fighting against its momentum as they tried to get their version of the truth out. No matter what happened afterwards, at least some part of the population will forever believe the Evo Church was a completely innocent victim of a random villain attack. It wasn't even that far from the official story, but the small distinctions made all the difference.
The Evo Church had hired the villain who'd 'attacked' them. They'd sheltered him. They'd, technically, initiated the attack by begging for his help. The Church was at fault for the entire situation! And that was just the FBI's spin on the thing, which only had the barest resemblance to reality.
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"This isn't even current!" Dan realized, as the news reel looped yet another video of civilians clumsily swaying. "Those civvies were freed before I even left!"
Abby pointed at the bottom of the screen. There, a tiny, scrolling banner said 'Update: Situation appears to be resolved, waiting on FBI statement.'
"They made an announcement like ten minutes ago," Abby said. "Just the once, and the program went right back to this." She gestured at the talking heads who were currently arguing over the motives of the attack.
Dan grunted, lacking a better way to express his dissatisfaction. "Whatever. I want to check in on the Andenos." He summoned up his surveillance setup, and began putting it back together. "One of these days," he grumbled, "things are gonna go according to plan."
He assembled his cameras and sound-proof boxes and hooked it all up to the television. A few button presses and a flicker of willpower brought up a camera view of the living room of Peter Andeno. The two of them were both seated on their battered sofa, eyes glued to an old television. They were watching their own local news channel, just an Dan had been. The volume was turned up, voices filling the small, old house, yet an oppressive silence filled the gaps between their words.
The two men, young and old, wore nearly identical expressions. It was as if they were paired Halloween masks, cheap plastic held precariously in place to hide the murderous intentions beneath. There was an unnatural stillness about them. It was controlled, a complete and intentional lack of body language. They were thoroughly suppressing whatever it was they were feeling.
There was a certain beauty in the discipline of it, but a lack of a reaction was still a reaction. Cornelius had schooled Dan on body language many times. The SPEAR leader was an expert at picking out aberrant reactions. It was nearly impossible for an unenhanced human to continuously maintain a foreign façade. Though trained professionals could often mask their body language while in public, nothing short of a specialized upgrade would allow them to keep it up forever. Eventually, inevitably, the mask slips and something gets through.
The unnatural stillness the Andenos were displaying was their unique version of the mask slipping. They were cultists, in the truest sense of the word, and their lifestyle reflected the shrouded circumstances such choices dictated. They had trained themselves to never reveal what they were really feeling, even in private. Security in secrecy. Rather than express themselves, they forced flatness. Dan could feel the tension in them being bottled away. They sat like a pair of coiled springs, held tight within steel clamps.
Nobody could live like this forever. They'd explode. The fuse was already lit. They were sizzling.
Dan settled into watch, and wait. It wouldn't be long, now, he reasoned.
But as the days marched on, Dan began to feel a whole lot less confident. The Andenos fell back into a completely static routine. Young Nikolos meditated in the mornings before school, and in the evenings afterwards. He came straight home each day, time varying only by a few minutes depending on the bus. He did not go out with friends. He did not sneak out at night. He did not play hooky from school. He maintained his routine, even as he simmered and boiled beneath a fragile mask of calm.
The elder Andeno spent all his time at home, either on the phone or in front of the television. The Church of Infinite Evolution was the subject of intense debate in the public sphere. The FBI narrative was finally taking hold, and the internet was on fire with speculation and conspiracy. At this point, it seemed widely accepted that neither the initial reporting of a random villain assault, nor the official FBI report of a villain on staff, was the truth. Instead, people seemed to gravitate to the extreme edges of the spectrum, where the Evo Church was deliberately targeted by some evil mastermind looking to destroy them in retaliation for their good works, or the Church itself was secretly pumping out supervillains, and one went rogue.
It was honestly a little funny how close, yet far, people were from the truth.
The property was under lockdown until the situation could be resolved. Dan had spoken briefly to Carver in the aftermath, and events were proceeding... mostly as planned. The Church's license as a religious institution would be revoked, but it may not hold. The Elder had shouldered the full weight of the charges, and the Evo Church's lawyers were attempting to salvage the situation. It was possible the Church might squirm out of the backlash, by throwing the Elder under the bus.
Agent Carver seemed to think it would depend entirely on public perception. If the citizens of D.C. were swayed to the side of the Church, the government would follow. It was election season, and now was not the time to go against the crowd. Peter Andeno certainly believed so. His time was spent speaking in code to various Church agents and calling in favors from members of the press. He ritualistically activated his EMP device at least once an hour, at randomly shifting intervals. He'd stopped using the egg timer, so Dan had to stay constantly aware of the man's position in the house.
The Geist guards remained present. Dan had expected a few more to show up at some point, but they never did. Wherever the Evo Church's Geists had fled, they were in the wind.
Senator Madison continued to campaign, and though he did not publicly endorse the Evo Church, many of his speeches seemed to lean in that direction. It was all sly winks and dog-whistles, nothing of substance to latch on to, but anyone listening carefully knew what side the Senator was taking. His backing, quiet as it was, held weight. But Anastasia's influence continued to creep on him, and the investigation into his activities continued unabated.
And so, time passed without major incident, right up until a Friday morning two weeks after the Evo Church raid, when Dan woke up to a news report about a new vigilante running around on the streets of Washington D.C.