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[Transcript]

        While Max, Isaac, and Johnny fought on the frontlines, Lisa was waging a desperate campaign of her own. She’d discovered the levers of power that controlled the criminal underworld of the Detention Fortress... and yet they wouldn’t budge no matter how she tried to bend them to her will. 

        Lisa drifted over in her ethereal way to hover on the outskirts of a square of squatting bullies.

        “Hello, gentlemen,” Lisa hummed in her best stab at femme fatale confidence (a difficult tone to hit, having fallen flat the last three times she’d tried to win new minions). “I see that you’re enjoying a delightful game of chance.”

        A couple hulking hoodlums turned to scowl at her, annoyed at the interruption. They were busy with a high-stakes game of poker, painstakingly drawing cards, erasing cards, and then redrawing them again in chalk each time the state of play demanded any change at all. It seemed like a deeply inefficient way to gamble, Lisa thought. She could help them lose their money so much faster.

        “Crossing your fingers for pocket change is ever so delightful,” Lisa said with a smile, “but did you know that there’s this really fun game that always pays out when you play it? It’s called ‘work’... and I’m your best bet if you’re looking for a pit boss who’d be down to deal you in.”

        Lisa unfurled a fan of shining Starchman Stars, which added a tempting golden sheen to her natural ominous underlighting.

        “All you have to do to win this jackpot... is ante up eight hours of obedience each weekday. And some weekends. But not the major holidays if you ask me ever so nicely.”

        Lisa’s winning smile was rattled to a frown as Juvie roughly jostled past to join the game.

        “Can’t knock the hustle, hoss... but only ’cause Napoleon said never interrupt a clown when they’re busy makin’ a fool of themself. Out of respect for the performance, I assume, and ’cause them French clowns can’t speak up to let you know you’re bein’ rude.”

        Juvie kicked a delinquent aside to steal his seat and deal the next round’s hand, a process that took nearly fifteen full minutes of patient chalk artistry. You can start your timers now to feel the diegetic weight of this endeavor. When she was done, Juvie cast a scornful look at Lisa’s Starchman Stars and scoffed.

        “Your money’s no good down here, hoss. Stars don’t sparkle underground.”

        Lisa narrowed her eyes at the kingpin she sought to supplant.

        “The law of supply and demand would dictate that my Starchman Stars are still more precious in a skyless den of shadow.”

        “There ain’t no LAW down here,” Juvie laughed, “except for MIGHT MAKES RIGHT... or rather, gets to do whatever WRONG’S most FUN.” Juvie gave a bystander a wedgie and then replaced every chalk card in her poker hand with super jokers. “That’s why STICKERS are the currency we use in the Detention Fortress.”

        Juvie nodded at the colorful stickers stacked high at the center of the poker game, then rolled up her sleeve to reveal that she was covered in rainbows, smiley faces, cartoon cats, and gold stars that disgustingly lacked a bespectacled bald man at their center. 

        “Glow in the dark, scratch and sniff? That’s a BONUS. Big bills. But it’s all legal tender so long as it sticks to the flesh.” Juvie ripped a pink heart sticker off her shoulder without wincing, stood, and rudely reapplied it to a frowning Lisa’s forehead. “The only way to make a fortune... is to TAKE a fortune... and every sticker on your skin is proof you caused somebody PAIN. What ELSE would prove your worth down here, where pretext can’t survive??”

        “...The hygiene not to decorate yourself with other students’ hair and skin cells?” Lisa helpfully suggested, refusing to admit she found this economic system goth and awesome, having been voted “Most Likely to Wear the Flesh of an Enemy” by a since-crushed tribunal of yearbook inquisitors back in Bayview Elementary.

        “Heh. I’ll give you this. You seem like a real slick spider, hoss,” Juvie chuckled, looking Lisa up and down. “Reckon you’re the type who slinks in shadows. Deals in secrets. The sort o’ quiet gal with lots to hide.” She shrugged and gestured to the wasteland prison yard surrounding them. “That mighta served you well enough topside... but here? In the Detention Fortress? There’s nowhere to run... nowhere to hide... and no one you can TRUST to have your BACK.” Juvie’s scornful gaze left Lisa to stare daggers over at a distant Johnny. “This place’ll strip you bare until there’s nothin’ left to lose besides your NERVE... and you won’t MAKE IT if you FAKED IT with your tricks an’ bribes an’ bodyguards ’til now.”

        The archbully of the Detention Fortress reached up, gave Lisa time to throw a punch and prove her wrong, then ripped the pink heart sticker she had loaned her from her forehead. Lisa flinched. A tinny rendition of the Little Witch Tuffet theme echoed out across the yard as Pompom struggled to lead the rowdy inmates in some calming calisthenics, but Lisa tuned it out. She’d only heard the silence in the half-second blink of darkness that her wince had forced upon her.

        “...You’re right. I don’t have anything to lose... and that’s why YOU should be afraid of me,” insisted Lisa, forcing her best eerie smile. “You have your crown, your peers’ respect—and both of those are very much at risk.” She glanced at Max, who was picking up followers like a sticky hand picking up filth as he smacked into walls and failed to get a grip. She glanced at Johnny, who was levitating for some reason. “You had to lend me something you could take away from me,” she said, pointing at the pink heart sticker she’d refastened to her shoulder. “Everything I care about is far away from here.”

        Lisa’s thoughts turned to Violet, safe beneath her bar’s trapdoor, and to the black book where she kept her deepest secrets, still hidden and secure inside her locker. Her sly smirk stayed in place, now, with a little bit less effort.

        “If you don’t care about yourself, hoss... you got worse problems than me. This ain’t a place where anybody ELSE is gonna worry ’bout your welfare,” Juvie drawled. “I wouldn’t count on the way of the underworld gettin’ shook up by the new blood, neither, if that’s the change you’re bankin’ on. I get dethroned—so what? We’re all still trapped in these walls like a maze full o’ minotaurs, drinkin’ milk and eatin’ beef to stay alive.”

        “...Speak on that,” Lisa suggested, sensing actionable madness in this analogy, but Juvie did not opt to extend the metaphor.

        “I’m sayin’ that it wasn’t any different with Johnny in charge. This place calcified an age ago... like any boneyard buried underground and then forgot.”

        “Mannn, all this nihilistic monologuing fills me with such overwhelming ennui,” said an inmate who was definitely not Diva, the seventh Black Saint Councilor-General, in disguise. “It makes me want to ruefully cry out the names of my unprosecuted criminal accomplices, or to start a small riot the guards can suppress and then punish collectively.”

        “I know, Valjean, I know,” Juvie sympathized with a sigh, patting the shoulder of her most loyal lieutenant. “Listen up, Thursday Addams,” Juvie grunted as she turned her focus back to Lisa. “I’ll give you the rundown once, if only ’cause the clique list lacks a shadowy cabal run by a goth chick—and pumpkin, I’m in a Halloween mood.” Everybody cringed at this, so Juvie hurried past it. “There’s about a dozen factions that ain’t budged a permanent inch since the dawn of detention. The borders never change for long, and the bad blood from the last feud’s never settled. NEVER. Even with me as the biggest fish, this small pond’s still no school: most of the bosses bowin’ to me got a grudge against another gang that they just can’t forgive. Best I can do is let ’em duke it out and rule the wreckage.”

        Juvie gestured to a corner of the prison yard where a gaggle of glamorous acrobats was facing off against a herd of musclebound gym ogres.

        “That there’s Harleen, ringmaster of the Classy Clowns. The meathead that she’s starin’ down is Stunner, the reigning combat don of Round House. They’ve always ONCE made peace with—uh, I mean, they never fight—”

        Juvie struggled to keep her exposition accurate as the Sphinx of Lies charged back in range, launching Max across the yard of the Detention Fortress with a single mighty swipe. The wind of the near-miss alone sent Max careening into Harleen of the Classy Clowns, who was swept off her feet and into the arms of her rival by the impact. 

        “OW! UGH, let GO of me!” the criminal ringmaster honked in a fury, scowling up at Stunner. “You smell good and your hands are soft!”

        “Huh?? You makin’ fun of me, Harleen?!” Stunner cracked their calloused knuckles and got ready for another round of brawling. “This is why I love clowns.”

        “Y-you... YOU love clowns?” Harleen asked, suddenly grateful that her cheeks were already painted a bright shade of scarlet.

        “YEAH!” Stunner protested, then froze up in flushed shock at their own irrepressible and undoubtedly honest admission. “Uh, well, maybe, but, uh... I mean, I’ve always liked YOU.” They blinked and turned beet red.

        “HUH?! But I genuinely like YOU! EEP!” Harleen’s rubber nose honked as her hands clapped to cover her mouth. 

        A surge of teen emotion turned new gears in both bullies’ brains, and it was soon the last time either faction leader could have said such words aloud with the Sphinx of Lies around to witness. Luckily, words failed them, and they started making out.

        “Ohmygosh, like nokissingyouguys unless, like, I’minvolved?!” Pompom commanded from her tower, but her megaphoned instructions went unheeded. “Like, why did everybody stopobeyingme? Like are you madatme and HATEme?!”

        Juvie gawked in disbelief at the impossible new couple and their matchmaker. Max had risen up the wall like the bizarre bully messiah he’d become (no doubt of his own power and volition), and was shouting out some cryptic prophecy about how he was going to be eaten by a lion, while Johnny and that other spiky boy had run up to mosh underneath him.

        “...Nothing changes here, does it?” hummed a triumphant Lisa, stealing back her pink heart sticker as she bid Juvie adieu.