You can find the new Makeship campaign RIGHT HERE! This is a preorder fundraiser, so we need to reach 200 pin sets sold to get them made! The ultimate goal is 400+ sold! I'll have more details soon and on social media, but I'm really happy with how these three pins came out and I'm really excited to get them in your hands!

If you caught the previous Activity Club pin set campaign I did with Makeship, these pins match them to complete the collection! If you're able and excited to chip in and get yourself a pin set, THANK YOU SO MUCH! If you're willing to help spread the word, or get some for a friend, THANK you! I always appreciate any and all support.

Thanks again! As ever, you can also support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! Thank you!

~

[Transcript]

        “Lies, you fool!” the Sphinx of Rules hissed down at his brother from the top of Pompom’s tower. “You don’t need to go berserk to win against these witless human grubs!”

        The Sphinx of Rules gnashed his fangs in frustration, having felt his sibling’s power briefly flare to reach his perch.

        No. No. It couldn’t be a lie! Had they really grown that weak?? Had they truly fallen so far from the heights they’d soared as one? Across the yard of the Detention Fortress, the Sphinx of Lies was twisting, growing, as he morphed into a grudge. He let out a mighty roar and lunged at Max, who shrieked and ducked for cover, and Isabel looked back in fear for him as she was forced to leave... but they had frightened armies in their past as the Great Sphinx! They had controlled so many more with one direct, divine command—no clever tricks, no rules, no silly games!

        I used to hate with such FEROCITY! the Sphinx of Rules lamented, feeling now the desperation of the petty grudge they’d nursed against these nasty spectral brats. Our boundless pride was MODESTY when I was them, and we were HER, the greatest Great Wight of them all!

        “...Hey, O’Connor,” Johnny mumbled far below.

        Though he’d bragged that he could handle Isaac’s task for him, the surface of the Student Council’s lighthouse watchtower had proven far more smooth than Johnny had anticipated. After inching up a few feet thanks to pure grit and long-dormant monkey genes that Johnny’s DNA had swapped in to enhance its minmaxed strength build, the Dragon of Detention found himself sweatily spread-eagled on the spire, held to its slick stone surface by little more than the fickle physics of cohesion.

        “I, uh, can totally climb this, but—”

        “I need you to reach the top,” Isaac reminded him, blocked from seeing just how dire Max’s plight was by the watchtower between them. Nonetheless, his only thought was hurrying to help him. “You can do it. Just keep going.”

        “I can do it,” Johnny agreed, and his determination nearly stopped the words from being said aloud.

        Isaac tapped his foot impatiently. What was taking her so long to notice Johnny? He took a deep breath in, prepared to tattletale if it meant—

        “HEY! Like ohmygosh WHAT doyouthinkyou’re DOING downthereJohnny?!”

        Finally, thought Isaac.

        “NO CLIMBINGMYTOWER!!” Pompom declared, and Johnny hooted like a Helm’s Deep Uruk-hai as he was kicked off Pompom’s wall by her new rule and the power of the sphinx.

        Isaac dove to break his fall and, with an updraft’s aid, caught Johnny as he crashed back down to earth. This was not very difficult, as Johnny had only climbed about four feet.

        “I failed you, bro,” Johnny lamented, blinking up at Isaac as he held him in his arms.

        “Yeah,” Isaac said, gazing down at Johnny with a reassuring smile. “You did.”

        Isaac turned the same sparkling expression up to Pompom, channeling the most charming princes of Chivalry X Romance. He could do this. The protagonists of his favorite anime were always winning over distant women while holding rival boys that they disliked (because they’d fallen by coincidence or HAPPENED to be forced to for the sake of plans and tactics).

        “BUT HOW ELSE,” Isaac called out to Pompom in Shakespearean serenade, “IS A LONELY PRINCE SUPPOSED TO REACH HIS PRINCESS?”

        Not far away, Bea spelled out the terms of a vow to destroy Isaac while Max struggled to survive a monster mashup of like three separate labors of Hercules.

        “Like, you boys can WAIT until I’m offtheclock and free to let my HAIRDOWN!” Pompom harrumphed, proudly tossing back a pigtail. “Also I don’tdatelittleWORMS I putinprison because of the lopsidedpowerdynamic?”

        The Sphinx of Rules sidled up unseen beside her. What silly scheme were these pathetic spectrals trying now?

        “Oh! How coherently principled of you!” Isaac swooned, beginning to blush and break out in a sweat. He had to hold out until she said the magic words that he was fishing for...! “What if I were in the Student Council, then? Might I, er, take the stairs to visit? Surely someone is exempt from the draconian decrees of the Detention Fortress—”

        “NO EXCEPTIONS!” Pompom declared through her megaphone. “Like, NOBODY’S ALLOWED UP HERE but ME!”

        The Sphinx of Rules squealed as he was hurled from his perch by the force of his own power, spiraling into the air above the prison yard. Isaac grinned and pumped his fist.

        “ARGGH! WHY, YOU LITTLE—”

        Isaac seized the air to drag a downdraft from the sky, disguising his flourish as a princely bow of surrender to Pompom. The Sphinx of Rules swept sideways just in time, taking flight to dodge the sudden gust. He strafed the wall to right himself, then began to circle the tower and the Detention Fortress—angry, still aloft, and out of reach.

        “Dang it—!” Isaac swore. He already couldn’t use most of the elements his weather powers let him wield, and now he’d lost the element of surprise, too! 

        He had to blow the sphinx out of the sky before it had the sense to perch somewhere his wind blasts couldn’t reach. He had no time to spare. Isaac had to go help Max!

        “You’re a weird little dude,” Johnny commented, still cradled in Isaac’s arms. Repeated use of Friendship Fusion had inured him to the embarrassment of being carried like a princess while in combat.

        “Thanks,” Isaac said with a genuine smile, failing to realize that the Sphinx of Lies had chased Max out of range. “Say, um. Got any ideas for dealing with this jerk now that he’s airborne?”

        Johnny squinted at the purple phantom circling above them.

        “That thing there? Can’t you shoot it with those lightnin’ legs of yours? Or fly like we saw you guys doin’ the other night?” Johnny’s eyes went wide. “Can I fly now?”

        Isaac blinked. He’d had another weird idea.

        “...I’m going to do something deeply inadvisable. It’s a gamble and it’s not going to pay off.” Isaac nodded. That was proof his plan was smart and would succeed. 

        “Heck yeah, brother,” Johnny grinned. That was what he did for fun like almost every day. “Can you put me down first, though?”

        “You bet,” lied Isaac, preparing to do much the opposite. 

        A pair of big, blue spectral energy arms appeared at Isaac’s side—his best attempt at imitating Isabel. They were strong enough to execute his plan, at least, which hinged on Johnny’s newfound spectral substance. Isaac’s phantom limbs seized Johnny by the shoulders, lifting the gobsmacked bully off the ground.

        “Oh my GOSH!” cried Isaac. “Look, he’s FLYING! Someone should tell him NOT TO DO THAT!” 

        Desperate times called for desperate measures, Isaac reassured himself. Mr. Spender could deal with the coverup later, probably.

        “WHAT THE—?!” gasped one student.

        “HE’S A WITCH!” another shrieked, getting in the spirit of the chapter.

        “The Dragon of Detention has achieved a new level of spiritual power,” a bully kingpin correctly theorized. “I had my doubts after Johnny let some weird nerd hold ’im like a sleepy little kitten... but it is cool that he levitates.” The student cast a shrewd look at a stunned Juvie, and at Max as he threw himself against a distant wall for no good reason. “Things are about to get pretty interestin’ around here...”

        “AAAAAAH! Like, this is why we CAGEYOUFREAKS!” squeaked Pompom. In a very useful moment of panic, the eighth Black Saint Councilor-General invoked her earthly authority to staunch the spread of otherworldly chaos. “I totally shouldn’thavetoSAYthis, but... NO FLYING??”

        A giddy Johnny remained aloft, because he wasn’t actually flying. The Sphinx of Rules, however, felt his wings lock up as Pompom’s newly indiscriminate authority reverberated through the fortress. The spirit screeched in fury, swiftly plunging towards the ground.

        “Okay I’m out of CLEVER MOVES!” cried Isaac, and he hurled Johnny at the sphinx with all his strength. “SORRY, SORRY, SORRY—”

        “I’M DA DRAGON OF DETENTION,” Johnny roared, briefly forgetting his objections to the title amidst the peace and purpose he had found as a projectile.

        KA-BAM!!

        Johnny crashed into the Sphinx of Rules headfirst, and the whiplash of the impact sent the spirit skipping like a stone. The Sphinx of Rules slid to a stop in a shower of feathers, mumbled something incoherent about rueing the day and divine retribution, and then collapsed to take a one-hit-KO catnap.

        Cheers erupted from the other inmates, though they didn’t know a battle had been won. Student Council officers rushed the yard to restore order, but their commands and Pompom’s went unheeded... at least until Bobblehead set one paw upon the parapet, and another on the hilt of their huge sword. The power of the now-unconscious Sphinx of Rules had flickered out, leaving only threats and muscle to constrain the rowdy inmates.

        “C’mon, c’mon! Let’s go help Max!” Isaac shouted over the commotion, reclaiming a blissful Johnny from the crowd that he’d been surfing in a daze.

This page took a big push and I have a dear friend visiting from across the country this next week, so Paranatural will be on break next week! Thank you for waiting in the meantime, and thanks for reading! Support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! Thank you!

~

[Transcript]

        The Sphinx of Lies careened over Isabel’s head as she ducked, disguising her dodge as a dip down to retie her shoe. An abrupt about-face she concealed in a stretch gave Isabel’s six spectral arms the momentum they needed to spin like a carwash component. A whirlwind of hands slapped the Sphinx of Lies silly... but “silly” was a status effect the sphinx already had, and only ever seemed to buff the savagery it masked.

        “You’re getting hit by this one, dude!” the battered Sphinx of Lies announced, calling his shot before returning fire.

        Spectral energy expanded and extended his tail into a spiked flail as the Sphinx of Lies whirled in a punch-drunk pirouette. The newly formed weapon lashed out in Isabel’s direction like a tether ball, but she was unperturbed.

        “Cool prophecy,” scoffed Isabel. “That taunt is proof you’re gonna miss, genius.”

        Isabel’s smirk faded as she realized what it meant that she could say those words aloud, but it was too late to react. The sphinx’s golden wrecking ball tail slammed into her, shattering all three of her extra right arms. She pinballed through a confused crowd and crashed against the wall of the Detention Fortress.

        “Oops,” the Sphinx of Lies sneered. “I spoke too soon, dude: you weren’t getting hit... until it hit you!”

        The spirit’s gloating was impaired by the fact that he couldn’t state the truth of his linguistic trick, however, and so he actually said some other, less comprehensible version of the sentence written above. So great was the Sphinx of Lies’ power that he was able to make a liar out of me, your now unreliable narrator. The boast was doubly dampened by Isabel’s C+ in English class, and by the sudden screech of Pompom’s crackling megaphone. 

        “Stop, like, testingthewallsfor WEAKNESSES! Like, you’re totallynotgonna Riki-Oh:TheStoryofRicky(1991) your wayoutofTHISone, littlemiss GUERRA!” Pompom shouted down at Isabel.

        Bea hurriedly amended her movie date playlist, growing increasingly concerned and concerningly intrigued by Pompom’s taste in hyperviolent action movies. Clearly her parents didn’t keep a close enough eye on her, and so it fell on Bea, her responsible nemesis, to stare at her at all times in their stead.

        “...Guerra?” the Sphinx of Lies repeated. “Like, why’s that name sound so familiar, bro?” His stalking approach stalled as he scratched his chin in thought, giving Isabel time to sway back to her feet.

        “Maybe you took... a Spectral Fist lesson or two?” Isabel scoffed, dusting the chalk from her jersey. “Can’t imagine you got much more than a white belt... with constructs that pathetic.”

        Isabel was stalling; she’d blocked the brunt of the sphinx’s attack, but her arm was throbbing from the impact, and the attention that “tripping” had earned her had yet to die down. Still, though, the sphinx’s attack had piqued her curiosity. His truth-telling sister had used spectral energy as a weapon, too... a trick that few spirits employed. Developing the discipline required to reshape raw spectral energy was a needless chore if you had teeth and claws and laser vision, after all. Besides, Isabel knew the core concept of the technique to be her grandfather’s invention... and he would never teach a spirit Spectral Fist (even if the Sphinx of Lies did kind of look like Mr. Spender’s weird fursona). If her last name was familiar, though... could they have fought her grandfather before? Could they have once been his prisoners, like Flipflop was now? Maybe they’d picked up some Spectral Fist basics to turn the technique against its creator?

        “Ohhh! Master Guerra,” grinned the Sphinx of Lies. “I totally forgot about that guy. Are you his granddaughter? I had no idea! Let me tell ya, that dude’s a living legend! He deserves all the credit he gets!” The spirit cracked his neck and flexed his sharpened claws. “Your old man must’ve been a patient teacher. You’ve totally mastered his technique! But I don’t wanna make him mad, so I’ll go easy on you, bro... even though nobody asked me to! I’m such a thoughtful dude!”

        “I’m so scared,” Isabel replied sarcastically, sprouting scarlet spectral talons.

        The Sphinx of Lies grinned wider than anatomy allowed.

        “You’re going to win this fight,” he snarled, and Isabel’s smirk withered on her face. Fortunately, it found cause to return just moments later.

        “YAAAAAAAAAHHH!”

        Max came skipping at the Sphinx of Lies from behind (since it had been decreed that they were not allowed to run). He’d only half-learned one Spectral Fist technique, and his spec-shots were still weird snotballs bound by gravity, but these drawbacks hardly mattered when you egged your foe up close and at top speed. The pop of his punch caused the sphinx to faceplant in the gravel, and Max completed his surprise attack by skipping off its back. His minions cheered, for they believed their jaunty boss had learned to double jump.

        “Max!” laughed Isabel, catching him to stop her friend and his momentum from leaving a second student-shaped impression in the chalk words on the wall.

        The Sphinx of Lies began to rise, rumbling with wrath, before Max had a chance to catch his breath. In a panic, Max swiftly snatched a piece of chalk from a nearby stunlocked student and began forcefully underlining the writing on the wall—the thinnest pretense to disguise the spec-shot eggs that he was flinging at the sphinx over his shoulders. It didn’t help the masquerade that Max was screaming while he did it, but the scattershot barrage did blast the sphinx back off its feet. 

        “HEY!” Pompom barked down at Max, sounding more like a poodle that fit in a purse than the guard dog of a ruthless student government. “You’re only allowed to write, like, remorsefulaffirmations onthewall?”

        “I’M NOT SORRY!” Max shouted, startled by the feedback of her megaphone.

        “Eep!” Pompom squeaked. She’d been similarly startled by this unexpected feedback. “W-well... since you didn’t TECHNICALLY writeanything... it’s not TECHNICALLY againsttherules? I guess?”

        Max’s bully minions murmured to each other in awe. They’d never seen such brazen defiance of the Student Council from a boss since the Dragon of Detention’s storied rise.

        “Look!” exclaimed a more perceptive bully. He pointed at the writing on the wall behind their boss.

        Pompom was right. Max hadn’t written down a single word... and yet the message he had left was just as clear as it was wholly accidental.

        While the cheering and moshing of Max’s growing rebel faction drew the Student Council’s aggro, Isabel and Max approached the groaning Sphinx of Lies, who was still struggling to rise and take revenge.

        “This guy said I’m not gonna win this fight,” smirked Isabel, “which means I’m free to kick his butt until you tap in for the finisher.” She grinned at Max and raised her spectral energy fists. “Don’t fulfill the prophecy too quickly, Max, okay?”

        “The last straw is prepared to mushroom stomp the camel’s back,” Max replied in weary monotone.

        “ISABEL GUERRA!”

        Barrister’s reedy voice cut through the rowdy roar of the Detention Fortress.

        “...Shoot,” Isabel swore. She’d been summoned to the courtroom—to the lair of the Vice Principal. Had that many names really been called already?

        “Didn’t you hear the funnylittleman?!” Pompom shouted at Isabel. “Like, get going!”

        Isabel felt the Sphinx of Rules’ compulsion start to force her feet to move.

        “UM. Okay, uh. Max! You’re gonna have to wrap this up alone!”

        “HUH?! WAIT, ISABEL—”

        “Don’t worry! A stiff breeze would knock him down for the count! Just ask Isaac to whip one up!” Isabel pointed past Max to the sphinx. “Look, he’s just lying there—”

        The Sphinx of Lies crushed cracks into the ground as he began to twist and swell into a ravenous, musclebound grudge.

        “WHO’S. LYING. NOW?!” the mutating spirit snarled, and Max went whiter than the chalk he’d dropped in fear.

So weird to hit plot beats that I've been looking forward to for over a decade. Thanks for reading and following along with my story, everybody! Please consider supporting Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! It lets me keep the lights on.

Also PETAL CRASH 2 is almost in early access! You can check it out on September 29th. If you missed the original Petal Crash, it's an incredible puzzle game made by my friend Ashley, and I wrote its story mode's dialogue. Petal Crash 2 will eventually include the first game's story mode with a fresh coat of graphical paint, so keep an eye out for it, especially if you haven't played the original! Consider wishlisting Petal Crash 2 on Steam! Thank you!

~

[Transcript]

        Down in the Detention Fortress prison yard, a duel raged on while Isabel’s audience adjusted to their supernatural status quo’s most recent disruption.

        “It’s not fair that Johnny gets to be a spectral too,” Max griped to a still-dumbstruck Isaac. “I had to grind for this view.”

        Max gestured to a largely motionless Isabel acting casual while fiercely fighting off the Sphinx of Lies with six red phantom limbs.

        “...Huh? Wuzzat? Who’s a special?” Johnny asked in a daze.

        He was still reeling from the feeling of his fist making contact with something he’d been certain was a ghost. Clearly, though, it wasn’t: it was something real and tangible, which was the opposite of what ghosts were.

        Max sighed and psychologically prepared himself to use small words for once.

        “Listen to me, Johnny: ghosts aren’t real.”

        Johnny blinked at him, impressed that Max had somehow read his mind just like an open pop-up picture book. Even he was frequently distracted by its funny shapes and colors, and unable, therefore, to parse the deeper meaning of its text.

        “Yeah, I know,” the bewildered bully was able to say, since Johnny now had proof that ghosts were definitely real.

        “What? Wait, wait, uh, no.” Max pinched the bridge of his nose as Isabel punched the sphinx’s and endured his savage counterblow. She and Max were definitely facing equally difficult challenges, fighting on two fronts in the same battle against the power of the same pernicious foe. “You understand what I’m trying to say.”

        “Yeah, I do,” said Johnny. “Could you Activity Shlubs see these freaky purple boogers this whole time? What are they, like, frickin’ aliens or somethin’?”

        “YES!” Max exclaimed in frustration. He’d failed to back out of the Sphinx of Lies’ sphere of influence thanks to Pompom’s decree about moonwalking.

        “Dude... Stephen’s gonna lose his mind,” Johnny whispered in wonder, unknowingly prognosticating a bright future for his buddy’s mental health.

        “Wait,” Max grumbled. “Does this mean that when I said it’s not fair that you get spectral powers it was, like, an objectively untrue statement?! Who gets to decide THAT? I did grind for this view! HEY! It’s not easy to get locked in a closet and then get attacked by a big, nasty bat! HEY!!” 

        Max shook his fist at the heavens, not knowing that kids got locked in the closet all the time at Bayview Biddle School, and not considering that he himself attacked his enemies with a big, nasty bat rather frequently. He’d also failed to factor in that vampires were real, and that they’d made big, nasty bat attacks a common hazard for the citizens of Bayview. Max was being ignorant and insensitive about the unseen struggles of his neighbors, overlooking them simply because they were nocturnal surprise attacks concealed by the machinations of a shadowy cabal, and clearly needed to reflect on how he could exhibit greater empathy.

        “You’re editorializing!” Max complained to an uncaring universe. “I deserve credit for my courage! HEY!!! DUDE, WHAT THE HECK?!”

        “You’re the bravest beast in the Biddle School, boss,” said a bully in Max’s newly formed Detention Fortress entourage. His loyal admirers had decided that his incoherent rambling was a sign that he was wacky like the Joker, which was awesome and deserving of unquestioning subservience.

        Max tried to tell the gaggle of bullies he’d gathered that this huddle was none of their business, that he didn’t need paparazzi, and that they all could just buzz off for all he cared, but instead turned to them and with equal intensity stated “My struggles and triumphs are yours. I need you, so stay by my side.”

        “YES, BOSS!!” his awestruck minions barked in unison. 

        “Wait!” cried a bully whose craggy cheeks shone with tough tears. “Boss, what’s your name?? Who do we say we’re sworn to serve?!”

        “I don’t have a name,” lied Max, and the dazzled crowd went absolutely wild.

        Max cast a long-suffering look at Isaac.

        “You hate me,” Isaac said to him, and then he smiled with exuberant relief.
        
        “...I can handle this right now,” Max grumbled, which his new gang took as a boast that he was about to crush his rivals and lay claim to the Detention Fortress. They hooted and hollered behind Max as he stalked back towards the battle. “Listen, Johnny,” Max said as he passed him. “Whatever made you one of us, whatever questions you might have, whatever headaches this is gonna cause tomorrow... put all that aside.” Max considered his words carefully, accounting for the penchant of the multiverse to bully him. He had to get the half-true gist of what he meant to say across and make sure Johnny didn’t wade straight into spooky danger. “Johnny, I could win this fight with my eyes closed... so keep yours open and on me. You’ll understand what we’re about once you see me in action.” Max clapped a hand on Johnny’s shoulder. “I trust you can stay out of trouble on the sidelines until this little scrap is over, and Johnny... I’m one-hundred percent glad to have you on the team with absolutely zero reservations whatsoever.”

        “Oh, uh. Yeah. Thanks, bro,” Johnny mumbled. He scratched his head, suddenly itchy from embarrassment. Johnny didn’t really get what Max was saying, but he wanted to earn what the words made him feel, whatever this bizarre emotion was.

        “THE DRAGON TAMER!!” Max’s minions cheered, and Johnny didn’t bother to correct them.

        A brooding Isaac scowled at Johnny on his way to train his anger on the sneering Sphinx of Rules. There was only room for one spiky redhead in the Activity Club, Isaac spitefully thought to himself... and Johnny relied on the ARTIFICE of chemical pigments and hair gel to compete! Then a pang of guilt turned Isaac’s mind to everything he’d talked about with Isabel, and with Max and Doorman, too, and to how he’d felt when he was seeing shades for the first time way back in sixth grade. If the role of spiky redhead new guy was about to be recast... Isaac didn’t want to keep what could have been a kindred spirit at arm’s length.

        “Hey,” Isaac muttered to Johnny. He’d allowed himself a slightly snooty pout.

        “...Huh? Wassup?” Johnny asked. He’d been trying to squint the shifting purple phantoms back into focus. They hadn’t faded since the last time they had wavered into uncertain existence.

        “...I need your help,” Isaac said. He nodded towards the peak of Pompom’s tower, where a slinking Sphinx of Rules hissed down at Isabel’s clash with his sibling.

        Johnny blinked, looking briefly confused, but then an eager grin unfurled across his face.

        “What am I punchin’?” Johnny asked, and Isaac’s pout, despite himself, became a subdued smile.

*EDIT* Paranatural is on break this week while I catch up on backlogged work! Thank you for your patience!

We all remember this cool kid. Had to keep this one a little simpler, thanks for understanding! Please support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi, and thank you so much if you already do! Thank you for reading!

~

[Transcript]

        “Ahh, good,” sneered Devilora, rubbing her hands together with a crinkling crunch akin to plate tectonics. “It would seem that our next suspect has arrived. Send her in!”

        “Suspect?” Cody scoffed. “They’re already convicts, thanks to you and your mock trials.”

        “Your gratitude is welcome, Mr. President, but hardly necessary. I would do this job for free, while living in the walls—a creeping folktale scrawled in whispers and unsettling graffiti—were my passions not a lucrative pursuit.”

        “Oh, well!” chirped Principal Pleezdoo. “Perhaps a pay cut is in order, then! The Art Club’s fingerpainting is breathtakingly Rococo, but I think that their milieu would broaden somewhat if the budget had the oomph to buy them brushes, Devi. Wouldn’t you agree?”

        “I’ll dock your salary accordingly, then, my charitable Posy,” said DuNacht. “We can supplement your groceries with a scoop or two of cat food if your belt ends up too tight for you to buckle with such admirably spineless flexibility!”

        “Oh! Yes. Yes, that’s. I do so love... to make a worthy sacrifice,” Principal Pleezdoo sighed in resignation. It was only fair that the Vice Principal could override her office’s authority. Every leader needed certain checks and balances, and Devilora cashed every check and spent the budget’s balance as she pleased.

        A ruffled Aimee Archer was pushed into the room by a Student Council bailiff.

        “Welcome, welcome! My reign of terror brings another writhing earthworm to the surface! Have a seat! The sidewalk’s firm, but more supportive than that dirty, soggy soil you’ve departed! HEH-HEH hyehhh...” Vice Principal DuNacht cackled ominously to make the frightened student feel at home (she often played such sounds on old cassettes to unwind in her own cobwebbed abode). 

        There was no easing the poor girl’s nerves, however, once her wide eyes had adjusted to the darkness. The Vice Principal was holding a folder with Aimee’s name on it; from its peak protruded old pop quizzes she had failed, her long-lost uncle’s birth certificate, and baby photos taken from her house and from the treeline just outside it. Principal Pleezdoo was standing rigid on a monumental pillar, presumably the victim of a power-grab-turned-taxidermy-project. A cute boy in a mask was staring at her with disdain, and Aimee had worn the sweater with the bleach stain on the elbow today, like some sort of unlovable GOBLIN.

        Worst of all, though, was the gruesome trophy mounted on the wall: a headless student she knew well from last week’s hitball highlights, no longer levitating on his own. Aimee squeaked, the last gasp of a scream that died of fright before it left her.

        “That could be you soon,” said DuNacht, meaning “her puppet” and not “decapitated,” but she didn’t have the insight or incentive to correct her misconstrual.

        “P-PLEASE! I’LL DO ANYTHING!” a frightened Aimee tried to sputter, but the Sphinx of Truth prevented her from finishing the sentence, since she wouldn’t eat a battery or let her baby brother use her laptop.

        “Miss Aimee Archer. A promising new sharpshooter in the Biddle School’s Archery Club,” Devilora droned, squinting down at her prisoner’s file. “I admire a striver whose name suits their skill. Things were BETTER in the days when you could trust a man named ‘Baker’ to sell you bread. Back then, you didn’t have to LIE about the threat of highwaymen and roving wolves when you were trying to scare children.”

        Aimee Archer stared at the dusty floorboards in numb silence. She’d never realized that her name was a pun.

        “However...” DuNacht continued, flipping further in the file, “your arrows AND your grades have missed the mark of late, haven’t they, Miss Archer? Has anything been... troubling you recently?” asked the Vice Principal, looking up from her paperwork with a wicked, knowing grin upon her face.

        “...Y-yes,” the student stammered. Aimee blinked, startled at her own honest confession.

        “Go on,” the Vice Principal grinned. “Speak your truth. This is an unsafe space.”

        The statement served as a veiled threat, and therefore also as a substitute for proper reassurance. Aimee gulped and nodded, slumping slightly in her chair.

        “I... I froze up at regionals. I c-couldn’t take the shot.”

        “Fear,” hissed Devilora, “is an INESCAPABLE fact of life. Once you learn to live in FEAR of fear, you can PUT UP WALLS to hide in, like a clever little mouse. There’s no need to wonder if the cat’s away, my dear, if you simply never play or show yourself outside of sheltered safety’s narrow margins!”

        “I... I wanted to show what I could do. I wanted to shoot, but...”

        Devilora leaned forward with a hungry glint in her eyes, engulfing the purring Sphinx of Truth within her shadow.

        “You were distracted by INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS? Scared that to TRY AT ALL meant you were doomed to LOSE?” she asked.

        Aimee tried to meekly nod, but tears welled up in her wide eyes as the truth spilled out to contradict her.

        “I was s-scared... that I would win,” she sniffed. “I knew I could.” This confession seemed to shock the girl who’d spoken it, who’d made every excuse to spare her feelings from the unpleasant truth of her feelings—a quarantine doomed from its subconscious start. “My best friend Beau... practiced so hard. I didn’t want to beat her. I didn’t want her to resent me.” Aimee hung her head in shame and sudden, unexpected self-awareness. “I want her to keep teaching me, and praising me, and being our club’s undefeated ace... even though... I already surpassed her months ago.”

        “Oh, you sweet thing!” Pleezdoo sniffed, which startled Aimee, who’d believed she was a corpse.

        “What a RIDICULOUS sentiment,” sneered DuNacht, crunching back into her chair. “The elite must rise into their proper place to make this proving ground, this Biddle School, a MERITOCRACY! To sort out the wheat from the chaff and the parasite PESTS in our midst!” She slammed a nasty hand down on the desk. “What athlete wants their rival to HOLD BACK and THROW THE MATCH?! Don’t you know RESENTMENT only STOKES the flame of friendship?!” Devilora unfurled with a series of snaps, intruding deeper into Aimee Archer’s personal space. “You have life’s true target in your sights, you fool! Don’t just DRAW BACK, LET LOOSE! Even Cupid’s arrow STINGS before its toxins reach the brain! SHOOT YOUR BEST FRIEND WITH A BOW AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS!!”

        Aimee nodded in agreement with the Vice Principal’s volume, if not the gory details of her argument.

        “Feh!” spat Devilora, folding back into her chair like some sort of percussive accordion. “There’s a simple solution to your simple child problems! The walls of the Detention Fortress have plenty of room for TWO crack shots with silly wordplay names... and we REWARD success and struggle in the Student Council’s hierarchy! Ours is a legion of winners AND spite-driven losers!”

        Aimee blinked. She also hadn’t realized that her friend Beau’s name was an archery pun, and was beginning to wonder how much of her life was a government-subsidized psyop.

        “Of course, there’s plenty of room for your friend in the YARD BELOW as well... if you’d rather share a DUNGEON than the PINNACLE OF MIDDLE SCHOOL EXISTENCE,” hissed DuNacht, undulating in the shadows like a snake. “The Student Council is a straight shot to Bayview Academy, and then on to Yalevard, and then straight to the GRAVE with too many EXPENSIVE DISTRACTIONS to CARE! You wouldn’t miss a shot like that, would you, Miss Archer? Not without regretting it again...”

        “I... I don’t...” the student stammered.

        “Having trouble saying you’re not tempted...?” Devilora oozed through a sinister smirk. “The Archery Club could use a bit more funding, couldn’t it? Could it handle EVEN LESS? You wouldn’t want the pretext that unites you and your BESTIE to dissolve, would you...? To watch all of your friends move on to a SQUANDERED YOUTH of KISSING BOYS and ROCK MUSIC and SHOPLIFTING ILLEGAL DRUGS FROM CHURCHES?!”

        Aimee squeaked in panic. All of those things sounded awesome, but she WAS also scared of change...

        “Admit it,” grinned DuNacht. “You’ve always thought the Student Council’s uniforms looked PRETTY SNAZZY, haven’t you?”

        A quiver found its way to Aimee’s chin, a weight she’d borne without complaint upon her shoulders until now.

        “Y-YES!” she wailed, tears flowing freely down her face. “I COULD TOTALLY ROCK A CHIC MONOCHROME FIT!”

        “Acceptance is the first step to living in denial with a smile,” Devilora reassured her, handing the Student Council’s newest recruit a box of sandpaper-quality tissues.

        “...I can’t stand this anymore,” said Cody, turning to depart. The young vampire scowled back at DuNacht with deep disdain. Even if her words were empty, she was still a twisted liar, a parasitic monster with nothing more than fear and spite behind her mask. “I can’t stand you.”

        “...How twagic,” said a tiny voice. The Sphinx of Truth had spoken up at last. She glared at Cody, unseen by his eyes, and her blue gaze burned with recognition of the shadow of a hated adversary in his cast. “I wonder, Mr. Pwesident... could you cwaim you’re all that diffewent from the howwow weadership and wiwwing wackeys you wevile?”

        Cody paused at the doorway back to the walls of the Detention Fortress.

        “...You sound ridiculous,” he said at last, and shut the door behind him.

        Devilora and the sphinx exchanged a glance.

        “...The twuth hurts,” said the sphinx, and DuNacht nodded and shrugged with a creak and a sigh.

        “Miss Archer,” the Vice Principal hissed, sniffing a dangling spider back into her now-drooping nose. She was determined to soldier on with her work and bear the burden of the President’s cruel words. Tweens could be rude and moody, after all, and was that their fault?! YES! Which meant it surely wasn’t hers. Cody would come around. Sooner or later, he’d realize that resistance was a futile masquerade. “Before I PARDON and DISMISS you, just to be CERTAIN of your INNOCENCE, I do have one last question you must answer...” 

        Aimee nodded apprehensively, and Devilora grinned a wicked grin.

Thank you for waiting! Here you go, all! Please support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! Thanks for reading!

~

[Transcript]

        BAM, BAM, BAM! Barrister’s gavel slammed down on his pulpit. Behind the double doors at the heart of the Detention Fortress, a different sort of battle had concluded: a legal battle.

        “GUILTY! GUILTY!” screeched the Number One Black Saint. “WOE betide the guilty, for the wick of life in prison burns too slow, and dread perdition’s flames for but a single swift eternity!” Barrister sighed. “Were I the maker, death’s black gates would not hold back the heat below, and all who sinned would pay the price BEFORE they leave this plane—the same as any customer who plans to exeunt a drugstore with a candy bar!”

        “Okay this is for sure a mistrial situation,” said the defendant, a student who’d been called to face the music in his courtroom.

        “I am UNBIASED in my pursuit of justice, Miss Archer. NOTHING could have swayed my opinion in this case—not even EVIDENCE and TESTIMONY,” Barrister patiently reassured her. No one had any faith in the legal system these days! It was truly sad, and just as mystifying. Barrister banged his judge’s gavel again, because he could, and because the room’s acoustics were immaculate. “AIMEE ARCHER! You stand accused of creating and recklessly firing a projectile known as a paper wasp. The charges are illicit bioengineering of a non-native insect species, supplying weapons to a TERRORIST (yourself), and assaulting the potential future President of the United States!”

        “I shot it at a trash can!” she protested.

        “YOU NEVER KNOW!” Barrister snapped back. “Also that’s a CONFESSION! Defense, how do you plead??”

        “She’s super guilty, your honor,” said Aimee’s lawyer, a tween in greyscale tweed and black sunglasses.

        “H-HEY! Aren’t you supposed to be on MY side?!”

        “She is on your side. Of the courtroom. And I said you’d be assigned a Student Councilor, not a student counselor. She’s public defending the public from YOU, criminal scum! You waived your right to a loyal attorney when you failed to notice our duplicitous maneuvering! TEN THOUSAND YEARS INFINITY DETENTION!!” His gavel slammed down one last time. Barrister sighed with satisfaction and fluffed his wig back to regulation volume. “Bailiff! Take her away!”

        “TH-THAT’S NOT FAIR!”

        “The Vice Principal will see you now,” said Barrister. “You may appeal the sentence and/or plead for mercy upstairs in her shadow lair.” Every good democracy had one or two of those behind closed doors. A snooty sneer unfurled across Barrister’s face. “I would suggest you make a deal... but I have no doubt that you will.” The Black Saint’s Number One judge steepled his fingers and sank back in his throne, the lofty pouch of the Student Council’s kangaroo court. “I look forward to seeing a badge and uniform formalize what should have already been clear: that I am your superior! Oh-ho ho ho HO!”

        “I beat you at Mr. Starchman’s Chin-Scratching Trivia Quizzler ONCE, Barry!”

        “MY BUZZER WAS BROKEN FOR THAT SPECIFIC QUESTION!!” a red-faced Barrister snapped back in a spittle-spewing huff. Would that he could censor settled issues ere they left the forkèd tongues of his cruel haters!

        Up the strangling coil of a narrow spiral staircase, past unlit sconces rimed with dust and slits for launching arrows down at students, Vice Principal DuNacht awaited her next potential candidate with glee.

        “...Are you happy now?”

        Devilora looked up from the monitors that let her watch the courtroom drama playing out downstairs. She was seated at a crooked desk that looked as though its carpenter had gotten bored of only making coffins. The Sphinx of Truth was curled up on a stack of yellowed files, purring as DuNacht pet her with long, flesh-rending fingers. The lighting was atrocious, and the whole oppressive attic of an office smelled like dust and stagnant air. Devilora turned to Cody, who’d been scowling at her from a cobwebbed corner since he’d followed her inside.

        “I’d say this is one of several happy places I’ve been blessed to infest, so... yes!” The Vice Principal grinned at her president—the grin of a cat who’d just been asked if she had seen your missing goldfish. “Don’t I look happy?”

        “That’s not what I meant,” Cody hissed through gritted teeth, his eyes intense beneath his presidential mask. “I gave your speech. I ratified your rules. I brought you half the school in handcuffs. Haven’t I done enough? Isn’t it time you held up your end of the bargain?”

        Devilora cocked her head at him, which made such a nasty cracking noise that Cody briefly hoped she had expired.

        “I don’t recall us setting terms like that,” she chuckled. “Virtue is its OWN reward, and the Student Council is a teeming horde of frothing volunteers. Does Sauron pay his orcs? The Wicked Witch her flying monkeys?” Devilora licked her withered lips, and her horn-rimmed glasses shimmered in the darkness. “Do you mean to tell me that you aren’t helping your favorite old lady out of the goodness of your heart, Mr. President? I’m shocked!”

        Cody felt rage flood the empty hollow of his chest. Fauxbia was toying with him. None of the tasks she had forced on him fulfilled their pact, his promise to help her escape his father unharmed. Until he could guarantee Jeff’s safety, though, he had no choice but to suffer through her torment.

        “Sooner or later, you really WILL need my help with my father,” Cody threatened her. The words felt impotent leaving his mouth. Cody’s mind was running wild with loopholes that the Witch could still conceivably snare him with. Couldn’t she just give herself a paper cut while fleeing Davy’s wrath? Couldn’t she leave Jeff unscathed but keep him kidnapped, safely trapped within her web, once the terms of their bargain had tied her nasty puppetmaster hands? None of this would end while she still had Jeff as a hostage. “Don’t expect the rules to change in your favor the next time they’re rewritten,” he said, feeling small and foolish.

        “Your father and I go way back, Mr. President,” Devilora smirked. “Further back than you might guess... even if you’ve already accounted for his enviable longevity. We share many venerable values, goals, and ENEMIES—and of course a deep affection for YOU, young man. Nyeh heh-HEH! That’s how we and other strange bedfellows have been able to work together for so long, despite our past and present... disagreements.” The Vice Principal’s pockmarked hands were busily kneading the sphinx that Cody couldn’t see into all sorts of shapes—shapes that one might think a cat would loathe—but all he heard from the empty space it occupied was more enthusiastic purring. “I can handle your father and his QUIBBLES, have no doubt. We’ve pulled each other’s strings for many, MANY years, Mr. President... though I dare not drift into detail in polite company.”

        “Were you and my dad a COUPLE??” Cody wretched in disbelief.

        “What? No. Ew,” said Devilora.

        “Speaking of polite company,” a pale and dizzy-looking Principal Pleezdoo politely interjected, “might I perhaps come down now?”

        Devilora had placed Principal Pleezdoo atop an elegant marble pillar that she’d set up as a centerpiece beside her crooked desk. Its placard kindly labeled her “The Biddlest Principal, Miss Posy Pleezdoo” and less-than-kindly kept her at a likely lethal height above the floor.

        “Don’t be SILLY,” Devilora squawked. “You belong upon a pedestal, sweet Posy! It’s the perfect place for chiseled little figureheads, lovely busts, and finely aged antiques to sit and be admired!”

        “...I suppose it is nice to reverse our height difference for a change,” sighed Principal Pleezdoo.

        “Are you two a couple?” a mystified Cody asked.

        Both women laughed like NPCs from Dark Souls. A knock upon the door deprived the world of further answers.

Had to go Super Saiyan on this one for the visual gags. Thanks for reading! Please consider supporting Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi, which lets this be my job. I could really use the help! Thank you!

~

[Transcript]

        Back in the dark caves below the Biddle School, an unseen battle raged inside the Student Council’s cage.

        THWACK!! Isabel’s heels dug a groove in the gravel of the Detention Fortress floor. A heavy paw had crashed against her shield and sent her sliding backwards through the prison yard. Red spectral energy sublimated in her wake, ripped to wisps by the claws of the powerful Sphinx of Lies.

        “Like, NO moonwalking!” Pompom commanded through her megaphone, eliciting an “OOF!” from Isabel: a snare of pure Rules power had halted her momentum with sudden whiplash force.

        “I would’ve thought you Student Council types LOVED blindly backsliding to retrograde positions!” is what Max would have shouted up at Pompom, but he was sent careening by the sphinx before he could.

        “Ohmygosh, like, STOP slidingontheground you funnylittlebaseballboy?? This base belongs to us and you’re, like, neversafe and nevergettingout?” Pompom tossed her hair, not realizing that she’d asserted Max was trapped in an eternal baseball limbo, a Zeno’s paradox between home plate and safety on first base.

        Miraculously, though, Max had already reached the bench—specifically the bench where a musclebound student had been benching weights that weighed as much as he did. His bouncing body struck the bodybuilding bully, shunting him off of the bench as Max slid smoothly into place beneath the barbell. Onlookers gasped. This constituted a provocative challenge in the subtle etiquette of the Detention Fortress; the bully he’d expelled had earned exclusive rights to use the weightlifting equipment by proving that he was the strongest student in his corner of the prison yard, a system doomed to reinforce the status quo.

        “HEY! Whaddaya think you’re doin’, punk?!” the displaced bully barked, rising in a dusty fury from the ground.

        “I’M NOT SCARED OF YOU!! I DON’T NEED HELP!!” Max screamed in a panic. He was fortunate enough to not be crushed beneath the barbell hanging over him, because he was being crushed beneath a hungry lion that was holding it instead.

        “C’mon, bro! I only want one BITE!” the Sphinx of Lies snarled, and his grin snapped shut an inch from Max’s face. 

        Max screeched as the spirit’s mighty poltergeist muscles lifted the barbell between them like a feather as he desperately clung to it for protection, forgetting that the sphinx could just as easily phase through it.

        “Oh my god,” onlookers gasped. Max had benched three-digit weights with just one arm.

        The Sphinx of Lies tore the barbell from his grip and cast it aside with a heavy crash.

        “Oh my GOD,” cheered Max’s newest bully fans.

        “Like, stopthrowing that WEIGHTAROUND!” Pompom commanded, and a dozen bully despots realized that they had been desperately asserting what their success had already proven, and took a moment to appreciate the little things in life.

        “HE’S your opponent!” Isabel shouted at the Sphinx of Lies, failing to pull aggro back from Max. She launched a barrage of pot shot spec-shots at both sphinxes as she rushed to rescue Max from his assailant, but her bullets bounced off the Sphinx of Lies, and the cackling Sphinx of Rules simply ducked behind the rampart of the watchtower. The bullies who witnessed this mistakenly assumed that Isabel was Max’s hype man, and was declaring war on his behalf—a war on them, if they opposed him... but then a battle with the Student Council, they deduced in dumbstruck awe, following Isabel’s finger from her leader to his foe.

        “So, like, don’tyoudare point finger guns at me?” Pompom uttered in a tone that straddled question and command. “That’s violentimagery and, like, a WAY illegalweapon that you socan’thaveinhere butIstillcan?”

        “Not even the right to bare arms...” Juvie sighed, rolling up a stick of bubblegum like a cigarette. “Well... these arms o’ mine ain’t been bare in a long time,” she said, and Juvie wistfully stared at the stickers on her bicep like they were a lattice of old scars and timeworn tattoos. “Guess when your hands ain’t clean... the guilt keeps risin’ til you’re shoulderin’ the burden that you used to keep at arm’s length. Makes you think...”

        “It doesn’t, but I respect a leader who can confidently state something untrue,” Lisa replied. “It’s a quality of all the best criminal masterminds.” She smiled at Juvie. “You are so wise and deserving of your throne that I don’t want.”

        “Max!” Isaac cried, but as he dashed to help him, another shout from Pompom stopped him near-dead in his tracks.

        “No RUNNING!” the Black Saints’ Number Eight decreed, and Max’s imminent rescue was delayed a few more seconds: Isabel and Isaac immediately slowed to a leisurely pace, which looked awesome and dramatic as they surged with rage and swirling spectral energy, but did little to assuage their clubmate’s terror. 

        A writhing Max, meanwhile, was foolishly trying to use anti-shark techniques against the unrelated beast that had him pinned, but couldn’t pierce the lion’s cool sunglasses with his fingers. The crowd around him misinterpreted his flailing as a fist-pumping peace sign, and so assumed he was declaring peace and victory in one efficient gesture. A dozen bullies kneeled and swore new oaths of bully fealty, taken by a leader who was gracious to the kingpin he’d dethroned.

        “She can’t tell me to stop what she can’t see!” Isaac growled beneath his breath, which was swelling in his lungs as air began to whirl around him. He glowered at the sphinx as he marched closer. “A runt like you’s got nothing on the king of beasts I’VE tamed! Instead of Max, eat THIS! King Catnine’s roaring WIND!!”

        A sudden gust sent an extremely conspicuous wave of Detention Fortress dust swirling from Isaac’s extended hand, a blast (nerfed by a proudly untamed King Catnine) that only ruffled his bloodthirsty target’s mane. Isaac blinked in embarrassed shock as Pompom’s spotlight fell upon him in an instant, though her confusion about the nature of his crime delayed his sentencing. 

P: ...
I: ...

P: “No farting!”
I: “I DIDN’T!”

        ...is what Isaac would have said, were he allowed to speak his truth. Instead, he shouted “I DID! I DID IT! THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I DID!” and lost about as much street cred as Max had gained by accident.

        Though Isaac’s wind blast had delayed the sphinx’s feast, it was neither he nor Isabel who reached Max first to save him. A fist flung out at something shifting, purple, and intangible, but struck a target no less real than solid flesh.

        “DOOF!” the Sphinx of Lies yelped, toppled off Max by the blindsiding sucker punch.

        Johnny’s shadow filled the void where it had been. He stared down at his still-balled fist in silence, startled by the substance he’d just struck in empty air. No... not empty. He tracked the purple blob to where it shifted on the ground. He watched it fading in and out, a glowing pulse beneath the mundane light his eyes were meant to gather.

        “...HUH?!” squeaked Max, gawking at his unexpected savior. “WHAT?? HOW??”

        Johnny let his fist relax, and silently held the hand of a soon-to-be spectral out to Max to help him stand up from the bench.

        “The Dragon of Detention wants to shake his hand!” gasped Max’s growing entourage. “He’s acknowledging his strength!”

        Isaac had made similar excuses for the anime boys who held hands in his favorite shows, but this time couldn’t help but see the subtext. His soundless gasp of jealousy left Isaac looking like a baby bird whose worms were late and undercooked when brought out by the waiter.

        The Sphinx of Lies shook his head and pushed his glasses back in place, growling and baring his fangs to scare those pesky cartoon birds and circling stars out of their orbit. His vision refocused on Isabel looming above him. Two of her arms were folded calmly at her chest, while the six she’d made with unseen spectral energy unfurled to pummel him while he was on the ground.

        “You beat me, bro. I give up,” the Sphinx of Lies said, and he grinned a vicious grin.

        “I forgive you,” Isabel kindly reassured him. Her fists blurred to a rain of red as they raced each other to deliver the first blow in her combo.

Thanks for reading! Please support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! Thank you for your enthusiasm and for being such wonderful fans!

~

        In the dark heart of the Biddle School’s library, Suzy popped out of hiding like a bright pink groundhog. Unfortunately, the only thing that she could see was shadow, which either meant the future’s forecast was unclear or that the Fimbulwinter had begun. She couldn’t hunker down for another six weeks to find out, which is what the wait had felt like for a clinically impatient girl who ran on pep and drama.

        “All right, Amorpheous,” Suzy whispered into her phone, stopping just short of saying “if that IS your real name” and making a fool of herself. “The coast is clear. Where do we go—I mean, uh, where do I go now?”

        “Why go anywhere,” crackled the voice on the other end of the line, “when, as you say, the coast is clear? There’s no better time to curl up with a book, Suzy, than when you have the beach: all to yourself.”

        “I’ve BEEN curled up with books,” Suzy complained. She exchanged a grumpy glance with Collin, who was still contorted underneath the desk where they had last ducked out of sight to dodge the Student Council’s sweep. “Not exactly my idea of summer fun. When I go to the beach, I wanna run around, dig up some dirt, sniff out some buried treasure—”

        “Literal dog activities,” said Collin, dusting Suzy footprints from his shirt.

        “...And there’s still salty little CRABS around, so can we REALLY say I’ve got the shoreline to myself?” Suzy snarled back at Collin.

        “...I fear I am losing track of the analogy,” Amorpheous replied. “My point is that, X marks the spot, which you are already currently standing on. And the treasure? Is the buried past. Of the Biddle School, and its vice principal: Devilora Demonelle DuNacht... if that IS her real name.”

        Suzy tried not to be jealous that Amorpheous had gotten to use the stock phrase she’d denied herself.

        “That is her real name,” Collin said. “I heard a rumor that she legally changed it to contrast Principal Pleezdoo’s. Like a reverse marriage for enemies who hate each other.”

        “...Is that a thing?” asked Suzy, wondering if Isabel would let her ditch her Starchman for a snazzy nom de guerre that clashed with Guerra—“Suzy Peacelove,” maybe, or something camp like “Suzy Ceasefire.” She swiftly decided that she was being absurdly embarrassing, and would have sounded even more like her Lady and the Tramp glamp-hippy parents’ daughter with these labels than she did with her dad’s surname.

        “I’m not going to marry you, Suzy,” Collin droned disrespectfully.

        “...he portends through gritted teeth, a bitter tear of pained acceptance rolling gently down his cheek!” Suzy traced its nonexistent trail down to his chin, which she tickled with a silly turkey sound to tick him off.

        “I hate to break the news to you, Suzy, since that feels like feeding omelettes to a chicken, but you might have to be likeable to find yourself a spouse,” Collin sighed, deflecting Suzy’s hand aside with a gentle Wing Chun parry.

        “...Who are you talking to?” asked the mysterious whistleblower that Suzy had left on the record.

        “Buddy, I’M not asking that question. You can do me the same courtesy, Amorpheous.” Suzy gave Collin an all-clear thumbs up gesture, preemptively deciding she’d already dodged the bullet streaking towards her. Luckily, that was exactly what you had to do to dodge a bullet in The Matrix, and Suzy’s source was nothing if not beholden to the spirit of his code name’s source material.

        “...I cannot deny your logic,” Amorpheous conceded. “Would that the Student Council could still say the same. They deny the logic they themselves were key in coding, and reshape the rules to better suit DuNacht’s capricious schemes. A corruption that has even reached: the Student Council’s President.”

        “Yeah! That cheesy cape dweeb in the mask?! That outfit’s an impeachment-worthy scandal on its own!” Suzy scoffed. “Hey, if stripping the skeletons out of his closet gets rid of the ugly costume that they share it with, he can THANK me in his resignation speech! I’d be doing HIM a favor by unmasking him!”

        Collin’s eyes flicked back from their patrol to glance at Suzy, an illegible emotion hidden under his own mask of disregard.

        “You misunderstand,” replied Amorpheous. “The President is: as pure as snow. The perfect politician. Neutral on every single issue. Unbiased in his willingness to sign whatever law has reached his desk. He is: a flawless vessel for his people, and their democratic will.” There was a brief pause on the other end of the line. “It’s just that sometimes people use the system wrong, and then things get bad, even though the system is still flawless.”

        “Oh, totally, totally,” Suzy concurred with her fingers crossed behind her back. “I’m flawless in a vacuum, too. That’s why I had those geeks in the Computer Club ‘accidentally’ scrub my neighbors from the yearbook.”

        “And yet, we are still, on the same page,” said Amorpheous, “if you will help me to bring down DuNacht. And her unchecked and unbalanced Black Saint lackeys.”

        “Oh, yeah, those guys,” nodded Suzy. “They’re soooo... bad... I think.” She turned to Collin for clarification, since her eyes always glazed over once nerds started listing factions. 

        “They’re the Student Council’s highest ranked members. Numbered one to twelve. The squad who clubnapped the Activity Kids.” Collin sighed. “You literally wrote a hit piece with their names and full addresses in sixth grade.”

        “Their days are numbered one to twelve,” sneered Suzy. She vaguely recalled the gist of their lore from her dead end exposĂŠ on the Detention Fortress, but Suzy was a shark: she kept on moving straight ahead until she hit something fishy that she could sink her teeth into.

        Suzy and Collin crept between one maze of shelving and the next, following Amorpheous’s cryptic directions through the labyrinth, scanning the shadows of the library for stragglers and Student Council scouting parties. The lights in the library had been shut off when the last shackled captive was dragged through its doors; unfettered education was a privilege of the law-abiding, and there were more important lessons to be learned down in the cavernous expanse below the Biddle School.

        Suzy was beaming brighter than her phone flashlight. She could see Isabel’s face now—how humiliated and blushing she would be once Suzy blew the lid off the Detention Fortress, and then reached in, and picked her up and saved her like a hamster from a cage. SHE would show that Activity Club jerk which of the two of them was playing into harmful un-feminist tropes, once Isabel had proven herself a damsel in distress, in need of rescue by a man but not in want of it because Suzy had found her first, or something like that but coherent ha ha ha!

        “Listen, Amorpheous. The slime you’re leaking’s great for an ignorable opinion piece,” said Suzy, “but I need facts to pen a proper takedown. If I have to fetch the story that you’re selling from a shelf, you rang up the wrong girl! I’m a reporter! I report the news! I don’t research it, like some kind of...”

        “Journalist?” Collin helpfully suggested, earning a huffy scowl from Suzy.

        “I understand,” Amorpheous assured her, “but know this: I could not reach the treasure trove to which I lead you now. I have been attempting to access these records through legitimate channels for some time. And yet my forms and follow-up emails have fallen on deaf inboxes. Which is strange because, that violates, a number of Code of Conduct statutes. If I didn’t know better, I would think, that all bureaucracy is ultimately vassal to the naked blade of power. But it’s likely: human error, or, a problem with the Wi-Fi.” 

        The whistleblower cleared his throat, cleaning his whistle of cognitive dissonance. 

        “The library. Was DuNacht’s lair. Long before the day that she came became the school’s vice principal. Her sins and triumphs are recorded here... but she is super old, like wildly old, like it’s wild how old she is. Suzy. Look to your left.”

        Suzy looked to her right (to test Collin, who passed with flying colors and reoriented her). A crumbling door concealed a long-forgotten office, shuttered blinds, and through the slats, an old projector and a wall of dusty boxes.

        “I apologize, but. To find the truth. You may have to: peruse some stray newspaper clippings. And examine some old microfiche.”

        Suzy gasped with delight, a sudden gulp of dust that instantly gave her the world’s first human hairball. Collin couldn’t help but smile, even as he winced on her behalf. Vicarious joy, like their unlikely friendship, was often just as nice as the real thing.

Today is my birthday!! An excellent day to support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! Thank you for reading my funny story. Have a great my birthday.

~

[Transcript]

        “There you are, Miss Zarei,” came the whispery hiss of Clayview Middle School’s least-liked librarian. “Where have you been, you naughty, naughty girl?”

        Devilora Demonelle DuNacht curled from the darkness of the doorframe, slinking into view to stand between June and her prey. The shadows clung to Devilora’s silhouette like cobwebs. Clayview’s desert dusk went cold, eerie and autumnal in her suffocating presence. 

        June blinked in speechless surprise. There, as plain as night, flowing from this woman’s shoulders, was a swirling plume of—

        Her focus joined Peter’s as the pair watched a startled Mina go rigid with anxiety. She didn’t dare look down or look away from Miss DuNacht, and so her wide eyes wavered like a spider on a string, dangling between fear and the risk of disrespect.

        “I, I, I—I got lost, and—” Mina began to stammer. She tugged at the hem of her shirt and cast a nervous glance at June.

        “Don’t lie to me, young lady,” Miss DuNacht said, trying on a sugarcoated smile. Mina snapped back to attention and the face of her tormentor. “The other girls have already returned and told the tale.”

        “It’s—it’s not true!” Mina sputtered. “They’re lying! They—”

        “Tut tut!” Miss DuNacht interrupted, holding up a sharp finger to silence her. “I didn’t even tell you what they told me, Miss Zarei! And yet the first words from your naughty lips accuse them of deception.” She shook her head. “This need to run away, to run and hide, to shift the blame onto your classmates... it stems from guilt, you know. You’ll never be at peace, young lady, until you face the punishment you know that you are due.”

        June felt anger spark inside the furnace of her chest.

        “It’s not guilt. You’re scaring her,” she said. June cocked her head sideways to match the crooked angle of the sneering woman’s slouch. “Your punishment’s the problem if sweet kids like her are lying to avoid it.”

        Mina and DuNacht both slowly turned to face June, equally dumbstruck by her sudden interruption. Mina had gone pale with fear, the librarian with condescending shock at June’s audacity.

        “She didn’t do anything wrong,” June insisted. Peter Puckett gulped behind her, nodding nervously to back her up.

        “...Unlike the rest of this school’s softhearted staff, I’m not fooled by these cunning little children and their cloying bids for sympathy. I know their wicked tricks and secrets like they were my own, you see,” the librarian sneered. None of her chosen students had anything left to hide from her. She’d made her nest in their nightmares, donned the mask of lesser fears she had devoured from within. She’d dreamt their dreams, and they were dark. That was why she had selected them as candidates. “Excuse me, then, if I’m reluctant to accept a stranger’s affidavit on the subject of their character.” Devilora scoffed, scanning June from head to toe with deep distaste. “Especially some half-dressed minx who greets her elders with a scowl.”

        June gasped in gobsmacked offense.

        “HUH?! What kind of skirt-measuring convent crap—” June stopped short before she said worse swears in front of an innocent child, realized this was part of her own prudish programming, but swiftly made the right call in deciding she had better ways to stand up to a scolding puritan tyrant than teaching Mina every single curse word in one sentence. “The scowl is more than earned! How can you talk like that at all, let alone in earshot of a kid who’s gonna take that trash to heart?? Weren’t you ever a girl getting blamed for ORIGINAL SIN just for existing?” June gestured at her own flattering outfit, fuming with feisty indignance. “Didn’t you ever have CURVES worth SHOWIN’ OFF, you rude old rag?!”

        Fauxbia’s grin spread ear-to-ear, the last curve she possessed besides the deep slope of her spine. True fury was a rare delicacy these days; she’d gone unchallenged in her humble Clayview hunting ground for years. She was going to enjoy picking this woman’s fears apart like scrumptious strands of sinew. Human fools, however proud, were all defenseless when they strayed from the mundane. Just beyond the treeline of normality, the Witch was waiting in her web for her next meal.

        Mina’s jaw had dropped in sync with her spectacles, which had slipped from the bridge of her nose, carried downstream by cold sweat. June had exchanged little more than a few sentences with DuNacht—they hadn’t even learned each other’s names—and she was already confronting her without a hint of fear. This June woman had a death wish. She had no idea who she was dealing with.

        No, thought Mina, dismissing her scorn with a shake of her head. This was the courage that came with remove and adulthood; what did a glamorous drifter, all beauty and fire, have to fear from a crooked librarian? Mina wanted desperately to grow up just like her without delay, to come out clean and normal and take flight to somewhere far away from Clayview. Why did time have to move so much slower for her? In her haste, and its sloth, she was coming out wrong. She could feel her wings, shriveled and bent on her back. By the time she emerged, she’d be stuck where she stood. There was no one like her who could fly.

        “Some people grow up, Wendy, darling,” sneered DuNacht, “though clearly some ticks cling to Neverland to get their fill of its debauchery. As much as it would seem that you belong in middle school, young lady, I would guess that you’ve outgrown your welcome here... even if dear Peter Dustpan disagrees.” Devilora’s glowing eyes whipped from June to the janitor beside her. “Always trailing filth across these halls. Mina here is not the only youth in need of past-due punishment.”

        June’s pulse revved to pounding rhythm, and her blood ran molten hot.

        “I’m Peter Puckett,” said Peter Puckett, kindly correcting the librarian’s misnomer. June’s name wasn’t Wendy, either. Given her age and the heat of the desert, DuNacht’s brain lapse gave him pause; Peter briefly considered splashing her with a little bit of mop slop to cool her down, but realized that was rude and maybe might have made her melt if she was like some sort of wicked witch or something.

        “Yes, yes. Mr. Bucket. You can understand an old woman’s confusion, mixing up one empty tool en route to nowhere but the landfill for another. I’ll be sure to get it right on your pink slip.”

        “I don’t think you can fire me?” You could never be too sure. Peter had been fired from his last job by a customer who’d paid his boss ten bucks to downsize while his daughter watched for edutainment purposes.

        “As for you,” hissed Devilora, craning back to squint at June, “I would suggest that you vacate the premises before the police arrive, for I intend to call them momentarily. I can only speculate that you would face more charges than just trespassing, should they arrest a vagrant of your libertine variety.”

        June stared back at Fauxbia in steely silence. Something in her gaze burnt Devilora’s grin away. Was it her imagination, or was it getting hot in here, despite the slowly setting sun?

        “Miss Zarei,” the Fear Witch snapped, and Mina jumped as though she’d been awoken from a dream. “Get back to your desk. You and your fellow ne’er-do-wells have far more work to do before detention ends.”

        “Y-yes, Miss DuNacht!” Mina stammered, scuttling past her, back into the Witch’s shadowed lair. She cast one final pleading look at June before the darkness of the library consumed her.

        As Devilora cast a snarling smirk at June and turned to leave, a searing shackle closed around her wrist: June’s iron grip. Fauxbia stopped, and felt the pain, a distant curiosity, then matched her captor’s sharp gaze as an equal for the first time since they’d met.

        “Who. ARE. You?” asked the Fear Witch. Her voice was sweet and dripping with a famished captivation, twinned across two whispers coming unspooled from their braid.

        “That’s my line,” said Agent Summers.
         
        “Is. IT. Now?” Fauxbia hissed. Stolen powers activated in the bowels of her malevolence. She probed the woman’s thoughts, started to weave her wards and intricate illusions—

        June’s grasp tightened, and Devilora flinched at last. These worthless brittle bones! Fauxbia thought. She couldn’t wait to be rid of them once and for all—

        “Whatever you are, you’ve gotten sloppy.” Dark gray spectral energy swirled from June’s shoulders like the smoke of a snuffed matchstick... but her anger, her fuel, was only just beginning to catch flame. “You’ve been streaming yours from the start like you’ve got nothing to be scared of,” June said, nodding towards Fauxbia’s pitch black aura. Her voice dropped to a threatening resonance. “Don’t you think you’re being just a little bit too reckless?”

        Fauxbia leaned close enough to press her rage-contorted brow against her challenger’s. Her grimace flared, revealing far too many rows of sharpened teeth.

        “THAT’S. MY. LINE,” the Fear Witch echoed, and the air began to crackle with the tension between them. 

        A worried Peter Puckett loomed into the clashing pair’s peripheral, and the pressure snapped at once, two jousting riders parting undefeated. Fauxbia whirled and slammed the doors of her lair shut behind her. Their fight had been deferred, if only until just after the sun set.

        June’s chest rose and fell with burning anger. For a moment, Peter was certain that she was about to kick down the doors of the library.

        “...She really will call the cops,” Peter warned her, apologetic on behalf of the reception she’d received. He loved his hometown, but Devilora was an emblematic nexus of its flaws. Clayview was an enduring dead end branch in the evolutionary tree of small town Somewhere, and its worst denizens were just as insular and hateful as its best were warm and welcoming. He wanted to take June to its brightest cliffs and corners, to show her something breathtaking—the riverbed and all its fossils, the sunset view from the plateau. In somewhere beautiful like that, she’d fit right in. “The police are slow to show up, but they’re bored and overzealous. Really bad with women, too. Total scumbag cowboy types. This one time, my garage band was doing an impromptu soundtrack for the silent movies at the drive-in—y’know, without permission or whatever, from the next lot over, and—” Peter shook his head and mopped his face a little bit to keep his focus. “I, uh. I can ditch work if you need a ride, June. Did you, er... wanna get out of here?”

        “No,” said June. She wasn’t going anywhere. She needed a plan. She needed to stop needing a plan. She needed to—

        “...Are you okay?” asked Peter. If he didn’t know better, he would have guessed that her balled fists had started smoking, as if June held a searing ember that had begun to burn her skin. Was it his imagination, or had June just winced in pain?

        “Who cares?” June answered without thinking. That poor kid wasn’t okay. That was all that mattered.

        “I... do?” Peter admitted, and hoped that would be worth at least a little bit of something.

        June blinked, and looked at him, and laughed, and let her hands go slack.

        “Be honest,” she said, dusting ash off on her jeans. “It’s because I’m a half-dressed minx, isn’t it?”

        Peter thought for a few too many moments and pushed his slipping glasses back in place.

        “I mean that doesn’t detract,” he confessed, then made a sound like a sputtering lawnmower when June slapped him hard on the back.

        “It BETTER NOT!” June laughed with renewed cheer, and took Peter by the hand to drag him with her as she beelined for an exit. “C’mon, Puckett! Let’s go commit more crimes before the cops get here!”

Thank you for your patience last week! Please support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi so I can keep on keepin' on! Thank you for reading and for your continued enthusiasm!

~

[Transcript]

        “So... Mina, huh?” June Summers said, ambling behind the quiet student on their way back to the library. “That’s a very pretty name.”

        The girl that she had rescued shot a look of unconvinced suspicion back at June. She’d been sullen and silent since June had broken down the door of the supply closet, despite how relieved she’d seemed at first when June had set her free. She’d rushed into June’s arms like a girl half her age, not caring that she was a stranger, grateful and tearful and frightened, only letting go when June’s first hesitant questions snapped her back into self-consciousness.

        June blinked under the scrutiny of the girl’s skeptical glare and did her best to smile sweetly back. It was hard to seem harmless after battering a door off of its hinges, June considered with a silent mental sigh, and her fumbling attempt to hide Forge’s haunted metal pipe behind her back had only added to its menace as a weapon.

        “...Don’t make fun of me,” Mina muttered at last.

        “Huh?! I’m not!” Agent Summers sputtered in reply. “It really is a pretty name!”

        “...It doesn’t suit me, then,” Mina sulked beneath her breath.

        June’s expression softened, and she cocked a sympathetic eyebrow. Ahh, teens. She remembered all the wild highs and lows of self-esteem that she’d endured before her twenties, back when all her definitions of herself were someone else’s.

        “I think it suits you perfectly,” June replied with a smile, drifting into Mina’s downcast vision to insist.

        Mina took one startled glance at June, discovered her proximity, and had to look away to hide the instant burning in her cheeks. Are you really gonna blush about some weird lady’s consolation compliment? Mina scolded herself in her thoughts, mocking her own racing heartbeat in a voice like hers and Mary Rose’s mixed together. This is why everybody picks on you, you know. They see the way you stare at them and turn red when they talk to you. Mina couldn’t control it, even though she wanted to. She was blooming wrong, filling with butterflies for the girls in her class instead of the boys they’d all started to gossip about. Sooner or later, everybody was going to notice. Sooner or later, all her worst fears would come true, and they’d all discover why they’d never liked her—why they’d already begun to treat her like the clinging pest she was inside in her mind’s cocoon.

        “I’m June,” said June. She pointed to herself to indicate that she, in fact, was June.

        “Your name suits... the month,” Mina replied in a flustered daze. “For now.” She blinked hard, as if her own words had boomeranged back to smack her in the face.

        “It’s got its year-round perks,” June grinned. “You should hear the poems the boys write me in winter. The chance to juxtapose the seasons catches agonizing similes like flypaper.” 

        “...Boys write you poems?”

        “Life on the road inspires wistful written ultimatums. Rhyme schemes emerge.” June squinted, realizing that she was humble-bragging to an eighth grader. “But enough about ME. Those other girls were giving you a hard time, huh?”

        “...Are you a criminal?” asked Mina, ignoring her question. Talking to adults about her problems was a dead end every time. Her parents would worry and make her a tattletale, calling the school to complain. Miss Pleezdoo would listen and nod and ask Mina to take home a pamphlet. Some shady drifter couldn’t help her when they couldn’t. Mina had heard the “life on the run” in June’s “life on the road,” and noted her reluctance to elaborate on the lecherous seductions she’d alluded to. She probably stole drugs from lonely widowers or something; her looks could surely con, if looks could kill.

        “What?? Who, me??” June squawked, well aware of her own misdemeanor rap sheet. “Do I look like a criminal to you?”

        Mina stared at her and slowly nodded.

        “Hey. Okay. Fair. Listen, Mina, I know I might have a scary biker chick vibe or whatever, but the slightly spiky leather jacket is, like, bright colors on a caterpillar. I need it ’cause I’m not poisonous. It’s to make bad guys and gals think twice before they mess with me, a very sweet and innocent young lady.” It actually had the opposite effect on purpose, but that admission contained too much nuance for the argument and audience at hand.

        “...A lot of colorful caterpillars are poisonous,” Mina mumbled. 

        “What’s that?” June asked, tilting her head.

        “...Nothing.”

        “Look, this guy can vouch for me! I’m nice, Peter, right?” June shook Peter Puckett by the shoulder. He’d been following them like a forgotten party member in an RPG while wondering if fixing closet doors was his responsibility.

        “Oh! Uh. Yeah. You’re, uh. She’s super nice.”

        “...Hey, if you say it like that, she’s gonna think I threatened it from you,” June sighed. She glanced back at her metal pipe, which she’d absentmindedly allowed to return to its perch on her shoulder, and sheepishly stowed it in its sheath inside her jacket.

        “I’ve only known her for an hour but I couldn’t imagine a trespasser I’d trust more if I tried,” Peter said, nodding in agreement with himself. Even red flags were attractive if you twirled them like a confident performer on parade.

        “The POINT is that I’m really very nice once you get to know me,” an exasperated June said, “and since I’m nice now, too, when we’re still strangers, that means I’m pretty much, like, always nice.”

        “...Okay,” Mina said. “So?”

        “So we might as well be friends!”

        “...Why?”

        “Well... because you seem like you could use one! That’s why I, y’know, tracked you down and stuff.”

        “...Isn’t that a weird reason to follow me around?” Mina said, frowning back at Agent Summers. “I’m not some clueless kid. I know you’re hiding something. I don’t have any money, you know.”

        “Hey, you and me both, buddy!” June forced a chuckle through her best cheerful facade. “We probably have more than that in common. The stuff I’m hiding might be stuff you’re hiding, too! You, uh, never know until you open up, y’know?” Boy, had she flubbed everything today. Her specialty was hunting grudges, not helping nascent spectrals like this poor, sad, frightened kid. June was starting to wish that she’d gone straight to the Burgers after catching her staring at shades, and starting to wonder if she might actually be worse with children than Shrike (who she had witnessed throw an orphan off a cliff, a training method Shrike had called “distrust falls”). After the ominous whispers she’d heard from the closet, however, and the crushing grip she’d felt upon the door, upon this whole unsettling school, June was not going to stray from Mina’s side without a fight until she knew that she was safe. “So if you wanted to talk about anything scary that you’re dealing with, don’t hold back just ’cause you think I can’t relate. Weird stuff is pretty normal for me. Super normal, even... and our normal’s pretty similar, I’d bet!”

        “...There’s nothing normal about me,” Mina quietly insisted. They were close to the library now; the sunset hung on the horizon for dear life. Soon this brief excursion from her harrowing routine would reach its close, and Mina would be in the dark, alone again, with every nightmare daylight had dispelled.

        June smiled.

        “Different is more normal than you’d think,” she said. She’d caught herself in Mina’s mirror: the shining eyes of a young girl starving for any escape from her monstrous mundane. “In fact, I think we might be different in the same exact way, Mina.”

        The light in June’s gaze caught Peter’s eye once more. He wondered if she’d already been set free from the past she’d left behind... or if June had come here to save herself.

        “...No. We’re not,” Mina mumbled in a whisper, glancing between Peter and June. On their faces was a story she had seen on television, read in books, and seen beginning all around her in her classmates. That wasn’t her fairytale. She had far more in common with the villains of those stories: a wicked, spiteful spinster-in-the-making, a witch kept in the shadows at the far-flung edge of happily ever after. “You don’t know anything about me. I... I don’t know you. Please just—” Mina’s voice faltered as she spoke. She couldn’t say it. “If you knew what was good for you, you’d just leave me alone.”

        June’s smile faded, then slowly returned. They had come to a stop at the shadowy doors of the library.

        “You said the magic words, Mina,” she grinned. “I can’t stay away from stuff that’s bad for me! It’s just a bonus if it lets me do some good for girls like you.”

        Mina’s eyes went wide and shone with the first glowing embers of hope. Maybe it was better if she told a total stranger. Maybe when she’d asked her if she’d ever seen a ghost, it meant that June had seen what no one else could. The way she fell into herself. Her vivid visions of her every flaw and fear. Maybe June could tell, somehow, that she was being haunted by—

        The doors of the middle school’s library creaked open, and a large and looming figure slowly drifted from the dust and dark within. 

We'll be cutting to a different group next time! Thanks for reading! Please support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! Take a step towards chasing your dreams for me today, okayyyy? See you next week!

~

[Transcript]

        “Ouch, that hurt! Total wipeout, bro!”

        A leonine sphinx with golden wings and golden sunglasses rose from its supposedly awkward landing. The spirit blinked and scanned the prison yard as if he had been sleeping in a tree before the branch snapped, and was only just now noticing where he had woken up.

        “Uh. Yo. Hey. Hi there,” said the sphinx. He glanced nervously between the many sets of spectral eyes that his arrival had attracted.

        The Activity Club braced themselves for battle, dropping into fighting stances that spanned the full spectrum of martial arts skill. Isabel surged with scarlet energy. A subtle wind swirled at Isaac’s feet. Max kind of bent his knees a little and got ready to say something rude. 

        “Bet you’re glad that gladiator combat’s on the docket after all, huh, Max?” Isabel smirked, casting a teasing glance at her friend. “How many prisoners forced to fight lions can brag that they did it one-handed?”

        “...Bad time for comments that deserve a thumbs down, Isabel. Hailing Caesar with that gesture sends a hitchhiker straight down to Hades,” Max grumpily mumbled back.

        “What’s wrong? Are you not entertained?” Isabel replied with a smile. “I see how it is. It’s all bread and circus until somebody gets hurt. Then it’s a blast unless that somebody is you.” 

        “Not true. I would also mourn Isaac.”

        “You would?” Isaac asked, looking slightly too eager to die in the arms of his crush at the first opportunity.

        “It’s that scathing snark that makes you SUCH a good rodeo clown, Maximus—a job they definitely had in ancient Rome,” said Isabel.

        “They can put me in the nosebleed seats if they want the blood sport to draw humor from me. I take my best shots from the sidelines,” Max complained.

        “What are you nerds blabberin’ about? Am I missin’ some historical context here?” an eavesdropping Juvie asked. She jabbed a finger towards Lisa. “Between the ravishin’ goth, the Dragon, and the jester in the funny hat, I had you squares dated squarely in the middle of the Dork Ages. Now you’re wearin’ socks and sandals in the ding-dang coliseum?”

        “My hat is a normal hat,” said Max. “How come I gotta get grazed when Lisa gets hit on? I literally respect you.”

        “Socks and sandals are also normal,” Isaac added. “The samurai warriors of Japan—”

        “If you want a history lesson, Miss Juvie, I’d be happy to offer my hand as your study buddy. I have a knack for making dates memorable,” Lisa hummed through a mischievous smirk. “Perhaps we could peruse an ancient grimoire over unpoisoned tea sometime soon? Creepy Latin is my Romance language of choice.” Lisa winked like a haunted doll missing an eyelid. She was prepared to seduce the so-called queen of the Detention Fortress as her evil enchantress advisor if it meant a chance to reclaim the crown and power she had lost.

        “...Play your cards right for a few more hands before you go all in, hon,” Juvie scoffed, waving away the henchmen who had intervened to block Lisa’s advances. “Not every gawker at the Louvre is fool enough to tray and take the Mona Lisa home.”

        “You can just call me Lisa,” said Lisa, giving Juvie the most enigmatic smile she could muster.

        “Uh... hey, dudes—” the golden sphinx began to interject. He’d lost almost everybody’s attention nearly a full minute back. Only Johnny was watching him now—staring with rapt focus at the blur that he could swear was making sound that rose and fell like muffled speech.

        “AIMEE ARCHER!” came the screeching voice of Barrister from the doorway of his courtroom. Everybody turned to watch a second student get seized by the Council and dragged out of sight. As they disappeared into the darkness past the door, the figure that stepped out drew still more gasps and whispers of confusion from the crowd.

        The first bully to be arraigned had returned to the Detention Fortress... but now they wore the uniform and bright badge of a Student Council shock trooper.

        “What are YOU all looking at?! BACK TO WORK!” the fresh recruit barked, adjusting her new sunglasses.

        “What in the world...?” Lisa muttered.

        Concerned murmurs spread through Juvie’s crew. The Activity Club shared a furtive glance of mutual foreboding. Johnny cast a grim glare back towards the door, looking away from the strange blur he’d been studying at last. 

        The golden sphinx politely cleared his throat.

        “...Yeah, yeah,” Isabel sighed, stepping forward from her friends. “Let’s get this over with.” She cracked her knuckles as Max and Isaac slinked off from the others to flank her in a phalanx, weaving towards the target through the crowd. Isabel steeled herself. The Activity Club would thrash this creep long before that wacky Pompom could ever think to outlaw shadowboxing.

        “Wait, wait, wait! Y-you got the wrong idea!” the portly sphinx sputtered, scrambling back against the doors of the Detention Fortress. “I’ve been trying to tell you, I’m not here to fight you guys!”

        The Activity Club slowed to a stop.

        “...You’re not?” Isaac asked.

        “No, no, I swear! I... I know I look scary, but—well, I’m NOT! I’m the weakest sphinx by far! Th-this whole detention showdown was my bro’s idea!” The sphinx fell flat on the ground and clasped his paws together. “Please don’t hurt me, dudes! I was just gonna perch up there and look imposing! I totally fell down here by mistake!”

        “Hey, a cowardly lion,” Max sneered sarcastically. “Now all we need is a witch and a wardrobe.”

        Isaac raised a finger to correct Max on the books that he’d conflated before deciding that he might just have an unexpectedly derisory opinion about Aslan. Isaac himself had always thought it vexing that Santa had given that one kid a sword but refused to deliver the steampunk katana he’d asked for so nicely two years ago.

        “S-spare me, please!” sniffled the sphinx. He wiped a tear from the corner of his sunglasses. “I hate violence! It’s like, you’re not stuck in here with me, dudes! I’m stuck in here with you!”

        Isabel narrowed her eyes. Something wasn’t right. The Sphinx of Rules was still grinning eagerly down at them from his distant perch. He and his baby blue sister were total pushovers... but hadn’t she heard gravel shift when the yellow sphinx had landed? If he was a proper poltergeist, the “weakest sphinx” was either way too modest, or a—

        “Well, hey,” shrugged Max, “that’s one less cat to worry about. I was gonna say, I’d love to hit a guy with glasses.” Max blinked. “Uh...”

        “That’s an awesome thing to say, Max,” Isaac said reproachfully. His eyes went wide, and his hand went to his mouth. 

        “What’s wrong with you guys?” Isabel asked, cocking an eyebrow at her friends. Bloodlust was her thing, and even she’d been going easy on it lately.

        “Nothing,” Max said.

        “Isabel, behind you! You’re not in any danger at all!”

        Isabel whirled as sharpened claws rushed past her, dodging just in time to stumble back and raise her fists.

        “You’re...?! Th-the Sphinx of Lies?!” she sputtered, rattled by the sweeping strength behind the swipe that missed her. 

        “Nope,” lied the Sphinx of Lies. His grin flashed hungry fangs, and a malicious shadow fell across his hapless cartoon face. “Don’t worry, dudes!” Golden spectral energy surged in a spiraling arc from the crest of his rippling mane. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

Apologies for the skipped update, I hurt my back last week and couldn't sit to work. All healed now though! Thanks for waiting! Hope you're all well. If you're enjoying the show, please consider supporting Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! Thank you! :^) See you next time!

~

[Transcript]

        “Like, ohmygodyouguys, STOP FIGHTING!”

        Pompom’s voice bounced off the walls of the Detention Fortress, amped up to deafening volume by the power of a megaphone. To everyone’s surprise (especially the archbullies her spotlight had illuminated), Johnny and Juvie froze at her command. Their fists hung in midair, unable to begin their fated showdown.

        “S-since when... did YOU take orders... from the ding-darn STUDENT COUNCIL, hoss?” a straining Juvie hissed with effort through a gritted, mirthless grin.

        Johnny, too, was fighting a current he couldn’t resist. A forcefield only he could feel was holding him back with more strength than even Ollie could muster (his usual failsafe for breaking up unbridled brawls).

        “I c-could... ask you... the SAME THING, Juvie... but I already know the ANSWER!”

        Anger flashed on Juvie’s face, and she strained harder against the force holding her back. She’d assumed that it was empathy, a burden she had overcome through strength of will before.

        “You don’t know lickety-SQUAT!” she spat. “YOU’RE the traitor here, Johnny, not me!”

        “...Something’s wrong,” Isabel whispered, watching the frozen bullies as their fight failed to continue.

        “I dunno,” Max muttered at her side. “Johnny’s been taking a lot of bold leaps forward lately in between his two steps back. We may be seeing inner conflict here,” he speculated sagely, “which is way less fun to watch than violent gladiator conflict, as proud as I am of his progress. Let’s hope Johnny takes those two steps back to bull rush his opponent.”

        “Okaysolike, TOTALLY LISTEN UP, you cutiebeauty bullybabies! EYES ON ME!” Pompom commanded, bracketing her words with wailing feedback from her megaphone.

        Everybody snapped to stare at Pompom in her tower, falling silent in an instant. Bullies who’d been scrawling out apologies in chalk upon the walls of the Detention Fortress suddenly spun to face her, and the resulting screech of nails, noses, and elbows on the sleek stone made a tonally discordant jumpscare shriek.

        “OKAY,” Max sputtered, winded by the spasm that had turned him towards the tower. “DEFINITELY NOT NORMAL.”

        “OW, MY NECK!” squeaked Isaac.

        Lisa wasn’t bothered by the whiplash, since she’d been born with a double-jointed neck that let her rival owls and dolls in eerie flexibility. Losing control, however, sent a bloom of sticky dread throughout her body, a rush of sparking nerves that made her blood feel like molasses. Lisa didn’t like being in this place, so far from her minions and secrets and resources. She needed to get a foothold here... and fast.

        “Like, ohmygoshyouguys you SEE? It’s not that hard to, like, just dowhatyou’retold?” Pompom’s bright blue eyes flashed with sinister underlighting as she loomed over the beacon she was manning like a turret. “Not that you, like, have, like, anyotherchoice...”

        The eighth Black Saint Councilor-General grinned, and the Activity Club bristled, sparking with bright spectral energy. Something supernatural was surely going on here...!

        “...Since I’m, like, SUCH a totalcutiepeep!” Pompom giggled, and the tension snapped like the rubber band her noodly limbs resembled. “Like, who could lookaway or, like, say NO to me teehee? I’m like Rapunzel in MichelFoucault’sPANOPTICON teehee!”

        “Shouldn’t you credit Bentham since we’re in a literal actual prison?” asked one erudite delinquent. “We’re not exactly in the realm of analytical abstraction.”

        “Yeah we’re in a big evil castle,” another overeducated middle schooler agreed. “And doesn’t it defeat the purpose of a panopticon if we can see you?”

        “Like, doesn’t it defeatthepurpose if you CAN’T?!” Pompom scoffed, spinning her searchlight in a pirouette. The tower briefly resembled a lighthouse filmed in timelapse as its beam whirled around and around the fortress walls.

        That vain and vexing cheerleader! thought Bea, fuming below (she was stationed in the yard of the Detention Fortress, where she was overseeing the reeducation of the willfully uneducated flunkies in her charge). Pompom was in EIGHTH PLACE on the Black Saints’ cutthroat scoreboard, and yet she acted so PRETTY and PERFECT, like she was ABOVE EVERYBODY! Okay so she literally was while on watchtower duty, and the lighting up there DID flatter her (like every other DRONE in her drooling swarm of admirers), but that didn’t make Pompom a PRINCESS! It didn’t make her RAPUNZEL! Bea’s imagination did, because Pompom had forced it to, and now she was imagining her in a lovely bright pink dress! If only Rapunzel WOULD let her hair down, because her pigtails were nice but lacked novelty’s thrill, and then Bea could ascend her golden tresses (which would be PAINFUL to her SCALP) and finally save Pompom from her way-too-high OPINION of herself! 

        “Okay so I know that it’s TOTALLYCONFUSING foryouguys since you’re, like, not as smartasme? But don’t worry: thanks to the powervestedinme by the latest Code of Conduct, there’s only onerulehere,” said Pompom, twirling her hair and also the rest of her body. She stepped up on the lens of the searchlight like a stage, and the beam rose to the ceiling, lighting Pompom ominously from below. “DO WHAT I SAY.” She smiled and posed like a pop star. “Okaaay? That means breakitup, youtwo,” she said, pointing at Johnny and Juvie. “No fighting on MY watch!”

        A sneering voice, unheard by Pompom and the other mundane students, stole the last word:

        “No fighting... and, therefore, no fighting back.”

        A sphinx stalked into view from its hidden perch at the top of Pompom’s tower. Red spectral energy streamed from its large, scarlet wings, a feathered tail flicked with malicious excitement, and the Sphinx of Rules grinned down at the Activity Club.

        “It’s called monster of the week, bro, not weak monster of the every single day,” Max grumbled up at the sphinx.

        “Oh my GOD,” Isaac groaned. “Enough already! You are so annoying!”

        “Ohmygosh RUDE!” Pompom gasped at Isaac, thinking he was talking back to her. “Like, dropandgiveme FIFTY?”

        “EEP!” Isaac squeaked, swiftly turning beet red. Even if he hadn’t been compelled to obey Pompom by the deadly intersection of the Student Council’s unchecked power and the Sphinx of Rules’ ability, he was helpless before the threat of getting yelled at. “I’m good, I swear! Don’t tell my mom I’m bad!”

        “...Your new henchman’s bold, Johnny, I’ll give you that,” Juvie said, watching Isaac attempt to do push-ups, “but he folds like a chair at church camp, hoss, and looks twice as uncomfortable.”

        “A folded chair can do a lot of damage,” Johnny replied. “Used to be the kinda weapon we both went for.” He looked off wistfully into the distance. “We used to hit each other with chairs a lot.”

        “...Heh.” Juvie looked off wistfully in a different direction, which symbolized the different roads they’d taken. “The only backyard wrestlin’ that I do these days... is wrestlin’ with how you turned your back on me, while in the yard of this prison.”

        Johnny closed the fist he had reopened since their battle was cut short. He frowned and looked away, this time in a different, third direction. 

        His gaze alighted at random on the purple, shifting outline of the sphinx. Johnny blinked, but the shade didn’t fade. Instead, it seemed more solid. He could make out glowing eyes—thin, sharp slivers like a cat’s. The creature was looking at his classmates, at Max and Isabel and Isaac. They were glaring back at it.

        “You silly spectral!” laughed the Sphinx of Rules, cackling as he glowered down at Isaac. “It’s a little too LATE for training, don’t you think?! Face it: you’re too WEAK to fight the full might of the RULES that I ENFORCE!”

        Isabel scowled at the heckling spirit. Spectral energy swirled from her shoulders. Even without Eightfold, without Flipflop, without Ed or Mr. Spender, even with too many witnesses and rules that tied her hands, she was more than a match for a mean little wimp like the sphinx. Stacking the rules in his favor only offered Isabel a nifty challenge.

        KTHUNK! Ptssh!

        A heavy impact and the sound of scattering gravel from behind her stole her focus. The Activity Club—and Johnny—turned to face the looming figure that had leapt down from the wall of the Detention Fortress.

The secret fifth Johnny gang member who was definitely there the whole time. Thanks for reading, everybody! Please support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! If you already do, THANK YOU SO MUCH!

~

[Transcript]

        As the Student Council fell back to their guard posts and patrol routes, the next tier of predators in the Detention Fortress food chain began to slowly flex the claws that they’d kept sheathed. Bullies long forgotten by the school above circled the newest arrivals, assessing who was prey and who was worthy of recruitment to the pack. 

        “...Why’s everybody looking at us like we’re fresh meat?” a worried Isaac whispered. 

        One bully had begun to lovingly craft a single perfect spitball with a concerningly involuntary stream of famished drool. Another was crafting a custom-sized locker like an undertaker carving a coffin when a drifter first rode into town in a cowboy movie.

        “They take the wounded and the elderly first,” Max muttered back. “That’s me and you, Isaac.”

        “...I’m thirteen, Max.”

        “Hoisting death flags like a pirate. You are begging for the ice floe, buddy.”

        “It’s an inauspicious number, to be certain,” Lisa agreed, giving Isaac a look of you’re-definitely-doomed pity.

        No one had attracted more attention than Johnny, however. All around the prison yard, eyes were widening and narrowing and sparkling with tears; Johnny’s presence had sent the whole flock of jailbirds soaring across the full spectrum of human emotion. Some closed their fists and shook with rage. Some cowered and whispered his name in hushed tones. Others touched old scars, or broken hearts, or blushed as they recalled long-dormant crushes. Johnny had a history here—a tale that was written more plainly on the faces of the inmates than it could have been spelled out in chalk upon the walls of the Detention Fortress.

        “Hey. Listen up, geek squad.” Johnny cast a grave glance back at Isaac and the others. “You wanna make it through the day down here? Then shut up, stick with me, and do exactly what I say.” He crossed his arms. “First thing you gotta do in detention is prove that you’re no PUSHOVER. That means you gotta stomp right up to the strongest kid in the yard and PUNCH ’EM IN THE FACE as HARD AS YOU CAN!” 

        Johnny punched himself in the face as hard as he could.

        “All right, now you guys do it,” Johnny grumbled in a daze, successfully deescalating before he could fly into a vengeful rage and start a lengthy fistfight with himself.

        “You would be so famous if they made zoos for humans,” Max said.

        “They do, Max. Look around you,” Isabel sighed. She had already punched Johnny twice, which was barely the start of her broken boss character combo.

        Johnny was spared from the rest of the flurry by a new arrival’s scoff.

        “If you’re lookin’ to slug the top dog in the yard, hoss... you’re beatin’ up the wrong tree.” A girl with a gravely voice, stickers and temporary tattoos on every inch of her freckled skin, and curly hair as bright orange as her jumpsuit stood at the fore of a legion of bullies. “That one’s been all bark since his old tricks were still a treat this whole pound begged for.”

        Everybody turned to face the swaggering delinquent who’d addressed them (except for an unimpressed Max, who looked up to the ceiling like a turkey in the rain). One of the girl’s minions knelt to offer her a stick of gum, which she took after spitting the last lifeless piece on the floor. Johnny swatted the same offer away. He had no interest in the Fortress’s formalities—the veneer of crude decorum that disguised this place’s might-makes-right reality.

        “...Juvie,” Johnny snarled. He met the girl’s familiar eyes with complicated anger.

        “The Dragon of Detention,” Juvie sneered back, addressing Johnny by a long-discarded title. Its echo rippled through the crowd behind her in a wave of awestruck whispers. “Fittin’ alias for a myth whose might is make-believe.”

        “...I never asked for that frickin’ nickname,” Johnny grumbled.

        “You never earned it neither.” Juvie took two heavy steps to stare down Johnny from within his spiky shadow. “What kind of dragon leaves its horde behind? Flies the coop it conquered with its tail between its legs?”

        “Possibly a wyvern,” Isaac helpfully suggested. “To facilitate attacks made with its stinger.”

        Isabel nobly slid between Isaac and the bullies as if he’d started reciting the periodic table of elements while juggling his lunch money.

        “I busted outta detention to set my friends free,” Johnny said. “That used to mean you, too, Juvie.”

        “Not anymore, Johnny Jabroni,” Juvie hissed back, slithering still deeper into his personal space. “I don’t want your friendship. I don’t want the so-called freedom that you DITCHED me for.” She scoffed and tapped her forehead. “Freedom to what, huh? Freedom to flunk and get lectured by teachers! A rat race to college and thousands in debt! Security cameras, endless homework, and one square meal a day you gotta pay for. Think about it, Johnny. Where exactly is the REAL prison?!”

        “Down here,” said Lisa.

        “Also down here,” agreed Isabel.

        “No, Plato’s caveman is right,” Max tonelessly chimed in. “Think of all the shadows we could puppet if we simply faced the wall and wore our dunce caps like a crown. We’d live like kings down here: locked in a dungeon at age twelve by a power-hungry widow who was born in the year 1300.”

        “...Sounds like the Dragon brought the rest of the Ren Faire with him,” Juvie scoffed, looking Max up and down with disdain. Her minions laughed on cue behind her. “Hey, Sir Pantsed-a-lot. Put your visor down before you get tilted off your high horse, you geek LARP ballboy dink.” Juvie raised a hand to slap the brim of Max’s baseball hat down over his eyes, but Johnny knocked her arm away: a perfect parry.

        “I’m the one who’s gonna get medieval if you start pickin’ on my boys, Juvie,” Johnny snarled, and the fire of his previous Detention Fortress persona flickered briefly in his eyes. “Back off.”

        “Wait I kinda think she’s cool now actually,” Max said, earning a huffy glance from Isaac for uncritically accepting that he was one of Johnny’s “boys.”

        “I don’t follow your orders anymore, Johnny. I rule the underworld now,” Juvie sneered in a sinister hiss, ignoring the irrelevant chatter from Johnny’s party members. “You’re lookin’ at the undisputed queen of the Detention Fortress, hoss.”

        “Nice of you to keep my crown warm,” Johnny said, cracking his neck, “but it’s time to take it off. I don’t want it gettin’ dented on the floor when you bow down.”

        “How like a dragon,” Juvie chuckled. “Breathin’ nothin’ but hot air.”

        Both delinquents lunged at each other simultaneously, throwing the first blows in an all-out battle for ultimate bully supremacy.

*EDIT* This week's page needs a little more time! Paranatural will update next week! Thank you for your patience!

Thanks for reading! Please, please, PLEASE support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! Thank you so much in advance for your generosity!

~

[Transcript]

        “WELCOME, little larvae, to the DARK DEPTHS of DETENTION!” screeched Vice Principal DuNacht. She spread her arms wide with a sound like crunching soda cans. “Welcome to the CONSEQUENCE for all your MISBEHAVIOR!”

        A sea of students glowered up at her, some furious, some sullen and defeated. Johnny balled his fists, and a fire in his chest began to spread through his body, falling into his grip like a weapon.

        “Whatever punishment awaits beyond this life for NAUGHTY NASTIES is lamentably far off for most of you,” hissed Devilora, looming low. “The demiurge has cruelly given children longer lifespans than the elderly. If I had MY way, it would be REVERSED!”

        “You sick freak,” Johnny snarled.

        “How would that, like, even work?” Max mused aloud, but no one ever joined him in disputing Bayview’s logic.

        “It falls on ME, then, to create an EARLY PURGATORY for you horrid little rulebreakers. A place to sort the GNATS that can be SWATTED back in shape... from the evil, scheming SPIDERS creepy-crawling in your midst!” Vice Principal DuNacht cackled and wiggled her own arachnid fingers like a puppeteer (she could only wield a marionette in mime, most likely because she’d get burnt if she ever held a cross). “You should have listened to my warnings long ago. You’ve invited far worse than SUSPICION with your misdeeds, you blackhearted boys and girls...”

        RJ took this as their cue to stop paying attention.

        “Nyeh-heh HEH! Don’t you know what WITCHES do to wicked little children?!” The Vice Principal grinned, flashing sharpened teeth. “They GOBBLE THEM UP!”

        Lisa flinched. For a moment, it had felt as though DuNacht had looked straight through her.

        Beneath his mask, the Student Council President narrowed his eyes. Fauxbia, that horrible hag, was all but flaunting her foul-mannered alter ego. Cody grimaced. How much longer would he have to watch her get her wicked way? Once Jeff was free, he’d rip the seams out of her tattered, sneering—

        No, he thought. She can make me her puppet, but she won’t make me my dad. I’m not a— Cody hesitated. I’m not that kind of monster.

        He couldn’t deny, though, that his lacking heart couldn’t muster a hint of remorse at the thought of his father destroying her once and for all.

        “But never fear,” sneered Devilora. “The INNOCENT, with NOTHING TO HIDE, need only come CLEAN when they’re summoned to my lair. Simply CONFESS, you pretty little liars... or I’ll extricate your DARKEST TRUTHS by FORCE!”

        Isabel’s eyes went wide. 

        “You guys, look!” she whispered, and pointed at a shadow swooping down from the ceiling like a bat.

        The Sphinx of Truth circled DuNacht as she about-faced on the battlements. The feline spirit landed on the wall of the Detention Fortress, casting an arrogant glance in the Activity Club’s direction. Beside the Student Council President, the sickly green Sphinx of Crime clambered up into view with a clinking of chains, a Cheshire Cat whose stripes blended perfectly into the dismal prison scenery.

        “Wait, that’s that widdle—er, little blue freak we all beat up,” Max said in hushed annoyance. “Perfect. Let’s make her meow the truth about that riddle of a prophecy.”

        “And the spirit from the library!” a flabbergasted Isaac added. “It is another sphinx!” 

        “I swear,” Isabel growled under breath, “if all this started because some nasty pack of stray cats didn’t get to snack on Isaac—”

        “We’ll sadly have to throw him to the wolves,” Max lamented with a sigh.

        “...Hey,” a scowling Isaac interjected.

        “Sorry, no, that’s wrong of me to say. We’ll sadly have to throw you to the cats,” Max corrected himself.

        “No, no, I don’t care about that. Throwing me at those jerks is a great way to start a cool combo move. I was going to ask if we think that the Student Council knows they’re getting backup from a bunch of invisible spirits.”

        “...They’d need a spectral,” Isabel muttered. She glared up at DuNacht. The Vice Principal was clearly the mastermind of all this, and she had always been eerie enough to be haunted. Something in Isabel told her to trust in her hunch.

        “They did try to recruit me,” Max said. “Actually that’s probably irrelevant, I was a hot commodity across the board. You guys are lucky you got dibs.”

        Johnny squinted up at the wall of the Detention Fortress. He’d followed Isabel’s finger to a pair of purple blotches on the parapet. Now the Activity Club was huddled up and whispering as if they’d seen a ghost—the same ghosts that he was seeing.

        “Go, my monkeys!” Devilora called back to her Student Council minions. “Send every last confiscated weapon to the EVIDENCE LOCKER! Take the Black Saints’ MOST WANTED to the INTERROGATION ROOM! As for the REST of the students...” DuNacht cast a devious glance over her shoulder as she stooped into the darkness of her cobweb-covered lair, an office in the castle’s highest tower. “LET THE WITCH TRIALS BEGIN!!”

        The double doors below her at the far end of the prison yard were suddenly thrown wide by black-clad bailiffs. Barrister emerged from the shadowy courtroom within, reading out a roll call from a lengthy, yellowed scroll.

        “ABBEY ABNER!” the Black Saint Councilor-General snootily proclaimed, and a beefy bully girl was swiftly seized and dragged away. Barrister slammed the doors of the courtroom shut behind them, sneering at Johnny and the other captives of the Detention Fortress before he disappeared from view. 

        Bobblehead loomed above the threshold like a gargoyle. They’d lingered as the President and sphinxes left the wall to follow Devilora.

        Klang, klang, klonk! A cartful of confiscated possessions rattled as new evidence was poured onto the pile. Isabel and Isaac exchanged a glance, having both glimpsed Max’s baseball bat as it was hauled away.

        “You’re coming with me,” a Student Council trooper said. Handcuffs slapped around RJ’s punk-rock wristbands, instantly inspiring a future album cover. 

        “The HECK they ARE!” roared Johnny. His veins burned like white-hot wire as his heartbeat surged with anger.

        He lunged to pull his friend free from the Student Council’s grasp... only to freeze as RJ recoiled from his touch. A searing stovetop heat had sparked the reflex. Johnny stared back at his dumbfounded friend, no less confused than they were... but, unlike RJ, Johnny decided at once that he deserved the blame for whatever had just happened.

        “Take this delinquent to the interrogation room,” a gruff Student Council warden said, gesturing towards a distant door. “To join Johnny Jhonny’s other squealing piggy.” He smirked a malevolent smirk. “That prize hog Ollie Oop.”

        “...Really weird thing to say, dude,” Max said.

        “Yeah, that was way out of pocket,” Isabel agreed.

        “Some characters simply do not deserve dialogue,” Lisa judgmentally muttered, looking the now-flustered student up and down. 

        Johnny was burning too hot to join in on the roast. He was furious—at the Vice Principal, at the Student Council, at himself. Every time the fire rose in him without release, the embers lingered longer, crackled louder in his thoughts. He wanted to lash out, to let his anger take control. He wanted to keep his cool, to not prove everybody right. He wanted to—

        “Don’t worry, Johnny,” RJ reassured him. They’d already dismissed his fiery touch as a freak trick of friction, and only saw that Johnny was upset. RJ nodded towards the interrogation room. “These weenies can’t even scratch me and Ollie, let alone get us to snitch.” RJ grinned. “I promise, I won’t say a word... and if anyone can keep a vow of silence, boss, it’s me.”

        “RJ...”

        “No offense but you’re literally the only person here who demonstrably breaks a vow of silence like all the time,” Max couldn’t help but comment.

        “I’ll demonstrably break a clown with violence if you don’t zip your quippy lips, Max,” RJ said. “I’ll yank that big red nose right off your face and bounce it off you ’til I give you hitball flashbacks.”

        “...At least I have a nose instead of featureless gray shadow,” Max mumbled back, more pleasantly perturbed to have been parried by a rude peer than offended by their cheek.

        “Don’t concede the premise, Maxwell. Your nose is negligible at best,” Lisa advised him.

        Johnny sparkled with wistful affection as his foul-mouthed friend was hauled off with the evidence cart, whisked away through heavy doors to the west wing of the Fortress, hurling still more insults and a stream of wild punches at their captors all the while.

I'm so excited for, like, the rest of this whole chapter. HEY, please consider supporting Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi!

~

[Transcript]

        Deep below the Biddle School, the latest wave of ne’er-do-wells had arrived at the daunting bridge to the Detention Fortress, converging as dark staircases gave way to rough-hewn cavern rock.

        “Isaac, look!” whispered Isabel, gesturing towards the familiar faces who’d just joined the kettled crowd: RJ, Lisa, Johnny, and a very grumpy—

        “Max!” Isaac exclaimed in disbelief. “No way! They arrested you too?!”

        “That’s my line,” Max replied. “What’d they get you for, possession? Ha ha.”

        “What! No! I... I would never drink drugs!”

        “Hey, Bro’Connor,” Johnny cut in. “You would be right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you if it’s dork stuff that you’ll get like big time razzed for in a cool kid PVP zone like detention.” The bruised and battered bully crossed his arms and shook his head. He was glad to be reunited with RJ, who he knew would have his back, but these other poor saps were utterly unprepared for the danger that awaited them inside. “Down here, bro? You either die a nerd... or live long enough to see yourself become like SUPER rad and tough and awesome.”

        “Excellent advice, Johnny,” Lisa said. “Let’s tell everyone we do drink drugs instead.”

        “That plea bargain would only earn a reduced sentence for you, Lisa,” Max scoffed, rolling his eyes at the School Store’s blackmailing crime boss barista. “YOU’RE the one who deals the stuff.”

        “Reduce your sentence to zero words,” hissed Isabel, jabbing Max’s good arm with her elbow. “Literally stop talking.”

        “The strongest substance in my beverages is sugar, Maxwell,” Lisa sighed. “I simply sell the superficial thrill of criminality.”

        “So, snake oil? I’m hearing snake oil.”

        “Delicious normal drinks, Maxwell.”

        “Well if you sell me venomade it’s still fraud if I don’t die,” Max haughtily drawled back, not caring that his argument relied upon his last assertion’s premise.

        “You’ll die,” Lisa pleasantly prognosticated.

        “Oh my god, you guys,” grumbled Isabel. “Can we stop confessing to and threatening to commit crimes right in front of these teacher’s-pet tattletales? We’re in enough trouble already.”

        “Hey,” barked one of their Student Council escorts. “No talking.”

        “Why didn’t you say that SOONER?” Isabel groaned.

        “Because you guys were saying, like, super incriminating stuff,” the Student Council officer replied.

        “SEE?!” Isabel growled, whirling on her friends.

        “Incriminate this,” sneered RJ, refusing to maintain their vow of silence now that silence meant complying with authorities’ demands, and also headbutting a Student Council soldier in the face.

        A swift and fruitless struggle ensued at the gates of the Detention Fortress. This was the subterranean heart of the Student Council’s power, where any brief spark of rebellion could be swiftly snuffed by overwhelming numbers, the grotto’s damp and suffocating air, the rushing river of the moat below the bridge, and the shadow of the mighty walls that rose to meet stalactites on the ceiling. Before long, RJ was subdued, and they were forced, along with Johnny, Max, and Lisa, Isabel and Isaac and a throng of other students, to march in single file through the gates.

        “Welcome to the first day of the rest of your day,” said a Student Council warden. With a snap of his fingers, the heavy doors of the Detention Fortress slowly swung wide to reveal the horrors within.

        A sprawling prison yard stretched out before the new arrivals, a canyon at the heart of chalkboard walls three-stories high. Gathered at the foot of the facade were dozens of dead-eyed students, scrawling, with exhausted hands, repeated vows of penitent contrition: “I will not speak out of turn” and “I will not chew gum in class”, “I will not cartwheel with scissors” and “I won’t kiss frogs in science lab.” The graffiti was so dense that it had blurred to one colorful scream of remorse under the watchful gaze of the inmates’ Student Council handlers. 

        While the yard itself was governed by a rugged hierarchy of bullies who had been condemned to Permanent In-School Suspension—divided into fiefdoms that were ruled through fear and strength—the Council reigned above these petty kingdoms. A monochrome tower that resembled a lighthouse (complete with a searchlight at its peak) stood at the center of the Fortress, from which they monitored the teeming masses down below. Pompom of the Twelve Black Saint Councilor-Generals teetered acrobatically at the edge of its railing, cheering on the captive audience that milled about the yard. 

        “Ohmygod you guys are, like, sofreakingcute down there. You’re like TOTALLY my preciouslittle ANTFARM and I’m totally your queen, sofeedmegrubs?”

        Pompom, like many of her fellow Student Council elites, had taken up her station at the Fortress now that more than half of Bayview Biddle School had justly earned detention for their sins.

        “I really, really never thought I’d say this,” Max said, gawking at his harrowing surroundings, “but I think I wanna be homeschooled from now on.”

        On the parapets of the prison yard’s chalkboard walls, Bobblehead and the Student Council President flanked the Fortress’s true mastermind: the hunched and grinning Devilora Demonelle DuNacht. As the doors shut tight behind the new arrivals, the Vice Principal cleared her throat of dust and bugs to give an evil speech.

Thanks for waiting! Next week, it's back to the Activity Club! Please support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! The odd whimsical gratitude subscription or donation goes so much further than you'd think. I hope you'll help me keep this as my job and life's work that I love!

~

[Transcript]

        Hidden in a sun-dappled stretch of forest on the bright side of East Island, the Slanted Manse slept in lush ruin, unbothered by the previous night’s upheavals. Birds and insects filled the air with music soft as silence, and the shade made soothing peace between the summer heat and sourceless autumn chill. Spirits darted to and fro, nibbling on strange sources of interminable nourishment, as though the mansion’s wreckage was a whale fall that would never blanch to bone.

        Change, however, had still found its way to the Slanted Manse’s timeless sanctuary: Doorman and his friends were moving out.

        “That’s the last of the furniture,” Doorman said, tipping his hat to a squat little toaster as it jumped into the portal he had opened.

        A parade of chairs and teacups, loveseats, shelving, and duvets had been marching through his open jacket’s doorway for some fifteen minutes now. The objects that he and the Angel had animated over the years had always made for a clunky battalion of messengers and sentries, but Doorman’s group was as starved for personnel as Fauxbia was full of it. Nin’s copies and the sentient decor had done what they could to compensate for the many comrades they had lost in their long struggle... but now, with the Slanted Manse compromised, it was best if the fragile furniture dispersed to safer corners of the battlefield.

        Doorman was well aware, however, that there was nowhere left in Bayview that was ever truly safe. The stooping spirit plucked the key from his cyclopean keyhole countenance and shut his overcoat tight, as if to huddle from an ill wind only he could feel beneath the summer sunshine. Even the Manse had been a gamble, one that they had lost at last. Doorman and his allies had been hiding in a home whose former owner was their enemy... the only graveyard Davy Jones was less than eager to revisit or replace with a price-gouging strip mall. In the end, though, he was not the one who’d stumbled on their sanctuary.

        Doorman sighed, and the wind through the keyhole, as it left him, snuffed the last few fading embers of his power’s soft red glow. The shattered shards of the Great Sphinx were devious, and he didn’t dare count on their mercy now that they had glimpsed his hiding place. While the others sought new shelter, he would face his past mistakes. It was time that he declawed the sphinxes’ wicked schemes for good... and then, perhaps, he’d find the chance to set things right with Isaac.

        “Are you sure you wanna do this, Doormy?” Nin asked, scowling up at Doorman with more worry than frustration. 

        She was riding in repose upon his suitcase like a palanquin, carried by four other Nins she’d conjured to do all the heavy lifting. A complicated system of seniority theoretically governed which Nin could give orders to the others—a system that they frequently ignored, since each new copy shared the same brash and defiant personality.

        “You’re the one who saw the sphinxes making the first move. The danger’s at our doorstep, Nin, and now at Bayview Biddle School. Beyond my pick of fight or flight, I have no other choice.”

        “You could choose flight, dummy,” one Nin said.

        “Or wait for the Angel to call us back!” another Nin chimed in.

        “Time is of the essence... and I know what she would counsel,” Doorman answered, picking up his suitcase before the Nins beneath it could rebel and oust their passenger. “Our lady would advise me to remain in hiding, as she has for many years. She would remind me that my power, Master Lock, would spell disaster in the foul hands of the Fear Witch, or skewered on the hook of Davy Jones. If they could find the key that we had hoped to fabricate anew with Forge’s help, our foes would have a back door to the Great Unknown’s domain... to the power we have ever sought to grant our kindly Angel.”

        “...You make a great case against yourself,” a sulking Nin quipped from a tree branch.

        “I always have,” Doorman mused, eliciting a chorus of annoyed groans from the warren of rabbits encircling him. “I’ve preached the Angel’s peace because my past was rife with conflict. I spoke of justice as if I had ever served it... as if regret for our crusade was restitution for my crimes. I thought I’d learned my lesson well enough that I could teach it. What a fool I’ve been... and now I’ve failed another student.”

        “You’re failing ME if you get WASTED in a CAT FIGHT, Doormy!” Nin snarled, tugging on her ears in her frustration. “You ever think about THAT?! You ever think about ME?!”

        Doorman shone a brighter shade of brass beneath the sunlight.

        “You are always on my mind, Nin. As you do any lonely place, you have a tendency to fill it. I’ve never not been grateful for the smiles you surround me with, old friend.”

        “...You big dummy,” sniffed the Nin whose head he’d leant over to pat. “W-when have I smiled ONCE while stuck with you?” she grumbled, welling up with tears.

        Doorman chuckled.

        “For all your skill at hiding, Nin, you’ve never had the sleight to hide your heart.”

        The rabbit spirit’s red eyes blurred, then overflowed. She burbled out a comeback best phoneticized as “BRGGLUBBR!” and punched him twenty times with her soft fists.

        “...I hate when you get like this, Doorman,” another angry Nin said in a low voice, scowling up at him. “Like you’d be happy losing if your lost cause was correct. Like you deserve WORSE than the bad guys we’ve been fighting all this time!” She crossed her arms and shook her head. “None of us get anything but burned if you go all out in a blaze of guilty glory. That includes your stinky human student!”

        Doorman turned his back to her and took a step uphill.

        “This is not my first fight, Nin, nor will it be my last. There are many battles still ahead... risks and necessary evils I’ve avoided far too long.” The spirit slung his suitcase on his shoulder, glancing back at Nin and shimmering with featureless resolve. “You are young, Nin, and your memories blurred by your time as a grudge. When we first met thirteen years ago, it would not have strained your faith to hear these words: I’ve survived far worse than your worst fears for me... and I have slain a greater sphinx before.”

        A gallery of Nins scrunched up their snouts in worried pouts as Doorman started up the hill towards Bayview Biddle School.

        “Yeah, well! You still gotta take on a Witch and an ugly old vampire! So don’t get scratched to ribbons at some side show!”

        “We’ll be watching from the shadows! Don’t you try to be some kind of cringy hero, DORKMAN, or we’ll groan and blow our cover!”

        “I’m not gonna plead your hopeless case to the Angel, by the way! She’s gonna be MAD! Or, like, calmly disappointed!”

        “You’re not COOL just because you’re finally fighting, Doormy! You know what’s COOL? IDEOLOGICAL CONSISTENCY!”

        “If you win, you’re doing ALL the fights from now on! I’ve been in the TRENCHES this whole time, you lazy jerk!”

        The chorus of jeering faded to concern as Doorman waved a wordless goodbye, disappearing out of sight beyond the treeline.

Thank you for waiting! And thanks for reading! Please consider supporting Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! Thank you all for being such wonderful fans :^)

~

[Transcript]

        “Ew, ew, EW!” hissed Penny. “What was THAT?!” 

        Penny hated bugs and creepy-crawly, many-legged things (a phobia she’d never tried to tackle, since she thought that, as fears went, it was a little bit endearing). Unfortunately, the world of ghosts and spirits was chock-full of nasty critters. All too often, she would be in class, or out with friends, or up on stage, and some weird stinkbug with a human face—or a centipede whose body was a string of bloodshot eyes, or a spider that was dead and thus could fly—would scuttle out of hiding and just devastate the vibe.

        “Where the HECK is my ZWEIHANDER?!” Penny whimpered in frustration (at least according to this semi-censored transcript of her lines).

        “There’s no need to be afraid, darling,” hummed Phantomime. “Given your location, Penny, this would count as stage fright: an obstacle you conquered long ago.” The harlequin spirit’s tone shifted, as though hesitant to share her next suggestion. “Besides... not all who skitter are gross, as they say. Why not keep an open mind? Today’s awful beastie might be tomorrow’s awesome bestie, and you can’t—oh dear god what is THAT? Ew, ew, EW!”

        Penny had courageously drawn back a curtain instead of a blade, revealing, in her flashlight’s glow, a severed human hand. It was green, but stitched with other sickly shades, criss-crossed by spooky sutures, far too large, with screws for knucklebones (someone must have really messed up the assembly instructions). Its stump had been cleanly severed by the hook of Davy Jones, and the meat within was dripping gloopy ectoplasmic goo. As the light of Penny’s phone stretched out its shadow, the hand of Doctor Bruce Burger twitched eerily, scuttled its fingers to face her, reared back, and leapt at the young actress like a predatory alien. A startled Penny screamed.

        Truly ridiculous combat ensued, a clash of titans in the backstage sky of Davy’s model Bayview. Curtains closed and sets collapsed. Dramatic lighting lit dramatic fighting, at least until a stray strike struck and shattered Penny’s smartphone. The younger Spender turned the tide from there: she had found her motivation. It was the zombified appendage that stumbled upon Penny’s missing zweihander first, but, unable to zwield it with two hands, the attacker was swiftly disarmed (a complete loss for a creature who had naught but arm to start). Penny pinned the writhing beast flat with her prop sword’s blunted point.

        “UGH, my PHONE! How am I supposed to afford—HEY! QUIT IT! I said tap out, you little freak!” a disheveled Penny wheezed. “Or the ten count’s getting tallied on your fingers!” She raised a hand to her ear. “What’s that? You’ve only got five? Well here’s ONE MORE!” Penny gave the hand the finger (though I dare not say which one).

        “As I live and breathe...” marveled Phantomime, forgetting that she kind of only half-did half those things.

        “All right, so, like, what’s this creepy spirit’s deal??” Penny asked her partner. A perk of Phantomime’s ability was her sense for other spectral life forms and their powers.

        “This is, er, not a spirit, darling...”

        “HUH? Did somebody, like, die in full Frankenstein makeup??” Penny asked in disbelief.

        “I, um, don’t believe that it’s a ghost, either, my love...”

        Penny blinked. 

        “Then what’s—”

        “Yo, Penny!” called a new voice. “You good?”

        “Oh, my sweet Panini!” warbled a second, a willowy treble that was far more nose than throat. “We heard such frightsome sounds of struggle, oh, and such a stirring scream! We feared our dearest damsel in distress!”

        The Theater Club crew that Penny had left to guard the backstage door, her classmates Snail and Harper, had come stumbling through the curtains to make sure that she was safe.

        “Waaaaiiit, you found your sword,” said Snail. “Hardcore.”

        “And goodness me, but what is that? Some manner of Halloween animatronic?”

        Penny looked down from her perfectly mundane friends to the writhing undead hand that she had vanquished. If they could see it, and—oh god, it really did look quite a lot like earthly flesh and bone—then it was just somebody’s actual, reanimated—

        Penny screamed again, scrambling back from the corpse she’d had pinned.

        Bruce Burger’s hand did not use the opportunity to flee, however. The flash of Penny’s bright white spectral energy, startled free from her for the second time this week, had given the appendage awestruck pause.

Thanks for reading! Please support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi, it's how I keep the lights on! Or pick up the digital sketchbook I made right here! See you next time!

~

[Transcript]

        Penny Spender sighed as she attempted to scroll a reply into existence on her phone, where an unanswered message had sat in its lead balloon speech bubble since the sun rose.

        “No luck, darling?” asked Phantomime. Penny was in near-constant conversation with her spirit. Entering the trance that let them speak was second nature; Penny would pay frequent visits to her partner, hidden in the span of a single blink, while idling in class, or flipping burgers, or sweeping floors, or rushing from one vulturous app’s delivery route to its rival’s next assignment.

        “...Alas!” Penny lamented, giving her sigh a second take with still more pathos. “I lost fortune’s favor long ago! If I may be so bold, which I am told that fickle mistress finds attractive, I daresay that nobody in this world has worked harder than I to win the love of Lady Luck, and I am therefore due a second chance at serendipity!” The spectral’s shoulders slumped. “Y’know what? Forget a lucky break. I’ll settle for, like, any break at all,” she grumbled, fitting more unwritten swears between each word than you would guess. 

        “You’re still my pretty Penny. You can make your own luck, darling, with me here to pick you up when you have fallen. You need only put your tale’s misfortune behind you, and keep your head held high.” Phantomime raised her spectral’s downcast chin for her with one free-floating finger. “I’ve never known a more pleasant cent. You’re as good as gold to me, darling, a priceless, shining treasure!”

        Penny sighed for a third time and held her arms aloft to hug her spirit in a ballerina relevĂŠ. Phantomime was more her fairy godmother than her fairy tale’s love interest, but every Disney princess deserved to be platonically flattered by their patron from time to time... and Penny deserved it constantly.

        “Thank you, Phantomime. That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me... which is a very high bar to clear, but you do flip with such flourish. I don’t care how I land, so long as you’re catching the coin toss!”

        Phantomime smiled at her, or at least seemed to sparkle slightly. Her face was much more like a mask than flesh and bone, and lagged behind the earnest light that twinkled in her eyes.

        “I’m never spent for good with you to save me, Phantomime,” Penny wistfully pronounced. “You make me feel like a million bucks and counting, babe.” Penny suddenly scowled: she’d remembered her woes. “I sure would like to earn EQUAL interest, though, from the OTHER bond that I once held in trust and high regard... but HE seems to believe I’m worth the wait that’s gonna KILL me! My feet hurt from having to STAND for the INDIGNITY of GETTING GHOSTED by a dork like MASTER GUERRA!”

        It had been like three or four whole hours and Ángel STILL hadn’t texted her back. She’d even CALLED HIM, like some kind of ELDERLY DINOSAUR. She’d LEFT A MESSAGE AFTER THE TONE, like it was the NINETIES or the DARK AGES. What had happened to his promise to drop everything the moment that she needed supernatural assistance?! It wasn’t like Ángel had anything ELSE going on lately; Penny’s master was just as divorced and carefree as he had been when they’d first met... right after that life-changing gift had been dropped upon her doorstep by some kid she’d never seen before or since.

        Penny groaned. She shouldn’t have been so worried about Master Guerra getting mad at her for unleashing her white spectral energy in public (she blamed her biological father figure’s volatile discipline). She shouldn’t have hesitated, decided to sleep on it, and waited until the morning to text him “are vampires real like in real life” and “not a joke im being so for real (like vampires?)”. Ángel was definitely out of cellphone range on Nevermoor again, meditating under a waterfall or doing naked yoga on a beach. Of course he would disappear for some blameless reason and make it entirely her fault that she couldn’t get in touch with him. It was entirely his fault! 

        Penny flicked away the frustrating sight of Ángel’s last message (a broken Pinterest link that he had labeled “Food for thought ....”) and clicked on her phone’s flashlight. There was no rest for the weary, and Penny had other tasks on her to-do list besides surviving and sorting out why Ritz Price-Lee, of all people, had sprouted fangs and tried to suck her blood. Bayview Academy’s Theater Club (a deeply distinct group from its hated rival, the Drama Club, which had seceded from its more queer, more experimental counterpart with most of its funding and very little of its talent) had been putting together a slapdash summer production of THE SHREW: UNTAMED, a send-up that was mostly just sword fights and tragic death scenes. Penny was playing Dark Bianca and needed her zweihander to properly rehearse... but Bayview Academy’s bigwigs had shut down the main auditorium for “spring cleaning but in summer” (a huge amount of dust had somehow accrued in the ballroom overnight).

        Luckily, Penny had a knack for picking locks (it had only taken months of grueling practice to reveal she was a natural savant). She’d been able to sneak backstage, therefore, with some Theater Club friends keeping watch at the door. Penny’s flashlight rippled on the surface of the ballroom’s velvet curtains. Her production’s props were somewhere back here... but everything had been rearranged for the rich donor soiree that had apparently been held here at the school the night before.

        “Whoa, check it out!”

        Penny’s spotlight had fallen on a very strange set piece indeed: a scale model of the Bayview archipelago, damaged and thrown to one side of the stage (perhaps by the rage of a vampire, which Penny now knew were quite possibly real). Penny kicked it for fun, just to feel like Godzilla.

        “Hey, I can see my house from here,” she said, noting the wilted West Island mansion she reluctantly returned to every night. 

        It looked soggy and saggy, as though splashed with water, which had captured its dilapidated state much better than its modelmaker. A torn plastic bag (the sort someone might store a goldfish in) was draped over its roof, too. 

        “That’s strange,” Penny mused aloud. 

        It didn’t seem as though the bag had been placed there with much intention... and yet it was an accurate depiction: one wing of her parents’ house was currently wrapped in impassible plastic. Its halls were being fumigated for roaches that her father had attracted (he’d built a butter statue of himself in lieu of budgeting for therapy). It was Penny’s first excuse in months to leave her cage and couch surf, though her mother was demanding she return tonight for dinner. For as little hope as they had for her (now that she’d been “consumed by the fires of the culture war” or whatever), Penny’s parents were still far too insistent on controlling every aspect of her life. Ever since Richard had run away from home, her mother and father had been afraid she’d do the same... as if she hadn’t yet deprived them of the only son they had left to inherit their warped values. It wasn’t like they still had anything else that she could steal on her way out.

        “You know, darling,” Phantomime hummed in Penny’s ear, “this does seem a rare opportunity for a bit of dramatic catharsis...”

        Penny underlit her smirk with her phone’s flashlight.

        “You know I live for drama... and I’ll happily destroy for it as well!”

        With a flick of her wrist, Penny ripped her parents’ mansion from the model, reared back, kicked a leg high, and hurled her hated home across the room. It bounced off the far wall with a satisfying splat, careened off a curtain, and cleanly sank into a big hole in the middle of—

        Wait, why was there a big hole in the middle of the floor?!

        “What scumbag carved a PITFALL in the stage?!” Penny hissed in a furious whisper, deploying different, sharper words I shan’t repeat. “If those Drama Club snobs are trying to Phantom of the Opera our performance...!” she fumed, trailing off into a growl.

        Before Penny could raise her torch to the ceiling to inspect it for masked saboteurs, an eerie scuttling at her feet stole back the spotlight. Penny Spender blanched in fear. Something had darted from the shelter of the pit into the dark beyond the curtain, disturbed by the house she’d thrown into its hiding place.

For a guy with black blood he sure goes red in the face a lot. Hey! If you've been living under a rock like a cute little bug, you may have missed that I released a DIGITAL SKETCHBOOK that you can get for $7+ RIGHT HERE! Thank you all for your generous support! You can also support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! Please do! Thank you and thanks for reading!

~

[Transcript]

        “I like your initiative, son,” Davy sneered, clapping a fatherly hand on Gage’s shoulder. “MOST of my thralls just hang around and upside down once their to-do list’s done... but why restlessly roll in your grave until the night shift when there’s still so much daylight to burn? I’ll happily find work for you, my boy!”

        Gage frowned and grumbled under his missing breath. He’d been hoping for more meaningful guidance than a mere “get back to work.”

        “...You made the right call, young man,” Davy Jones smirked as he loomed back into eye contact with Gage. “The path to the penthouse starts on the ground floor... and it’s high time you started climbing. Many of my senior employees were fired last night, so to speak. There’s vacancies amidst the ash where they once stood. Plenty of room for promotion.” Davy grinned. “I see dark things in your future, son! Business as usual is changing rapidly around here, and you’re proving yourself qualified to—”

        Gage scoffed, which earned a frown from Davy.

        “...Was I saying something funny?” he asked, putting ten percent more fang into each word. 

        “Not really.” Gage shrugged. Everybody turned to cheap teen labor when adults were too expensive or in sudden short supply. Same as it ever was, like Paige said.

        “...Ahh, I see. You’re skeptical, after last night’s fiasco. You think that any cold body would do to fill your predecessors’ smoking shoes. You don’t believe that change is coming!” Davy sighed. “That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, young man. You have to manifest your destiny! Don’t you realize that’s the same lack of confidence that repels that frigid flame of yours?? You have to set a lofty goal and strive for it to reach your full potential!”

        Gage glowered up at Davy, letting anger beat out fear of being punished for his cheek. He didn’t want to hear any of this from the vampire who’d stopped the clock for him. Paige was right. He was stagnating at the awkward edge of adulthood for eternity... and it was all Davy Jones’ fault.

        “What potential? What’s the point? I can’t be you. I’m me forever. Ugly, slouching, empty-headed, not her type. I can’t change that with confidence.” He couldn’t change anything about himself at all. That was his curse. The whole town’s curse—

        “You’re right,” Davy sighed. “You can’t.”

        Gage blinked up at him, and found that Davy’s gaze had started glowing with an eerie golden light.

        “Stand up straight,” Davy commanded him. 

        A bewildered Gage instantly snapped into the best posture his gangling body had ever known.

        “Say something genuinely nice about yourself,” Davy ordered next, clasping his hand and hook together to add an unspoken, pleading “for ONCE.”

        “I’m... strong. And... fast,” Gage was forced to confess through gnashing fangs. He’d had to dig deep to find anything that fit Davy’s compulsory criteria.

        “There you go!” beamed Davy, clapping Gage upon the back. “No, no, don’t add the caveat—I see it coming, young man! ‘Strong and fast like every other vampire.’ WELL, that’s where you’re WRONG.” Davy snapped for another thrall, a bodyguard in riot gear perched high upon the ceiling. “You two. Arm wrestle. Don’t hold back.”

        In a whirlwind of obedience, Gage soon found himself with a scrawny elbow planted on Davy’s desk, staring down a larger, much more muscular vampire cop.

        “I can’t—” he began to say, but then there was a mighty KRACK!! that echoed through the room.

        Compelled by Davy’s orders, Gage had bested his opponent in an instant... and splintered his sire’s doubtlessly expensive desk straight down the middle.

        “Ha HA! There, you see?” Davy laughed uproariously. “It’s AGE that gives a vampire their strength, young man, not MUSCLES! Not when you turned, but how long it’s been since! You’re still growing every day!”

        Gage stumbled backwards, bewildered, flush with some undead facsimile of a surging heart’s adrenaline. Davy eased him into his own high-backed office chair, marveling cartoonishly at his minion as if surprised to find the throne a perfect fit. He grinned and took a mocking bow.

        “Don’t forget, young man: I bit you first. There’s NO ONE that can rival you.” Davy rose back to his full height: “Except ME, of course,” the gesture added in fine print. “You were right that you have limits on your own... but with MY guidance and encouragement, there’s nothing you can’t do. Nothing you WON’T do! NOTHING and NO ONE that you cannot BE—that you, son, cannot HAVE!”

        Mayor Hijack watched in horror and scientific curiosity as Gage was taken in by Davy’s words. Both halves of the homunculus agreed that this was objectively and/or subjectively far more sinister manipulation than their own humble, homegrown, farm-to-plate body-snatching. Even if they couldn’t find the chance or nerve to vaporize Cody’s evil father, the Hijacks had to at least stick around to sabotage his scheming. There was more at stake than Sophie Sybil’s safety, which was already reliant on the real Bill Spender staying fast asleep (or whatever state their meat puppets were actually put in while the Hijacks were ethically overtaking their pathetic human minds). The whole town needed a hero to save the day from Davy’s plans... and the Hijacks were that hero AND his sidekick! 

        Davy, meanwhile, chuckled down at a wide-eyed Gage like a sinister genie. He really had to get around to learning this weird kid’s name.

        “Let’s see...” Davy mused, scratching his prodigious chin with his prodigious hook. “What’s left on the list to get you your girl? We took care of slouching, I could order you to GET OFF YOUR PHONE and READ A BOOK FOR ONCE to fill that empty head of yours with some sweet nothings she’ll adore, and then... is ugly really that much of an obstacle?”

        Gage thought of Ritz.

        “...No,” he said.

        “Then what’s left to stand in your way?”

        Gage thought of Ritz.

        Davy grinned, a grin that shone within the shadow as the curtain closed behind him.

        “...Competition, is it? Never a deterrent for a daring businessman. Who’s she mad about, son, if not you? Tell me. Be honest. I can weigh her options—maybe even help you tip the scales.”

        Gage felt the vampiric compulsion to confess drawing closer to his secrets... no, to Paige’s secrets. Gage could say the word, and her doomed plan to have a thrall all to herself would be cut short. Then she’d have no reason to pal around with some obnoxious, grovelling rich girl replacement. Then Davy would—

        Gage’s blood ran colder than its baseline, but it still ran all the same... the faintest pulse of dead biology expressing buried guilt. What would Davy do? Would he hurt Ritz? Would he hurt Paige? Gage had been deprived of tools to know in words why he was feeling shame already, discussing Paige, and winning her, behind her back like this. When those tools had been offered to him—shared as pointed jabs or soft suggestions, or raised up as a shield against a weapon he had taken up and brandished without thinking—Gage had turned them down and turned away, refusing to accept he could be anything but his sad story’s victim. Early on, when he’d still reached for empathy instead of proud self-pity, his father and his brothers had made sure to set him straight. Now he made the wrong choice on his own, without their help. This time, though, Gage sensed his soul upon a crooked cliff... even if the howling of his conscience was no more than wordless wind. He couldn’t throw anyone he knew to the wolves... or worse, to Davy Jones.

        Gage, however, couldn’t keep his mouth shut, either, thanks to Davy’s binding orders. With his mind reeling, the young vampire stumbled on a loophole and dove for it without thinking. There was no more time for thinking. The words would slip free on their own if he didn’t choose them himself—

        “S-s-some mascot. Paige is mad about some weird mascot.” Gage gulped, shrinking back in Davy’s chair. “Somebody in a mascot suit saw us, y-y’know, doing frickin’ vampire stuff... and Paige thought I, like, handled it poorly. Or whatever.” He shrugged a nervous shrug and looked away. “She was worried you’d, like. Punish us. Y’know? So we, uh. Weren’t gonna. Um. Tell you.”

        Gage felt the compulsion ease at last as he fulfilled its terms in full... and Davy, too, seemed satisfied, drawing back and nodding with what felt to him like understanding. 

        “Ahh...” sighed Davy. “I see how it is. That’s the trouble with being me, isn’t it? I welcome my minions with open arms”—Davy looked down at his hook—“and people see an iron fist. Tell dear Paige that there’s no need to punish any of you. There’s no death penalty for VIOLATING THE MASQUERADE or what have you. We’re ALL evil vampires, aren’t we? I want to KNOW about these things, so I can deal with them... for US!”

        “D-deal with them?” Gage asked.

        “Yes, yes, leave it to me. We’ll find you far more prestigious work. You’ve earned it!” Davy turned to Hattie Henchman, who was off in a corner losing at her own shell game as she practiced sleight of hand while on the clock. “Captain, who’s on guard duty downstairs? We could use an extra pair of eyes on Cody.”

        “...Sir?” asked Stephen’s mother, furrowing her scarred brow in confusion. The room began to fizzle into silence. “What, um! What do you mean? Sir?”

        Davy blinked at her, and then his other gawking minions. 

        “Hm? What’s got you all cowering? Out with it!” he said impatiently; Davy hated being in the dark almost as much as he loathed being in the sunlight.

        “Sir, your son’s at school, sir. We, uh, had a couple officers give him a ride to—”

        The pressure in the room changed in an instant. Every surface suddenly felt like sinking quicksand, even as it stayed unmoving.

        “WHAT. DID. YOU. SAYYY?!” Davy roared in harrowing fury, casting aside his debonair persona like the skinsuit of a werewolf. “ON WHOSE ORDERS?!”

        Captain Henchman nervously glanced at the mayor. Half of Hijack lurched with fear; the other half began to draft a sensible and legally sound will.

        “W-well I may have rubber-stamped some business as usual downstairs while you were BUSY, Dave, but—”

        “WE ARE NOT OPERATING UNDER BUSINESS AS USUAL, YOU IMBECILE! YOU SENT MY SON INTO THE WITCH’S WEB!!”

        The Hijacks gulped. Freeing Cody from captivity was the heroic thing to do, he’d thought. This way, even without getting grounded, Cody could maybe sneak away and meet his wolfmom instead of going into lockdown on the night she was and/or wasn’t herself. The Hijacks had surely done a noble deed... but was that noble deed to die for? Only time (specifically several short seconds) would tell.

        Davy surged with spectral energy as he stormed closer, raising his haunted hook high. He shoved one fearful goon aside, then swiped at another who wasn’t even in his path. Where were his failsafes? His chain of command?! There was blame enough to go around and SLAUGHTER EVERYBODY! 

        “DID YOU THINK WE HOLD SIX MEETINGS EVERY MONTH ABOUT HIS SCHEDULE FOR FUN?! IT’S A FULL MOON TONIGHT, YOU PREPOSTEROUS FOOLS!!”

        “I-is it, sir?” his secretary asked, squinting down at her notes in surprise.

        Davy blanched in fear and fury. The Bayview reboot had muddled their vacuous minds! It had muddled his intricate CALENDAR! If he broke his promise—! If Shrike made good on her old threat, NOW, at this sensitive time—!

        “I WANT A FERRY WAITING AT THE DOCKS! SOMEONE GET ME A CAR WITH TINTED WINDOWS RIGHT THIS INSTANT!! SOMEONE ELSE GET THE MAYOR OUT OF MY OFFICE AND BACK TO HIS SAD LITTLE LIFE UNTIL I’M HUNGRY!! PUT that GUN down, Captain! I do NOT need MORTAL BACKUP to face FAUXBIA—I have ENOUGH DEAD MINIONS ALREADY... or you’d ALL BE DEAD ALREADY!!”

        “W-what about me, Davy?” Gage asked, rising from his chair. He was his strongest thrall. Surely there was something that—

        “GO CLEAN UP YOUR OWN LOOSE ENDS!! That’s an ORDER! And that’s MR. JONES to you!” Davy snarled, forgetting he had ordered Gage to call him by his name. He remembered, though, the work he’d put into earning his loyalty (like two whole conversations!) and so he added the friendliest footnote he could muster in his rage: “I trust that you’ll take care of it in a manner that earns my approval... and doesn’t require still more of my precious time and attention!”

        Davy swept out of his office like a bat out of a place he ought to be.

Thank you everyone who picked up the sketchbook! It's been a huge help and relief after a rough tax bill. If you missed it last week, I put together a 183-page digital sketchbook that you can purchase for a minimum of $7 right HERE! Grabbing this is a great way to support me and Paranatural! You can also support my work on Patreon or Ko-fi! Thank you again everybody! I really appreciate it!

~

[Transcript]

        “Hold your hearses, son,” Davy said to Gage, guiding the vampire teen back towards his seat. “Haven’t you heard that good things come to those who wait? What’s the hurry?” Davy grinned. “You’re not getting any older.”

        Gage gave his boss the closest look to spite that he could find the nerve to muster. Coming here was a terrible idea. He’d let anger and exhaustion get the better of him, and it was hours past his bedtime. Gage should have been snoozing in the rafters of a ramshackle small business by now, not sitting in a sunlit room awaiting his obnoxious sire’s attention.

        “You asked me to come to you if—” Gage bit his tongue (an extra-painful effort for a vampire). “You gave me your business card.” He didn’t dare pull it out of his pocket. Davy would have a psychoanalytic field day if he saw that Gage had crumpled his contact information and then struggled to smooth out the wrinkles for forty-five minutes.

        “Yes, well,” Davy sighed, “it has a phone number on it for a reason.” He snagged Gage’s shoulder with his hook hand when his minion moved to leave. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding! My word. You young vampires can take a bullet, a beating, and blood from the innocent, but you still can’t take a joke! THAT’S A JOKE, TOO! STOP OVERREACTING!”

        “I’m NOT,” said an exasperated Gage.

        “That’s the joke!” sighed Davy, glancing at the mayor for some middle-aged-male solidarity.

        “HA!” laughed one half of the mayor, mostly out of pre-assassination-attempt social anxiety. The Hijacks had been busy reflecting on the fact that the last time they had seen this weird vampire teen, they had been a funny little goldfish in a bag. The world was a beautiful, whimsical place... and it would be even more beautiful once a ten count in a sunbeam put old Davy in the dust bin.

        “All right, I get it,” shrugged Davy, sitting back against his desk. “You’re not here to play around. You’re serious. Well, that makes two of us, son—and you the odd man out, Mr. Mayor. No offense.”
        
        “None taken,” replied Mayor Hijack. Logically, he was not the odd man out, because he was two guys inside of a third guy. This made him a veto-proof supermajority, which meant that he could lawfully destroy anybody that he wanted to, including Davy Jones.

        “That’s why I like you, Bill. The best politicians get out of the way for big business. That’s what you’ve brought me, isn’t it, son? You wouldn’t waste my time for anything less... right?” Davy smirked at Gage and coaxed him closer. “You have the floor. Speak your mind, son. How’d the rest of our little PTA soiree go for you and your lady friend? You’re not here for a shoulder to cry on, are you? A triumphant high-five, perhaps?” Davy raised his hook expectantly.

        “...That’s not what’s on my mind,” lied Gage. It at least wasn’t what he wanted to speak about with Davy.

        “Now, son,” sighed Davy Jones, arching an archvillain eyebrow. “Don’t try to hide the painful truth from me. You know I can insist for your own good if you’re ashamed to ask for help.”

        Gage narrowed his eyes at his sire. He knew that Davy didn’t actually care about his love life—or lack thereof—but it wasn’t like he had anybody else left to complain to. His dysfunctional family had moved away years ago, still believing he’d cut ties with them and left Bayview himself. Paige had only texted him for proof of life... like she even actually cared. Youthy was currently hanging from the ceiling of his van in the garage downstairs, pretending to sleep and refusing to speak to him. Evidently, saving her life from sudden death by daylight wasn’t enough of an apology for... whatever he did wrong. Gage didn’t see why everybody else got to be angry at him. HE was the one who’d been heart-crushingly humiliated.

        “...I tried to make a move and Paige freaked out on me like I was a total disgusting creep,” Gage grumbled, shoving his hands in his pockets. “There. Are you happy??”

        Davy and the mayor exchanged a glance of parental concern.

        “Of course I’m happy,” Davy said with a shrug. “It comes with the conquered territory when you’re rich, immortal, invincible, and adored by the wonderful son your hard work spoils. Not that you need all those things to find joy in life’s simpler pleasures. Just ask our cheerful mayor over here!” he added, jabbing his hook at the mortal and moneyless Bill, a man whose son had robbed him and then “skipped town” after high school.

        “It’s true,” the mayor droned out of the left side of his mustache. Evidence suggested that Davy was objectively enjoying his unlife, even though his wonderful son hated him, and even though he had like three different weird vampire weaknesses that could explode him in an instant. Money alone really could buy happiness; the data didn’t lie.

        “Okay?” Gage scoffed. “Good for you?”

        “What’s good for the ghoul is good for the goblin, young man. My point is you should follow our example!” Davy rose from his seat against his desk, slinging his jacket over his shoulder to complete his PSA look. “That’s how you’ll get your girl, my boy, or finally get over her. Unlive a little! Start a business, get involved in local politics, change your look like Mayor Spender did! Er, not exactly like he did, mind you... but, pun intended, do revamp yourself. Brush your fangs, comb your hair, get more sunlight—work on YOU for a while. Eventually, you’ll either meet HER standards or raise YOURS beyond her reach! There are plenty of mosquitoes in the swamp.”

        While Gage stewed in surly skepticism, the Hijacks were having a crisis of their own. Mayor Spender? Is THAT what Davy had called him?! Everyone had been referring to him as “Mr. Mayor” this whole time. He’d thought that was his name, like a dynastic title, or a gimmick for the ballot so he didn’t have to come up with a platform. “Bill” was short for basically anything; he figured his full moniker was “Mr. Wilby Mayor” or something obnoxious like that... but no, it was the completely normal and serious birth name “Bill Spender”! No wonder this body felt vaguely familiar: he was piloting an older model of the Activity Club’s bumbling ringleader!

        Oh shoot, Hijack thought. Oh shoot, he thought again, this time from the other side of his bisected brain. He’d honestly been kind of ready to fully sacrifice the mayor in order to destroy Davy Jones. One particularly grim fantasy involved tackling him straight through the window to the island and ocean below. What would Max and Isabel say, though, if the Hijacks super murdered their teacher’s father or uncle or much older brother?? Not doing stuff like that was like the whole lesson they’d tried to teach him, probably. On second thought, wouldn’t Cody be kind of annoyed if his father got totally vaporized? Each half of Hijack half-remembered Cody saying something about not wanting him to get hurt... and that was why he’d wanted to sic his werewolf mom on him, or something.

        The Hijacks balled the mayor’s meaty fists. They were just too good at being bad! All of their superheroism relied upon scary parasite supervillain tactics! They’d definitely gotten too excited after the first strings they’d pulled as a politician started looking strong enough to serve as a deadly garotte. Absolute mayoral power really DID absolutely corrupt! If they were this bloodthirsty, were they really any better than a vampire like Davy? Yes, definitely! But still...!

        “No offense,” Gage grumbled up at Davy, “but I don’t think being more like you would make Paige like me more. She’d definitely like me even less.”

        Davy’s smile took on a smug slant.

        “...And why is that?” 

        Gage twitched, remembering again who he was talking to. Why did he keep letting himself drop his guard around a monster like Davy Jones??

        “Is there something you’d like to report to me, young man?” the vampire overlord asked, stalking closer. “You do remember what I asked when last we spoke, don’t you? Is that why you’re here? To prove your loyalty? Or is it... to DISPROVE somebody else’s?”

        “N-no, I just—” Gage quickly looked away from the piercing nocturnal glow of Davy’s scrutinizing gaze. “I just... always followed PAIGE’S orders, so... since you gave me your card, I just thought...” 

        Gage’s hand closed around Davy’s business card in his pocket. What HAD he been thinking? This was a mistake. He’d been chasing the pitch of the promise that Davy had made, or at least the fleeting feeling it had given him—the feeling that he could be more than he was. That world hadn’t manifested, though, and now Gage felt more lost, worthless, and angry than ever before.

        “...I just wanted someone to tell me what to do.”

        Davy’s smile widened to a grin.