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[Transcript]

        “Well, well, WELL! What do we have HERE?”

        Vice Principal Devilora Demonelle DuNacht unfolded to a ceiling-scraping stoop within the School Store’s dimlit doorframe, observing the students beneath her like delicious earthworms writhing on a sidewalk.

        “Naughty, NAUGHTY children!” Devilora sneered, wagging a skeletal finger at the cowering crowd below. “Hiding in the cupboard, spoiled rotten by debauchery, hosting pathologic subcultures assured to spread corruption like the PLAGUE! Thank greater goodness that it’s not too late to AMPUTATE the limb that bears the boil!”

        “This time, you’ll save Europe, and they won’t burn all your friends like they did in your Middle Ages,” Max compulsively quipped. A gallows was a stage of sorts, and he would get the last laugh if it killed him, which it almost surely would.

        “Watch your TONGUE, you little brat!” the Vice Principal hissed back at him. “I’ve never ONCE had friends!”

        “Oh, dearie me!” A pale and ruffled-looking Principal Pleezdoo frowned from behind the bars of an elegant birdcage, which was dangling on a chain from Devilora’s crooked talons. “That simply can’t be true! I’ve endured—er, endeared you for some time now, Devi, haven’t I? And I’ve come to abhor—er, to adore you in return! What are we, Devilora, if not friends?”

        “You’re my sweet little canary, Posy dearest, here to issue final warnings to the minors in this noxious vein of underground delinquency!” Devilora shook the principal’s enclosure, which was lined with paperwork instead of newspaper. “Now sign more DETENTION WARRANTS! I like to observe legal formalities for their pleasantly inevitable deference to the will of NAKED POWER!”

        “...Well, I may quibble with the tenor of your methods,” Pleezdoo sighed, “but I can’t claim that you don’t get results!” 

        She’d been banned from making claims of any kind, factual or financial, by recent Student Council legislation. Principal Pleezdoo was a little iffy on the wisdom of granting Vice Principal DuNacht unlimited wartime powers for the rest of her life, but since it was all perfectly legal, there was nothing much that she could do except hope Devi died soon. This was the healthy ebb and flow of functional democracy. Principal Pleezdoo hummed a pleasant tune as she set about signing more warrants, opening her cage to hand the last stack to her captor before returning to the work within her permanent forever-prison.

        “HEH-heh heh heh HYECK! Fly, my pretties! Round up EVERY SINGLE RULEBREAKER!” the Vice Principal cackled. She threw the wanted posters she’d been handed high into the air, and they began to flutter down like criminal confetti. On her signal, a wave of traitor bullies crashed into their loyal counterparts while Jazz and Roxy buffed them with their best bardic support spells.

        “On what CHARGE am I being DETAINED?!” Max roared righteously over the ruckus, struggling to wriggle free from Diva’s cuffs. “I know my RIGHTS and NONEXISTENT WRONGS!” Only Lisa and Suzy had solid proof that he was the infamous bus jumper, and their BLACKMAIL meant that all his other crimes had been committed under duress, an exculpatory circumstance if ever one had—

        “THEFT of SCHOOL PROPERTY!” grinned the Vice Principal. She jabbed a bony digit at his baseball bat.

        “What? This isn’t—” Max blinked. “Oh. Uh. Actually yeah you got me there.”

        Max’s haunted bat sprung from his grip and into Devilora’s, as if tugged by an invisible string, as Diva made the most dramatic arrest that she could muster.

        Lisa, meanwhile, stood in numb silence as the School Store she had worked so hard to build fell down around her. The contrast that her stillness struck between her and the chaos of the Student Council sting, however, was the opposite of camouflage. Devilora turned to her as if she’d caught the scent of blood (a sense that evolution might have wanted her to wield, though a minority of scientists dissented to suggest she used her nose to reach the bug juice at the bottom of old pitcher plants).

        Lisa shuddered. Many adults at Bayview Biddle School cast longer, darker shadows than they should have—she’d seen so many secrets, from a distance, through her monitors and wiretaps—but Vice Principal DuNacht was more unsettling than all of them combined. Sometimes, only sometimes, it felt like she could see through Lisa’s lies, through the persona she presented... as if a second pair of eyes was watching, too, while the Vice Principal was near, circumventing her defenses from an angle drowned in darkness. Lisa sensed it now more than she ever had before. An earworm of a song, a pleasant tune, crawled out from underneath the room’s cacophony. It was slowly getting louder, slowly nesting in her mind. It reached a whining high note, like a kettle’s steaming screech, like the whistling of a missile whipping straight towards Lisa’s head—

        “Lisa! Watch out!” 

        Violet leapt over the bar in flawless dressage form despite her current lack of horse. She tackled Lisa out of the path of a wayward boomerang hurled by an eccentric bully warrior, and the pair collapsed in a heap behind the counter.

        “HEY! Are you okay, Lisa?! Snap out of it!”

        Lisa blinked, then climbed a blurry pigtail to her best friend’s worried face.

        “...Violet,” she said. A wall that she relied on was repaired with her next blink. “I’m fine.”

        Violet groaned, an exaggerated sigh of relief, as she rolled off of her friend. Shouting and fistfights and clashing bayonets were filling the School Store with a deafening disharmony, but Violet and Lisa had found a brief pocket of peace behind the bar.

        “I SWEAR,” Violet growled, “there’s SOMETHING IN THE WATER in this school... and if there ISN’T, I might PUT IT THERE to DO THE WORLD A FAVOR!”

        “You’re hurt,” said Lisa, glancing at Violet’s skinned knee. She must have scraped it on the floorboards when she’d tackled her.

        “What?” Violet looked at the scrape and scoffed. “Who cares?”

        Lisa didn’t answer. Not out loud. 

        “Look, Lisa, we have to, like, get out of here—”

        The creaking of a trapdoor drew Violet’s attention back to Lisa.

        “I quite agree. Quickly, Violet. Hide down here. You go first, and I’ll—”

        “Don’t you dare,” Violet scowled back at her. “You go first, and I’ll catch up? Like, are you kidding me? You’re so obviously going to shut the hatch the second that I’m down there!” She crossed her arms. “You’re NOT as good a LIAR as you think you are, Lisa.”

        Lisa smiled at her friend.

        “...I think it’s very sweet that you believe that.” She took Violet’s hands and gently untangled her crossed arms, which softened Violet’s scowl as if they’d been a ribbon tied to keep her frown in place. Lisa squeezed her dear friend’s hands a little tighter. “Listen, Violet. I’m the mastermind. They’d look for me, and find you, if I suddenly went missing. Just stay until it’s safe. I’ll be in touch.” Her smile widened, curling to a playful, cunning smirk. “Trust me. I still have a few tricks up my sleeve,” she said. She’d lied.

        Violet searched her smile for the long span of a few uncertain seconds, then finally relented with a sigh.

        “...Okay.”

        Lisa chased a flicker of melancholy from the surface of her mask. Violet was really very sweet, and far too innocent by half. If she could see how desperate Lisa really was, how needy, petty, selfish and repulsive she’d become in secret while her friend grew ever brighter, Violet’s trust, her worry and affection, would doubtlessly unravel in an instant.

        “Just don’t say anything INCRIMINATING without a LAWYER PRESENT!” Violet advised her, poking Lisa as she started down the ladder.

        “Understood,” said Lisa, smiling mischievously. “I’ll make sure that there are lawyers listening when I confess to all the crimes I love to do.” She shut the hatch before Violet could finish rolling her eyes to scold her. 

        Lisa’s face fell with the trapdoor. It fell further as the shadow of Vice Principal DuNacht rose up across the bar, swallowing her whole within its darkness.