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[Transcript]

        Many of Doctor Zarei’s precious memories, unfortunately, had come uncoupled from the lessons they had tried their best to teach her. Years after June Summers had released her from her nightmare, a different door creaked open to reveal Mina Zarei. This time, she’d unlocked it all by herself... but not in an empowering, full-circle sort of way.

        Doctor Zarei scowled down at a trembling student from the entrance of the nurse’s office (her office, for today, until she could exterminate the Witch and then immediately quit).

        “...What do you want?” Zarei droned at the girl, peering imperiously over her spectacles.

        “P-please, um! Mrs. Nurse! C-can I hide in here?” the student asked. She cast a nervous glance back down the hallway. “The Student Council is rounding everybody up! I d-don’t know why, but I was mysteriously compelled to put on soft-soled shoes for gym class, and now they’ve got me dead to rights for dress code treason! I d-don’t—”

        “Are you hurt?” Doctor Zarei asked.

        “N-not yet—”

        “Are you sick?”

        “No, but—”

        “Then soft-shoe somewhere else,” Zarei said. “I’ve far more pressing ailments to address.”

        THUNK! The door swung shut in the frightened student’s face. Zarei’s white coat billowed behind her like the grand cape of a queen who’d poisoned her way to her third husband’s throne. Three regal strides brought her to the rear of the office, where, past a curtain, her loyal subjects awaited.

        “Hitbox! Horseplay! Hotwire!” Zarei barked, throwing the curtain aside. She was not, as one might guess, activating an intricate missile launch sequence; instead, she was addressing a rowdy roomful of her remaining homunculi spirits. “Handprince! Heartworm! Look alive!”

        They did look alive, because she’d brought them to life, a success that less sober mad scientists than Doctor Zarei would have announced to a storm-swept sky while cackling maniacally. Mina wasn’t satisfied with her experiments’ results just yet, however. Each new artificial spirit she created was a prototype, a step towards the perfection that her true goal still demanded. Mina was certain that she would achieve it soon. She might have achieved it even sooner, the Doctor considered with a scowl, if every byproduct born of her clinical trials and tribulations did not require constant babysitting.

        “Milady! This CAD, this little gray cell that BELONGS in a little gray cell, won’t stop laying FALSE CLAIM to—”

        “MOM IT’S MY TURN BUT HANDPRINCE, HE—*SNRRKK*—HE WON’T LET ME PLAY WITH THE SYRINGES, AND—”

        “Doctorrr...! I tried to pet Heartworm and she BIT me REALLY SCARILY. Can you melt her with a potent acid compounddd...?”

        Mina sighed a growling sigh and pushed her glasses back in place. Of the thirteen homunculi recorded in her progressively more ominous, Resident-Evil-style lab notes, seven had solidified within the bizarre spectrobiological crucible that was her parents’ basement. Her prototypes were possessed, it seemed, of a compulsion to meld and metamorphosize, as though they all instinctually sought the same perfection she did through grotesque recombination. While this had whittled down her workload as their caretaker, the main outcome of their chimeric cannibalization was the sabotage of all the useful powers they had been lab-grown to wield.

        Revolting mitosis had split Ventrilobite into Humbug and Heartfelt, dividing her control over emotions between a real bummer of a spirit and a creature that Zarei could only describe as an “aggressively parasitic Care Bear.” The handful of finger-puppet homunculi that Zarei had designed to seize control of all five senses—a suite of powers she had used to run hallucinatory combat simulations—had scattered into single digits, which had added back up to a whole lot less than the sum of their valuable parts. Humbug and Smelly had briefly combined into Stinkbug, who controlled disgust, which was likely why he’d never minded looking in the mirror. Joining him inside a foul cocoon, Touchy and Tasty had amalgamated with their sibling into Handprince, a royal pain whose power let him claim exclusive rights to use whatever he’d last licked a finger and touched. Fortunately and unfortunately, all it took to usurp his control was a damp cloth and (for good measure) a spritz of disinfectant.

        Soon after this, Earworm and Heartfelt had merged into Heartworm, restoring the vital Ventrilobite’s power through Heartworm’s control over vitals—one’s racing pulse and sparking nerves included. What was not included, however, was an education in human anatomy, and so Heartworm was lamentably less skilled as an emotional manipulator... plus, linguistically speaking, pure joy had been a smoother pill to swallow than an equal dose of dopamine. Just last night, Seahorse, who’d once controlled sight, had hitched herself to Stagecoach, whose power to control his fellow homunculi had kept the group on task. The pair’s shared vision of freedom, and their fear they’d been too strict to their fallen siblings, had formed the rebellious Horseplay, whose power seemed to be the fact that no one could control her. This, however, meant that she, too, was unable to control herself, and so had spent much of her morning colliding with furniture and then just sort of propped against a wall.

        Hotwire (whose touch let him take dormant spirits’ powers for a spin) and Hitbox (who could puppeteer inanimate objects while granting them spectral collision physics) were still in their original, extremely useful forms... but Zarei had noticed them eyeing each other with slightly less disdain than usual, and feared what sort of slacker they’d create if they combined. 

        Then there had been Hijack... and Sockpuppy, the happy accident who’d sparked Zarei’s life’s work. She had... resigned herself to their departure. Bayview’s darkness, as she and Jean and Richard had always known, was only ever dormant. Still, though, its sudden return had struck her by surprise, and taken two of her most valuable creations before she’d realized how much danger she had blindly sent them into. While she had no indisputable evidence that proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they were truly gone, Mina had deduced that their demise was the most logical hypothesis... for the empty, gnawing feeling in her chest. Though she’d outgrown Sockpuppy’s antics, though the matter they were made from would reconstitute, someday, into a different form of spiritual life, it still felt like a waste to lose them both in swift succession. 

        Yes... that’s what it felt like. What a waste. Zarei scanned her remaining creations. Keeping them close to her, and safe, was only logical. 

        For their sake, for hers, for everyone in Bayview, she would see the Fear Witch skewered and sealed away forever like the antiquated specimen she was. That crooked old spider had no idea how powerful Doctor Zarei had become since she’d left home. No one did. Mina wouldn’t let DuNacht play any wicked part in the disaster she had spent her life preparing to prevent.

        “I want everyone in place to form my exoskeleton! Battle stations, all of you!” Zarei thrust out a hand. “We’re taking on a devious, merciless, power-stealing supervillain! No fear! No mistakes! That’s how we end this nightmare once and for all!”

        “For HIJACK!” screeched Hotwire, raising a tendril to the ceiling. “To prove he was a USELESS SHRIMP that W-W-WE D-DON’T N-N-NEED!”

        “For Sockpuppy! He was the second best of us... a title one of YOU may yet lay claim to ere the morrow dawns, my lessers!” Handprince tactically positioned himself at the back of the homunculus formation. “PEASANTS... TO WAR!”

        Before Doctor Zarei could hypocritically critique the unhealthy grieving techniques of her literal brainchildren, a cautious knock upon the door of the nurse’s office redirected her annoyance from her spirits.