Isaac straightened the robe he’d made and checked the sashes in the mirror of the suite bathroom. It had ended up being halfway between the native style and something he’d seen out of the Isle of Leaves, a necessary alteration simply due to the differences in frames between ikiski and humans. The flat-top cut had to be styled slightly to work better, but unfortunately he didn’t have any of the very expensive products that could be used to quick-grow hair, otherwise he might have gone with a top-knot.

  He emerged from the bathroom to see Sarah still fiddling with her robes. Unfortunately, he wasn’t a fabrics meta, so all his adjustments were just cutting and stitching rather than anything that would make it power-friendly. The end result was still something he was proud of, though he couldn’t have managed without the tinkered costume station shortcutting a lot of the most tedious work. And letting him use every scrap of fabric; he’d originally just intended on three sets of robes, and expanding that to seven strained his purchase a bit. Not to mention that everything had to be done with just three bolts of colored cloth; red, blue, and half-black, half-white.

  “Looking good!” He offered Sarah, who smiled back and shifted the camera that was hanging around her neck. That was the largest bit of alteration necessary for her clothing; adjusting it so the camera, notebook, and dictaphone had their own dedicated securements that didn’t mess with the fit of the robes.

  “I’m just ready to be off. Sitting around like this just feels like wasting time,” she said.

  “Gotta agree with that,” Isaac said. The lack of motion made him anxious, even if there was nothing more significant at stake than making it to a diplomatic function on time. A function where he didn’t even have any particular duties, but apparently it would have been insulting to their hosts to leave anyone behind at the embassy. Though it was also bizarre to think about attending a diplomatic summit with his girlfriend for a bunch of dinosaur people inside Earth’s hollow core, when only months ago he was just a single hospital janitor.

  “Might as well hang out in the main room,” he concluded, and patted himself down briefly to ensure he had everything he wanted. James had offered him a gun and holster, but Isaac just didn’t have any experience with them, so aside from his own notepad and wallet, he was just carrying a few cords on the off-chance he needed them. Though to some extent just packing such things felt like begging for trouble.

  He offered his arm, and Sarah joined him, smoke rolling over her kimono-like outfit to add a flower motif from his sketches and a long-handled kiseru, another thing taken from the stuff he’d seen out of the Isle of Leaves. With her illusions up she looked closer to that ideal of beauty, skin uniformly pale and facial expressions smoothed away by the smoke’s alterations. The Brute Squad was already waiting, as well as the diplomatic staff that didn’t get robes. They were bureaucrats, paper-handlers, economic experts, and otherwise non-combatant types.

  “I still do not like this,” Savage grumbled in his mechanical voice, but the miniature servo hands built into his cybernetics kept making gentle, minute adjustments to the fit of his robes.

  “If someone gives you trouble you just shoot them in the face,” Bubs said happily. “I like that custom.”

  “It’s less simple than that,” James said, striding into the room. The ten-foot-tall power-armor guards followed him, their footfalls making the floor under Isaac’s feet shake with each step. “Don’t start trouble, and don’t pick on anyone smaller than you. Size matters, here. Lia, you’re most at risk for unreasonable challenges, so everyone else keep an eye out for her.”

  Getting acknowledgments from the rest of the Brute Squad, James led them out the door. They were in two groups; James, the bureaucrats, and the mech-suits as the official diplomatic delegation, and Isaac, Sarah, and the Brute Squad as the extras. There was no clearing of traffic from the streets as there would have been for a diplomatic group in Star City, but rather they were expected to make their own way.

  “Honestly feels a little bit insulting,” Isaac muttered, considering the swath of city between them and their target. An idea came to him, though, an exercise he could try to make their lives easier.

  He summoned his power, focusing it on a very specific idea, the metaphysical concept of their advance. Their movement to the meeting. Focusing as much as he could, he invested in the specific idea of making it harder to deflect them from their path. Something that he should be touching, metaphorically or otherwise, since he was part of it.

  Almost to his surprise, he could feel it working. It was more like trying to invest in a thread or a piece of paper than anything substantial, but that was unfortunately all he could tell. It wasn’t actually a piece of paper or a string, where he could tell how much inertia there was and could hold it in his hand to feel what he’d done to it. The only real feedback he got was the sensation of some of his power vanishing off into somewhere.

  It still made him a little bit uncomfortable. When it came to something as complex as moving from one place to another, was that extra inertia affecting people’s choices? So long as things were restricted to physics, it was clear what was being affected and what wasn’t. Even ontological inertia was restricted, narrowly scoped to just an individual or a thing.

  If he were to start affecting larger, more diffuse concepts, would it result in changes to probability, or would he be interfacing with actual fate and destiny? The books he’d read made it clear that there were costs to directly contesting or using those forces, but Issac really wasn’t. Unless it was possible for him to aim his power at them, which was an idea he promptly buried in a deep hole. That wasn’t trouble he needed to borrow.

  Not surprisingly, to him at least, it turned out there was no trouble on the way to their destination. People got out of the way, not wishing to engage with a large group of obviously armed humans – and the Brute Squad – or maybe just sensing the extra inertia he’d invested in their travel. They seemed to hit the lights just right. Not that they didn’t have to stop, but the waits were short. Isaac didn’t know whether to attribute that to his power, to the size of their group, to luck, or if that was just what was expected on the streets they were using.

  “Easier than I expected,” Sarah remarked, and Savage hissed.

  “Don’t say things like that,” the cyber-dino warned her, to the nods of Bubs and Lia. Rocky said nothing, but Isaac thought he caught a bobble in some of the rocks.

  “I think I’m the one doing it,” Isaac volunteered to Sarah, sotto voce. “Might be coincidence, but I’m trying some stuff.”

  “Well, keep it up,” she said in the same undertone.

  “Don’t want to go too far,” he cautioned her, though one of the reasons he was willing to experiment with that particular bit of metaphysics was that it was self-terminating. They weren’t marching endlessly, they were going somewhere. Once they arrived, the concept he was boosting simply vanished, its purpose fulfilled. At least that was the hope, but he didn’t want to put everything he had into the journey in case he was wrong.

  It did feel like they were walking with the wind at their backs, though, as their group approached an impressive building that looked to be created by stringing walls between a cluster of the conical buildings. Not that it was haphazard construction; the walls were a gleaming, almost glass material, opaque but with depth, and covered with carvings.

  The entrance was just a massive arch in the wall, tall enough for the thirty-foot types to pass through as if it were a normal doorway. A fact made obvious by the presence of two of the massive ikiski, standing out among a crowd of smaller types, though smaller was relative. As they passed through, Isaac found that much of the walls were transparent from the inside, casting light upon the lizard-people that filled the space. Every size seemed to be represented, in discrete steps from towering behemoths down to the Gratin-sized types.

  A palpable change went through the ikiski as they entered the ballroom, like a bow wave from a boat. James continued forward past the entrance, and Isaac had just begun to pull on his power to try and divest inertia from the metaphorical concept of the journey when they all came to a halt and a tension was almost visibly released. Isaac thought he felt it himself, but he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t just imagining things, or synthesizing it from seeing the effects.

  “Stay sharp,” James said quietly, his voice sounding over the comm-pins they were all wearing. “I don’t recognize everyone, but the colors are from all four kingdoms involved.”

  “Understood.” Isaac spoke at the same time as Bubs, their voices overlapping on the comms, making Sarah shake her head and Isaac grimace. Even if he wasn’t technically part of Justice for Hire anymore, he knew that confusion over who was in charge was not a good thing. When it came to security, Bubs was probably the better choice, but Isaac was responsible for Sarah. Hopefully it wouldn’t matter.

  Their group waded deeper into the hall, surrounded by the noises of ikiski speech. Whistles, warbles, chirps; something halfway between birdsong and whalesong. Growls, snarls, and roars; the small ones adorable, the large ones bone-shaking. But the most alien thing, in Isaac’s opinion, was the lack of any kind of snack bar. Every single function he’d been to had finger food, drinks, maybe even a full buffet. There were plenty of decorations within the hall, both on the walls and by way floating crystals projecting holographic sigils or icons, but the entire floor was uncluttered.

  “This is honestly a little bit creepy,” Sarah muttered, scribbling away in her notebook before surreptitiously snapping a few photos. The dictaphone’s receiver dangled from her pocket, taking in the profusion of ikiski noises. “I like Gratin, he’s great, but I have no idea how he manages if this is how he feels up in Star City. Just surrounded like this.”

  “I suspect—” Isaac started to say, but was cut off by a near-deafening noise from the two titans speaking. Their voices shook the floor, and the whirling mix of differently-sized lizard-people started to separate out into something more ordered. James glanced around and then cursed.

  “I’ve seen this before,” he said, speaking rapidly. “An official challenge, the honest-taking-of-strength, but I wasn’t told—keep yourselves safe and get out of here as soon as you can.”

  “Heck,” Isaac said, and shoved inertia into his robes, his hands going to one of the bits of cord he’d strung along his clothing and readying it. Sarah immediately stuffed her recording implements back in her robe, breathing out smoke that settled over her and rendered her nearly invisible. The Brute Squad shifted back toward them, closing in protectively. Lia’s skin lit with runes and Savage’s armor whirred as several long-barreled weapons articulated into position.

  At no signal Isaac could see, the ballroom erupted into a brawl.

  He had instant flashbacks to the convention center, the first time he’d been out with Sarah, when the supervillain Plasmaster had decided to attack in earnest rather than for fun. This time, it wasn’t supers in blue armor and drones with flamethrowers, but an entire roomful of lizard people, many of whom were twice Isaac’s size or more. The only upside was that nothing was on fire. Yet.

  At the same time, this was far worse, because these weren’t screaming, half-trained henchmen. The first reptile that dodged in past the hedge of the Brute Squad was hard-muscled, a head taller than Isaac, and with crystaltech armor making a cybernetic-looking helmet in ruby and sapphire, with emerald spines emerging from its back. The way it moved reminded Isaac of Captain Multiples more than anyone, someone who relied on skill more than super-speed or strength.

  Not that Isaac had any intention of letting the reptile close enough for that to matter. He knew he wasn’t up to that standard, and in grappling his only real advantage went away. Instead, he flicked out the piece of cord, its whipcrack lost under the thunder of Savage’s guns. The ikiski dodged to one side, but since it was merely cloth Isaac whipped it sideways and the cord snapped against the ikiski’s shoulder.

  It went sprawling with a surprised chirp, skidding across the ground off to their right and just past Savage, out of their perimeter. Not far away, Isaac could see the mech-suits dealing with similarly-sized ikiski, guns blazing away to relatively little effect. Not that it was simply lizard versus human; there were plenty of the natives fighting each other as well, though that was scant reassurance.

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  “To the wall,” Bubs said, as Lia’s runes flared and formed a translucent shield to absorb the charge from one of the smaller reptiles. At some point the big archway they’d come through had closed, but Isaac figured if they were going to get out of there, it wouldn’t be through the door anyway. While he could possibly crash through the material, it was more likely that Stratum would be able to get them out. Even if it could only take them one at a time.

  “You coming, James?” Sarah asked over the comm, sounding far less bothered by the violence than Isaac felt. But of course, she’d seen a lot more of it as the daughter of one of Blacktime’s lieutenants, and even if she couldn’t turn into smoke at the moment, she probably had more understanding of something like this than most.

  “That’d break the agreements!” James said, his voice coming between gunshots. “We’ll be fine, I’ve done this before, but I want you out of here!”

  “I can handle myself,” Sarah grumbled, her voice seeming to come from empty air rather than over comms. “Wish I’d brought a gun, though.”

  “Roger that,” Bubs replied, hurling one of his darts at a smaller ikiski and dropping it to the floor. An enormous collision, almost like an explosion, paused the combat for a moment, coming from the pair of thirty-foot titans clashing in a fury of tooth and claw. In the momentary faltering of the melee, Isaac had an idea and leaned into the idea of that stillness, summoning his power and shoving at the inertia there, hoping to make it harder to start up again — and give them more time to get to the wall.

  As ever, it was hard to tell whether his power truly made a difference, but the frozen moment where everyone was watching the pair of ikiski fighting stretched longer than it probably should have. In those seconds of stillness, their little group managed to hustle across a few dozen more feet of floor before the brawl ground back into motion. Close enough that they were nearly at the wall.

  “Stratum, make a hole,” Bubs ordered, whipping more of his game darts at anyone nearby while Stratum used his bulk to suddenly charge toward the wall. Isaac still didn’t know how they worked, but when they got a good hit in, it seemed to incapacitate the target. Unfortunately, getting a good hit on the large, scaled ikiski didn’t seem to be easy.

  Isaac lunged forward to shoulder-check a lizard-man who’d slipped past Lia, claws catching in his inertially-invested fabric but, unfortunately for the individual in question, getting twisted with ruthless force and snapping audibly. It made Isaac wince, but nobody else seemed to worry too much about injuries. On the other hand, it was clear that there was some sort of sorting mechanism, since none of the twenty-foot tall types had bothered them yet.

  “Dammit, if I had my powers back all the way,” Sarah sighed, clearly not one quarter as worried as Isaac was. Though Isaac had caught trails of her smoke now and then, so she was doing something to befuddle their attackers. It didn’t take much imagination to realize how potent Sarah’s illusions could be in combat, even if she couldn’t flood the entire room like before.

  “We’ll get there,” Isaac managed to squeeze out, wielding his cord to drive off another ikiski trying to flank Bubs. He felt almost breathless despite being maybe forty seconds into the fight, though he knew that was just in his mind. But they were almost to the end of it.

  They fought through the last few feet, reaching the wall of the ballroom as the whistles and shrieks from the combat almost seemed to harmonize. It was a strange sensation, a passing moment of synchronicity among the chaos of the brawl. If it weren’t for the violence, it would have kept and held Isaac’s attention rather than merely distracting him.

  “Savage first, me last,” Bubs said to Stratum, drawing more darts from his bandoliers with amorphous tendrils and flinging them out at the nearest reptiles. In response, the elemental rumbled and attached himself to Savage, sliding right through the stone wall as if it were water. Lia was next, then Sarah. Each transition took only seconds, leaving just Isaac and Bubs, side by side with their back against the wall.

  When Stratum came to take him through, the sensation was utterly bizarre. Like being dunked in water, but at the same time the water was utterly rigid, a feeling on his skin that was the distant, unwanted cousin to being wet. It was the most awful experience he’d had since he had been trapped inside the character of Ravdia, but it was at least mercifully brief. After only moments he was outside the brawl-room, on one of the odd winding sidewalks next to Sarah.

  The harmony he’d heard inside was even stronger outside, and for the first time he understood why the reptiles called themselves the Singing Ones. The architecture somehow filtered and amplified the vocalizations, turning the wide-scale fight inside the ballroom into a massive aria bouncing out and reflecting off the conical buildings around them. There were only a few ikiski on the sidewalk opposite where they’d exited, but even those few had stopped, warbling and crooning along with the complex harmony.

  “Guess they don’t see it as a problem,” Sarah said grumpily, letting the invisibility illusion fall away. Isaac was pretty sure the issue was less getting attacked herself, so much as it was James being in the line of fire. He knew that he’d be pissed if it were Cayleb there instead, so he just put a comforting hand on her back.

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Isaac said. “He said he’d done this before anyway, right?”

  “He never told me he was out there fighting lizardfolk,” Sarah griped. “Mom’s going to be pissed.”

  Isaac laughed. He couldn’t help it; the comment seemed so incredibly out of nowhere, and now that they weren’t under attack he could relax a little bit. His intention to not get into any super-fights had gotten a small dent in it, but relative to what could have happened, the entire incident had been relatively minor.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” he said, and Bubs groaned.

  “Don’t say things like that,” he said in his burbling voice.

  “Not until the situation is resolved,” Lia agreed, runes still glowing on her skin as she looked around. “Can’t you tell? The entire city is acting as an amplifier for the song. In the Deep Kingdoms…”

  “Crystalline Entities,” Sarah said, looking around in sudden nervousness. Isaac vaguely recalled them as being one of the many threats that various supers kept away from the Five City Alliance, along with biotitans and mutated animals. They’d appeared in a few comics that he’d read, but there was no telling how accurate those were.

  “Yes a very much concern.” Gratin’s voice came from just beside Isaac, the cook somehow managing to infiltrate the surrounding members of the Brute Squad. Isaac twitched, but Sarah didn’t seem surprised.

  “Then why risk it?” Sarah asked, nervously rolling the illusionary kiseru between her fingers as she looked down at Gratin, clearly more anxious just talking to people than she had been during combat.

  “We could not wait anymore no. Should have been after Gloryfall but allowances were made for time and distance yes,” Gratin remarked. Isaac sucked in a breath; even down here, so far away from Star City, he couldn’t escape the effects of his actions. It wasn’t directly his fault, but he still felt responsible for Glorybeam’s depowerment—and everything that had flowed from it.

  “She was responsible for your surface connection?” He asked, trying to understand how bad the situation was.

  “She was like a Great King, and we built this city because of it! But now, no king here no. Our alliances are strained to breaking very badly right now yes. One more week and the city would fall apart very much.” Gratin fairly vibrated in place, dancing from foot to foot. “It may have been safer to remain at the meeting yes.”

  “I really was hoping to avoid super-fights here,” Isaac sighed. “Oh well. Can’t do anything about it now.” Now that he didn’t have to worry about being assaulted, he found he was more than a little peeved at getting involved. But then, he had heard over and over that once someone stepped into being a super, it was just a thing that happened. Seeing trouble invited trouble to look back.

  “Let’s head back to the embassy,” he said after a moment, glancing around to make sure the other members of the Brute Squad were in agreement. Technically he should have let Bubs or even Sarah make that call, but he felt like he needed to decide what direction he was going. Not to stay still or let other people debate over possible trajectories

  “James, we’ll meet you back at the embassy,” Sarah said, talking into her comm pin.

  “Okay!” James replied, his voice clearly distracted and partially muffled by ambient noise, but she visibly relaxed at the reminder that he was still fine. Savage and Lia formed up ahead of them, with Bubs and Stratum behind, their little group orienting themselves and cautiously moving away from the still-singing ballroom.

  “Oh,” Isaac said, remembering the thought he’d had in the middle of the fight, and hoping it might defuse some of his girlfriend’s obvious worry. “Get this. Brawl-room.” Sarah looked at him for a moment, then her frown dissolved and she laughed, although it was more strained than he had hoped.

  “That’s terrible,” she said, her hand going to her notebook and clearly glad to be distracted. “I’m using it.” Isaac chuckled. That kind of joke was definitely Cayleb’s influence. Hopefully his brother would have a chance to read whatever Sarah ended up writing about their time in the Deep Kingdoms.

  Paradoxically, the further they got from the brawl-room, the more transparently clear it was that the whole city was some giant speaker, almost certainly audible from other parts of the Hollow Earth. Part of him was fascinated, both by the construction and by the fact that it wasn’t deafening all of them, but the other part was just annoyed that they’d gotten caught up in such a bizarre foreign custom. He kept a sharp eye on the other ikiski pedestrians, but a good chunk of them were humming or singing along with the music, and didn’t seem to think about accosting their group.

  Isaac figured that was actually more thanks to Gratin than it was to the obviously armed and ornery Savage and Lia. Reading the body language of reptile-folk was more difficult than it was for people in Star City, but he could tell that there were a lot of glances in the diminutive cook’s direction. It almost reminded him of how people would look at the stage-director, back when he was in theatre, and was a strange thing to see on the streets of a foreign city.

  Gratin exchanged some words with Savage in the fluting, warbling language of the natives, which answered some questions about the cyber-raptor’s heritage and raised others. Isaac firmly told himself not to pry; it wasn’t his business. The trick at the moment was to get through whatever was going on with the ikiski without it collapsing into the kind of catastrophe that had occurred with Glorybeam and Greg back in Star City. He had no idea how it might, but hadn’t seen Gloryfall coming, either.

  “You doing okay?” Isaac asked Sarah, who sighed and flipped her kiseru between her fingers. While the smoke illusions were intangible to him and everyone else, he had to wonder if they had physicality to Sarah. In the same way that he could ignore the investment or divestment of his own power, she surely interacted with her own creations differently than anyone else. Especially since one of the aspects of her power was to become smoke.

  “Mostly pissed that James never said anything about this,” she admitted, smoke pluming upward from her lips. “If I’d known that he was getting into fights—I mean, he doesn’t actually have a power. I’m the only one who got a power from Dad, I should be the one doing dangerous stuff. Not him.”

  “Yeah, I think I get it,” Isaac agreed. “I was a little weirded out when my brother joined Star Central. But he’s a tinker, so he’s not in combat. Got to be a lot worse for you. But if James is in charge then he knows what he’s doing.” Isaac knew that wasn’t always the case, but wasn’t going to cast aspersions on James even by implication.

  “Yeah, maybe, but I could help.” Sarah scowled, waving her kiseru by demonstration. “Even now I can do something. Not as much as I used to, but…” She sighed. “But he doesn’t want it. Worse, it sounds like staying to help would just make it harder for him, and I hate that too.”

  “When I was with Justice for Hire, one of the rules there was that you didn’t do more than the job asked for,” Isaac mused aloud. “Sounds lazy at first, but the point was that when it comes to really sensitive stuff, especially with superpowers, you could cause more problems if you’re not careful. It’s one reason why I don’t think I was really cut out for it. Was a janitor too long to be okay with leaving messes alone.”

  It actually hadn’t come up much at the time, since they’d been so busy, but a few days to reflect over everything had definitely left him with a bad taste in his mouth. Not as much as his own responsibility for the chaos, and doing something to help curb the massive crime spree after Glorybeam had fallen was better than nothing, but still not enough.

  One thing he was hoping to do, if he was actually given time to try and work out the more esoteric aspects of his power, was figure out what he wanted to do with them. His small successes in how he’d affected environments and groups that he was a part of, showed that in theory he could have a much broader effect than he thought back when he was pushing around equipment at the hospital. Yet he didn’t quite have anything that would keep him from being used by forces like Star Central or Blacktime, coerced to use his abilities on behalf of people like Greg, who were so sure they knew better.

  Sarah was in a similar position from a different perspective. Her own father had actively invited her into the supervillain life. That had ended with the depowerer, but with her powers returning it was only a matter of time before she faced the choice once again. Though having met her mom, Isaac was pretty sure that Sarah wouldn’t be forced into anything by anyone this time around.

  “Someday you’re going to have to tell me what you did as Ravdia,” Sarah said, eyeing him sideways through the illusionary hat she kept tilted at a rakish angle. “I don’t have to worry about someone out there pining over a missing magical girl, do I?”

  “He mostly worked on the Brute Squad,” Lia said, cutting in from where she walked in front of them, one of the runes on her skin still glowing softly. “We spent most of our time subduing mundane or nominal-type criminals. Important, necessary work, but one without glory or acclaim.”

  “That’s the point of the Brute Squad though,” Savage’s artificial voice pointed out, as Isaac rolled his eyes and reached out to squeeze Sarah’s hand reassuringly. “We’re not people who benefit from attention.” The raptor’s cybernetic eyes glanced backward, his metal-spined tail flicking in annoyance. “Which is why I mislike it here.”

  The traffic-light barriers went up, blocking off the mount-dinosaurs that were the obvious demonstration of why Savage didn’t like to be there, but Isaac was distracted by Sarah sticking her tongue out at him for a moment before flashing him a smile. The singing, if anything, was getting louder, and it took Isaac a full minute of walking along the sidewalk to realize that it wasn’t just coming from the city.

  “Halt,” Savage said, stopping on a dime, his head snapping off to the left.

  “I hear it too,” Isaac said, though he didn’t know what he was hearing, aside from some odd rejoinder to the song of the brawl-room. He followed Savage’s gaze, not seeing anything, but Lia’s runes cycled as she performed whatever scrying magic she had at her disposal.

  “I knew we waited very much too long to start this,” Gratin muttered, and Lia confirmed the implication a moment later.

  “Crystalline Entity,” she said. “This is beyond us.”

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