That night, Dirk got to tick off another experience from his “things I didn’t get to do as a teenager because my childhood totally sucked” list - namely, a sleepover. And, he had to begrudgingly admit, it also totally sucked.

This sleepover severely deviated from his American movie informed expectations of pillow fights, painting nails, and talking about boys. Instead, it involved the four of them huddled in his living room, doors barricaded and curtains drawn, guarding in shifts and expecting to hear a thud in the wall or the crack in the electric sockets at any moment. The thud or the crackle never came, but the morning did. With the morning came the prescient question of what the hell they were supposed to do now, which brought them to the detective agency office for lack of better ideas. After all, it was a slightly more suitable place to stay in rather than one British man’s profoundly chaotic apartment.

And the office is where they stayed - sleep deprived, soaked in anxiety like ladyfingers in sweet espresso, and surviving on a stable supply of junk food and the aforementioned sweet espresso. Currently, they were in the process of deducing the case. What that looked like is Dirk’s giant cork board propped up against the wall in the waiting room, Dirk, Todd, and Farah arguing rather loudly with each other over various minute details, and professor Daly watching them from the couch, perplexed.

The professor did not even try to contribute to the discussion since he was far more interested in talking to Mona. She had just assumed a human form to chat with him, and he was throwing question after question into her pure, curious mind.

“…and if I may ask such a personal question,” Roger continued, smiling awkwardly at Mona, “if you were to transform into an object that can be separated into two distinct entities, what would happen upon you changing shapes again?”

“Not sure,” she shrugged. “But we can check!”

With that, she turned into a Russian nesting doll, which the professor carefully took apart one by one and spread out across the coffee table. He then watched the dolls with such intense attention, he thought his eyes would pop out of their sockets. But alas, when Mona became her human-looking self again, all the dolls were gone at once.

“Fascinating,” professor muttered, rubbing his eyes. “Absolutely astonishing. This does very much make me think of the prospects of quantum entanglement in this case, and…”

“Quantum entanglement?” Mona repeated. “What’s that?”

“Oh my dear young lady,” Roger beamed, “if you only wish to find out, you can learn this from a tenured professor of Cooltown University.”

And that prospect appealed to Mona quite strongly, so she gave him a single enthusiastic nod.

Meanwhile, the discussion of deductive methods at the cork board was rapidly approaching boiling levels. The current point of contention seemed to be the degree to which Kevin’s feeling of being watched related to professor Daly’s popping light bulbs. Dirk was searching for a direct link, Farah was of the opinion that he was omitting a few (or few dozen) key steps.

Todd stood back, unwilling to take sides, and took in a generous fraction of the cork board. He had no way of knowing just by looking at it, but in fact Todd was witnessing an accurate depiction of Dirk’s mind: vast, utterly unorganized, and filled to the brim with a wide array of mostly minor and inconsequently details that, on their own, made no sense at all, but put together almost looked like a meaningful whole. For example, a photo of a child’s drawing of octopuses… what was that for, exactly?

“What do you think?” Dirk asked him suddenly.

“About the Kevin and light bulbs connection?”

“No,” Dirk frowned, “about pizza. I’m ordering now. Have you been listening at all?”

“I’ll have whatever you’re having,” Todd muttered, and Dirk walked up to the window for a moment, leaving him and Farah alone. “This won’t make sense to us,” he told her. “This literally, physically, cannot make sense to us. Like, holy shit, I can’t even imagine being able to process this amount of information at the same time.”

“That’s why he put everything on the board,” Farah commented.

“But that’s literally everything,” Todd continued, “I mean, I can look at it on the board, can see the pieces, but I can’t, you know… think about the way he does. I can’t even look at it, to be honest. It’s too much.”

Farah glanced at Todd, then at the board, then at Todd again - and nodded.

“Us talking is helping him do the thing. I think,” she said. “But yeah you’re right. We’re pretty useless.”

By now, Dirk had returned and immediately picked up where he had left, except his brain kept going while he was ordering pizza, and as a result where he had left was approximately twenty miles and fifty seven years further than Todd and Farah. When he realized that, he stopped, thought about how to recap the last three minutes of his brain’s steady churning, then stopped again.

“So does anyone know how real investigators go about solving cases?” Todd asked at no one in particular. Dirk raised a hand and opened his mouth to speak, but Todd interrupted him with “TV shows don’t count,” after which Dirk no longer had something to say.

“What about comic books?” Dirk suggested after a prolonged pause.

“I need a shot of caffeine,” Farah declared, practically stumbling out of her chair, “and by shot I mean an actual syringe full of caffeine straight into my jugular.”

“Might as well just do amphetamines,” Todd laughed.

“Great idea,” Farah said through a jaw-displacing yawn. “This isn’t working, by the way,” she said at Dirk in particular.

“I think we are having great fun!” Mona smiled.

Dirk was about to give his sophisticated essay-length opinion on the concept of fun, when the doorbell rang and caused a terrible road accident to his train of thought.

“Oh that must be the pizza I ordered!” he said, and walked confidently towards the door.

This, in turn, set off a brewing thought process in Todd’s brain, and he wrestled with it for a moment before deciding that he would rather tackle that after a hot meal. The thought did a three sixty loop around his head and rammed into his forehead again just as Dirk was unlocking the door.

“Wait!” Todd yelled, “you’ve ordered literally a minute ago, they couldn’t have…”

But it was too late. Dirk had already undone the locking mechanism. The door clicked, then opened wide and hit the wall with a loud clang. On the threshold stood…

“Lilly?!” the acrobatics in Dirk’s eyebrows were so impressive, they would have been accepted into circus school immediately upon audition.

“It is indeed me,” she declared, stumbling into the agency office. “You know, for people in your predicament, you are astonishingly relaxed about who you let into the place.”

With that remark, she turned around, locked the door, then marched confidently towards the windows and drew the blinds on every single one.

“How did you find this address?” Dirk asked.

“Pff,” she scoffed, now walking up to various walls and pressing her ear to them. “You are very easily googlable. Another major security flaw, by the way.”

“Who is this girl again?” Farah asked, standing up defiantly with her freshly brewed coffee in one hand, her other palm resting comfortably on the gun holster at her waist.

“Hi,” Lilly smiled a crooked, forced smile, “my name is Lilly and you are very screwed and will likely be dead or comatose in approximately forty eight hours.” She smiled again. “And no this is not a threat. I am not here to save you, either, I am here because,” she looked around frantically and suddenly discovered professor Daly sitting just a few meters away from her. “Oh. Hi, Roger. I, uh, I didn’t notice you here.”

“Is there anything you want to say now Lilly?” Roger asked, one eyebrow raised, the other subtly frowned.

“Yes, uhm,” she hesitated, as if unsure whether the charade was worth maintaining, “yeah well listen, Roger, you’re fucked.” Evidently, she decided it was a bit too late in the end. “And it’s partially my fault and I am sorry, I really am, cause they think you have it and you don’t and, well, it doesn’t matter who messed up cause I will fix it.” She smiled, warmly this time. “I’ll keep you safe, I promise. I have a place you can go to and lay low for a while, and this bunch is not completely useless so…”

“Hold on and roll it back a bit, young lady,” Roger said. “I think I lost you somewhere along the way.”

“Oh you really did but that’s not the point. Trust me, it would take me 20 lecture hours at least to explain this whole thing and we don’t have the time…”

“No one is going into hiding,” Farah interrupted. “We’ve tried that already. It didn’t work. And I’m not losing another person.”

“He isn’t dead,” Todd reminded, but was emphatically ignored.

“Y’all are fucking stupid,” Lilly beamed, “and you will get very hurt. If you are expecting me to get impressed by this high school geek club of yours, then forgive me for not having much confidence. I’m here to protect my friend,” she said, glancing at Roger, “and I will do what I think is best for him.”

“And have you asked me about it, perhaps?” Roger walked up to her, eyebrows frowned slightly, and took a stand a couple meters away. “Has anyone here asked what I think is best for myself?”

“Roger,” Lilly’s expression was soft, but her eyes betrayed something bigger, deeper and darker - like all-encompassing blackness behind the stars on th night sky. “Oh, I wish I could tell you.”

“This is about Arthur, isn’t it?”

She nodded, unsure of what to say next.

“Can I just ask?” Dirk interrupted, “What was the entire plan, exactly? Get the professor to safety, and then…”

“Go and fix it.” Lilly shrugged. “I know where they’ll go next. It’s in the middle of a desert, in California. And the key’s still there as well.”

“That’s it then,” Dirk smiled, “we’re all going.”

“How in the observable universe is that the logical conclusion?” Lilly scoffed.

“Don’t expect logic from him,” Todd advised. “But he is most likely right. I know, it’s very annoying. But you get used to it.”

“I hate admitting it,” Farah said, “to myself most of all, but I really doubt we can protect him. Hell, I shouldn’t have to protect him!” She laughed after a sudden realization. “I’m not the police. I’m not a bodyguard. Why do I keep taking responsibility for everything?”

“Y’all would make some psychotherapist a very rich man. Or woman. Person. Whatever. Never understood the gradation myself,” Lilly said. “So let’s say you’ve convinced me of your incompetence. But I’m pretty sure he won’t be safe with me either.”

“This is to do with Arthur,” Roger repeated, and Lilly gave him a quick, reluctant nod. “In which case I don’t care. I’m an old man,” he said, “I don’t have much to live for anymore. My story has ended a while ago and I’ve been pushing myself through the epilogue. Now I feel like there is more to it, like there are bits of this story I haven’t seen. And I am willing to risk everything to get there. Quite literally.”

Lilly paused, as mighty beasts fought inside her for dominance. It wasn’t clear which one of the beasts won, but eventually she sighed and rolled her eyes and said:

“Okay. Sure. Whatever! If you can’t help but get involved, whatever! I’ll have to multitask. I hate this species so fucking much,” she whispered under her breath. “I hope you have a nice car that fits five people. And also a cat.”