Denise didn't even know what to say.

This guy, Neil? He wasn't even the person who they came here to see. And he didn't let her weak-willed sister get more than a sentence into their cover story before bullying her into blabbing EVERYTHING. Their real names, what they'd been through, their Branches, all of it.

But after he'd heard them out, he didn't try and take advantage of them or blackmail them or do any of the countless other horrible things that she was afraid he'd do.

Instead, he agreed to both of her requests without any apprehension.

And if that wasn't crazy enough, he wasn't even interested in Denise's Branch!

She seriously expected to have to shave a couple of years from his age in exchange for his assistance at the very least, but nope.

Nothing.

And that's why the only thing she could conceive of doing at the moment was hugging her little sister as tightly as she could while bawling her eyes out. The relief from having finally found an actual good person was just too much to bear.

----------

"Ahem..."

The sound of Neil's gruff fake coughing as he walked past them was what finally pulled Denise out of her crying fit. And while she may not have shared Lorraine's ability to literally read people, she could still tell that seeing their emotional outburst had him feeling extremely uncomfortable.

He's probably the type that tries to keep up a certain image in front of other people...

After all, he'd clearly gone out of his way to make his office as close to something that you'd find in some noir movie as possible.

Hell, he even dressed the part.

And while in the process of examining his clothing that probably wouldn't have been out of place back in the '40s, Denise also took a proper look at the man wearing them for the first time.

He looked to be in his late teens at the very most, with brownish-yellowish eyes and a reasonably handsome face. His hair was light brown, reaching just past his shoulders and tied back in a ponytail...

...but the thing that she found the most striking about him was his height. Her father was always proud of his 6'1" stature, but there wasn't a single doubt in her mind that Neil was even taller than that.

Though her current twelve-year-old stature probably skewed her perspective on such things at least somewhat.

He could definitely stand to eat a little more, but it's not like that's a dealbreaker...

"C'mon."

"!!?"

Anyone would be frazzled at least a little if the person they'd just been checking out suddenly called out to them.

"Y- yeah?" Denise responded, hoping that he didn't notice her wandering eyes.

"I'll show you to where you'll be staying until I can work out how to get you safely out of town," Neil replied.

Keeping his back to them, Neil opened the office door and stepped out into the hallway.

A safehouse? It's a safehouse, right?

More likely than not in a subconscious attempt to take her mind off of the events of the past few days, Denise's imagination began to run wild with thoughts of what sort of place a real-life safehouse might be like.

Maybe a spooky abandoned house, or the residence of someone who owed him a fa-

"Eh?"

"What?" Neil glanced back at Denise.

"Those stairs are leading up."

She pointed up the stairwell that he'd already placed a foot on.

"But the way outside is down there."

She then pointed down the stairs that they'd taken to reach his office in the first place.

"Yeah, well we aren't going outside."

"?"

Neil looked up at the ceiling and let out a sigh.

"I have some vacant rooms upstairs," he said. "That's where you'll be staying."

"Huh, I was expecting some kind of safehouse," Lorraine said, clearly just as confused as Denise was.

As expected of my little sister.

"Yeah," Neil shrugged, "well I can't think of any place that's safer than where we are right now. I have eyes on this building 24/7, and they'll let me know the second that someone suspicious approaches."

Eyes?

Once again, Denise's imagination went on autopilot as all sorts of possibilities flooded her mind.

Maybe some kind of underground connections? Or even a spy network of homeless people like in that one movie...

----------

"Welcome to your new home for the next however long."

Neil led the two girls into what one might expect to find in a medium-end hotel, a single main area with a connected bathroom and furnished with a queen-sized bed and loveseat.

Tracing his fingers along the wall, he walked over to the other side of the room where its only window was located...

"There we go."

...and pulled out what could only be described as a collapsible wall.

Holy crap!

Upon a closer look, Denise could see a groove running along the floor and ceiling, seemingly the track that the false wall was meant to travel along.

CLICK

And with that, the deed was done. The room's area had just been shaved off by maybe a tenth and its only source of ambient lighting was now completely cut off.

"Sorry if it's kinda stuffy in here," Neil said as he brushed the dust from his hands, "but a safehouse isn't any good if people can tell from outside which room you're in."

"Oh, I get it!" Lorraine nodded her head over and over again. "The false wall is to block any light that's inside the room!"

"Clever girl!" Ankh called out from his perch on Neil's shoulder.

Whoa, so that's why he-

Their mysterious benefactor's stock rose even higher in Denise's eyes.

"So, uh..."

After turning on the light so that everyone could actually see, Neil pointed at the ceiling.

"My place is upstairs," he said. "So if you run out of food or whatever while you're here, just pop in either there or the office downstairs and I'll take care of it."

"Thanks," Denise nodded.

Come to think of it, she was starting to get kind of hungry...

"I'm not sure about clothes, but I'll see what I can do about that. Worst-case scenario, I'll go pick up something for you tomorrow."

"...I'd really appreciate that," Lorraine said, taking the opportunity to finally kick off what she'd so lovingly referred to as "stripper heels."

----------

After giving them a quick rundown of how to turn on the TV and where the extra rolls of toilet paper were and a bunch of other vital details of their temporary living arrangements, Neil started towards the door.

"I need to step out for a bit," he said, "did either of you have any questions before I go?"

"No," Denise shook her head, "I think we're good here."

"Cool, then-"

"Actually," Lorraine called out just as he was about to step through the doorway, "there's something that I wanted to ask you."

"Oh?"

"...yeah..."

Lorraine closed her eyes and took a deep breath like she always did when she had something important to ask.

"...how deep does all of this actually go?"

"Hm?" Neil seemed kind of confused.

"Branches, I mean."

Leave it to Lorraine to ask the questions that I'm too dumb to even think of.

"Like, I randomly woke up one day with universal translator powers," Lorraine said, "and a little voice in my head yelling 'remove' at me whenever someone pissed me off. I thought I was going insane."

The detective's gaze hardened a little after hearing that last bit.

"But then barely a month later, the same thing happened to Denise."

Denise nodded in confirmation.

"And now we have some kind of weird psychic detector headache sense thing that knocked both of us the hell out the first time it happened," she added.

"...yeah, that's standard," Neil sighed.

"But why?" Lorraine asked. "I had no idea that any of this stuff even existed, but then my entire life gets shot to hell because of it?"

Noticing her sister's increasingly agitated state, Denise took her hand.

"It's a curse," Neil growled. "The two of you... and I'm no different, we all just had the shit luck of getting caught up in it."

A curse...?

"Only a tiny percentage of the population ends up with them naturally, but they almost always try to take advantage," Neil said. "And the ones who don't end up getting taken advantage of themselves more often than not."

"Like me..." Denise mumbled.

"Most of the time they try to keep all this Branch nonsense under wraps, but any overt incidents end up getting covered up anyways."

"B- by the government?" Lorraine gasped.

"By everyone," he shook his head. "None of the big groups want this stuff out in the open."

So if we'd gone to the police, then-

"The only real advice I can give you going forward is to keep your heads down," he sighed. "Especially considering what Denise is able to do."

And with that, he left them to their thoughts.