Sai looked at Lord and Dame frowned, how had they got into their house. How indeed did they know their names?

They looked at the front door, it was shut and locked. Confused, Sai looked up at Lord and the tall man smiled thinly, a fresh dark bruise high upon his cheek bone above a split and bleeding lip. Sai frowned and looked at their hand to find their knuckles bloody and their pink flowery shirt torn and crumpled.

The woman, Dame, opened the briefcase, the stiff leather a creaking backdrop for her clipped voice.

"We have, in addition to your recent assault of two agents of the king, I have here a list of complaints from the officials of the king's court with regards to the letters sent on the 3rd, 7th, 18th and 21st of the previous month.”

Sai looked around as they tried to get their bearings, they were in their living room, with a pair of strangers and no recollection of how they or the other two had got there. They had almost no idea what was going on, despite having seemingly spent long enough with the pair to be sat around the table with them. In short, they had almost no idea what was going on, but they knew an accusation when they heard one.

Keen to start distracting the duo Sai waved their hands to gesture vaguely. "I don't see why you'd think this was me though. This could be any Sai, or even someone trying to smear my good name! And besides, basically everyone thinks that the king is..." they leaned over to look at the documents "...A relic of Britain's incestuous past and a stain on the very concept of democracy."

Lord's jaw clenched and his face began to twitch. Sai watched their reaction curiously, apparently the letters had really upset him, but that did beg the question of how the duo had even gotten them.

Sai caught his eye and winked; this stuffy duo really was getting boring. They drummed their fingers on the table as they considered their next move, their brown fingers tapping a merry tune as their nails clicked against the table.

Dame looked very unimpressed, it seemed that she was not a fan of music. Sai grinned at her -well in that case, the next course of action was obvious.

In a flash of pink Sai jumped out of the chair and onto the table. Took a second to pose triumphantly and began to sing their rebuttal, their gangly form crouched and contorted as they attempted to avoid the worn light fitting above.

Your position/approach unprofessional,

Perhaps your arrival inevitable,

Your attitude sucks,

Yet here lies the crux,

The evidence you carry is negligible,

Sai closed off the outburst of half-rhymes in a flurry of jazz hands and watched the duo closely, as they held the outlandish pose. Lord’s face was a fury with his perfect white teeth clenched as Dame frowned and shook her head.

“Unfortunatly for you and your…. Charming… song, the letter on the 21st was smeared with your blood. How you managed to cut yourself in such a way we do not care to know, but our analysts belive that alcohol was likely involved.”

Sai pasted a cocky grin across their face as they cursed drunk Sai internally. Maybe they did have evidence, they did recall awaking with a mysterious drunken injury which lined up suspiciously well with that particular letter.

“Sounds awfully flimsy to me, I am afraid I am going to have to ask you to leave.”

Sai jumped back down from the table and placed a hand on the implacable Lords shoulder with the intent of ushering him out of the door, only to find their vision blur into darkness as their hands brushed against the starched black of his suit.

When they regained vision, the duo was gone. No sign of their presence save a glossy page filled to the brim with tight text. Sai grimaced and went to look for a magnifying glass, this was textbook malicious documentation, and they were damned if they’d not read the fine print document – out of spite if nothing else.

It took Sai a good twenty minutes to find the magnifying glass in the kitchen…being used as an impromptu coaster. A quick examination revealed it to be scratched and scuffed, but not unreasonably so and Sai sat at the table to read the maliciously sized text.

The hours ticked on as Sai deciphered the text, cutting through paragraphs of clarifications and subclauses and making notes in the margins as the obfuscations and legalese fell before their litigious mind. By the end of it, the paper was marred with ink, crossed with lines, scribbles and clarifications to reveal the truth – the duo, and whatever strange entity they worked for only had claim to those who agreed to be part of The Empire Beyond whatever the hell that was, and it seemed, the inquiry and harassment were the first step in that, in taking ownership of the street.

Sai considered it for a second and mused to the room aloud. “Would it really be such a bad thing for there to be a government here?”

Sai thought about it for a moment more and pulled out their phone to check up on how the government was doing in that Britain, checked that the news sites they had been reviewing were not parody. Having determined that they were not, Sai felt the answer was clear.

Without further consideration they swiped away the search and dropped Red a quick, if overly dramatized message:

Hey Red, I have been accosted by government agents! The fiends broke into my home and threatened me with the most violent of reprisals and malicious of paperworks! – We must retaliate forthwith with an equal and opposing violence!

To Sai’s surprise her response was immediate:

I will get battle ready and arrive in exactly 58 mins time.

They smiled at the weird wording, it was unlike Red to respond to a joke in the same spirit, but it was nice to think they were finally rubbing off on her, and an hour was more than long enough to grab a cup of coffee and get some reading in before they worked out their plan with Red.

Sai heard the knocking at their door as Red arrived about an hour or so later and let herself in immediately. As she kicked open the door Sai’s stomach did a flip, she was dressed head to toe in armour, layers of leather panels roughly tied together with cable ties and bolts, an ornate sword, a replica Glamdring perhaps, held unevenly in one hand as she charged up the stairs flailing wildly.

Sai flinched and jumped up from the sofa, the book they were reading flying across the room as the sounds of chaos filled Sai’s home. They hurried to deescalate the situation, internally the swore at themselves, she’d said battle ready, and they’d assumed it was a joke, but Red didn’t do that kind of joke.

They scrambled up the stairs after her and attempted to reason with her, but Red’s face was a mask of furious rage.

“I know how they got in; I saw the door in the sky where there never was one before. I think if we destroy it then they will not be able to send reinforcements. All we need to do is build some kind of trebuchet” Red extracted a notebook from their ever-present bag and thrust it at Sai.

“See, all we need to do is to get some spring-loaded steel and launch some kind of spear into the sky.”

Sai pushed the notepad to one side and grabbed Red’s armoured shoulder.

“Err, sorry to say but you know how sometimes you misunderstand jokes?”

Red nodded absentmindedly as Sai continued.

“Well, this is one of those times. We are not literally at war; I was being overly dramatic I guess….”

They paused as they noticed Red glowering up at them with a look of intense irritation.

“You could have said that.”

Sai considered arguing for a second but accepted that had they thought about It for more than a second, they’d have realised it was a terrible thing to say to the excitable demi-girl. “If it makes you feel better, I am still planning something treasonous, just not literally murder.”

Seemingly disappointed, Red began taking off her “armour” and stacking it in a pile to one side of the room. Once she was suitably disrobed, she turned back to Sai and pulled open a notebook expectantly.

Sai grinned, it seemed all must be forgiven then! Talking slowly and being careful to be precise with their wording, they outlined the actual events which had happened including a quick rendition of their short song, which Red jotted down diligently.

“….So basically the plan now is to make something that will annoy them more than me and make them so angry they'll leave on their own accord. THEN, maybe we can look into breaking that door.” I don’t suppose you can build something that looks cute but is really annoying? Or loud or something?”

Sai chuckled as Red began rooting through her bag of notebooks, flipping through each and putting a few select books to one side as she rooted though and pulled out the various designs and schematics she had sequestered away within. Each was removed, carefully examined for a reference comment, and handed it to Sai as she searched for the next one. As the stack grew the designs became less concrete and vaguer as the stack moved from recent successful designs, like the streets WiFi towers, to unstable ideas Sai and the other members of the street and vetoed before eventually culminating in old, wrinkled schematics which seemed to predate Red’s arrival on the street entirely.

After perhaps twenty steps in along this winding path of time, she stopped at an ancient worn-down notepad. Sai noticed that it was far older than the rest, its scratched leather cover predating the colour coded network of books that Red had used for as long as Sai had known them. Its spine was bent with age, and the thin dry paper crackled as Red pulled a crude schematic from the between the pages. As Sai watched, she hesitated for a moment turning the paper over bashfully in her hand before reluctantly handing it to them.

"How about this, I remember the design being better, so I’ll have to re-do it. It’s err.. It's one of my first designs, but it should be loud, and err.. Scary...I based it on my favourite Doctor Who character...But dad, err dad always said the prototype was fucking annoying’…So…Maybe it can help?"

Sai took the worn paper and made great pains to appear to consider the sketch carefully. They were aware that even if the messy childish handwriting had been readable, they'd never have been able to understand what the design was meant to be doing, but wanted to give the best impression to Red before accepting it. Of course, it did help that one of the sections they could read was marked: Bark gun – 200 Bark/s. If nothing else, that would prove to be infuriating at worst, and ear splitting at best.

Sai grinned to themselves and looked up from the paper to find Red’s face mere centimetres from their own, the tell-tale white knuckles of nerves as she wielded her pen perilously close to both their faces. In response Sai forced their grin wider and wrapped their friend up in an enthusiastically energetic hug.

“It’s perfect”

Red's eyes lit up from within the cage of Sai’s arms as she squealed with joy. "I KNEW IT! I KNEW THEY WERE WRONG! PROJECT KAY-NINETY-TWO GETS TO BE A HERO AFTER ALL!"