@ACE Group Chat

Ruth:

Last ones, I swear! Noe is just too adorable. Those ears need scritches

Stella:

So you said the last three times, lol! At this point, I’m worried you’ll change sides if we ever face a catgirl villain.

Ruth:

Do those exist? Don’t play with my heart.

Ah, gotta go. Detective Killjoy finally brought in that Kasper guy.

Stella:

Poke me when you want me to pick you up. I’ll workshop my pickup lines till then. ^.~

~~15 minutes later~~

00:00.001:

City Hall was under attack by more of those fire creatures. These ones looked like sweets, but they were still solid fire on the inside. There were six of those Candy Banes trying to smash the roof and the cleaning crew.

I’ve taken care of it.

So, two major government buildings got attacked and it’s possible this last one was a distraction. I had a look around for the villain but I came up empty.

Oh btw, I was on patrol and I noticed the city is HUGE. How exactly do we keep the whole thing safe? I had a look and all the alarm data Ruth sent me earlier also only covered Downtown and South Bulwark where the school is.

Terra, confirm something for me. I found this book cover. That dino looks a lot like what attacked the Police Station, right? These new creatures also resemble something from a toothpaste commercial.

Stella:

Hey, Millisecond! ^.~

So nice to see you here! Thanks for taking care of that! Terra’s busy, but I guess it kinda looks like that fire-breathing t-rex, sure! Funny coincidence!

Great question, btw! ACE mainly deals with the area around the school because of travel and response time. I mean, my power is pretty cool so we can cover a way larger area than most, but even tele-hopping through the street takes time. It’s gotta be a pretty big, ongoing situation before it’s useful to go all the way across the city.

But don’t worry! The districts of the city that we can’t reasonably get to still have the police, some of which are even superpowered themselves! Plus most districts tend to have their own local heroes (or vigilantes) to help out.

Besides, most of the cool supervillain-attracting stuff tends to be downtown!

Ruth:

I totally forgot you were added to the chat! -.-;

Time to delete some of this rambling.

I know this is annoying, but Principal Arkwright will want a detailed account of what exactly happened at City Hall. Do you need any help with that? It’s easiest to E-Mail it to her and CC the rest of us. Oh, and TRACE too. They’ll probably want any new info they can get.

00:00.001:

Will do. I actually kinda liked seeing this rambling, so don’t worry about it. It’s a cute kitty.

Stella:

One last thing. We kinda crashed the interview with Detective Killjoy, but Ruth still managed to take some notes before we dropped by. She kiiinda left the notebook in the interrogation room in all the excitement, though. That won’t be an issue for you, right? See if anything there will help you. Just leave the notebook in my room when you’re done. I’ll find it.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Stella is trying to get me to retrieve their notebook so they don’t have to awkwardly slink back here to get it.” Milly smirked while she pushed through the doors of the police station.

This time around, she’d taken the extra step to wear a hoodie for an added touch of anonymity. While she didn’t feel she was doing anything wrong, she was still breaking into the station. Who knew what sort of high-tech cameras they might have?

“I hope this’ll do, but I should look into how to get a real costume.”

Then again, it wasn’t as though there were multiple girls with superspeed running around the city. It couldn’t be that big of a stretch to attribute any activity of that type to The Millisecond now.

Milly made short work of the lock on the interrogation room, but if the notebook had once been in the interrogation room, it wasn’t anymore.

“Great, well, let’s have a look around then. If we hurry maybe we’ll only be a month too late to see the…” Milly checked her phone where Niki had left her locations of various sightings. “..Ugly big-headed squirrel with a sock for a tail in the park. Sure, why not.”

Milly knew what the notebook looked like, she’d used it yesterday to write a note to ACE. That felt like so long ago, she’d barely even begun to explore her power at the time. Now, she casually stepped onto walls and hopped over desks to find her mark.

It didn’t take too long. In the first place, a high school girl’s notebook was distinctly more sparkly than most of the dour covers that adult officers apparently bought in bulk. Milly found the book on the desk of the detective she’d seen Ruth with initially. He wasn’t there, but the gilded nameplate read ‘Detective Gilroy’. Apparently, he wasn’t the type to leave potential evidence just lying around.

Milly left the station then leafed through the pages while she strolled to her next destination. According to Niki, most of the sightings of the strange creatures had previously been in the western district of the city: Westmidlyn.

It felt a little nostalgic to see the old notes ACE made on Orchid back when they only knew her as the mysterious pickpocket whose stakeout turned into a super fight against plants. Much like their notes on Milly, the pieces were right but the whole picture proved tough to put together.

“You know, Theodore, this’ll actually be the second time I’ve been to Westmidlyn,” Milly mused while she read through the notes on the Minutemen and their arrest. “Niki and I were looking for Doctor von Vector, the guy who we originally thought might’ve had something to do with Meatcrawl. His apartment was west of downtown. Pretty middling area, to be honest.”

Theodore didn’t dignify that joke with a response.

“Fine, be like that.” she shrugged and flicked through the pages. “I doubt there’s a connection between Vector and this new villain but the same principle ought to apply. Go over there, look at stuff in person, then figure something out.”

Not that Milly had any idea what she could possibly learn from these old sightings. Like a birdhouse where a pixie once sat a month ago. She’d been present for the latest two appearances and learned nothing.

Ruth’s notes on the interview were interesting at least. Apparently, a visitor had given him the drawing of the fire-breathing dinosaur. After learning that it resembled what attacked the police station, he grew agitated and complained that the meaning of it hadn’t been clear to him at the time. The Minutemen had hired a guy as ‘insurance’ to bust them out should they ever get caught.

“Huh, so it was an insurance guy?” Milly felt as though she’d fallen for one of those ‘the doctor was a woman’ jokes. “You know, Theodore, I was really trying to keep an open mind, but most of the clues so far felt like maybe it’d be someone younger.”

All the reported sightings of the different summons were somewhat childish, but it was possible that a clever supervillain might do that on purpose to throw investigators off the scent. Or perhaps their power was only capable of creating whimsical creatures.

“The plan must’ve been to create a big distraction that the Minutemen could take advantage of to escape, but Kasper didn’t know to capitalize on it? Drat, looks like Stella and I dropped in before Ruth and Killjoy could ask about who he hired.”

At the time, Milly had just been happy to get out of there so quickly. However, if they were really about to break the case wide open, why did they randomly pump the brakes? Ruth must’ve known they were only a name away from catching a supervillain, but she just bailed as if she didn’t care.

“Mhm. We were kicked out, but I bet Killjoy continued that conversation. A plea deal to rat him out could work even without Ruth there. I guess the police will catch the guy themselves.” Milly scratched her head as she mulled it all over. “Maybe that was the point? That guy directly attacked the police station, so they want to be the ones that get him, without help from superheroes.”

Milly could respect that.

“I guess TRACE doesn’t have a case anymore then. Should I just go home?”

As unsatisfying a conclusion as that was for TRACE’s first outing, their discovery of the drawing had been invaluable. If the crook got caught, that was all that really mattered. Terra mentioned before that solving the case would let her bring them in to help with Vanna’s case. Presumably, that meant figuring out how to tie Meatcrawl to Corvus Dynamics.

Milly closed the notebook and handed it back to Theodore for safekeeping.

“Ruth could have told me that the case had basically been solved,” Milly grumbled. The quickest way to school was to just turn around, but since she was already all the way out here in Westmidlyn, maybe she should find something else to do.

She immediately spotted her first order of business. An adorable pair of little Beagles chasing each other around in a circle. Their leashes twisted together while the owners, a man and a woman, panicked and pulled the knot tighter.

“Aw, just what the doctor ordered!” Milly knelt down by the pair and petted each set of fluffy ears. With every stroke of the carefree pups, she brushed away a little more of her stress.

“It can’t be a waste of time if I got to see you two. Isn’t that right? Yes, it is. Yes, it is,” she cooed while scratching one beneath the chin. Deciding to lend a hand, she unclipped the leashes and unspun the tangled mess. After a bit, she had it figured out and leaned down to clip the leashes back on but paused when she realized a problem. “...Drat.”

Two dogs. Two owners. Two leashes to connect them, but who belonged to whom?

A quick examination yielded little result. No obvious similarities or matching accessories. The tags had contact information, but both of their phones were locked so Milly couldn’t match them based on that. Fortunately, after Milly rifled through their pockets she discovered the man carried a wallet with a picture of one of the cute beagles as a puppy. It was even cuter, but more importantly, it had the same fur pattern.

“Oh good!” Milly sighed in relief while she clipped the leashes back into their proper places. “I was this close to just taking my best guess and hoping they’d notice the mix-up.”

A mix-up?

“Mhm,” Milly frowned, then pulled out the notebook again. “Hold on a second… Who’s to say the summoning power belongs to this insurance guy? I mean the timing and motivation line up but Kasper didn’t even know the guy’s power.”

On second thought, Milly would pay those sightings a visit after all. During her journey, she texted the rest of the group and inquired about Kasper's visitor.

Too bad it would take forever to hear back.

It turned out that Milly was completely right to think that visiting the sightings was entirely uninteresting. Without the creatures present, each location was just a series of street corners, a plaza, supermarkets, and the occasional park or playground.

None of them were particularly enlightening, but Milly still made a sketch of each one. At least this way she’d get a little bit of practice in drawing backgrounds for her comic.

“I guess it makes sense that the main areas where people spotted them are common places with a lot of people. If a cereal mascot showed up in the sewer who would notice? That would also explain why the vast majority of these are at noon with only a couple at night.”

Theodore felt it went without saying that the conspicuous absence of events at any other time merited further investigation. So, he didn’t.

“Hey, you’re right. It is kinda weird that it’s only around noon and midnight. That also applies to the attacks on City Hall and the Police Station. Maybe their power has specific windows in which it’s active like mine?”

Milly vividly remembered the way Principal Arkwright deduced her window of Milly-time by taking note of when she didn’t use her speed to reply. If that really was true, that certainly would make it much easier for the police to take this villain down themselves.

“We should let someone know about that. Oh, right. I could put it in the report. On a related note: ugh, I gotta write a report? Nobody mentioned there would be superhero homework when I accepted! I should’ve been a vigilante like Dad.”

Theodore knew she technically had been one for nearly a day.

“That was before I had you to keep me on the straight and narrow,” Milly snickered while she jaywalked across the street. “This doesn’t count. Come on, we’re almost done.”

Together they swung by the remaining sites, and while the sites themselves were still awfully uninteresting, Milly passed by an elementary school that caught her attention. She’d seen several schools on her trip so far, but this one had something unique on the sign out front.

An ugly big-headed squirrel with a sock for a tail.

“...Huh, that looks really familiar.” Milly paused by the sign. “Tell me if we walked past here before.”

Theodore didn’t.

“That’s what I thought.” Milly checked her chat log with Niki again. “A rabbit with a straw, no… A bulldog wearing a hat, no… Ah! The ugly squirrel in the park! This is one of the creatures!” Milly pointed excitedly.

So far, identifying the source material for the creatures hadn’t been much help. After all, knowing it was inspired by entertainment or advertising didn’t actually narrow down the suspect list when just about anyone could have access to those. Until now. There was no way that weird thing was known to anyone outside this neighborhood.

“Great! I mean, that’s still a lot of people, but if this is the right area there’s gotta be more to find.” Milly looked around the street then eyed up the school. She patted the sign as she strode past to the front door. “I reckon I’ll start here then fan out until I turn up something useful.”

As it turned out, Milly didn’t have to go very far.

Inside the school, she found multiple depictions of the creatures that came from books, such as the ‘Big Rex’ series, but also a few drawings made by the kids that were plastered in the halls. The only trouble was that she had no way of actually telling who those belonged to, who taught their class, or who the teacher’s aide was. All people that had to be questioned.

“Dang it. This would be so much easier if I could just go around asking people stuff.” Milly grumbled as she leaned up against one wall while staring at a poster of a large cat hanging from a tree, yet another one of the harmless creature sightings. “I reckon nobody is gonna be all that receptive to random notes containing probing questions. I’d die of boredom before convincing anyone I’m the good guy.”

She checked her watch.

15:30.

“Milly-time is nearly over, just another four minutes. I could hang around for another half a Milly-day and then talk to people…” Just saying it made Milly’s chest tighten. She only had a precious little bit of normal time and she really didn’t want to spend it on this, but she felt guilty for being selfish.

Theodore showed no trace of judgment.

“Oh! That’s a good idea!” Milly pulled out her phone.

At the gates leading back into Arkwright Academy grounds, a security guard waved Celine and Paige through.

“We’re going to look so cool.” Paige chewed a candy cigarette with all the confident swagger of a rebellious teenager with the real thing. If she actually realized Celine hadn’t brought the right ones, she didn’t let on.

Celine didn’t look so sure. Her fingers fidgeted with hers like she couldn’t decide how best to get rid of it. Her best chances had already passed. She timidly offered it to Paige. “Wouldn’t it be cooler if you were ‘smoking’ two? Twice as cool.”

“Nonsense!” Paige tried to wrap an arm around Celine’s shoulders but only came up as high as her waist. Undeterred, she gave Celine a jostle and popped the candy cigarette into her mouth by force. “A rising tide lifts all boats, you know? I’m the tide in that analogy. You’re obviously hopeless, so I’ll have to do a lot of lifting!”

“I, uh, thanks? I think?” Celine muffled around the cigarette.

Their phones beeped simultaneously.

“What!?” Paige stomped her foot as she read the text from Milly. “We just got here!”

Celine couldn’t look more relieved.

Milly strolled over campus toward the fourth-year dorms with Stella’s notebook in hand.

“In hindsight, asking for help from TRACE was really obvious. It’s literally what they are there for. Too bad I couldn’t tell them about what I found in the school if I don’t want to blow my cover, but I’m sure they’ll figure that out on their own. I can already hear Paige taking credit.”

Putting both of her identities on the teams was convenient, but she needed to keep what Milly knew and what Millisecond knew separate. It wasn’t too tricky, but it did make Milly consider the benefits of sharing her identity with the team just so she wouldn’t have to worry about it.

“Maybe someday. We’ll cross that wall when we get to it.” Milly grinned as she reached the dorm building. She could see the large windows of Stella’s room up above and walked right up. Her power certainly had its perks for cutting corners and taking shortcuts. “Mhm, I’m just gonna call it being efficient.”

Her ‘efficient’ plan hit a bit of a snag at the top, however, when Milly discovered Stella’s window was locked from the inside. Without a keyhole to mess with, Milly wasn’t sure how she was supposed to open it up.

“Drat. Gambled and lost.” Milly sighed while she looked up and down the building, trying to determine which direction would actually be more efficient at this point. The roof was closer, but there was no guarantee that there was an entrance up there. Perhaps she ought to play it safe and just take the front door.

While Milly teetered on the window sill of uncertainty, a third option caught her eye. While the large bedroom windows were closed, the little bathroom window was cracked open. She made her way over.

“Why does this feel so much more wrong?” Milly wondered as she squeezed through the smaller window. She had to be careful not to get Theodore caught on the frame but Milly finally managed to climb down into the bathtub. She noticed her shirt was wet where it had touched the wall. “Bleh. Stella must’ve showered before her date.”

The place smelled weird, kind of like copper. Traces of some kind of red shampoo clung to the sides of the drain. Milly supposed this was karma for breaking into Stella’s room like this. She pushed the shower curtain aside.

“I guess I’ll take the long way bac—Gah! What the heck is that?!”

A huge pile of sand sat up against the sink with a vaguely humanoid torso sticking out the top as though someone had half-buried a blurry mannequin with two big triangular bumps on its head.

Milly’s brain caught up with her knee-jerk reaction a second later. That was obviously Terra. First of all, what other sand person did she know? Secondly, it was Terra’s room too. But why did Terra look so different from usual?

Upon realizing she was looking at a person, Milly quickly averted her gaze. It wasn’t right to look at someone naked. Although, did that apply here? She’d already gotten an eyeful and frankly seen nothing. Curiosity got the better of Milly as she took a hesitant second glance.

To Milly’s relief, there was definitely nothing scandalous recognizable. If this even really was Terra and not a big clump of dirt she kept in reserve to recharge or something.

“I’m sorry for barging in like this,” Milly said to Terra even though she knew it was useless.

What was a little harder to be blasé about was Terra looking at herself in the mirror over the sink.

Milly didn’t have the nerve to lean in front of Terra, but she could see her ‘face’ reflected in the mirror. It had no facial features whatsoever. No eyes, no mouth, no nose. Just sand.

It gave Milly the creeps. She was reminded of yesterday night when she’d accidentally broken off Terra's legs while moving her. Terra had been entirely sand on the inside too. No bones or muscles.

As she calmed down after the initial shock, she started to notice more strange things in the periphery. On the sink counter stood three tall plastic frames, two of which held up long blond wigs while the third was a scorched mess.

“I reckon that’s how your hair looked perfectly normal after the fire.”

Milly stared at Terra’s reflection for a long moment, then slowly panned back to the wig stand. An egg tray-looking thing below the wigs held a pair of glass eyes, and a glass of water with a set of dentures below that. A picture of what looked like Stella was taped to a corner of the mirror.

The old idiom of ‘putting on my face’ had never before been so literal. All the pieces fit together, except for the two triangle shapes on Terra’s head.

Milly squinted. “Wait, are those cat ears?”

Somehow that was the most surreal part of all this. Not that Terra was apparently 100% a sentient pile of sand that required prosthetics to resemble a human, but she played with making animal faces in the mirror. Milly remembered doing that as a kid.

It was that one little touch of normalcy that jarred Milly back to the reality that what she was doing was entirely inappropriate. It didn’t matter that Terra didn’t look like a normal person, inside or out, that didn’t make it okay to gawk at her in a private moment.

Especially when Terra had made sure to protect Milly’s privacy.

Milly started to speak but thought better of it. She left the notebook and slinked out of the bathroom without a word.

She’d apologize when Terra could actually hear her.

With a loud hiss, the bus came to a halt at the Acorny Elementary stop.

“I’m telling you this is some kinda hazing ritual!” Paige gestured wildly as she stepped off the bus. A swirl of discarded paper bus tickets danced in her wake. “If they really thought this was something, why aren’t they here?”

Celine meekly followed after her. “W-well, I’m sure they’re looking for more matches like this one online. It can’t have been much fun to find an obscure image like this. I suppose if you really want to trade and scroll through Doodle Image search for hours, we could ask to trade? I’m okay doing anything, really.”

Paige looked thoughtful for a split-second, then marched toward the school. “As I said, we’re doing the important fieldwork! Any nerd can tap on a keyboard, that’s why Niki’s doing that part.”

“I thought it was kind of cool that they put in so much work already.” Celine cast a quick glance over her shoulder as though she expected Milly to just materialize. “Mhm. Do you think you could maybe do the talking while we’re there? I’d like to try something else if that’s okay.”

Paige unfolded the T-Rex drawing. “Knock yourself out. I’ll be over here, solving this case by myself.”

A rustle passed through all the drawings hanging in the school.