***GABE***

How do we get rid of all this foam? Something tells me it's resistant to fire elementals and light as well. And it's sticky enough that dark energy would only make it worse. (Sorry, Harris, you'd be SOL in that case.) Maybe water, though? Or ice? If I can form sharp enough blades, I could puncture the foam already hardening and coalescing around my hands. That shit is disgusting as fuck, and I say this as a guy who's had enough experience handling sticky bodily fluids (mostly his own) that I could devote a section of my CV to it. When I have one, that is. Am I still too young to have one, since I'm not even eighteen yet? Remind me to ask about that at Garrick's Career Center when school starts up again after New Year's.

If I'm still here and not condemned to Third 'Verse dreamscape life at that time, that is.

And if my idea works, the day of that condemnation will hopefully be a little further into the future.

Moment of truth.

I clench my fists as much as I can with the foam surrounding me and weighing down enough on me that it's now extra-hard to move. Cold spreads under the foam, and then the pressure on my hands lightens as ice spikes tear through the surface. Three of them, Wolverine-style, because why the hell not? More geekboyishness on my part, it's not a crime. It's like when Mom got me a laptop for my seventeenth, and one of the first things I did was get myself a Supernatural anti-possession symbol sticker for the lid, which made her squirm. And then Alex, not to be outdone, got himself a sticker with the Eeveelutions, at which point Mom said, "Screw it. My boys clearly have their own individual tastes, and while I can't say I approve, I won't infringe on them."

Basically, the attitude she takes to everything, ever since we became teenagers. She pretends to not wholeheartedly approve - like after I came out - but we all know the truth.

And why am I boring you to death with this account of my past life? Not that you're bored, of course, but I know what you're really here for - me saving my friends' bacon and showing Alicia Wahlberg who's boss.

(Apologies for the clichés, and more apologies in advance for any others to which I may subject you in the future. Because God only knows how dead true originality is.)

Alicia's face falls comically as I start to really tear through the foam, my ice blades shredding it and stopping it from forming that disgusting cocoon. That's me on my way out, and as for my friends, I have to be a little more careful around them. I don't think they'd take kindly to getting spiky ice in certain sensitive places. Well, maybe Park, because he did threaten to relieve Harris of his 'nads-

No, I didn't. Park can't talk as long as the foam still covers his mouth, but it doesn't block the thoughts radiating from his brain.

Excuse me? I specifically remember-

I told him he'd be singing castrato. That's not a straight-up ball removal. Just cutting the wires that carry his testosterone. More highly specialized surgery.

Is that really how it was done back in the day? asks TJ.

"Dom would know." Alone of all of us, Jae has somehow managed to keep his mouth from being foamed to any degree, so he can still talk. "He's the Jeopardy! champion in the family."

"Not the only one anymore," Alicia taunts us. "Not when you're all in jeopardy."

Harris, whom I'm working to free now because he's the next closest to me after Park, scoffs at her. "Really? That's the best you can come up with, lady? I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed-"

"Think about it," Alicia says. "Even when you get out of that foam - all too easy, I have to admit - where do you go from there? Nowhere. You're stuck until I say you're not."

"Even if we say 'uncle?'" I roll my eyes.

"Wouldn't work on me, 'cause I couldn't be anyone's uncle."

"That's not the...never mind." I growl under my breath, then look around the room, where, thankfully, the foam has stopped falling. Though I can't say I don't expect Alicia to start the ball rolling again. Not to mix my metaphors, or offend Sisyphus. But it's true what she says - there's no other way out of this place. The way forward can only be opened electronically...and same with the way back, into the elevator, which Alicia's probably sent up to ground level all over again just to screw with us more.

Leave it to a light elemental working for a Silicon Valley company to become a murderous technopath. And I thought those megacorps were a little less morally questionable than, say, their Wall Street counterparts. But only in a 'verse where I'm around, I guess. I almost said "alive" there, but given that I spent three days recovering from a gunshot to the head, I'm still not at all convinced I'm really alive, even in a "Second 'Verse body" or whatever.

Back to the matter at hand, though.

I finish freeing my friends, then angle my head towards Park and think, Can you interfere with her powers somehow? She's in the electrical systems - can you get in too?

Maybe, but the Plexiglas between us isn't helping. All the wiring is on the other side.

Do your best. I relay the same suggestion to TJ, as well as to Jae, whom I'm pretty sure is a light elemental like his brother. He doesn't correct my assumption, though he also says that the wiring would be hard to access.

Although... He eyeballs the speaker through which we've been hearing Alicia's voice. Better to stop that from working before she can get into any of our dual elementals' heads.

I nod. Go for it.

And so he does, making the speaker spark. Alicia says a few words, then appears to shout them, shaking her fists for further effect. But we can't hear her at all, except for maybe some muffled vibration through the mostly soundproof Plexiglas. If I could lip-read, I'd know exactly what she's saying, but for now I'll just assume it's a tirade of F-bombs and C-bombs and all the other radioactive curses in the English language combined into some kind of explosively obscene soufflé of swears.

"There's no mike in that speaker, is there?" asks Harris.

"Test, test, one, two, three," TJ says. "Stay out of my head, Peppermint bitch!"

Alicia crosses her arms and says something that even a bad lip-reader like myself can plainly see: "I heard that, asshole!"

"You were supposed to!" TJ yells at her. To me, he adds, "Sorry about that - now I know she's gonna kill us."

"Not if we can help it." I keep looking around, even pacing like a caged animal. We are not going to be stuck in here forever, no way... "You sure there's no way to reach the outside wiring?" I ask Park. "Or...well, technically, it'd be inside wiring, but you know what I mean, right?"

"If there were..." He glares at Jae for a moment. "This guy might've just fried our one connection to the inside."

"Yeah, well, if I could've fried her, I would've. Speaking of..." Jae brandishes a single long light blade, ready to take on Alicia, who's now opening the door. The rest of us get ready to fight as well.

"Five against one?" she simpers. "Isn't that cheating?"

"Your powers are strong enough that to use them against any one of us alone would be cheating too," I say. "Trust me, you're evenly matched like this."

"Yeah..." Alicia twirls a string of lightning around her fingers. A string that I fully expect to expand any second now. "But you know what I'm capable of, right? Just ask your brother. He was, well, none too happy when I portaled him over to the Third 'Verse for a minute. Neither was that Michael guy." She lets her lightning grow. "Michael. Such a sweetheart, and so good-looking too. Why did he reject me?"

Park scoffs, then makes a blade the same length as his brother's. "Because he's aromantic."

Alicia stares at him, her lightning shrinking until it's extending only a couple of inches from her fingers. "You know him?"

"We've met a few times. He said he didn't know how to tell you that was the real reason he kept turning down your advances - he's always been happy without a significant other."

And while Park and Alicia chat, Harris and I sneak around behind her. I hit her lightning hand with layer upon layer of ice, essentially turning it into a giant hailstone. Harris, however, darks up her other hand, then waves over TJ. I only hear a split second's thought-speak between them, too fast for me to keep up on, but I don't need to keep up when I see them put their instant plan into action. As Harris switches from dark to fire, TJ snaps his fingers, sparking off some small snaps of lightning which arc up into Harris' jet of flames. It's a technique Barry Allen used once, I think, although he was able to do it as a one-man job with a propane torch.

The fire roars out and Alicia, in a moment of stupidity, puts up her dark-cocooned hand to protect her face.

A small explosion flattens us all and sets her hand and hair ablaze.

"Shit, Harris!" I jump to my feet and grab his hand, pulling him through the Plexiglas door with our three light-elemental boys in tow as well. Behind us, Alicia stops, drops, and rolls in an effort to extinguish herself. I guess she forgot that dark energy, once it's lit up the way Harris just did, doesn't stop burning until it's all gone. Like any other accelerant and/or petroleum derivative. (Except dark energy isn't petroleum, though it's pretty high in carbon from what Fionna's told me.)

"That was surprisingly easy," Harris says.

Park shudders. "Don't jinx us, man."

"Where do we go now?" I ask Jae. "I bet they're gonna be on super-high red alert now."

"Yeah, so we don't have any time to waste. I'll lead the way!" He jumps ahead of me and Harris, his lab coat swishing around his ankles. He's worn it open the whole time, like it's some kind of Harry Dresden duster. Well, I suppose in his own way, he makes it look badass. Unlike me, keeping it half-unbuttoned to make room for my chest and shoulders.

I almost want to take the coat off entirely. I mean, it's not like I'm fooling any of the real lab workers around here - and as we run down the corridor, those lab workers look through their windows and see us on the move, all with looks on their faces ranging from consternation to surprise to absolute shock. Sometimes even of the electric variety - I swear, at least once, I see a hapless technician accidentally stick his hands into the wrong part of his open computer carcass and nearly fly across the room as a result.

"I'm guessing whatever we want is in the last of these labs?" asks TJ.

"You guess right. Even I don't know what's in there, but Kaden..." Jae stops to look down a corridor that branches off from the main one, but it's short, with only two doors that look like they lead to either stairwells or supply closets. "You know how I said he likes to go to the club and get drunk? I'm usually there with him to make sure he doesn't spill classified shit, and last week..." He checks another branch-off corridor, then throws his light blade down its length before reforming another one in his hand. I don't pause long enough to see the effects of that throw, but the grunting sounds I hear tell me the story.

"Kinda throwing your life away at this company, aren't you?" Harris aims a wry grin at Jae.

"What life?" Jae scoffs. "I think I hit my ceiling in this hierarchy years ago."

"Time you found a new one, then." Park copies Jae's light-throwing move as he passes by the same corridor from whence came the grunts.

"With more benefits," Jae says with a crooked smile. "No preexisting conditions. Auto insurance in addition to health. Oh, and cakes."

"Cakes?" repeats Harris, his sweet tooth looking ready to jump out of his mouth.

"Didn't know this place had a bakery," says Park.

"They most certainly do, brother mine." Jae does a damn good Mycroft impression there. I guess I'm not the only one shipping Mycroft and cake. "Mycakes," it's called.

At the end of this corridor, we get two choices - go left, or go right. The trouble is, both forks lead down long paths. At this point, I don't think we're under the building proper anymore - more like under the courtyard in the center of the ring. Although given that this building, by all accounts, is even bigger around than the Pentagon, that doesn't really narrow it down much. Although I think we entered the building from the northeast - the best direction from here back to Spellman - by now we could be more towards the western edge of the ring.

If not for the adrenaline suppressing the more rational sides of my brain, I'd probably have less trouble calculating our position on the fly. Not that I can even fly in this damn lab coat - you know what? Fuck it. I'm not wearing this anymore. I get rid of it before following everyone else (good thing we're not splitting up; I guess we've all learned some good lessons from slasher film after all) down the left corridor, which Jae has judged to be our best bet.

"Whoo! Take it off!" Harris crows before imitating me.

"Not sure you could do much with your wings, though." TJ spreads his arms - his fingers come within two inches of each wall, the corridor is so narrow.

"So what? I could barely breathe in that thing."

"At least you weren't wearing a corset," Park says.

"Haha, remember when Jess made you wear one for her talent show?" Jae laughs.

"I'm surprised she was smart enough to conceptualize that at...how old was she, eight?"

"Gender-swapping the usual stereotypes of the magician and the lovely assistant. Brilliant! You know I used that in my portfolio when I first applied to the sales team here?" Jae slides up to a double door, knocks on it, and listens to its gleaming surface before reaching towards the keypad on its other side. "And now," he says, "absolute silence."

Nobody talks. Nobody even breathes while we all watch Jae twist his fingers around, Doctor Strange-style, in front of the keypad. On the transparent, touch-sensitive surface, small circles and the long sticks connecting them swirl around like a screensaver. Why Jae doesn't touch them isn't immediately clear to me, though I bet this particular keypad isn't calibrated to accept his prints.

If Harris hadn't just burned off half of Alicia's (while I froze the rest), we could probably have used them to force our way through this door. But no, we were pretty concerned with forcing her out of the game as quickly and efficiently as possible. Good thing too, because dragging her all this way when she could overpower us at any time? Hell no. Not worth it. I'd rather not get my ass kicked by another enemy if I can help it.

The keypad beeps as Jae successfully opens it. We race through, ready to see what's on the other side-

"Wait, what the hell?" Harris isn't the only one staring at what lies on the other side in confusion.

"This is what we're here for?" I ask. "A giant geode?"

"Not exactly a geode, I don't think..." Jae gazes up at the large, rough black rock sitting in the center of the room, its cross-section exposed to reveal round, shiny greenish crystals. Olivine, I think, with little silvery sparkles scattered throughout. "More like a meteorite."

"That's what I thought," says Harris. "But what would Peppermint need with space rocks?"

"Maybe they're mining them for silicone," says Park. "Or...whatever minerals they might have that are better."

"Whatever it is," I say, "I think we're gonna need a land elemental to shake this shit up." I shake my head as I think about the only one in the Second 'Verse I know. "Why does Paul Smythe still have to live in Bearville, dammit?"

"Remind me to summon him down here whenever we get the fuck out of this place, huh?" Park says.

"And now you sound like Annie instead of Russell," says Harris. "Except you wouldn't be the one taking our sweets away."

"No, never." Park says. "I have a reputation as the cool big brother to uphold. Just ask Jess."

"And me, I've got a reputation as the cooler big bro," says Jae. He knocks on the meteorite's black outer surface - black because it was burned coming into the atmosphere, I believe. Then again, all I know about meteorites, I learned from a Dan Brown novel, so my knowledge could be pretty much all wrong. "Hey, land elemental powers I didn't know I had, why don't you wake up?" Jae laughs as he pretends to muscle the big old meteorite out of the room. "Well. There goes my reputation, then."

"Hey, don't give up!" Park says.

Jae walks around the meteorite and picks up a small handheld device, one of three similar ones placed on a table in the back of the room. They look like old-timey PalmPilots, like the kind I once found in my mom's office drawer while looking for glue sticks (ah, grade-school arts and crafts - except I can't even remember what project I was doing), with colorful sticks of light, shaped like tuning forks, sticking out of one end on each doohickey. The sticks on the one Jae's just picked up are blue. The two others on the table have red and yellow sticks, respectively.

"What do the colors mean?" I ask.

"Nothing much, really, I don't think..." Jae muses. "But they're probably just there for shits and giggles anyway. A little flash-bang for your buck on this prototype."

"Prototype for what?" asks TJ.

Jae puts the yellow-stick device into TJ's hands, and the red-stick device into Park's hands, while holding the blue-stick device himself. "Harris, Gabe, when I tell you, open the door, hold it, and get ready to use your elementals on anyone who comes after us."

"Just the two of us?" I ask. "You sure we can handle a potential giant horde of enemies by ourselves?"

"We'll be...otherwise occupied." Jae presses a button on his device, and a blue beam of light, Ghostbusters-style, jumps from the two sticks at the business end to the meteorite. Park and TJ follow suit, red and yellow beams lancing out as well, and when all three beams touch their target, the meteorite lifts off the ground in willful gravity defiance.

"It's gonna be tough getting this thing out the door," says Park, "but it'll barely fit."

"Hopefully," says TJ.

It's then that I notice where the light is really coming from. It's not emanating from the devices, not really. Well, the colored light is, but the devices themselves are pulling white light from the hands of those operating them. White light beams which pass through the handheld ends, then through the sticks, where they acquire their bright primary shades.

"Open the door!" Jae calls out.

Harris and I comply, stepping into the hallway with our elementals weaponized and ready to fight whoever waits on the other side.