Ava didn't think that this gala could get any worse.

Then the lights went out.

Someone coated in sour-smelling cologne knocked into her, toppling her from her 9-inch heeled height and onto the dance hall floor.

A boot heel stepped on her left hand.

Someone tumbled into her as she was getting to her feet and almost knocked her back onto the floor.

They didn't even apologize! These people.

Yeah, Ava was over it.

As the sass queen got up, hiked up her skirts and elbowed her way through the impossible chaos, she couldn't help but notice the vague flicker of an orange light nearby. She shuffled towards it--curious of the light, and whether or not it could be shared.

The orange light had disappeared now, and she wondered if she'd dreamt it...just as someone in the darkness elbowed her in a rib as they stumbled past her, making her give a frustrated cry into the void.

Ain't nobody got time for this.

But wait! The vague orange light flickered a second time as she got closer to it, and she couldn't help but think that the silhouette the light warmed itself around looked vaguely familiar.

Ava kept from calling out his name, but found herself amazed as she watched the orange glow press into a small rectangle of something solid... of wall...and somehow the figure and their vague light walked straight into it and disappeared.

Ava rushed towards that same space of wall and let her hands feel over its surface.

Solid...solid...AHA!

One small section had been stripped away and become a wide-open doorway, invisible in the darkness.

She didn't have a clue how it'd happened, or where this random tiny door was about to lead, but Ava wasn't about to wait around like a fool caught in an Apple store on iPhone launch day.

She crept through the opening.

If this space age world had maintenance workers, these were the creepy hallways they would use, Ava thought to herself as she paced slowly through the dingy, damp space following after that dim orange glow up ahead from a safe distance. She slipped out of her strappy heels to avoid them clicking on the hard floor and carried them her fingers.

That has to be Jungkook. She saw those silhouetted features round a corner up ahead. Oh, he's dead meat. The nerve of this guy for ditching me in this mess....

She rushed after him, abandoning her stealthiness for speed as she hiked up her skirts and her feet pattered along the hard, cold floor. When she rounded the corner--her body collided with hard flesh.

Jungkook braced his arm against her collarbone and roughly threw Ava up against the damp wall. He lifted his free hand up, from which a small orange light radiated and washed over Ava's face.

Ava didn't know that Jungkook could look so terrifying. His rounded dark eyes were sharp now. Suddenly, she couldn't breathe.

Recognition hit him. Jungkook quickly stepped back from Ava, his arm falling away from her and innocent confusion crawling into his features.

Ava's hands padded along her collarbone where his arm had just been pinned.

He asked in a boyish daze, "What are you doing here?"

"Following you."

"But--"

"Someone was an ass and ditched me at the worst party of the century." Ava folded her arms and commanded, "So you better make up for it now by taking me with you."

"Uh. Sure. Just don't...like, talk or anything." Jungkook shrugged, then started stalking off through the dank hall again.

"I'll talk if I want to...." Ava grumbled.

He looked back at her over his shoulder and held a finger to his lips. "Gotta be stealthy, please. I've a mission to complete."

Ava bit the side of her cheek and kept quiet. She wanted to rant and rave. But he was just so dang polite about it.

Jungkook eventually stopped along a nondescript piece of wall and started motioning over the surface with both of his palms glowing that faint orange color in. Ava realized that his palms had magic runes etched into them, in large arrow-shapes, which the light was coming from.

"What are you, some kinda wizard?"

Jungkook ignored the question. Then a rectangular slab of wall slipped away. Kookie pushed it open, and bright light greeted them. Ava realized that they were now in the metallic aircraft hangar.

"Okay. That was kinda cool," she admitted.

Jungkook's eyes were narrowed and focused. He kept looking down at his left wrist, where a tiny map-hologram was projecting across his forearm, along with scrawled bits of data.

"This one."

He ran towards a smaller ship, with a diamond shape and plenty of noticeable rust around the frame. It stood propped up on three skinny legs that, Ava thought, made it look like a fat, rusty chicken.

Ava peered around his shoulder at the rust bucket. "What's this?"

"Hoseok's ship."

"It looks as trashy as his personality." Ava let out a bitter laugh at her own joke.

Jungkook frowned back at her. Then he stepped underneath the craft's body and pulled open a hatch that looked to Ava like the opening of an air ventilation shaft. His hands reached inside and he set to work.

"What are you doing?"

He pulled something that looked like a miniature screwdriver out of the pocket of his suit jacket.

"Downloading the security programs so that we can unscramble their password codes and, later, use them to sneak onto Hoseok and Yoongi's main ship."

"Ooookay."

Ava didn't really get it. She also didn't really mind the way that Jungkook's hair was sticking to his sweaty forehead. Or that he had decided to take off his suit jacket and roll up the sleeves of his white collared shirt over his forearms.

Who knew veiny arms could look so...manly?

Jungkook fiddled away with the hatch, eventually pulling out the Era equivalent of a USB drive and sticking it into an available port.

"Now we just gotta let it download and then... OUCH!"

The screwdriver device fell from his hand.

Jungkook's shout startled Ava out of her daydreams about his masculine arms, and how good they'd look wrapped around her.

"What's wrong?"

Jungkook's hands pressed into his ears and his eyes squinted together as he doubled over in pain. A static buzz was crackling in his head like an electric storm, scrambling his thoughts as a series of images played through his mind.

"Not...now...."

"Jungkook! Hey, Kookie! What is it? What do you need?" Ava was holding his shoulders, but when he toppled over onto the ground with a heavy groan, her panic fully set in. "HEY!"

His hands pressed even harder against his ears as his body curled into itself in pain. In his mind's eye he saw a swirl of green and white light, like fire. Shae's panicked face was in the direct path of the flames.

The images played through his mind as he writhed on that hangar floor. Jungkook felt like his body and his will were being torn in half: there was the half that said that he needed to complete his recon mission ASAP and should get a freaking grip already...and then there was this strange new thing rising up from somewhere inside of him that said nothing was more important than protecting Shae--whom he'd never even talked to and knew nothing about, for crying out loud.

"Kookie! Hey, can you hear me?!"

Ava wasn't sure if smacking him in the face would help. She tried it.

"Hey!"

He groaned and rolled onto his back, his eyes now glaring up at the ceiling and glazed over with a dazzling blue light.

"What the frick?!"

"I don't think he can hear you."

Ava swerved.

There stood a tiny woman in all-black. Her body was in a flowing robe that fell over her head, and a black mask covered her mouth.

Ava's eyes narrowed incredulously and she held up a hand in warning towards this tiny strange woman. "Lady. Now is literally not the time. I think this guy is possessed or something and you don't exactly look like a priest, so--"

"Yeah, I can't say I know what to do about that freaky light show happening over there," the tiny woman waved in Jungkook's groaning direction, "but, in any case, I'm taking both of you with me." The woman smiled beneath her mask, and it reached into her striking dark eyes.

The strange woman in black started forward just as Jungkook seemed to be regaining consciousness. The blue light in his eyes had stopped flickering, at least. When his normal eyes looked up and saw the masked woman, recognition dawned.

"What the heck are--"

She dropped on Kookie like a cocoanut on an innocent tourist. The two rolled, wrestled and struggled on the hangar floor, and Ava watched in awe and suspense as the little woman writhed and tried and, eventually, succeeded in driving a tiny little needle into Kookie's neck.

In a few seconds more, Jeon Jungkook was a drooling and unconscious blob on the hangar floor.

The woman got to her feet, smacking her hands together as if to clear them of dust. "Ok. Now you can either help me get his body up through that hatch, or you get a shot too."

Ava threw up her hands in exasperation. "This freaking gala. Is the shit. That wouldn't. Quit." She told herself that she'd rather be accommodating to this random masked lady than end up passed out not that disgusting oil-stained floor in her kick-ass emerald evening gown.