It was a new era. An evil era. The age of good boys who played nice was over. The time for supervillains had arrived. And the Trio was uniquely positioned to be those supervillains.

Being some of the only humans left in Demondale had its upsides. The job market was hardly competitive—the sunshade scared most people off, clearing the way for Warren to get his dream internship at City Hall. And there was rarely a line at Starbucks because the majority of residents drank blood.

But since the Mayor had declared Demondale the world’s first official colony of hell, it had become too clear to the would-be supervillains that they needed more power to stay alive. More and more demons were arriving by the day. Before the sunshade, the only people who got eaten were college kids whose parents never came to check on them. Or anyone stupid enough to walk alone down damp, dark alleys in the former cannery row. Now that the monsters didn’t have to wait until sunset to prey on the weak, it was open season on humans.

Which was why Warren had bought the Books of Ascension off a pasty demon named Skyler for five thousand dollars printed off a counterfeiting machine Andrew had designed. Hopefully by the time the demon realized he’d been ripped off, Warren would be the embodiment of Shaak’garar, the primordial Old One whose name translated to something pretty close to “the Scorpion King.”

Then Jonathan would finally be safe. No more constantly looking over his shoulder. No more worrying about getting murdered just for going to the grocery store. No more sleeping with a stake under his pillow. He would have real protection. Not just a tableful of magical objects to point and shoot at anyone looking for a quick meal.

Warren had been amassing the items on the security table since high school. Even before the Hellmouth had been officially opened, humans had needed help staying alive in Sunnydale. The artifacts were the Trio’s first line of defense. There were weapons for warding off vampires—holy water, a crucifix, a crossbow that shot wooden stakes. There was a corkscrew knife called the Dagger of the Unkillable purported to, well, kill the unkillable. There was weird magical stuff the Trio only sort of understood, mostly purchased from the warlocks downtown—like the clay urn that was bigger on the inside and the Gandalf staff that always pointed itself west. And the pièce de résistance—a shrink-ray prototype Jonathan had made.

The guest disrupting the security table was a brunette girl with lifeless blue eyes. Andrew was pretty gifted with an airbrush, but even he couldn’t paint realistic eyes. The robot stared vacantly into the middle distance as she repeatedly bumped into the table as though attempting to walk through it. Each thump made the Gandalf staff roll nearer and nearer to the edge of the table.

“Stop that,” Jonathan told the girl, doing his best to shoo her without touching her. Knowing that the robots weren’t technically alive didn’t make approaching them any less terrifying. The party-bots couldn’t talk, but were all the kind of pretty that made Jonathan feel puny and insecure. Warren had not taken his suggestion to create a line of practice girls, ones who were conversant and didn’t look like models.