“Means you need to say something to make it work,” Teddy said. She’d rolled back onto her belly to read, her chin resting on a pillow and her arms outstretched before her.

“Something like . . . Sisterportation: Teddy?”

Teddy disappeared from her spot on the mattress and reappeared right next to Emily . . . still in the same pose and three feet in the air.

The girl had time to go “Huh?” before crashing belly-first on the ground with a dull thump.

Emily scrambled off her seat, eyes wide and arms questing for something to do as she took in her summon’s sprawled-out form. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Boss, that hurt!” Teddy whined.

“I’m so sorry!” Emily said.

Teddy rolled around so that the full force of her pout could hit Emily dead-on. “My tummy squished,” she said.

Emily looked the girl up and down, but nothing past her pride looked hurt. “I’m really sorry. I won’t do that again.”

Teddy sighed and rolled again, then again until she was back over by her mattress. “At least tell me before you do that. What if I was in the middle of sleeping? Or pooping.”

Emily felt her cheeks warming at the thought and decided to save the new skill for emergencies. Not that it would come in handy all that often in other situations, she figured. “That was my only Skill Slot point,” she said, changing the subject. “The rest of my points are all normal Skill Upgrades, and I’m not sure if I want to make this one better. It seems . . . good enough.”

“Does it have restrictions on it?” Teddy asked as she resettled.

“Um. It has a twelve-hour cooldown and can only summon one sister at a time? Those don’t seem that bad.”

Teddy shrugged, a strange gesture when lying down. “The Skill Upgrades will probably just make that shorter or increase the number of sisters before doing anything fun.”

“Is there a limit to the number of levels?” Emily asked. She was curious as to how many times she could upgrade the new skill.

“Depends on the skill,” Teddy said. “Are we going to sleep tonight?”

“I guess,” Emily said. A glance at her phone for the time showed it at just past seven. Still a little early. “I still have a lot of thinking to do.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s a Boss job,” Teddy agreed. “You going to find a costume or something? If I get one, I want it to be red. And have bears on it.”

“A costume,” Emily repeated. She wasn’t keen on the idea. Then again, she was less keen on the idea of succeeding against someone like Homie only for her identity to be leaked because someone saw and identified her. “We’re going to need to find something,” she said. “I don’t even know where to start.”