“Making up for lost time. I fought two fucking Endbringers in this dream before getting to the good parts. It would be really damn nice if I could just enjoy something simple.”

“Mmm hmm,” she murmured. “Seeing if a bit of vigorous rubbing might make your knight in shining armor shine brighter?”

“Uhh…”

“You’re fortunate, in a way,” she said.

“Fortunate?”

“Part of your power comes from their analysis of emotion, sentiment. If it didn’t, that wouldn’t have felt so rich. If you wished, you could experience the most climactic of emotions, here, in memories and recordings where that emotion didn’t already exist.”

“Okay, hey. Let’s change the topic.”

“Must we? I’ve missed seeing you squirm, and if the name Damsel of Distress didn’t tip you off, I quite liked stories of knights and dames and evil sorceresses when I was small.”

“I didn’t expect you to show up in that hallway,” I said.

“You’re proving the likes of Tattletale right, when she says you’re a stereotypical brute. That wasn’t a graceful transition. That was blunt. For shame.”

“It was a shock,” I told her, ignoring her digressions. “Seeing you.”

She seemed amused. “The cretin tried to kill Kenzie. What she thought was Kenzie.”

“When she was talking about you taking her over, I thought it was metaphorical, not a literal wresting of control.”

“She fights me constantly, but the difference between us is that I grew,” Ashley said. “My idiot sister fights me by doing the opposite. If the screeching halfwit did anything else, anything at all, she wouldn’t be so vulnerable.”

“Will you…?”

“I think I’d rather not,” Ashley said. “I wouldn’t say I’m content, but I’ve always been a restless creature. A bird with twisted wings of annihilation.”

I smiled.

“If I wasn’t restless here, I wouldn’t be me, perhaps. I relive some of my greatest hits, I explore. I deal with them.”

I twisted around to look at where the fingernail, painted with white and black, was pointing. At first I thought it was the inside of the apartment. It was the window. In the four different panels of window that made up the access to the balcony, I could see five reflections of Ashley, all long-haired, some with clawed fingers.

“Are they a problem?”

“I had too many new experiences that they can’t relate to or reach. They linger behind, or at the fringes. I’m fine. I worry about Kenzie, and about you, and the others.”

“In that order?”

“Absolutely. Can we walk?”

I nodded. I floated down to the ground beneath the balcony. Ashley used a single burst of her power. The reality around us shuddered at the power use.

I thought about commenting on that, but it felt out of place.

“I can’t help but notice that Kenzie found her way here,” she said, one narrow eyebrow arched, her tone dangerously conversational.