He screamed at them, and it was the sound of mortal terror. He’d succeeded in getting Love Lost and Nailbiter’s attention, and now huddled at the foot of a building, pulling against it as if he could pull himself through the seam between sidewalk and store. They didn’t seem to know what to make of him. I didn’t blame them.

Love Lost touched Nailbiter, and pointed in my direction.

Yeah, she could see me. I braced for evasive action.

Anxiety Chris screamed again, louder. Nailbiter moved a hand, and he darted to one side, taking a wild path that saw him running up the wall and off the side of the building, radically changing direction as he touched ground.

He was quick. I was put in mind of a bug darting to the darkness as the lights came on.

They were caught between keeping an eye on me and keeping an eye on Chris.

When Love Lost touched her mask, Chris sped another fifteen feet in a heartbeat.

She pulled off the mask, and she screamed at him. I could see the distortion, aimed more at the ground now. Roughly conical, it covered a lot of area.

Chris twitched, jerked, moved this way, then that. He raised his fleshy spider legs and pointed two tips at them, and Love Lost moved slightly behind Nailbiter, as if she’d find cover behind the exceedingly thin limbs.

Chris screamed back, raw and scared.

There was a moment’s pause, and she screamed at him again. Compounding the effect?

He screamed at her again, quivering in the wake of it, and crept closer.

Nailbiter’s fingers stabbed the ground between herself and him.

He screamed, brief, and ran away. It seemed he couldn’t move in a straight line, or the evasive action was built in, because he traced an ‘s’ shape as he ran.

I flew to put buildings between me and her. Where were Spright and Prancer now? We’d diverted the dangerous elements, but I wanted to fix things. I wanted to take concrete, measured steps to make things better, now that Advance Guard had shit the bed as badly as they had.

I wanted the world to make sense again. And Cedar Point didn’t make sense.

Two more screams, both in short succession. Anxiety Chris’s scream. I turned to look, and I saw the faint shadow of Nailbiter’s nail-fingers stabbing skyward.

Love Lost was running up the fingers. They were thin, but she didn’t seem to be struggling.

Her mask was off, and she was looking down. Looking for me.

Scratch my earlier theory about her not wanting to provoke me.

I couldn’t get to cover fast enough, so I did the opposite. I headed straight for her. If she thought she could deal with me, I wanted to see what she’d do. I pushed out with my aura for the first time, to make it harder.