Saturn pressed the power button on his PC, then turned to face his two guests and leaned backwards against his desk. They were now in his living room, and Plural and Circus looked at him with big expectations, ready to hear whatever he had to say. But he said nothing, and just five seconds after he pressed the power button, he turned back to his PC, sat down on his desk chair and entered his password.
For the next five minutes, he fumbled with the tracking app, trying to get a live location on their target. In the meantime, Plural had made herself comfortable on his couch and Circus wandered around the living room, not knowing what to do with herself in someone else's house.
Eventually, when he couldn't get a real-time signal, Saturn realized what the problem was and buried his head in his hands in frustration.
"What's wrong?" Circus asked him worriedly.
Plural also looked up from her phone to see what was up.
"I might've… fucked it up…" Saturn explained with his hands still covering his face. "The last ping was at the shop, right about when I put it on the dress. After that, it stopped…"
He moved his left hand down until he was able to look upon the other two.
"So what, it broke?" Plural asked.
"No," he hesitantly continued like it was embarrassing to say, "I think I held the button for more than five seconds while I was hiding it in my hand…"
Plural squinted her eyes at him like she wasn't sure if he was joking.
"Oh…" Circus uttered.
After that, some silence followed, and there was a depressing mood in the air as it became clear that their amazing plan to track the creature had already failed. Saturn was feeling particularly down, after skillfully clipping the tracker onto the dress in such a stressful situation, then announcing it so excitedly to Jenny, whom he'd hoped to impress. Now, he just looked like a fool who'd just wasted everyone's time.
Nervously, he reached for his phone to break the bad news to Jenny.
"Hey! Cheer up!" Plural got up from the couch. "You're still the coolest guy in my book!"
That was not a high bar for him to beat, yet he couldn't help but smile at the gesture. His eyes remained on his phone as he composed his message of bad news to Jenny, which he sent to the group chat.
"[You]Sorry, no location… I fucked up… Tracker is disabled @Jenny"
Plural's phone buzzed, and she took it out of her pocket to read his message. It didn't take long for the message to get a read receipt for all members of the group and for Jenny to react with a heart. Some dots started moving at the bottom of the chat to indicate she was typing something.
"[Jenny]@You It's okay! You did great! 😊"
"[Roadkill]Now what?"
"[Jenny]Just keep your eyes open and put me on speed dial."
"[Jenny]And stay safe!"
"[You] 😔"
Circus looked back and forth between the two, following the notification sounds going off on both phones. Saturn glanced at her and realized how this looked, so he started typing again.
"[You]Do we add the new girl here Y/N?"
"[You]She's looking at us funny @Roadkill"
"[Jenny]OK with me! 😊"
"[Roadkill]Go for it"
"[Roadkill]She doesn't see history right??"
Saturn looked up from his phone and at Circus, who looked at him with puppy eyes, having stood there next to a bookshelf, watching them type away for the last minute. He opened his contacts and navigated to the add new contact screen.
"Wanna enter your number?" he asked and handed over his phone, "I'll add you to the group."
Stars appeared in Circus' eyes, and she immediately hopped over. After furiously typing away with visible excitement, she handed the phone back to Saturn with her number and name entered, and he pressed save.
Then, he added her to the aptly named "✨ Sparkle Squad ✨", causing Circus' phone to buzz. And before she could even behold the notification for herself, Jenny—clearly bored in her cell—had already greeted her.
"You Added Circus"
"[Jenny]Hi Circus🤗"
"[Jenny] 👮"
Circus couldn't contain her excitement as she scrolled across her screen and saw Jenny's greeting.
"I'm in the Sparkle Squad!" she cheered.
Then, she looked up at Plural with a frown.
"What do you mean 'history'?"
♦
"What?" Saturn asked indignantly. "Here?"
The two girls were standing in the hallway, and Saturn was holding the front door to his apartment, about to kick them out.
"You heard Jenny! We have to stay safe!" Plural argued.
"Yeah, but…" Saturn eyed the interior of his modest and messy apartment, "not here, man."
"T-That's okay, I agree," Circus said with her hands raised, like she didn't even agree with Plural's suggestion to begin with.
After all, she'd only met these two today for the first time, and to suggest spending the night would be—
"Why don't you stay at yours? You have a big house," Saturn retorted with his eyes on Plural.
Circus yelped and turned to Plural, who frowned at Saturn, then looked like she was actually entertaining the idea.
"What about you?" she asked incredulously.
"I'll be fiiine!" Saturn dismissed her concern and slowly closed his door, waving at them when his hand was the last thing they saw. "Drive safe!"
Now, with the door closed, Circus anxiously looked at Plural, and Plural met her gaze.
"Well," she grinned, "guess it's just you and me, new girl."
♦
That night, Circus submitted to the sleepover and joined Plural at her place. Plural cooked a simple meal, and as the night went on, the young officer seemed to grow more and more at ease with her. She seemed excited to hear the details about the camping trip and all the amazing things she'd seen Jenny do, and Plural obliged.
"Makes me wanna quit my job and join you guys…" Circus groaned.
"Join us doing what?" Plural asked. "Your job is way cooler than ours! It even brought you to us!"
"Well—"
"Besides, we're in this together, now!" Plural went on. "You'll get plenty of chances to see Jenny's powers. You don't need to change your job for that."
"My boss sucks. Did I mention that? It's the guy who arrested Jenny," Circus said. "Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing the right thing. Especially today."
Plural gave her a genuine smile.
"But you approached us. That's more than what your coworkers did. Way I see it, you're the best of the best."
Circus looked up at the ceiling and didn't react to Plural's compliment, like it went through her ears unprocessed. They were lying next to each other on the large couch in Plural's living room, which doubled as a retractable bed for guests. The TV was at a low volume in the background.
"How did you become friends with Saturn?" Circus turned to Plural and asked.
Plural looked up at the ceiling, then giggled.
"He hit me when he reversed his work van."
Circus' eyes widened. She expected Plural to elaborate but received nothing.
"And then what?"
"I wasn't hurt. We fought in the parking lot," she continued as if Circus had to press another button to continue the dialogue.
"Then what?"
"HR made us take consolation sessions together. They cared more about the fighting than the accident."
"And you bonded over hating HR?"
"Yep!" Plural said with a proud smile.
Circus looked at the ceiling again and then closed her eyes.
"Sounds kinda romantic…"
Plural opened her eyes wide and looked at her friend.
"We're not like that…" she said, then looked away like she swallowed whatever she wanted to say next.
Circus opened her eyes and turned to her new friend again. "I meant your story sounded pretty nice, I—"
But she froze as she stared at something behind Plural, freaking her out.
"What's wrong?" Plural asked, but Circus looked focused and didn't respond. She pushed herself up, then smoothly maneuvered herself over across Plural's body to place herself between Plural and whatever it was she saw. A confused Plural rotated with her as she moved, eventually giving her a good look at the thing she saw.
An intruder in her house. It looked like Jenny, but it wore a black goth dress and a tiara and stared at the two with lifeless, sociopathic eyes. This was the first time she and Circus got to see it in the flesh, and the sight of it gave her shivers.
"We finally meet!" Circus started talking to it.
Plural swallowed and froze in place. This new girl she'd only just met today wasted no time protecting her like a meat shield. Jenny would be proud if she was here to see it.
If Jenny was here to see it…
Plural slowly moved her hand to find her phone, which was on the couch somewhere nearby. She didn't look away from the intruder as she felt around the couch to search for it.
"You haven't introduced yourself yet. What do you go by, copycat?" Circus continued her audience with the creature.
The Jenny-thing scanned Circus up and down, then gave Plural a passing look.
"We can call you 'Dark Jenny'. Easier for us lowly humans."
Circus was sounding oddly comfortable talking to it like that, like she hadn't the slightest fear for the thing.
When she finally got hold of her phone, Plural subtly moved it into her peripheral vision. She swiped up and moved her fingers to enter her PIN only to find it was being rejected. On closer inspection, it was Circus' phone.
Her heart skipped a beat, but on checking the emergency numbers, Plural was relieved to find that Circus had already put Jenny's number on speed dial.
When she dialed it, she could faintly hear the dialing sound as it wasn't on loudspeaker mode. Jenny took two rings to pick up, and Plural could tell Jenny was saying something, but couldn't hear what it was. She was frozen with fear and didn't respond. Hopefully Jenny took the hint.
Meanwhile, Dark Jenny got up and sat on its knees. Its eyes went to Plural's scared face now, but the eye contact was swiftly broken when Circus quickly followed and sat upright in the same way, mostly blocking its view of Plural.
"Not a talker?" she confident asked the intruder. "I figured you'd know every language by now! You understand what I'm saying, I can tell."
Dark Jenny blinked and met Circus' eyes with what seemed like a look of intrigue.
"Wanna know something else?" Circus continued. "I think you're trapped in there!" she pointed her finger towards Dark Jenny's chest. "You're hiding in this shell because you have nowhere else to go! After what our Jenny did to you!"
In response, Dark Jenny reached out its arm towards Circus and touched her cheek like it was wiping away tears, but Circus wasn't crying. Plural witnessed the scene from the same position she'd been in when she first saw the intruder, having not moved an inch except to dial Jenny.
The moonlight shone through the tall window in the living room and illuminated the scene. It'd only gotten dark in the past hour, so they didn't get around to turning on the lights yet.
Plural was cursing herself for being unable to do anything. She could still hear Jenny's voice on the phone, which she was holding next to her waist. Jenny's muffled voice sounded like she was yelling in a panic at this point.
Then, Dark Jenny took Circus in for an embrace, giving it a clear view of Plural and the phone. Circus couldn't do anything about it anymore without pushing Dark Jenny away, if she could even manage that. On locking eyes with it, Plural felt even more petrified and stopped breathing.
It felt like an eternity passed where nobody moved, until the tension was finally broken by a loud bang. Dark Jenny and Circus disappeared from the couch in an explosion of red sparkles, leaving Plural behind.
Plural needed another moment until she could finally breathe again. Her hand with the phone shot up to her ear and she yelled two words she should've yelled right away: "My house!"
Moments later, Jenny appeared in her living room with blue sparkles, sliding across the floor like she had some momentum before she teleported. She checked every angle of the room to find nothing, then looked at Plural. Jenny looked like she sounded on the phone: panicked.
"Where's Circus!?"
Plural didn't know how to respond. Jenny was so fast, the pieces were still coming together for her. The reason Jenny didn't come here first thing was because she thought Circus was the one who called.
"It took her…" Plural finally formed a coherent sentence.
"What? No…" Jenny looked out the window, and her expression made it pretty clear she didn't hold a lot of hope she'd catch their trail. Nevertheless, she disappeared again, leaving a wake of blue sparkles.
Alone again, Plural stared out the moonlit window and felt a wave of emotion overcome her. She heard Jenny's voice come from the phone again and brought it up to her ear.
"I'm sorry…" she told Jenny, who hadn't hung up the call this whole time.
"I'm sorry I didn't…" Plural was now crying over the phone.
"Call Saturn and tell him I'm coming to get him," Jenny responded over the phone. "I'm not leaving you guys alone anymore."
"Okay," Plural obediently replied.
When the call ended, Jenny instantly reappeared in Plural's living room, giving her a small scare.
A teary-eyed Plural fetched her own phone from the couch and called Saturn, who picked up fast.
"Y'ello—"
"J-Jenny's gonna come to your house now, okay?"
Jenny locked eyes with Plural the whole time as she waited for an answer.
"Uhm, sure? Are you okay? You sound—" and Jenny instantly disappeared again, making Plural flinch and pull the phone away from her ear.
From the phone came Saturn's muffled voice, which was eventually joined by Jenny's. It only took ten seconds before Jenny returned and landed in her backyard, carrying Saturn in her arms.
Plural hung up the call and ran over to open the sliding door, and Saturn looked over at her as Jenny put him to the ground.
"Hey!" he saw the tears on Plural's face and immediately came running over to give her a hug. "Did it show up?"
Plural pressed her eyes shut as if to squeeze out the tears, which were surely ruining her makeup, then slowly nodded.
Behind him stood Jenny, watching the two embrace each other with wide eyes, like she was only now noticing Plural's distress. Hesitantly, she walked over, looking guilty, until she stood next to the two. Plural took her left arm off Saturn's back and wrapped it around Jenny, telling her to join.
♦
There were police sirens in the distance.
"They'll come here, too. We can't stay," Plural said.
Nobody responded. She was sitting on her couch looking at the TV, still at low volume, after just having explained everything that happened to her friends. Jenny was sitting next to her staring at her own lap, looking sad and guilty. Plural looked over at Jenny and put her hand on her shoulder.
"Hey…" she prodded.
"I'm sorry I couldn't find you," Jenny said without making eye contact. "We were so close. I could've saved Circus and faced…" she swallowed in hesitation, "Dark… Jenny…"
Plural put her arm around Jenny's waist and rubbed her face on Jenny's cheek, smearing what was left of her tears and makeup onto Jenny. Jenny eventually returned the gesture, joining the pity party of hugging, rubbing their cheeks together and taking turns saying sorry.
Eventually, from the other side of the room, Saturn coughed and interrupted their ritual, and the two girls turned to face him without letting go of each other.
"What do we do now?"
He was sitting at the dining table on the other side of the room, having spent the night fumbling on his phone, looking like whatever he was doing wasn't working. Now, he looked almost uncomfortable with what the girls were doing.
"You said we can't stay here," he continued. "Where do we even go? Are we fugitives now?"
Jenny looked at the two, let go of Plural and slapped her own cheeks.
"I am. And I don't trust the police to keep you two safe if you turn yourselves in," she said, then laid her eyes on Plural. "It threatened you both and took Circus because I wasn't there to protect you."
Plural returned a melancholic smile.
Jenny stared at her feet for a second, then got up from the couch and walked to the window.
"We'll go back to my house first, take what we need, then we search for them full-time."
"We can probably crash at Circus' place without the police finding us," Saturn replied, then gestured at the clock on the wall, which showed that it was almost midnight.
Jenny looked over at the clock, then understood what he was insinuating.
"I can't leave the poor girl out there and… sleep!" she said impatiently.
"Plu and I are useless if we don't sleep," Saturn argued, "'sides, how much juice are you running on? Haven't you made this mistake once already?"
"I could sleep," Plural said, raising her hand like she was voting.
Jenny looked away from them and out the window again, then stayed silent like she was struggling to go against her better judgment.
"Fine," she eventually gave in. "My place first."
♦
Jenny dropped her friends on a rooftop opposite her house.
"Two cops," Jenny pointed down at an SUV parked across the street.
"Can we sneak past?" Plural asked.
Jenny grabbed their hands and teleported them into her bedroom, which was the shortest jump distance for her. Her two friends almost lost their balance when they landed on the bedroom floor.
"I can't see any signs of booby traps…" Jenny said, already stepping towards the door. "This way."
When they found their balance, Saturn and Plural looked around and needed a second to register where exactly in Jenny's house they were. The house was eerily dark, and they weren't about to turn on the lights.
Before Jenny left the room, she stopped in her tracks and turned to her bed, spooking her two friends. Alerted, she ran over to the target of her fixation.
"What's the matter?" they asked her.
Jenny looked at her empty nightstand.
"It's been here…"
They did a double take and noticed that her charger was missing.
"Not gonna drop dead on its own anytime soon, then…" Saturn said.
"Let's go," Jenny said.
They followed her to the hallway and to a fortified-looking door to a different room. The door opened on its own when Jenny stepped close enough, just like other parts of her house.
Once inside, Saturn and Plural examined the room, which looked like some kind of laboratory. There were tools lined across the wall, hanging over strange machines that looked like they belonged to an engineer.
Jenny opened a cabinet and took out another charger, then put it in a backpack. Next, she retrieved two wristbands from a drawer under a desk in the center of the room and handed them to her friends. They looked robust and had just one button on them that felt like it took some effort to press. When they put them on their wrists, Jenny gestured to Plural to press the button.
When she did, Jenny's hair-antenna perked up and pointed towards Plural's wristband, beeping and flashing a green light. Jenny gave her a thumbs up, and the hair-antenna stopped beeping and went down on its own. She turned to Saturn and gave him the same instructions, resulting in a repeat of the same result. She winked at him.
"More reliable than phones. Works across the world," she explained.
"Sweet…" her two friends said in unison.
Jenny took a third wristband and three headsets from the drawer and put them in her backpack, then zipped it up and put a single strap around her shoulder.
"Now, the big one," she said as she walked to what looked like a safe that opened for her the same way everything else did.
The safe's interior resembled a 3D-printer setup, with a small emerald in its center. Jenny retrieved the emerald and closed the safe.
"This is what I meant," she showed the two. The gem was small enough for her to be able to close her hand around it, and Jenny had relatively small hands.
"Bring you back to a full charge in an instant?" Saturn quoted Jenny's own words as he stared at the object.
Jenny nodded.
"More than that. I can overcharge with this. Two-hundred percent."
Her two friends looked at the emerald with wide eyes.
"Hold on," Saturn raised his finger, "is this what gives you your Super S—"
"Yes…" Jenny cut him off and averted her eyes in embarrassment, "it is."
"Two-hundred percent…" Plural muttered in surprise. "That's nuts! Why don't you just this and beat its ass?"
"It wouldn't be enough," Jenny explained, bursting her bubble. "It just gives me bigger reserves. I could never destroy my own body, even with this…"
Then, she gave her friends a confident smile.
"But it'll let me win a battle of endurance."
"You think it stole one too?" Saturn asked, looking at the now-closed safe.
"No, this takes forever to make."
Jenny looked at her two friends and held up the emerald.
"I want one of you to carry it. Can't risk popping it on accident."
She looked at them like they were supposed to decide with rock-paper-scissors who got to hold onto it. Plural made it easy and held up her hand, refusing it.
"I think you should take it," she addressed Saturn. "I might snort it up to feel something."
He grinned at her and took the emerald without objection.
"So, how does it work? You know, in case you're all out, like when you got us out of the woods," Saturn asked Jenny. "Hope you don't actually have to snort it."
"You're not far off…" Jenny looked to the side. "When it breaks, my body reacts to the stuff inside," Jenny closed her hand into a fist to suggest she'd crush it. "But I don't think you could break it."
Saturn raised an eyebrow and tapped the emerald with his finger.
"To me, it's fragile…" Jenny continued. "It'll break in no time if I have it on me when I fight Dark… me…."
For a moment, Jenny shivered, showing she didn't love referring to her nemesis by the nickname Circus gave it.
"And if it pops mid-fight," Jenny argued, "it might leech some of the energy."
Saturn nodded and stowed the small gem in his pocket, next to his keys. Then, he chuckled.
"Guess that makes me your squire."