"Does this look good on me?"

  "Gaah!" As the minidress-wearing brunette suddenly appeared in his room, Gabe tried to leap away, cover his anime boxer briefs and close the browser tab on his smartphone at the same time and failed at all three. "Cindy! Stop doing that!"

  "You'll have to be more specific," the teenage girl told him before twirling around like a ballet dancer and making the sequined, dark blue bit of fabric gleam under the fluorescent light while managing to look even smaller. "So?"

  "So what?" the Spanish boy demanded with as much dignity and annoyance as he could muster while knowing the futility of complaining. "And you know I meant your sudden arrival. This is my room! As in, not yours!" This was far from the first time Cindy and he had had this song and dance, after all.

  "How is that relevant?" the annoying girl quipped with a smirk as she stalked closer. "Gabby, Gabby, Gabby, you know I occupy every space in my range. My so-called 'sudden arrival' is just making one of my instances visible to you." She cackled and jumped away as Gabby flushed in embarrassment. "Now does the dress look good or not?"

  "Why are you asking me?" the sword-wielding super demanded in turn, the metal sword strapped to his side shifting through a dozen different forms and enchantments. He had several ideas about getting back at Cindy for this but what would happen if the situation escalated? "It's not as if I know much about fashion."

  "Because the soldiers won't give any answers they think might displease me, the General learned how to keep me away with his powers last week, and Atomic Barbie is still AWOL while we've been cooped up in this base in the middle of the desert for weeks," she explained and Gabe had to admit those were pretty good reasons. Then, almost in afterthought she added "Plus we got a date in Vegas."

  "...What?!" the boy sputtered, almost dropping his phone in the process.

  "You, me, Vegas, tonight," Cindy stated with a sagely nod. "Honestly, Gabe, get on with the program and tell me what you think of this." And between one eyeblink and the next gone was the sequined dark blue minidress, replaced by a strapless blood-red gown just long enough for the hem to brush Cindy's knees.

  "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" the now-frantic boy made the universal 'Stop' gesture. "You can't just decide we'll go out!"

  "Why, you have anything better to do in this dusty old hangar? Training's on hold, the base is on lockdown, we even stopped going on monster hunts." Cindy started pacing around Gabby's bed, her usually subdued flickering intensifying until she was a drawn out blur of images, each one wearing a different dress. "Nobody knows anything about why, or if they do they're not telling, but something must have happened. Something big."

  "And you think what, that a night out is the best reaction if it did?" As much as Gabe felt just as restless as Cindy apparently did, he didn't think a road trip was a good idea. Not to Vegas anyway or at least not with... he paused, looked at Cindy's flickering images in their many dresses and sighed. The girl had been acting oddly since their trip to Canada. Less a terror and more friendly, or her passive-aggressive version of it. It wasn't as if Gabe had missed the very obvious signs or that, objectively, the brunette wasn't prettier than most models. It was just that... Gabe questioned how long this friendlier approach would last and what would happen if it stopped. In his extensive, Internet-provided experience, relationship drama was bad enough with just one normal girl; Cindy was an entire legion of them.

  "No, but I'm bored." Cindy stretched lazily and her dress flickered into a gleaming black thing with way too many straps and chains for a moment before reverting to the red gown. "Don't tell me you're not. You've been browsing old anime sites for hours, now."

  "It's good research!" Gabe immediately said defensively. "It gives me ideas for new magic swords to make."

  "Bah! Why do I even bother?" The brunette flickered and was suddenly standing by the door instead of lying on the bed, though given what her powers were she was actually doing both still; only what everyone else could perceive her doing had changed. "I've said my piece, you can come with or stay here and watch that orange-haired guy swing an oversized sword like a club. I'll be leaving in two hours."

  And with that Cindy vanished, leaving Gabe to wonder just how long had the girl been spying on him. He had the suspicion that she'd never stopped...

  xxxx

  "You can't possibly be that stupid," Mark said when he caught Gabe sneaking through the dark, empty corridors of the base nearly two hours later. The other boy was floating two feet off the ground, navigating the underground portion of the military base without making a sound. At least it explained how he'd snuck up on him without Gabe noticing.

  "Shh! Keep your voice down, someone might overhear," the would-be magical ninja whispered after narrowly avoiding stabbing the suddenly appearing black teenager on reflex. It would have probably broken his sword if he had; he'd enchanted the blade to give him ninja skills, not cut through whatever armored vehicle Mark had to be mimicking.

  "You're really going to leave the base on a lark?" Instead of whispering or trying for stealth, Mark walked after Gabe as the two boys wandered through corridor after empty corridor, finally reaching the above-ground levels. "With Cindy of all people?"

  "It's not as if there are other options," Gabe muttered, now holding a dagger in his off-hand. The blade of silent kills, as he'd 'inventively' named it, generated an aura of silence that rendered the two of them inaudible to casual observation. "Besides, she's right. We've been cooped up here for too long, and kept in the dark about everything." The boys got through the open main door of the hangar and under the open, star-strewn sky. A thin mist hung over the ground, the distant hills ringing the base the only part of the wasteland visible through them. "I mean, where's everyone? Shouldn't there have been guards here?"

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  "That's no excuse to go AWOL and you know it," Mark insisted, arms crossed as he still floated over Gabe's shoulder. "We were not told because we did not need to know and in any case sneaking away to Vegas is a terrible decision."

  "You're not my mother, Mark," the swords-master shot back. He'd been unsure about going out with Cindy, but the more the other teen argued against it the more certain he became by the minute. "And what's wrong with having some fun, huh? All we do is train, or test new powers, or hunt monsters. We're not prisoners, we're allowed to go out."

  "Ugh, you're not even thinking," the tech-mimic groaned as the two of them walked towards the base's main gate which, unsurprisingly, was locked, barred, and guarded. Even with night vision gear and almost certainly having some minor enhancements of their own though, the quartet of armed guards could not see through the darkness and fog nearly as well as the two younger but far more powerful boys. "All she had to do was give you a smile and here you are, going after her like a lost puppy. Did you already forget what she-"

  "No, he didn't," Cindy said, suddenly appearing between the two arguing boys. "You though, Mark? Deliberately trying to ruin my date? Maybe you need a reminder." She was back in the dark blue mini-dress with the sequins and instead of her usual boots she wore old style sandals, their leather straps hugging her legs from the knee down. Her long brown hair had been pulled up in an elaborate knot, with locks escaping it in artful ringlets. The only thing missing was make-up, but only because there was very little such an addition could do to improve the girl's looks. In his t-shirt and shorts, Gabe suddenly felt very under-dressed. Unfortunately, by the time he'd discovered he lacked date-quality clothing, there had been no time to fix the issue.

  "You wanna throw down, bitch?" Mark growled, his face twisting into an angry scowl. "Because we can throw down right now!"

  "And ruin our evening?" Cindy tsked then lay a hand on Gabe's shoulder. "Come find me tomorrow if you're still in the mood but until then stop bothering us." And with that parting remark, both Gabe and Cindy flickered and vanished, leaving a fuming Mark behind.

  Almost the same time, the pair of teenage supers reappeared a good hundred yards beyond the base's outer perimeter and further than either the guards or the searchlights could look in the foggy, near-total darkness. Then Gabe almost fell to his knees and lost the corned beef sandwich he'd had for dinner as it violently vacated the premises.

  "Are you OK?" Cindy asked the boy as she helped him up and pulled his long dark hair from his face.

  "Ugh... not really..." the magical swordsman conjured a letter opener of pure silver that shone with a pale white radiance and slowly cleaned up his face by proximity alone. "What... was that? Did you... teleport us?"

  "Not really," Cindy told him with a shake of her head. "What do you remember of the last few moments?"

  "You mean besides the sudden projectile vomit?" Gabe almost gagged just thinking about it... but then the events immediately before that came up in his mind and confusion replaced nausea as the dominant emotion. "I remember you holding on to my shoulder while telling Mark off... but I also remember you picking me up and running until we were through the gate? What?"

  "It's a new trick I've been trying," the brunette explained. "One of my instances held on to you and got the last word in with Mark, yes, but another could have easily picked you up and ran all the way here. It was possible and by shifting instances that probability turned into reality."

  "...that makes no sense," Gabe protested as the two of them slowly walked away from Tonopah Test Range, following the south main road through the rocky, barren terrain. "Did you offer to fight Mark tomorrow, or did we run away? This is really confusing."

  "Why not both?" the girl asked with a nonchalant shrug. "If my power lets me occupy all possible nearby locations and take all possible actions in a given moment, why can't it let me go through two different series of events?" She flickered and Gabby remembered the rest of the explanation as if Cindy had already told him; "That's the idea anyway. The execution still has bugs that need to be ironed out."

  "Bugs? That's what you call the head-splitting headache of remembering two conflicting timelines?"

  "Work in progress, Gabby. Not sure how to fix it for people who only get one brain at a time," Cindy mused and Gabe got the feeling that trying to understand how Cindy really thought would make his head pound even worse. "Anyway, can you make one of those flying swords of yours? I don't feel like walking to Vegas."

  "Sure," the boy agreed and after a quarter minute of concentration he'd conjured one of those humongous anime swords that were larger than the average surfing board. It was as blunt an instrument as any surfboard too, and it had a strong enough animation enchantment to levitate both itself and a pair of teenagers at attack helicopter speeds. "One flying sword, courtesy of Gabriel Airways. Next stop; Las Vegas!"

  "Gabby?" Cindy called out as the two teenagers flew through the night. "Awesome as this magical flying sword is, you did get one thing wrong."

  "Uh..." the boy looked at both the sword and their surroundings. "I can't think of anything. What is it?"

  "We're flying west," Cindy informed him before pointing behind them. "Las Vegas is south-east, a couple hundred miles that-away..."

  xxxx

  A scowling Mark took to the air, his mimicry of technology letting his awareness expand through darkness and mist for miles and miles. He might not be able to track the Bitch as she flickered in and out of space and causality, but he could track her and Gabe as they flew via his power's simulation of a sophisticated LIDAR and RADAR array. And by pushing another of his trio of tech-mimicry slots to emulate a modern stealth drone, he could follow after his targets almost entirely silently. The imaginary engine pushing him along spun its turbofans so quickly that the resulting roar would have been solidly into the infrasound part of the spectrum, inaudible to anyone without a dedicated sensory power.

  Mark had no idea what Cindy was playing at with her novel faux-friendly act, but he worried it was going to be as horrible as the first few days they'd been forced to spend together. Even if it wasn't, even if she was really changing and finally seeing some growth as a person, he was not about to trust his only surviving friend to her. One battle, less than an hour of them fighting against a common foe, was not nearly enough to forget or forgive months of being a terror and a horrible person. So he would follow the pair, observe them from a distance even if neither of them wanted or needed a chaperone... because that's what friends did.

  He was so focused on the two other teenagers and their flight that he did not notice the mist right next to him taking the shape of a tall, thin, humanoid shape. Then a gust of wind blew, the light of the moon fell at a different angle as he flew around, and the misty figure was gone as if it had never been more than a trick of perspective...