Gracie Abrams is eking out a solitary existence, fighting day-in, day-out against the drain of working customer service and nursing two newborn kittens in her off time. Out on her own ever since her sister moved in with her boyfriend, the burden of...
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"They found out," Sam, the Speaker of Doom, greeted me one morning. She'd come out of her room, frizz tangled with the electric plaid headband she'd fallen asleep in. "The bald guy's here."
With zero hesitation, I looked up from where I'd been slowly sewing patches into old bedspreads I'd kept at my apartment in case I needed to make rags or wrap a dead body or something. Lord, I hope I wasn't a hoarder. "Saitama?"
Kakashi sat beside me. He wasn't only teaching me how to sew, but Kirishima, as well. As soon as the name left my lips, his head ping-ponged from Sam to me. I gave him a confused head tilt, and that was his cue to move closer for some reason.
His gloves found my fingers, loosely interlocking them on the floor. The space was wide enough for an orange head to poke her snout through the gaps and wrap her treacherously pointy teeth around our fingers. Hable really needed a teething ring.
"How'd they find out?" I asked Sam as she scrounged in the kitchen for coffee.
Bella leaned against one counter, surprisingly still here when the sun was up. Usually, she was...wherever. Always seemed to be the first one to know what was going on, so I assumed she engaged in endless networking. Whatever it was, she was damn good at it. How was it that whenever we were in need of something, she knew a guy, who knew a gal, who knew someone who could hook us up? They don't teach classes about where to find an industrial-grade hair dryer during the apocalypse. You had to be born knowing it, apparently.
"I don't know." Sam waved the flip phone with a flourish, taking a long, probably scalding drag of her coffee. "But there's a meet-and-greet today, where he'll be signing autographs."
I snorted before I could stop myself. For One Punch Man to appear in an alien world and immediately go with the flow, ending up a worshipped deity who needed to sign manga volumes was...right on brand, really. He probably hadn't even blinked when they asked.
"Problem is, the witch clans on the outside don't really know what's going on here," she said, frustrated, "and we're all on lockdown, so it's not like they're gonna listen to us. It makes the other clans sound less credible, when this spell shouldn't have been used the way it has. How could anybody else understand what happened if they weren't here?"
Yikes, that did sound bad for the whole "prove we deserve human rights" campaign. If the government thinks you're lying, then...
"We're about to get a lot more weirdos around here," Bella sighed, then walked straight out her front door, giving a single cookie to the hound on the pillow and not even a nod to the rest of us.
I knew she wasn't the warmest and friendliest, and I knew we were completely in her space, but...damn.
When I didn't hear her heavy heels on the stairs, I looked back at the door just in time for it to open. Her long hair popped in like loose ivy as she called, "Cozy's here."
