Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

So it turns out that someone took the Halloween Haunted House shtick a little too literally, that Richard Xanthos creep just dropped dead at his dinner table, and that same someone has trapped the Misfits and the Holograms inside this gothic deathtrap of a mansion to either starve to death or destroy each other.

And Pizzazz is just pacing the length of the dinner table, arms folded, wearing a tacky pink party wig that’s making her entire scalp itch because the Misfits commit to their group costumes, trying to figure out just how Jem is to blame for this, because the glitter-bomb vampire is the only person from either band who’s unaccounted for in this dining room.

At least she has enough class to keep that thought to herself, though.

That’s a lie: the first thing Pizzazz did was blame Jem. But that was in more of a It’s Her Fault We’re Even In This Mess sense, not the Jem Did The Murder sense, and the remaining ‘and the Holograms’ have already tried blaming her for getting them into this mess twice since the old man called them into the dining room only to lurch over with a knife in his back.

Pizzazz had just barked back that they’d know it was her if she had done it, because Pizzazz always signs her work.

It’s like they don’t even understand her.

“Jem obviously didn’t do it, Pizzazz.” Kimber says, through her mouthpiece. For some reason Pizzazz refuses to fathom, she’s clad in one of those inflatable shark costumes Pizzazz always sees outside the steakhouse by Jetta’s favorite pub in Santa Monica. “Jerrica’s right here—”

A pause.

“And she can tell you that Jem’s been sick in bed all week.”

“Kimber’s right, Pizzazz.” Jerrica shakes her head, as she tries to keep bits of the makeup for her basketball werewolf costume from peeling off in a nervous sweat. “Jem has the flu.”

“Whatever, that phony can lie to you just as well as the rest of us.” Pizzazz shakes her head. “But you better not be contagious.”

"If anyone here's contagious, I'm pretty sure it's the Misfits." Shana huffs.

Aja staggers back into the room, dressed as a... something, and grabs hold of the door-frame to steady herself.

“Pretty sure the front door is locked,” Aja huffs, doubling over to try and catch her breath. Pizzazz has already tried her cellphone and all the downstairs phones, which means they’re going to need to find something to break if they plan on making it out of here before Christmas. “And the windows are all fake.”

“No pager signal, either.” Shana offers, helpfully shaking a little two-way bleeper.

And Jerrica goes full girl scout, just like she always does when she thinks it might make people listen to her, and tries to take charge of their escape plan.

“Aja,” Jerrica shakes her head, picking at her nails with the edge of her thumb. Pizzazz has no clue why the Holograms even brought a girl who always seems like she’s scared of her own shadow to a haunted house like this. It’s unethical treatment, Pizzazz thinks, she’s going to have to get Wimp Protective Services involved. “Can you get us out of here?”

Aja just shakes her head.

Jerrica’s face drops. “Please tell me you can get us out of here.”

“If you give me six hours and a sledgehammer, maybe.” Aja exhales in a deep breath, pushing herself off the wall.

“I can give you the six hours.” Jerrica offers. “Take Jetta and Roxy with you. Kimber, I need you to—”

That gets Pizzazz’s hair to stand on end.

“Hey, Teen Wolf.” Pizzazz marches forwards, jabbing a finger at Jerrica. “I better have a knife in my back before I’ll let the Holo-shams order the Misfits around.”

“Do you wanna end up like our host or not?” Jerrica jabs back. Pizzazz has to give her credit, actually, for a complete wimp she’s never been one to take a threat lying down. “Look, Pizzazz, I know—”

Pizzazz holds up a hand to silence her, glancing over her shoulder to the other Misfits. “What do you think, ladies?”

Stormer sighs, rubbing at her face. “I think we should go with—”

“Overruled.” Pizzazz barks.

“Hey, let her finish—” Kimber shouts, in a flailing mass of inflatable limbs.

“Can it, spaghetti girl.” Pizzazz waves her hand dismissively. “Misfits, we’ll find our own way out.”

“Alright, have it your way.” Jerrica throws her hands up in the have-fun-with-that kind of mock surrender, returning her focus to her sisters. “Just scream, or something, if you’re getting—”

“Axe-murdered.” Aja nods, sagely.

“Psh, you wish.” Pizzazz huffs, stomping back to the others. “Don’t bother trying to follow us on our way out. We’ll pull the ladder up behind us.”

Stormer’s hunting for clues over by a dusty fireplace that looks like it hasn’t been lit since the Civil War while Roxy tries the windows. Jetta sits with her elbows on the back of one of the dinner chairs, shaking her black-and-white braids loose from a half-hearted outfit she discarded most of before she ever walked into the house.

“Kinda creep builds fake windows into a brick wall?” Roxy shakes her head, her face almost visible beneath caked-on makeup and a red-pink wig, rapping her fingers against the fake glass. It slides loose with an eerie screech, and Roxy digs her fingernails into the pain to claw it back.

“Kind with more money than sense, innit?” Jetta offers, folding her arms as she watches Roxy do all the work. Pizzazz has already figured she’s going to be worse than useless tonight. “Proper way to do a haunted house though. Well impressed.”

“Well, you can sit there being impressed or you can help us get out of here.” Pizzazz offers. “I refuse to let the Holograms escape this death-trap before we do.”

“Oi, Pizz. Dropped your gay card.” Jetta says, deathly serious in the flickering faux-candlelight. When Pizzazz looks down to try and find it, Jetta bursts into laughter. “Wheyyyyyyyy.”

Pizzazz scowls.

There’s a matte painting of the grounds they trawled through to make it into the house tucked behind the glass. Roxy taps the painting with her fingers, then peels it back, and finds that it comes loose easily enough to be intentional. There’s something written on the other side in thick letters, but it’s too dark in this dining room to make out any of the words.

“Jet, read this.” Roxy offers, and walks over to the chair.

“Storm, read this.” Jetta huffs, without even looking at the painting, and hands it to Stormer.

Stormer takes a second to let her eyeballs adjust to the candlelight before she starts trying to read the message, giving Pizzazz just enough time to cross the table and yank it out of her hands.

“If you want to escape this house…” Pizzazz reads. “Look for a lion who’s brave as a mouse.”

“What, Wizard of Oz?” Jetta perks up.

Pizzazz rolls up the painting and tosses it over her shoulder, glancing down at Xanthos. “Figures this guy’s murder mystery would all be about books.”

“It could be also a painting,” Stormer offers, picking up the discarded sheet of paper off the ground. Let her have it, Pizzazz thinks. It’s useless to her now. “Or… a statue.”

Come to think of it, Pizzazz did notice a bunch of stuffed animal heads in the hallway. It’s as good a start as any.

“Well then go look for it, Stormer.” Pizzazz orders. “Roxy, take Jetta with you and find out where that stiff kept his library.”

“Yeah?” Rox folds her arms. “And what’ll you be doing?”

“I already know who did this.” Pizzazz sidles onto the table, crossing one leg over the other. “And I’m going to find her.”

Pizzazz tries to yank the knife out of Xanthos’s back in a dramatic flourish, but finds upon gripping the handle that it’s a plastic prop hooked up to something inside his jacket.

Well, at least nobody is actually dead, but it does ruin her moment.

“You were born to play a corpse, Xanthos.” Pizzazz says, sliding off the table and heading for the doorway. “C’mon, Misfits. I am not letting Eric put out a posthumous album tomorrow morning.”

An hour earlier, the Misfits are standing out on the porch of Richard Xanthos’s mansion waiting to see the look on the Hologram’s faces.

That’s a lie: Pizzazz is waiting to see the look on Jem’s face. The other Misfits are, mostly, shivering.

But Pizzazz figures that’s on the Holograms. After all, the Misfits are wearing their outfits tonight.

“How long am I gonna have to stand out here, in this poxy rain,” Jetta groans. “Tarted up like the drummer in a band we hate, while you make yourself up to look like Jem ‘cause you’re all over her bloody carpet?”

“I thought you were used to the rain, Jetta.” Pizzazz offers, putting the finishing touches on her blush in a pocket mirror. “How’d I look?”

“Like bloody Jem, you muppet.” Jetta scoffs, making grabby hands for Pizzazz’s cigarette. “Oi, two’s up on the fag, yeah?”

Pizzazz takes one final drag, and stomps out the smoldering cigarette butt with a glittery purple heel.

Then, it’s time for her to huddle her Holo-Misfits together to game-plan how they’re going to get under all those Holograms’ fake skins tonight with their perfectly co-ordinated costumes.

Well, they’re almost perfect: Pizzazz immediately notices that Jetta’s rain-soaked purple wig is sitting at an angle beneath all her locs, and straightens it out.

Pizzazz also notices that Roxy’s in a red-pink wig and that stupid frilly white suit while Stormer is fiddling with the hem of whatever Raya normally wears in what’s definitely the wrong shade of pink wig, because apparently Stormer refuses to get hard and mean with her little playmate ever since those two traitors recorded their album together.

Which Pizzazz thinks is utterly ridiculous, because Kimber has never passed up an opportunity to steal Stormer’s style when the opportunity presents itself.

Tonight is supposedly an industry event, another one of those Xanthos Charity Foundation get-togethers that Eric wanted them to attend just to make sure that the Holograms don’t have too easy of a time getting that quarter-million dollar grand prize donation for the shelter for orphaned puppies and a photo op in the newspapers.

Pizzazz doesn’t even know what she’d do with all the money if she wins the prize, besides build a forty foot tall solid golden statue of herself on the front lawn of her father’s mansion, and she knows that they probably won’t get the prize, because the whole stupid industry has been rigged to let Jem conquer the world ever since Jerrica Benton dragged her out of that orphanage and put a microphone in her hand because she was too scared to admit that her daddy made some bad business deals before he died.

Six bands have supposedly RSVP’d, but The Misfits have arrived as fashionably late as usual and there’s no sign of Space Cadets, Eric has paid a dump-truck of her father’s money to keep the Limp Lizards and probably the Leatherettes out of their hair, and the Lunas know better than to get involved with the real bands.

The Holograms will show up, Pizzazz knows they’ll. When they do, they’ll be declared the obvious winners of whatever game they’re going to play. So, in the absence of any incentives to actually win that cash, Pizzazz does what she’s learned to do best: get their faces in the papers the old-fashioned way. And nothing says rockstar tantrum like goody two-shoes Jem throwing a fit that their friendly rivals showed up to the charity event in a good-natured homage to the second-best band in Los Angeles.

All they have to do is be their usual glamorous selves, throw a few pointed barbs the Holograms’ way, and wait for them to throw the first plate at the buffet.

Even then, Pizzazz is feeling pretty sure she’s the only one who’s actually committed to this idea.

But it’s a good idea, one that will get under Jem’s skin and get their names in the papers for the right wrong reasons, even if Pizzazz thinks that these traitors in her midst are only barely humoring her plan tonight, so she taps at those faux Jem-pink earrings she’s kept since the China trip, the way she’s pretty sure Jerrica does as another one of her nervous tics when she spots an old-fashioned car she once almost sent off a cliff speed past the gates and wind up the hill to the entrance.

“Showtime, Misfits.” Pizzazz says, planting her hands on her hips in her best-worst Jem pose, and tries to ignore the fact that Jetta’s wig fell off again.

“It’s still not the worst mansion I’ve ever been trapped in.” Jerrica decides, rubbing at the corners of her eyes. “I think our impostors are worse this time around, though.”

Just thinking about the fact that she’s been trapped in enough ominous mansions to have opinions on which ones were the worst is making her reconsider Riot’s idea of handing control of the company to Kimber and spending a year recharging on a deserted island.

Jerrica can think of worse sharks to hand the company over to.

“Definitely lower production values.” Aja shrugs.

“I still don’t understand the fake home movies—” Jerrica pauses, shaking her head. She has enough problems tonight as it is, she needs to stay focused on getting out of this house.

“Why’d we agree to come to this shindig, anyway?” Aja asks, cracking open the metal casing of the stage light and fishing around in the wires to find something she can hook up to a battery. “I thought the plan was to go trick or treating with the Starlight girls.”

“Mrs. Bailey is taking them.” Jerrica sighs. “Kimber’s convinced Xanthos knows something about my father.”

“...Kimber’s also convinced that Santa Claus is real.” Aja muses.

“Aja.”

“Psh, I’m hilarious.” Aja offers, with a cant of her head. “You think Raya’s glad her brother’s birthday’s tonight? She’s gonna be the last Hologram standing.”

Jerrica feels bad about ripping the pyrotechnics out of the walls, but they need more than just ‘spooky-flickering-fake-candles’ to get out of here.

Kimber and Shana are on the other side of the mansion right now, scoping out whether the second-floor windows are real-enough to crack open and climb down. At this point, it’s looking like their only way out is either up or down— find a way to the roof or the basement. Nobody particularly wanted to go down into the basement when Jerrica suggested it, least of all Jerrica, but Jerrica feels like she’s going to have to bite that bullet eventually.

“Don’t even joke,” Jerrica exhales, fiddling around with some of the bookshelves in this study on the off chance there’s a hidden passageway down into some secret basement. As far as she can tell, there isn’t. Strangely, there doesn’t seem to be anything from Xanthos’s library in here, either, because all these ‘books’ are just fake spines made from cardboard with vaguely spooky titles. “I’m getting a headache just thinking about how we’re going to explain it if we don’t make it out of here.”

“Plus side,” Aja bites a length of tape off the roll, and wraps the battery to her improvised flashlight. “You wouldn’t have to. On account of being dead.”

“Second-hand headache. Jem’s going to be sending me migraines beyond the grave.” Jerrica offers, with a sigh. She knows Aja’s just trying to take her mind off the responsibility of getting them out of there, so she plays along. “Who do you think they’ll get to play the memorial show?”

“I’d say it’s Ashley and the Starlights’ time—” Aja flips the switch, and the light comes on. “To shine.”

“Good work.” Jerrica says, blinking away the sudden light. It reminds her of being in the basement of the old house after the power went out, fixing the circuit breaker— Rio came down with an industrial light for her he borrowed from one of his high school friends who went into construction, tried to tell her he brought it down for her— only for Jerrica to turn her head in time to almost blind herself with the beam.

He apologized for hours.

Aja sets a significantly less powerful light down in the corner of the study, angling it towards the desk. “Might be time to use the secret weapon, Jer.”

Jerrica hasn’t tried to contact Synergy yet— being stuck in a tiny dining room with the Misfits made it almost impossible to find the space to discretely call her. But if anyone can help them get out of here, it’s her.

“Synergy, I need—” Jerrica glances up as footsteps ring out against the hard-wood floor. Someone’s standing in the doorway.

Jerrica lets her arm fall to her side, unable to call for help while a Misfit is watching.

“Stormer.” Jerrica offers, folding her arms and jumping to accusations. Stormer’s smart, smart enough to almost catch her out enough times that Jerrica feels like she has to channel a bit of Pizzazz if she wants to disguise what she’s doing around her. “I thought the Misfits didn’t need our help.”

“Promise you won’t tell Pizzazz?” Stormer smiles in the dim light. Jerrica can see that she’s ditched the pink wig— her costume was so bad that Jerrica genuinely can’t tell whether she was supposed to be Raya or whether Pizzazz put two Jems in the band as part of her joke.

Jerrica puts her hands on her hips. “Depends on whether this is a trick or not.”

“I…” As Stormer pauses, Jerrica notices in the flickering light that she’s carrying something rolled up in her hands. She figures it’s not unlike Xanthos to turn his own murder into a scavenger hunt. “Wouldn’t do that to Kimber.”

“That doesn’t extend to the rest of us,” Aja offers.

Stormer pauses for a moment. “And, I won’t tell Pizzazz if you wanna use your secret earpiece to talk to Jem, either—”

Jerrica blinks. “To… talk to Jem.”

“Kimber talks in her sleep.” Stormer shrugs. “…Glad Jem’s not here tonight, she’d give me a lousy PSA about that.”

“My PSAs are not lousy.” Jerrica insists, genuinely offended. “They’ve won awards.”

Stormer folds her arms, narrowing her eyes.

Jerrica fakes a cough, and then composes herself. “...And if Jem didn’t have a cold tonight, she’d tell you that herself.”

“I thought you said she had a flu.” Stormer huffs.

Jerrica huffs. Deflect through aggression. She has to put Stormer on the back foot before she figures the Jem thing out. “I’m not a doctor, Stormer. I don’t know these things.”

“Look, I wanna get out of here.” Stormer shakes her head. “My brother’s playing that old church downtown tonight. D’you want my help or not?”

“Alright, then. I promise not to tell Pizzazz.” Jerrica decides. It’s not a difficult decision to make, nor is it the first time she’s offered to help Stormer get away from the Misfits for a little while, and she doubts it’ll be the last. “What were you going to tell us?”

“For one thing, Xanthos isn’t dead. This is all one big scavenger hunt.” Stormer unfurls the rolled up paper, producing a big scrawled clue on the back. “And Roxy found this behind the fake window.”

Jerrica awkwardly pulls her reading glasses on over her peeling werewolf makeup, figuring she might actually need them tonight. “Wizard of Oz?”

Except, all of the books Jerrica has found so far are fake: So she adds.

“...Remember that lion statue on the way in?” Stormer offers.

(Pizzazz is already close to screaming because she never got the reaction she wanted when a Jem-less Holograms walk through the door. She shoves a hand to a statue of a lion recoiling from a mouse, then again when it refuses to budge, and storms into the dining room.)

“Alright, Sy— ” Jerrica pauses, putting her finger to her earring. Force of habit. “So, Jem, can you hear me?”

“Barely, Jerrica.” Synergy’s voice carries a tinge of Jem, and Jerrica turns around to cover her ear to try and reduce the chance of being overheard. Stormer’s mentioned how similar she and Jerrica sound over the phone, when ‘Jem’ called her number to check in on how Kimber was doing. “There’s a surprising amount of interference. I would suggest moving to a better vantage point.”

“I’ll try the attic.” Jerrica says. “Can you get a message through to Rio?”

“I have attempted to contact him, but I do not know his current whereabouts.”

Well, that’s the most concerning thing Jerrica has heard all night. If Rio’s in Starlight Mansion, or even if he’s in his house, Synergy would be able to contact him. Jerrica knows him well enough to know that he rarely goes out without telling her where he’s going, and she doesn’t remember having any kind of conversation about that over the past few days. Is he part of the scavenger hunt? Jerrica wouldn’t put it past him, but she doubts it.

Jerrica shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut and counting down. Three. Two. One. Cool head in a crisis.

“Alright.” Jerrica says, finally. “Aja, get to work shining some more light on the situation. Stormer, I need you to find Kimber and—”

“Find me for what?” Kimber asks, eyes lighting up through the mesh eye-holes of her shark costume as she pokes her head in the door. She dips her head to Stormer, offering a tip of an imaginary hat. “Detective.”

“Every window was fake, Jer.” Shana offers, stretching her arms out in front of her. Her concession to the Halloween theme is long gone, Jerrica has no idea where she ditched the witch hat. “Not one of them budged an inch.”

“One did.” Jerrica says. “Aja can fill you in. Kimber—”

“Be the Watson to Stormer’s Holmes, got it.” Kimber raises an inflatable fin in salute.

“I was going to say ‘check out that Lion statue,’ but that works.” Jerrica shrugs. “I’ll head to the roof and see if I can contact Jem.”

“But you’re—” Kimber says, almost reflexively, before remembering that there’s still a Misfit present. “…You’re right. Let me know what she says.”

“Well, I hope Jem’s alright,” Stormer offers, jamming her hand in the mouth of the lion statue. “Your sister sure seems worried about her.”

Kimber, sitting on the staircase to deter any more knife murders, puts her chin in her fin-hand and rests her elbow on her knees. Hiding the truth from Stormer is getting exhausting at this point, now that they’re spending more time together, and Kimber’s always having to stop herself from slipping up and calling Jerrica her sister when she’s got her Jem face on, or lying and making up excuses to try and keep up with all Jerrica’s cover stories.

“Jer's… exaggerating.” Kimber says. “Jem just didn’t want to come out tonight.”

“Thought she’d be all over a charity shindig.”

“Everyone needs a day off.” Kimber shrugs. "Plus, with the band and all, we never get to do anything just as sisters any more."

“You get those songs I faxed you for Back—” Kimber draws the number in the air with one of her flippers, because she’s kinda convinced it’s the smartest way to name a sequel album in history. “Two Back?”

Stormer looks at her, with her hand in the jaws of a giant golden lion, and politely registers her displeasure with the working title. One day, Kimber thinks, the whole world will understand her true creative vision.

“I’ve got, um,” Stormer offers. “Some suggestions with me in my purse. I was hoping to go over them with you after dinner.”

“Oh no.” Kimber gasps, putting one big inflatable fin over her heart and feigning flopping over dead on the stairs. “They’re all terrible.”

“No, they’re great and you’re a genius.” Stormer says. “It’s just hard to collaborate like we could in the studio for the first one when there’s still this whole band feud—”

“Band truce.”

“You guys shot Pizzazz into the future,” Stormer says.

“She shot us into the past!”

“Yeah, but Pizzazz is never gonna see it that way.” Stormer shrugs.

After fishing around for a few more moments, Stormer pulls back some individually-wrapped sour candies and an ornate wooden cylinder fastened with a four-digit combination lock.

“Kimber,” Stormer says, pre-emptively. “No.”

“Kimber yes.” Kimber offers, and reaches through the rail of the staircase to grab the Halloween candy from Stormer’s hands. She fiddles with her fins, trying to unravel the wrapper. After a few seconds, she gives up with a little dejected flail of fins. “Try… 0-3-2-2.”

“Your birthday?” Stormer does. It doesn’t budge. “Any other ideas?”

“1-9-6-8.” Kimber offers. “Jerrica told me it’s when Xanthos started his foundation.”

“Must be tied to one of the other clues.” Stormer locks in the combination, and shakes her head. “I wonder how Jerrica’s doing trying to contact Jem.”

Stormer gets her answer when a scream rings out from above them, and Kimber bolts up the stairs.

Past the creaking staircase up to the attic, Jerrica shines one of Aja’s improvised flashlights around the maze of cardboard boxes with spooky labels and taps her fingertip to her earring.

“Synergy, is the signal any better up here?” Jerrica asks,

“Yes, Jerrica.” Synergy’s voice comes through crisp and clear. “I’ll analyze the clues you’ve found so far, and see whether there’s any—”

A hand lightly taps Jerrica on the shoulder.

“You’re, um, dead.” A woman in full Hockey Mask murder gear says, cheerfully. “Follow me over to the green room, please.”

Jerrica blinks at her. “That’s… really underwhelming.”

“We’re trying not to cause any, um, actual murders.” She offers, with a shrug. “Your British friend tried to bite one of us.”

“Can I scream anyway?” Jerrica asks. “I feel like I need it after the night I’m having.”

“Go for it," the actor says. "They'll be stuck on this all night otherwise."

Jerrica takes a deep breath to center herself, lets loose her best horror movie wail while the actor pours fake blood over the floor, and then follows the axe murderer through a side door out of the movie set and into the ‘backstage’ of the house.

Chapter Text

“Storm!” Kimber pulls her fins up to her mouth-hole and calls up the narrow staircase-latter to the attic, unwilling to risk puncturing her shark costume on a loose nail. She’s holding the cylinder in her hands until Stormer comes down, awkwardly trying to twist it to put the code in. “Did the axe murderer get you?”

“Knife murderer,” Stormer calls down from the attic, poking her head through the hatchway up. “And no.”

“Is Jerrica up there?" Kimber shouts. "Is anything up there?”

“I can’t see her.” Stormer offers. “Just dust, boxes, and whole lotta fake blood.”

Kimber pauses, canting her head to one side. “…How can you tell it’s fake blood?”

“Craig got into… a lot of fights, back when we were kids.” Stormer pauses in that stormy way she likes to do sometimes when she’s trying to be evasive. She shakes her head, putting on a front, and Kimber gives her some space to change the subject. “Plus, I used to help Clash with make-up for a buncha low budget horror movies.”

Kimber puts a wistful fin to her chest. “My dream job.”

“What, doing the make up on a film set for fifty bucks and a free hot dog?”

“No!” Kimber calls up the stairs. “Being in my own horror movie.”

 “Psh, we’d get killed off in the first five minutes.” Stormer figures. "Gotta teach the kids a moral lesson about living in sin."

“That,” Kimber decides. “Is half the fun. Show up, kiss girls, run around screaming, then get killed in the most creative way possible. You’ll be the only thing people remember when they walk out.”

“I’d rather be remembered for being in a good movie.” Stormer sighs. “I get enough memorability from those public access shows makin’ fun of the Misfits movie.”

“Okay, but those robots are cute.” Kimber offers. “And the jokes aren’t even that mean!”

“I just like my movies with a little less blood and guts, I guess.” Stormer muses. There’s a long pause, and the sound of footsteps creaking through the thin ceiling, and Kimber is pretty sure that Stormer has been axe-murdered until she calls down. “Kimber! I found another clue.”

“Outrageous,” Kimber says, doing a victorious little fist-pump. “What’s it say?”

“To unearth lost secrets tightly concealed,” Stormer reads. “Look in the mirror and all will be revealed.”

Kimber taps a shark fin to her mouth-hole as she thinks for a moment, and then calls up the ladder. “Stormer! Is there a mirror up there?”

“Yeah, just give me—” Stormer grunts, and there’s scraping against the floor above her. “There! I’ve got it. It’s 8-1-0-1.”

“You’re gonna have to come down.” Kimber offers, rattling the wooden cylinder. “I can not open this thing.”

“Wh—” Stormer pokes her head through the hatch, and clambers down the staircase backwards. “Oh, because the fins.”

Kimber dutifully holds out the cylinder.

“Where’d you even get that costume?” Stormer asks, clicking the first number into place.

“Guy I used to date works in the special effects department at Major Studios.” Kimber wiggles her shark fins proudly. “I talked him into salvaging this from the set of Space Sharks of the Crab Nebula after it wrapped.”

“Spaghetti guy?” Stormer scrunches up her nose, clicking the second number into place.

“No, not spaghetti guy.” Kimber retorts. Stormer has so little faith in her, sometimes. She’s never going to talk to that creepo again. “You’d like him. Apart from the part where we used to date.”

“I don’t dislike the guys you used to date because you dated them,” Stormer clicks the fourth number into place. She tries to twist it open, and finds that it won’t budge. "I don’t like ‘em ‘cause they all treated you awful.”

Kimber makes a little so-so hand-wobble with her outstretched fin. Only most of them treated her badly.

“It won’t budge.” Stormer huffs.

“Wait.” Kimber says, leaning in because she feels like a genius right now. “It’s a mirror, so it was backwards. Try 1-0-1-8.”

That works. Stormer grabs the cylinder and cracks it open, unfurling a thin strip of paper that Kimber imagines would be incredibly easy for Stormer to read were she not currently in the process of being hugged by a giant inflatable shark.

“Just when I thought it was safe to go back in the water,” Stormer laughs, tapping two fingers to her lips and then pressing them against the mouth-hole of the shark costume. “You gonna let me read this, shark-shark?”

“Maybe five more seconds,” Kimber says, before Stormer wiggles out enough to get her arms free. So everyone wins, really.

“Huh.” Stormer says.

“Is that a good ‘huh’ or a bad ‘huh?’”

“It just says: Return to the Scene of the Crime.” Stormer tries to angle the paper so Kimber can spot it through the costume. “Didn’t even make it rhyme.”

“...Sounds like they kinda did.” Kimber offers. “Did you guys miss anything in the dining room?”

“I think we missed everything in the dining room.” Stormer shrugs. “C’mon, lets go figure it out.”

“Lead the way.” Kimber makes an After-You-My-Lady gesture with her fins, and Stormer graciously descends the stairwell. “I wonder where Jerrica’s hiding.”

“Don’t touch me,” Techrat drones, as another guest enters their control room. “Don’t touch any of my incredibly expensive equipment, and do not ask questions you already know the answers to. You may offer suggestions for potential ‘scares,’ but I am under no obligation to follow them.”

“Techrat.” Jerrica says, emerging into the control room of this operation after wiping off the last of her wolf prosthesis in the surprisingly full-featured kitchenette Xanthos set up for the staff of his Haunted House Experience. “I should’ve known the Misfits were behind this.”

Techrat reclines in their office chair in a comfortable-looking skeleton costume, blowing loose strands of hair away from their face. Jerrica’s pretty sure she’s never even seen this many screens outside of a television studio before, there’s almost two dozen closed-circuit cameras set up in various rooms of the mansion hooked up to the kind of special effects and recording set-up she’s pretty sure Video would kill to have access to.

It’s probably a good thing she didn’t ask Synergy for help, Jerrica thinks. Erasing that particular tape would’ve been another in a long line of problems she could do without tonight.

“This humble rat is merely a freelancer with a love for the Halloween season, Hologram.” Techrat offers, with a wave of their hands. “…And some hefty bills to pay after that temporal displacement incident.”

Jerrica is still trying to block that whole mess from back in August out of her mind. She likes to focus on things she can actually control, those tactile problems she can work through and solve, rather than linger the abject chaos that her life has turned into ever since she received those earrings almost two years ago.

It’s probably not working out all that great for her, her sisters and Rio can probably both attest that, and Jerrica still feels like she needs a vacation or thirteen before she throws the kind of public tantrum that makes what Clash did to that restaurant look like a stuffy awards show speech, but it does mean that she’s been trying, incredibly hard, not to linger on figuring out what was going on with the band of robots or the Nice Pizzazz skulking around backstage at the old church trying to get a photo op with her.

Jerrica is dealing with enough problems to drown two people at the best of times, she doesn’t need to add any more to the pile.

At least they re-united the dinosaur with his mother.

“In any case,” Techrat says, unwilling to humor Jerrica’s lingering presence by the console any longer. “You might find this rat’s colleagues for tonight more amenable to— blegh— small-talk.”

Jerrica figures that she’s getting nowhere with Techrat, and she’s definitely not planning on spending the rest of the night with Roxy and Jetta in the green room, so she looks around the control room for any other workers she can talk to. There’s a familiar woman with yellow-red hair, who looks like she’s just come from a catering gig in her black shirt and slacks, sitting in one of the other booths.

Jerrica knows that woman, but only as Jem, which makes introductions a tiny bit more difficult than they otherwise would be.

So Jerrica gives Techrat her best Jem smile, and points to the microphone on the desk. As much as she thinks it’s a terrible idea to get involved in this mess, it does give her an opportunity to be on the other side of the scheming for a night.

Broken truce or not, Jerrica thinks that Jem still owes Pizzazz for a scheme or two.

“If you really want to get under her skin,” Jerrica says, tracing a circle around the two cameras as a Pizzazz-shaped blob of pink wigs and too much glitter runs between their blind spots. “I can do a pretty good impression of Jem.”

“Of course you can.” Techrat stares at her for a moment, shaking their head. “Touch the microphone only to press that button. Do not pull the wire, do not pull it off the desk, and do not cry to me when Pizzazz insists that the truce between your bands is over for good.”

“Then let’s really give Pizzazz something to scream about.” Jerrica says, watching Pizzazz-as-Jem stomp around the third floor of the mansion loudly trying to draw Jem into a confrontation. “Hook the microphone up to Camera 12.”

“Top of the Food Chain,”
by The Misfits

Pizzazz shoves over another priceless ornament and darts her eyes around the sudden darkness as all the lights in the hallway suddenly flicker and dim one by one, in the kind of grim procession that reminds her too much of that awful drop she feels when the show's over and she has to sink back into reality. Everything around Pizzazz seems to fade into a kaleidoscopic haze, blurring and fraying into the shapes behind her eyes when she rubs at them after waking up, and Pizzazz feels like she’s running through a world of fun house mirrors, distorting everything around her into the same dreamlike haze.

In every reflection, of every imaginary mirror, Pizzazz swears that she sees the same face. It’s how she knows who to blame for this in an instant, because she’s been saying it all night.

“Nice try, Jem.” Pizzazz sneers, pressing a hand to the wall to feel her way through the corridor. “But it’ll take more than that to scare a Misfit.”

“Pizzazz who? You’d think that after she got kicked off her own label, she’d know that she’s done in this town.”

“Now you come out.” Pizzazz glances around for the source of the voice, holding her arms wide and turning around to try and goad Jem into showing herself. “What’s the matter, Jem? Too scared for a fun house?”

“I mean, how tired is her act? She barks, and smashes up the place, but we’ve heard it all before. What’s new? No wonder Riot played her like a fiddle.”

Another corner in the dark, and that same voice rings out once more.

“We’d sign her to Starlight Music out of pity, if we didn’t know she’d never make it.”

That’s not Jem at all.

That angers Pizzazz more than anything. That someone would steal that goody-two-shoes bubblegum pop monster’s voice just to try and get a cheap rise out of her.

No.

What Jem and Pizzazz have is professional courtesy. Getting to the top of the food chain by any means necessary. Whatever this is? This isn’t going to do at all.

“Stop pretending you’re Jem.” Pizzazz barks.

She’s had a plan to break out of here the entire time. See, Pizzazz has been running around the same three corridors for the past twenty minutes trying to figure out the boundaries of these cameras. There’s no visible tell of where they’re hidden, but they do play the same three ambient horror noises straight out of her stock music tapes whenever she walks close to them.

They seem expensive. Pizzazz is going to break all of them until she either breaks them all or they get so scared that they let her out.

Thanks to this little Jem stunt, Pizzazz knows where to look.

So Pizzazz kicks off a glittery-purple heel, and tosses it at the speakers.

“Show’s over, you hear me?” Pizzazz growls, and marches back into the corridor. “When I get my hands on you, you better hope Jem’s around to stop me.”

Back in the control room, Jerrica goes white as a sheet.

"Congratulations, Hologram." Techrat sneers. "I now have to account for an enraged Pizzazz tearing up our equipment."

"I... might have done some damage there." She admits, leaving the microphone be.

Kimber scrambles into the dining room, after hearing an eerie voice followed by a crash upstairs, and turns around to watch the door while Stormer gives everything in the room another look over in case they missed any obvious clues the first time around. There doesn’t seem to be anything out of place, or anything as obvious as the matte painting that started this whole hunt, which is kind of concerning.

“We,” Kimber decides. “Are gonna be stuck here for hours.”

“It’s our only lead.” Stormer says, ducking under the dining table to look for anything creeping under there. Kimber starts pulling the chairs out on her side of the table, but neither of them find anything that seems like a clue. “There’s gotta be something in this room—”

Kimber does notice a something. She glances over to the big moustache-wearing elephant in the room: Xanthos himself, still slumped over in his chair at the head of the table. Kimber doesn’t know if anyone has checked whether he’s actually dead yet in the context of the game. Which seems like a given, since he has a huge fake knife in his back, but she’s seen enough movies to know that people who are only mostly dead linger long enough to deliver important information.

Kimber holds up one of her fins, trying to indicate to Stormer that she’s about to try some reverse shark psychology to trick their murder victim into speaking. “I just don’t think there’s anything in here, Storm.”

“You’re right,” Stormer fakes an exhausted sigh, covering her mouth to stop herself from laughing. “I think we should just sit down and wait for someone to come rescue us.”

“Or solve the puzzle for us.” Kimber shakes her head.

A groan escapes the lips of their murder victim.

Kimber puts her hand to her chest in mock horror. “Xanthos! He’s a zombie!”

“He’s not a zombie, Kimber.” Stormer says, playing along with the charade. That's her girl. “Go get help!”

“No!” Richard Xanthos croaks, attempting in vain to push himself up off the dinner table. “It is too late for me! But I die, in the hopes, that you might solve my murder.”

Stormer grabs one shoulder, Kimber grabs the other, and they drag Xanthos upright. There’s a big dull mark on his face from pressing it against the table for so long. At least Kimber can’t doubt the commitment.

“Did’ya see who did it?” Stormer asks, because Kimber figures you gotta start with the obvious questions. “Or hear anything?”

“I only saw…” Xanthos coughs, bursting one of those fake blood capsules that used to be the bane of their mom’s existence every time Kimber wanted to be a vampire for Halloween. She remembers that they had to replace the carpet in the old house because the bloodstains on it raised questions whenever the social workers came to check up on Aja and Lela and Shana. “A figure, spiriting down into the basement.”

“...The basement.” Stormer looks over to Kimber, who is caught up being incredibly sad that she’s never gonna see that old house again. “Kimber, are you—”

“I’m good!” Kimber lies. She claps her fins together, looking down at Xanthos. “So, Xanthos. While I’ve got you here. How is it that you and my dad knew each other, anyhow?"

“That’s a secret I shall take,” Xanthos despairs. “To the grave!”

“You did already kind of die, dude.” Kimber says. “I figure the statute of limitations is up on this one.”

“...And woe unto me, what a glorious performance my death was.” Xanthos offers, flopping back down on the table. “We might speak about it, after this night is done.”

"I... don't think you're getting anything outta him, Kimber." Stormer asks. “Basement?” 

“Basement.” Kimber repeats, in a dull groan. She's really not looking forward to trying to navigate her shark suit down those spooky-looking stairs.

Kimber runs for the doorway, and Xanthos graciously returns to playing dead.