Yusuf supported Alice into the elevator, while Amon carried Caim as if he weighed nothing at all, curled like a child swathed in the strange purple bandages.

It clanked up the floors, the group standing in awkward silence. Ruby dropped her keys at the lurch of a floor and the clatter on the old linoleum was unnaturally loud in the tiny space. “Sorry,” she mumbled, fidgeting with the jumble of keys strung on a keyfob of wood festooned with pink and green glitter.

“You should have summoned more help, or recalled me, rather than let him face that thing alone,” Amon finally said in a dull voice. “He’s not made for that.”

“I didn’t know.” Ruby ran her thumb over the little fob. “None of this was what I expected when I got up this morning, y’know.” She couldn’t bring herself to look at Caim or Alice. “How am I supposed to know how to manage a bunch of super powered muses against an evil… clown… knight thing?! I”m not a goddamn clown wrangler!!” she shouted as the door ground open to a tiny, elderly woman with a shopping cart staring hard at them through her heavy glasses.

“She’s clearly not.” Amon tried a smile that just made him look like he’d eaten a caterpillar as he squirmed past her.

“I’m not,” Ruby added sheepishly, scampering after him.

Yusuf and Alice just looked at each other and shrugged as he helped her to the door.

The apartment looked exactly like it had when she left: filled with plants, her lanky calico cat sleeping on the windowsill, a scatter of word jumble and puzzle books littering the coffee table. It looked so perfectly normal she almost broke down in tears.

Ruby took a long, hiccuping breath and noticed the others were staring at her. “Uhm. Ok. Alice, do you want to lie down? Bedroom’s over there,” The cat stretched, and slid off the windowsill, twining around her legs.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Baby,” she scooped the purring calico up in shaking hands as she tried to clear the jumble of magazines off the couch. “Uh, Amon. You. You can put Caim here.”

She gave Baby a little squeeze and set her down, forcing herself to go through the routine of getting her dinner while Yusuf helped Alice to the bedroom and Amon set the wounded gunner on the couch. The box of crunchy food shook in her hand and she set it on the counter.

Home felt exactly as safe as being under a blanket so the monsters under the bed couldn’t get you, she mused as Baby abandoned her food bowl to perch herself on Caim’s lap.

Amon gently pressed his forehead to Caim’s. When he looked up, there was a hard light to his eyes. He strode over to the windows and looked over at her tiny balcony. “That’ll do.”

“Is this going to blow my apartment up?” Ruby asked as he slid open the door.

“Does it matter?” He stared down at her and she shivered.

“I guess not.” She looked down at the phone. Caim’s book was still showing that tiny sliver of red. A small star winked at the corner of Amon’s, and four were shining. One was greyed out – The Berserker- and she frowned. “What’s that?”

“Probably nothing good.” Amon shooed her towards the balcony. “Caim said you’d …” He shook his head and looked back at the couch. “Nevermind. Just do it.”

Ruby tapped the books, bracing herself for the jolt as the air outside split with a burst of light and a crack of thunder loud enough to rattle the building. Down at street level, car alarms went off.

“Double summon. Berith, The Alchemist. Cerberos, The Builder.” The woman’s voice said from her phone. Amon’s head snapped so hard toward it that Ruby thought he could’ve broken his neck.

The shock ran up her arms, but she gripped the phone tighter as the shockwave followed the burst. She hadn’t noticed before, but Ruby swore she saw a flutter of leaves, no, pages, before the light fully cleared. Pages that swarmed into two figures on the rooftop below.

One was a virtual giant, copper-patina hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, and a thick brush of a ridiculous muttonchop mustache across his olive-gold skin. The sleeves of his grey coat were rolled up to show a swarm of elaborate tattoos between the heavy silver bracelets and grey fabric. The smaller – by comparison, at least- was darker, his brown skin lit with an amber glow. Ruby swore the short dreadlocks he wore were made of black opals, with flashes of neon colour winking in the deep black.

Alone, Caim had been striking, but his oddness had been almost easy to overlook. But now that she had four of them, it was like looking at a jewelry box, each of them a delicate, intricately created doll. Before she could ponder it further, that moment was broken as Amon bounded off the balcony like an overactive puppy. “Beri! Cerb,” he yelped, throwing himself at the two of them before they’d even had a chance to fully look around.

Ruby still didn’t know which one was which, but the bigger swung Amon around like a toy before setting him down. The other grabbed them both and brought all three together in that gentle forehead touch. Both newcomers ruffled Amon’s pearl-white curls then turned as one to look up at Ruby.

They shared a look, then shot a glance at Amon, who shrugged. “Caim’s gotta explain it but he’s…”

“It’s ok.” The big one gently patted the back of Amon’s head. “We’ll do our best.”

“Hey! You’ll have to get down, and I’ll let you…” Ruby shouted down as the big man held out one decorated arm, his bracelets breaking apart.

“BLUEPRINT,” he said. A rotating cube of light appeared over his outstretched hand. “ACCESS.” There was the screech of metal and grinding of stones as her balcony and the rooftop began to peel apart and rebuild. Ruby jumped back in time to see all of it clattering into a collection of stairs.

“You’re the Builder.” She offered a hand to him as he led the other two up the new construction.

He looked at it, then patted it awkwardly. “My Lady Author,” he nodded at her, then quickly pushed past. “Excuse me.”

“Don’t mind him,” the other, Berith, said. There was a glitter of gold in his shifting eyes. ‘You have a human in need as well?”

“Yeah. Caim, he said you could help her. She got hurt by one of those clown… things, and he knocked her out…” Ruby fell silent under the weight of Berith’s gaze. “What?”

“You slowed the infection, that’s good.” He followed her to the bedroom as Cerberos fussed at the couch.

Alice was propped up on the pillows, fidgeting with a plush turtle. “I heard the boom. You guys make an entrance, don’t you?” She laughed wearily.

Berith smiled, not unlike Caim had, and Ruby felt a fresh pang of guilt. “Can you help her?”

“Can you give me a few moments, Author?” He turned that smile on her. “I promise, she’s safe with me.”

“It’s ok, Ruby. Go check on the rest of your guests.” Alice waved her off. “This is the least uncomfortable thing that’s happened today.”

Ruby reluctantly backed out of the room. Behind her, Amon sat banished to a corner, thumbing resentfully through a fashion magazine while Yusuf talked softly but quickly on his phone. She recognised the sheepish posture, but realized with a start she couldn’t understand him as she had before. Caim’s doing, she thought, sneaking a guilty glance at the couch.

The gunner was speaking in feeble moonlight and salt air as Cerb spread a number of glowing pages in the air before him. “Yeah, I know bookbinding is considered an art, but you don’t have to do everything on your own, dog-ear.”

“You can understand him?” Ruby asked, cautiously approaching the couch.

He didn’t look at her, eyes flicking over the pages. “Of course,” he said flatly. “You could fix this in an instant, y’know, Author. Better than I can.”

“So I’ve been told.” Ruby pulled out her phone, tapping what she thought might be the menu. “But everything happened so fast and…”

“We’ll figure that out after we get sorted here,” Cerb grunted and Ruby backed away.

“Yusuf, I’m so sorry about your cab...” She joined the cabbie as he put away his own phone. “You got sucked into the weird and I’m just. I’m sorry.”

“I was trying to explain to Farah that I’m running late. Not sure how I’m going to explain why my cab looks like it went through a trash compactor, though.” He scratched at his beard.

Cerb immediately looked up, eyes bright. “You need a car repaired?”

“Stacks, it is so wrecked,” Amon piped up from the corner and Yusuf shrugged and nodded.

“Please let me fix it.” Cerb beamed at the man. “I’m really better at mechanical things.”

Caim weakly slapped at him, and Cerb bent to touch his forehead to the gunner’s. “You’re the worst of all,” he said with a soft smile.

“I guess I’ll make some coffee or something,” Ruby sighed.

Cerb sat back on his heels, then grabbed a six-month old issue of Vogue off the floor. “Ah, good. BLUEPRINT. DRONE,” he said. The pages ripped themselves free and refolded, twisting into three child-sized origami homunculi. One tottered into the bedroom, one into Ruby’s bathroom, and the third, to her immediate horror, out the front door.

“Uhm?”

“I need to do too many things at once. It helps to have extra hands,” he said absently just as Berith came out, followed by the paper drone.

“Cerb, I need…” Berith started and the Builder grinned.

From the bathroom, Ruby heard Cerb’s voice. “BLUEPRINT, LAB.”

“Wait! I need that room! What if we have to, you know, go?” Ruby panicked.

“Leave the toilet!” Cerb shouted as the bathroom filled with eerie noises. “Beri, I need a soma amp, three Jade 32 and a fractal patch when you’re in there cooking.”

Ruby followed Berith to the bathroom door and gasped at the infinitely larger space where her shower enclosure used to be. “Oh god, I’m never getting my deposit back, am I.”

“I’ve seen enough Doctor Who to know how this goes,” Yusuf added, peering around the corner as Berith began to open a series of boxes.

“Cerb! Where did you put my toadstone?” Berith yelled, rifling through vials and tubes filled with substances Ruby couldn’t even begin to identify.

“Toadstone? You mean your disgusting five pound lump of clown goo? You probably left it in Australia.” Cerb didn’t look up from his work on Caim, gently shooing the cat off the gunner’s lap. She immediately took up residence on Amon.

“Ah, bookworms. You’re right. Well, I need some to make the cure for Miss Alice.” He leaned out of the lab. “Amon! Go find a clown and rip the head off.”

Amon’s face twisted in disgust while he petted Ruby’s cat. “You want me to what? Have you been sniffing binding glue?”

“Did I misprint? Head!” Berith snapped.

Ruby looked down at her coat, its pink fluff matted with smears of black ooze and Caim’s glittering green ichor. “Hey, can you use this?” She peeled it off and sighed sadly.

Berith grabbed it from her and took a long, unsettling sniff. “Perfect. Thank you, Author.”

“Am I getting that back?” Ruby called.

“Alchemist, not a dry cleaner,” Berith shouted from what had been her bathroom.

“Nope. Never getting my deposit back,” Ruby sighed as the coffee maker chimed.