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When Lyra had met Bastien and Luke, she hadn't ever expected... Well, no, maybe that wasn't quite right. She hadn't even been expecting to meet them when she'd met them. You didn't really expect to meet anyone when you followed a voice in your head to a sewer and used magic to fight some horrible monster.

But still... Even given the absurdity of her general life circumstances lately, she never thought she'd be walking down a seedy alley, following an erratic signal on her GPS.

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Though maybe that wasn't quite right either. It wasn't really what she was doing that was strange--- or at least, not more strange than any of the other things she found herself having to do lately. As far as unpleasantness went, for example, this was still a step up from the sewer, though whether her day stayed that way remained to be seen.

It was more that she just... didn't ever expect anything to happen to anyone. Not anyone she knew, anyway. Which was sort of the point of, well, not knowing anyone.

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Up until when the other Contacts--- that was what they called it, called themselves, Contacts, as if they were some kind of medium--- found her, Lyra had been doing a pretty good job of cutting off ties to anyone in her life. Which was what you did when the imaginary friend you'd had when you were a little kid showed back up again when you were in college, and started warning you about doom and gloom and the end of the world, because then you started having to think seriously about the possibility that you were having your psychotic break.

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And if you had enough presence of mind to recognize that this was what was happening, then the sensible thing to do was to minimize the collateral damage, right? Make it easier on everyone, so that when you did go nuts, no one was around to get hurt, and no one was too choked up over it.

Her friends would be able to tell the psych with perfect honesty that she'd been acting strange lately, isolating herself at home and being moody, all that classic stuff you heard about on the news.

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Classic warning signs of a killer, and all that. Which really made her wonder if those guys had been going through anything like what she had been going through back then, and if all the psychs had it the wrong way around.

She half expected to wake up to find herself covered in the blood and guts of some poor random bystander after every fight with Jericho's monsters. It hadn't happened, but the thought had been there. It was only after meeting Bastien and Luke that she had begun to accept that there might be other explanations for it.

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And to be honest, the relief she'd felt that it wasn't, you know, terminal psychosis was no joke. But it did also pretty neatly nix her plans of dying alone and taking all her secrets to the grave with her.

She still hadn't gotten back into regular contact with her college friends, and she was at least half certain that her school had kicked her out by now, but she became... well, if not 'friends', at least comfortable acquaintances with Luke and Bastien, and politely professional terms with their higher-ups.

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There had even been talk of introducing her more formally to them, or at least to some other Contacts whose home territories lay elsewhere, but they decided to take it slow so as not to overwhelm her.

The fact that they were worried about scaring her off probably said a lot--- about how much they needed her, and about just how much a mess she had looked when they'd first found her.

A sewer wasn't the best place to be making a good first impression though.

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So now she had people again, but Lyra had sort of been riding on the high of being not insane, or at least not insane alone. And if there was some rich guy funding the whole thing, and everyone was drinking the same Koolaid, there had to be something more to it than just finally snapping from the pressure of one finals season too many, right?

She'd conveniently forgotten that having people meant you could lose them too. And, perhaps more pertinently, that what they were doing was dangerous.

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The monsters were real alright, which meant that the havoc they caused was real too, and not just the result of some particularly grisly and creative self harm on Lyra's part. She'd always come out of it alive, but even nightmares still felt like dreams, and she could almost rationalize away the bruises and cuts she'd come away with.

The idea that they could die doing this... It wasn't that it didn't exist in her mind, but that it never felt concrete, maybe. Like it was just something they said.

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And to be perfectly fair, maybe their Oracle hadn't died. Maybe she was just... Lyra didn't know what. Not dead. Incapacitated, somehow. Maybe she had an alcoholic bender and was just having a real bad hangover.

... No, Lyra knew even as she thought it that it probably wasn't true. This wasn't the three-wishes, click-your-heels-and-go-back-home wizarding-world-of-Larry-Otter kind of magic. This was maybe more adjacent to those cursed video tapes some unsuspecting fool took home in a horror movie. If their Oracle had cut off contact, then whatever happened, it was going to be bad.

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"Hey," said Bastien. Lyra looked up, blinking at him. She hadn't even noticed that he had sped up to walk next to her. She was losing it; they'd put her on point and here she was getting distracted.

"Oh," said Lyra, pushing up a smile. It was a reflex, and it should have been easy. In her entire high school tenure, no one had seen through it once, even when she'd been dealing with the relatives who were suddenly interested in adopting her on account of her parents' estate.

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Bastien wasn't convinced though. A furrow appeared between his brows, and a frown tugged down the already downward-tugging corners of his mouth. "Don't overthink it," he said.

"Who's overthinking? You know I'm a man of action," said Lyra, thumping her chest with one hand.

"Yeah?" Bastien arched a brow at her in that way of his, the one that always made Lyra felt a little smaller, like all her bravado was falling in around her. He could do 'unruffled' like no one's business.

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Lyra bit back the urge to sigh. Sometimes she wished he'd throw her a bone here. Banter, she could do. She could throw quips back and forth with Luke all day, not that his responses were what she would have called 'quips'... Luke was maybe a little too straightforward, to the point of having a one track mind.

But what was she supposed to say to 'yeah'? The least he could give her was something to work with.

She wasn't about to admit he was right though.

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"You two talking strategy or something?" said Luke--- speaking of one track minds. But Lyra was glad for the intervention, and turned to him with that same smile turned up a few dozen watts.

"We're figuring out how we're going to break in. My vote is for Metal Gearing this. Get a bunch of boxes, and..." She could hear Bastien's sigh of exasperation, and he lengthened his stride, separating himself from the two of them. Well, that was his loss, if he didn't want in on this conversation.

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She stuck out her tongue at him, then resumed talking to Luke about the merits of crashing through an upper apartment window as an avenue of escape.

It wasn't even as inane a conversation as Bastien probably thought, actually. The buildings around them were all pretty tall. They weren't skyscrapers or anything, but it had been a while since they'd passed a single-storey affair.

The combination of their height and just how closely they were pressed together gave the alleyways a claustrophobic atmosphere.