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Nigel Arden was a serious man and he liked it that way. He comported himself seriously, he refused to dignify unnecessary silliness with a response, and he demanded that other people take him seriously. So few of his children had ever understood the concept that one needed to be taken seriously in the world if one wanted to accomplish anything—Avery, the first of them to die or mysteriously go missing, certainly hadn’t understood that—but Nigel Arden understood such things perfectly well. That was why he scarcely wasted time on laughter, and why he didn’t bother smiling unless he had something to smile about.

It was also why, when one of the brightly colored freaks who troubled Destiny City bumped into him, Nigel Arden firmly stood his ground and glared right back at him. Whatever these hooligans thought they were doing, running around in such outfits and looking like they did and causing so much trouble all the time, Nigel Arden was not one to be pushed around by the likes of them. If they thought themselves special because they had no sense of shame or decorum, then they had bloody well think again.

“Whatever form of clinical insanity causes you vigilantes to act the way you do,” he said coldly, in the same tone of voice that he’d usually used when disciplining his children, “it hardly gives you any right to expect normal people to cater to you.”

Yet, under the streetlamp-halo and the vivid streaks of color from the meteor shower above, something about this particular brightly colored, vigilante freak struck a chord in Nigel Arden’s memory. He couldn’t entirely place it. Couldn’t entirely think of why. He’d never seen the man before him in his life, he knew that much. So, he couldn’t at all understand why he felt this odd sense of recognition.

“Exactly who do you think you are,” Nigel Arden demanded, narrowing his eyes and fully expecting that this would intimidate his would-be assaulter. It was a double-edged question, both an indictment of the vigilante freak’s impudence and a demand for a name. But it didn’t matter.

Nigel Arden didn’t get to hear the answer.

Rushing out of the dark of a nearby alley, a pair of massive claws rushed toward Nigel Arden. They grabbed at him and, moving on unnaturally stretchy arms, pulled him in closer. Pain whited out everything else he could have noticed as they rent and tore at him, as the very dark around him seemed to throb with unnatural life, as if the humidity in the air were the slobber of some great and terrible, unfathomable beast.

If Dunnottar wanted an answer out of Nigel Arden, it never came. The only thing coming from him was screams of pain and terror as the monster—whatever it was—ripped him limb from limb.

It was a miracle that, through it all, the man managed to think at all about what the vigilante freak had said, accusing him of being happy that one of his sons had disappeared and likely died. Authorities had found the car and Avery’s old phone abandoned up in Maine, but given the way Avery had so recently come close to flunking out of DCU, what was Nigel Arden supposed to have thought? Dramatics—behavior such as running away like that—were just childish lashing out on Avery’s part.

The actual answer came in the form of another powered aura running onto the scene. Kaifeng and Helene had gone out together tonight, then split up to cover more ground. They were going to reconvene in a nearby park in a little while, and mostly, Kaifeng hadn’t run into any trouble tonight. When he’d felt another Order aura, he’d followed it in the hopes of running into a friend—whether an old one or a new one. Even as he’d gotten close enough to pick up the feeling of a youma’s aura, Kaifeng had assumed that he’d get there and find the situation handled. Pages and just-starting-out senshi could be strong, clever, and resourceful, same as any Squire, Knight, Eternal, Super, or Princess senshi.

That was distinctly not what Kaifeng found waiting for him.

Instead, he heard the screams of pain and terror coming from the alleyway. He saw the Page (wearing what he recognized easily as Lysithean colors and the Lysithea symbol, the crescent tiara with a unicorn horn in the center and little earsies on the side). He heard the guttural snarls and other messy noises from the youma (which would have sounded great layered over the right death metal song, but that was beside the point right now).

And as he darted in, Kaifeng saw that the Page didn’t seem to be moving in to fight the youma and save the civilian. Oh no, poor guy. He looked fairly close to Kaifeng’s own age, but that had a perfectly reasonable built-in explanation for the fear: going for nearly thirty years without magic and monsters and all of it being real could throw anybody through a loop, and being confronted with the visceral reality of it like this? That could all too easily upset anybody.

“Don’t worry, gege,” Kaifeng told him gently, giving the Page a nod. “I’ve got this.”

Time being of the essence, Kaifeng didn’t channel his usual magic pool. Running into the alley and squaring up with the youma, he swung his bamboo club in the way that called on its spell. The cold air that rushed toward the youma took it out easily, despite its size and the general scare factor of it looking like someone had mashed up some kind of ooze monster with the Xenomorphs from the Alien movies. The bigger they were, the more satisfying it was to topple them.

At least, until Kaifeng looked down at the civilian left behind by all of this.…… Oh. Oh, he really was quite mangled, wasn’t he? That……

Kaifeng knew plenty of people with healing magic. Some of them had helped him very directly in battles before. But he was pretty sure this would have been well outside the bounds of what most of them could easily fix.

Kaifeng hadn’t expected the Lysithea Page to follow him into the alley, even after he’d dusted the youma. He also hadn’t expected any explanation of what had happened, since from the outside, it had seemed so straightforward, to him? But apparently, not so much.

Apparently, this wasn’t a case of the Page getting struck with nerves and frozen in terror.

Expression open and earnest, Kaifeng listened to the Page and nodded sympathetically. “My condolences, gege,” he said gently. “Your friend is lucky to be remembered by someone who cares so much for him, even if his father was some kind of ‘better to bury the son’ type.”

Kaifeng still recalled the stories like that from The Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars, recalled hearing them from Zhìháo’s parents and grandparents, always told as if they were unimpeachable cultural wisdom from the Yang dynasty when all they sounded like, to Kaifeng (at least, now, in retrospect), was somebody telling him that they were entitled to hurt him however they wanted.

He held out a hand, intending to introduce himself—but before he could, a bright light and a whoosh outside the alley made him snap to attention. A car rushing by. They hadn’t stopped, but that didn’t mean someone else wouldn’t—“Kaifeng of Saturn,” he said with a small smile, “and we should get out of here. I don’t think your friend would want you to take the fall for this when you didn’t do anything wrong.”

Maybe that was a debatable matter in some people’s minds, but……well. Kaifeng disagreed. Deliberately letting your late friend’s abuser die made perfect sense to him. And frankly, the fact that he spotted a little rainbow-colored charm on the ground made Kaifeng feel like the universe agreed with him.