Greg Veder was painfully bored.
He went to school, talked to Sparky and Tay-Tay, and went home. Then he logged onto PHO as XxVoid_CowboyxX and spent the rest of the evening bouncing between conspiracy threads, cape discussions, and the increasingly disappointing reality that GStringGirl still wasn’t around.
It sucked. Sure, there were other people online. Lots of them. But most were idiots or boring, which was arguably worse.
Greg scrolled through another thread discussing Anakin Skywalker and immediately regretted it. Half the posters thought he was a Case Fifty-Three. The other half thought he was some secret government project. And one particularly dedicated user had somehow concluded he was an escaped pseudo-Endbringer.
Greg closed the thread before he lost more brain cells.
Nobody knew anything. Which made sense, since the PRT was keeping the guy locked down tighter than a Tinker vault.
But that was another problem. The whole reason Greg had wanted to meet Anakin in the first place was because of GStringGirl.
Anakin clearly knew weird stuff. GStringGirl had weird problems. The solution had practically presented itself. Then the PRT had grabbed Anakin before Greg could even get close, and now everything was stalled.
He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling of his bedroom.
The glow-in-the-dark stars he’d stuck there years ago looked back at him. One of them was peeling.
Greg narrowed his eyes.
His life had become unbelievably lame, a revolving door of school, home, PHO, and sleep. Even his conspiracy hunting had lost its appeal because every road led back to the same Cauldron-shaped hole.
Anakin Skywalker was sitting somewhere inside PRT custody, and Greg couldn’t do anything about it.
His gaze drifted toward his computer desk, then toward the window, and finally back toward the ceiling.
His brow furrowed.
Wait.
Why was he assuming Anakin was staying with the PRT?
The thought hit him so suddenly that Greg sat upright.
“Hold on.”
Anakin Skywalker wasn’t some random guy.
The man could fight capes single-handedly and knew enough about secret conspiracies to make most PHO threads look amateur. Someone like that wasn’t going to spend his time sitting in a government building forever. And once he was out, he wasn’t going to stay in a motel or some temporary housing arrangement.
That was ridiculous.
The more Greg thought about it, the more obvious it became.
Of course Anakin had a base. Every important person had a base.
Heroes had headquarters, villains had hideouts, and conspiracy theorists had bunkers. So Anakin Skywalker absolutely had some kind of secret lair.
Maybe it was underground. Maybe it was hidden in the Docks. Maybe it was disguised as something normal. The details weren’t important. What mattered was that it existed.
And if it existed…
A grin slowly spread across his face.
That was it.
That was actually it.
All Greg had to do was find said lair, and maybe there would be something there that could help GStringGirl. Or at the very least, make her interested enough to talk to him again.