I have slept very little over the last few days. My best friend was kidnapped. It’s the League’s fault for not protecting the people around me or being honest. It’s my fault for letting her go alone that day, especially knowing that it’s me Stone is after.

Yesterday, I finally blew up in everyone’s face about it. Not literally. The base and the League’s members still stand, but I don’t know. Can I still call them my friends? My allies?

I can understand the need for a buddy system, but it was made around me without anyone telling me what I already knew, or more. They at least suspected that Stone was looking for me before the investigation of the other victims was underway.

The first girl was a hero working under M.E.T.A. They had tried and failed to track her. She was kidnapped right after the mass invasion.

As for the second, she was taken at that basketball game I went to. Nobody knows how the Arachne Regime even knew to look there, or when. The best anyone can guess is that we’re being closely watched or listened to, possibly through a spy.

I was on my way to go swimming with Denise, the day before my mom and I left Paragon by train, when the attempt was made on the third girl. If there was any sort of spy, it couldn’t have been the founding members because they all knew who I was already, behind my mask. It couldn’t be our newest, eleventh member–who Walter expressed a likelihood that he might not be staying with the League for very long–because he’s too new. I’m sure Rampart knows me as well.

Wait, yes he does. He was at my birthday celebration.

So then Blaze or Dissarap?

Maybe I’m just getting paranoid. There’s no further proof that we have a spy. In fact, there’s more proof that Doctor Terrell might be Swan Diva.

Then, at school, people can’t figure out how to approach me. They’re avoiding me awkwardly, even though so many of them looked like they wanted to say something.

This has been . . . a week.

No kidding, right? Where do I begin?

The Monday after I last wrote you, I was getting dressed for P.E. when a few of the girls hugged me all out of the blue. They wanted me to join them, not because, after so many months, they finally recognized me as one of the girls, but because they were sorry for what had happened, and proud to know the girl behind Pixeletta.

On Sunday I joined some heroes as they raided a potential nest of low-level villains. When we got there, our suspicions were right, and we took down a heavily armed base full of Arachne Regime agents. We interrogated them afterward for the location of Stone and the girls.

The villains refused to give up Stone, but said that he was acting on his own. I’m not sure how much I believe that.

I spent the next couple days helping other heroes with their tasks, and asking around town. One villain I took down said she would help me if she could, because there are some things that most villains don’t do. I think she called people who do those things “gutless pieces of shit who had given up the right to live.”

Wow, even quoting her, saying that word feels wrong.

While out on one of my patrols, I found Walter sitting in a diner. Actually feeling bad about running out on the League like I’d done, I popped in to say hello to him. He had just finished looking over a letter when I caught his attention.

We’re equally unhappy with one another, and have a mutual understanding on that. He told me that I don’t have to play the bait if I don’t want to, nor do I have to come back to the League’s base until I’m ready, but that I was welcome. I don't know if I believe that, either.

I asked him if the letter I spotted him with was anything important. He said it was a job offer overseas, one he would consider if he didn’t already have a job here at home. He promised me that he would get Denise and the other girls back before that happened.

Hello, irony, my name is Judy Tanimoto.

I started talking to everyone in the League again over the weekend. But I still haven’t gone back to the base, and we still haven’t gone into full-fledged conversations or casual banter. Then, in a twist of events, a gang appeared, dressed in torn straight-jackets and odd masks, that attacked the M.E.T.A. headquarters.

I can’t say where those are, of course, but I can say that was the first time I have ever stepped inside their facility. I did so with the League’s ten members—Walter had to let the newest member go like he suspected he might—and we helped get the situation under control. The gang we took down, by the way, was full of mutants born from science experiments, and they were bent on world domination despite their paranoia and physical deformities.

A few of the others from the League expressed an interest in looking into the whereabouts of the lab those gang members had come from, but we all agreed that dealing with Stone was our top priority.

Even if they’d managed to turn the M.E.T.A. headquarters into a madhouse for a few hours.

Meanwhile, my new ”friends” in school are gossiping away. One of them said that the homeless folks around the corner from her house have been acting strangely. I wouldn’t be mentioning it, but Walter told me over the week that the mayor had sent him a message about a growing restlessness in the shanty colony south of here, in Shiva Bay.

I’ve received a message to meet someone in private. That’s dangerous. It’s also directing me to that brothel I once saw in the shanty colony. I don’t know about this.

The way I received the message was through that girl I mentioned last Friday. She lives close enough to the shelter and the shanty colony that someone gave her family a folded note to be handed to me.

Again, this is so suspicious, but something about it is pulling at me. I’m trying to work up the nerve to ask for help from someone in the League so I don’t have to go alone. I’ll try to go by Sunday night.

If I can’t ask for help, then I’ll leave a note inside the base for the others to find, telling them that I’ve gone to look inside a trap.