"Okay, I think that’s everyone." I said, looking over at Callum since he was sitting on the couch the next afternoon, messing with Koda’s fur.

"No, that’s not everyone..." Callum said nervously.

"What do you mean that that’s not everyone?" Becky asked as she grabbed a can of soda from the fridge.

"I… May have invited someone else to join Y.A.K.S…."

I sighed heavily, knowing exactly who it was. "Really?"

"What?"

"You had to invite your little boyfriend?"

"Wait… Callum has a boyfriend?" Becky asked excitedly.

"We don’t get to see each other a lot since he goes to a different school and I want to introduce you guys to him!"

"Literally, Edward, Becky, and I already know the guy, Callum."

"Okay, but you don’t see me telling everyone about you and-"

"We are not going to talk about that because you are dating his best friend, Callum. At least when I suggested Erika, I brought it up to the group for approval. When you do it, it’s one big ole surprise!"

"She’s not wrong, Callum." Becky admitted. "You never tell anyone in the group when there’s another member coming in. Heck, you barely told us when Anna was coming in!"

"It leaves my mind, okay?" Callum groaned. "Besides, it kinda slipped my mind because of everything that happened yesterday."

"What exactly happened yesterday?" Becky asked.

"Long story." Callum and I said together.

"Hey Anna..." Edward said awkwardly, peeking his head out from the door to the basement. "Are we waiting for anyone else, or…?"

"Actually, we’re waiting for your best friend." I said, rolling my eyes. "Somebody didn’t mention that Damian was joining Y.A.K.S.."

"No way!" Edward said excitedly. He then looked down at his feet sheepishly. "Not that I’m not excited to be here without him. I actually rather like your house."

"Yeah." I said nervously. I heard a knock at the door. "That must be him, so tell everyone that we’ll be down in a sec."

"Got it." Edward said, quickly retreating to the basement.

"You two are so awkward together that it’s cute." Callum said as he got up and walked to the basement.

"Shut up Callum..." I said, glaring at Callum as he descended down.

"Am I missing something?" Becky asked as Koda got off of my lap and went downstairs.

"Most definitely." Koda said, Becky following him downstairs.

I answered the door, seeing Damian standing at the door carrying a bag of clothes in one hand, playing with the string of his blue sweatshirt with the other. He awkwardly smiled at me. "Hey..."

"You hurt Callum, I hurt you. Got it?"

Damian nodded nervously, running a hand through his hair. "Got it."

"Come on. Everyone’s waiting downstairs." I said, leading Damian downstairs. Everyone gave Damian a confused look as he just uneasily shifted his feet, looking like a fish out of water since we were all still in our school uniforms.

Callum got up, quickly walking over and hugging Damian. "Glad you could make it."

"These are probably going to be too big, but I brought you some of my older brother’s clothes until you and your aunt can go out and get more. This is kinda my fault, so..." Damian said, holding out the bag.

"Not your fault that my parents are asshats who can’t deal with the fact that I am dating a guy."

"Wait…" Edward said uneasily as he looked over at me, giving me a perplexed look. "Are they dating, or am I reading into this too much?"

"No, they’re dating." I said, clapping my hands. "Welcome to Y.A.K.S. everybody!"

"Since when are you president?" Callum asked, sitting down next to Damian.

"Until we’re working as a team, I’m taking over so that we can have team building exercises." I said, crossing my arms. "This is also known as my house my rules."

"I thought we already were working as a team?" Keisha asked uneasily.

"Yes, but now we have to throw Damian into the mix. Even before I knew he was coming, I was gonna make us do this." I said, turning on the TV. "Now, when I told my father that we were doing this, he thought I was crazy. Back in college, when he bought this at an antique store, this game ruined a many friendships. The goal for this, however, is to form friendships. A couple rivalries may be formed, but for the most part friendships."

"What exactly are we doing?" Trayvon asked.

"We are going to be playing a video game." I said, grabbing the four Nintendo Switch controllers as the Switch turned on.

"Okay, but what game?" Keisha asked hesitantly.

"Super Mario Party."

"YES!" Keisha cheered. "We play that game all the time at home!"

"Really?" Becky asked genuinely surprised.

"Yeah. My dad has this thing with old video game devices. Every Friday, we have family game night. The amount of times I have beat that man at Super Smash Bros with Joker as my main."

"Well, then hopefully you can help Becky." I said, handing the controller to Keisha.

"What?" Keisha asked, her eyes blinking in surprise.

"The game is four players only, Keisha. Since there’s eight of us, we’re gonna be doing teams of two with someone who you wouldn’t normally work with. You two are the only ones I have preassigned. I didn’t know that Damian was coming, so everyone else is up in the air."

Damian looked over at Erika. "You’re Erika, right?"

"Yeah..."

"Wanna partner up?"

"Sure." Erika said as I handed her a controller.

"Anna, you and me?" Trayvon asked.

"Yeah, which means that Callum and Edward are together."

"Great!" Edward said happily as I handed the red controller to Callum, keeping the blue one for me and Trayvon.

"Okay, make sure you talk with your partner about what character you guys want to play with." I said, sitting down next to Trayvon.

"What do you want me to do?" Koda asked.

Damian’s eyes widened. "The dog-"

"Yes, the dog talks." Edward interrupted. "We have been through this multiple times in the group already. Just accept the weirdness and move on."

"Well, you do know how to read, right?" I asked.

"Yeah. My mom taught me before I got adopted."

"Dogs know how to read. Who knew?" Becky said, shrugging at Keisha.

"Well, the voice acted lines in here are just random noises. Why don’t you read them out loud?"

"Okay."

"So… What character do we want?" Trayvon asked, motioning to the screen. It seemed that Becky and Keisha had already chosen Bowser as their character.

"I mean… My dad told me that Daisy is a pretty good character. Wanna do Daisy?" I suggested.

"Daisy is the pink one, right?"

"No. The pink one is Peach. The orange one is Daisy."

"Then who the heck is the blue one?"

"Rosalina, I think. I don’t remember. My dad needs to re-educate me on Mario characters." I said, shrugging as I clicked on Daisy’s picture.

"My dad was never really around for that kind of thing. I don’t even really know who Mario and Luigi are."

"Me too, honestly." I said, shrugging. "I get confused between the colors. Who's red, who's green, who's yellow, who's purple, I can't tell the difference!"

The game started after Callum and Edward had chosen Mario as their character. We played the game for about an hour with me and Trayvon somehow securing a win after getting all of the bonus stars at the end of the game. There was lots of yelling and screaming with both Becky and Keisha yelling at everyone else because they were in last place, Erika and Damian just chilling in the background and laughing at the chaos as it unfolded, and Callum and Edward just antagonized me and Trayvon as we made small talk about random TV shows that we didn’t realize we were both into.

When the game finally ended, I looked at the others. "That’s all I really had planned for today, so you’re all free to go."

"Keisha, Erika, Trayvon, to my car!" Becky said cheerfully as she started walking upstairs.

"When Season 5 of House Full of Aliens drops next week on Hulu, we need to meet up to watch it." Trayvon said excitedly.

"Definitely." I agreed. "Season 4 definitely left on a cliffhanger when Kimmy got kidnapped by the Federation of Extraterrestrials."

"Text later to figure out a day?"

"Definitely." I said, waving goodbye as Trayvon walked the rest of the way up the stairs.

"You need a ride to your aunt’s place?" Damian asked Callum.

Callum nodded. "Yeah. She doesn’t get off until six."

"Cool." Damian said, turning around to look at Edward. "Do you need a ride too?"

"No. Uncle Frederick should be here soon." Edward said quickly.

"Okay." Damian said, shrugging. "I’ll see you two on Friday to talk about the Herbstreit thing, right?"

"Yeah. We’ll see you then." I said, waving goodbye as the two walked up the stairs. I looked over at Koda. "Hey Koda, why don’t you go wait upstairs for Dad?"

"Why?"

"I just wanna talk to Edward about something. Alone."

"Okay." Koda said, walking back upstairs as Edward silently followed him, closing the basement door.

Edward walked back downstairs, sitting down on the ground. "Okay. We’re alone."

"That we are." I said awkwardly. "So… What exactly did you want to tell me yesterday?"

"Are you sure you want to hear this, because once you know, there’s no going back. The only other person outside my family who knows is Damian, and that’s only because we’ve been friends since we were five."

"Sounds serious."

"National security serious."

"If you want to tell me, just go ahead and tell me." I said, sitting down on the ground. "I won’t judge."

Edward sighed for a second, as if regretting this decision, then sat down across from me. "Okay, but you absolutely under any circumstances can not tell anyone what I’m about to tell you."

"Okay."

"I mean it, Anna. I’m being dead serious."

"I get it!"

"Are you sure you-"

"YES!" I said, laughing a bit as I said it. "I am absolutely positively sure I know the severity of what you’re going to tell me. God, you’re acting like this is a matter of life and death."

"That’s because it is..." Edward said nervously.

"What do you mean?" I asked hesitantly.

Edward fumbled with his hands nervously, as if trying to calm himself down. "You see, my family is… Extremely influential in England."

"How?"

"That’s… Complicated too, but-"

"What isn’t complicated with you?"

"Look, my family is huge. Like… Really big." Edward said, taking a deep breath before he continued talking. "We were peaceful. It was me, my mom and dad, my older brother, and my little sister. When I got my power at age fourteen, Mom and Dad started training me on how to control it right away. My little sister got her power two years later when she was twelve and they put us in training together. My brother never got his powers.

"Eventually, with rising tension in my family, my brother started separating from us. I was really confused since we were always so close, but then he suddenly just pulled away like I didn’t even matter. Then, end of the school year last year, I found out why my brother had been avoiding me.

"He was off at university since he was nineteen years old and he became friends with a bunch of powerless people who didn’t like the fact that people with unnatural abilities were in charge of everything. They turned my brother against my family, made him resent me and the rest of my family all because he was the only one born without powers."

"I thought that everyone was cool with the lax rules in England."

"That’s how King Edwin and Queen Delia made it seem. I always knew that there were people who didn’t agree with their rules or even the fact that they had powers and were in charge, but I didn’t know how… Radical some people could get over it until he… He…"

"What did he do?" I asked calmly, this story sounding eerily familiar.

"After dinner one night, he was home for a visit since it was our parents’ wedding anniversary, and he opened up the window, sneaking his friends inside the house. First, they snuck into my parent’s bedroom. One of his friends held a pillow over my mother’s face until she suffocated to death. I think my father heard her muffled screams, because the next thing I knew, I was being woken up by one of my brother’s friends firing off a gun in my parents’ bedroom."

"Oh my God..."

"They pulled me and my sister out of our rooms and took us to the main part of our… Our house. My brother told us that he and his friends had killed our parents. We started begging for him not to kill us and he just looked over at me with total disgust in his eyes. He asked one of his friends for a gun, and then," Edward explained, taking off his blazer and unbuttoning his white collared shirt, surprising me that some of his skin, especially near his torso, was almost as pale as me. He pointed to a spot on his torso, where his pale skin and his darker skin met, a visible scar about as big as his thumb easily shown on his skin. "He shot me. He didn’t shoot my sister since he didn't feel right doing it because she was only thirteen, so he keeps her as his captive. Only reason I’m alive right now is Frederick."

"What did he do?" I asked, struggling to hide my surprise from his different skin colors.

"It’s called vitiligo." Edward explained, buttoning up his shirt again, probably in case my dad came down and didn’t get the wrong idea. "Some parts of my skin just lose pigmentation. Only affects one percent of the world population. It’s not that big of a deal, really. I have patches like that all over my skin."

"All over?"

"Right now, when I wear clothes that show those places, I have to wear makeup to cover them up to keep people from recognizing me."

"Why would they recognize you?"

"You’ll understand when I finish my story." Edward said, smiling nervously.

"Well, continue. You were at the part where Frederick saves you."

"Right. He convinced my brother that he was on my side and that he was going to throw me out back, and he safely got me out of the house and got me checked out. As soon as I was healed, the two of us got on a plane and came here. He talked to your president about what happened and she granted me asylum here until I graduate from college. Then, I can go back to England and face my brother. Until then, I’m forced to deal with my brother out here, being powerless to do anything to take care of him myself." Edward concluded. "When we got to Megatropolis, Beth was informed of the situation and she suggested that I join Y.A.K.S. for my own safety."

"Wait… If your brother is constantly in the news, then why hasn’t your parents’ deaths been in the news?" I realized, giving Edward a confused look. "And why do you have to wait until college?"

"It’s because my brother is covering up the deaths, saying that our parents are just sick and that he’s in charge while they’re out. As for me... He's just neglecting to tell anyone about me for... Reasons."

I tilted my head, realizing that the things Edward had explained about England and rising tensions were only things that one person would know. Edward wasn’t even his real name. Hoping that I wasn’t just taking a stab in the dark, I took a hesitant breath. "You’re Braylen Winchester, aren’t you? The Crown Prince of England."

"I’m not surprised you figured it out. You are pretty smart." Braylen said uneasily.

"And you can’t go back home until you’re of age to take back the throne, right?"

"Maybe much smarter than people give you credit for."

"Do I have that all right?"

"Yes, you do."

"Oh my God. All those times you glared at the TV, those times I jokingly called you Prince Charming, the fact that you knew that Princess Camille was hiding behind the wall, the fact that he's been keeping you out of the news, why you froze when I yelled at you at that party, it all makes sense now."

"You can’t tell anyone." Braylen said quickly. "If Alex finds out that I’m alive, he is going to kill everyone I care about. Camille, Frederick, Damian… You."

"You care about me?" I asked hesitantly.

"Of course I care about you, Anna." Braylen said, rolling his eyes a bit. "Why do you think I even told you this to begin with?"

"Because we kissed yesterday an- Oh shit I’ve kissed a prince." I said, the fact just dawning on me.

"Because I care about you way more than I want to admit." Braylen said, reaching over and grabbing my hand, some of his pale skin peeking out from underneath his sleeves. "First thing Fredrick told me when we got here was to not get attached to anyone because they’d just be another casualty, but Godamnit, I just had to get attached to you."

"Am I the only one you’re attached to here?"

"No, I like everyone else, but..."

"You have feelings for me." I said slowly.

"Yes." Braylen said nervously. "I know that this is kinda fast, and I know that you probably don’t feel the same way, but-"

"Who said I didn’t feel the same way?" I asked, giving Braylen a confused look.

"I mean, based on your reaction yesterday-"

"Ed-Braylen, I was surprised because most people don’t just normally don’t lean over and randomly kiss a person."

"So are you saying that you have feelings for me too?"

"I think so, but I don’t know because I’ve never gotten that… Butterfly feeling with anyone else before so I feel lots of confusion and stuff like that-"

"Oh thank God, I thought I was the only one of us who thought that way." Braylen said uneasily, laughing a bit.

I nervously laughed with him until we were awkwardly quiet for a couple minutes. "So… What do we do now?"

"I don’t know." Braylen said uneasily. "My mom and dad never really let me out of the castle because they always intended for me to marry this princess girl who was always kinda mean to me so I don’t really know where to go from here."

"Do we start dating now?"

"Maybe?" Braylen said uneasily. "I really don’t want to force anything-"

"I don’t want to force anything either." I said, taking a deep breath. "I got an idea."

"Okay..."

"Why don’t we just play this thing by ear and see where it goes? That way, there’s no real pressure for anything."

"I like that idea." Braylen said happily. "Let’s play it by ear."

"Glad we got that figured out." I said happily.

Braylen smiled at me slyly. "So… I was your first kiss?"

"Maybe..." I said honestly, feeling my face heat up.

"You look really cute when you blush."

"If you think I look cute when I blush, you should see me with a sunburn." I said awkwardly.

Braylen bursted out into laughter, a wide smile growing on his face. "That was a really bad joke."

"It was a bad joke." I agreed, laughing with him.

Dad opened up the basement door. "Hey Ed, your uncle is waiting by the door."

"Okay!" Braylen yelled, then turned back to me. "See you at school tomorrow?"

"Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow, Edward." I said, winking playfully at Braylen.

He laughed, grabbing his school bag as we walked back upstairs. Braylen waved at me once more, then closed the door. Dad looked at me, elbowing me playfully as he smirked. "Did something happen between you two?"

"What? No. Why would you ask that?"

"You’re blushing up a storm, honey."

"Nothing happened!"

"Okay okay, I’m teasing. Help me make dinner?"

I nodded, glad that today had gone off as smoothly as I hoped, though I was still concerned about Braylen’s family. Hopefully, England could survive until he was old enough. If not, he’d have a broken country on his hands, even more broken than America is now. If his brother ruined England, things were going to get messier than they already were.