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[Transcript]

        Hidden in a sun-dappled stretch of forest on the bright side of East Island, the Slanted Manse slept in lush ruin, unbothered by the previous night’s upheavals. Birds and insects filled the air with music soft as silence, and the shade made soothing peace between the summer heat and sourceless autumn chill. Spirits darted to and fro, nibbling on strange sources of interminable nourishment, as though the mansion’s wreckage was a whale fall that would never blanch to bone.

        Change, however, had still found its way to the Slanted Manse’s timeless sanctuary: Doorman and his friends were moving out.

        “That’s the last of the furniture,” Doorman said, tipping his hat to a squat little toaster as it jumped into the portal he had opened.

        A parade of chairs and teacups, loveseats, shelving, and duvets had been marching through his open jacket’s doorway for some fifteen minutes now. The objects that he and the Angel had animated over the years had always made for a clunky battalion of messengers and sentries, but Doorman’s group was as starved for personnel as Fauxbia was full of it. Nin’s copies and the sentient decor had done what they could to compensate for the many comrades they had lost in their long struggle... but now, with the Slanted Manse compromised, it was best if the fragile furniture dispersed to safer corners of the battlefield.

        Doorman was well aware, however, that there was nowhere left in Bayview that was ever truly safe. The stooping spirit plucked the key from his cyclopean keyhole countenance and shut his overcoat tight, as if to huddle from an ill wind only he could feel beneath the summer sunshine. Even the Manse had been a gamble, one that they had lost at last. Doorman and his allies had been hiding in a home whose former owner was their enemy... the only graveyard Davy Jones was less than eager to revisit or replace with a price-gouging strip mall. In the end, though, he was not the one who’d stumbled on their sanctuary.

        Doorman sighed, and the wind through the keyhole, as it left him, snuffed the last few fading embers of his power’s soft red glow. The shattered shards of the Great Sphinx were devious, and he didn’t dare count on their mercy now that they had glimpsed his hiding place. While the others sought new shelter, he would face his past mistakes. It was time that he declawed the sphinxes’ wicked schemes for good... and then, perhaps, he’d find the chance to set things right with Isaac.

        “Are you sure you wanna do this, Doormy?” Nin asked, scowling up at Doorman with more worry than frustration. 

        She was riding in repose upon his suitcase like a palanquin, carried by four other Nins she’d conjured to do all the heavy lifting. A complicated system of seniority theoretically governed which Nin could give orders to the others—a system that they frequently ignored, since each new copy shared the same brash and defiant personality.

        “You’re the one who saw the sphinxes making the first move. The danger’s at our doorstep, Nin, and now at Bayview Biddle School. Beyond my pick of fight or flight, I have no other choice.”

        “You could choose flight, dummy,” one Nin said.

        “Or wait for the Angel to call us back!” another Nin chimed in.

        “Time is of the essence... and I know what she would counsel,” Doorman answered, picking up his suitcase before the Nins beneath it could rebel and oust their passenger. “Our lady would advise me to remain in hiding, as she has for many years. She would remind me that my power, Master Lock, would spell disaster in the foul hands of the Fear Witch, or skewered on the hook of Davy Jones. If they could find the key that we had hoped to fabricate anew with Forge’s help, our foes would have a back door to the Great Unknown’s domain... to the power we have ever sought to grant our kindly Angel.”

        “...You make a great case against yourself,” a sulking Nin quipped from a tree branch.

        “I always have,” Doorman mused, eliciting a chorus of annoyed groans from the warren of rabbits encircling him. “I’ve preached the Angel’s peace because my past was rife with conflict. I spoke of justice as if I had ever served it... as if regret for our crusade was restitution for my crimes. I thought I’d learned my lesson well enough that I could teach it. What a fool I’ve been... and now I’ve failed another student.”

        “You’re failing ME if you get WASTED in a CAT FIGHT, Doormy!” Nin snarled, tugging on her ears in her frustration. “You ever think about THAT?! You ever think about ME?!”

        Doorman shone a brighter shade of brass beneath the sunlight.

        “You are always on my mind, Nin. As you do any lonely place, you have a tendency to fill it. I’ve never not been grateful for the smiles you surround me with, old friend.”

        “...You big dummy,” sniffed the Nin whose head he’d leant over to pat. “W-when have I smiled ONCE while stuck with you?” she grumbled, welling up with tears.

        Doorman chuckled.

        “For all your skill at hiding, Nin, you’ve never had the sleight to hide your heart.”

        The rabbit spirit’s red eyes blurred, then overflowed. She burbled out a comeback best phoneticized as “BRGGLUBBR!” and punched him twenty times with her soft fists.

        “...I hate when you get like this, Doorman,” another angry Nin said in a low voice, scowling up at him. “Like you’d be happy losing if your lost cause was correct. Like you deserve WORSE than the bad guys we’ve been fighting all this time!” She crossed her arms and shook her head. “None of us get anything but burned if you go all out in a blaze of guilty glory. That includes your stinky human student!”

        Doorman turned his back to her and took a step uphill.

        “This is not my first fight, Nin, nor will it be my last. There are many battles still ahead... risks and necessary evils I’ve avoided far too long.” The spirit slung his suitcase on his shoulder, glancing back at Nin and shimmering with featureless resolve. “You are young, Nin, and your memories blurred by your time as a grudge. When we first met thirteen years ago, it would not have strained your faith to hear these words: I’ve survived far worse than your worst fears for me... and I have slain a greater sphinx before.”

        A gallery of Nins scrunched up their snouts in worried pouts as Doorman started up the hill towards Bayview Biddle School.

        “Yeah, well! You still gotta take on a Witch and an ugly old vampire! So don’t get scratched to ribbons at some side show!”

        “We’ll be watching from the shadows! Don’t you try to be some kind of cringy hero, DORKMAN, or we’ll groan and blow our cover!”

        “I’m not gonna plead your hopeless case to the Angel, by the way! She’s gonna be MAD! Or, like, calmly disappointed!”

        “You’re not COOL just because you’re finally fighting, Doormy! You know what’s COOL? IDEOLOGICAL CONSISTENCY!”

        “If you win, you’re doing ALL the fights from now on! I’ve been in the TRENCHES this whole time, you lazy jerk!”

        The chorus of jeering faded to concern as Doorman waved a wordless goodbye, disappearing out of sight beyond the treeline.