I laughed. "You're probably right about that. We don't even do our social media. I assume it's being done either by our board's staff or maybe by someone on the 'for profit' side of the operation. So far as I know, no part of the League released the dragon video, though."

I thought about that. I'd never asked who did our social media. For all I knew, someone on the board thought it would do some good.

Coming back to myself, I continued, "You might be right about not caring who knows his secret identity. If he grew up in a compound, he might not have one."

Jeremy nodded. "I heard once that the massively strange metahumans stay in the compounds. The guy who told me about that one was arguing that they were the true cause of all the so-called alien sightings in the 1970's. But you've told me that the aliens were real, so..."

Haley and I looked at each other.

Jeremy noticed our look and frowned. "I guess that's another theory down the drain."

"We didn't see anything like that," Haley said, pulling herself up to sit on the top bunk.

"On the other hand," I said, "we were invaded by goblins, ogres, trolls, assorted faeries, and a dragon. Plus, we discovered that the Castle Rock Compound has a level of completely unoccupied prison cells under the compound."

Jeremy stared at Haley and me, his eyes widening. "No shit."

Haley nodded. "Totally true. We had to break out."

For a moment, he didn't breathe, but then he said, "So what you're telling me is that the news reports skipped the interesting stuff. Are you going to spill it or what?"

Haley leaned a little forward, putting her hands on the bed. "I'm not going to be able to stay for the whole story. There's still freshman orientation stuff I need to go to."

For the rest of the afternoon, Haley and I told him about the summer. Haley left after we got all of my stuff upstairs. I spent the rest of the time telling Jeremy about the summer.

When I was done, we were both sitting at our desks, and he was shaking his head. "That's kind of convoluted. I had no idea Dark Cloak got his powers from faeries, but since he did, it makes sense that he'd bring in a dragon to do his dirty work. It's weird that he's working with the Coffeeshop Illuminati though, and even weirder that they were behind overthrowing Turkmenistan's government. How's your hand?"

I shrugged. "It works normally. Paladin's healed worse."

Jeremy's eyes fell on the books on his bookshelf. In addition to textbooks, it held books of conspiracy theories, more than one of which mentioned Lee, my fighting teacher. Others argued that there were no aliens and that the Abominator fight in the 1970s had been fabricated by our government.

The covers were full of exclamation points.

"You know what's crazy? With all the conspiracy theories I've read, I've never run across the Coffeeshop Illuminati. Even stranger, I think I've run into them."

I sat up in my chair. "Seriously? How?"

Jeremy twisted his hand, pointing his thumb toward his laptop. "Online super and conspiracy forums. Lots of people write about things that are happening nearby and sometimes you get people who aren't forum regulars asking questions. That's no big deal because there are always lurkers, but this guy started asking me lots of questions about Grand Lake and if I'd ever seen the Rocket or knew anyone who I thought might be the Rocket and what times did the Rocket most often appear? You know, that kind of thing. I couldn't say anything much because of the Block, but this was going on in the middle of summer when everything was going down for you guys."

I felt a chill go through me. "You don't think they knew that you knew me, do you?"

Jeremy shook his head. "No chance. Everybody on that forum knows I go to school in Grand Lake. It's my claim to fame, and I've answered a lot of questions about it, but thanks to the Block, I can't say anything dangerous."

"Yeah," I said. "But watch out, okay? If it feels like someone is asking too many questions, let me know. "

"If that does happen, how will you handle it?" He asked.

It was a good question because I wasn't completely sure what the answer was even as I replied. "Well, first of all, I think we'd make sure that you didn't get kidnapped or killed. Uh... After that, I think we'd check out how people contacted you so that maybe we could find them before they did anything."

Jeremy nodded. "I can see that, but you know what that last bit reminds me of? It's totally different, but you know what you can do if you want to find Kid Biohack?"

I shook my head.

Jeremy grinned. "This is great... Get this. He posts his fights live but with a lag. Just follow his YouTube channel."