[center][color=bb0a1e][sub][i][b]"When a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth."[/b][/i][/sub]
[sub][b]-Anatomy[/b][/sub][/color][/center]

Two years had gone by. Two summers, two winters. Two years worth of rain, sunshine, sunrises, and sunsets. Two years without Julian, without the Renegades, and the world didn't even notice. Edge Towers stood through it all, nearly empty, a monument to the casual, barbaric indifference of the planet Earth. Stone, stoic, sterile, at least from the outside. Within, beyond the notice of Eilidh, the towers' nominal caretaker, memories and emotion boiled and seethed in the empty rooms and dusty halls. While Eilidh was the Renegades' last trace, their remnant, this building was something else. A haunted house. A reminder. A legacy.

Dandelion sensed visitors. Their voices vibrated through the walls and floors, and the smell of their sweat and cloying chemical unguents wafted through the ventilation ducts. Eilidh's presence was normal, her behavior patterns were predictable, based on routine, easy to avoid. There were three new people. Two familiar, one not. Nor were these strangers the usual sort of doorknockers; proselytizers, repairmen, trick-or-treaters... On odd occasions someone from LexCorp or the Justice League would drop by, but these were not them either. A chord of fear ran through Dandelion's spiderweb of flesh at the unexplained presence of these strangers. Any inexplicable visitor could be someone from S.T.A.R. Labs, having seen through Dandelion's ruse and been sent to collect them. This was almost certainly not the case, but Dandelion only survived this long by being careful.

Feeling inquisitive and territorial, Dandelion pressed their senses to where the gathering was drawing together. Voices echoed off the towers' walls and ceilings, and Dandelion listened. The vents, sprinklers, and other unseen orifices into the building's superstructure were all akin to eyes and tongues to Dandelion, observing unseen, as they had done for the last two years. This tower had become their body; its titanium girders were their bones, and its glass exterior Dandelion's skin. So spread out they were through every gap and seam and functional system of the building, that even psychic Eilidh had spent the last two years ignorant of their presence. The Dandelion she had known was a concentrated being, with a mind like a swarm of buzzing insects. Now, metastasized through such a massive space, their presence was much more diffuse, below notice. A barely-perceptible hum, like white noise.

Dandelion had not felt the need to speak or reach out to her at all in this time. What was there to say? Their earlier attempts at psychic contact had borne no fruit, and their friends, the second family Dandelion had ever known, had abandoned them. Sometimes, in the first year, when someone had tried to put another team in the tower, Dandelion had emerged at night to observe her as she slept, wondering if the secret to curing Dandelion's loneliness was still locked in her dreaming mind. But failure eventually gave way to bitterness, and Dandelion wondered if there was any point to connecting with human beings at all.

Still, Dandelion's curiosity remained, even if it was tempered by caution. For now, they made no move. Like a patient hunter, they watched, waited. The door was open, the shades were drawn, the halls were empty. Dandelion was hungry.