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It was a great day, the day they first came to Auradon. It was what they'd been hoping for for so long, for them and nearly everyone they knew. It meant freedom, it meant possibilities, it meant the future. They should have been overjoyed.And in the beginning, they were.They packed in a rush, not wanting to waste a moment, just in case they would miss the car. Just in case they needed to be on time, or half an hour early. Just in case someone would try to stop them. Just in case they would turn around and the glittering invitation of hopes and dreams and life and everything it represented - to them, to all the kids they knew - would dissolve in a puff of dust, and it was never real after all.Just in case.Things from the treehouse that had served as their headquarters ever since their little ad hoc agency had started, in the form of little Harry and Jace huddling together up there for hours trying to piece together the clues of what had happened to their long-dead siblings, pudgy fingers mispelling names and dates and last-seen-bys in messy handwriting, were thrown into various bags and suitcases. It didn't matter whose; everything up here belonged to all of them. They'd go through their things once they finally got to Auradon and see where to put everything.The treehouse looked bare and empty, even though not much had been up here in the first place. It was surprising how desolate the place looked when all the papers detailing every case were removed, the floor clean, the table clear, no more stacks and stacks of papers threatening to fall over in the corners. The three chairs, only one with four legs, and the carpet gone, sold quickly in the market in case they'll need money in Auradon. Their emergency stash of food and supplies donated to that orphanage named after Carlos.And just like that, their life in this treehouse was over. Everything that made it theirs was gone.None of them were very anxious to leave all of a sudden. They stood on the ground looking up at it; at the beams warped from rain, the crooked roof. Remembering the feeling of wood beneath their fingers, the comforting patter of rain on the thin roof.The treehouse was their headquarters. The treehouse was their home.Everyone knew: to find the detective agency, look in the treehouse. One of them, at least, would always be there. Half of them would be sleeping in there on any given night. To be without it felt...strange, in a bad way, and they hadn't even lost it yet."We still have the papers," Hermie reminded everyone. The papers, detailing every case they had ever taken, notebooks and folders stuffed into everyone's backpacks, records of the past decade of the Isle. The papers were the history of the Isle, or at least the past ten years of it. And not the history of the important things, like Maleficent's and the Evil Queen's battle to become ruler of the Isle. The history of the things that mattered only to them, the children of the Isle, the weak, the unimportant, the powerless. Disappearances and thefts and deaths that didn't matter to the big names on the Isle, and so people came to the Baduns. That what was in the papers. That was what was important, even more than the treehouse.They could set up a new detective agency in Auradon without the treehouse, but not without the papers.Feeling more lighthearted, they hurried to the car from Auradon.There was a bit of a holdup at first, when Eddie tried to bring the table from the treehouse with them.It was a small enough table that it could fit in the trunk of the car, since they'd all be bringing their bags and backpacks and so on into the car with them. They were not going to be separated from their possessions, thank you very much. Especially aforesaid papers.But the driver refused, smoke puffing up from his cigarette, on the grounds that he was here to bring six teenagers and their luggage to Auradon, and nobody had said anything about any furniture. Besides, why would they need to bring their own table? Did they think tables didn't exist in Auradon?Eddie argued that it wasn't just any old table, it was a special table, with sentimental value, and history. See, here was where Reza had tried to carve his name into it but had been interrupted and forgotten about it, which was why the table was labeled "Rez;" here was where the wood had gotten chipped when they'd been hauling it up into the treehouse; here was the gash when some angry enemy of someone who had hired them - there had been so many of those that they couldn't remember who it had been - had driven a knife into the table.Eventually a compromise was reached whereas the table was left with Diego de Vil, who promised to keep it in the little rooms he rented after finally getting out of Hell Hall a couple of years ago, until they send for it, or come back for it, or until Diego himself comes to Auradon. How he would argue the table into the car, nobody knew, but it satisfied everybody for the time being.They were divided up among three dorm rooms. Harry and Jace (of course), Hermie and Yzla, Reza and Eddie.Which meant they needed to decide which of their rooms would serve as the new headquarters."It should be us," Eddie suggested, who had been campaigning for the last three years to rename the agency after all of them instead of just the Baduns. "Just because you two started and named it doesn't mean you should always-""For badness' sake, Eddie!" Hermie threw her hands in the air. "Not this again! We are not calling ourselves the Badun Balthazar Bing...Yzla and Reza don't even have last names! That's ridiculous!""We could just call ourselves the BBB for short," Eddie suggested, and it did sound catchy."BBB?" Yzla echoed. She gestured to herself and Reza. "What about us?""Just pick a last name, nobody cares anyway," said Eddie dismissively. "Choose one starting with a B, though. We can be the BBBBB Detective Agency."Hermie rolled her eyes.Eddie was voted down, like he always was. They decided to set up the new headquarters in Jace and Harry's new room, because of course they do, just like the treehouse was right outside Hell Hall.Thus decided, they took out all the papers and stacked them everywhere. The table, the nighttables, the dressers (having so many open flat surfaces felt wrong), the shelf on top of the closet (why?), various corners where they wouldn't get in the way. The main space in the middle of the room was mostly clear...for now. Soon enough, it would no doubt be filled by more papers detailing more cases.But more cases didn't come.They filled out papers about everything they knew about themselves and their families.They went to doctors and got shots.("Well, I got shot once," says Jace when he's asked if he's had any shots. "We were investigating by the docks and this one guy didn't like the questions we were asking and had a gun from somewhere - let me tell you we gave the de Vils a talk about who they sell their fixed-up stuff to - it healed, though. Barely got infected, we only had to call in one favor from Ginny Gothel for medicine. See, here's the scar."The doctor stares at him in horror.)They sat through Remedial Goodness, which wasn't as boring as previous VKs had warned them, because the curriculum had been revised and updated with input from said previous VKs.They got class schedules and textbooks and far too many teachers than they ever thought possible.They were offered the option to sign up for various extracurriculars, which they all refused.They began sitting through actual classes. Some of them were boring or confusing. Some of them were interesting and enjoyable. Some of them were neither.They began to meet other Auradon kids.On the Isle, meeting new people was simple.Well, no one was really new. After their entire lives living on one island, with no one leaving or entering (except those who went feet-first into the depths or were dragged into the world kicking and screaming, as the common Isle sayings went), you knew who pretty much everyone was. The one exception had been Evie, who had been exiled under house arrest with her mother for ten years, but everyone had known who she was nonetheless specifically because they didn't recognize her.But there was knowing people and then there was knowing people. There were the people you occasionally passed by in school or at the market or the docks. There were the people who were family members of allies, or friends of friends - not in your immediate circle, but on your side, and you knew them well. There were enemies, people you clashed with. And there was everyone in between.What the Badun Detective Agency generally did was show a united front. Look strong and tough, but not so much so that it looked like they wanted to start a fight. Show no weakness. Hand over one of those business cards Reza wrote in his spare time and offer the agency's services: We solve mysteries, any mysteries, anything you need solved, for an acceptable fee.Turned out, when they tried that technique when meeting Auradon kids, they got many strange looks, many worried looks, and were all but shunned."Zevon says Auradon isn't like that," Yzla announced as they all deposited themselves into their already-usual corners of the Baduns' room, their new headquarters - Jace and Harry sitting together on one of the beds, Hermie laying down on the other bed with her head over the edge, Eddie and Yzla sprawled out on the floor, and Reza in an actual chair. "He says when new people meet each other they're supposed to act polite and friendly - " She made air quotation marks with her fingers as she said this. "And that people hardly ever get attacked so they don't ever worry about it. They shake hands and everything when meeting new people!""Shake hands?" Harry echoed. "What's the point of that?""To check if the other person is holding a weapon, of course," said Reza."I thought people don't get attacked," said Harry. "Wait, you said hardly ever?""From what I hear," said Yzla, who was the agency's current sole source of knowledge about what was "normal" in Auradon, and that came entirely from the weekly phone calls she had with her on-the-run brother, "mostly any attacking is done by CJ. She and Zevon are running around somewhere, he doesn't tell me where they are in case the phones are bugged, but apparently she's been robbing a bunch of banks lately."Everyone grinned."They're not sending her back to the Isle?" asked Hermie. "I wouldn't have thought Auradon would let it go." After all, Auradon had been pretty quick to banish all their parents to the Isle forever."They can't catch her," said Yzla. Everyone in the agency had witnessed at least one episode involving CJ Hook and her failure to be caught by someone, usually someone she'd just robbed/tricked/played a prank on/an angry older brother or sister. In some cases, all of the above."Plus," Yzla added, "apparently the king's reimbursing all the money she steals, any damages, whatever. They'd probably be trying harder to catch her if he wasn't.""At least they aren't asking us to try to find her," said Eddie.Everyone nodded in uncomfortable agreement. They were glad to be spared the dilemma of handing over a fellow VK; while they had no alliance with CJ, and had in fact been quite vexed by her in the past, like most people, to be hired to find her meant being the reason she'd be sent back to the Isle, and they'd never do that to anyone.But no one had asked them. No one had asked them for help in finding or solving anything. Not even other VKs."You guys are always together," the girl sitting in front of Jace commented. Alana, a daughter of one or another of Ariel's sisters, gifted legs to attend Auradon Prep."What, us?" he asked.Alana looked back at him, beside Harry, in front of Yzla, who was beside Eddie, who had Hermie on his other side and Reza in front of him."Yup," she said. "You guys are all like that? I never see you apart."Of course she never saw them apart. You stuck with your crew, or pack, or detective agency, or whatever you wanted to call the people who had your back. Going off on your own in foreign territory was a recipe for disaster."We stick together," Jace said.Alana nodded. "All of you are like that?" she asked again. "The other VKs, I mean. I remember Mal and her friends, I hardly ever saw them apart either. And those little kids, Dizzy Tremaine and Freddie Facilier's little sister and those twins. They're always in pairs at least. Well, except Freddie. She's always by herself. She doesn't have a group?""Nah, she does," Hermie piped up. "But they're not here now."Freddie's group consisted of her and CJ and Zevon, small for the Isle. And CJ and Zevon were running rampant around Auradon, with Freddie alone at Auradon Prep.On the Isle, if you were left alone, due to your group all dying or having a fight or whatever, you didn't remain alone for long. Either you rejoined together, or you found a new group, or you....didn't.Jace wondered if Freddie felt alone. Isolated. Vulnerable.Because on the Isle, you could never be alone. So they stuck together."We don't need mysteries to be solved here," said Celia when they asked her if she wanted to hire them for anything. "Auradon does it all."When they asked her what that meant, she gladly explained. Well, mostly gladly."It's Auradon," she reminded them, as if they could forget. "People don't murder each other or steal stuff, and nobody disappears, and if anything ever does happen then they have police whose job it is to fix it. They get paid and everything. By the, like, government or something, not the families of the dead bodies they find. All the problems you guys did don't really exist here."Oh.Well.Celia held out a deck of cards. "Tell your fortune?"With nobody hiring them for anything, the six of them suddenly had more free time than they knew what to do with.Classes were mandatory here, but even before and after them, the days stretched out long and endless and boring.They were all so used to, well, being a detective agency. People clambering up the treehouse asking questions and demanding answers. Running around searching for witnesses. Careful questioning, sometimes disguised as an ordinary friendly conversation that could go on for hours. Searching for evidence. Digging up any new suspicious mounds of earth - the part they all hated. And writing everything, everything, down.If they didn't record everything, who would?With none of that to do, there was, well, nothing.What did normal kids do in their free time? Normal kids who were lucky enough to have free time, that was.That option wasn't really applicable to them, was it? Well, what did Isle kids do in their free time?"Carlos tinkers a lot with computers and wires and stuff," Jace volunteered. "Diego has his band, Hunter has his camera, Ivy either designs clothes with the rest of them or sets stuff on fire.""The pirates throw wild parties," Eddie said enviously."We could do some of this extracurricular stuff they told us about," Harry suggested, flipping through papers, which was a familiar sight. "Anybody want to try out chess club?""No," said Yzla."I'm bored," Hermie sighed, flopping backwards on the bed."Well, that is what we're here to try to figure out," Jace told her."Can't you do some circus stuff for hobbies?" Yzla asked Hermie. "What circus stuff?" Hermie asked. "Why would I know how to do circus stuff?""Didn't your father run a circus?" Yzla asked. "Wouldn't you know how to, I don't know, walk on tightropes or juggle or whatever it is they do there?""My father ran a circus twenty years ago!" Hermie exclaimed. The villains' habit of living in the past affected their children more than they liked to admit. "Why would I know how to do any of that?"The usually garrulous Reza, who had been quiet all this time, interrupted the burgeoning argument by saying abruptly, "Watching the stars."Everyone paused and looked at him.He shrugged. "My father used to take me up on the roof and look at the stars when I was little." Like most VKs, Reza rarely mentioned his parents if he could help it. "I think he liked it - it used to be his job, back before the Isle. I still do it sometimes, when I can. Only it's hard on the Isle because there's barely any clear spaces to see the sky from..."They all thought for a few moments."Well," said Jace, "stargazing it is."So they went to the roof.This was easier said than done, because several floors and locked doors lay between themselves and the roof. But it was hardly a challenge for them, who were used to getting into places they weren't supposed to be and poking around where they weren't wanted.Jace pulled out his lockpicks, and Eddie climbed out a window one time, and soon enough they were all together on the roof.That was when they realized the sun hadn't even set yet. They still had a long way to go.So they whiled away the hours, up there. Harry played chess against himself. Reza read a book. Yzla tried and failed to call her brother on her new Auradon Prep-issued phone.They also all fell asleep at various times, because on the Isle, you learn to sleep whenever you can.Eventually, they all awoke. Well, what woke Harry and Jace was Yzla's phone ringing, and what woke Reza, Hermie, and Eddie was Yzla yelling into it, "I'm busy! I'll call you back later! Answer me next time!"And they all looked up at the stars.Auradon Prep was one of the tallest buildings in the city, as befitted a school where many of the students were royalty. It was also set apart from the city. Nothing obstructed its view.The sky spread out above them, rolling away endlessly, more open than they had ever seen it. No smoke or pollution obscuring it, no shimmering barrier getting in the way.The sky was black as velvet, and the stars - hundreds of them, no wonder Reza's father had loved doing this - were like diamonds scattered all throughout it. It was beautiful.