He laughed in their face. “You think you can be one of us?”

They didn’t react like everyone else expected them to. They squinted through the breath that was aimed at their face and when he was done laughing and talking, they wiped their face off with their sleeve. This turned his amusement, cruel and fanatical, into something more angry.

“I think I can be something,” they replied. Their voice was cool, so much cooler than anyone else’s had been that the rest of the troupe remembered. But the group stayed quiet, hidden in the trees, waiting for what would happen. “One of you, maybe not. In charge of you? That’s another thing.”

“How dare-”

Everything happened too quickly. There was no one who knew what happened next. They floored the man and all of them attacked, their defense of their own. But the person took them all out. Not a one of them could say they knew how it happened. They were all on the ground, their weapons useless to them or taken away.

They stood there, in the centre of the mess they had created. They looked down upon the entire troupe with a critical eye. “You could be much better,” they said. “I will make you so.”

And they did.