The rain had finally stopped . The four of them sat scattered in the cramped, two-bed motel room, half-lit by the flickering TV playing an old western with the volume low. The air was thick with silence—restless, loaded. Dick sat on the edge of the bed closest to the door, boots still on, elbows on his knees. "Alright," he said, breaking the silence. "We’ve been on the run, jumping from fire to fire. We need to stop pretending we know what we’re doing."

Rachel, curled up in a corner chair, gave him a skeptical look. "Pretty sure that’s your job."

**He smirked, but only barely, **. "My job is to keep us alive. And I can’t do that if I don’t know what you’re all really capable of. We’ve been fighting side by side, but we’re still strangers when it comes to powers." Kory leaned against the window, arms crossed. Her reflection shimmered faintly in the glass, the last of the motel's neon reds and blues playing across her golden skin. "You want a training session. In a motel room."

"Unless you’ve got a better arena in mind." Gar piped up from the foot of the second bed, where he was sitting cross-legged, hoodie up, eating dry cereal from the box. "I mean, I’ve seen worse team bonding exercises. This beats therapy." Rachel hugged her knees tighter. "What if we lose control? You really wanna explain to the front desk why there’s a shadow monster in the bathtub?" Dick stood, voice calm but firm. "That’s the point. Better here than in the middle of a city when someone’s trying to kill us." A beat passed. No one moved. Then Kory exhaled through her nose and stepped toward the door. "Fine. Let’s take it outside."