With great power comes something

They left the bench when the air from the loading doors started to feel too cold. Miles picked up the bag with the suits in it. John adjusted the strap of the one holding their regular clothes and the empty packaging from the vendor. Neither of them said much on the way out.

The main floor was still loud panels letting out, people in full cosplay posing for pictures, the usual end of day crush near the exits. They kept to the edges. A couple of people glanced at the folded costumes under Miles’s arm, the way anyone might glance at a bagged suit on the way out of a con. No one looked twice at the two of them in plain shirts and jeans. Outside the doors, the sidewalk was normal. Cars, streetlights just starting to come on, a few attendees already heading for hotels or rideshares in regular clothes. None of them had any reason to know what had happened in the back booths by the arts row.

The hotel was only a few blocks away. They’d booked it weeks ago, separate rooms on the same floor, back when the weekend was just going to be panels and artist alley. The lobby was warm and bright. A couple of people from the con were checking in at the desk, still in pieces of costume under jackets. The clerk barely looked up when Miles and John stepped into the elevator.

They rode up in silence. Miles’s floor was first. The doors opened and he stepped out, then paused with one hand on the edge so they wouldn’t close.

“You good?” he asked. The gray shirt pulled across his shoulders when he turned. Still not quite used to the way it sat.

John nodded. The jeans felt looser when she shifted her weight. “Yeah. Room’s just down the hall.”

“Text if you need anything,” he said. “Or if the side effect starts up again.”

“Same.”

The doors started to close. Miles let them. John watched the numbers tick up the rest of the way, one hand resting on the bag with the Spider-Gwen suit inside. Outside the hotel, the city moved the way it always did. No one on the sidewalk or in the lobby had any idea what the machine had done, or that the two people who just walked in were still waiting for Monday to put them back.