Given that you're still way underground, it's trivial to use your Earth Powers, and not too hard to locate Monty's strings: almost nobody is near the sinkhole anymore, and his stringerprint is distinctive. (You've been looking at a lot more of them over the past couple months, so you can compare.) It's sort of melty? Like his strings got too hot and dripped everywhere? You're guessing the spooky mask did it, because nobody else's look like that— maybe Jean Ramsey's would've, but the Crown's messed hers up so much you can't tell. You're getting distracted. Slipping out of your body, you drift toward Monty's strings, then deftly thread yourself up and through.

You are grabbed at once and slammed and pinned to the black indistinct ground before you can introduce yourself. You have communed with Monty, who is, in his mind, black-gloved and black-cloaked and trident-wielding, and who looms over you for only a moment before recoiling. "Charlotte?!"

"Hi!" You are awfully sturdy these days, and the slamming (etc.) didn't even wind you. "Good morning!"

"You are in my—" He drops the trident in disgust, tears the cloak off, but keeps the gloves. "You are in my head."

"Yeah! It beats walking. Thank you for not strangling me, by the way. Do you want to team up again?"

"...Charlotte, we're skirting Jean's intended rules to begin with. She's going to want to see us out and about, er, killing wildly. Ideally killing each other, I'd assume, but barring that... the worst thing we could do is partner again. I thought Lucky went over this."

You appreciate how he's letting the 'in my head' thing drop. Very sensible of him. "The worst thing if we care what stupid Jean Ramsey thinks. You remember that I'm going to kill her?"

"Yes. But how much damage will she cause before then? Directly or indirectly? She hasn't even begun on the 'directly.' I don't see any reason to provoke-"

"Do you have somebody else you're partnered with for today?"

Monty sighs. "No."

"Okay, well, I need you for today. Because today, I'm going to get out in the open, and I'm going to start yelling, and a lot of people are going to come and try to kill me, okay? And they won't, but I'll still probably have a little trouble killing them all. And I know you have a lot of experience with..."

"Killing."

"Yes! And you were helpful yesterday! And I don't entirely trust Lucky to watch my back in a fight like that, and Earl..." Might turn into a giant scary monster man and start eating people, if he gets hurt too bad. "...has other issues, and Gil is okay at fighting, but he's better at other things. I need you, Monty."

"I will state for the record," Monty says, "that I think this is a bad idea."

That's all he says. You raise your eyebrows. "But?"

"But I know how you get, and if you're going to make yourself the center of attention like that, I would rather you not be unsupervised. Do I need to find you?"

"Nope! Give me five minutes."

(3/lots)