All The Stars In The Sky

by HVK

Darkness rises, and Sierra, Cody, their friends, and new intern Rossiu are thrust into a Grim Dark nightmare of war. But they and their friends have got Kamina and his Ork Boyz on their side, and that evens it up! Now they just have to fix it all.

4. Breaking and Entering

Well, it's been a bit of a fairly long time since my last update, but the important thing is I'm actually updating (with GUSTO! You can't go wrong with gusto. Except when you do) and I've got genuine plot develoupments! The Orks being awesome! Kamina being...Kamina! More Death cameos! Cameos from other series that are really, really awesome! And the power of voodoo. Sort of.

But before any of that, there's a small reminder of why it sucks to be attacked by Chaos.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything I don't own.

...

Night had fallen long since the Rossiu had been brought to the infimiry (or, more accurately, a large room in a defensible area that the contestants had coerced a few interns that knew medicine to hanging around in just in case something bad happened) by Geoff and the rest, and there had not been a great deal of improvement in his condition, though most of the contestants were unaware of his situation and thus could do nothing, even those inclined to do so. And Beth was the only one who knew about how it was progressing.

It was probably for the best that only a very few knew about what had happened to him only a few hours ago, and what had been happening to him since. Geoff knew nothing of it, having trusted the would-be medics to do their job. Neither did any of the others, as news passed slowly on the airship owing to all the killer robots and wild animals and deadly traps and also Ezekiel. (Though he was becoming less prone to attacking them all the time, though they didn't know if it was his humanity starting to come back or just him learning from the beatings he received.) Not many of them would be inclined to think kindly of Rossiu to begin with, owing to the stigma of being associated with Chris and his unspecified but no doubt evil schemes and suspected of being intimately involved in whatever it was. (Admittedly, it was mostly Alejandro and Heather who believed this and had spread the theory around. On the other hand, those two knew evil.)

If anyone but Beth knew what had happened to him since the...event, any doubts about his loyalties would be shoved aside in favor of basic humanity; nobody deserved to go through that.

(The corridor echoed with his screams. Pitched higher than seemed usual for a boy as old as he was, going ragged and abruptly diminishing to choking whimpers that sounded horribly wet, and all so often punctuated by small splatters, meaty chunks hitting the walls with considerable force.)

The 'medics' had long since left, insisting that they could do nothing for him and had fled for parts unknown. (Possibly involving parachutes and airlocks. Work experience wasn't worth this horrorshow.) Upon reflection, Beth thought, it wasn't unexpected. Those 'medics' knew first-aid, they knew the basics of resetting bones and the details of blood loss and how to treat basic concussions (these all being increasing pernitent skills in the current atmosphere), but none of them knew real medicine. No one was a surgeon of any quality, and certainly none of them were qualified to treat Rossiu.

(Behind the screams there is an awful growling noise, a wet gibbering echoing behind his noises, so quiet and faint that the creaking of the leather straps were louder. It sounds like something trying to move it's way through a tight space and frustrated at how little purchase it had.)

It had started bad; his shoulder a lacerated mess like claw marks from a beast that couldn't exist, a cthonic conspiracy of every nightmare-thing that had ever dwelled in the nightmares of madmen, and Rossiu's still twitching and whispering things about a many-faced machine-god made of green fire bigger than worlds, and all the while his body trembled with infection and feverish chills, his muscles spasming so violently they had to restrain him, but it had gotten worse after that

(When there are splatters, there are also solid thumps where the metal table lurches just a little bit from the force of his spasms. It's bumped away from the wall and hit a hastily set-up stand until it fell over with a clattering of dozens of little instruments, and it was still quieter that the sounds of Rossiu screaming like his insides are tearing themselves apart, eating each other and vomitting themselves up as good as new before doing it all over again...and again...and again...)

Beth had thought she'd known what fear was. Over the last hour and a half, she had learned that when you were utterly helpless and could do nothing but watch something slowly dying in such pain that you prayed they would just die and stop hurting so much, it was quite different watching it happen to a person than an animal like she was used to.

Beth knew quite a lot about certain forms of medicine. She'd grown up on a farm and been responsible for a lot of animals. She'd seen her fair share of awful things then, and had fixed them when she could. (And, a certain cold thought kept reminding her. when it had been neccesary, when recovery was a fool's dream and there was too much pain, she had...helped them.) She knew how to do basic medicine well enough on animals and she'd thought that she could do the same for Rossiu (she didn't think there was too much of a difference between pigs and people when it came to just right under the skin, really); thought she could patch him back up and maybe make him a little bit nicer and not acting like he was waiting for someone to hit him or even like they would wise up and stop being silly all the time.

She'd tried to help him. She'd tried, even long after the limits of her knowledge had been stretched to the murky horizons of guesses and desperate hopes. And then she'd gotten the blood off her hands and trying not to be sick and not think about what was happening to Rossiu and how was that even physically possible?

Her legs trembled so much her kneees knocked against each other hard enough to hurt. Beth hugged herself tight so she wouldn't shiver and it was hard not to cry. The screaming hurt, but not as badly as the certain knowledge that she couldn't do anything to help him.

(There is ONE thing, a cold voice whispered, and old acts and memories came to her, rememberences of the baby animals that weren't born awake and the broken legs so infected that they went rotten and the other quiet and shameful time the only thing that could be done for them was to end it. She whimpered and tried to ignore the suggestion, because it sounded like a good idea when his screams got louder and that was just wrong.)

Her stomach churned as the noises got worse, but she kept her gorge from rising, if only so she wouldn't have to find a bathroom and leave Rossiu to his fate. She didn't want to leave alone when he-

She couldn't finish that thought without trembling more violently than before. She just couldn't.

She closed her eyes, glasses slipping a little from sweat and tried not to cry at the fact that there was nothing that could be done for him, nothing at all, and either he was going to beat this...this, or he was going to just die-

Beth's mental track derailed itself. She blinked. Something, some recent but foggy thought was bugging her, like some distant light obscured by a fog she was mired in.

(She remembered Rossiu's eyes, shut so tightly it had to hurt almost as bad as everything else, and then his eyes opened and, and-)

She remembered light, like liquified emeralds, so radiently and impossibly green, and something that spun-

The window in the door flashed and Beth jumped up, and there came a flash of green light, bright and impossible and good.

She didn't know why she reacted the way she did, wrenching the door open and running inside; much later on, she would have plenty of time to question what she was thinking at the time enough to decide that she wasn't thinking, no more than dogs thought about why they were chasing cars.

The stink was like a slap to the face, like a personal offense. She'd smelled some pretty bad things over her life, and only the smell of things left dead in the sun for weeks compared to this nasal atrocity, this awful stench like ten-thousand weeping horrors from the blackest pits of the foulest atrocities ever conceived by humanity, sliding from her nose into her brain with such violence that she weeped uncontrollably in reflex, and it was so hard not to gag or retch.

There were...things on the walls, right by Rossiu's bed, lumps of twisted and distorted meat with little spikes and what looked like eyes surronded by mouths and little tentacles and they were moving and crawling and weeping and Beth hardly noticed them at all because there was Rossiu right there, still strapped to the bed even though he was straining so hard that he kept lurching the twenty-pound hunk of metal all over the place and hurting himself some more, his body twisted and surging and spasming like he was having a seizure except that seizures didn't have big chunks of your body seize up and grow mouths and start growling until your muscles started swelling in such awful ways and then the nasty little lumps just splattered into a dozen little chunks that were still moving and hit the walls to start getting bigger and Beth, some iron-hard will settling deep in her, moved to do something, anything-

Moments are quite short spans of time. But there is space between them, and in the space of one moment and the next, things happened.

In that space of time, a dark figure calmly walked over to Rossiu. He had been there the entire time; he was not a being that could be recorded on camera, nor seen by those who were not fit to see him. Dark flowed in his wake; not the darkness of evil, but a soothing darkness, the balmy relief of a shade on a summer day, and the sweeping inevitable end of pain that was the kinder side of death.

It was a darkness born, on some level, of light.

Death himself looked down on Rossiu, his blue star-eyes glowing brighter than the light of supernovas. In one hand he held a scythe, and in the other he held an hourglass, the sands in it running furiously; the top bulb was nearly empty, and yet, sand kept running down without it getting any shallower.

Some would say that time had frozen; Rossiu in the grasp of some mighty convulsion, his body a mass of bruises inflicted by his spasms and horrid wounds where his body, nearly breaking itself from the power of the Warp trying to smash it's way through him and into this world, had pieced itself back together from his exertions. The room itself, clouded by gore and sprayed blood and vile bodily humours and the manifold awful afflictions the Warp's struggles had worked on Rossiu. And Beth, frozen in mid-step into the room, her expression a horrified mixture of many roiling emotions. Death looked at her for a long time, like an man working out a wonderfully complex puzzle that he had not even fully begun to figure out and did not expect to find any answers soon.

Death gazed at her moment longer, his usual curiosity regarding sentient beings fading into a stranger sort of thing. It is often said of Death that he didn't feel anything, and this is true; he lacked the neccesary biological components to feel emotions as humans would understand them. However, he did know things like satisfaction, and regret, and concern. Looking at Beth, his expressionless face nonetheless conveyed a alien species of pity.

He knew what was coming for them. They did not. In some respects, that was a blessing, but in others, it left them woefully unprepared.

Death turned aside and returned his attention to Rossiu. He didn't look overlong at Rossiu's Warp-spawned injuries, nor at the shape of the mind stilled at the moment; the Warp was forcing it's way into Rossiu, and he was experiencing all of it's vast horror. And, perhaps, other things as well. Death had seen things like that before, of much greater magnitude, and when the time came he was the surcease of pain and shepherded them to whatever came next.

He held up the hourglass, peering at it with professional interest. It was a fairly simple hourglass, the bulbs twisted slightly now. On the rim of the lower was a name: Rossiu Adai. The sand in the upper bulb was almost gone, and yet, there was something unusual about it.

There were faint green sparks in that bulb, new grains of sand condensing from them. Even though time had supposed stopped.

CURIOUS, Death said, and that was all.

He was aware of what would mostly likely happen here. The Warp might either chew a tunnel through Rossiu and allow the hordes of Khorne through it (and this airship, born of war and fire, was such an appropiate vessel for it), or else Rossiu would deny them that and die in doing so. Like a coin falling; it would land on one side or the other, and the chances of the former were so much higher than the latter, and even though it would be a bitter thing, the latter was still so preferable than the alternative.

And yet the green sparks, flashing in an hourglass that was twisting shape slightly in Death's hand. Coins, after all, sometimes landed on the edge.

Death allowed his temporary dismissal of Time to cease, and the screams immediately started anew.

Beth, though utterly unaware of Death's presence, half-stumbled around him in her rush to Rossiu as the boy screamed in animalistic misery, all pretense of sanity and civilization forgotten in the face of the horrors crackling through his very soul and reshaping his body into an appropiate veseel, rejected and denied at every turn-

The insane daemonic forces of Chaos against a single human will that would kill untold millions for the sake of what was right. Both contained and battling within a single human body. Chaos against that which was, at it's core, Good and Lawful.

It was no wonder that the battle was literally tearing his body apart. And yet, he still lived.

Death watched, waiting patiently for a conclusion, as the girl Beth tried to do something, anything, to halt the agonizing horror in front of her. Death found it interesting that even directly exposed to the Warp-energies emanated from Rossiu (though quite subdued and invisible to human eyes at the moment), she was entirely unaffected by it, or even aware of it's effects. He wondered, briefly, if it would do any good to explain the situation to her.

YOU DO REALIZE THAT THIS IS NOT TRULY A PHYSICAL TRAUMA? Death said to her, tilting his head. THE POWER OF THE WARP IS ATTEMPTING TO WREST IT'S WAY INTO THIS PORTION OF THE MATERIAL PLANES BY USING HIM AS A CONDUIT.

"KHORNATH!" Rossiu howled, a rare word from his agonized ravings. "Comes! He comes! I smell the blood, I hear the howls, the chains and the blades roar as one, all his own are coming and none can stop his coming..."

"Come on, please stop dying! Please stop it!" Beth said, not really listening. (If she had, she might have gone a little crazy; the portents of the Warp are not fit for human hearing.) A bit of Rossiu's shoulder swelled up and burst, little wriggling things smacking into the walls and quickly expiring, and now there was a nasty gash in his shoulder. Beth turned pale and looked back at the door and started to move. She hesitated only for a moment...and then she ripped a bit from her pants, enough to make a crude bandage, and tied it around the new gash in Rossiu's arm.

A KINDLY GESTURE, I AM SURE, BUT I DO NOT THINK THAT ACTUALLY MATTERS MUCH IN THIS SITUATION, Death continued. THE POWERS OF THE WARP RACKING HIS BODY ARE THE DIFFICULTY HERE, AND THE BIOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES ARE NOT GOING TO MAKE A GREAT DEAL OF DIFFERENCE ONE WAY OR THE OTHER. I DO NOT THINK THAT YOU HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO EXPEL THE CHAOS GODS' INFLUENCE UPON HIM AND YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA THAT I'M TALKING TO YOU, DO YOU?

"Is it weird that I'm starting to get used to this?" Beth asked rhetorically as Rossiu's front twitched violently. "I mean, it's already so bad that I'm kind of adjusted to what's going on? It's gross, no doubt about it, but-" Rossiu's chest abruptly swelled up in a hideous mass of cancerous bubbles the color of a bruise that was itself burned and then all of that exploded right off him in a nasty mess that splattered onto the ceiling and then fell off and landed all over Beth and Rossiu. "Oh, fook, that's just nasty!" Beth shrieked.

"We fall," Rossiu whispered. "We fall, we all fall, we all go into the dark..."

AH, THAT'S WHAT I EXPECTED, Death said of Beth, sounding only a little disappointed that no one was listening to him. Again. (He was used to it, though.) AND INCIDENTALLY, IT'S NOT THAT BAD, he added, referring to what Rossiu had just said. IT SOUNDS OVERMUCH LIKE THE COMPLAINTS OF SEXUALLY IMMATURE CHILDREN THAT SEE FAR TOO MUCH ROMANCE IN NIHILISM AND OTHER UNSAVORY PRINCIPLES, TOO. IS THIS REALLY WHAT CHAOS HAS SUNKEN TO? IMPLANTING OMINOUS BUT POORLY THOUGHT-OUT DECLARATIONS OF DESPAIR IN THE MINDS OF THOSE IT TOUCHES?

"Hey, I think poetry like that sounds cool, and so does my mom," Beth said automatically.

HRM? Death said, wondering how you pronounced a noise like that anyway. He thought you need a vowel or cosonant somewhere.

Beth paused and looked around, her eyes sliding over Death without registering his existence. "Um. Is someone there?"

YES, said Death.

"Anyone at all?" Beth said again. Rossiu screamed loudly, his head pounding against the metal table several times in his convulsions. More bits of him swelled up and burst. "Besides you, I mean."

YES, Death said, more loudly this time.

Beth looked around frantically, still seeing nothing. "...This is getting weird!" she complained. More Rossiu-flesh burst and hit her in the face. "And I just realized that I said that after the guy I kinda-sorta have a crush on was attacked by a demon and is melting on the inside, pulling himself back together and dying in some other horrible way before piecing himself again until he inevitably succumbs. When was stuff like this normal?"

I AM NOT SURE I CAN HONESTLY TELL YOU, Death said dutifully. THOUGH I EXPECT YOU CAN TRACE IT RIGHT AROUND TO THE POINT WHERE YOU WILLINGLY ENGAGED YOURSELF IN THAT UNPLEASANT TELEVISION PROGRAM.

"Why do I get the feeling that someone's giving me really broad and unsolicited advice right now that would probably make me feel like an idiot?" Beth said.

KEEN OBSERVATION OF THE PLAINLY OBVIOUS? Death suggested.

"Oh well, it's probably nothing at all," Beth said, concentrating on patching Rossiu up.

Still twitching in the straps, Rossiu gasped. "I can see Death behind you," he whispered. "Resplendent in his darkness and glorious in his compassion...he is far less ominous than I expected..."

THANK YOU, said Death.

"Absolutely nothing at all," Beth said. Death tapped a finger on his scythe with some measure of discontent. "Oh, I bet this is my fault somehow! Something unspeakably awful happens to all the guys I like! Oh no...it's the curse! The curse from Boney Island! Demons smelled my curse and they came for you, Rossiu!" she whimpered and closed her eyes so tight so she wouldn't cry. "Rossiu...I'm sorry..."

NO, THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU, HE SIMPLY HAD THE RIGHT STATE OF MIND AND RECEPTIVITY TO THE FORCES OF THE WARP, Death said. AND EXTRAORDINARILY BAD TIMING.

Beth paused. "What timing?" She looked around wildly. "WHO KEEPS SAYING THESE THINGS!"

OH, I DON'T KNOW WHY I BOTHER, Death said, a little testily.

Something in the air flickered. Rossiu stood completely and utterly still, his eyes wide. He twitched once, twice, and a third time, his jaw working around words that didn't come and gasping in short and desperate bursts.

The bandages that had been wrapped around his shoulder (and something like mold growing over them) burst apart and Beth stared at them in surprise; the gaping wounds on her shoulder looked open nearly to the bone, all the muscle and flesh burned away...and burned was the right word, for the awful wounds glowed with a malefic fire like the very flames of Hell itself, a bizarre non-color that hurt to look at and veins of it creeping into Rossiu's flesh, cracking his skin and spreading out and little lumps appearing on his skins before cracking open into what looked like eyes-

AH, Death said dismissively of the works of Chaos. DRAMA.

"Oh my God," Beth said, low and still, her eyes wide and her body completely unmoving at the sight of this thing that should not be. She didn't move, though it was unclear if she was afraid to run...or unwilling to do so.

Rossiu absolutely howled and his body went into a seizure again, pulling and straining and slamming against the straps like his body was being pulled in a dozen different directions at the same time and he kept screaming and screaming, "A thousand insect-things beyond human conception, swarming and feeding and EATING AND EATING, they come for us body and MIND AND SOUL, they're fattened with the meat of an entire galaxy and THEY'RE STILL SO HUNGRY-"

Death looked at Rossiu's hourglass. It was wholly unneccesary in the circumstances to see his life falling away...falling...falling.

"No!" Beth said. "No no no!" She blinked away tears, her face frozen in a expression of absolute helpless horror.

"The dead walk," Rossiu gasped, his arm twisted and a awful face appearing in the rapidly mutating flesh. "The star-eating gods of old took them from their bones and put them into metal shells that know no pain, know no fear and they KNOW NOTHING. All life they will destroy and they cannot die. They will not die. They are dead, and yet they live. The metal lives. The Metal Lives. THE METAL LIVES."

Beth shrieked again as the face on Rossiu's arm snarled, pushing and pulling and growing larger. She stared at his arm, the color draining from her face along with her hope of making this better...and then she stared at his arm, or rather, the part were the corrupted flesh joined the smooth slide of muscle from his neck. Past that point, his damaged body was still free of the daemonic corruption of his arm. Her lips narrowed into a thin line and she grabbed something off the floor, something shining and strong and sharp.

"So many horrors," Rossiu sobbed. "So many evils, so many awful things and-" he stopped, his eyes seeming to look at some distant thing. "I see ancient ones. So old, so powerful...and almost dead. A foul god-thing of desire and lust and it's eating them, but they will not die. And there is...there is...a warrior-princess? A battle-queen? I don't know...don't know...her eyes are strange and the boy-" He froze. "The boy. There is a boy with her. His eyes...his eye." His breath stopped for a moment, and then he said in a hushed voice. "A spiral."

Beth held up a saw, her eyes closed in grim determination, and she advanced on him again.

Rossiu kept babbling as his arm surged, and the hellfire in his arm guttered as sparks of green light appeared from his very flesh. "I see...stars. A machine-titan larger than worlds, with so many faces, made of green light, like a god enfleshed." Rossiu shuddered as the green light flashed brighter still. "I see...I see-"

Beth had already tuned out his ravings. She bit her lip, the saw raised over his arm. For a moment, she heisitated. "...I'm sorry, Rossiu..." She whispered, and brought it down.

Rossiu's eyes widened, and for a single awful moment, he was looking right on Beth with perfect clarity.

The saw didn't make it the whole way. Rossiu's eyes flashed, and green light flooded from him, spinning around him and encrciling him at once, so bright that Beth stumbled back and dropped the saw. Rossiu roared again, like a defiant beast, the hellfire in his arm guttering out and the daemon eyes in him dying in bursts of green and Beth felt something wash over her, something wild and chaotic (but not in a bad way) and completely crazy, almost like the horrors she had seen before now except this was good like nothing she'd felt before and some awful presence tearing away from Rossiu and slamming down into the floor and down, down-

And then everything went green.

Death watched the hourglass. It too flashed green, just once, and that was it.

When the light faded, Beth stumbled back and made a small noise of utter delight; the gore and blood and other icky stuff was there but Rossiu was not hurt anymore; his arm had been restored, the muscle on it a bit diminished then before but unharmed, most of him was bruised and an unheathy pallor but otherwise unharmed. There was no awful mutation, no blinking eyes, no hellfire, nothing monstrous or scary anymore. He was alive; unharmed, unhurt and miraculously alive. And in place of the wounds on his shoulder were markings that looked like the curces of a spiral.

And nothing creepy was moving in the room and Beth found herself wondering if she had been having a vivid and awful nightmare. She could almost believe it, aside from the blood and fluids all over the walls.

Rossiu took a shuddering breath. With some interest, Death observed that the hourglass had changed, both bulbs resembling drills for some reason, and the upper bulb was full of sand now. WELL, THAT WAS ENLIGHTENING, he said, watching Beth sob and rush Rossiu in a mighty hug.

"Eh?" Rossiu grunted dazedly. "...Miss Beth? What happened...?"

"Are you okay?" Beth whispered. "Do you feel hurt?"

"No..." Rossiu whispered, slipping away from her. "I feel...huh. I feel...better...different. Did...something happen to me? I remember such..." He froze. "What is...what did...what happened to me?"

"Nothing," Beth said smoothly, settling him back. "You had a nightmare. That's all. Just a nightmare."

"...Oh," Rossiu said faintly. "Okay. That's okay...I can live with that. I'm alive." He chuckled. "Feel like lots of things are alive that their brothers think aren't alive."

"Rossiu?" Beth asked, concerned.

"I'mma sleep now, 'kay?" Rossiu muttered, his eyes closing. Moments later, his breathing was even and measured, and he was soundly asleep.

"Yeah," Beth said tiredly. "Okay. You do that. I can work with that." She paused, a doubtful look crossing her face. She screwed up her face in determination and dared to lean over and lightly kiss Rossiu on the forehead. He shifted a little in his sleep, his usual neutral expression shifting into a faint smile. Beth smiled back, a certain look on her face implying that she would be falling asleep soon herself.

EDGE IT IS THEN, Death said to himself, satisfied with these proceedings. I DO NOT REALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT COINS HAVE TO DO WITH THESE MATTERS, BUT IT'S NOT IMPORTANT, I IMAGINE. He shifted, ribbons of gentle darkness sliding around his cloak. THE TAINT REMAINS, IF NOT IN HIM, BUT IN THE AIRSHIP ITSELF. I SUPPOSE THERE IS MUCH FERTILE GROUND HERE FOR IT TO OPEN IT'S OWN WAY IN TIME. Death didn't look happy about this. He tapped a bony finger against his chin in poor mimickry of seeing someone do it once. I BELIEVE THAT WE MAY HAVE TO OFFER ANOTHER OMEN IN A MORE..DIRECT FASHION.

Death paused again. Significantly so. WHY DO PEOPLE PAUSE WHEN THEY MAKE DRAMATIC STATEMENTS LIKE THAT? IT SEEMS MORE EFFICIENT TO SAY WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY ALL AT ONCE. LESS AIR IS WASTED THAT WAY. He thought about it somemore, came to no reasonable conclusions, and gave the transmogrified hourglass another look. He almost seemed to smile, and glided off.

In the hours to come, Geoff and Bridgette would come up to see how Rossiu was doing. They would firstly want to know where all the blood and other icky stuff had come from and why it was coating the walls like it was. Then they would want to know why Rossiu kept staring into space like he had soon some partly awful and partly wondrous revelation and it was consuming his attention. (Moreso than usual.) And then they'd want to know how Rossiu's injury had healed so quickly, and, finally, they both really wanted to know (in rather lewd and knowing looks, of course) why Beth had stayed watch over Rossiu.

The farm girl and the new intern were able to make up some pretty decent answers for most of these things, and in Rossiu's case they weren't really lies since he didn't know much of the truth himself. (There was an amusing incident involving a basketful of bloodbags and the interns did a live animal sacrifice that summoned forth dread gods that threw them out of the airship; Rossiu went into a coma and beheld the secrets of the multiverse; the daemon attack wound up being a mere flesh wound and you'd be really surprised by the power of positive thinking. And...ah, yes, neither of them could come up with any plausible excuses for why Beth had taken such an interest in Rossiu. Geoff thought that was hilarious, at which point Rossiu brought up all the times he had totally struck out with Bridgette before they hooked up, at which point much amusement was had. Except from Geoff, he was amazingly embarrased.)

There was also the problem of the hole that had been burned right into the floor below Rossiu's bed and apparently going into the depths of the airship. Beth refused to speak of it, and they eventually decided to nail some boards over it and leave it be.

It wasn't like there was anything that might come up from the bottom of the airship or something.

...

By coincidence or design, the very next morning after Rossiu's recovery, Da Boss of Da Boyz, the mighty Kah-Mee-Nah, declared that they'd done enough screwing around and it was time to get the awesome goin' on, and in the interests of doing just that, Da Boyz had gotten to work building a means of getting Kah-Mee-Nah and a small party up to the Total Drama Airship.

The result was what you got whenever you had Orks make anything; it would do the job, probably, but it was still a little...sketchy.

Da Boyz had made camp on an isolated cliff after their battle and had worked through the night, their space hulk of a ship hovering a short distance away with a gigantic neon sign that said WE ARE DEFINITELY NOT ALIENS on it. (No one had shown up to contest this.) And, upon a spot that had been agreed upon by the Mek Boyz (ork mechanics) and the Weird Boyz (orks with abnormal levels of psychic capability) after some appropiately physical arguing, a large machine had been made, a feat of engineering along with some psychically assisted bending of the laws of physics and a lot of incredibly good luck. It's parts had been harvested from industrial equipment, tanks, abandoned cars and other fruits of looting as well as whatever the Orks deemed to be public property. (Anything that wasn't nailed down or on fire, in other words.) Massive treads and cylinder-presses formed a assembly line to it's base, a huge tower constructed from assembled electromagnets to make a crude railgun shooting the payload into a Y-shaped...thing at the very top, contained by a number of surprisingly sophisticated machines all designed to sustain the velocity, focus and amplify it even more, shooting the target at an incredible speed while keeping it safe in a shell of Orkoid psychic energies. (It also looked a lot like a giant slingshot.)

Kah-Mee-Nah approved of what they'd managed to build in such a short time. It was a common misconception, he reflected, that Orks were stupid. They were not, though he freely admitted that he was a bit biased here, as he quite happily held the dubious honor of being 'da most Orky humie ever to walk da worlds and stomp anyfing dat look fighty', as urban legend put it. Orks were focused, and generally considered putting too much thought into relatively simply problems to be dithering around the whole thing and make everything worse, and they were posessed of a cultural mindframe that gave humans, Tau, Eldar and various others reason to think the Orks primitive or barbaric, but 'stupid' wasn't the best word for Orks.

Lots of people had thought him stupid. Mean-spirited, sadistic and ruthless they had been in varying degrees. And he'd left hundreds of battlefields littered with their bodies. It wasn't something he thought about very much (like most Orks, Kah-Mee-Nah didn't have much concern with killing enemies; Orks just liked fighting, and since very few beings were as tough as they were, it was a generally acceptable consequence), but it did make him wonder if he was eventually going to run out of bad guys to stomp because he already got them all.

It was an interesting idea, for the brief time he had it, and just as quickly dismissed. If he did take out everybody that made things worse, he reasoned, he wouldn't be any better than they were. Good guys didn't go out to waste everyone they thought was a problem, or so he'd been taught. They looked for problems, they helped people on the way, and they stopped those problems. Slaying was an acceptable means of doing so, within certain justifiable limits. And anyway, there would invaribly be more bad guys to fight. That was unfortunate.

After Nikigok's most recent report, he'd decided that the time to act was now; he was deeply unhappy with recent events aboard that airship; turning the contestant's prison into a more literal deathtrap, stocking the place with horrible threats and making every day a literal fight for their lives was something he really didn't like.

(Simon would have just HATED that, he thought briefly. A rare expression of grief flashed for a moment. The Orks did not dwell overmuch on the dead, but in that regard, he was unlike his chosen people.)

But, on the other hand, it made him think. "Hey," He said to the nearest Ork milling around and setting things up. As luck would have it, it was Bitz, who he'd taken a bit of a shine to; in fact, he'd recently given him the name 'Jammy Bitz' in deference to obscure Ork slang and his incredible luck in still being alive dispite his constant tendency towards injury. "I gots some thinkin' ta hammer out."

Bitz waved a Mek over to take over calibrating the target computer (which, in typical Ork fashion, was an eclectic combination of clacky-balls, some silicon chips slapped together, a number of actual computers taped together and a hot cup of tea, all of it somehow creating what a moderately skilled techician would be astonished to recognize as a functioning Infinite Improbility Engine of limited capacity) and lumbered over to Kah-Mee-Nah. "What'z it, boss?"

Kah-Mee-Nah pointed dramatically at the horizon. "Those kids we're gonna see! They're out dere somewheres, right?"

Bitz nodded. "Sure! We tracked 'em down nice and good! Almost ready to send yaz off ta say 'hey'."

Kah-Mee-Nah nodded, glancing at the machine the Orks had made to do just that. "Not just me. You too, and the others that I gets packed into the shooty-us-thing. Also, Boota." Kah-Me-Nah's insistence on that had led to a particularily obsessive Mek Boy constructing a 'Make-It-Smaller-For-A-Bit-Zapstik' that had reduced Boota to the size of a large housecat. (He was now sleeping atop Kah-Mee-Nah's head.) They didn't know how long it would last, nor did they care; most of the ones that noticed thought it would be a fair laugh sticking around and watching Boota swell back up when no one was expecting it.

"Yeah, dat too." Bitz looked faintly puzzled. "Why's ya asking dat?"

"I wuz just thinkin'." He said so distantly, like he had been thinking a little too much.

"Yaz gonna do yuh-self no good just sittin' around like a zogger. Get out dere and do stuff, dat's da ticket." This was Ork philosophy at it's finest and simplest.

Kah-Mee-Nah rolled his eye. "Dis is an important bit, Bitz. Yaz been watchin' how dis season is different from da other ones, yeah?"

Bitz tilted his head; there was a considerably number of clanking noises. "Dey's a lot tougher on da humies dis time 'round," He said eventually. "I can see dat much."

"Yep," Kah-Mee-Nah said, satisfied. "Dey make 'em do all kinds of crazy stuff before, but dis time? Like they's trying ta kill 'em! Dat don't seem like dey's s'posed ta do that. Dis Chris jerk what runs the game, somefink ain't going right with his head."

Bitz peered at him. "...Yaz thinks the Chaos 'as got to him."

"I t'ink something is talking him without bovverin' with his ears," Kah-Mee-Nah said seriously. "Thing 'bout dis world I's noticed. Dey know when somefing spooky's gone wrong, mebbe recognize it, but dey's too stubborn or slow to see it when it's a for-sure thing. And if dey do, people call 'em crazy and don't give 'em an ear to talk to, see?"

"Humies is stupid," Bitz remarked, his massive shoulders shrugging as if in astonishment at the foolishness of humanity.

"Naw," Kah-Mee-Nah said. "Just inexperienced. Don't know no better." Bitz grunted disapprovingly but didn't push the issue. You didn't get to be Da Boss without being the roughest, the toughest, the greenest and the meanest. Kah-Mee-Nah appeared to think the whole thing over and shrugged, grinning like a fool. "One thing after anuvver; first we says hi, then we works stuff out!"

"I likes that plan," Bitz said after chortling a big Orkish laugh. "Simple, easy ta remember."

After that, he wandered off, getting the last few bits of business settling: making sure their 'gifts' were properly packed up, finding the Orks that had volunteered to come along (Bitz and Gritsgrotz among them), getting their vehicles set up on the loading spot and a coupling set up to make sure the vehicles didn't fly apart in mid-air, instructing Da Boyz on what to do until he gave them the go-ahead and meet up with him and the other minutia that was called for.

It didn't take that long, though; Orks weren't much for organization, outside of the Storm Boyz faction of Orks who thought that human things like tactical methods and proper warfare experience were worth knowing, and even they would have been considered annyoingly laid-back and unprofessional by most other military sorts. (They made a large part of Kah-Mee-Nah's Orks.) In less then fifteen minutes, he'd already finished up by giving instructions to a very unusual Nob from the Goff tribe. "...And after you've mopped up those other zoggers we have our eyes on, I'll give the signal and you come and find us, yeah? Hopefully, da kidz'll will go for it!"

"And if they don't like it?" The Ork he was addressing said, looking faintly troubled.

Kah-Mee-Nah snorted and clonked him on the upper arm. (Since that was as high as he could reach.) "What are yaz doing, throwing around squig-headed doubts like dat! Don't believe in a lousy future! The future ain't somethin' that happens just because, it's BUILT on our dreams, our choices, our decisions and our BELIEFS! If you believe in a future where everything's wahoonie-shaped, that's what yaz gonna get! And if you believe inna a future where everything goes right, a future where Orks everywhere see Da Right and Proppa, where da Chaos is da way it used to be in the before-our-times, and da humies and da elfies and da Tau ain't always tryin' to kill each other just because...if you believe in a future like that, and yaz scrape yazself to da bone and tooth ta make it real and pull it headlong from all the da maybes of tomorrow? THAT'S WHAT YOU'LL GET!" Kah-Mee-Nah grinned like a maniac. "Ya gets it?"

The Ork, whose name was Thrall, peered down at Kah-Mee-Nah and nodded. Just once, a quick but heavy motion like the falling of an avalanche. He was a good deal unlike the standard Ork, having picked up humie linguistics fairly well, he deeply frowned upon 'doing stupid things because someone yelled a Waaagh', and, all things considered, if Kah-Mee-Nah hadn't come along he probably would have become a prophet of Gork and Mork above even the famed Warboss Ghazghkull Thraka. When Kah-Mee-Nah had first met Thrall's warband, he'd been unusually receptive to Kah-Mee-Nah's ideas, won over by words instead of the usual beatdown (Orks normally put little stock in words, reasoning that the greenest Ork was the one who could prove how good they were in proper battle); Kah-Mee-Nah usually had him in-charge when he had to do other stuff (in an ordinary crew, it would been the second-in-command, but Kah-Mee-Nah's second-in-command, a beastman named Viral, was off on another mission); Da Boss reasoned that Thrall was a pretty cool guy who wouldn't go out and kill stuff out of boredom.

A Mek Boy waited until they were done talking to bang some large wrenches together to get Kah-Mee-Nah's attention. (He could have just cleared his throat, but that wouldn't have been Orky.) "We'z ready to get this goin', Big Bro!"

Kah-Mee-Nah grinned, positively gleeful at the prospect. "Aw right! Get Da Boyz together, I'mma shoving off!"

Very shortly afterward, the Orks were gathered in front of Kah-Mee-Nah and the five others that had chosen to accompany him, armed to hunt daemons if need be and dressed to impress: Bitz, his mechanical parts freshly replaced and in good order, wearing a denim jumpsuit colored in the yellows of his tribe the Evil Sunz, and slung in an array of pockets and holsters was a collection of oversized shootas, blastas and even a Zappa-Gunn.

Then there was Grotsgritz, wearing a 'Ard Boy's suit of powered armor with lots of spikes, electrical prongs and other bits everywhere, a frightening collection of choppas and chainsaw-knives built into it, and his favorite blasta was slung on his back, though the fearful image was a bit spoiled by the drinking-hat hammered under the helmet. (And then the powered armor looked oddly like a football player's uniform.) On Gritzgrotz's shoulder was an unusually large Gretchin named Lakkabork, self-proclaimed 'Craziest Grot Alive' and maybe the fact that he'd wired a jet into his spine had something for it. He was a talented Mek Boy with a number of cybernetic parts he'd done himself and he wore the colors of the ferocious Goff tribe; his armored vest (Kah-Mee-Nah's flaming skull insignia on the back), metal-on-fabric overalls and various tattoos painted in checkered black-and-red.

Looming over them both was Chopstop; he was bigger than a Nob and his entire body replaced with bionics, remade into a (relatively) small-scale Killer Kan of an Ork that was all blue-painted sharp metal plates, a Power Klaw for one massively oversized arm and an array of guns on the other just around a surprisingly delicate and precise set of splindly finger-bits. Da Boyz claimed that Chopstop was a Painboy who loved surgery almost as much as he admired Dreadnaughts, so he made himself into a killing machine, tough enough to take any hit the smaller Boyz couldn't and strong enough to spook a Squiggoth. But he still did his fair share of surgery too; he was their number-one Painboy (a rather accurate term for an ork doctor). He rested back on bent-back legs like a Dreadnaught's, steam hissing from vents, grim red eye-lenses peering down at them all.

Finally, there was a young Ork named Brikspok, sprouted only a few months ago and smaller than average but earning a reputation for himself. He was wearing several layers of ragged longcoats sewn out of murals he'd made himself, odd images dedicated to Kah-Mee-Nah and the gods shimmering with every move, as well as a set of overalls made from Tyranid-skin and decorated with dozens of little trinkets he had fancied and stitched right into his trousers. His entire body was a prayer to Gork and Mork; sixteen screws and bearings and small gears from a fallen Dreadnaught piercing his pointed ears, elaborate spiral-shaped blue tattoos that were moving across his body, drifting on green flesh like clouds in the sky, and then there were his eyes. Not red, but shining green, randomized colors twisting across them. A bizarre haze flickered around him, an otherworldly aura spiraling in his wake and leaving small miracles in his passing, the power of da Orks infused into his very being, soaked up like water to a sponge and spewed back out with abandon. His very body crackled with power; not merely the power of the Waagh, but also the mysterious power of the Spiral that Da Boss offered, helping to tame the often-fatal powers of the Waagh and allowing him to communce with other Orks instead of being ostracised for their own safety, for this Ork was an Ork with a greater-than-normal affinity towards the Ork's sub-conscious psychic powers, or as they put it, 'onna da Weird Boyz'. In his hand was a crude staff: a copper-lined lamppost torn from the ground and festooned with all manner of decorative trinkets, topped by a huge war banner bearing the mark of Da Boss; the Orky skull burning with fury, one eye-hole squinting madly and a pair of stylish sunglasses atop them.

Behind them was the stuff they were bringing; essential supplies for their mission, some loot they felt would be appreciated and some other things, loaded into their vehicles that they were bringing; the Dakkacycle flipped upside-down with a slightly smaller war bike belonging to Lakkabork coupled to one side, a war trukk Bitz had appropiated at the other side and to the rear was a enormous war trukk even bigger than the Dakakcycle (though not as awesome); a heavy customized war trukk Gritzgrotz was improving all the time at the bottom and clamped to the rest, carrying all the other stuff they were bringing with them in the large storage tray at the rear as well. Except for the Dakkacycle, huge drills had been affixed to the vehicle's fronts for a purpose none of them were strictly aware of but too excited to ask. No one asked why the Dakkacycle hadn't been prepped like the others, because Kah-Mee-Nah didn't need to have drills put on anything beforehand.

"Someone record dis!" Kah-Mee-Nah shouted gleefully, a man that was a lot more sentimental than most expected: some Orks messed around with a monstrous machine, and it clambered to life, Orks getting out of the way as a spindley-legged contraption scuttled into view, a massive lens appearing in site as other, stranger devices retracted. Levers and switches had been thrown and it settled into view, the Ork's expectations of what was wanted enough of a command and power source to make it do as desired. It settled into place, lens focused on them, and the Orks gathered around Kah-Mee-Nah and his chosen few; even the Squiggs and Squiggoths, still kept out for a bit of fresh air, gathered around; unlike other warbands, they were part of Da Boyz and every one of them knew it.

Da Boyz flexed and posed, trying to look cool. Others shot guns and burners wildly into the air, mostly the ones on the fringe because they knew that looked cool. The bigger Nobs and Skarboyz at the back posed in such a way that they framed everyone else with their sheer bigness. Most of the Gretchin, all of the assembled Squiggoths and quite a few Orks broke into unashamed weeping and sobbing and theatrical displays of sorrow; their big brother, Da Boss, the mighty Kah-Mee-Nah, was leaving for a little while. The inspiration that moved them onto Da Right and Proppa, the only humie (or Ork) as Orky as da Godz, da only one who laughed to cheer them up, fight when they were bored and never had a bad thing to say about anyone. He made them feel...good in a way they couldn't phrase but felt down to their algae-melded DNA; their sadness was ameliorated only by the knowing that he would bust right through the gates of Death to at least say 'Go kick some arse!' or something inspirational, and he definitely wasn't going to come back without something exciting for them all. Thrall looked dignified and badass, Kah-Mee-Nah even more badass with his chainsword slung over his back but too manic to be dignified. Lakkabork made some victory signs with his hands while Gritzgrotz and Bitz punched each other's fists in a gesture of fierce brotherhood. Chopstop looked vaugely stoned (but still pretty badass) and Brikspok started up a exciting victory tune he made up on the spot and called up the spirits of the earth beneath them and the oceans beyond to join in. (It was a pretty rockin' song, all considered.)

As the machine, not exactly a camera but similar enough to a video recorder though vastly more sophisticated, recorded their antics in three-dimensional splendor, several of the Orks picked up on Brikspok's new song. No two Orks sang the same lyrics, but getting it right wasn't important, it was the passion in their words, the energy in their voices that mattered. The singing spread, dozens of other Orks singing in what was more or less tune, until Kah-Mee-Nah thought the song was zoggin' metal and roared along with all the hot-blooded passion and mad joy only he could muster for so small a matter. The waves spontaneously smashed against the cliffside for an appropiately dramatic backdrop, and as if on cue, every single Ork joined in the singing, from the tiniest Gretchin to the biggest Nob, a thousand-fold chorous of rough but earnest voices roaring together, even the Squiggoth's massive voices providing a wordless baritone. A mighty symphony rang out, the sounds of musical instruments singing out of thin air thanks to Brikspok, and had there been anyone else to witness it's awesomeness, they would have beheld a full warband of Orks, banded together under the leadership of a single human, singing together in cheerful chorus just for the hell of it, a kind of chaos totally different from the screaming nightmares of the universe they'd left behind; something good and wild and all-encompassing, a wild force that would be as likely to give you a light smack in the noggin as it would to give you a hug, but you'd feel happy either way because it was just plain awesome like that.

Without warning, Kah-Mee-Nah hit a particularily passionate high-note and added, "BOYZ! YOU LISTEN TA ME HERE AND NOW; BELIEVE ME WHEN I SAW THAT THERE AIN'T NUFFIN WE CAN'T DO IF WE BELIEVE WE CAN!"

"YEAH!" Da Boyz roared.

"HELL YEAH! I KNOW WE CAN! YOU'RE ALL MY SOUL-BROTHERS! FROM DA LITTLEST GRETCHIN TO DA MIGHITEST SQUIGGOTH, I'D BUST UP DA GODZ OF CHAOS IF THEY SO MUCH AS LOOK FUNNY AT YAZ, AND YOU'D DO DA SAME FER ME! IF DA EMPEROR DECIDED YAZ AIN'T GOOD ENUFF TO LIVE, I'D SMACK HIM UP 'TILL HE SAW DA RIGHT AND PROPPA! AND ANYFING ELSE OUT DERE RAN AND HID WHEN DEY HEARD I GOT UP TODAY, 'CAUSE DEY KNEW YOU ALL WAS GETTING UP TOO!"

"YEEEAH!" Da Boyz cheered.

"WE'Z GONNA SMASH THROUGH THE INFINITE TOMORROW AND SHATTER DESTINY TO PIECES AND SHOVE 'EM BACK TOGETHER TO CREATE THE FUTURE WE CHOOSE FOR OURSELVES!" Kah-Mee-Nah yelled, and with his next words he refuted all the powers of the dark Gods of Chaos: "I DON'T NEED TO HOPE! I DON'T WANNA ACCEPT WHAT IS! I GOTS MORE THEN COURAGE! AND THERE'S MORE TO WHAT I'M SAYING THAN JUST DESIRE! WHAT I HAVE IS BELIEF! I BELIEVE IN YOU BOYS!"

There was a mighty roar, the precursor of a great 'Waagh' cry.

Kah-Mee-Nah went on. "YOU BELIEVE IN ME! SO I CAN DO ANYTHING WITH YOU BOYZ AT MY BACK! I CAN SMASH THROUGH MOUNTAINS, TEAR THROUGH DREADIES AND OUTRACE DEATH ITSELF! ALL 'CAUSE OF YOU! I BELIEVE IN YOU JUST AS YAZ BELIEVES IN ME! BELIEVE IN THE ME, BOYZ, DAT BELIEVES IN YOU!"

(All that he could do, was because of them. For that, he owed them all.)

There was a massive scream, wild and joyful and primal, and there was something else there, something alien to the average Ork. A quality missing in those who were normally so cheerfully myopic of the not-now; a vision of a future that had been told to them in broad strokes, so little that was specific but unfolding in each Orkish mind to tell a story grand and glorious, something of fights that would make a difference, their ancient destinies fulfilled at long last by their ancient makers, their almost unnoticed envy of their fundamental inability to truly live as Da Boss did wiped away as they transformed their own natures into something better and brighter...

Something beyond mere survival. Something above bragging rights or expectation of the next fight. An opportunity to make a difference. To be heroes.

From any other, they would dismiss it as humie nonsense. From Da Boss, their big brother, the mighty Kah-Mee-Nah...it was as though hearing from the gods themselves. Many believed it was the same thing. And as he said, he believed in them, and so they believed in him, and thus themselves.

They had not the words to describe how they felt, even if they stopped to think about them. All the same, it was a beautiful thing.

"Aw right!" Kah-Mee-Nah said, pushing his sunglasses back into place with a finger. "Me and these Mad Boyz here are gonna shove off for a bit! NO WORRIES! THE NEXT TIME YAZ SEES US, WE'LL HAVE NEW BUDDIES TO ROCK OUT WITH! TA SHOW DA RIGHT AND PROPPA!" He dove behind the Orks behind him and went straight for the machines, clambering over the vehicles loaded there and climbing into the seat of the Dakkacycle, strapping himself in so he could sit while upside-down. (No one asked how his sunglasses stayed on. Perhaps gravity feared to remove them from his brow.) "BOYZ! MOVE OUT!"

The rest of his chosen got into their respective vehicles; Lakkibork into his war bike, Bitz into his war trukk and Gritzgrotz into his own war trukk with Brikspok riding shotgun while Chopstop hunkered between the Dakkacycle and the war trukks. Kah-Mee-Nah also wound a bunch of straps around the back of his head to make a crude but secure harness that Boota slipped into.

The Orks scattered as machinery whirred to life, the recorder still doing it's work. And soon, "WE GOTZ IT AIMED!" A Mek Boy yelled, entering a few commands into a control panel, and the mechanism turned very slightly to the left. Some of the Orks fancied that they could see a distant shape, far out to sea, where their brother Nikigok had gone.

"THEN START HER UP!" Kah-Mee-Nah yelled.

The conveyer belt (or rather the three of them hooked up together; they had to be big enough to support the massive vehicles) started up. It moved quite fast for the load it was moving, but still too slowly for Orkoid tastes. "Why's it so zoggin' slow?" Chopstop complained.

Lakkibork snickered. "Jus' yaz wait."

Chopstop looked at him, his articulated metal face creaking in interesting ways as it tried to frown. "Wuzzat s'posed ta mean-"

There was a revving noise, and the conveyer belt abruptly propelled the quite surprised Orks directly into the machine, their clamped vehicles landing heavily against the wall and leaving everyone a bit dizzy. "Whee?" Bitz said dazedly.

"Zog-head!" Lakkibork taunted him. Bitz gave him a smack. "Whee?" He said, now dazed.

"Maybe we shoulda put somethin' to make the dizzy stop happening," Kah-Mee-Nah said vaugely. The platform they were now upon began to spin, grinding fast up the long chamber above them, electromagnets spinning. "Yep, definitely gotta do something about that."

"Oh," Lakkabork said suddenly. "Check out da speed boost!"

The platform was rising faster and faster. "Speed boost?" Chopstop repeated. "What speed boo-"

They hit the first series of electromagnets and accelerated so violently that there were all thrown back on their seats (if Chopstop hadn't been secured in place, he might have smashed right through Gritzgrotz's windshield), centrifugal force hammering into them with such force that they could only manage a slight 'whee!'. And then they hit the second electromagnets. And the third set. And the fourth. And the fifth, accelerating at speeds well in excess of insanely fast with each one: lights lit up on the outside of the machine as Kah-Mee-Nah passed each successful series of electromagnets. One Ork, taking notice of the increasingly faint but still quite loud noises, turned to another and asked, "Should dey be screamin' like dat?"

"It ain't proper speed if no one's screamin'," the other Ork said firmly.

All of that happened in less than ten seconds: there was the mighty sound of a sonic boom shooting up, contained and withstood by the telekinetic barrier at the top (sonic booms didn't work that way, but the Orks thought that they should, and so they did) before they shot right up through the top, nearly punching through the glowing green band of telekentic energy maintained by a number of increasingly stressed Weird Boyz; they stopped a few inches from piercing it, floating in place and slowly spinning while the green band, moving around them in incredibly violent currents as it struggled with their acculmated kinetic energy, spun around and around, glowing brighter as Da Boss pumped more power into it, doubling it in size.

"Shouldn't da sonic boom 'ave made us all deaf and stuff?" Chopstop said dubiously.

"Shh!" Brikspok said urgently. "Reality 'ates it when ya points out da inconsistencies!"

"GAH! MY EARS!" Lakkibrok screamed.

"Whoops."

"See?" Brikspok said smugly.

"Hold on, yaz gonna take off now!" Thrall shouted up as the final phase of the launching begun.

It is important to remark, as this band of energy collected into a ball that moved back and stretched between the prongs, that for all of the scale of the lanching platform, that the machine looked like an oversized slingshot. Given how the band of energy was pulled back, the resemblence was almost painfully obvious.

The huge structure rotated slightly, Kah-Mee-Nah and his boys aimed a little higher. Bitz' monocular focused on a distant dot, zooming in on something so far away that none of them could have even gotten this tiny glimpse without technological aid, and excitedly yelled, "I sees it, I sees it!"

"No yaz don't," Gritzgrotz said, just to be contrary. Bitz kicked him in the head. "Gah, the pain! It hardly hurts at all. WUSS."

The energy band twisted up like a screw as they suddenly started spinning around, the kinetic energy pulling the band tighter and tighter, almost to the breaking point.

Kah-Mee-Nah yelled, "FIRE!" and shouted something else as a Mek Boy hit the appropiate button. Boota squeaked in dread.

The band snapped, and with such force that some excess energy rebounded with such force that the machine completely tore itself apart and the Orks scattered, a few of them cheering at a truly awesome explosion. (Much time would be spent pouring over the recording of this and experienced Burna Boyz giving their opinion on the finer technicalities of that explosion.) Kah-Mee-Nah and his fellows, on the other hand, were fired like bullets hard enough to send a mighty shockwave throwing the unprepared Orks backwards; bullets aimed at that distant speck on the horizon that was the Total Drama Airship. For a moment the Orks saw them all ascending into the sky like a green fireball, the Ork's belief that this would work making so that it did, Da Boss' overwhelming power erupting like volcano-fire in a green shower all around them, moving so fast that Da Boys only saw it for a moment. Then they were a green speck, ascending higher into the sky than many birds dared to fly. And then, except for a gleam in the distant-most horizon, they were gone.

Da Boyz cheered at this success, and decided to throw a party to celebrate. Later, Thrall thought he had heard Kah-Mee-Nah shout, "LATER BUDDIES!" just before he went.

...

A few minutes later, Kah-Mee-Nah was still having trouble not screaming in glee at the awesomeness. "I'MMA DO THIS MORE OFTEN!" He shouted, eyes wide and crazed, the telekinetic shield around them keeping off the worst of the winds and pressure and other nasty bits about being fired into the sky from a giant slingshot. Boota, secured by a bunch of straps to the back of Kah-Mee-Nah's head, nonetheless clung to a small set of broken goggles around Kah-Mee-Nah's neck like it was a good luck charm.

"WHAT?" Lakkibrok said, temporarily deafened. "I COULDN'T HEAR YOU! HEY, THIS IS FRAKKING AWESOME! FASTA FASTA FASTA!"

"WHOOOO!" Bitz yelled, the speed freak legacy of his tribe screaming out from his very soul and the only thing keeping him from jumping out of his war trukk and hanging on for dear life just to get closer for the speed and the sheer insane thrill of it was the straps. (Kah-Mee-Nah thought ahead! Sometimes.) "WAZDAKKA, YAZ CAN EAT MAH GRITS!"

"DEY SAID I WUZ CRAZY TA TURN MYSELF INTO A ITTY-BITTY KILLA KAN!" Chopstop boasted. "DEY SAID I WUZ CRAZY TA MADE IT ATMOSPHERE-RESISTANT AND AERODYNAMIC! 'WHEN IS YAZ EVER GONNA GO FLYING?' DEY ASKED ME! WHO'S FLYING NOW, ZOGGERS?"

Brikspok wiggled his arms. "WHEE!" He said. The other Orks gave him a disappointed look for such a lame reaction. "What? Flyin' gives me da willies."

The mighty bullet shaped bundle of Orks (Kah-Mee-Nah totally counted as an Ork) arced over the sky, their destination in the sky growing more apparent. As Gritzgrotz looked down, he noticed a ship down below and he took the oppertunity to throw a discarded can as hard as he could; it punched through the telekinetic shell without harming the shell, moving so fast as it fell to sea that it burst into flames halfway and missed the ship by a good margin, hitting the ocean with such force that a huge depth charge boomed out of the water with a forty-foot high waterspout, scaring the living daylights out of the tourists on the nearby cruiseship. Gritzgrotz chuckled. Kah-Mee-Nah smacked him. "Don't litter, it ain't nice! I used ta live in a place with tons of litter, it ain't fun!" He paused, and smacked him again, adding, "And don't almost sink ship for giggles!"

"How'd yaz hit me from all da way over there!" Gritzgrotz demanded.

"DON'T UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF LOVE!" Kah-Mee-Nah roared and raised his fist in indignation; green power swelled out of his flesh and spun around his fist, much like the larger mass swirling around them all. "NO FORCE CAN STOP THE MIGHT OF MY BROTHERLY FIST!"

"Okay," Gritzgrotz said, finding nothing wring with that.

It might have been a mistake for Kah-Mee-Nah to generate more power, even just a little like that; it was immediately sucked up into the greater resevoir protecting them, pumping it up again, the front end turning a pointed shape like a drill and all of it spinning faster than before. And, as a result, they accelerated ever more than before.

The people on the cruise ship below, already staggered to have apparently just been under attack, were even more stunned to see a green meteor appear out of nowhere and streak across the horizon, as suddenly out of sight as it had come from nowhere.

The six of them shot through the sky like the bullet they looked like, drilling right through the air without slowing in the least, clouds breaking apart and fillign up the vaccum they created in their wake, and many who could see the sight of cloud formations tearing apart like this deemed it a portent, mostly of the ill-fated sorts. They arced ever higher, sailing to greater and greater heights...

And then, it finally came into clear view. A huge zeppelin of a design alien to this world, an enormous and elongated balloon bearing a smaller but still unbelievably big structure beneath, all red paints and elaborate curls of brass shaped like a man's idea of flames. The Total Drama logo was painted on their side of the airship's enveloup, the not-quite-faded stylized flame mark just beneath it.

As their path brought them closer to it, Kah-Mee-Nah was struck by how off this airship was for this world. It didn't seem to belong; it was too big for local zeppelins, the culture that had produced wasn't of this world, it just wasn't appropiate. And the look of it! It was a fierce thing, all jagged angles and rough protrusions. It was a means of warfare, a machine meant to faciliate killing; the Orks knew war machines when they saw one, gene-programmed knowledge going back to their earliest proginators screaming this. And here it was, made into a tool for tormenting twenty-five humies that didn't know just what they had gotten into.

It's underside was coming closer; Kah-Mee-Nah roared, "SPIN ON!" and rather than summoning more of his particular hot-blooded energies, simply siphoned off a good deal of the excess energy around him, drawing it down into the Dakkacycle, green shimmering through the metal and turning it's front into a brilliantly shining light, full of energy that he directed, pushing it into a shape natural for it's purposes, and in moments, the energy swelled up into pseudo-matter just visible under the swirling green, growing larger and more defined, and then the light of it broke apart, revealing a massive drill affixed to the front of the Dakkacycle.

His fellow Orks activated the drills on their vehicles, the power tools roaring to life just as they started to slow down, the energy keeping them going so fast rapidly being drawn into their machines. Not quite done, Kah-Mee-Nah forced more of the energy into all the drills, making them triple in size until their vehicles were dwarfed by the glowing drills extending from their fronts.

"Boss, we ain't gonna make it!" Lakkibork cried, noticing that they had lost almost all of their terminal velocity; they could begin to fall at any moment, or simply smash into the airship.

"SCREW THAT!" Kah-Mee-Nah bellowed defiantly. "WE'Z GONNA MAKE IT! BELIEVE WE WILL, AND IT'LL HAPPEN!"

"WE'LL DO IT FOR SURE!" Brikspok agreed. Chopstop and Gritzgrotz roared in approval, ever confident in their Big Bro Da Boss.

Lakkibrok heisitated for a moment, they had been yelling so loud he had heard them even dispite being a bit deaf. "I...uh..." Slowly, he grinned. "I DUN' BELIEVE WE'LL MAKE IT, I KNOW WE'LL MAKE IT!"

The green power around them surged up, and for the final time, they accelerated.

"SPIN!" Kah-Mee-Nah boomed, tilting his vehicle hard to the side. The Orks followed suit, throwing their considerable weight into it, and their bundle of vehicles began to spin like the drills they sported, the energy around them surging mightily and spinning as well, great streamers of emerald power flashing away like a hundred little comet-tails.

Kah-Mee-Nah shouted, "Boyz! Combination...IM-PACT!" and the low side of the airship loomed like a on-coming metal juggernaut, and like any other obstacle that had ever gotten in the way of Kah-Mee-Nah and Da Boyz (spinning, spinning, they drill through the air, the drills of their vehicles and the big one of the energy field around them and they just pierce the walls of foot-deep metal), they smashed right through it.

More than half of the accrued velocity that got them there had been short just before impact. Nonetheless, they still struck so hard (smashing right through the wall and the energy field finally gave out in a explosive blast of green and bounced on the ceiling of the brig and hit the floor really hard) that the entire airship tilted a little bit, just enough to knock the unknowing contestants head-over-heels in whatever they were engaged in (Owen is knocked across a hallway mere moments before a killer robot can spring on him and falls to it's doom; Eva, Noah and Izzy fall down in a tangled heap and crash onto Ezekiel, finally capturing him after some time spent trying to catch him; Alejandro and Heather are knocked off their feet and into a open closet that locks behind them; Rossiu was thrown right out of the bed he'd and waking him from a truly unusual dream where he had been elected Space Pope and now he had a concussion now too; Sierra and Cody are lifted off their feet and right out their door, and they take it as a omen that they ought to leave their room already even if it means possibly being away from each other for even a few minutes, dreadful though it is).

The airship was quite easily reoriented. The contestants were a bit freaked out, demanding to know what the hell had hit them. But down on the brig, in the very same place where the Total Drama kids have first come into the airship not so long ago, Kah-Mee-Nah fell out of his seat, rubbed a sore spot on his arm and got up, not further hurt in any way. "Dat was pretty metal," He said, looking a bit winded from a heavy adrenaline rush. "...I totally gotta do that again! But better. Needs more rockets. Maybe some fireworks. And maybe some stompas, they work for everythin'. Ooh! I know! We'll shoot ourself in giant robots wearing rockets that shoot fireworks! Also, we'll have wolves doin' the shooting. Wolves is badass."

"Totally," Chopstop agreed, trying to disentagle himself from the straps and such. "Oy, leggo my leg!"

"I ain't touchin' yer leg!" Bitz said, having some trouble with the straps. He managed to get them off, but only in such a way that they wound up wrapped around his throat and he almost strangled. Luckily, Lakkibork crawled up and cut them out. "Gah, that was lucky!"

"Yoz'd be lucky if yaz didn't keep gettin' inta accidents and like," Gritzgrotz said, stepping out of his war trukk without any problems.

"Ain't yaz da one dat keeps shootin' him?" Brikspok said, glowing green as he floated to the ground.

"...Shut it!"

"Why'z all dis funny stuff happened to me?" Bitz complained. With uncanny timing, Chopstop accidentally stepped on him. "Zog it!"

"Whoops," Chopstop said, carefully moving his foot away.

"Didja hear dat crunching noise! I t'ink dat was my BACK!"

Chopstop peered at him. "...Nope, ya spine's just fine. I think...yeah, it wuz just da chocolate in yer pocket."

"GAH! DAT'S EVEN WORSE!"

"Aw right, boyz!" Kah-Mee-Nah said, after they got that stuff sorted out. (There were many hittings involved. Bitz came off worse, naturally. He was ashamed; he'd come off second to a Gretch.) "Let'z get down ta business! What'z we gonna do!"

The Orks tensed, ready to get started some good screaming and rallying and enthusiastic narration...and paused. They looked at each other, glancing at the floor, and didn't shout anything. Lakkibork coughed. Brikspok shuffled his feet. They looked embarrased, astonishingly. "Um..." Gritzgrotz said after a moment. "I dunno. Wot?"

Kah-Mee-Nah raised a finger, his face grinning madly...and paused. His grin fell into a puzzled frown. He lowered his finger, thought mightily...and finally shrugged. "I dunno either," He confessed. "Didn't t'ink dis far ahead, tell ya honest."

The Orks considered this. "Eh, fair enuff," Lakkibork said. "Used ta run wif a Warboss dat picked fight by throwin' darts at a board. I wuz a dart! Yaz aktually thought about getting us here!"

Kah-Mee-Nah nodded. "Toldja foreplanning wuz worth it." Gritzgrotz rolled his eyes but didn't challenge Kah-Mee-Nah. "So...uh...eh, guess we'll just look around dis place until we find da kids." An idea appeared to strike him. "An' while yer at it, help 'em out by taking out da crazy stuff dey're tormentin' them with! Smash the traps! Knock down da animals! Shut-down da killer robots! Help da kids any way ya can! Got it?"

The Orks agreed enthusiastically, though to be honest, they would have probably greeted any plan that way. "YEAH!" Bitz said. "We'll smash 'em up, just like THIS!" He ran over to their vehicles and gave the clamp a vicious kick. It immediately depowered, all the vehicles seperating, and the Dakkacycle and Gritzgrotz's war trukk fell right on him, "...I'm okay..." He said weakly.

"My war trukk!" Gritzgrotz yelled in horror. Kah-Mee-Nah glared at him. "And...uh...Bitz too! I guess. Oh no, not my war trukk! And Bitz! Does dat sound betta?"

"You suck!" Kah-Mee-Nah said, and smacked him on the head. In the meantime, Bitz got out from under the vehicles, extremely dizzy but quite unharmed. "Okay boyz...let's start looking! Based on wot we've seen, dey's probably on da upper levels, see?"

The Orks nodded. "Yoz got it, Boss!"

"Not like it's gonna take us a while or anything, right?" Lakkabork said hopefully. Kah-Mee-Nah winced. The other Orks glared at him. "Wot?"

"Ya jinxed it!" Kah-Mee-Nah said.

"...Oops?"

"Doesn't anyone pay attention to these things!" Brikspok complained.

"Hey, how is we s'posed to get up there anyways?" Gritzgrotz pointed out. "Ta da upper levels, I mean."

Kah-Mee-Nah paused. "...I have no idea."

...

The rest of the day passed; while it is the acceptable thing in this circumstance to say that it did without incident, this is a gross error in light of the contestant's personality clashes and the fact that there were now Orks aboard.

Instead, it can be considered that nothing overwhelmingly dramatic or sufficient epic occured in that time; all that transpired were what, on the ship, had come to be defined as life as normal; the contestants defending themselves from the hazards of their prison-transport, new non-contest related alliances being made without anyone quite aware of it, some of the teens performing their own projects meant for escape or just occupying their hassled minds, the harried interns keeping the ship running or doing their part to harrass the contestants based on their personal inclinations...that had become normal for them.

A new kind of normal had arrived on the ship. Or to be more accurate, the death of normality had arrived on the ship, the destroyers of stasis and murderers of loathsome standards such as they would surely encounter. (That was part of the point for them coming at all.)

It wasn't good at staying hidden, either, as Sierra and Cody had deducted.

So, in the bunker that served as the headquarters for the production staff of the Total Drama series, Chris was in a grumpy mood, having been escorted by a creepy and impatient employee of the producers to attend to his actual duties, which since he wasn't actively hosting the show on-site anymore required somewhat more technical responsibilities. (In other words, he was in charge of editing the clips to create the illusion of a narrative.)

He sat in a big chair in front of a television monitor, housed in a small room with a fair number of video equipment in it, and gave the man who had escorted him a petulant look; he wasn't at all happy to have been literally dragged out of the shower, forced into a pair of shorts and shoved into this chair. "Man, you have problems," He said, crossing his arms and making grumpy noises. "They should have laws against that. You saw my everything and stuff."

"Geez, you are such a baby," the man who'd done this; on second thought, Chris wasn't certain if this person was actually male. He, or whatever, was an androgyne with extremely light skin (Chris had seen worms and other parasites with the same texture as this...person), wearing a black suit that showed off a slim figure that was like an athletic woman's except for the plainly flat chest and masculine hips. His face was beautiful in the way that a man's could sometimes be, though the features were unquestionably feminine; Chris blamed the way his escort wore his long black hair in a girlish style that reminded him of a palm tree. His eyes were the weirdest shade of brown Chris had ever seen, so bright that they were actually red. And the pupils were off somehow. Almost like a snake's.

The person coughed; it was the meanest sound Chris had ever heard. It was like the kind of sound a snake would make after biting you so it could express it's disgust at having to waste precious venom on your worthless carcass. "Okay, okay!" Chris said. He glanced at the nametag on the business suit: Levia T. Han. (It sounded like a cheap alias. It probably was.) "Geez, what's with you producer guys being so uptight all the time? You guys have got to learn to relax. Heart attacks, they're gonna happen."

The freak in the suit clicked his tongue. Chris tried not to shudder; he'd heard noises like that before, and they came from scaley things that bit. "Y'know, I've been meaning to ask you something, kid. Why is it you talk like a surfer boy when you're from Newfoundland?"

"What, you have something against the way I talk?"

Han snickered; it was a...weird way to laugh. He shut his eyes as tight as he could and grinned as wide as he could, showing a big white smile that was nonetheless full of teeth sharpened to points, and he made the weirdest noise Chris had ever heard and associated with happiness; a mix between a girl's giggling and a bass chuckle, with a touch of sibilance when he had to breathe, his throat bulging at the sides with every breath and his thin lips never once sliding back over those pointed teeth like he wanted to bite the world in the throat.

This guy was seriously creepy. And Chris had met a lot of geuinely creepy people; if this guy had had the gospel of a forbidden cults dedicated to slaughtering kittens to end the world written on every inch of his skin to spell out nausea-inducing atrocities and fetishes, it would have been a step up in creepiness because it would have an essential honesty of purpose. Han clapped Chris on the bare shoulder, his hand smacking against glistening flesh with a sound like a hammer on tender meat; Chris winced. Dude was strong. "I like you," Han said, still grinning like a monster and patting him on the shoulder hard enough to smack the bone. "You've got the kind of attitude that'd take you real far in my line of work."

"Oh yeah," Chris said, rubbing his shoulder and wincing; there was going to be a bruise for sure. "What job is that?" Seriously, he thought. What the hell?

"Oh, this and that. I go places. Talk to people, make new friends." He grinned again, wider and weirder than ever. "Start some shit, know what I mean?"

"Sure," Chris lied. "Seriously, ow. You hit like a bear or something."

"I'm just made of sterner stuff than you." Levia T. Han chuckled. "Anyway, the bosses are bitching about stuff. Got a new episode to air in less than a few days and we've, uh, run into a few weird stuff that you oughta see. Responsibilities and stuff for the new season format."

"Yay," Chris said, with all the enthusiasm of a diseased parrot. (A far more dire state than most people assume.) A thought occured to him. "Hey, I'm not a kid!"

Han chuckled; Chris tried not to recoil. "Compared to me? Yes. You are." Han looked directly into Chris eyes, peering from over his head, and he looked older than anything Chris had ever seen. Old in the way that iron maidens and guillotines were old.

"You're all kinds of creepy, man," Chris said, not one to keep his opinions to himself. "Even worse than the usual nutbars I deal with."

"I get that a lot." Han mercifully pulled away. "Anyway...weird footage. Take a look-see."

"Aw man, do I have to?" Chris whined.

"Yes," Han said in an amazing mimicry of Chris' voice; if he'd heard it anywhere else, Chris would have thought that it had been a recording of him. "Seriously, this was your idea."

"Was not!"

"Okay, geez, more with the whining! Not your idea for this kind of thing, I'll give ya that, but..." Han paused, smirking. "It was your idea to monitor those kids instead of you being on-site. Guess who's monitoring the big stuff?"

Chris rolled his eyes. He had been fully aware of his new responsibilities in his altered role; he'd insisted on changing it, actually. The...incident with Sierra and his dearly beloved plane had made him a bit cautious about being near the chaos that followed in the contestant's wake. He'd done this sort of thing before, looking through the footage for the most interesting and important scenes that would make some sort of false narrative good enough for the TV viewers, pruning out the boring stuff (and the things that would make even the forgiving and bloodthirsty audience shocked at what the contestants were going through), setting aside interesting but unimportant stuff for 'extended cut' episodes in case a week went by without anything good happening and they needed to fill up an episode somehow.

That had always been a scheduled thing; he planned his days around it, he got the footage viewing catered. Being dragged out of shower, forced to get dressed and shoved into a chair to do his job was not business as usual at all. Chris had a brief impulse to stall just to spite people, but he didn't think it was worth the effort. "Oh, fine!" Chris scooted the chair up. "So what's all the whining about weird footage? The kids finally snap and go on a murdering spree? Have an orgy? A murder-orgy? Orchestrate a really elaborate song-and-dance number with wonderful cherography and a totally kickass rock montage? I hope it's not the last one, it'd be like they do it just to get back at me for last season. They didn't give me an epic song-and-dance number."

"You forced them to sing all last season."

"Yeah, forced! Where's the fun if they don't choose to do it, huh?"

"I dunno. Funny? It's always way more entertaining if you make people do stuff, espicially if they really don't want to do it. Song and dance numbers, community service, romantic comedy movies, genocide..."

Chris nodded sagely. "Yeah, totally get where you're coming from." He paused. "Wait, what was that last one?"

"It had absolutely nothing to do with implications that I've tricked people into mass murder." Han snickered gleefully. "And it's all such damn good fun! Er, is what I would say if I had done stuff like that. Which I totally haven't."

Chris gave him a sidelong look and scooted his chair slightly away. "Um, yeah...I'm gonna...move over here now."

"Why do people do that whenever I talk about my greatest accomplishments?" Han complained. "Do I smell weird? Is that it? Do I have a funky odor that would outdo the Nurgalites and their regular contests of unbelivable funk-itude, a smell fit to bring famines and kill entire populations and summon forths daemons of smell because my smell was so bad the creature took it as a challenge?" He turned to Chris. "You'd tell me if it was my weird smell, right?"

"Yeah, sure, whatever," Chris said, not really listening.

Not looking at all reassured (and grieviously concerned about the unstated degrees of his funk-itude), Han turned the machine on, presumably now opening up communication channels for the footage or something similar (Chris wasn't much for technical issues. He had people to do that for him). In fairly short order, the footage started playing and Chris resigned himself to the task at hand.

The very image was of Cody and (Chris twitched a little bit) Sierra, both of them sitting at the top of a small seige tower made from random junk they'd put together, squatting right in the middle of a corridor. Strange weapons from cobbled-together robot bits extended through gaps in the walls and there were a few disassembled killer robots lying around, and Cody was posised over small piles of their component parts, reassembling into...something. Sierra was doing much the same thing, and it was difficult to tell if she was leading this little project or if he was. They also looked fairly filthy; Chris wrinkled his nose, wondering how badly they had to stink. "Okay, what's going on here?" He asked, pausing it.

"Everybody on that ship is going a little crazy from cabin fever, stress and danger," Han said. "Psychologically speaking? Looks like those kids are dealing with it by making a fort and...doing something on computers in their rooms. Not sure what. We don't have good angles in there."

"Manage the National Dwarf-Tossing Championship?" Chris suggested. Han gave him a look. "What? Dwarf-tossing is a big deal in my family!" Han continued to give him a look. It was not a friendly look. It was, at best, the kind of look that suggetested that the look-giver considered you to be an insect, and not the environmentally friendly pest-eating sort either. "What's the big deal here, anyway? Something specifically interesting about these two?"

Han looked like he had something on his mind, but he shook his head. "Not really. You could say they're, ah, symptomatic of the general loonyness you've set up."

Chris blinked. "Really? Cool."

"Observe," Han said, fast-forwarding it a bit; when he stopped it, Sierra and Cody were much the same as they were, except now they were just sitting on a pile of cushions in the middle of the fort and staring at the floor; the robot parts had been assembled into what looked like a crude pair of metal boots that Cody was wearing for some reason.

And astonishingly, they were loonier than usual. "I wonder if someone has ever played the lava game with such gusto that they burned their feet," Sierra said to herself, idlely playing with a strand of hair that had gone stringy.

"Huh," Cody said, fiddling with his new boots. (They seemed unneccesary, since he was wearing them over his shoes.) "I never thought about it." He paused. "Hey, Sierra."

"Yeah?"

"I always wondered. How much wood...could a woodchuck chuck...if a woodchuck could chuck antelope?"

Sierra blinked. "...It depends on the woodchuck's lifting power, general enthusiasm, whether or not he's being compensated, and if so, how much."

Cody nodded. "And another great mystery of the universe is solved. And now there's just what that omen we saw was about. Half the time I think it just means I'm going to die on this airship." (Watching this, Chris grimaced. He'd heard them talk about that omen a fair bit since they'd come aboard and it was starting to get on his nerves: he'd set up a lot of incidents to befall them both just to make them think that was what the omens were about, but none of it had worked.)

"No way!" Sierra said. Cody smiled gratefully at her, and there was a banging at a door they had put into the floor. (After tearing it out of the wall it was in.) Sierra flinched and looked at the floor again. "Ugh, the floor's getting all weird-looking. Either sleep deprivation and lack of food is making me goofy in the head...or the power of collective belief has made the floor made of lava!"

"But there's only one of you," Cody said, his fingers halting in their examination of his mechanical boots

"I'm big enough for three people," Sierra said. "Maybe four, if the fourth's a skinny person."

Cody blinked a long hard blink, as if processing this. He gave Sierra's larger frame a speculative look, looked at the floor...and then he screamed like a little girl and jumped into her lap, throwing his arms around her midsection and wailed miserably. "Save me from the floor lava! I'm too young to die! Possibly, I'm actually sure how old I am anymore! Damn you, multiple missed birthdays! YOUR ABSENCE HAS LEFT ME CONFUSED AND UNSURE AND POSSIBLY UNDERWEIGHT FROM LACK OF CAKE! DAMN YOOOU!"

Sierra tightened her grip around Cody; he gave a little boyish squeak, though he clearly welcomed her grasp. (This, Chris noted, was a considerable difference from the behavior he was used to. He cackled malevolently, plotting ways to stir up the fandom shippers. Han rolled his eyes, because he thought human romance was gross.) Perhaps to save himself from the 'lava', or more likely because his position was a bit awkward, he wrapped his arms around her as much as he could and settled a bit more snugly into her lap like she was his favorite cushion or something. (She was big enough for it. Or he was small enough for it. Possibly a mixture of the two.)

The door on the floor slammed open, and Leshawna, Justin, Harold and Nikigok dressed like an intern climbed up, all except Nikigok wearing goofy-looking wigs and foil-covered hands with tiny candles on top. "NO!" Cody wailed. "Don't come in, THE LAVA WILL TAKE YOUR SOULS! And ruin your shoes. You don't want lava eating your shoes." He paused, staring at Nikigok, who waved. "...Why is there an alien with you guys?"

They turned around. "Yo," Nikigok said. "Wait, I'z definitely NOT an alien!"

"Yes you are!" Sierra said. "I can see you right there. Being all alien-y and stuff."

"Newp!" Nikigok scoffed. "I iz definitely a intern! And also a humie. JUST LOOK AT MY NECK!"

"Yes!" Justin said. "It is quite impressive, that neck."

There was a long beat. Leshawna and Harold had the grace to look embarrased. "He kinda started following us around and he won't go away," Leshawna said. "He's good at whuppin' the crazy stuff that attacks us and he doesn't eat a lot, so...yeah, we got a live-in alien."

"I iz an intern!" Nikigok said stubbornly.

"No you're not," Everyone said flatly. Nikigok pouted.

Everyone but Justin. "He's dressed like an intern," Justin remarked. "And clothing hasn't lied to me yet!" Behind him, Harold facepalmed.

"Okay," Sierra said. "You're so totally an alien! You're not even bothering to disguise yourself!" At Nikigok's infuriatingly smug expression, she said, "You're, like, four feet tall!"

"I come from a family of shorties. Great-Grandpa was so big he could ride a horse, but that's as tall as we get, yeah?"

"Your pointed ears with all the piercings?"

"Lots of surgery. It big thing where I come from! Cousin Gogik went deaf after he passed through a magnet factory..."

"The green skin?"

"I'm not green!" Nikigok flinched as he said this, as though betraying some ancient racial principle, but he went onward. "I'm...very jaundiced."

"And your red eyes!" Sierra demanded.

"You silly person, you. Have you never heard of...PINK EYE!"

"...Pink eye doesn't look like that," Harold said, having been watching the conversation and staring suspiciously at Nikigok for some time.

"It doesn't?" Nikigok asked, looking worried. Harold shook his head. Nikigok fell to his knees and wailed to the skies, "YOU LIED TO ME, HIGHLY DUBIOUS INTERNETS!"

"You're totally an Ork," Cody told him.

"Actually, I iz a Gretch. Grot. Haven't settled on one word fer it." They stared at Nikigok. "Aw, crap. I just blewed my secret identity."

"Wasn't secret to begin with!" Leshawna said, ignoring the crazy-ass goblin-thing and marching right over to Sierra and Cody, Harold and Justin with her and trying not to react to the smell.

Justin didn't manage very well. "THE SMELL! I CAN ALREADY FEEL IT BLEACHING MY SKIN! IT BURNS!"

"It doesn't stink like your deodorant does!" Sierra said defensively.

Justin winced. "You don't have to get personal...hey, you're not at all enticed by it?"

"Nope!"

"And you can smell it?"

Sierra wrinkled her nose. "Wish I didn't, but yeah."

"THE DEODORANT DOESN'T DRIVE MAD WOMEN INTO MOLESTING FRENZIES!" Justin yelled. "The commercials lied to me!"

"Totally," Sierra said. "I have way more class than that! Probably." Everyone looked at Sierra. She pouted. "I do not go into molesting frenzies at the drop of the hat! Why does everyone think I do that!"

"Just about every televised moment we've had together?" Cody suggested.

"Oh, right," Sierra said. She lightly brought her face to Cody's, forehead to forehead. "I bring this upon myself."

"Yes," Cody agreed with a smile. "Yes you do."

"Noah really wasn't kidding when he said they were losing it," Harold said. "Or going totally codepedant. Wait, is that a bad thing with these two?" Leshawna shrugged, supposing that Cody having a girlfriend would stop him from hitting on all the other girls, and that having someone depend on Sierra might help even out her craziness, given what she knew about her. (Also, she thought they were adorable together. Bridgette and Gwen agreed, though Leshawna suspected that Gwen had her own ulterior motives for doing so.) Harold glanced at the computers Sierra and Cody had dragged up there, a diagrams, notes and other things still there. He took a look at what the monitors said, which was basically a summery of all the stuff they had found. His eyes widened with surprise. "Gosh! Look at all this stuff! This is just what I totally was hoping for! I knew they might find some stuff out, but I didn't think they'd get all this..."

"WE ARE AWSOME!" Sierra and Cody cheered. They bonked their foreheads together. "Ow," Cody said.

"Wow, dat's a lotta good reportin'," Nikigok commented, walking over. "Heh, they even got the graffiti I did for Bro Kah-Mee-Nah." Harold stared at him. "Er, not dat I did any o' dat. Or was there with Da Boyz at any time. Yeah."

"You just said you were!" Cody yelled.

"I'M HUMAN!" Nikigok shrieked. "Yep, definitely human! I iz DEFINITELY not an alien sent by da most badass and awesome guy with EPIC SHADES to come over here and spy on yaz fer a bit and mebbe sabotage da evil things da wanna hurt you." They stared at him some more. "...My butt is itchy!" He scratched himself, with entirely too much enthusiasm.

Sierra blinked at Leshawna, who blinked back, trying to process the insanity and doing her best to ignore Nikigok instead of damage her brain by immersing herself in the craziness. Leshawna frowned, noticing what Harold was examining. "What's all that about? Is that what you two were holed up in your room with!"

"Technically, we're now holed up in this fort," Cody said.

"I promised Izzy we'd leave our room and we so totally did!" Sierra said cheerfully. "Now we're in a fort we won't leave, but we're outside the room, right?"

Harold ignored their rambling and shrugged guiltily. "I...uh, I asked Sierra and Cody to check out the stuff on the aliens that showed up not too long ago."

"Wait. Aliens?" Leshawna glanced sharply at Nikigok. "No freaking way. There's others here besides that little shortie?"

"WE IZ DEFINITELY NOT HERE TO BLOW SHIT UP!" Nikigok said. "...Fer da Right an' Proppa! Seriously."

Harold blinked at Leshawna. "Wow, you must not be keeping up with the news."

"Harold, little reminder? We're on a airship and isolated from the rest of the world, fighting for our lives!"

"Didn't stop them," Harold said, pointing at Sierra and Cody. Justin was now poking Sierra in the head, perhaps testing her to see if she was a real human girl or not; he found her continued attraction and love for Cody over his own sexual appeal to be deeply suspect and a bit of a personal insult. Nikigok was staring at Sierra and Cody with deep fascination, for some reason.

"Nope," Cody agreed. He frowned. "What's with the goofy hats and wigs you guys are wearing?"

"As...uh...protections and stuff from really spooky stuff," Leshawna said evasively. "You guys missed some big stuff. On the other hand, from what I heard, you didn't want to be there."

"...Huh?" Sierra said.

"It was DEMONS!" Justin screamed. "DEMONS! They totally, like, TORE INTO THE NEW INTERN GUY!" He shuddered. "I had to help clean the mess he made in the infirmiry. It was so gross."

"Actually, yaz pronounces 'daemon' with an 'A'," Nikigok said cheerfully. "That's how yaz know it's our daemons yaz talking about. An' them daemons ain't DAT tough. Proper wusses, yaz see. Now, make fun of da humie's God-Emperor in front of Boss Viral, now DAT'S SCARY! Like dumping blood into a shark's pool or throwing a kitty into da pool. Wait, Boss Viral is a kitty-shark...person...thing. Or is it shark-kitty...person...thing? Never asked. Bit of a muck-up, eh?"

No one was listening to Nikigok, but Cody and Sierra had certainly heard the bit about Rossiu getting hurt. Just for a moment, their state of cheerful looniness wavered. Neither of them said anything, but they had mutual looks of horror. (Well, Sierra did; Cody was still staring up into her face to avoid looking at anything else for some reason, they couldn't see his face too well.) "Really?" Sierra squeaked. "The daemon thing, not what the little alien guy was yammering about."

"I IZ NOT AN ALIEN." Nikigok said. "AND I CAN'T STOP YELLING CALMLY. HOW AM I TALKING LIKE THAT? WAIT, I'M NOT CALM NO MORE! NEVER MIND!"

"Yeah, really," Leshawna said. "I didn't really buy it myself, but..." She faltered. "...I saw the mess myself." She shuddered. "Don't care if he is working with Chris or not, that stuff ain't right."

"The wigs and hats ward them away," Harold said solemnly. "Trent tells me it's an old family secret of his."

"...Because the hats and wigs are really the holy relics of an ancient order of demon-killing monks and they're anathema to the demons?" Cody guessed.

"No, it's because these hats and wigs are so stupid looking that any demon who sees them would flee in utter horror of their tacky-ness!" Harold said. "Even nefarious fiends that dwell in the places that seek to unmake all reality have standards, you know."

"Of course," Sierra agreed.

Nikigok shivered. "So...tacky! Can't look...directly at it!"

"Hey, it works against demons and crazy creepy alien saboteurs!"

"Hey, I'm not creepy or a saboteur!" Nikigok said, offended. Sierra stared at him. "Uh, or an alien."

"...Aren't you forgetting something?" Sierra said.

"Hmm...nope, can't think of anything."

"Wait, how could you notice our wigs and stuff?" Justin said skeptically to Cody. "You've been staring into Sierra's face for the last five minutes or so!"

"I looked through the reflection in Sierra's eyes," Cody said dreamily. "So pretty. Her eyes, not the wigs. It's important to me that you realize what I'm talking about."

"Aw!" Sierra said, wiggling with joy. "I feel all warm and fuzzy inside!"

"That's both sort of cute and really creepy," Leshawna said. "I'm gonna go with mostly creepy if anyone asks."

"Dis is that romance stuff humies get all worked up over?" Nikigok asked. "...Humies is lame." Sierra threw a screw at him. "Ooh, I'm getting free stuff! Good fights, nice table scraps and industrial products! This is da best mission EVER."

Leshawna went over to Sierra and grabbed her hand, (Because she didn't want to waste time seperating Cody from her, and she suspected that he had a better grip then he looked) pulling her to her feet with a mighty grunt; Sierra was quite a bit taller than Leshawna, and while Cody weighed even less than he looked, it was still adding weight to Sierra's already considerable size advantage. "Come on you two," Leshawna grunted. "Let's get some food in you and a good bath, if I can get find one that doesn't have giant robot spiders riding slightly more giant fighting robots in it. Maybe that'll make you guys less crazy."

"I wouldn't bet on it," Cody said, in a brief moment of clarity. "SIERRA! WATCH OUT FOR THE LAVA! It's making funny faces at me. And I think it just flipped me off. Not cool, man."

Nikigok gave the floor a dirty look. "You bastard."

Sierra ran her free hand through Cody's hair, fingers digging through the strands and lightly stroking his scalp, and she kept him propped up against her with her arm. "I, uh, have really tiny lava-proof stilts. That are also invisible."

"Okay," Cody said, finding that perfectly sensible in his current craziness and not realizing how weird it was for Sierra to be the sensible and sane one for a change.

Justin looked at Harold. "...Is he being serious, or is he just making it up to be funny?"

"I don't know," Harold confessed. "He's spent, like, half a week alone with Sierra without any food or barely any sleep; who knows what sort of wackiness has rubbed off?"

"I HEARD THAT!" Sierra said.

"I know, I wasn't really trying to be quiet," Harold said.

"Oh, alright then," Sierra said, forgetting the matter instantly. It was either her being nice to one of Cody's few friends (even one that wasn't quite as close to him as Sierra had become, though Harold was real close to it), or just her short attention-span getting even shorter.

"Bah, I've seen crazier'," Nikigok said dismissively. Justin, Leshawna, Harold and Sierra stared at him incredulously. "Might give Bro Kah-Mee-Nah a run fer his money...maybe. I guess. Wouldn't bet big money on it, though."

Justin rolled his eyes at the annoying tagalong's behavior, refusing to believe that anyone could be so stupid...and then he noticed the switches on Cody's metal boots. "Hey, what do these do?"

"Huh?" Cody said. "WAIT! DON'T TOUCH THOSE-" Justin flipped them on and jets fired from the soles of the boots (fortunately missing Sierra's legs, and anyway the jets weren't heat-based in any way but worked on completely different and weirder principles) and he was torn from her grasp, mighty though it was, and his face was suddenly right there in the camera; there was a loud smashing noise, and it went dark; either the camera broken then, or the clip had ended.

Han waited patiently for Chris to respond. He did not. Han rolled his eyes and said, "So, jet boots! The kids turning into a regular mad scientist or something!..Dunno how that happened. But you see what I mean? It's getting all kinds of..." He trailed off, realizing that Chris wasn't in his seat. "Hey, where in the name of the Ouroborous did he go!"

"Yo," Chris said from behind him. "Went to dry off and change clothes. Also: jet boots! AWESOME."

"But the clip!" Han said. "Important exposition relevant to the situation at hand! Your job! You just skivved off your personal duties and no doubt wasted tons of money!" Han paused. "...I dig your style."

"Yes," Chris agreed. "Saw enough of the clip to make a snap judgement. Sierra and Cody going crazy, Leshawna and two other jerks barge in to make them clean and stuff...might work for that 'falling into insanity' sub-plot we've got going for everyone. If everyone's going as nuts as them, I could have a massive backlash from the fandom! Again. Or a psychological documentary. Think all the editing might make it invalid for submissions, though...oh yeah, and the alien. That'll go over great!"

"What?"

"Sure. Everyone loves aliens! Except Americans." Han stared blankly at Chris. "What? Don't you get political humor?"

"Nope," Han said. "And you changed clothes...?"

"Hey, I'm not comfortable in nothing but bath shorts around a dude I don't know." Chris chuckled. "Not unless I know you real well, know what I mean?"

For once, Han looked suitably creeped out. It was an unusual experience for him. "...I never said I was a guy."

"Oh." Chris looked Han up and down. "Never would have guessed. You're a bit not-so-there in the bust and your hips...don't really exist. Still, you're kinda cute in a vaugely androgynous way."

"Oh, I never said I was a girl either," Han said, looking a touch puzzled.

"...Right..." Chris stepped back into his seat, giving Han a funny look. "So what are you then?"

"Gender's like a rigged raffle ticket thing for me. I'll take what I can get."

"Okay, changing the subject now!"

"I'm also not a hermephrodite!" Han said cheerfully. "Figure that one out."

"CHANGING THE SUBJECT NOW!" Chris yelled. "Next clip, please!" He paused, something finally registering to him. "Wait. What was that stuff they were saying about Rossiu and demons?"

"Nothing important," Han lied. "You know what will make you forget all about creepy transgender talk?"

"PLEASE TELL ME NOW," Chris begged.

"VOODOO!" Han shouted.

"...What."

Han fiddled around with the footage-machine-thing (Chris was pretty sure that was the technical term). The screen quickly displayed a lunchroom of some sort that Chris recognized from a good chunk of footage.

It was the cafeteria, which the contestants had taken to frequenting as some sort of home base. (Sort of.) Currently present was the entirety of Team E-Scope: Izzy was standing on top of a makeshift table, making some sort of pattern in the middle of it by dribbling ashes and other stuff on it. Noah and Eva were standing off to the side, both of them looking stoic and, if you knew them well enough to gauge their feelings, slightly apprehensive. Chris noticed that they were wearing vanilla-colored robes and silly hats akin to what Leshawna and her rescue troop had been wearing, though these had little sticky-notes pasted to them, with designs similar to the one Izzy was drawing on them.

Izzy chanted, and it was anyone's guess if she was making words up at random, actually using a foriegn langangue that no one there was familiar with, a combination of the both, or something altogether different. "This is stupid," Eva said sourly.

Noah, reading a book titled Reaching the Overworld For The Uninformed - Stupid Things You Don't Do So You Don't Piss Off The Loa Or Some Other Pantheon, looked up. "You mean 'this is a waste of time stupid', or do you mean 'this is ridiculously dangerous meddling-with-incomprehensible-forces stupid'?"

Eva considered this. "Both," She said after a moment.

Noah grunted. "That makes two of us."

"Shh, you guys!" Izzy said, nearly fumbling the design. "I mess this up, it'll bring massive bad juju on us! Or it just won't work. Whatever!" Noah and Eva both rolled their eyes, but they complied nonetheless. "Huh, I probably should have prepared a sacrifice or something. Oh well, I brought something almost as good, I'm sure they'll understand!" She reached into her bag and pulled out...a bottle of rum. (With a helpful note on it that said 'DEFINITELY NOT RUM'. Izzy had the same approach to subterfuge as the average Ork.) "Rum is the drink the dead like best! Wait, these guys I'm asking up aren't dead. Generally. Depends on how they got to be Loa. Eh, I'm sure they've got buddies who'll appreciate it."

A thought percolated in Noah; by the time Izzy had finished the design he couldn't hold it in anymore and said, "Uh, you ever think that maybe this isn't the best idea?"

"Whatcha mean?" Izzy said.

"...If Duncan and Bridgette and Geoff and the rest of them are right and demons attacked Rossiu after trying to posesses him or something, it seems a little counterproductive to come to the room where demons attacked and finding a solution to possible demonic hauntings by conjuring voodoo gods."

Eva grunted agreeingly. "Didn't know voodoo was a real thing anyway..."

"It's a pretty big religion," Noah said, being a master of all obscure knowledge. "Comes from Africa and the Carribean; apparently, Christianity melded with native African beliefs when the missionaries came, and what came from that is voodoo." After a moment, he added, "The stuff in the movies isn't really anything like what people actually do in voodoo."

"How do you know that?" Eva asked.

"My cousin Bernie went to the Carribeans and came back a changed person. For starters, he was now my cousin Berta, but he...she...also had gotten into voodoo big-time. It's hard not to pick stuff up when people won't shut up about it."

"So, Harold might have a use or two," Eva said.

"Oh, I wouldn't go that far..."

"Shush you guys, something's happening!" Izzy said. The lights in the room flickered. Once...twice...a third time. Nothing else apparently happened. "Aw, I was expecting something more dramatic-"

The shadows at the corner of the room swelled up like a tide, lapping at their feet and fading back like sacks full of dirt. "Okay, that works," Izzy said while Noah and Eva moved away, alarmed.

The design Izzy had made, what Noah told Eva was called a veve, shifted, the ash and ground chicken bones and other things that had been put into it swirling around like motes of light in a sun beam. The light flickered again, going out for a moment; there was a clattering noise while the lights were gone, and went they flickered back on, the bottle of rum had fallen over on it's side. Not a drop of rum had fallen or spilled; in fact, the bottle was completely empty.

Noah had gotten a good view of the bottle. It had been quite full only moments ago.

Eva stared at it for a long moment, her lips pressed so tightly that they were going white. "What the hell...?" She said softly.

"Is this supposed to happen?" Izzy said to Noah.

"Why are you asking me!" Noah snapped. "This was your idea!"

Izzy snorted. "Pretty stupid of you to let me do this, then." Both Eva and Noah had a bad case of eye-twitching.

The darkness seemed to swell up around them again. A presence, something mighty and strange, overpowered whatever feeling remained in the room, leaving the three of them feeling that they shared the room with with something mightier than armies and stranger by far than anything they had ever encountered, and then...

"Hey, are you guys waiting for something or what?" A loud and unfamiliar voice said from directly behind them. Noah, Eva and Izzy shrieked (well, Noah did, and Eva thought he sounded more like a girl than she did) and whirled around, gathering together into a tight little bunch. Sitting on the edge of the table with her leg's crossed was a dark-skinned woman peering at them through a pair of cheap sunglasses with a missing lense (and a veve on the other), wearing a swallowtail jacket over a fishnet shirt, fashionally tattered denim shorts and a well-worn top hat, all of her clothing black, accented with purple where the dimmed light struck her.

They stared at her for a few moments, and she stared back at them with mild curiosity. She smiled a big grin after a moment and wiped what looked suspiciously like a trace of rum off her lips and picked a pool cue (or coco macaque) from behind her, toying with the surprisingly ornate shaft. Noah thought he saw wisps of smoke trailing behind it, that looked like faces. (Except they weren't screaming or crying; if anything, they looked vaugely stoned and content.)

"Hi," Izzy said after a moment. "Who are you?"

"And what are you doing here?" Eva asked, glowering at the strange woman and cracking her knuckles threateningly.

"Maybe I should be asking you those questions," The woman said, her voice lightly accented with traces of New Orleans, and swung herself off the table. She was a startlingly tall and long-limbed woman, and she looked like she could match DJ or even Chef Hatchet in height; even so, she felt taller in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with physical stature. "'Cause...hey, you rang."

"Come again?" Noah said, blinking briefly. When he closed his eyes, she was still standing where she was; when he opened them, she was gone. "Eh?"

"What, you didn't think one of us would show?" A strong feminine hand placed itself on Noah's shoulder and lightly smacked the side of the head, though not unaffectionately. The three of them whirled around; the woman was standing right behind Noah. She chuckled good-naturedly. "Boy, don't go messing around with stuff you don't know. Bit like swearing in langaguges you're not fluent in. Heh, not like I'm one to talk. I could tell you such stories..."

"What?" Noah said, thoroughly bewildered. (The fact that he was a good deal smaller than the woman standing behind him wasn't helping; she was really pretty, and more than a little intimidating.)

"Wait," Izzy said. She looked from the veve on the table and back to the woman. She brightened up. "Ah, you're a Loa!"

"What," Noah said, but flatly this time.

"Yep," The woman said, and shadows whipped around her for a moment, half-seen and brushing past Noah's shoulder with a gently coolness, like dipping into lukewarm water after a hot day.

"...No way," Eva said, looking as bewildered as Noah. (But starting to the way woman was invading his personal space the way she was as a personal insult.)

"I think...'Loa' is the word for a functionary in the Voodoo pantheon..." Noah said slowly. He looked at the woman, who was giving him an appraising look not unlike Courtney had been giving Duncan when the two had first met. He felt a sudden nameless dread, and Eva took a half-step in front of Noah, blocking much of him from the woman in a manner that was both territorial and somewhat possessive. Noah's sense of dread got a little worse, but strangely he found the gesture reassuring. He wasn't sure why. The woman didn't miss any of this and grinned, giving him a thumb's-up. "Wait. You can't mean...no way."

"Totally," The woman said. She was suddenly right in front of him, crossing the intervening distance without any means of doing so, and as she did, a veil of darkness erupted around her, an utter blackness fading to darkest purple at the edges and ten thousand and more gently drifting figures just barely glimpsed behind that veil. An inescapable, perfect darkness...a darkness that seemed, nonethelesse, to be fueled by some primal and benevolent light. "I am Baronne De La Croix," She said. "Voodoo Goddess of Death, daughter of Baron Samedi and my mama Aimee, psychopomp to the newly dead (that fall under my purview, y'know), and a bunch of other stuff I can't be bothered to remember off the top of my head." She paused, and added, "Also, currently figurin' out to be top Goddess in the fields of drinking, brawling, shooting pool and making love. Trying to find a way to combine them hasn't worked out so far, but no harm in tryin'!" She laughed boisterously and grinned like a maniac. "Greetings from Ville au Camp."

"You don't say," Noah said flatly.

Eva twitched, all her inner stores of barely held rage trying to muster up some anger at this strange woman and desperately trying so very hard to not like her. It wasn't working. "Huh," Izzy said appraisingly. "Didn't know the Loa ever came in person. Didn't happen the last time I did voodoo." A sly look came into her eyes. "But the guy that I got into being the cheval..."

"Sort of like the earthly vessal for the gods," Baronne De La Croix said, answering Eva's unspoken question. "Yeah, I heard about that. Dad's still telling the story; he's done all sorts of crazy stuff and even he was impressed by what you got him to do. And that guy wasn't even drunk! How did you hook up a particle accelerator to a lawn mower and not spook the rhinos before you had the bullhorns go off?"

Izzy put a finger to her lips. "Trade secret."

"Gotcha." While Eva and Noah glanced briefly at Izzy but knew better than to ask, Baronne De La Croix gave them a fresh look. "So...what do you guys want, eh? An, uh, friend in the business asked me to pop and give you lot a hand."

"We know a guy who supposedly was attacked by demons," Noah said flatly before Izzy could derail the subject again. "In this very room, no less. Izzy got the bright idea to ask one of you for confirmation or advice. Or something, I didn't think this was actually going to work."

"Yeah, I get that a-" Baronne De La Croix stopped. "Wait. You were attacked by demons and the very first thing you do is mess with voodoo when you don't even believe in it? In the same room where there were daemons? Which you probably don't believe in either, given the way you put it."

"Yep!" Izzy said proudly.

"...I don't know whether to shake your hand for bravado or slap you for a horrendous lack of savviness. I mean...seriously...heck, my buddy Donner has more sense than that, and he's even more of a ditz than his daddy Thor!"

"Wait, his dad's who?" Eva said.

"Uh...never mind." Baronne De La Croix gave the room a speculative look. She sniffed the air. "Huh. Yeah. Something's weird going on here all right. Sort of like standing in a door that's opening real slow from both sides, y'know?"

"...Not really..." Noah said.

"And it's not just this room," She went on. "There's some major break-throughs going on all over this ship. Whole places is getting keyed to somewhere else. Not exactly an ideal situation, specially for you. And..." She paused and tilted her head. The shadows writhed around her, and she blinked. "Okay. This was unexpected."

"We're all going to die, aren't we?" Eva asked pessimistically. The Baronne ought to know, being a goddess of death.

"Eh," Baronne De La Croix said, shrugging. "That's your affair. Sorry. But that's not what I was going at; this whole place isn't local. This...ship...thing you got going around."

"Sure, we already knew it was foriegn-" Izzy started to say.

"You're right at that point," Baronne De La Croix interrupted. "Except you're a touch...ah...small-scale in terms of strict accuracy. This airship deal?" She tapped her coco macaque on it a few times, producing a surprisingly musical noise; it sounded like distant drums, and musical instruments that they associated with ancient Japan for some mysterious reason, and then there was the echoes of some awful discordant noise lingering afterwards, like something new and not altogether welcome. "Is not from around here. In either an international or continential sense."

"Huh?" Noah said.

The Baronne facepalmed with her free hand. "I gotta spell everything for you? This airship, meaning this big ol' chunk of metal you're stuck in, is not from this world and it isn't supposed to be here. Meaning that it's got certain sympatheties for certain...things...that have certain bad inclinations and might just be slippin' in."

"I don't think I like where this is going."

"If you did, there'd be somethin' wrong with you." The Baronne gave them a look that was almost pitying. (Which is not a good thing when it comes from a death goddess.) "There are...ah, let's call them entities out there, though they're also places at the same time. And sometimes living ideas, but let's not get bogged down in the technicalities. We're talking about things that are big. And crazy. And maybe, just maybe, if you're not afraid of looking a touch provincial to some of the less moral big players, you could call them evil. Things like that...they'd love to exploit things like this place. Places that shouldn't be, yet are. Places that, in the ordinary course of things, could never be in the places they nonetheless are in. Bridges between possibilities, you might call those places. And the thing is...when you got bridges, you got people that go and cross them even when you don't want them hanging around your town." She raised an eyebrow. "Just by existing, this place could have a few doors that those things could exploit. Little doors, tiny ones, you'd barely notice them even if you could detect them...but they see them. And they know ways on making them wider. Working on making them wider, little nasty rats chewing walls open...chomp chomp chomp..."

"Okay, now you're just being really creepy," Noah said, trying to keep his emotions controlled.

"I'm a voodoo goddess, it's part of the job description in this political climate." The Baronne grinned briefly, but her expression quickly sobered. "You kids don't even know what this airship is, do you?"

They glanced at each other. "A flying deathtrap?" Noah guessed.

"Big hunk of stupid metal?" Eva volunteered.

"The silicon-based physical represention of a hive-mind suffused in twenty-two percent of the hermaphroditic population that awaits the day the beast with seven mouths sings the song that ends the world so it can challenge it to a rock-off for the fate of the Earth and also who has to clean the sewers of Calcutta using only a toothbrush and one-fifth of a magic doughnut! But little do they know, I'll be waiting for them! I shall do battle with them both, for the sake of my lucky-lucky autographed glow-in-the-dark snorkel!" Izzy suggested. Noah and Eva glanced briefly at her again and then at each other, debating the potential merits of this idea (for their powers of logic had been slightly worn away from the stress of having things routinely try to kill them) before dismissing it. The Baronne stared at Izzy for a long, long time, finally raising an eyebrow, her mouth hanging open wordlessly. "What? I love that snorkel."

The Baronne said nothing for a time. Eventually she glanced at Eva and Noah, who were marginally saner. (Marginally, because Eva was a walking temper tantrum waiting to happen, and Noah hung around Eva and Izzy all the time. Something was wrong with the boy.) "Attempted murder situation's really getting to her, I see."

"Nah," Eva said. "Not so's you notice."

"I think she's actually doing better than the rest of us," Noah said. "Being forced to focus a bit helps whatever's off with her brain."

"Sometimes when I fart, I can hear the echoes of the Dreamtime," Izzy said blissfully. "...But then people tell me to stop."

"What was I talking about again?" The Baronnne said. "I can't remember. Now all I can think about are echoes and the Dreamtime and farts. And crawfish for some reason, but I'm probably just hungry."

"I dunno, vauge portents?" Eva said. "Somethin' about evil presences and what this place is actually about. Something like that."

"Ah, yes," the Baronne said. "This airship thing...it is not someplace you would wish to be in the ordinary course of things."

"Yeah," Eva scoffed. "On account of it's a freaking deathtrap."

"Besides that." The Baronne bit her lip, looking at the metal of the airship all around, and her eyes unfocused; she blinked, and the look on her face was almost...haunted. Like she had glimpsed things almost too horrible and awful to bear, even for one such as her. "This place...ill intent and cruel desires are built into it's very structure. It's metal was forged with the desire to doom countries. It was designed from genius perverted through the lens of supremecist war-profiters. It was sent to the skies at the behest of a genocidal psychopath that embodied all the cruelest and most terrible aspects of the fire that burned in his every breath."

She paused. "It was engineered for a sole purpose, and it was only one of many for that purpose. And that purpose was to bring the most awful and final form of war to the last stronghold that stood against a warlike country that was little more than a rotting shell of it's former glory, and it was to accomplish this by bringing fire-soldiers to a kingdom born from the strength of the earth itself and burn the entire continent it stood on to the ground and exterminate every living thing on it in that hellstorm."

She tapped her coco macaque on the metal, and it echoed. At the very edge of the sound was the sound of burning things, and screams so distant they could hardly be heard at all. But they were there, all the same. "This ship was designed to be part of a fleet sent with the intention of murdering an entire civilization, and that intention has sunken into the spirit of it's metal. This has left traces that certain entities can and will exploit. They have already been drawn here, and the doorways here remain. They cracked open when the blood game you're stuck in started. They started opening wide when your friend Rossiu was attacked. Boy shook them off...not without some consequences but he kicked those off too. But all that did was delay Them."

Noah had remained silent and skeptical throughout her speech. The calm earnestness of her words belied what he felt was the absurdity of what she was actually saying, and he felt inclined to believe her. (She was, after all, a voodoo goddess summoned to answer questions about an attack of demons. Arbitary skepticism would be in poor taste.) "...This ship is evil. That's what you mean, yeah?"

"As a word? 'Evil' suffices well enough."

"Figures that our nemesis that calls himself a host would get an airship made of evil-" Noah stopped. He glanced at Eva. "You realize what this means?"

Eva frowned. "Rossiu was...right. He wasn't making up crazy stuff when he said that Chris stole it from another world or whatever."

"Probably Chris sicced the demons on him for telling us that," Izzy commented.

"Wow, lucidity from you," Noah said archly. "Truly, wonders never cease."

"That's what she said!"

"You realize that makes no sense."

"If it did, I probably wouldn't say it."

"Hm, true..."

"So what do we do about the demons?" Eva said to the Baronne. Unfortunately, she was gone. "Huh?"

"Great, she's gone. That was a waste of time," Noah said. "A portentious and alarming waste of time."

"It's spelled with an 'a'," the Baronne's voice said from everywhere, and nowhere. "'Daemon'. That is what's comin'. That which is of Chaos, of the insane tides of awful possibility that washes against the shores of the Prime Material Planes. A chaotic and evil incarnation of the Immaterium, influenced by a long-gone war and driven to violence by the echoes of war's worst passions and excesses. And that is what is coming. The arm and will of a entity that is valor and courage given a shape and name, courage with such absence of restraint and sentient direction that it becomes courage unchained and insane. Courage without direction or restraint is not courage at all, but the desire to do battle, to defeat challenges regardless of the circumstances or the morality thereof. Not courage anymore, but bloodlust. Violence. You face violence and bloodlust in the shape of nightmares given flesh, and there are coming."

"Ah," Noah said. "That's...one of the less inspiring and pleasant things I've heard in a time of crisis."

"Chaos and it's daemons have that effect on people."

"Where are you talking from?"

The Baronnne chuckled. "Where? Where? I am psychopomp. I am traveler and transport in one. I am sometimes The Way, and sometimes I follow it. You speak of things that are everywhere and nowhere, but I truly am."

"Confusing, if not unexpected. So what do we do?" Noah asked.

"Sorry," The Baronnne said, and it sounded like she meant it. "Direct action on the part of guys like me would have, ah, undesirable effects on the World. I've done what I can without making unfortunate side effects occur...but forewarned is forearmed. You have an inkling of what may be coming, and that alone is encouraging."

"How!" Eva said.

"Well, better that you know what you're facing, even a little, instead of being totally blindsided by it." Eva grunted. "On that note," the Baronne said, her voice growing fainter. "Keep in mind that help can come from unexpected places. The evil of this place was the culmination of a hundred-year war that begin with the genocide of an entire people...but the last of that people returned, all the same, and broke that evil. And they do say that history repeats itself." She chuckled, distantly. "...They say green is the opposite of red. Blood-red flows down the that awful gore-crusted hillside we call history, but green things grow through it. Green makes things happen. Green makes things spin. Green? Heh, yeah, it's sure-as-hell a chaotic thing, but not bad chaotic. The kind of chaos that makes things change. And the Chaos that's coming is so very badly in need of real change, not the stagnant violence and corruption that's it has been for way too long. Don't make premature presumptions, kids; just because something looks human don't mean it is, and just because someone goes with people that looks like monsters don't mean they're the bad guys. I've seen weirder saviors...believe me..."

"I. Don't. Under. STAND!" Noah nearly screamed.

There was a pause. Then, more impatient than ever: "Oh, come on! Do I have to spell everything out for you? Seriously? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get off a good mysterious vanishing moment, and then you guys pull a whiny 'woe-is-me, I-don't-want-to-have-to-THINK' bitch-fit! Come on, work with me! Do you want to wind up Fatebound because you want to mess with crazy Legendary stuff, because that's a lot less fun than it sounds, seriously! Look, just...ugh, just chill out and work with what you get, and don't make dumbass assumptions. But, uh, green's probably a good thing. Yeah, definitely a good thing. Can I tell you guys that? Yeah, it's blatant enough for you to pay attention but subtle enough that you won't have any idea what the hell I'm talking about until you get to that point, at which point retrospect will make it blindingly obvious."

"...Hooray?" Izzy said. She paused. "Wait, I just realized! If you're doing stuff, doesn't that mean that voodoo is the one true religion! Is all other mode of thought a horrible foot-sniffing MISCONCEPTION!"

"Uh...no," The Baronne said. "Not really. Hell, my buddies come from the Norse, Egyptian, Aztec, Japanese and Greco-Roman pantheons, I've seen really pendantic angels made of holy fire advising walking corpses that are doing the whole 'I wanna be a real boy-slash-girl-slash-interderminate-gender' thing, there's a whole bunch of Fae souls being born into human bodies so they can keeping encouraging idealism and stuff, we got bona-fide werewolves policing the spirit world and ...so, yeah, encountering just one pantheon or cosmological principle and immediately assuming that that's the full undisclosed universal Principle is pretty lame, man!"

"Oh, okay," Izzy said, calming down.

"I missed that, could you try again?" Noah said, confused.

"Bah," the Baronne said. "Don't make me come up here and make me repeat myself! Or, I dunno, down here. Or sideways? Geez, extraplanar cosmologies is so confusing. Huh, Vill Au Camp is sort of underwater, so maybe it's 'down'...but it doesn't exist with the World, exactly...geez, my head hurts. And I'm an ichor-based philosophical construct so as not to mess with your guy's Fate or anything, I'm not sure I actually have nerves to hurt."

"What?" Eva said. "I can't hear you, your voice is getting harder to hear!"

"What? Oh, yeah, I'm totally fading out. So, uh...closing comments! Uh, don't drink to excess until you're positive it'll be a good experience or would be absolutely hilarious. Never use the power of pyrokinesis unless you absolutely have to, or if it's really entertaining; also, don't do it around girls with tons of hairspray, it's only funny the first dozen times. If at first you don't succeed, it's probably because you didn't put enough dynamite in the sewer system. And-"

"Ooh!" Izzy said. "One more thing, ONE MORE THING!"

"Oh, for the love of...what?"

"Would you say that you have friends...on the other side?" Izzy grinned like she had just told the most clever and original joke ever.

There was a pause. Then, "Damnit, that joke's getting old. First of all, yeah, I'm a Loa, so there's tons of people here that are my friends and are on the other side, so...there you go. And secondly...again, I'm a Loa. A god of voodoo. I am a friend on the other side." Her voice was so faint now it could barely be perceived. "Y'know what, I'm just gonna go now. Before something else stupid happens. I assume that this is an occupational hazard of hanging around you guys."

"Yes," Noah confirmed.

"Good to know, I'll let the other dudes know so they remember to stay the hell away from you guys. For the sake of their sanity, please, think of the not-crazy gods that you would surely drive mad! Later, guys, it's been...bit annoying, actually." Her voice finally faded away entirely, little more than whispers on the wind, and then that too was gone.

"Huh," Noah said. "That was...interesting."

The clip stopped.

There was a long, long pause.

"Any thoughts?" Han said.

"Uh, yeah, one," Chris said, his eyes wide and his jaw still a little slack. "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT! That's the second time I've said that in less than an hour! Totally a bad sign."

"Looked pretty obvious to me," Han remarked. "They summoned a bona-fide voodoo goddess. Huh...I don't think voodo actually works that way."

"Come on, seriously," Chris said. "What the hell was that! When does crazy shit like that happen at all! Why do things keep babbling on about the airship being evil and nasty things breaking through like it's some kind of creepy cosmic horror story!"

"Well, I wouldn't know anything about evil cosmic intelligences breaking through," Han lied. "But...wait, 'things'?"

Chris looked a bit awkward for a moment. "...I'm definitely not having creepy dreams and second thoughts about stuff possibly caused by those dreams. Nope, no way."

"Okay. But seriously, have you seen the crap that's pulled on your show? How does any of this surprise you?"

"...Good point," Chris admitted, giving Han a suspicious look. "Well, uh..." He bowed his head. "...Crap, there's no way I'm putting that on without some heavy editing to get past the stuff about me getting an airship made of evil. How was I supposed to know that machines made for genocide have creepy vibes?"

"Basic logical thought?"

"Zip it!" Chris snapped. He fumed. "...That Rossiu kid is starting to be a royal pain."

"So? Just kill him off or something, then." Chris glanced at Han, putting it under consideration. "He could, like, become an enemy of your's."

"Psh, I've got, like, thousands of those," Chris said dismissively. "Like, the entire cast or somethin'. And they're hopeless. What are they gonna do, take command of an army of homicidal alien thrill-junkies, point them at me and say 'kill'?"

"It's a distinct possibility."

Chris snorted. "Yeah, like a million-to-one. And besides, you go with what you got, y'know?"

"...No, not really. I have no idea what you just said."

"Yeah, I get that a lot. My cousin gets it worse when out-of-townies show up." Chris toyed with an imaginary pencil, because he already secretly wanted to be a supervillain and supervillains always played with pencils. (At least he believed them to do so.) "Eh...I'm thinking of turning that Rossiu kid into a regular member of the cast just to mix things up. Again. The fan will riot!"

Han scratched his head. "Really? Huh. Cast member... does he keep showing up in the clips you approved or something?"

Chris sighed in exasperation. "All the time! Keeps on butting in; disabling traps, passing by and giving them little tips on turning dangers against the other threats, periodically locking them into their rooms so they're forced to cooperate and partner up...I wanted to edit him out or just not show anything with him in it, but that wouldn't go, see? Half the clips he's in help make some sort of plot for the season, and the others...feh, it's like he set things up to make it stupid-hard to edit him out."

"Did he?"

"...I don't know," Chris said, looking creeped out. "Fanbase doesn't like him much; I hear that half the kids tune in every week just to see if he'll get beaten up or in a fight with someone or pushed out an airlock."

"After all that stuff he does?" Han said with a malicious grin. "Heh. People."

"He locks people in rooms to make them get along," Chris said blandly. "Not that the contestants know he's behind that...I think..."

"So the fans like him?"

"Are you kidding! Have you watched that kid? He's creepy as hell, more neroutic than a bagful of syphillitc monkeys, and you should see one of the clips where he rants to Alejandro for two and a half hours about the Greater Causes of the Common Good, the Will to Survive and how not being a total jerkass is a good idea. Something like that, Al wandered off before Rossiu realized he was gone. The fanbase just does not like him; something about him being a 'self-righteous promoted minion' and 'a creepy little bastard that gives off shotacon vibes' and 'a freak that's gonna grow up to take over a country and kill people because he thinks it'll save more people'. That last one makes sense, actually. He gets more hate then Sierra ever did, and trust me, that's a lotta hate!"

"So you wanted to edit him out to please the fans?" Han said, looking appalled. "You suck-up."

"What, are you nuts? People tune in half the time just because it pisses them off! I love reality TV! I don't know anywhere else I could make this much money making people angry at me for doing my job!"

"You could become a movie director that makes cheap adaptations of popular franchises!" Han said.

"What? No way, I'm still civilized."

"Psh, standards are for wimps! And moralist whiners. And people that breathe through their mouths. And cry when you eat their dogs and make them watch."

"Wait, what?"

"...I am begining to suspect that I'm making too many admissions of guilt around you, aren't I?" Han said flatly.

"Yeah," Chris agreed. "Seriously. What's wrong with you?"

"...Hey, my dad thinks I'm doing okay!" Han said indignantly. "Although I will admit that he's not the most, uh, informed of experts. A little divorced from perfectly sane opinion, he is."

"Yeah, sure, I wasn't listening after the part where you were being very stupid," Chris said. "So, what's next?"

"Well, I imagine you got more footage to look through, give the guys in production the head's-up on your final decision and whatever stuff you usually pull and not think too hard on why I showed you those specific clips, but first, wanna see my tattoo?"

Chris blinked. "What."

Han pulled his pants-leg up nearly to the hip: on his thigh was a black tattoo, a stylized dragon or serpent biting it's tail to make a perfect circle, and inside that circle was a eight-pointed star tipped with arrows.

Sufficiently distracted, Chris pulled away a little bit. "Uh, nice tattoo," He said uncertainly. "What's with the dragon thing?"

"It's called the Ouroborous," Han said pleasantly, grinning like the living avatar of all creepy psychopaths. "Dragon eating it's own tail. Rebirth within death. The destroyer that will never be killed. A serpent that cannot be slain."

"Uh, okaaay...and the star?"

Han chuckled. "Believe me, if you knew what that meant, you wouldn't have to ask about it." He grinned wider. "It'll become perfectly obvious soon enough, yeah?" He pulled his leg down, leaving a lot of questions waiting to be asked and making it clear that he had no intention of giving answers.

The question of the mysterious circumstances surronding everything was forgotten. (And Chris didn't even need to ask about if the airship was really evil or not. He'd known perfectly well what they were made for when he had stolen it and he couldn't care less.) Han showed Chris more clips, now somewhat more wary about what, exactly, Chris would see and gently steering him away from certain clips featuring information he now decided that Chris wasn't prepared for. (Mainly because he kept asking inconvienient questions.)

Chris hardly noticed his 'assistant' steering him this way; he thought that he could hear the most distant echoes of a awful and monstrous voice, made of many thousands and billions of utterly mad voices led by a single resonant and terrible one, and it just laughed and laughed and laughed.

That sort of thing could distract a man.

...

It was a pity that the lower levels of the airship hadn't had any cameras installed in the lower levels, because the recent intruders would have made for awesome television. (Well, Chris could have had cameras put in just in case the contestants made their way down there, but it had seemed like a waste of money, and Chris had had all entrances to the lower levels sealed off and the interns do all their work in there with only communication from Rossiu to direct the.)

This particular part of the lower levels had been kept dark; since no one had bothered coming down there for any reason since the contestants had left the brig and escorted into the upper levels before the ways back were sealed behind them. There was a sound like some rooting around with the lighting, and the lights went back on. In fact, they went back on so fast that the effect was like standing in front of a flash-bang.

Da Boyz stood revealed in that flash of light, having taken to wandering through the lower levels in an attempt to reach the upper levels (where, presumably, the contestants were) and having gone unnoticed thanks to the lack of cameras and astonishing luck in avoiding any of the interns forced into mechanical work. Most of them had the sense or extenuating circumstances (Kah-Mee-Nah's shades, the bionic eyes of Chopstop and Bitz and so on), but unfortunately Gritzgrotz wasn't so lucky. "Gah!" He yelled, clapping a hand over his eyes. "My EYES!"

Kah-Mee-Nah glanced aside through the glare; Boota, thanks to his sunglasses filtering out the light, was still sound asleep on his head. "Sorry," Lakkibork said from his position at a nearby fusebox. "Yaz told me ta get the lights on, I get the lights on! I get them on real good!"

"That's what she said!" Brikspok said.

There was a pause. Kah-Mee-Nah scratched his head in confusion. Boota grunted and kicked at him to make him stop. "What's that mean?"

"...I don't know."

"I'm blinded!" Gritzgrotz reminded them. "Now I'll have to get eye fixin's!"

Bitz snorted. "So what are you complainin' about? You can have some zakka put in! ZAKKA, MAN! It's like dakka, but with more flashy stuff. And lasers. Maybe t'ings explodin'. Can't go wrong with t'ings explodin'!"

"...Oh yeah! Nice to have something go right. We been down here fer so long and we got nuffin'! We ain't found nuffin' but killer robots that can't take a decent hit and liddle interns that run like un-Orky wusses when they hear us makin' noise and also tons of machines dat would be fun to muck with but we ain't got time for them. Oh, and we'll probably die if we do and make da airship fall outta the sky! Also, I've gone blind fer a bit."

"I wonders how I can adjust to sunlight again," Chopstop said. "Being in da dark all da time done changed me."

"We been up here for less than a few hours," Kah-Mee-Nah pointed out.

"...Being in da dark all da time changed me quickly."

"I don't wanna live in da darkness," Lakkabork complained. "It makes me itchy."

"THIS SUCKS!" Gritzgrotz yelled.

They glanced at Brikspok, as if waiting for him to complain to. The Weird Boy didn't; he just stared into the air, frowning slightly.

"Psh, this is just a little bit of a delay!" Kah-Mee-Nah said optimistically. Boota sleepily wiggled a paw approvingly. "We had a worse time of it when we tangled with Gazdakka in the Big Racemeet on planet Scorchmark! Remember the monster trucks that tried to kill us? And the flying monster trucks? And the flying monster trucks with tons of dakka? And the monster trucks that were actual monsters but didn't fly or have any dakka? And also the little go-carts with gophers in them. Still don't know how they got entries in the race. Or the anti-matter cannons."

"Yeah, but den I could see proper, on account of I wasn't blind," Gritzgrotz said mutinously. "Which is proper annoying, see? Oh wait, I can't, 'cause I'm BLIND!"

"You whine worse den a humie!" Bitz said. "I didn't cry half that much when you shot me in the face!"

"Yes you did," Lakkabork said.

"Shut it!"

"HERESY!" Grizgrotz boomed, whipping out his gun and shooting Bitz again. At least, that was his intention, but because of his blindness (and lack of aim to begin with) he hit completely the wrong target. "GORK DAMMIT, ME KNEE!"

Kah-Mee-Nah winced. Boota yawned, the noise waking him up, and he gave them all a dirty look for being so noisy. "And this is why it's a bad thing to go shooting yer buddies for no reason," He told Lakkabork, Bitz and Brikspok sternly. "Yer enemies are fair game, 'cause dey're jerks. But not yer buddies!"

"I unnerstand completely, Boss!" Brikspok said solemnly. He glanced around again.

"Bro!" Kah-Mee-Nah reminded him.

"Yeah, dat too." Kah-Mee-Nah and Boota rolled their eyes.

"Oh boy, a patient!" Chopstop said gleefully, stomping over to Gritzgrotz and carelessly picking him up.

"Oi, put me down!" Gritzgrotz snapped.

Chopstop didn't seem to pay attention. "Oh yes, I can see da potential here! We can has a jumpset put into that leg! Maybe amputate and put in a retracted blade into the primary bone-thingy we'll replace...maybe I'll use a fuel line, so if you get hit there it'll explode and yaz'll go flying and stuff. Everyone loves flyin'!"

"I don't!" Grizgrotz complained. "Flyin' ain't Orky!"

"And we can armor the joints with gravity-repulsor bits, so you can give super-kicks!" Chopstop said, not even remotely aware of his 'patient's' complaints. "Or bust holes in the space-time continuum. That happens somethings, with those bits. We had a Time Lord over the last time that happened. On da other hand, he was the cool one, dat one doctor whose name I can never remember. Then again, you'd be able to bust holes in da bad guys! Dat's always a nice one. Or I could just take off everything below the waist and plug you into a single-seater dakka-runner. Some of da Speed-Freaks love dat stuff."

"Not so popular lately," Lakkabork commented knowingly. "After the rest of da guys in da home galaxy got more serious, most of da Speed-Freaks are trying to look less silly. Being half-wheely thing don't give us a lotta respeck, ya know?"

"Psh," Kah-Mee-Nah said. "'Serious' is fer borin' people! And da Imperium. Da home galaxy needs ta lighten up."

"Then it's decided!" Chopstop declared, his Power Claw retracted into his arm and a number of lethal and terrifying instruments sliding out in it's place, including a number of syringes. "Hold still, I'mma inject you with somethin' that'll knock you out right quick. Won't feel a thing for da serjury, I promise!"

"Actually, dat's okay!" Gritzgrotz said quickly, his vision clearing up enough to let him see the horrifying instruments aimed at him; chainsaws, buzzsaws, shears, bonesaws, scalpels, a rubber ducky on a spring... "I think I'm seeing better, and I didn't even feel that bullet, 'onest-"

"Hey, look, it's One-Eye Yarrick and he says he wants you to be his new best enemy EVER!" Kah-Mee-Nah said, him and Boota pointing behind Gritzgrotz.

Gritzgrotz gasped. "Really!" He tilted his head as far as it could go. "Wait, I dun see him...hey, WAIT A SECOND-" Chopstop extended a syringe filled not with any liquid but with a small and disgruntled looking Squig; he plunged it into the side of Gritzgrotz's neck and pushed down, the Squig squeaking slightly as a greenish chemical was squeezed out of it and injected directly into Gritzgrotz's bloodstream. "Bleh?" Gritzgrotz said, and fell unconscious from the potent anesthesia. (A Painboy that carried a quality supply of anesthetics was a smart Painboy!)

"Okay then," Chopstop said ominously, looming over his unconscious and helpless victim. (Or patient. Among Ork physicians, it was really the same thing.) "Let's see what we can do here..." Surprisingly (to everyone besides Kah-Mee-Nah, who had seen it coming) most of the deadly instruments slid away and a thin set of claws delicately went into the knee wound and pulled out a large crumpled bullet. They retracted, and a spray-bottle appeared that quickly sprayed it's contents on the bullet-wound, which quickly healed over now. "And his eyes will be fine if he rests fer a bit," Chopstop said, throwing Gritzgrotz over his shoulder. "Problems solved, yeah? And I didn't cut anything off either! I AM DA BEST PAINBOY EVER!"

"No yer not!" Bitz said. Chopstop kicked him into a barrel full of garbage. (No one knew why it was there.) "Ow."

"Wait, all dat talk was just you foolin' around?" Lakkabork said.

"That, an' he likes messin' with people," Kah-Mee-Nah said.

"Yep," Chopstop confirmed. Boota hopped off Kah-Mee-Nah's head and picked up the barrel of trash with Bitz inside it (dispite it being much bigger than him) and threw it at Chopstop. "Ow!" Bitz said again, Chopstop not even reacting to it at all.

Kah-Mee-Nah clapped his hands together gleefully. Boota posed. "Okay, now here's da plan! Since Gritzgrotz won't complain so much I can't get a word in. Da way I see it, I figure we ain't in da right place were those humies we're after are!"

"We already knew that!" Bitz remarked. No one listened.

"Dat makes sense," Brikspok said, tuning in after being otherwise distracted with...something. "Ain't seen a trace of them around anywhere! Or sensed any of it."

"Yer powers ain't so strong without Da Boyz aroun' ta power yaz up," Bitz noted.

"...Yeah, well, some of us like not havin' ta worry about yer head explodin'," Brikspok said sullenly.

"Wuss." Brikspok smacked him on the head with his staff. "Ow! Why iz everyone hittin' me today!"

"'Cause yer a zog-head," Brikspok said. Then he hit Bitz again.

"Wot was dat for!"

"Da Boss wants to talk!"

"It's not 'Da Boss'!" Kah-Mee-Nah said hotly. "It's...feh, whatever, da point is dat we gotta break for da surface!"

There was a long pause. "Kah-Mee-Nah," Chopstop said slowly. "We iz onna airship. We iz flying in da sky. We'z already above da surface. Any more above, an' we'd be in space. Again."

Kah-Mee-Nah and Boota grunted in unison. "It's a metty-phor!"

"For what?" Bitz asked.

"Probably somethin' that doesn't sound so stupid," Lakkabork said.

Kah-Mee-Nah rolled his eyes. "Damn it, I miss havin' Viral around. He didn't complain about little details like this all the time, but no, he just had ta go recruiting among da Imperium again!"

"Actually, Viral complains about crap like dat all the time."

"More den any of us!" Chopstop said. "I reckon it's da shark in him. Dey like to fight."

"No, it's gotta be da cat part o' him," Brikspok suggested. "Cats, they's always fighting. I sees kitties, they just sittin' there, and POW! They fight like they's Orky, see?"

"My butt itches," Bitz said. They stared at him. "What? It does."

"My point is dat we gotta get out of these...whatever it is," Kah-Mee-Nah said patiently. "Some kinda engineering place? Engine room? Maint'nence place? A lungfish depository? Whatever. We gotta find a way up into...uh, where all the stuff happens, I guess. Then we'll find da humies! And you know what'll happen then?"

Brikspok chuckled darkly. "Ho yes, we know alright...heh heh heh..."

"Oh yeah," Chopstop said, chuckling like a grinding engine.

"I know allzright!" Lakkabork said, laughing a high-pitched chattering noise.

"I wasn't paying attention, but I'm always up fer a good evil laugh," Bitz said, joining in. He has a surprisingly good evil laugh. (He probably had a voice synthesizer for vocal chords or something.)

"Whee," Gritzgrotz said faintly. (He was still unconscious, but the call of a good laugh comes to all Orks, regardless of their consciousness or not.)

Kah-Mee-Nah led them all in a truly boisterous and mad laugh that boomed throughout the engine room...until he abruptly stopped, a confused look on his face. "Wait. Why'z we makin' us sound all evil an' stuff?"

"Bad influences," Brikspok said.

"Dat dun sound good," Gritzgrotz said, waking up for a few moments. "...Peace out!" He passed out again.

"...Who says 'peace out' anymore?" Chopstop said.

"I do!" Bitz said. Chopstop smacked him. "Ow! Okay, that joke's startin' to wear thin..."

Brikspok chuckled, and then he turned serious. "But dere are two things I think ya oughta know about..."

"Yeah?"

Brikspok paced around the place. "I'm getting a lotta big-bad vibes from this place. This ain't a good place ta be, see?"

"Yeah," Lakkabork said. "It's full of deathtraps and killer robots and savage beasts and also Heather an' Alejandro. Kind of hard to guess which of them is da worst."

Brikspok shook his head frantically. "It's not dat! Well, yeah, a liddle bit, but I wuz talking about somethin' else, see?"

"...No," Kah-Mee-Nah said cluelessly. Boota shrugged.

The Ork psyker paced around, little green sparks flashing around him in his anxiety. "The airship itself. Somethin' proppa bad went inta it's making. Somethin' dat da Chaos-things would find proppa attractive, see?"

Kah-Mee-Nah frowned thoughtfully. "...That'd explain a few t'ings. What kinda things?"

"I dunno," Brikspok said, frowning mightily. "I keep seein' bits an' pieces of things, and dey ain't good. I see fire, and humies dying. It's touched by hands what got blood on 'em, from over three humie generations ago. Big-time blood." Brikspok gave him a serious look. "Goes right down ta da metal, see?"

"...Yeah." Kah-Mee-Nah scowled. "Somethin's coming through, ain't it." It was not a question.

"Not yet," Brikspok said quietly. "But somethin' made it through for a little bit, not too long ago. Got pushed back, I think. Tried to use a mind what ain't wantin' to be used. But dere's too much humie-evil for da Chaos ta ignore this place. And...it's getting ready ta come through soon. I can feel it. Like a big nasty beastie, snufflin' and snortin' and spittin' everywhere...it's breath feels like my skin's melting and da gods turned away from me..." Brikspok's voice went quieter. "...it hurts, Boss...it knows I'm here, it knows what I can do and it wants in me..."

There was a long pause. "Not yer boss," Kah-Mee-Nah said, with the sort of finality that transcends simple commands. "I'm yer brother."

For a moment, Brikspok did and said nothing. Then, he stirred, eyes glowing with a green light that grew steadily brighter. "Yeah. Yeah. That ya is."

It might have only been a trick of the light, but the shadows began to stir in a horrible way, like massive and awful forms were casting grim reflections...and then were just as suddenly gone. Like a stealthy beast on the hunt.

Kah-Mee-Nah gave the darkness of the room, cast by the now-ample lighting, a harsh look. Then he turned to Brikspok and said, "An' what was the second thing?"

Brikspok pointed up. The Orks (and Kah-Mee-Nah, and Boota) looked up and saw that there was a hole right in the ceiling above them, going right through the floor above them...and the floor above that, and the floor above that, and the floor above that, it's edges frayed like claw marks and melted at the same time. "I t'ink we gots up a way up."

There was a pause.

"HOW DID NO ONE NOTICE THAT!" Kah-Mee-Nah demanded.

"I dunno," Lakkabork said. "Looks kinda new. Maybe it was made a little bit ago and no one's seen it yet?"

"Don't make much sense to me," Kah-Mee-Nah grunted. "Bit too much weird goin' on in this ariship for everythin' to always be that simple, yeah?" He frowned and looked up...and then he grinned. "Boota?" The miniturized Squiggoth hopped to his shoulder and saluted. "Wanna go do some scouting? We gotta widen them up a bit so we can fit." The holes weren't big enough to let even Lakkabork in.

Boota considered it for a moment, and then nodded, hopping from Kah-Mee-Nah's shoulder and jumping from the edge of the hole to the upper one. Kah-Mee-Nah watched him go and finally said, "Boyz! Fetch the vehicles! WE GOTZ SOME DRILLING TO DO!"

The Orks cheered.

Well, except Gritzgrotz, but he was unconscious, you can't blame him for that. (Except for the fact that he had been rendered unconcious to make him shut up, but besides that.)

...

The infirmiry, in spite of assurances to the contrary, was nowhere near as awful as it had been earlier.

The blood had been cleaned off, the gore scrapped away, the tables put back into order, the blankets burned and replaced, the hole in the floor...well, they weren't metalworkers or anything so they'd just put some boards over it without asking any question about where they had found lumber in the first place. (Nikigok had brought it with him; the lumber had been his own personal clubbing supply. For clubbing people upside the head. He wept bitter tears at having them appropiately for a constructive task.)

But it was still a bit untidy, and in defiance of all sensibility, Rossiu was not resting from his horrifying near-death ordeal but contentedly sweeping the floor of dust, sunflower seed shells and a few of his pieces that no one had picked up.

He was humming a hymn to himself in Korean; he had a surprisingly musical voice, and his sweeping was barely hampered by the large bandage he had on his shoulder that limited his range of movement only a little. It wasn't strictly needed at this point, but it was good for delaying a few awkward questions for a while.

He liked sweeping. It always seemed his lot to do the messy chores that no one else wanted to do, the unglamorous tasks that were nonetheless essential to everyday life espicially when they were supposed to be done unnoticed, and it was fortunate that Rossiu enjoyed doing them anyway. He liked feeling useful and wanted.

Still, he reflected as he swept and tried very hard not to think about what had happened to him earlier, he would still do those things even if he was hated for them. Even if the more distasteful jobs he tasked himself to earned him the spite and disgust of everyone around them. He would still do them, just so no one else had to.

Father Magin (the man who was, Rossiu felt, the father he'd never really had and better than the one he remembered from childhood) had always told him he'd had a martyr's complex. He didn't mean it as a bad thing, like a lot of people did these days. Father Magin understood, and Rossiu had learned, that sometimes there were things that just had to be done. They might make you unpopular. They might make you resented. People might well hate you for doing them, but they had to be done, regardless.

When Rossiu had really understood what Father Magin meant when he spoke of duty and responsibility and the right thing, it was like a light had flicked on in his head. The darkness had dispelled, and it was like something in his head had snapped into place with a sound like all the doubts and sorrows of his childhood dying without a whimper, and in their place came peace.

He felt at peace now, doing his job, regardless of the risk to himself. Even if, he mused unhappily, nobody on this ship wanted anything to do with him-

His thoughts were interrupted when the door to the infirmiry opened. Rossiu looked up curiously and saw DJ (who he got along with fairly well, though he had it on good authority that DJ was one of those that thought that he was way too intense for his own good) peek in. "Uh, hi," DJ said. "I heard about what happened and Beth said you were feeling better and WHAT ARE YOU DOING!"

Rossiu blinked as DJ rushed inside, followed by a perplexed and worried Bridgette, Sadie, Geoff, Lindsay, Katie and, astonishingly, Duncan, all of which seemed just as shock to see Rossiu up and about. (Well, most of them. Duncan looked a bit impressed.) Beth followed a few moments later, looking embarrased for some reason. "Ah, hello," Rossiu said. "I noticed that this place was looking a spot messy so I decided to tidy up."

"I thought demons tried to eat you!" Sadie squealed. "We thought your arm was going to fall off! You shouldn't even be out of bed and you're cleaning!"

"I like making myself useful," Rossiu said, shrugging mildly, privately thinking that what had happened to him was certainly a lot worse than that.

"Your shoulder," Duncan said, scratching his head and looking like he was rethinking what he thought about Rossiu. "Demons. Remember? Bad day?"

"It was only yesterday," Rossiu said, smiling faintly. "And anyway, you get used to being violently assaulted by extradimensional horrors."

"...You've been attacked by demons before?" Duncan said incredulously.

"Well, actually, no. But it happened to me and I suppose I've already adjusted it, so I'm certain it counts." He shrugged, as if it was unimportant. "Anyway, I can hardly fulfill my duties in quietly keeping you all alive and finding a means to help you escape this deathtrap through passive-aggressive warfare with my employer."

"Wait, what?" Geoff said.

"I said nothing," Rossiu said innocently.

Beth coughed. There was a long silence from the others as Rossiu looked at her. "So, um," Beth said awkwardly. "What do you...y'know...remember?"

"Remember?"

"Of...your sickness?"

Rossiu tried to look blank.

(His body tearing itself apart. Visions vast and unspeakable, a inhuman intelligence hammering at his every brain cell, turning his memories inside-out and warping everything it touched until what was good was bad and all he had left where the darkest moments. Blood, his blood, splattering everywhere along with mutinous pieces of himself come to squealing unholy life. Beth standing over him with a saw, such a grim look on her face. And...a entity, standing before him, tall and dark and strangely kind, speaking in a voice that went directly into his brain without bothering with his ears and sounding like slabs of lead slamming together-)

"Nothing. Nothing whatsoever," Rossiu lied.

He hadn't remembered. Not at first. He wished it had stayed that way.

They looked at each other a moment more, sharing a private history that was brief and already filled with a horror neither of them wished to contemplate. Bridgette broke the silence and said, "But really, what are you doing up? You could, like, hurt yourself or your arm! Again. I'm sure being attacked by demons causes all kinds of nasty infections!"

Rossiu shrugged. "Well, I did a lot of thinking about how I could make Chris' life more difficult and this was the result. Too much?"

"That's not really a funny joke," Katie said, looking worried.

"You thought I was joking?" Rossiu said, mystified. "Wow, Father Magin was right, I really do need to work on my vocal tones and make my intent more clear..."

"Meh, that stuff's for wusses," Duncan said. "...Wait. Who's Magin?"

"The priest who taught me during my stay in the Vatican."

"You were raised by monks? Priests, whatever."

"I guess so."

"...Wow, that explains a lot."

Rossiu frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?" Duncan only snickered in response. "Uh...what are you all doing in here anyway? Don't you have...I don't know, important things to do?"

Geoff and Bridgette looked blankly at each other. "We, um, we were worried about you," Sadie said honestly.

Rossiu blinked. For a moment, his mind blanked, and he totally missed a faint scrabbling noise under him. "...What?" he said, totally bemused.

"Wow, you totally have a, um, what's the word?" Lindsey said. "A sheltered life?"

Rossiu felt extraordinarily out of his element, and couldn't say or think anything for a moment. Sierra and Cody had come by earlier, earnest and worried, but honestly he wasn't sure what to think of them; Sierra was more than a little weird and Cody had become distinctly unhinged recently. They weren't the best control group for emotional experiments.

DJ and Geoff shared an amused look at his astonishment. "Well, least you're okay, right?" DJ said, a touch cheerfully.

"Oh, certainly," Rossiu said, an idea coming to him. He paused, a funny expression on his face. The mop was dropped, and suddenly, his mouth dropped open and his eyes rolled back in his head. He stumbled back, his arms flopping loosely and his body moving...strangely, like something was piloting his body. "He comes," Rossiu said in a harsh voice quite unlike his own. "The Bloody One comes. Vast is His reach, and infinite is His wrath. In His footsteps do the oceans of blood he has unleashed, and they do swim with the endless world-corpses of those given to Him. In his left hand is the doom of all that He sees fit to challenge, and in His right hand is the axe that will unmake all things! His voice sows the Chaos of a thousand-fold berserkers, and he rises from his throne of skulls! His champions, the World-Breakers and the Betrayer, have opened the door forged in the intents of darkest fires. Know that His desire for war shall turn this realm to dust! KNOW THAT KHORNE IS COMING."

The others recoiled in absolute horror. (Some of them watched horror movies.) "Holy crap, HE'S POSESSED!" Duncan said.

"Hit him in the head with something!" Geoff said. "IT'S FOR HIS OWN GOOD!"

"I always knew it could end like this!" Katie and Sadie wailed, and they ran behind DJ.

"What are you doing behind me?" DJ said. "Do I look like a meat shield to you?"

"Yes!" They said.

Bridgette folded her arms and gave Rossiu an indignant look. "That's not very funny, you know."

Rossiu blinked and straightened up. "Hrm, I suppose not," He said with a shrug, clearly not posessed at all. (But pretty good at faking it.)

Everyone paused. Katie and Sadie peeked out from behind DJ, who looked like he wanted to run somewhere. Geoff, standing behind Rossiu with a metal folded chair in his hands, sneaked off and whistled nonchalantly when Rossiu gave him a polite look. Lindsey put her hands on her hips and frowned indignantly. Duncan stared incredulously for a moment, and then he started laughing.

"What posessed you to do something like that?" Bridgette said. Duncan started laughing harder. "That's not what I...you know what I mean!"

"I've been sitting here for far too long and I came up with things like that to pass the time," Rossiu explained in his usual deadpan. "The moment seemed too good to pass up."

Duncan, DJ and Geoff nodded approvingly; good practical jokes were regarded by both as awesome. "We might just make a decent buddy out of you after all," Geoff said, clapping Rossiu on the shoulder. Rossiu winced; Geoff was a pretty big guy.

"Um, thank you?" Rossiu said uncertainly.

"What was that 'Khorne' stuff about?" Katie asked while Sadie sighed in relief. Lindsey, the moment passed, was quickly letting her temper go, but Bridgette still seemed annoyed at Rossiu.

"I'm not actually sure," Rossiu admitted. "I believe I heard it in a..." He paused. It was quite a long pause. Enough time to remember what he had dreamed of in his...condition, after he'd been attacked. Enough time for him to swallow nervously, like a man who had seen such things that his brain had forced them to fade from memory, and the stain they left was enough to keep sleep away for a very long time. Things are remembered in dreams, however distantly, and some things should not be remembered. Rossiu looked like somebody who desperately did not want to remember. "A dream," He said at last. He shivered and put a hand to his shoulder, wincing at some unspeakable dream-born memory.

There were things that he dared not think of in those dreams. "Chaos," He muttered to himself. "It keeps coming back to Chaos."

"What was that?" Bridgette said. DJ and Duncan glanced at each other, a touch disturbed by the raw emotion in Rossiu's voice.

Rossiu shrugged and tried to smile. "Nothing important," He said, because I dreamed and saw every sin and horror a man could commit come to screaming life and drive a million worlds to such evil that I dare not speak of away from the sun sounded weird.

"Well," Geoff said cheerfully, grabbing Rossiu by the arm to the younger boy's surprise. "If you're good enough to want to get stuff done, you shouldn't be hanging around this dump!"

"Wait, what?" Rossiu said.

"Sure," Duncan said, with an absolutely evil grin. "I bet there's tons of awesome stuff I bet you can help us with. Like, maybe, screwing around with this ship to make things a bit more...eh, fun for us?"

"Well, I suppose I would know, but-"

"Enough said!" Duncan said cheerfully. "C'mon, I think I found some gun turrets in the next corridor over."

They dragged Rossiu off, the boy looking completely uncomprehending of his circumstances. "Wait, you can't drag him off like that!" Bridgette said.

"It would appear that they are," Rossiu said, politely puzzled.

"Come on, babe!" Geoff told Bridgette. "He's doing fine enough to kid around! Let him hang with the cool kids!"

"We have some?" Lindsay said, perplexed.

There was a duo as Duncan and Geoff face-palmed. Bridgette snickered, despite herself. Sadie and Katie glanced at each other as if wondering if they now counted as 'cool kids'. Lindsey looked a bit miffed at the reactions since no one was answering her question. Rossiu still looked quietly resigned to his fate. DJ patted her on the shoulder. "I guess there's worse things we could be doing," He said.

"I suppose," Bridgette said doubtfully. She paused. "Do you hear a noise?"

Katie leaned aside. "What noise-" There was a loud creaking noise, of tremendous force being applied to a stiff and unyielding opposition. Rossiu saw the wood boards over the hole under his bed bending, splinters popping over and the nails sliding out of place. "Oh, that noise."

The wood exploded, splinters and chunks of wood flying everywhere (fortunately not hitting anyone), sawdust rising up and making DJ cough. "What the hell was that?" Duncan said. He blinked, seeing a figure rising out of the hole. "Uh, hey, guys?"

"What?" Lindsey said. Her eyes widened as she saw something approach from the hole, it's body strange and thick. "Oh no," She said, remembering a dozen other encounters that had started this way and inevitably ending in either running or destruction. "We gotta go, it's-"

The dust faded. A green furry thing the size of a large housecat stood in front of them, looking curious and unthreatening dispite it's impressive tusks. "Buu!" It said, raising a paw.

"That's not an evil robot or a trap," Bridgette said slowly. "That's not an evil robot or a trap at all."

"Or a crazy animal that wants to kill me," Geoff observed. DJ shuddered; somehow, Chris had found the baby seal and the panda. "It's-"

"IT'S SO FLUFFY I'M GONNA DIE!" Lindsay, Sadie and Katie squealed, hurting everyone's ears. Bridgette quickly ran and scooped the little creature up before they could get to it; the three girly-girls slumped in disappointment, for they knew better than to get between Bridgette and an animal.

Rossiu tilted his head. "This was unexpected," he said, giving the animal a suspicious look and looking furtively at the hole.

"What do you think it is?" Geoff said, leaning over to get a better look at it and grumbling to himself at how...pleased it was to be hugged by Bridgette like it was. He gawked when it wriggled out of her grasp only to crawl inside her sweater, snuggling against her chest. "Hey, personal space, buddy!"

Bridgette giggled, not at all offended by the liberties the animal was taking. "Ooh, fuzzy!"

"Buu!" The animal squeaked smugly, it's head poking out from the neckline of Bridgette's sweater.

Geoff crossed his arms and fumed. "Lucky little bastard..."

Duncan rolled his eyes and patted his shoulder in a gesture of manly commiseration. "Guess there's a few advantages to being short," he muttered. "...Wait, why's it wearing sunglasses?"

"...Maybe it likes looking stylish?" Beth guessed. Duncan snorted dimissively. "What? It could be!"

Katie tilted her head. "Why's it green?"

"...I don't know," Bridgette said slowly, wriggling a little as the animal snuggled into place. "I wonder what it's doing on the ship in the first place?"

"Maybe the little guy just got lost," DJ said, warily hanging back so that his animal curse didn't do the poor thing any harm. (He was, of course, still convinced that he was cursed; the others generally believed that he was the victim of some spectacularily bad luck, but the fact that bad things kept happening to the animals that attacked him only helped his case.) "Looks a little bit like a furry mole-rat, you ask me..."

"I think he looks like a Boota," Rossiu said suddenly. They stared at him. "What? He does." Boota blinked and stared, not at Rossiu, but at DJ, having not noticing him until now. He wriggled away from Bridgette's sweater with a small pop (the experience wasn't unpleasant for her, but Boota had that effect on girls), and he bounded right for DJ, compelled by some strange instinct.

"No no no!" DJ wailed. "Don't do it, little guy! I'm cursed!" Boota ignored him and hopped from the ground all the way onto his shoulder. "Aw, no! Get away from me before you hurt yourself!" Boota ignored him and hopped onto the top of his head and onto DJ's hat...skullcap...the white thing he wore on his head. "No! Aw, no!" DJ sobbed in horror of the doom he was bringing on poor little Boota.

Duncan took a careful step back. "Man, you're overreacting. You don't have any animal curse-"

A spotlight fell right onto DJ's head. Or it would have, if Boota hadn't kicked it so hard it crumpled and shot it right into the hole he had come through with a terrific ringing noise. Geoff blinked. "...THAT WAS AWESOME!" He cheered. He blinked, remembering how Boota had invaded his girlfriend's personal space in such a way to make him envious. "...Sneaky little...trying to wow me with his awesome..."

"Well, look on the bright side," Beth said to DJ. "From one cursed person to the other! On the one hand, you might just be cursed, but on the other, it doesn't seem to bother him one bit."

"Yeah," Bridgette agreed, wondering vaugely well she felt envious of DJ's hat-thing. (To be fair, it was an awesome hat.)

DJ looked unsure, but the faintest glimmer of hope dawned on his face. Boota patted him on the head reassuringly. (He'd watched the show, of course, he knew all about the animal curse thing.) Derailing all further conversation on this topic was a loud and wild (but human) voice that came from the hole: "OY, BOOTA! WAS THAT YOU? IT SAFE UP THERE OR WHAT?"

"Who was that?" Duncan said incredulously while Boota perked up at the sound of that particular boisterous voice.

"He sounds hot!" Lindsay, Katie and Sadie said. Bridgette and Beth stared at them. "What? He does!"

"Why do I suddenly have an urge to self-narrate?" Geoff wondered, that voice having it's own effect on him. Rossiu and Duncan nodded sagely.

Another voice came from the hole, this one manifestly not human, rather like a rolling growl. "WE GOTS A FREE LAMP THINGY! SCORE!"

"GET DAT OFF YOUR HEAD," Another voice said, and this one sounded almost...mechanical. "YA LOOKS LIKE A GIT!"

"NUH-UH, IT MAKES ME LOOKED DISTINGUISHED!" There was a smacking noise. "OW! MORK DAMMIT, STOP HITTING ME!"

"OKAY."

"REALLY?"

"NOPE!" There was another smacking noise.

"BOOTA!" The first voice said. "YOU THERE OR WHAT? WAS YOU CAPTURED! NO ONE CAPTURES ONE OF MY BROS! I'LL BLOW UP THE SHIP AND EVERYTHING ON IT WITH MY AWESOME!"

"What," Duncan said.

Boota squeaked loudly. There was a pause. "STOMPIN'S OFF THE MENU, BOYZ." The first voice said again.

"AWWW!" The others said in disappointment.

Sadie scratched her head. "Okay...this is getting weird..."

Boota squeaked some more. There was an even longer pause...broken by an incredibly loud revving noise, like massive engines firing up, and right after that, the even louder squeal of power tools.

"What the crap!" Duncan yelled as green light flashed up from the hole. Beth and Rossiu stared in faint recognition. The entire floor under them rumbled so powerfully that several of them fell off their feet (Beth kept Rossiu from falling over, though), following by a tremendous rasping noise...

Like drills chewing through metal.

"HIDE!" Duncan said, not exactly the smartest move, but they panicked enough to do just that, overturning some tables to make barricades by the walls and jumped behind them dispite Boota's infuriated squeaks-

Just as the last of them ducked behind the makeshift barricades, the entire part of the room around the hole (thankfully far from all of them) tore itself apart as a huge monster of a motorcycle tore it's way right through, a tremendous drill shredding the floor as it came through for a brief moment, they all had a perfect look at the man riding it; younger than them but different, wild blue hair, something red like a cape flying behind him, really awesome shades-

And then he smashed right through the wall before Boota could so much as call out, leaving them all behind and still going. They heard the distant crashes as more walls were smashed through, and more after that, and more after that...and so on and so forth. There was a distant sound that implied that even the floor wasn't safe from that giant drill.

"Okay," Duncan said. "What the fu-"

He was cut off, as right then more giant machines came screaming through; a massive mutant hybrid of a truck and a jeep, battered and scratched and dented and bristling with weaponry, slamming into the floor with a wild screech and the huge green monster-thing whooping like a maniac, much of it replaced with creaking machines. This one smashed through the wall too, following the path of the first one, but going a completely different direction once it entered the corridor and somehow drilling right through the ceiling and still going.

After that came an even bigger monster-truck thing, it's wheels covered in spiked treads and chainsaws protruding from nearly every concievable surface, two railguns mounted on the front and so many other things that they didn't notice because of the massive mechanical behemoth hunkered into the front seat, a smaller (but still really big) monster of it's kind wedged next to it, and a third monster clinging to the back of it for dear life in one hand and a staff in the other, yelling in protest when the truck turned a sharp right at the gaping hole in the wall.

A bike came last, bigger than a car but smaller by far than the other vehicles, ridden by a large goblin-thing with a jet wired into it's spine, howling like a maniac as it drove it, did a wheelie, and abruptly drilled into the floor, disappearing from sight.

From all around, there were rumblings and clankings. The sound of chaos (but not Chaos) echoed so loud that it hurt their ears. When it faded, none of them had anything to say.

"Okay," Geoff said. He stopped. Then, "What the hell just happened!"

There was a pause that indicated that this was the best anyone could think to say.

Until Duncan, his voice solemn and grave, said, "I can die happy now, because I have seen the face of awesome and it was those truck-things and that big motorcycle."

Rossiu nodded. "Indeed." He and Duncan glanced at each other, clearly surprised that they had anything in common at all.

"Told you he'd be hot," Sadie told Bridgette smugly.

"You only saw him for barely a second," Bridgette pointed out.

"That was long enough!" She giggled, her and Katie blushing brightly.

"Did that first guy have a chainsaw-sword?" Beth wondered. "...I think I want one too."

"I'm scared and confused," DJ said plainly. And on DJ's shoulder, Boota facepalmed, distraught that no one ever paid attention to anything any more.

Clearly, this was going to be more difficult than he'd thought.

"I knew there was something that would come from the bottom of the airship!" Rossiu said abruptly.

...

A/N: Seriously, Kamina and Da Boyz are going to meet the Total Drama kids. For a crossover story, there's not a whole lot of 'characters from Series A meets characters from Series B' going on here. Mosty it's vague portents and creepiness and cameos from Scion and Rossiu.

By the way, if you're wondering, Baronne De La Croix is a signature character from the epic role-playing game Scion, wherein the player characters are the titular half-divine children of the Gods, battling the primordial Titans in their parent's names. (Since those parents are busy on the home front of the Overworld.) The general pantheons (with others included in various splatbooks) are the Aesir (the Norse gods, so popular they got their own book), the Dodekathon (the Greco-Roman gods), the Atzlanti (the Aztec gods), the Pesedjat (the Egyptian gods), the Amatsukami (the Japanese gods) and, of course, the Loa (the voodoo gods). For some reason, I've recently gotten into researching the fictional variations of Voodoo, and when I'm into stuff, it tends to intrude into my stories like this. Since I'm extremely uncomfortable with portraying real-life stuff in my stories (and, honestly, I'm paranoid about offending someone), I took the vision of Voodoo as laid out in Scion and took it from there.

Also, Levia T. Han. Yeah, definitely NOT someone to trust. (He squicks out Chris. That's a bad sign if I ever saw one.) He's also not an original or from Warhammer 40K in any way, but a character from one of my favorite animes given the Warhammer 40K treatment. The tattoo ought to be a big clue. Obviously, his current name is a pseudonym, and a lazy one at that.

Originally, I was going to have everything after Kamina showing up with the Orks to be clips Chris watched with Han. I decided that the last two clips worked better as they are now and things...escalated from there. (That tends to happen with me.) That end bit with Kamina and the Orks literally crashing in wasn't even originally there!