What if the Intersect had been...different? What if its negative effects had been much more immediate, plaguing Chuck from the get-go?

Chuck is gone.

"Volkoff and I staged my execution at an isolated cove on the Costa Brava. I made my husband, the only man I have ever loved or will ever love, watch as I was shot in the head. One of Volkoff's men knocked Stephen out before Stephen could interfere. I had lured Stephen to the beach; I knew he would follow. I watched through binoculars when he came to...and...believed what he had seen, what I staged."

Chuck could not stop singing the song. Over and over, he sang the words as the car sailed toward Bozeman. Fulcrum. Stop Fulcrum. ~Leave the betraying bitch behind. ~Frost. Sarah! He had been singing for almost six hours.

Chuck Amuck

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Love Went Mad

,

Chuck stepped into the Bozeman Buy More, shaking his head. He stood still. Shook his head again, hard. It was like home, Burbank. Still despite its familiarity, it also felt unfamiliar, near and far. The encircling green was nauseating, the signage all Orwellian capitalist japing. Head shake. Head shake. He walked slowly toward the Nerd Herd desk.

A small young woman with dark hair turned toward him, a clipboard in one hand, a ballpoint in the other, tapping the former with the latter. She looked up at Chuck, then watched him intently as he finished his head-shaking trek to the desk. She smiled a quick, genuine smile, aiming her chin up so as to look Chuck in the eye.

~Cute as a button. What? I don't say that. Dad used to say that.

"Hey, there! I'm Lou. Welcome to the Buy More!" She threw her arms wide as if to embrace the encircling green. "What nerding needs...herding?" She stammered through the last bit, and her cheeks reddened. Especially when Chuck gave her a lost look and shrug.

She leaned forward, titling her chin up even more, her dark eyes brighter for the contrast with her scarlet cheeks. "My boss makes us say that shit. Sorry..."

"Not a problem." Chuck's voice was hoarse from singing and Lou seemed puzzled by his near croak. The mania that had seized him since Mary's confession in the barn had passed. His exhausted mind felt tender, sore - blistered all over. Still, he felt more or less like himself. Except for the need, the urge, the need: deal with Fulcrum, destroy Fulcrum.

It was an ulcerous pain, gnawing insistently when he tried to ignore it, less insistently when he did as it demanded. Right now, the pain was a slow-burning cigarette in the center of his brain. He managed to smile around the glowing ember. "I...used...to work at one of these. I know how it goes."

Lou's smile grew, and grew conspiratorial. "So, what can I help you with, O! Tall Bunyanesque Buymorian Ex-pat?" Her eyes promised mischief.

Chuck grinned in spite of it all. "I want to build my own computer - power on the cheap. Do you have what I need?"

She gave him a smirk, standing back from the desk so that he could see her better, turning herself a little at the waist and cocking her hips. "What do you think?"

Even though he was not in the grey flannel suit, far from it in his farm flannel shirt, jeans and boots, hay clinging to him, he gave her his best Cary Grant look. "I'm flattered - but I am also spoken for."

"I love you, Chuck." The memory of Sarah's gentle whisper, the words she had spoken, had been in his mind since he parked the car, her words his life-preserver. The burning in his head cooled as he replayed them, and re-lived Sarah's warm, full-body embrace.

How he had wanted to say the words back, return her embrace! - but he could not do it. His eyes remained shut, his mouth too, his body still.

Lou snickered with unhidden frustration, calling Chuck from the barn to the Buy More. "Damn. That's how it always goes. Good equals taken." She huffed, blowing her bangs away from her head. "I don't know if we have the components you need. They've eliminated almost all the old force-feed stuff we used to get, the nerd candy, the stuff that the real nerds wanted. These days, you have to buy the whole fucking computer, and the one you buy can't even be opened up. Sealed like a tomb. That's the way of all tech, you know? It eventually becomes nothing but user-interface - like smartphones are all screen - and basically unrepairable. Trash it, ring China for a replacement, huh?"

Chuck was charmed by her mixture of savvy and slang. "True. Well, what's going to get me the most bang for my buck?"

Lou eyed him again. She put her hand on her own head, as if measuring herself. "See, that question would have been so much more fun without the 'spoken for' bit earlier."

Chuck felt his cheeks color. "Sorry, but I am. Spoken for."

"I know. I can tell. That's part of the reason it pisses me off - I want the kind of guy who can be spoken for but every time I find him he's…"

"...Spoken for?" Chuck offered, completing her thought.

She nodded glumly, but then smiled. "C'mon, I'll show you what we've got." She led the way from the desk to the aisles of computers in the rear of the store. After a few minutes of talking and tinkering, Chuck found what he wanted. "Can you wipe it for me? Get rid of all the stuff that comes on it. You must have something that'll do that. Maybe back in...the Cage?"

She smirked again. "You really are an Ex-pat. I'm not supposed to do that," she looked around, "but, sure, it can be done." The conspiratorial tone was back, thick.

"Good. Could you do it while I finish shopping?"

Lou sized him up. "The Cage is big enough for two, and I know how to turn off the security camera…"

"Spoken for."

"I know. Damn it." She grabbed a boxed laptop and headed through the doors.

Chuck thought of his run through the same doors in Burbank. He'd been running from Sarah but toward Sarah. He just had not known it. He should have looked back.

~Killer.

No, she loves me. The pain began to intensify. Chuck began to look for other items. The pain lessened.

He got to check-out with his hands full. Lou was waiting on him, the laptop box's tape cut but closed. "Cash or charge?"

"Cash."

She rang him up and he paid. "I get off in a little while," she noted, a sneaky look on her face. "There's a good coffee shop up the street, Zocalo, just started serving good sandwiches. Killer roast beef…"

Chuck frowned then smiled. "Sorry, Lou. No time. Things to do."

She shrugged. "Well, I'll be there, if you change your mind." She speared his eyes with hers. "Tender, moist...really, really moist." She waited.

"Of that, I have no doubt. And thanks...for the kind - and repeated - offer, but, no."

She handed him a large Buy More bag, everything inside it. She gave him a regretful but good-natured final shrug: "Thank you."

Morgan was seated beside Batgirl. Beside Zondra.

He was fighting to keep from stealing glances at her, and losing in a rout. Catching a furtive glance, Zondra grinned at him. "So, Morgan, do you crash your bike into every woman you see, or did I just get lucky?"

Morgan turned to look at her directly. She had been quiet since she had arranged for the flight. She had looked at him several times as they drove to the airport but had not spoken. He was unsure what to make of her grin or her question now - or her earlier looks.

"Did you get lucky?" Morgan asked, a little too loudly. A second later, he heard his own question. "Oh, God. I mean, um, um, I don't know that having me crash my bike into you counts as lucky, exactly."

Zondra grew thoughtful. "Well, I admit I'm sore as hell, and a lot of that is your doing, although the rest of it was that Jill Robertson woman, the bitch with the glasses and the gun. But I do think I got...lucky." Her unreadable grin reappeared.

"Yeah, well…" Morgan fished around for something to say, glad Zondra was talking to him but intimidated as hell by her too. Her eyes were a shade of brown Morgan only knew to call intense. "...I can say that I don't do that to every woman I see. You were my first." Morgan heard his own comment a second later, again. He squeezed his eyes shut, then smacked his own face. "Geez, that's not...I mean...not that I…"

Zondra took his slap hand in hers. Her hand was surprisingly soft, her grip surprisingly soft too, though he could feel the strength there. "Morgan, I am honored to be your first." She bowed her head.

He had no response to her that would not make him feel more awkward, so he just sat there like a bearded Pet Rock, afraid to acknowledge her hand on his and terrified that she would remove it. She did not; she left it there.

She looked away from him, looked out the window at the darkening sky. "I've never been to Montana. What about you?"

"No. I've never been anywhere. Once, when I was eight, my mom took me to Legoland." He shut his eyes again and gulped. "I know that must sound lame to someone like you, leading a life of international intrigue."

She barked a laugh, loud enough that several other passengers looked at them. "Morgan, what do you think I do all day, most days? Let me tell you what I don't do. Dress in expensive gowns and foil international terror plots hatched by dark but handsomely mysterious bad guys.

"Evil is not mysterious, Morgan. It's always the same. Twisted selfish bullshit. Evil is one note. It's goodness that's different, goodness that's mysterious.

"Most days, I spend my time telling lies to petty crooks while they stare at my chest, I spend it hoping I can get them to rat on their bosses, who turn out to be other equally petty crooks, but just accidentally on a higher rung in a gonzo, evil Ponzi scheme." She shrugged. "You get used to it, I guess. Try to tell yourself it's just a job. Do the job. Try to do it well, whatever that means in the midst of so much that's so bad. Worry about promotions...demotions...spy versions of office politics."

She turned and looked at him again. "What I don't do is spend time with...human beings, human men. I don't spend time with men who are amateurs at bravery, amateurs not because they bungle but because their bravery is motivated by love. The men I've known have been professionally brave, brave for selfish reasons, mouthing words like 'duty' but ultimately as self-serving as the petty crooks who are supposed to be on the other side.."

Morgan had no idea what to say to her, to all that. She gave his hand a squeeze, hard but not enough to hurt. Obviously, all this had been much on her mind.

Morgan decided to switch topics. "Who was it you texted to get us this flight?"

"Brown is his name. He told me when he arranged the flight."

"And he's helping you, us, Chuck and Sarah...But I get the feeling he's not exactly acting in the chain of command?"

Zondra contracted her brows. "How did you know?"

"Well, he obviously helped you at first without you knowing who he was. That made me think…"

She smiled at him. "And think right. He hasn't explained it to me, but he's suspicious of what's going on with Graham - and I am too. Graham should have told me about Sarah, Chuck, but he didn't. Not even when I asked why Ellie would know who Sarah was. Why would he want Ellie...eliminated?"

Morgan felt anger bubble inside him. "I don't know, but I'm with Ellie: fuck Graham."

Zondra's face became unreadable again. "Well, I'm on this plane, so I guess I agree."

"Damn," Casey muttered, flicking his eyes up into the rearview to meet Frost's deadly stare.

"So you think your son has his dad in his head? Talk about the child being father to the man!"

Carina punched Casey's shoulder., hard "You know that's not what that means."

He looked quickly at Carina - her blue eyes infinitely more pleasant than Frost's. "Yeah, well, how about 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge'?"

Carina's gaze shifted subtly, saddened, and she opened her fist and rubbed Casey's shoulder where she punched him. Silence fell in the car. Casey saw a look pass between Frost and Sarah, a look of worry, the look laced with regret for Frost, and laced with sorrow for Sarah.

"Well, it's one hell of a way to concretize daddy issues," Casey said, just trying to end the silence. "So, really, his dad is in his head?"

Frost shook her head as she answered. "No. It's not like Chuck is possessed, at least not by Stephen, his actual father. We need Ellie, a doctor, not Father Karras, an exorcist." Frost actually smiled at her quip. "The Intersect, even in its earliest forms, took on a life of its own when hosted, a life that it constructs atop and out of the life of the host. It...I don't know...slowly becomes the host or the host slowly becomes it…" She frowned to herself. "It's like a marriage partners who come to resemble each other over time: as the Intersect provides content, information it also copies content, information."

Frost looked out the window. She sighed. "I really don't understand much of this. And clearly Stephen went on working on it after we...parted."

Casey glanced at Carina and she shrugged at him. Parted? Casey did not ask.

Frost went on. "The Intersect has various problems, but the worst problem with the Intersect is caused by the copying...It copies emotions. But the Intersect cannot properly process emotion, particularly strong negative emotion, unrequited love, pain, hatred...wrath.

"Because it can't, it 'runs' the emotion over and over, or fragments of it, memories of it, in response to anything that "resembles an environmental cue" - that's how Stephen once put it. It keeps trying to 'process' the emotion.

"It copies the emotion but it can't cope with it, can't find a way to make the emotion make sense, become part of a life, a history. So the host experiences the emotion over and over, always afresh. Digital PTSD. The better version, the one Chuck has, handles emotions better, but it still fails ultimately to cope with them, and that failure is one reason why it ends up harming the host, a psychological harm added to the physiological harms."

Carina turned in her seat, holding her seatbelt away from her body so she could. "So, that means that if an emotion like that, wrath or something, gets copied, the person who has the Intersect is condemned to...living and reliving...the emotion? Whether it is his or not?"

In the rearview, Casey saw Frost pale in her seat and her eyes gathered tears . "Yes." Carina rotated back in her seat. "You see," Frost added, "the Intersect, at least last I knew, keeps its copies. Stephen had the Intersect and it copied him. That's my guess. Now Chuck has it, and the Stephen version in Chuck's head is slowly copying Chuck, and copying Stephen into Chuck. Stephen had the technology to copy the Intersect in someone's head, but as far as I knew, he had no technology for removing it from anyone's head."

Frost turned to stare out the window. Casey saw Sarah reach over and put a soft hand on Frost's shoulder, but Frost did not respond to it.

After a moment, in the new silence, Frost whispered aloud. "Oh, Orion, what have we done."

Orion? Without thinking, caught up in the moment, Casey looked at Sarah in the mirror. "Orion? Isn't that the guy you chased all over Europe, a termination target?"

Sarah's eyes went wide.

Frost wheeled toward her, smacking Sarah's hand away. "What? What did he just say?" Frost spat out each word like a dagger. The silence became poisonous.

"You hunted my husband, Orion?"

Sarah nodded slowly. "Graham gave me a termination order. National security risk. I only knew the target as Orion. I couldn't catch up with him."

Frost bared her teeth, a taunting, growling smile - and a threat. "I told you he was a spy."

Frost turned back to the window. Casey tried to send a visual apology to Sarah, but she was staring at Frost's back.

Carina gave Casey a reproachful look.

Shit.

As bad as her life as Graham's enforcer had been, Sarah had to admit, she had lived through better days.

A lot had gotten clearer, and some of it made her feel better. Better in the midst of despair.

She now understood, or hoped she did, Chuck's running hot and cold with her. She even understood (she blushed to think of it and had omitted it from her narration to Frost) why Chuck had urged her to put something on their first night together, after she witnessed her first flash. He had done it for her; he thought his dad was there.

She did not completely understand why Chuck had not just told her what was going on, although the more she thought about that, the more she suspected it was because he could not tell her. The Intersect was preventing it somehow, jamming the gears. He had told her, to the extent that he had, in jokes, and presumably that was why the words slipped past the Intersect. Chuck spoke them without the intention of telling her anything - his intention was mere self-mockery. Evidently, the Intersect was no more adept with rhetorical figures than it was negative emotions.

Still, despite her growing clarity about Chuck's plight, Chuck was gone. And he had tranqed Sarah and his mother. How far gone was he? How much of Chuck, her Chuck, had the Intersect claimed for itself? What a strange enemy, an inhuman usurper from within.

Of course, Sarah knew about internal battles. She had spent her life running from them, doing all she could to avoid any reckoning with herself or her past.

That was just to have fought a different battle though, the battle to avoid fighting her battles. No matter where you run, how hard, how long, you can't escape yourself. You turn out to always already be there, waiting on yourself, in whatever distant location. Sarah had found herself enshadowed, awaiting herself, in cities all over the world, in Langley, in her DC apartment.

She was now forced into a reckoning. Budapest, the daycare, Chuck...now Frost. Sarah kept seeing images of herself everywhere: in the eyes of a tiny baby, the eyes of innocent children, Chuck's warm brown eyes, Frost's arctic blue ones.

Sarah did not know how to fuse those images. They confused her. It was hard to have just found your heart and then to find it hurting so much. It was better than thinking you did not have one, though. She did not welcome the hurt, but she welcomed the wholeness.

The image of herself she saw in Frost's eyes terrified Sarah. It was the image of herself that had kept her working, running, avoiding herself for almost a decade. Worse, with Frost, Sarah's image was doubled: there was the image in Frost's eyes, but there was also Frost herself. To what extent was Sarah Frost, Frost's second coming? That had been the joke at the Farm; it had played a role in her being dubbed 'Ice Queen'.

Maybe it was true. Maybe she was Frost Redux. She had managed to avoid seductions of the sort that Frost had not, of the sort that did so much to destroy Stephen and Frost's family, but Sarah's body count was no doubt higher - Frost had not been wrong about that difference in their files. And now Frost knew that Stephen would almost certainly have been one of those bodies if Sarah had found him.

Chuck had gotten past that, somehow. Sarah was not sure Frost ever would. That baring of her teeth, that threat - the issue was not finished between them.

Carina was right. It was a hell of a way to meet your boyfriend's mother, and a hell of a mother to meet. Sarah glanced again at Frost. Frost's back still faced Sarah, eloquent.

Brown was limping along a hallway in Langley, his cane tapping. He had on his sweater but he was not going to Graham's office.

It took effort, but Brown identified the computer in Langley from which the attempt on his had been made. He knew the office number; he knew a name. There was a mole in Langley, and Brown was willing to bet the mole was Fulcrum.

Brown thought about last night. He had been the conduit that allowed Sarah to talk to Ellie. When Sarah first tried to call, she had gotten no answer. She texted Brown, concerned that she could not reach Ellie and hoping he knew something. He did, of course. He put the women in touch with each other. It was only after the call ended - a couple of hours after it ended - that Brown realized he had yet to tell Chuck and Sarah that Bryce Larkin was alive. He sent Sarah a text, but he had heard nothing from her. He wondered why that was. At any rate, Chuck and Sarah and Casey and Carina should all be on their way to Bozeman.

Brown was not planning to confront the mole. He just wanted to see the man, be sure. Brown knew him slightly, but, although the man was an analyst, he had not worked directly with Brown.

Brown also wanted to plant a bug in the man's office. His progress was slow. He had hardly slept since this all started, since getting assigned to Walker's mission. The truth was that he had hardly slept before the assignment. Sleep simply would not come after his father died.

His father. A policeman, a cop, stuffy and old-fashioned. A worker for the public weal, his dad said of himself often. A good man. He had been a cop in Boston when so many cops were corrupt. By refusing the corruption, his father had chosen a life that was a two-front war, under attack by the (supposed) good guys and by the bad guys. But his father had fought that war, and still managed to give Brown and his mother a good life. His father had been a noble man, a man of fortitude.

In Langley, Brown was surrounded by the ignoble. People like the mole. Like Langston Graham.

Graham. Graham's concern about Chuck Bartowski was not only, not even primarily, a concern about national security. The termination order on Ellie Bartowski proved it.

Cane tapping, Brown neared the mole's office. He knew he was now the hub of a hastily assembled group of rogue spies - but rogue for good. People with some nobility left, enough, even if they had been compromised by the lives they led, perhaps compromised before they chose those lives. He knew that the situation was precarious. It might all fall apart at any moment.

Brown had to get them through this, get himself through this. He was rogue too, no denying it now. But given Fulcrum's infiltration of the CIA and NSA, maybe this was the only available strategy for fighting them: to break from the agencies and go it alone. If they could wound Fulcrum badly, or even - Brown smiled grimly at the wording - cripple Fulcrum, then he and his people could ask for forgiveness despite not having asked for permission.

Brown stopped, took a breath, and knocked on the mole's door.

"What did you say," Bryce hissed into the phone. "Gone? A fire? An explosion? No one saw or heard anything? The guards all dead or missing? And why am I only hearing about this NOW?" His hiss became a scream.

He ended the call and looked at Jill. She was afraid, cowering. "Get our things." Bryce ordered, gesturing to their luggage in the hotel room, pulling himself together. He continued, back to the hiss. "Bartowski destroyed Outlook."

The pain in Chuck's head lessened as he stepped into the Montana State campus library. He had checked online but the Intersect had been right, no flash necessary: Chuck's old professor from Stanford, the one who had gotten him kicked out, Fleming, was now part of the MSU psychology department, the holder of an Endowed Chair. Chuck pressed his lips into a line, the voice in his head sounding metallic: ~The Fulcrum Chair, that's what they should call it.

Chuck wove in and out of the stacks until he found an empty carrell. He sat down. He had the computer he had bought and his dad's computer in a new backpack. Earlier, downtown in Bozeman, at a gun shop, he had bought other supplies he needed. He had left most of those in the car - no reason to try to get them in and out of the library, he hoped. Atop his head was a replacement cap, a new International Harvester cap, a red one, with a large block 'I' in the center. The backpack and hat were campus camouflage.

He got out the new computer and went to work. As before, the speed and accuracy and insight with which he worked were a surprise. And then he stopped typing and stared at the wall of the carrell. Metallic voice. His dad's voice becoming metallic. It's not my dad talking to me, it's the damn Intersect's version of my dad. Chuck shook his head. His dad, or rather the Intersect, had more or less told him that to begin with, but it seemed so much like his dad, especially at first, that Chuck had allowed himself to think of it that way. But it had never been his dad, a copy, maybe, but never Stephen Bartowski - how could it have been? Chuck had let his unrecognized longing for, need for, his father create the illusion that Stephen was really there, in Chuck's head. But that was crazy. Stephen Bartowski was a man, a human being, not a routine in a vast, complex program. People weren't digitizable, despite the fantasies of computer science professors and sci-fi conventioneers.

The metallic voice had been a constant give-away, if Chuck had simply focused on it. Chuck's head was not occupied by his father exactly, it was occupied by an AI-program that had copies bits and pieces of his father but was not thereby made into his father. All this time, talking to the damn Intersect. Idiot. You are supposed to be smart, Chuck. The problem was that the Intersect no longer seemed like his dad, or like itself. It was starting to seem like him, like Chuck.

Chuck vs. Chuck. Chuck vs. iChuck.

He wanted to contact Sarah. He started to get up, to go find a phone.

His head conflagrated in pain. Unbearable. Burning, burning, burning.

He sat back down, badly shaken and shaking, his eyes squeezed shut, tears running from them, rolling down his cheeks. I can't call her. ~I can't trust her. ~I can't trust Mary. I love her. ~I don't.

The pain subsided a little and Chuck was able to open his eyes. He sat, blinking. After long moments, he wiped his cheeks. He felt sane and insane, controlled and out-of-control.

His face slackened and he went back to work on the computer. As he did, the pain continued to decrease,the flames subsided. After a few minutes, he fished the flash drive out of his pocket, the drive he used to download Fulcrum's Intersect. He put it in the computer and opened it, not running the program but consulting the programming itself.

Let's see what Fulcrum's done to my Intersect. Chuck studied the programming for a long time, lost in it.

Eventually, the library lights flicked on and off quickly, an alert that it was about to close. Chuck put his things away. Studying the program had been...enlightening.

Time to visit Fleming's office. The larger pattern was finally clearing.

A/N: Some technical writing stuff below. Feel free to skip it. But please, please leave a review. Let me know what you're thinking.

Continued thanks to Beckster1213 and David Carner.

Chapter Theme: Love Went Mad, Elvis Costello and the Attractions

Since a couple of folks mentioned finding the story tricky to follow (it is), I thought I would comment on what I am doing; perhaps that will help.

(Of course, to the extent that the confusions are caused my bumbling and ineptness, I can only apologize.)

Like almost all my stories, this one strives for a rounded form. Among other things, that means that I am always circling back to reclaim earlier comments, conversations, scenes. That circling back puts demands on the reader: you have to remember the things to which I am circling back. That's tricky in a story as complicated as this one

Even worse, I am employing a multiplied version of unreliable narration. In a couple of early A/Ns, I warned that the story is shot through with self-deception, ignorance and ulterior motives. Everything in the story is presented inside the scope of a character's POV, and that character may be lying to others, lying to herself, or ignorant, confused, etc. Even when a character is sincere, she may be wrong - as a result of ignorance or confusion or self-deception. Also, since everything is scoped within a POV, sometimes important things get said of which the speaker does not realize the importance. The story centers on notions of trust/mistrust and the reader, like Ellie, is constantly being forced to decide whose version of events to trust/mistrust.

For most of the story I have tried to keep the characters in the moment and to give them little access to the larger picture, so they have not been able to help the reader keep that larger picture in mind. That's slowly changing, but only slowly. The descriptions of Chuck's flashes as clear subpatterns in an unclear larger pattern are both fictional and metafictional. Metafictionally, they are meant to characterize the story's unfolding.

I have wanted the story to create a simulacrum in the reader of the experience of the characters, particularly Chuck. So his confusion and disorientation (notice how important the words 'orientation' and 'disorientation' are to the story, their frequent appearance) have purposely been presented so as to be represented in the mind of the reader. That means that I am trying to create a certain feeling of confusion in my reader, at least in some sections of the story.

Juxtaposed sections are often contrapuntal. For instance, in the last chapter it matters that Ellie, Morgan and Zondra's conversation about Sarah the assassin is stationed alongside Sarah kneeling at Frost''s feet and tending Frost's burns. And so on. Contrapuntal relationships criss-cross the story.

(By the way, I don't I believe anything I am doing is particularly original. Nor do I claim I am succeeding at it. I am characterizing the will, not the deed.)

What all this means is that the story requires a close, steady, deliberate reading (and likely re-readings), a serious effort on the reader's part. I understand that some may not want to make the effort or invest the time. No problem, no one is forcing anyone to read this. And if someone can get it all without making a serious effort, well, cool! I don't want it this to be hard, I just wanted to write a certain kind of story. (And I have tried to help by not stringing the posting out too much.)

Z