A/N: Aaand we're back! Happy New Year, ladies and gentlemen! This is where the story gets even more ridiculous than usual; I may have said this before, so I apologise doubly in advance, but I think I might have just topped myself in the silliness stakes. But if there was a time for things to get weird, it's now: we're in the home stretch , people, and this chapter takes us to the only place it could possibly begin.

Anyway, without further ado, the latest chapter!

Read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Wicked's still not mine.

Elphaba was back.

She hadn't been seen anywhere in the Deviant Nations, the sorcerers and seers assigned to the task of piercing the void had found no trace of her, and even the Mistress of Mirrors was on the verge of giving up hope… but Dorothy knew without a shadow of doubt that Elphaba was alive and within her reach.

Admittedly, the trail of clues that had led her to this conclusion couldn't be explained to anyone without sounding completely insane: it was nothing more than a few vague echoes of the Hellion's old insight, the gift that had allowed her monstrous other self to read the details of another living being's life as plainly as words in a sentence. All Dorothy knew was that she'd sat down the couch that morning and promptly nodded off, courtesy of a long night spent either training or delivering messages – only to awaken half an hour later with a head full of ideas telling her exactly what she needed to do next.

These weren't visions of the future: whatever power she'd inherited from the Hellion, it wasn't like Elphaba's gift of prophecy; there were no sudden glimpses of the future, no weird dreams, or anything remotely like that. Indeed, the weirdest thing about that morning's catnap was that she hadn't seen anything truly unusual in her dreams – nothing more unusual than the sort of things she'd usually see in her dreams, anyway: plenty of screaming locomotives demanding to see her after class while all her teeth fell out of her mouth, but nothing really magical in nature.

And for the brief moment she'd found herself glimpsing the shadows beyond the world, she found no signs of anyone waiting for her there: the Eyes In The Darkness were gone.

All she had were hunches and portents, intrinsic knowledge without logic pouring itself directly into her fevered brain: someone was breathing in the darkness, and that meant that Elphaba was alive. A flash of green light had split the darkness of a prison cell, and that meant that Elphaba was no longer trapped in the void. A cloud had darkened the blazing sun over Unbridled Radiance, and that meant that Elphaba was ready to begin the fight again.

It made no sense to Dorothy, and more than once it had occurred to her that she had finally gone completely insane, but perhaps that was what she'd need to help Elphaba. If she was to find her and bring her home, perhaps Dorothy would need just a tiny bit of the Hellion's madness.

So, as soon as Dorothy was able to slip away from the daily duties, she hastily gathered a shoulder bag of essential equipment, tucked Toto under her arm, told the Dolls to listen for her signal, and made her way upstairs to Dr Kiln's apartment. To her credit, Vara was a dutiful governess, but she simply had too much on her plate to keep an eye on Dorothy at all hours of the day, so she didn't notice her leaving the apartment – and as Dorothy had spent the last few days working as a courier for parts of the city too battered to support comms, nobody batted an eyelid about her running into what should have been a restricted area.

As expected, the apartment was deserted: Dr Kiln was at yet another meeting with the other heads of the city-states, trying to manage the crisis alongside the Mistress of Mirrors as best as he could. From what little Elphaba heard, the other Nessa had taken out a sizeable chunk of the guerrilla troops loose on the Deviant Nations, pinpointing the locations of at least six platoons of infiltrators via their shadows and drowning them in their own darkness – but unfortunately, there were still dozens more to track down. So far, there wasn't much good news in sight, but if nothing else, Dorothy could go about this next job without being disturbed.

With her knowledge of the ventilation shafts in the area, it didn't take much effort to sneak into Dr Kiln's apartment and find the Ruby Slippers. Fortunately, Kiln had written some notes on how to operate them, and though they were a little bit on the rudimentary side, they were just detailed enough to let Dorothy know that her plan might just work.

As she stepped into Slippers – the shoes once again shrinking to fit her feet just as they had the first time she'd put them on – Dorothy reflected that, even with Kiln's notes on her side, what she was about to do might be the most reckless thing she'd done in quite a while. Of course, the sensible thing would be to tell the others, to let them know that Elphaba was alive and within reach, but how could she explain herself when the clues made no sense even to her? No, if she were to reveal what she knew to Kiln and Nessa, they probably wouldn't believe her – even Glinda and Leoverus probably wouldn't believe her. And if they did believe her, they'd probably assign the job of finding Elphaba to someone else… and Elphaba might not have the time to wait for new rescuers to be selected.

In the end, all Dorothy could do was follow her intuition and hope that she hadn't made a terrible mistake. Pausing only to make sure that the Ruby Slippers were secure and her equipment bag was fully stocked, she took a deep breath, kissed Toto for good luck, double-checked Kiln's notes, and then followed the cues her new insight had given her.

With three brisk swivels of her feet, she clicked the heels of the Ruby Slippers sharply together, kicking off three consecutive showers of luminescent sparks. Then, before the haunting crimson glow could fade, she whispered, "Take me to Elphaba."

And before she could make sense of the déjà vu she'd just experienced –

– she was gone.

At first, Elphaba thought she was still in the void, for the world she'd arrived in was pitch-black.

Then, she felt a hard stone floor under her feet, and realized that she was no longer floating in between dimensions, but standing unsteadily in some kind of underground chamber. This threw her for a minute. Scant minutes ago, she'd been absolutely certain that the portal ahead of her led back to her point of origin, but unless she'd somehow ended up trapped in the caverns beneath Loamlark all over again, there was clearly way off-target.

Reaching out ahead of her, she stumbled forward until her outstretched hands finally touched the opposite wall: from what little she could tell, it was rough concrete, so she obviously wasn't in Loamlark. As she continued feeling her away across the walls, her fingertips eventually brushed a riveted steel surface perhaps three feet wide and a little over six feet high; this was presumably a door, but she couldn't find any handles, hinges or any sign that it was meant to be opened from this side. Tiptoeing backwards, her feet scuffed against a jutting concrete ledge set into the wall behind her, possibly a bench of some kind… but then she felt the ragged blanket trailing over the edge of it, and realized that this was obviously a bed.

This place was probably a holding cell of some kind, though Elphaba didn't want to imagine what kind of prison would insist on the inmates going about their days in total darkness. About the only luxuries they'd allowed were a toilet and a sink, judging by the porcelain fixtures squatting against the walls on either side of her, but that was it. And there was a curiously smothering atmosphere to this place, a sense of something cloyingly obnoxious weighing down on her from all angles – not quite heavily enough to be painful, but just heavily enough to be vaguely annoying, like an irritatingly catchy song played on the radio at low volume.

But just as Elphaba was starting to wonder a bit about the kind of people who'd be imprisoned in cells like this, she heard a muffled snore from the bed, and realized with a jolt of shock that she was about to find out.

For a little over twenty seconds, she stood perfectly still, waiting for the outraged yells, the bellowed roars for the guards' attention, and the sound of heavy boots lumbering down the corridor towards them. But after half a minute passed without a single missed snore, Elphaba tentatively summoned a low-intensity magical light – just so she could get a better look at the cell around her.

Nothing happened. Finally, she realized that the smothering atmosphere was actually a low-grade anti-magical enchantment, of the kind that could be cast upon an object and kept active around an area at all hours of the day. Evidently, this was a prison for magicians, and for a moment, Elphaba wondered if she'd somehow wandered into a trap set by Unbridled Radiance… but then she re-evaluated the spells cast on this cell, and realized that an anti-magic enchantment this low-grade obviously hadn't been meant for her: at her current level of strength, it was actually possible to resist the nullifying effects – not enough to tear the whole thing to pieces, but just enough to work a few stronger spells in spite of the cloying magics.

She tried again with a slightly more powerful spell, and instantly the narrow concrete room was lit up by a floating incandescent lantern. Unfortunately, though she'd been no louder than a whisper, the merest act was enough to rouse the prisoner from sleep; immediately, the figure in the bed shot bolt-upright, fixing Elphaba with an incredulous stare.

To Elphaba's shock, the prisoner couldn't have been a day older than ten years of age: scrawny, pale and almost painfully waifish, her blonde hair a tangled mess, her watery blue eyes seemingly too big for her skull. She was dressed in a huge, baggy pink dress with sleeves that dangled ridiculously over her bony fingers, and as she sat up, Elphaba couldn't help noticing the gigantic pair of slippers dangling from the toes of her minuscule feet. This was clearly a stranger, and yet there was something about that arrogant, imperious gaze triggered a surge of recognition in Elphaba's tired brain: she'd met this kid somewhere before.

But before she could put her mind to where she could have possibly met this strange child, the girl's eyes narrowed into a furious glare. "You," she snarled. "Of all the people in the world, it couldn't have been the Empress; it just had to be you… and you're supposed to be dead!"

"Excuse me?"

"Everyone in the Creche is talking about it! Even I couldn't help but hear through the door: Lintel's grand invention swept you away into the darkness and the Empress slammed the gate shut behind you. How in Oz did you get here? Unless you had some kind of navigatorific gift on top of all the others, how could you have possibly made your way back from that – let alone here, of all places?"

There was a pause, as Elphaba slowly digested this. She'd been nurturing suspicions from the moment she'd noticed the girl's curiously adult speech patterns, but that exclamation – "how in Oz" – and the distinctively Ozian malapropism that had followed was simply too familiar for her to dismiss as mere coincidence. Once upon a time, Elphaba would have considered her suspicions baseless and impossible, but after the discovery of the Hellion's true identity, she didn't have a drop of scepticism left to spare… and besides, she'd already seen something like this in the depths of Alphaba's memories.

"…Madame Morrible?"

The little girl's face soured considerably, as if someone had just waved a carton of rancid milk under her nose. "So you figured it out," she sneered. "Congratulotions. Come to the front of the class and collect your gold star, dear. Do you want more redundantified answers, or are you actually going to start paying attention to those dream-memories I've heard so much about?"

Elphaba wracked her brain for a moment. It wasn't easy to focus on the precise dream-memories, for they had such a limited place in the big picture that they had faded almost immediately after being absorbed by Elphaba's brain, like the backdrop of a half-forgotten dream. The relevant details were squirrelled away in the long period of fugue that had resulted in Elphaba virtually sleepwalking through a month-long campaign across the southern edge of the Deviant Nations, and with so much turmoil crammed into both the real world and the dreams, the fate of this other Morrible hadn't even earned a mention in any of Elphaba's reports: the simple fact was that, after she'd been scapegoated as the Plague Witch, the former press secretary's influence on politics had decayed to the point of total irrelevancy, and by the time the Empress had begun erasing all memory of Oz from the world, Morrible had been pretty much forgotten anyway – yesterday's news in more ways than one. But after perhaps fifteen seconds of concentration, Elphaba finally recalled what she'd seen.

At some point just prior to the biological attack on the Empress's daughters, this version of Madame Morrible had been given a terminal diagnosis: with her health ruined by years of ill-advised alchemical tinkering, decades of brutal punishments and gods only knew what else, Morrible wasn't expected to live out the year. Desperate to claw her way back to the top of the heap and stay alive long enough to enjoy the fruits of her labour, she had sought out a means of extending her life, eventually finding it in Alphaba's immortal blood.

According to the reports that had belatedly crossed the Empress's desk, Morrible had been able to gather a sizeable clique of scientists and magicians from across the Pottery, all of them united by the common cause of achieving immortality. With the help of this eccentric cabal, they'd contrived to steal a small quantity of Alphaba's blood, then set about using it in a magical rite of Morrible's own devising. From what little her spies had been able to learn, they'd actually been making progress, up until something had gone horribly wrong: to date, nobody was certain if the sheer power of the Empress's blood had somehow resisted being used in such a way, or if Morrible had simply been too eager to be careful. Either way, the results had blown up in her face and taken the rest of her clique with her.

Instead of gaining the immortality they sought, she and her colleagues had been cursed with a fluctuating state of eternal youth, often regressing to infancy, sometimes managing to hang onto their teenage years, occasionally gaining a toehold in adulthood only to shrink back into childhood without rhyme or reason. Unable to look after themselves, the Empress had made them wards of the state, imprisoning them in a plush nursery where their not-inconsiderable talents could benefit Unbridled Radiance. And before long, they'd earned the nickname-

"The Childlike Researchers," Elphaba realized aloud. "Glinda saw you back when she was in Unbridled Radiance. But if you're here, then this must be the Creche itself; we must be right under Exemplar!"

"Full marks."

Elphaba's mind reeled in incredulity. "Are you telling me that I'm right in the middle of enemy territory? That I've actually ended up in the Empress's own capital city?!"

And if I'm here, she silently realized, Fiyero can't be too far away – the Empress would want him close to her side, after all. I might actually have a chance to save him!

Meanwhile, Morrible was transfixing Elphaba with her trademarked glare of withering contempt, best reserved for disruptive students, delayed essays, liberal tutors, and Glinda. "It's good to see that your distinguishiated education hasn't in any way dampened your grasp of the extremely obvious, Miss Elphaba," she said, dryly. "Now, if I may ask… how the hell did you get here?"

This threw Elphaba for a minute: how had she gotten here? As far as she could remember, she'd learned how to navigate the tangle of portals dotting the void and used her newfound knowledge to track down a portal that would lead back to her point of origin, sneaking into one world and sneaking out through the opposite side until she'd finally found the doorway she'd needed… but she'd thought that it would lead her back to the Deviant Nations, not into the bowels of Unbridled Radiance! She'd mastered the art of navigating the void, so how could she have blundered so spectacularly by landing right in the middle of the lion's den?

(Inside her mind, the Nome King chortled silently to himself.)

"I… I found a portal I thought would lead back to the Deviant Nations," she admitted sheepishly. "But instead it took me here."

"What a stroke of luck for you," said Morrible dryly. "If only you had a radio on hand to tell your friends in the Deviant Nations the good news: after all the decades spent trying to plant a spy in Exemplar, after all the times the Mistress of Mirrors struggled to sneak past the magical barriers over all the mirrors, you just end up sitting amidst the Empress's best-kept secrets purely by accident. Not that it'd do you any good: the Deep Sepulchre is completely signal-shielded and layered with anti-magical enchantments, just to make sure any of us good little inmates don't misbehaviate. And yet…"

She looked from the tiny magical lantern floating in the air next to Elphaba, and her eyes narrowed to slits, her mouth curving into a hateful-looking smirk. Elphaba had seen Morrible smile like this before back in Oz, and it usually meant that the decrepit old opportunist had spied a chance for personal advancement: she'd worn it when Elphaba's powers had accidentally manifested in front of her, she'd worn it when Elphaba had been able to use the spells of the Grimmerie, and according to Glinda, she'd worn it when she'd learned of a way to draw Elphaba out of hiding. Even if that ugly, near-predatory tightening of the lips hadn't looked horribly wrong on the face of a child, it wouldn't have been a welcome sight.

"And yet you're using magic," young Morrible mused aloud. "I can sense that the enchantments are all still working, but you're somehow resisting the effects!"

"I take it that's rare?"

"Nobody among the Childlike Researchers has ever managed such a thing: anyone planning to escape or rebel has had to manually disable the enchantments, sneak past them, or simply find a place that they don't cover. In all my time at the Creche, Miss Elphaba, I've only known one witch with the strength to overpower the anti-magic wards: the Empress herself."

The young witch chuckled malignantly, her body subtly changing stance under the blanket. "Yes, I think you're exactly what I need, Miss Elphaba… at least until the Empress comes along."

And then, before Elphaba could react, Morrible pounced.

In hindsight, she'd been too complacent for her own good: even in the darkest days of her tenure as Wicked Witch of the West, she'd never expected to be physically assaulted by a child, and even though Morrible technically wasn't a child, Elphaba hadn't been able to stop herself from regarding her as such. But even if she'd been regressed to ten years old, the former press secretary was most definitely not a child: she still had her mind, her legendary cunning, her cold-hearted ruthlessness – and too late, Elphaba realized that, even humiliated and ruined as she was, Morrible was still prepared to do literally anything for the sake of her ambitions.

As such, the first move caught her complete off-guard: one moment Morrible was sitting up in bed and eyeing her visitor with undisguised avarice, the next she was leaping through the air towards her, arms outstretched, fingers curving into talons, her mouth opening wide as if to scream – until finally she crashed headlong into her, seizing Elphaba by the shoulders; off-balanced by the impact, Elphaba staggered backwards, only to end up smashing her head against the door behind her with a loud, undignified-sounding thud. A white-hot surge of pain rippled across her skull, entire constellations flashing before her eyes as she swayed drunkenly on the spot, trying to regain her equilibrium even as her attacker pressed her against the wall.

Morrible's jaws seemed to unhinge before Elphaba's eyes, her mouth stretching wider and wider until it seemed as if she might literally bite her head off. But then, something at the back of the ex-headmistress's throat seemed to unfurl, sending a rubbery length of oily-black tissue and cartilage erupting out of Morrible's open mouth: it was a proboscis, almost two feet long and tipped with a stinger-like barb.

A few vague memories of incident reports from the Creche fluttered in and out of Elphaba's confused brain, and in a flurry of panic, she instinctively tried to shove Morrible off, but the blow to her head had left her too slow and disoriented to respond in time: the proboscis was already in motion, plunging downwards towards Elphaba's chest, and with one swift jab, the barbed tip tore through the front of her dress, sank into her undefended flesh and began burrowing deep into her body.

The pain was nothing short of excruciating, but it was nothing compared to what happened next: with an obscene sucking sound, Morrible began to feed. Though she looked like a mosquito, it wasn't blood she was siphoning away, but the intrinsic energy of Elphaba's body, the proboscis draining arcane power from her host and allowing Morrible to glut herself upon it with loathsome gusto, filling the air with a nauseating gurgling almost reminiscent of laughter.

And as she drank, she changed: the oversized dress she wore seemed to fit her better and better with every passing second; her scrawny arms grew longer and more muscular, and before long, the sleeves could no longer dangle over the fingers; her legs telescoped upwards, sending the hemline of the dress rising higher and higher until it almost brushed her knees; her face subtly reshuffled itself, growing longer and thinner, the features becoming more refined, more aristocratic, more mature – until there was no mistaking the fact that Madame Morrible was aging before Elphaba's very eyes, slowly regaining her lost years with every drop of energy she drank.

In turn, for every year that Morrible regained. Elphaba felt herself grow younger: the muscles in her limbs shrieked in pain as they remoulded themselves into configurations they hadn't seen in years; the witch crystals in her back withered, shrank, before finally withdrawing entirely into the flesh of her back; her skin prickled and burned as her battlescars vanished one by one. Even her hair changed, casting off the utilitarian haircut and erupting down past her shoulders in glistening black locks.

Within a matter of seconds, Elphaba had lost over five years of age, and Morrible had aged to about fifteen: now a lanky, smirking teenager with a spangling of acne across her forehead, the imperious looked much better suited to her features. But unfortunately, she hadn't yet stopped.

In vain, Elphaba tried to push Morrible aside, to stop this terrible siphoning process, but her arms felt like they were made of rubber: either the pain of having her musculature regressed had left her too weak, or Morrible had actually been draining her strength itself away as well. As for her magic, that simply refused to respond beyond a few vague flickers of light.

Behind the proboscis, Morrible began to laugh. And as she did so, her voice began to echo across the cell; delirious with pain as she was, Elphaba couldn't tell if Morrible was using some kind of magical telepathy, or if she'd literally grown another mouth to speak through.

"Yes," she chortled, "you see how it is, now: I'm not just draining your age, but your very power. By the time I'm done, I'll have all the thaumaturgicatory might you once possessed, no matter how young I get."

"But… why are you… doing this?" Elphaba gasped; she couldn't be much older than nineteen now.

"Because I'm going to need power if I want to escape from this rat's nest, Morrible replied. I was originally intendiating to take the Empress's power, but as she isn't here, you'll the next best thing – and once I'm finished with you, I'll have the strength to tackle her directly. Then her power will be mine! My curse will finally be broken, and Unbridled Radiance will belong to me! I'll be the Empress this world deserves – immortal, all-powerful, invincible, and unstoppable!"

The siphoning paused, and a mocking grin appeared on Morrible's face, only slightly hidden by the proboscis. "Of course, by the time I'm done with you, you'll probably be nothing more than a few stray cells… but it's not as if you were using your life for anything worthwhile, was it?"

And with that, the siphoning process continued: the proboscis resumed draining, harder and more vicious than ever, until Elphaba swore that her skin might simply rip off. Another year bled away from her body, and then another, and another. Dropping past seventeen, she began rapidly losing height, her very bones alight with pain as they began to contract inwards; as the process began to pick up speed, it was almost like being on an elevator – a slow but undeniable plunge toward the ground. Within a matter of seconds, her robes were huge, her sleeves hanging over her arms, her dress swallowing her legs, her shoes dangling off her toes; for a moment, she was a gawky adolescent hiding behind her hair, and then the plunge continued, sending her plummeting into her childhood.

Meanwhile, Morrible's body now threatened to burst out of her dress: she looked to be about twenty years of age, trim, healthy and attractive. And if she'd chuckled behind the siphon before, now she all but roared in triumph.

"How old are you now, Miss Elphaba?" she gloated. "Eleven? Twelve? How long do you think it'll take me to drink up all your remaining years and rendify you down to infancy? Perhaps I'll give you a minute to savour the helplessness of your predicament before I take what's left, before I let you feel what it's like to melt down into preborn cells. Won't that be a sticky ending?"

Elphaba tried to scream, but all that emerged was an exhausted, high-pitched groan; Morrible had drained so much of her strength that she could barely force air into her lungs.

And then something very unusual happened – more unusual than the current situation, to be precise: as Morrible drained another gulp of Elphaba's power, she underwent yet another distinctive transformation, but instead of growing older and more powerful, her skin began to change colours. It started as a curious blemish on her left hand, but in the space of no more than a second, it had spread down her arm, up her neck, across her flesh, until every single inch of Morrible's visible flesh had been turned a vibrant shade of green.

Instantly, Morrible noticed: the siphoning stopped, leaving Elphaba wallowing somewhere in the vicinity of eight years old as the bewildered ex-press secretary stopped to examine herself.

"Wait, this wasn't supposed to happen!" she exclaimed. "I was only supposed to gain your powers, not your pigmentification! This is all wro-"

And in that moment, just as Elphaba was trying to take advantage of this unexpected lifeline, there was a vivid flash of ruby-coloured light. Next thing she knew, a familiar figure was standing over the two of them, looking down on Morrible with undisguised alarm in her luminous gold eyes.

Dorothy blinked in astonishment, eyes struggling to adjust to the dim light as she took in the bewildering sight before her.

An eight-year-old girl in a gigantic black robe was half-slumped against the wall, pinned down by a blonde-haired woman dressed in a worryingly undersized dress; it was hard to be sure, but something like a drinking straw had burst out of the woman's mouth, and she'd jabbed it into the little girl's chest. And it was hard to be sure in this light, but it looked as though she was draining something from the girl – something that Dorothy's insight told her could only be her life.

Also, though the woman clearly wasn't Elphaba, she appeared to have skin almost identical to hers, and though the girl was clearly too young to be Elphaba, her now-gigantic hat was now perched atop her head.

Dorothy had no idea where she was, who the two strangers were, or how Elphaba ended up here, but she knew at once what she had to do next: the Ruby Slippers had brought her directly to Elphaba's side, and even without her insight, she knew at once that Elphaba wouldn't have drained anything from a child, much less their life.

Crossing the darkened cell in two strides, she grabbed the woman by the shoulder and jabbed her outstretched fingers directly into the back of her neck. Instantly, the woman shuddered to a stop, her body freezing in place as the Hellion's paralysing touch slammed home. Then, she fell forwards…

…and as she fell, a torrent of luminous blue fluid erupted out of the straw and began spontaneously pouring itself onto the little girl, flowing back into her eyes, nose, mouth, into her very veins. For every drop of it that she absorbed, she grew older: she shot up in height, her body rapidly filling out the oversized dress until it fitted her once again; the green returned to her skin, leaving her a rich shade of emerald from head to toe; finally, a number of witch-crystals began sprouting from her back, punching tiny holes in the back of her dress.

By the end of it, the little girl was once again Elphaba Thropp, and the woman with the drinking straw had shrunk down into a pale-skinned ten-year-old.

Elphaba let out a long, wheezing breath, absently massaging the wound that the straw had left in her chest. "Thanks," she panted. "Ow. Uh, happy as I am to see you, Dorothy, how the hell did you and Toto get here?"

"The Ruby Slippers," said Dorothy proudly, clicking her heels together with an illustrative shower of sparks. "I told them to take me to you, and they did!"

"How did you know that'd work? I mean, I knew Kiln said that they had enough power to do just about anything, but how did you know that they'd be able to teleport you all the way into Unbridled Radiance without being stopped by the border defences."

"I didn't: I just… had a feeling they might." Dorothy blushed, hoping that Elphaba wouldn't ask too many questions about the source of these hunches.

"Uh-huh. And I'm guessing that trick you just used was another part of the Hellion's repertoire, right?"

Dorothy nodded sheepishly.

"Question is, how did Kiln even let you get close to the Slippers? I thought they were part of his lab."

Dorothy hastily explained the situation back in the Deviant Nations since Elphaba had been flung through the portal: how the Mentor was on her deathbed, how Kiln and the other Nessa were busy struggling to keep Greenspectre intact, how they were barely keeping the Deviant Nations themselves from collapsing into individual city states, and how they'd barely managed to stop the guerrilla invaders.

By the end of it, Elphaba's face had turned grimmer than ever. "I don't suppose that the slippers can get us back to the Deviant Nations, can they?" she asked gloomily.

Unfortunately, the Ruby Slippers weren't up to it. Though she held onto Elphaba's hand and performed the familiar sequence to the letter, the three of them remained trapped in the cell. Elphaba quickly began assembling theories: maybe the Slippers were a battery of magic, and transporting Dorothy into this cell had exhausted their powers, leaving them effectively useless until they could be recharged. Or maybe the defences surrounding Unbridled Radiance had been reinforced in response to Dorothy's arrival, until even their powers couldn't get them out. Whatever the case, the Ruby Slippers were effectively useless for the time being.

"Meaning that the only way out of here is going to be through that door," said Elphaba, grimly. "And the complex beyond it, and all the guards, and the capital city above it, and the Empress herself."

"I'm sorry, Elphaba."

"No, don't be: quite apart from the fact that you just saved my life – again – I think we might just have an opportunity to find Fiyero and do some serious damage to Unbridled Radiance while we're here: Paragon's supposed to be just a mile or two away from this part of the Sepulchre; if we can get access to it, we can recall the Purified and undermine the defences of a whole empire! Or, if we can access a radio, we might even be able to call for help, bring in some firepower from the Deviant Nations. Of course, it'll depend on us being able to get out of this cell, but now that I've got my powers back, it might not be as difficult as it looks."

"But you can't just fight your way through a whole city, can you?"

"True," Elphaba sighed. "Definitely not with the Empress and all her armies on standby. We'll have to plan this out, and for that we'll need someone who's probably seen enough of this city to know what we need." She eyed the paralysed body on the floor. "How long do you think she's going to be out?"

"Maybe ten more minutes."

"Is there any way we can wake her up right now?"

Dorothy grinned. "I know just the thing: Toto! Nose!"

Toto obediently trotted over to the prone body on the floor, sniffed it for a moment, and then pressed his nose directly against the back of the paralysed girl's neck, instantly exposing her to the full chill of his cold, wet nostrils. Immediately, the girl sat up with a yowl of disgust, arms flailing in all directions; for a moment, she could only gibber in confusion, unable to make sense of where she was and how she'd ended up on the floor. Then she saw Elphaba – back to her normal age and restored to her full strength.

With an enraged howl, the girl threw herself at Elphaba, but Dorothy was ready for her. Though the girl was obviously a much better magician, Dorothy was a lot fitter than she was, and even with only a tiny drop of the Hellion's power unlocked, it was easy for her to wrestle the strange girl to the ground before she could use her drinking straw again.

"No, no, no!" the girl shrieked. "Not fair, not fair!"

"Morrible-"

"You keep ruining my life! I don't care if it's you or the Empress, you keep on taking what should have been a perfect opportunity for mutual for profit and running it into the ground! Iintroducing you to the Wizard, reorganizing your psyche, trying to refiniate immortality from your blood – I keep trying to make something worthwhile out of you, and you keep screwing everything up! Why couldn't you just play along? Why couldn't you just give me what I wanted – for once?!"

Elphaba sighed deeply. "Morrible, have you ever considered acting your age?"

"Oh, you think you're so clever, don't you? You think you're so much better than me! Well, you're not! I got closer to the reins of power that you ever did! I shaped the destiny of Oz! I had the ear of the Wizard himself! And what have you done, Elphaba? Who have you governed? Nothing! Nobody! I-"

"Do you want to be paralysed again?"

Morrible immediately fell silent, though the scowl steadfastly refused to leave her face.

"Okay, Morrible, listen up: now that we're here, we're going to see if we can sabotage Exemplar's defences and call in help from the Deviant Nations, but we're going to need key locations to target, and we're also going to need a means of getting out of here first."

"What makes you think I know anything?" Morrible replied, sourly.

"Because I've seen the Empress's memories, remember? I've seen what the Empress uses the Childlike Researchers for, and I know she occasionally takes you and the others on excursions around the city to deal with unique problems. So if there's anyone who'd know their way around Exemplar's defences, it's you. Also," she added, "We're going to need to know where Fiyero's being held."

"Oh, I see how it is. You've destroyed my hopes and dreams all over again and now you want me to help you. Isn't that just the way? I try to set up a scenarioation in which everyone benefits – including you, I might add – only for you to flush it right down the toilet and storm off, then you start demanding favours from me!"

"I'm confused: how would reducing me to embryonic goop have benefited me, exactly?"

If Morrible had even noticed the jibe, she showed no sign of it. Instead, she sat down heavily on the bed and sulkily folded her arms. "You're getting nothing from me," she hissed, her rare barely held in check. "I don't owe you anything; as far as I'm concerned, you owe me everything including your life. I deserved everything."

"Remember what I was saying about acting your age?"

"OH, SHUT UP! I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, I-"

Dorothy was reaching out to paralyse Morrible again when a shudder suddenly ran through the sulking prisoner's body, almost like an electric shock. Then, before the stunned eyes of Elphaba and Dorothy, Morrible began to shrink again. Once again, her body retracted back into her oversized dress, her limbs contracting inwards, her facial features softening, the shape of her face itself becoming rounder and less developed, a subtle hint of puppy fat creeping across her arms and face…

In less than fifteen seconds, Morrible had shrunk back down to about seven years of age, left practically swimming in her now-gigantic dress. Even more noticeably, though, her demeanour had changed from sulking and petulant to openly terrified.

"No!" she whimpered. "Not again! I'm losing even more now. For Lurline's sake, Elphaba, can't you just give me a little of your age? Please? If you've seen everything the Empress has seen, you'll know I've been losing more of my mind with every single change: I'm barely hanging on to my own memories now! Names, dates, the faces of my parents… they're slipping through my fingers even as we speak! In a few days – gods, maybe a few hours – there'll be nothing left of who I was. I'll become a child in mind as well as body." She let out a choked sob. "I'll die, Elphaba! Can't you just give me a little of your power, just enough to keep me going until the Empress gets back?"

Elphaba considered this.

"I don't think she'll come back at all," she said at last. "I think the Empress isn't interested in paying a visit until the last of your adult mind is gone for good. So there's not much point in me lending you some of my life-force anyway."

Morrible sagged in despair. "Why can't you just let me keep one of my dreams?" she demanded pathetically. "Would it hurt you to just indulge me for once, before I die?"

"It doesn't have to end that way, Morrible," Elphaba reminded her. "We can help you: if you show us how to get out of here – and help us stop the Empress once and for all – we might just be able to save what's left of your mind."

"…how?"

"Paragon. Glinda told me that she saw you arguing with the Empress over a chance to incorporate your mind into Paragon's database, so you could be preserved forever as one of its guiding minds. Alphaba turned you down that day, but if we can defeat the Empress, there'll be nobody to stop you from joining Paragon."

Morrible's eyes narrowed. "And if you can't get me to Paragon before the last of my adult mind vanishes forever?"

"Then you win your freedom anyway. As long as the Empress is still alive and Unbridled Radiance is still in power, you and all the other Childlike Researchers are nothing but prisoners, only allowed outside these walls with Alphaba's permission. Your new life won't be worth a thing, Morrible, and your new self will never realize just how miserable she really is without the sun, without friends, without freedom. Help us, and I can promise you that whatever life you lead, you'll be happy, safe, loved and above all, free."

Elphaba paused for a moment, and then added, "And there'll be a statue to you – the adult you."

"A statue?" Morrible echoed.

"A big statue," Dorothy amended. "With a brass plaque and gold trimmings."

Morrible thought about this for what seemed like hours, but it couldn't have been for longer than a minute, her face furrowing with anxiety as she struggled to make up her mind. To Dorothy's eyes, she truly looked the part of a child – in point of fact, like a kid struggling to decide what she wanted from the candy store.

"Alright," she said at last. "What do you need?"

Fortunately, Dorothy had been careful to add a notepad and pen to her shoulder bag of supplies, so it took less than ten minutes for them to draw up a map of the Creche and the city's defences, along with a list of potential targets.

Priority number one would be Exemplar's defence shields, a network of spells arranged at key points around the palace: as long as the magical shielding remained intact, it would be impossible for all the fields of the Deviant Nations' air force to so much as dent Exemplar's rooftops.

However, they would also need to bring down the enchantments that prevented the Mistress of Mirrors from infiltrating the city; as far as Elphaba could see, the other Nessa was the only way that anyone might be able to transport a fleet all the way to Exemplar without first having to batter their way through the border defences. And even if getting the fleet in was impossible, being able to send all the armies of the Deviant Nation pouring in through the mirrors and shadows of Exemplar would no doubt be a big help.

Getting to a radio wouldn't be too difficult: as a major covert facility, the Deep Sepulchre was outfitted with one of the best radio transmission setups in the empire. According to Morrible, it used primarily for communicating with away teams, infiltrators, deep-cover agents, and other operatives who couldn't use normal radio frequencies without compromising their positions. With this, Elphaba could theoretically be able to signal the Deviant Nations for help without alerting Unbridled Radiance's surveillance experts.

Fiyero was a little more complicated. According to what little Morrible had been able to glean from the needlessly chatty guards who delivered her food, he had been taken to a private room somewhere in the Deep Sepulchre and was now being seen only by qualified members of the Childlike Researchers. Morrible had been able to supply a room number, but actually getting in would require more effort.

Unfortunately, Elphaba's plan to break into Paragon's central chamber wouldn't be possible for the time being: after Glinda's little intrusion, security had been tripled in that part of the Deep Sepulchre; only the Empress was allowed full access to Paragon. Everyone else had to be vetted a dozen times over, or be in the company of the Empress herself… and frankly, Elphaba doubted she'd be able to impersonate her at the best of times. For now, the plan would have to be shelved until they had some serious reinforcements on their side.

Morrible had also outlined the staging ground for Dr Lintel's mechanized portal. There was a germ of an idea of what they might be able to do with that, but for now, the best thing to do with it was to reduce it to scrap: regardless of whether the Empress intended to invade other worlds or just use it as a handy means of execution, it needed to go before Alphaba started getting any other bright ideas.

Finally, Morrible had pinpointed a room within the Creche, just down the corridor from the cell – labelled simply "LAST RESORT: HOSTAGES (?)" Elphaba had a worrying feeling she already knew what was there, but it was hard to say if she could be right or wrong: comparing what she'd seen in the dream-memories was difficult, especially the most recent ones, almost like reading a description of a building and then experiencing the dislocation of actually seeing it in the real world. For now, she'd take Morrible's advice and use the place as a last resort.

Unfortunately, getting out of the Creche and travelling around the city was a problem they couldn't easily solve – in part because the anti-magic enchantments would probably nullify or destabilize the simplest ways of escaping, from disguise spells to telportation.

"Maybe I could pretend to be one of the Childlike Researchers," Dorothy offered.

"Would that even be possible?"

Morrible nodded thoughtfully. "We seem to have been receiving a lot of new faces around the Creche lately: from what I've been able to learn, it looks as though the Empress has been deliberately exposing certain scientists and magicians to my botched immortality treatment so she can have them contained here, under her strict control. With all the new additiations, Dorothy might not even be noticed."

"See? Besides, you said that they get let out for special jobs, so if I can just leave with the others, I might be able to sneak off and get the work done while you stay hidden here."

"I think that might be asking a bit much of you, Dorothy: no offence, but I don't know if you've got the magic to shut down the defences. Plus, what happens if you get caught? No, we need a disguise for me, something that can completely hide the colour of my skin, something can't be supressed by the enchantments, something that could make me look like-"

She froze, suddenly reviewing everything that she'd just said, then everything that had happened while Morrible was feeding on her.

Then, she glanced in the direction of the shoulder bag. "Dorothy, you wouldn't happen to have a jar in your survival kit, would you?"

"Of course."

"And a change of clothes your size?"

"…yes." Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. "What are you planning, Elphaba?"

"Something extremely stupid. Morrible, I'm going to trust you with my life at this juncture, and in the event that you decide to betray me, Dorothy will keep you paralysed until you starve to death. Is this understood?"

"Absolutely. What do you need?"

Elphaba took a deep breath. "I'm going to need you to feed on me again."

"…alright. But how is the jar involved?"

"I'm glad you asked, Morrible, because that's where things get really stupid…"

A/N: Like I said, the home stretch. Up next: into Unbridled Radiance - Abandon Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.

Feel free to supply your theories in the meantime...