Disclaimer: Come on, I'm running out of ideas for inventive disclaimers! Just accept that I don't own anything and be happy.

---

I'm not a sneaky person. In no way do I enjoy slinking about in enemy territory.

Which is exactly what I was doing. With Ammik and K'ata by my side, I was tiptoeing my way to doom. We had disembarked from our little landing craft moments ago, unpacking equipment and weaponry and donning our various armor and suits. (K'ata wore the suit. I think we're going to have a bit of trouble extracting her from her new host. That, or go through the Punk/New Wave phase again. (Plus, none of the armor in stock would have fit her new, tiny frame.))

We seemed to have landed in the creepy swamp part of the planet-ship, which didn't lighten our moods any. Ammik, caught between sneezing and battling the hanging moss, was having the worst time with it.

I checked the sensor on my forearm computer for the eighty billionth time that day. It showed high levels of magnetization, which was expected on such an enormous ship. But nothing else.

"Morrick, do you hear music?" Ammik asked, cocking his head in a very beagle-like fashion.

"Music?" I asked under my breath. Sure enough, I heard it. Alternative rock, it sounded like. "Freaky."

"Very." Ammik glanced at K'ata. "What's up with her?" K'ata was staring intently at the source of the music, a slightly baffled and dazed look on her face. She then leapt up into one of the trees and swiftly began heading toward the sounds over a path of branches.

Ammik and I followed silently. K'ata's judgment wasn't usually faulty, and even if it was this time, we were both curious. As we neared the music, the air seemed to lighten and brighten. It became more airy, if that makes any sense at all.

K'ata was ahead of us in the trees. She jerked to a halt, though, and we caught up to her and did the same thing. There was a rock band in the middle of the swamp.

I repeat, there was a rock band in the middle of the swamp. Now, does anyone else find this odd? I find it very odd indeed, and Ammik agrees with me.

I stared. Then I pointed with my mouth open. Then I shrugged and looked at Ammik. He shrugged and looked at K'ata. She waved. Then she made a very controlled and graceful fall back down to earth.

"They're alright," she whispered. "They're just doing what the dragons do."

"Rampaging and pillaging harmless villages and eating peasants?" I asked rhetorically.

"No. Creating and harnessing energy." She gave me one of those haughty looks she's famous for and slapped me.

"I deserved that," I said, resigned that even though K'ata might not be in her own body, she was still herself.

The music changed to a far edgier song and the air turned red and hummed. Ammik's hair went poofy and mine did too. K'ata did her telepath thing and saved us all from our rather frightening Afros.

"Let's not put that in the mission report," Ammik suggested. "Oh, wait, Kou'al's already seen." Since I was adamant in my refusal to permit anyone in my head, Ammik was the one having to put up with Kou'al's mildly childish antics.

"Great," K'ata muttered. "Now he'll be singing the Afroman song."

"I hate that song," I whined. "I liked the original."

"Didn't we all." Ammik glared at the air in front of him. I had learned to interpret the glare as Kou'al being channeled. "Hey, you three, quit with the VH1 chat and get back to work. We haven't all century, you know."

"No one's waiting around a century," I noted.

"Just shut up! And get away from the nose ring-wearing punks. I can hear the music."

We all obediently edged away from K'ata. "But no one's got a nose ring!" she protested.

"That's good. Nose rings are for punks," he said in a satisfied tone, as though one of his strange, subliminal demands had been met. "Carry on. You're all doing very well."

"Ammik is channeling Kou'al channeling young Mr. Grace from Are You Being Served? and it's funny," I said cheerfully.

The music began to sound like AC/DC so we all ran away. Not because it didn't sound good or anything, but we were just scared. We quailed, quailed like fluffy little animals in the face of a Dodge pickup.

"That was scary," Ammik said.

"Wait till I show you heavy metal, then. You'll love heavy metal. You can go as fast as you want and you can steal stuff and vandalize stuff and there's goats and full body massage and Ozzy eating a sandwich instead of live bats!" I was close to working myself into a foaming from the mouth frenzy until K'ata prodded me sharply.

"That's the autobahn. And I told you not to eat any of the mushrooms here." She turned and looked back at us. "Come on."

We followed her for a while until Ammik fell through a thinly covered passage to hell. That, or a pongee stick pit.

I was wrong though. K'ata grabbed me by the hair and dragged me with her as she jumped into the hole. We fell, and fell, and fell, and then we crashed into something soft and bouncy and well lit.

Ammik lay in a heap on the floor, staring into space. Poor Ammik. He always seemed to be getting into trouble.

"Well," I said sardonically. "That was fun."

"Was not," Ammik groaned. "Was painful and achy-making." He struggled to rise and then lay back down.

"Hmm, this is a nice place to stop," I muttered. "Lovely place to get ambushed, too."

A large hoard of penguins rushed out bearing staff weapons. I didn't know whether to laugh or… laugh. It was in no way intimidating. I mean, penguins? Who's actually dumb enough to use penguins as an army?

"Honk honk," one said. It had a shiny thing melted onto its forehead and its armor was gold rather than the dull silver of the rest.

"We don't speak penguin," K'ata said slowly and clearly.

"Naw, duh," the leader said. "I mean, penguin isn't even an official language. If you spoke it, we'd have to cart you off to the nuthouse. By the way, you're arrested for trespassing on private property."

I struggled to cover a laugh. "You're going to take us in, are you?"

"No," the lead penguin said blandly, "but they are." He looked behind us.

K'ata and I looked obediently. We didn't see anything. "Um, what are we supposed to be seeing?" she asked.

"That's just it. You aren't supposed to see them," the penguin said ominously and then cackled evilly.

K'ata looked intently behind us. "Morrick, there's nothing there," she whispered.

"I kinda figured that, since we've been being impudent and nothing's stabbed us yet," I whispered back. "What do we do? Ammik's still messed up and those weapons are real. I think the destruction of small, fuzzy animals is a sin in the fleet, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but we've got to do something," she muttered, pressing buttons on her forearm computer that would arm the lasers on the other forearm. "I think the cannon will do the most damage," she told me.

"Uh-oh," the lead penguin said. "Waddle, troops!" he cried and began a hasty retreat. Well, as hasty of a retreat as one can beat with such short little legs.

"I feel like a sea lion," I stated to no one in particular who happened to be standing beside me aiming lasers at retreating penguins.

"Fat and dangerous?" Ammik asked. I jumped, for he had crept up behind me. "'Kay, so what are we blowing up?"

"Penguins," K'ata said as the fired the first shot. Rather than exploding, the penguin made a sizzling sound and fell over backwards.

"Ugh, that's nasty," Ammik protested, wrinkling his nose as the smell. "I wanna try!"

"Knock yourself out," K'ata said cheerfully.

"You two are sick," I growled. I aimed the cannon and fired. The penguins were nearly vaporized.

"Cool," Ammik said, watching the mist of blood and gore settle.

"Nasty." I turned. "Come on. It's only a matter of time before someone else comes along."

"Wait a minute," K'ata ordered. I stopped walking but didn't face her. "Why'd you do that?"

"Because picking them off one by one is a form of needless psychological torture and I don't condone needless torture."

---

We continued walking for a while until I was certain we had gotten lost. Ammik, in his quest to emulate me, mimicked my certainty.

"I'm sure we've passed that tree before!" he protested as K'ata dragged him along. "I think we should stop and ask for directions."

"Ask for directions in enemy territory?" she mocked.

"She's right, Ammik," I said. "That's not a good idea. However, this is." I took out my smallest laser and etched my initials into the tree Ammik thought he'd seen before. "Now, if we pass this again, we'll know we're lost."

The two made suitably awed sounds at my little stroke of genius and we proceeded. Well, until we fell into another hole.

"This is getting painfully repetitive," Ammik said from beneath K'ata.

"You're too pointy," she complained. "Hang around Morrick more. You'll have to eat more in order to deal with all the stress from him."

"Heifer," I muttered. "It's not my fault you have an eating disorder. It's Lawrence's." My dog had been psychologically damaging the crew for a while before I found out and made him stop. "Wonder what we're going to have to vaporize in this hole?"

"We're not going to vaporize anything," a voice strangely like Kou'al's said, full of mocking, hateful laughter. My cannon was torn from my shoulder, wrenching it painfully. K'ata and Ammik suffered similar experiences.

"Bastard," I muttered. I had kind of been counting on the use of weaponry in this one. "Ammik, you ready?"

"Yep. I want to be… a lumberjack!" he exclaimed triumphantly and began singing about trees. "Oh, I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay. I sleep all night and I work all day."

"He's a lumberjack and he's okay. He sleeps all night and works all day," K'ata and I sang obediently.

My cannon was thrown at me with painful accuracy. I'm not going to say where it was thrown, but it was thrown. "Enough singing. Let me guess, Kou'al sent you three to destroy me, did he?"

"No," K'ata said. "I just came along to watch and then retrieve my body."

"Oh, jolly. You're the only one I was really worried about," the fellow agreed amiably. I made no protest, as I was bent over in pain, trying to catch my breath, but Ammik began singing again. I slapped him.

"Hey, what was that for?" he asked. I answered him by slapping him again.

"So, are we going to fight soon or do I have time to watch the England-Portugal game?" Darth Kou'al asked.

"Oh, go ahead, we were going to watch it too, even though we know it's going to go into penalty kicks and England will lose," I muttered, gasping slightly when I was knocked, not against, but through the wall behind me.

"Don't say that!" Darth Kou'al said. "Gods save the queen! Footy footy footy!" He began to do a laughable rendition of the badger dance.

"What? It's true," I said. "I mean, England and Portugal are well matched enough to keep one another from scoring, and Portugal has a better record with penalty kicks than England, who are 0-2 for games where penalty kicks decide the outcome."

Ammik prodded me mentally. "You never told me you liked football!"

"I don't. He does. I'm just faking him out to get him off his guard so you can feint at him, giving me a chance to attack." I made an attempt to pull myself out of the rubble of the wall. It didn't go very well.

"Enough!" he roared. "England! England! England!"

"Eh, Morrick, is this guy familiar in any way to you?" K'ata asked me in an oddly strained tone of voice.

I looked at him for a moment. He looked like a tan version or Kou'al. (Yautja tan green. It's an odd occurrence.) But at the same time, he looked as though he had smoke or water coalescing around him, making his form vague and suddenly false-seeming. I looked even more closely and saw a slightly human-shaped outline within the coalescing impediment.

"Err, there's someone else pretending to be Kou'al under the shifty Kou'al hologram?" I asked her silently.

"See? You're not an idiot after all." She smiled. "Now, look closer, consider all you've seen and heard, and then tell me who you think is beneath that hologram."

I squinted at the hologram, determined to prove that K'ata was not, in fact, as supremely clever as she thought she was. "Um, Jet Li?" I asked.

"Nope," Ammik said. "I figured it out."

"Shut up, Ammik," K'ata told him. "Try again, Morrick."

"But I know who it is!" Ammik protested loudly.

"Shut up, Ammik!" K'ata and I said in unison.

"Creepy," I muttered. I thought for a long moment. "Err, do I know him?"

"You do," K'ata said, nodding.

"Uh, that's not Queeaqueg, is it?" I asked uncertainly. "'Cause, ah, you see, I kind of told him I knew some Earth martial arts, and, eh, I kind of don't. And I went so far as to provoke him, and, eh…"

"Ain't Queggy," Ammik said, cheerful.

I thought for another moment. "James?" I asked.

"Which one?" K'ata asked.

I assessed the figure again. Too thickly muscled to be Revan. "Hierachy? You can't be serious."

"I go by James now, mostly," he said, not really paying any attention to us as we discussed his identity.

"Well," I said oddly. "Eh…"

"Nothing to do now but watch the game," K'ata said. She seated herself by James, who had tossed aside the hologram and was now a fairly attractive - but not to me - young British-looking fellow. Ammik joined them, leaving me in the center of the stage, so to speak, looking like an actor who has learned the part of Romeo from Romeo and Juliet and has then been asked to play all three of the witches in Hamlet. Right then. The show was to commence in about four seconds.

"Eh?" I managed. "Wha…? Yeh!"

"Sit down, O Fascist One," James said. "What, you thought that I existed only on Earth? Nah, I'm pretty much omnipresent. And "Queggy" wants to kill you. He thought you were some bird named Turiya."

I gulped. He had just named the Muse, or in layman's terms, the Mistress of the Universe. One does not name that lady. I had no choice but to leap upon him and render as much harm as is physically possible.

"ARGH!" I roared as I leapt. He was caught off guard and we tumbled together over to the next wall. He didn't have enough hair to get a good hold on, so the whole "beat his head against whatever blunt surface you have available" method would be rather difficult. I settled for trying to throttle him.

And then he went all Resident Evil on me. Seriously. Nemesis would have noticed a strong resemblance. There were a lot of teeth and I found myself on the ceiling, clinging there unceremoniously, like a slightly mad ninja.

"Come down, Morrick," Ammik called to me. "He isn't going to do anything to you. You're the main character."

"What?" I asked.

"Err, nothing."

"Oh." I looked at the now normal-looking James. "Alright, look, we're going to have to establish a few ground rules here. No more shape shifting."

"Why?" he asked. "Seems like if you're going to be leaping upon me and attacking me, I need every advantage I can get my hands on, right?"

"Well, you named the Lady. You can't name the Lady."

"Why?"

"What is it with you and this whole questioning authority thing?" I asked. "You just don't. If you do, she'll be provoked into doing something destructive and often rather funny that my old friend Tim would have rather liked."

"Tim the band dork?" James asked. "Yeah, this bird online, she's always talking about him to Alan. That isn't you, is it?" he asked, suddenly edgy.

"Eh, no. The Lady won't give me her passwords. I think she gave them to the other James, though."

"Yeah, Alan told me about that. 'Twas rather a strange thing to do, if you ask me."

"I don't. The Lady is infallible." I floated down to the ground. "Even if she does write crappy fan fiction." I am quite convinced that this year at least I'm going to beat out Heathcliff for "Most Troubled and Handsome Male Lead". Oh, wait, I'm not supposed to know that I'm not real.

"Hey, how can I be talking to you, a book-person who hasn't even got a book yet, when I'm real?" James asked, grinding salt into already suppurating emotional wounds. I made to make a snippy retort, but K'ata stepped in.

"Actually, we're all real in this context of real. We exist here and only here. You, however, are fragmented. The Lady has chosen bits and pieces of your personality, added a few quirks of her own, and created a character similar to what she knows of James, the man she chats with online. You are not that man. You are…" She searched for a proper word. "An abomination!"

"Whoa, chill out, K'ata," Ammik soothed her. "You're not all that bad. Certainly, you're weak and undeveloped, but, if you play your cards right and show us where K'ata's body has been stashed and help up fix Micosucci's mind and all that, you might just be considered for further advancement in the storyline." Ammik winked suavely. It wasn't pretty.

"Eh, no thanks, if playing my cards right means what you're making it sound like." James edged away from Ammik. "In fact, I'd rather be an abomination. Kind of like Vain, I -"

He was cut off by the fact that I had leapt upon him again. You guessed it, that's another one of the Muses That Cannot Be Named. This time I didn't let the fact that his hair was short deter me from banging his head against a hard, blunt surface - the floor - repeatedly.

"Oww. Oww. Oww. Oww. Oww," Ammik began saying sympathetically.

"Shut up, Ammik," I muttered. "Defamers must die!" I yowled.

"Morrick, if you told him who he wasn't supposed to mention, it might make things a lot easier," Ammik suggested.

"Me, defame the Muses! Are you mad, Ammik? Do you expect the horses to start talking to you?"

"What are horses?" he asked.

"I was ranting! You do not interrupt me when I rant!" I yelled at him. I was still beating James' head against the floor. "I can't tell him who we're not supposed to mention, since if I mention them, I'll be the defamer and I'll have to beat my own head against the floor!"

"Oh," Ammik said. "I get -"

"I'm not finished!" I howled. Then I thought about it for a moment. "Never mind. I'm done." I got up off the now unconscious James and looked around. "Where'd K'ata go?"

"She went off to find her body while you were killing James," Ammik said helpfully.

"I wasn't killing him. I was simply…" I noticed that James wasn't really breathing. "Oh. Damn."

"Oh, don't worry, he'll be back. We just have to go bury him in the Pet Sematery." Ammik got a strange look on his face. "Long ago, the Micmac Indians were having a bad winter and they had to turn to cannibalism. So, their burial ground turned evil. Now, children bury their pets there to bring them back to life. I haven't gotten to the part where Louis buries Gage there though." His face returned to normal. Well, as normal as it had ever been.

"Ammik, you amaze me. Only you would be able to ruin a scene with a King reference." I looked at him balefully. "Now, help me drag him to yonder table before I have to kill you, too." I was feeling intimidating, what can I say?

"Morrick, you're strange." Ammik helped me move James, him being heavier that I had at first thought, being made of a lot more muscle than I had estimated. "Now, I guess we'll just have to wait until he comes back to life."

"Uh, no? Ammik, you're crazy if you think I'm staying alone with you and a corpse. I'm going to go hunt for K'ata, and you're staying here with James. When he wakes up, you both may follow me."

"You suck," Ammik muttered. "Fine. But I'm telling Lawrence and he's going to do terrible things to your apartment."

"And this differs from the norm, how? Ammik, just guard the corpse," I called to him as I headed off into the veritable labyrinth that was the planet-ship.

---

"K'ata?" I called. "K'ata? Where are you?"

A small, orange kitty bounded over, effectively blocking my path. In a very, very sultry, Angelina Jolie-worthy voice, it said, "For you, I just might be."

I had seen Shrek 2. "No need to introduce yourself, this is a family story. What do you want?"

"Ugh. To not be a kitty any more. Your K'ata is a powerful enough telepath to release me from this wretched body, is she not?" The cat stretched languidly. "I mean, it's not as though I mind it or anything, but I just want my old body back, is all." Her eyes shifted from muddy, animal yellow to fierce, emerald green. "Plus, your Lady commands it."

I shivered. Muses were known for making their wishes known through animals.

"Who are you?" I asked, sweat beading on my forehead.

"Why, I'm Kayla Micosucci. Who did you think I was?" The cat then hissed. "We have company."

Ammik and a very shell-shocked-looking James shambled over. James gave me an odd look and then decided not to got there. Well, I had recently killed him. You wouldn't speak to me either if I had recently killed you and then you had been resurrected.

"What's with the kitty?" Ammik asked.

"Eh, this is a Messenger." I didn't bother to explain what a Messenger is. The title is meant to be mysterious. "Ammik, I think this is your fiancée."

"Wha…?" he asked. He stood there for a moment and then looked down. Micosucci was entwining herself about his ankles like a real cat would.

"Miss me, love?" she asked, so amorous that I gulped. Lucky Ammik, I think.

"Eh…" He looked at me imploringly. I shrugged. I didn't know what he wanted; I didn't want to know, either.

"Can I ask one question?" James asked.

"You already have. But you may ask another one," Micosucci said, suddenly prim.

"What the hell is going on?"

I took several long moments and contemplated the question. If I looked at things from a physical angle, it would be thus: I was standing in a dimly lit cave-like area with Ammik, my friend, James, a man who I didn't really know and who I'd just killed and he'd come back to life, and a cat who claimed to be the Renox weaponry developer Kayla Micosucci, also Ammik's fiancée. We were glibly discussing why we were there.

However, if I looked at it from any other angle, I might have to go mad. I was beginning to realize that I do not exist anywhere save this story and others like it. Nor do any or my friends exist. I have been created, not born, and supplied with whatever "memories" as will make the story more interesting. My "life" is a complete lie.

I know this other angle is true. I just don't like to think about it. I mean, if you were a character, you wouldn't like to think about being edited out, would you?

Finally, I answered James. "A whole lot of shit that only the Muse knows about. Hell, even the one creating this doesn't know what's going to happen at the end. Maybe for her, there is no end. Which means there is no end for us, either."

"Well, that was confusing." He snorted and walked off, perhaps to study the lovely, natural cave architecture.

"No need to be such an ass about it!" Ammik called. He then looked at me, slightly perplexed. "I don't get it."

"You don't get what, Ammik?" I asked.

"I don't get how you can know this. I don't get how you can know that none of us exist."

"Oh, we exist. Just not really." I looked into his eyes, fully convinced that he, too, understood our cumulative plight, that it was merely his place to act as though he did not comprehend. "It's hard to explain."

"I think you did a pretty good job," Micosucci said, still rubbing up against Ammik's ankles. "Now, if we can please return everyone to their rightful bodies?" she asked, asperity tinting her mind-voice.

"Right, that mess," I muttered. "Do you know where K'ata is?"

"Yes, I do." With her tail in the air at a jaunty angle, she trounced off in that infuriatingly uppity way cats have. "Follow me."

We followed her a short distance, not really thinking of very ground-shaking things. I was thinking that I wanted to ask Miranna if she could make beef-flavored leafy greens, too. What? I'm an almost ordinary human male. I like red meat, or the flavor, anyway.

When we arrived in the laboratory, K'ata was rising from a life-pod with entirely too many wires. Micosucci's body lay in another pod, with wires attached to its head and other neural ports. (As a rule, the Renox have enough equipment on and in them to be compatible with everything mechanical, from a toaster to a spaceship.) The sight of K'ata almost brought tears to my eyes; K'ata was the only truly close friend that I had, the only one that was still fairly unchanged from the time we had first met, that night on my deck at my house on Earth. Certainly, I had Ammik and Rachel and Alvin and now Liz again, but they were new or they had changed almost beyond recognition.

I did the first thing that came to mind. I ran to her and hugged her around the waist, since I'm short and she's like nine feet tall. She patted the back of my head fondly, which I appreciated greatly, since "fondness" in Yautja culture is the same as "great and lasting affection" in human custom.

She and I broke to look at Ammik and Micosucci and the cat. He was busy attaching wires to the cat's head and rummaging about in various sundry drawers and small boxes for something.

"What are you looking for?" Micosucci asked impatiently. She looked angry too. Her fur was standing on end and her ears were laid back. "Hurry it up!"

"I need to find the cat's personality." He found a small, blue crystal and smiled. He inserted it into the drive that it corresponded to and pressed a button. The cat became limp. Then it seemed to re-inflate with life, but dull, normal animal life, not sentience. He took a long, hard look at Micosucci's body and his smile fell. From his right breast pocket, he withdrew the pink crystal that contained Micosucci's complete mind.

He stared into its depths, thinking deeply. Suddenly, he slammed it hard across the workbench, shattering it. I gasped, shocked speechless.

"I love Liz," he stated simply. "So she has to be dead."

---

We respectfully vaporized Micosucci's body. Ammik kept the cat cradled in his arms as we did it. James rejoined us and agreed to return to the fleet with us, owing to the fact that the planet-ship was empty, that his seeming Kou'al-ness had been a clever ruse that served no real purpose, and that he would be really bored alone.

We returned to the fleet, filed our reports, and felt really, really depressed for a long time. And then we ate cake.

---

Here ends Part One of the Morrick Evans Sequel Saga. (Notice the anagram.) We don't know what happens next, but we're sure it'll be one hell of a trip.

---

A/N: Weird, huh? Well, I guess this is just what happens. I've gone off Morrick for right now. I think I'll get on rewriting The Devine Secrets or go ahead and write Turi and Kou'al's whole story. Or maybe even give Morrick his own story, the one that created him. Really, I don't know. I'll write whatever I want out of my head and into yours.

Thank you for reading these five chapters. Having someone besides me know this story means the world to me.

The Muse, Turiya Foul