While I'd attempted to walk properly after having my ass handed to me by Cowl, in reality I had to accept that I needed to be supported by a pair of men in military fatigues to stand upright. It was embarrassing, but from some of the looks I was getting from other members of the National Guard, they were shocked and awed that I'd stood in the middle of a killing floor and could still walk away only a little worse for wear. That, or maybe some of them were coming to terms with the terrorist bombing that had just happened on American soil. It wouldn't have mattered that there wasn't a physical bomb; the debris from Cowl's attack had blown out the front door and a part of the front wall, and while nobody (myself mostly excluded) had been hurt, this was real. Magic was real, and it was dangerous as hell.

Or maybe they'd all just drank a dozen cups of coffee after driving in a convoy from some military base nearby. It's not like I could read their minds.

Some of the older soldiers, though, were the opposite: eyes up and moving, hands either free or on their rifles, stances ready even when standing tall. Whether it was military experience or hard living, I wasn't sure, but I suspected this wasn't their first rodeo.

I chuckled a little to myself. Maybe Cowl and the other black hoods trying to run this shindig were biting off more than they could chew.

I swallowed my amusement.

Or maybe they'd gone up against the military in a previous timeline, and they'd won.

Was it really somebody on our side, or maybe even on my side, screwing with time to stop these guys? Seeing everything they had at their disposal, and trying to salvage some kind of win in an otherwise unwinnable scenario?

I hoped not. Win or lose, whoever was responsible was going to catch hell for trying, and that's ignoring what it might have been doing to their minds.

While I'd been thinking over the dangers of what we'd be up against, and whether it was some hidden ally playing with time, I'd been walked over to the back of an ambulance for the second time in two days. I did my best to ignore them as they looked me over.

A helicopter broke into my mental review of the short fight, and I had barely a thought to spare for the lady-who-wasn't-there over the sounds of the descending chopper. It landed without slowing the blades down, and four individuals climbed out. The helicopter took off back into the air as they took in the scene, and I took the opportunity to look them over.

Two of the guys I dubbed Thing 1 and Thing 2, because other than which side of the middle two guys they were standing on, they were otherwise identical in size and apparel. They were wearing heavy SWAT gear without any SWAT logos, and they were armed with short rifles that they kept pointed down while they looked around. Their faces were covered with balaclavas, their helmets were heavy, and their blackout gear stood in sharp contrast to the rest of the military guys in the area dressed mostly in jungle green and desert grey camo. I suspected that if I were dumb enough to make a sudden move into my coat while looking at any of the four guys who had come out of the helicopter, they'd shoot me without hesitation.

The other two guys not dressed in my-orders-are-to-leave-no-survivors black were clearly officers. They were the only two guys I could see wearing their military dress instead of fatigues, and I suspect they'd been grabbed that morning before they could change into something more appropriate to the battlefield Chicago had become. One had a plain face under a pair of plain black glasses and he was pretty tall, though not so tall as me, and the other was maybe 5'6", and looked angry at everything. Mr. Angry-Face looked to be in his late fifties, if the grey hair under his military hat or the lines on his forehead were any indication, but I could have been off by a few years in either direction.

The taller, somewhat younger man spotted me and pointed, muttering something to the shorter man, and the pair of them started walking my way. Thing 1 and Thing 2 may have kept their guns pointed at the ground, but they didn't stop looking at everything as they escorted their officers to greet me. I wasn't sure what their ranks might have been, but the shorter man had a bunch more ribbons on the left side of his chest and a star on each of his shoulders, so I suspected he was the one with a higher rank.

The angry man with stars on his shoulders looked pointedly at the building, especially at the massive hole in the front of it, then turned a glare back at me.

"When you told us you wanted to get to the bookstore, before it became a big scene, I hadn't read into the implication that you were planning on making it one," the angry older man said, fighting to keep his voice even. "Regale me, oh wise Dresden, Chicago's Resident Wizard, with some sufficient reason for your actions that will not have you imprisoned here and now. You have thirty seconds. If you try to be funny, I will consider having you shot."

I looked up at Thing 1, who moved his finger to the trigger of his rifle, then back down at the man. I believed implicitly that he was being absolutely serious.

"I was being diplomatic."

The man closed his eyes for a moment, and I swear, he was shaking, literally shaking with rage. He turned away from me to take a deep breath, and I watched him mumble a few numbers before he turned back to me like the almighty wrath of God.

"There are no words for the level of shit that is about to fall on you from great height, do you understand me!? I am going to put you in a hole so deep in the ground you'll need to take a bus to China to wipe your ass, which will have to wait until the excavation crews are done removing the boot I plan to plant there so hard, you'll need the best doctors in the world to identify that you were ever human in the first place! When I'm through with you, they'll have to leave you in that hole, because if they try to move you, they won't find enough pieces to bury anywhere else! DIPLOMATIC?! YOU CALL THIS DIPLOMATIC?! I'll show you diplomatic, in every shape and form they've come up with since the word was invented, you sack of shit! Do you hear me?! I said, DO YOU HEAR ME, SHIT STAIN?!"

I was caught up between the idea that he was barking like an angry bulldog and the soldiers at his sides who could probably make me disappear, and an errant thought passed through my mind that if he wasn't yelling, this guy might get along swimmingly with the Mob boss Marcone. Back in the present, I just nodded, choosing to go along with him rather than find out the hard way if he'd do away with due process and follow through with his threat.

He grit his teeth, took a deep breath, and actually calmed himself down. It was almost scary how quickly he buried the rage, and managed to work his way back down to just 'extremely angry.' He kept up the glare, then said clearly, "I'm going to go talk to somebody with a brain. You have until I get back to clean up your act, and if you don't I will have you taken to prison for impeding a federal investigation, and depending on what we find, treason. Is that clear?"

"Uh, yes, Sir," I offered. If I'm being honest, I was more troubled when I was up against Cowl earlier, because he was actively trying to kill me, but it was nice to know I could still piss off my allies, too.

The guy turned to walk away, and waved between the other officer and me. "Find out something useful," he told him, then walked away.

I watched the man step away, and the guy he left me with gave me a pitying look.

"What?" I asked him neutrally.

He shook his head. "General Chase was visiting his family here in Chicago when the call went out. They were only a few blocks from the Morgue when it was attacked. If not for that, and the expectation that magic may kill all our electronic forms of communication, he wouldn't be here." He cleared his throat. "Of course, that information goes nowhere, understand?"

I nodded again.

He nodded back. "It might help if you were a little more understanding when next you speak to the General, Mr. Dresden. I'm curious, though," He gave me a questioning look. "Were you trying to be funny, or were you actually trying to be diplomatic?"

"The latter," I told him, looking past him at the man I now knew was a General; he was standing over a table they must have pulled up just for him, leaning over it and pointing at various spots on what was probably a map. "I was speaking with another Necromancer, who I've nicknamed Cowl for his magically hidden face, and he was trying to probe me for information on what he was up against." And to ask me about time travel, that too. "When he decided I wasn't worth his time, he attacked me. If you guys hadn't backed me up, I don't think I'd still be here, so… thanks, I guess."

The second man rubbed his hands together, looking at the blown up store. "Why were you speaking with him in the first place?"

I sighed. My back was sore again. "I was getting ready to throw down with him when he showed up, but it was a trap. I was buying time. It didn't work, and all I know now is that we may have a mysterious benefactor that the Necromancers are up against. That, and the other side is apparently on the fence on whether to recruit me or shoot me on sight. No," I corrected dryly, "actually, they were on the fence. I think they've swapped cleanly over to shooting me on sight, so there's that."

"If you say so, Mr. Dresden," the man told me, trying to look at my eyes. I pointedly looked away, and changed the subject.

"Hey, normally you military guys wear name tags, but you're sort of, well, not," I gestured to him, "so is there anything I should call you, or are you just the tall military guy?"

He shrugged lightly. "Lieutenant Tarkin."

I blinked. "Wait, Tarkin? Like, Admiral Tarkin?"

He gave me a flat look over his glasses. "I wasn't a fan of those movies, to be honest."

I mentally prepared to give a twenty minute presentation on everything wrong with his previous statement when somebody yelled, and almost everyone in the area with a gun pointed it down the road at a pair of wolves and a big dog, who froze where they were. Andi and Kirby, I suspected, with Mouse.

"They're with me!" I called out before things could get any worse. "Let them through, they're with me!"

There was some confusion for a moment on whether I could give that kind of order, but plenty of the soldiers pointed their guns down and away. The General himself gave a bellowing order to "Stand down!" and the Alphas carefully made their way over to me. I sighed, and pointed back in the direction of our car, half a block away.

"Go get dressed, please," I told them, and then, to Lieutenant probably-wasn't-really-called Tarkin, "Can you send somebody with them while they get dressed? They don't shift with clothes. It's not far."

"They can stay right where they are," General Chase cut in, striding back over. "Right where we can see them, until I get an explanation. We damn near shot them when we set up our perimeter around the Bookstore, and then they got in the way of our snipers in pursuit of your man in robes." He looked between me and them. "Well?"

"They're my backup," I offered. "They were supposed to cover the front, in case something went down. Your guys did that job alright. I'm probably alive because they caught Cowl there off guard, right before he executed me."

The General gave them a hard look, then looked back up at my eyes. I pointedly looked at his forehead, and wondered for a moment if it was a military thing to look at people's eyes like that, or if they were specifically ignoring whatever warnings they might have had on looking wizards in the eyes. Eventually, he shook his head.

"Rather than wait ten minutes for us to set up a real perimeter, you had a trio of dogs on standby for a breach." He nodded with a condescending smile. "That worked out pretty good, not keeping everybody on the same page, didn't it?" What little smile was there vanished. "If you weren't the only man in the city with enough magical knowledge to tell us what the hell is going on with the spooky side of this trainwreck in motion, I'd follow through on my previous threats, and I would bury you. As it stands, I'm going to put a pin in that."

He took a deep, deep breath, and let it out without taking his eyes from mine.

"How about you tell me, in plain terms, what they bring to the table?"

I looked down at them, and I prepared to say something, but something stopped me. What did they bring to the table that the military didn't?

"Your hesitation doesn't sit well with me, Wizard," the General said quietly.

"They're quick, they're quiet, and they're good at skirmishing where most of your soldiers are going to have to come from obvious directions," I said quickly, feeling a little insulted on the Alphas' behalf. "They're a well-maintained unit, and they have a good idea of what we're up against. They're here to watch my back from the shadows, and to ambush anything that tries to get the drop on me. I trust them," I finished grandly, not stopping to wonder if any of it didn't fit. The two Alphas present looked at me, and I hope it was with some kind of appreciation; I was busy looking at the General, not them.

General Chase looked down at them, clearly ready to disagree. For good or ill, he closed his eyes and shook his head. I suspected I was trying his patience.

"Lieutenant, see to it that the dogs get some clothes," He told his subordinate. "You, Dresden, are needed for something else."

He turned and walked away, and I caught Mouse's eyes and waved him to follow me. My dog fell in step with me, and we followed General Chase while the Alphas left with Tarkin. The area had become a hive of activity around our conversation, and larger trucks were pulling in to secure the location. I actually saw a couple of soldiers pulling sandbags out of one of the trucks, setting them in quarter circles around the entrance to the bookstore, before I nearly walked into the General. He had four soldiers waiting for him by his little table, and they stood at ease around it.

He either didn't notice or didn't care that I'd nearly stepped into him, and he gestured to one of his men, one holding a clipboard, to speak.

"We've discovered something on the second floor of the bookstore, what we believe to be a ritual site of some kind. Without some expert advice, we don't want to touch anything that might explode, like the bookstore itself did," he summarized for me.

The General narrowed his eyes at me again. "For what good it's done us, you've pulled the locations of places supposedly like this one out of your ass. Now, you're the only man we have here in Chicago who can identify what exactly we're dealing with. Are you going to help us, or should we read you your rights?"

"I think I'll skip to the part where I help you," I answered. "It'll probably save everyone a little time."

"Take these two with you," the General pointed to the guy with the clipboard and another of the soldiers, presumably somebody who would keep an eye on me. "And don't think I haven't noticed the dog. If he wasn't on your file, like so much other shit you've pulled over the years, I'd tell you to leave him here, but you'd probably just claim he can smell magic. Maybe he does. I don't care. Get moving."

He turned away from me, and started talking to one of the others on some other matter.

While I often insist that holding back what we've learned so we can dangle it around like bait to our enemies and allies is like Wizard crack, I wasn't keen to upset the military any more than I already had. I swallowed any further responses, nodded to the two men, and resolved to just tell them what I found when I was done. I whistled for Mouse as I headed back into the Bookstore, feeling morbidly eager to see why Cowl had been standing guard over it.

As per General Angry-Face's orders, the pair of babysitters in military uniforms fell in line with Mouse and I, and the one not holding a clipboard stepped in front as we came to the exploded doorway. The bookstore itself looked about as destroyed as I expected it to, now that I could look at things from an outside perspective; the bookshelves were mulched, and the books themselves had been shredded by an absurd amount considering how short the fight actually was. The back room, where the more valuable books would normally be locked away, wasn't nearly as destroyed, but the expensive books themselves had been cleaned out. Not a single paperback had been left behind. What significance that had, if any, was beyond me at that moment.

There was a door out the back, where I assumed Cowl had fled, and another hidden half behind a bookshelf. We took the latter into a stairwell, with one guard leading, followed by me and then Mouse, and the final guard taking up the rear. The first guard knocked on the door at the top, and somebody on the other side let us all in.

Given the state of the war zone downstairs, I was surprised at how untouched things were in the little apartment we'd entered into. There were piles of white powder everywhere, either some kind of dust or drugs, and the kitchenette had been almost physically ripped out of the way to make room for a raised iron circle nearly six feet in diameter and half an inch tall. The edges of all the hard iron lines were etched with sigils and colored red with what I suspected was blood.

I looked up, and blinked. While dwellings that have magical beings in them don't have televisions as a rule, this one had a couch placed as though there should have been one. In its place, however, was a large dart board. In the center of that was a picture of a certain wizard detective with a knife in the eye. I almost hadn't been certain of who the picture was of, at first. The number of knife-sized holes in it almost impossible to make out.

Mouse whined, his tail deep down between his legs. I absentmindedly reached down to pet him, and tried to ignore the feeling that the air was simultaneously too clean and choked with something cold and empty.

The soldiers hadn't touched anything. I guess the military had sufficient training on not messing with crime scenes. That, or unknown things that might explode.

In that scenario, that would make me the bomb squad.

"Alright, guys," I told the four military men (two had been guarding this area), "I'm not going to ask you to leave, but I'm going to walk around to see what I can see. Please don't stand in front of me. I'm going to use my Sight on some of this, a kind of Magical vision, and I need to get as clear a picture as possible."

Mouse and the others waited by the door for me to get started, but one of them spoke up.

"Mr. Dresden, Sir?" the guard who had been trailing us spoke up. "If you can, please state your findings aloud so we can record them."

I looked back to find that the man with the clipboard had taken out a pen and readied himself to take notes. I sighed.

"Alright, let me be straight with you," I told him. "Normally, I look over the entire scene and then tell the investigators afterward what I've found, because then they turn it into something usable for their higher ups that doesn't roughly translate to 'magical shennanigans happened and we're up against a Wendigo,' or something like that. My mental processes during the investigation sometimes go sideways while I'm trying to discover the truth, so… I may sort of gibber."

He shrugged. "I can always rewrite a formal report based on you gibbering if I have to. It's going to help us if we can follow the process, Sir. Gibber all you like."

I shook my head and turned back to the scene.

"Do you know what a Wizard's magical Sight is, soldier?" I asked him.

"We have a description on file, but if it's related to what you're about to do, it wouldn't hurt the record to write down now."

"Alright. A Wizard's Sight allows them to see what I'll loosely call the 'Truth' of the world. We can see through illusions, glamours, some kinds of lies, magic, and we can get a picture of the intent or background of a location or thing, as well as an overview of a person's true face and form if we happen to look at somebody while our Sight is open. The downside is, no matter what I see, it's going to be fresh in my mind forever. You with me so far?"

He was frantically writing down everything I was saying, but he nodded, not looking up.

"Great. So, I'm going to see about opening up my Wizard's Sight on some of this stuff after I get my first look around, but I'd rather not see any of you, and it's also possible I'm going to become physically ill because of something grinding against my senses. Just let me know when I can get started. I'd like to get this over with as quick as possible if I can. This place is giving me the creeps."

It was a little annoying to have to wait before I could get started on a scene, but I'd been called to other scenes with reporters or other less open-minded authority figures in the past, so I could be patient. Half a minute later, the soldier gave me the go-ahead, and asked me to be as clinical as I could manage.

"Alright. So, I've just entered the suspected Necromancy working area, and my first thought is, 'Damn, this place is really clean considering we had a fight downstairs.' There are piles of white powder all over the place, but they're almost ordered, like they're in neat piles as opposed to all over the place. The kitchen has been ripped out to make room for an iron circle, estimated six feet in diameter, raised maybe half an inch off the ground, and covered in sigils. The sigils appear to be both etched in and worked over with a red coloring, best guess says it's blood. Given that we're up against Necromancers, I suspect human blood.

"As a side note, there's a dart board with my face on it, well-used. I suspect whoever put it there doesn't particularly like me."

I sighed, then waited for the guard to finish marking down what I'd said. This was a pain in my ass, but if I wanted military support, I had to grin and bear it.

The next rooms were less interesting, and I kept up my monologue as I walked through, confirming more piles of dust in different locations. I trailed off, looking around the bedroom, then tilted my head.

The guard cleared his throat. "Please continue out loud, Sir."

I grimaced. "Yeah, sorry. I'm just trying to see if the piles of dust are positioned in a way that gives them significance. Pentagrams, pentacles, other religious symbols. No clue yet on whether the dust placement is significant, or if they were dropping it around wherever it fell. Until I go back over things with my Sight, I can't be certain. ...Hey, remember how I said this place is giving me the creeps? I want you to note that down. This place is foul somehow, I just haven't discovered why yet."

The guard didn't answer, but with how quickly his pen was scratching away, I suspected he'd gotten it.

I was about to leave the room when something caught my eye. On the other side of the bed, laying in one of the piles of whatever-it-was, was a pair of glasses. I noted it out loud, including that the frames were purple and had some kind of glitter on them, then stepped back away.

The piles of white powdered substance were everywhere. They were in the bedroom, in the bathroom, everywhere except…

"Alright, I just noticed that what's left of the kitchen here is almost free of dust," I continued my dialogue as we made our way back to the entrance. "It's not just that there are no piles here, it's that the whole area is squeaky clean. It's a normal practice to keep a circle clear to maintain its integrity, but the entire kitchen isn't just clear of those piles, it's practically spotless." I swallowed. "It's also obviously the source of Necromancy in this house. Whatever happened, I'd be very surprised if it didn't happen right here."

I mentally prepared myself, closing my eyes.

"Alright, guys. It's time. I'm preparing to open my Wizard's Sight. Please don't interrupt."

Over the course of the past two days, I'd opened my Sight more often than I normally do in a year. I've waxed lyrical about the whys before, but it had been some time since I'd Seen something I'd desperately wished I could forget.

As I focused the energies of my mind and opened my Third Eye, I was almost physically pushed back by the force of my revulsion.

The change was huge and immediate, and the very air around me was choked with blood, dust and death. I gagged, dry heaved, and could not look away from the circle. The iron itself had been drawn from the blood of a thousand men, who had been thrown into the fires of a great forge, stirred in and mixed with half a thousand pounds of once-cooled lava from a village where a supposedly dormant volcano had killed hundreds more. Many of the men had been alive when they'd been thrown in, and of them, many had either entered the fires willingly or had been mind-raped into diving in. From that bloody, violent mess had this iron been filtered out and forged into the circle that lay before me.

The sigils, the dozens or hundreds of sigils, had been painstakingly carved with the bones of even more sacrifices, and the blood of their marrow had stained the symbols of death and life in dead languages the world around. Rebirth. They spoke of rebirth, out of the corpses of thousands and thousands of sacrifices to a single, common goal.

What that goal is or was didn't seem to matter. Only that it had cost far, far too much already.

I managed to turn my head, to tear my gaze away, away from the kitchen and into the living room.

It wasn't worse, but it sure as hell wasn't better, either.

The piles of dust had turned into figures, into people, most trying to defend themselves, hands or tentacles or paws or anything else held up against some dangerous force, the figures themselves trying to flee or fight, their faces locked in the rictus of those final moments of fear, pain, anger, confusion, and in several chilling cases, their eyes were drawn painfully, in terror, to the circle I'd just turned away from, like they knew they were sacrifices to it, and like the many piles of Monster dust that surrounded them, left out to show them their own fate, they were next to face it's gaping maw.

I Saw more, looking at those piles of dust. I Saw how much power, even now, that they contained. Within those unused piles remained bits and pieces of something like ghosts, and Undyne's words came back to me:

"Monsters' bodies aren't really made of flesh, they're made of magic mixed with dust surrounding a SOUL."

Something had used the circles to consume their Souls.

Mouse's whine turned into a howl as I fought to close my Sight, and finally, I managed it.

My eyes were closed, but the images I'd seen were still there, still clear and crisp, like they would be for all eternity.

I heard the soldiers saying something and trying to get me to move, but I was too far lost to what I'd Seen. I was shaking, and Mouse had lain down next to me and was licking my face. I'd opened my eyes at some point, but I couldn't really see.

I was drawn back, over and over, into the depths of that iron circle.

It had been hard to see, at first, through all the pain and death, but gradually, as I dimly recognized a medic had come in to shine a light in my eyes, I forced myself to look past the circle to what had stood within it during the recent ritual.

It had been a man, once.

Bathed in the blood and dust of however many sacrifices they'd somehow brought to this place, he'd stood inside and swallowed all that came to him.

I finally knew what the Necromancers were planning tomorrow night, at midnight on Halloween. This was, at the very least, a proof of concept, but it was probably also them… it felt dirty to lessen the loss of life, but the phrase "priming the pump" seemed most accurate. The only thing was, the location didn't make much sense.

I felt myself being moved.

Where, then? Where was the actual ritual most likely to take place?

The Museum, or the University.

The Museum had the symbolic deaths of however many civilizations buried away within it's artifacts, and was one of the remaining black marks on my map. That said, it was practically over the water, and it wasn't nearly as central a location as the University was.

The University had some other magical significance that I suspected I'd have known more about if I could either ask Bob or could manage to piece it together for myself, but I was trying to put together the picture from a puzzle I'd only gotten half the pieces for, none of them edges or corners.

Why was that circle-

I felt the image force its way to the forefront of my mind again, and I leaned over the side of the stretcher I was on and puked.

While it didn't fix things, that purging managed to temporarily clear the massive headache I'd built up in that room, and the stomach acid from my breakfast's sausages made me cough and inhale as much clean air as I could. Somebody helped me sit up straight as the world came back into focus.

A medic was trying to look me over, but the short General stepped forward and did his best to look me in the eyes. I forced myself to look down at the many ribbons on his shirt while he looked me over.

"What did you see in there?" he asked curtly.

"You're not going to like it," I told him, then burped stomach acid. The doctor handed me a glass of water, and I swished it around in my mouth and spat it out onto the street, then drank the rest.

"Tell me anyway."

I told him. Every merciless detail.

He didn't like it.

He stepped back, looking up at the room with the circle from the outside, where I realized we were, next to the ambulance again. His fists clenched, and his face turned red.

"Where does that leave us, Dresden?" He asked through clenched teeth.

"It tells us that once we wash this place out with bleach and melt down that damned circle for scrap with a clergy of priests exorcising it, it won't have any value for the enemy anymore," I told him. "I suspect the Monsters will want… will want their dead back."

At that, he nodded. He turned back to me, looking in my eyes again, and I looked away.

"While I don't normally take military guidance from civilians, you've just told us how to destroy a location critical to the enemy without burning the building down or blowing it up. That means we can move our forces somewhere useful. I'll take that over stumbling in the dark any day of the week. While you're still going to answer for everything you're involved in when this is over... do you have any ideas on our next step from your grand plan so I can turn it into marching orders in the meantime?" He asked.

I took a shuddering breath.

"One black mark on the map down," I told him. "Several to go. I think the University is going to be where things actually go down tomorrow night, but it might help drain their resources to wipe out whatever is lurking elsewhere first." I evened my breathing and gave him something that could charitably be called a smile. "Have you ever taken the time to visit Chicago's Field Museum? I hear it's nice this time of year."

He grunted, looking back up at the bookstore's second floor.

"Are you good to walk?" The military man asked me, rather than the doctor.

I pushed myself to my feet, stepping around the puddle of puke. "I'll manage."

"Good." He nodded at Things 1 and 2, who were hovering nearby. They moved to flank him. "I'll be moving to our field base, trying to organize this mess. Take the Lieutenant with you. Dismissed."

The General started shouting at the soldiers to pack up everything and probably started delegating taking that ring back to Mt. Doom, so I started looking for Andi and Kirby. Even if Lieutenant Tarkin was backing us up with a hundred soldiers, I still wanted them briefed and ready.

We left for the Field Museum shortly after.