A/N: Bit of a breather here, folks, a chance for us to recover from the events of the last chapter while I struggle to find time to write between real-world obligations. Hope you don't mind.

In the meantime, thank you all for reading, reviewing, favouriting and following... and don't worry, there will be fewer codes in this chapter; as much as I loved your translations and interpretations, I recognize that I need to balance the challenges with accessible content, and I may have tipped the scales in favour of excessive challenges. So, as I said, a deep breath before we continue in more ways than one.

Anyway, without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Gravity Falls and The Secret World is not mine. Once again, I've unleashed another cavalcade of unsubtle references; as always, see if you can recognize them.

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Srbz, ivzwvih. Rg'h nv, Qlsm. Yvg blf mvevi gslftsg blf'w svzi uiln NV ztzrm, wrw blf :)

At the very centre of the patchwork of surrealist labyrinths and apocalyptic wastelands that composed the new reality, beyond the private hellscapes and isolated torture realms that bubbled and broiled and blasphemed between it all, there lay a special region of Bill's kingdom. This was Bill Cipher's backyard, his display case, his nature reserve, his landfill – a place where everything that couldn't be sorted into its own special hell was eventually dumped and left to fester.

This putrescent continent was the Rotten Heart.

Unlike some of the other playgrounds, this place was open to anyone who might happen to stumble across its boundaries, for it had been meant for virtually everyone. This was to be the ultimate receptacle for the wandering remnants of the human race: for the refugees, the dispossessed, the wanderers and the ramblers, for those not fortunate enough to have been killed off for good and those not despised enough to have been given a private hell of their own, this was to be their home until they finally stopped being amusing. Sooner or later, no matter what they did, no matter how far they travelled, no matter how many times they were killed, they all ended up in the Rotten Heart.

On the shores of an ocean of rippling blue-and-black fog dotted with the eternally-sinking husks of ships that had fallen foul of the knifelike reefs, upon a beach of razor-sharp glass shards littered with the writhing, leaden bodies of those unfortunate enough to make contact with the ethereal sea, the path to the Heart began. Many refugees never made it off the beach: the dream-stuff that was the ocean infested them, polluted their veins and paralysed their bodies, leaving them eternally decomposing amidst the razor sand and barbed-wire kelp, their minds awash with the visions the sea induced. Thus, this place was called the Nightmare Coast.

The Shapeshifter, having no need of a ship and strong enough wings to carry him over the shredding sands, bypassed the whole thing without much effort at all.

Uphill from the beach, past a sweep of lacerating dunes, lay the Gardens of Torments.

Here, a number of windows into the private hells of Bill's kingdom had been opened, and a particularly unfortunate selection of offenders had been left to suffer before the eyes of the world: anyone who wanted to reach the epicentre of the Heart would have to travel through the gardens and witness the punishments meted out to those who dared oppose Bill Cipher's rule. Kept out of phase with reality, every grisly detail of their torture could be witnessed, but nothing of the outside world could reach them: they could not be rescued, nor could any friendly face be seen or kindly word be heard. Thus, the passers-by could not help, but only watch in horror as the parade of abominations played out before them.

Shifty, being Shifty, had little interest in helping any of them – though as he swept through the garden, several of the private hells envisioned caught his eye.

The prisoners on display were rebels, revolutionaries, assassins, regicidal maniacs and all manner of militias, anyone who'd made the mistake of trying to take the fight to Bill. In fact, the only people who weren't on display were the Zodiac; after all, they'd gotten closer than anyone else in the entire universe to destroying Bill once and for all, and Bill's ego wouldn't tolerate such news reaching the ears of his playthings. Instead, the lesser offenders were brought out in force: the failures who'd never made it as far as the Wheel.

Here was a governor, a petty man who'd made the mistake of rallying his constituents against the Henchmaniacs. Normally, this was the kind of politician that 8-Ball wouldn't have bothered to scrape off his toenails, but then the idiot decided to challenge Bill to a public debate over the proper use of power. Bill had replied by promptly incinerating the unfortunate governor. In his new ethereal display case, he was burning still… and always would be. On he went, a living bonfire tripping over his charred feet and blundering into walls with scarecrow arms wreathed in flame, his smouldering toupee now a halo of fire; wherever he went, he left a trail of sizzling fat and a smell of roasting meat.

Here was a sniper, some unfortunate ex-military hero who'd thought he could end Weirdmageddon with a single bullet on a clear day. Unfortunately, he hadn't been armed with a quantum destabilizer and hadn't realized that shooting Bill in the eye would only piss him off. Now, the sniper was his own bullet: seized and crumpled like paper, his limbs crushed inward, his body squeezed into a ball no bigger than a marble and fired – splattering the human bullet against a wall. Then, he'd be scraped off, revived, rebuilt and made to repeat the sequence again – for ever.

Here was the Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squadron, retrieved from a future that no longer existed and suspended in time like flies in amber, subject to all the random whims of temporal flux that could be unleashed – all at once: aged by hundreds of years while simultaneously regressed into infancy, smeared across a millennium of history without ever once moving or breathing or even living, becoming different people – and sometimes different species entirely – as their personal timelines randomly rewrote themselves. All suffered, and all did so paradoxically.

Here was Time Baby, a cloud of disconnected molecules struggling to reassemble themselves, confined and compressed just enough for the process to become horrifyingly visible. Every now and again, his body would briefly coalesce just long enough to take on an almost-corporeal form, screaming in agony as he struggled to reassert his own existence; but as quickly, the forces that imprisoned him swept his body apart once again.

Here was Blendin Blandin, dangling from a meat hook driven through his jaw and out his mouth. Hands tied behind his back, he could only kick helplessly in mid-air as the hook and chain swung him back and forth across his little display case, with all the myriad failures and humiliations of his career playing out around him, a little more exaggerated with every iteration. For good measure, his throat was split by a vicious-looking surgical scar from where the Henchmaniacs had removed his larynx – Bill's replacement for the mute button.

Here was Rumble McSkirmish, trapped in a side-scrolling beat-em-up game, where he was continuously reincarnated as a one-hit-point enemy that even the most incompetent player could easily eliminate. Plus, the bonus round gave the player free reign to punch every last inch of flesh off Rumble's digital bones.

Here was Sev'ral Timez, sewn and stitched together into a writhing, multi-bodied lump of diseased flesh, eternally screaming in effortlessly-tuneful voices.

Here was an awkward, spindly figure lurching clumsily around the forests of old Gravity Falls on legs too long and too thin to comfortably support him. At nine feet and seven inches, he was the tallest of his kind to ever walk the Earth, and every step he took was agony: his joints throbbed with every move, his overextended limbs hunching his shoulders and back into a painful arch, and his oversized feet regularly tripped him up no matter how carefully he walked. Whenever he fell, another bone snapped. There was no support to be found among his family and friends, most of whom refused to even share their home with him a moment longer, and often took to stabbing at his feet with knitting needles. Had he been able to, this wobbling, pain-wracked giant would have begged to be put out of his misery, but all he could say was "Shmebulock."

Here was Candy Chiu, separated from all her friends and from anyone who might sympathize with her, condemned to a never-ending procession of meaningless tasks: paperwork, editing, filing, shelf-stacking, coding programs that would never be used, stacking shelves, hauling cargo, searching for lost valuables, killing the occasional horde of zombies, and most arduous of all, music camp. And there would usually be someone attractive and fitting Candy's tastes in the vicinity, and none of them ever bothered to pay any attention to her. In this world, an extrapolation of her worst nightmare, she was kept working and motivated by the vague promise that one day she might be rewarded with an hour of free time. But no matter how hard she worked, no matter how well she performed, her taskmasters were never satisfied. Candy often ended up collapsing from exhaustion, sometimes even dying from it, but the invisible taskmasters would always be around to resuscitate her – and jolt her back into wakefulness with a cattle prod.

Every now and again, an information pamphlet would fall from the sky.

Tired of being tired? It proclaimed. Sick to death of being weak? Bored with being a puny human? Pay a visit to the Ruinous Toymaker's workshop, and we'll take away all those little aches and pains and vital organs. Just ask your taskmasters to make an appointment. Don't wait, don't delay, and don't bother staying human! Come on down to the Ruinous Toymaker's workshop and be improved!

And every time it happened, Candy would break down in tears and howl – swinging wildly between English and Korean – "STOP IT! PLEASE STOP IT! PLEASE, GIVE ME A MINUTE WITH MABEL OR GRENDA AND I'LL NEVER COMPLAIN AGAIN! JUST LET ME SEE MY FRIENDS!"

But it never worked, and every time it happened, the pamphlet looked just a little bit more tempting.

And here was Grenda Grendinator. On the face of things, her life in captivity was nothing short of idyllic: her life in Gravity Falls was perfectly replicated, her friends and family all recreated in exacting detail, and Marius Von Fundhauser was by her side. By all appearances, she should have had everything she needed to be perfectly happy… except for one tiny problem.

Whenever Grenda reached out to touch – to kiss Marius, to hug Mabel and Candy, to cuddle her pet iguana, to do anything that required physical contact – it all started to fall apart. No matter how gentle she was, no matter how carefully she tried to interact with the world around her, whatever she touched began to slowly crack. Marius, Mabel, Candy, her parents – one by one, they crumbled into shards of screaming ex-human being and fell to the floor, collecting in vast heaps of living, suffering porcelain that only went on howling in agony as Grenda tried frantically to reassemble them. Eventually, she'd be left alone in a world of ruins, populated only by screaming piles of rubble that still begged to know why Grenda had hurt them so badly… and of course, the huge sign dominating the horizon:

YOU MONSTER.

Inevitably, the rubble would be swept away and a sobbing Grenda would be allowed to begin again with a fresh landscape of people to accidentally annihilate.

All these horrific punishments and more were glimpsed by the Shapeshifter as he swept past them. Of course, the names of these prisoners and their reasons for being here eluded him entirely, and though few of the unfortunate victims sparked the odd flicker of recognition in his brain, he couldn't determine why. Despite Shifty's best efforts to recall where and how he might have seen those agony-stricken faces, none of the prisoners stirred anything other than the occasional sting of déjà vu.

In the end, he could only march onwards through the Garden of Torments, edging ever closer to the very centre of the Rotten Heart – totally oblivious to the whispering that echoed behind him.

Beyond the gardens, atop a desolate, blasted hill, sat possibly the ugliest collection of buildings that had ever had the misfortune of being labelled a city.

From what Shifty heard from the gatekeepers (once he'd found a suitably nondescript human form to wear), this place sometimes sat in the shadow of the Fearamid so that its master could watch the suffering in action below, but with the eternal palace now on tour around the maddened cosmos, it now sat drowning quietly in the sweltering gloom of the black sun's anti-radiance. The Henchmaniacs almost never visited this city except on special occasions, and Bill only occasionally appeared at the great pyramid-shaped shrine in the central plaza; few monsters ever attacked the place other than wild dogs and bandit gangs, and little Weirdness occurred within the city limits unless Bill was bored and felt like sending a message. As the gatekeepers themselves explained, this place had been meant to be a nature reserve in which the unattached refugees of the new world could live and work and suffer and die as they had in Earth's antiquity.

For this was Cipheropolis, the great sanctuary-city of mankind, in which humanity could live free – with Bill's strict permission. Judging by the smell of raw sewage and the screams floating from over the wall, little amenities like safety, law or basic human dignity were optional at best.

The outer fortifications were bad enough – a hastily-gathered mishmash of barbed wire fences, crudely-cemented brick walls, and a few paltry hillocks of rusted metal. Beyond it lay a sweltering labyrinth of oddly-built buildings: scrap metal shanties reinforced with cardboard and other rubbish, rickety wooden houses built from the few trees left at the bottom of the hill, squat cubes of mud brick drying in the suffocating heat, crude granite towers held together with improvised concrete, even artificial caverns of bone – gathered from the many corpses this place produced. Worse still, chimneys from smithies and brickworks and other primitive industries belched smoke into the air, muddying the sky with putrid black clouds and only making the place seem even more hellish from a distance.

The residents had clearly done their best to add a little colour and artistry to the mix: some of the houses had been painted bright red, blue, gold, purple; Christmas lights, neon signs and even a few digital billboards had been scavenged from the ruins of the world beyond; there was even the occasional mural painted on the side of a building. But it was all overshadowed by the grotesquery of it all – most prominently of all by the giant skyscrapers of gleaming black volcanic rock dominating the skyline, a vast mass of needle-sharp stalagmites stabbing brutally upwards into the polluted sky alongside the barbed tip of the Pyramid Shrine. According to the gatekeepers, Bill Cipher himself had built these towers, extruded them from the rock of the hill itself and filled them with rooms in which the refugees of his kingdom – those who had no hell of their own and no other place to go – could huddle and cower and give thanks to their patron.

And just for good measure, some smart-ass had added a hand-painted sign to the front gate: "WELCOME TO CIPHEROPOLIS. ABANDON HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE."

Shifty wasn't looking forward to spending time among humans, least of all an entire city of them, and the thought of remaining invisible among so many single-formed weaklings filled him with nausea… but for now it was unavoidable: assuming Mr Carter had been telling him the truth, Mabel Pines would be here in a few days, and if she had any intelligence, she wouldn't dare enter a place like this if there was any word of a Shapeshifter loose in the city. Until she arrived, he'd have to keep a low profile, disgusting though it was. Besides, he at least an address: provided this Rallying Flag Hotel had private rooms, at least he'd have the luxury of being separated from the revolting inhabitants of this place.

So, telling himself the reward would be worth the effort, he stepped through the gates and into the bustling streets of Cipheropolis. Immediately, several realizations hit him at once:

Firstly, the place smelled even worse on the inside. According to the gatekeepers, indoor plumbing was only available in a handful of districts, most of which had been claimed by those wealthy enough to own private armies, leaving everyone else reliant on crudely-dug latrine pits – or, for the exceptionally impoverished, buckets. Add to that the fact that corpses were usually left where they lay until the pig farmers came for them, and most of the clean water sources were owned by the gangs, and the entire city reeked of shit and blood and decomposing flesh, all roasting merrily in the sun.

Secondly, the sheer number of people was nothing short of staggering: there had to be over ten thousand people passing through this street at any given time, and this was just the people passing by the gates – reportedly a deeply unpopular part of the city, according to the guards on patrol. Beyond, in the narrow byways and canyon-like boulevards, the crowds marched a million strong, untold multitudes of human beings scurrying back and forth across the city in search of whatever they needed to scratch out a living in this hellish metropolis. Merchants, blacksmiths, carpenters, pickpockets, gong-farmers, beggars, prostitutes, weavers, mercenaries, labourers, guards, scavengers, priests, gangsters, drunks, musicians, dancers, acrobats, actors and entertainers of every stripe, along with dozens upon dozens of refugees just hoping to live long enough to find homes and jobs of their own. Mutants, too, made their homes here, with dozens of figures amongst the horde earmarked by the telltale signs of Weirdness-induced distortion: beastly faces peered from under hoods; tentacles wriggled in uncooperative sleeves; inside-out figures left a trail of bloody footprints on the cobblestones as they hobbled, whimpering, through the streets; old men walked in the bodies of children, leading their now-senile grandchildren around in terrified desperation. Shifty, who'd spent most of the last thirty years either alone or in the company of no more than four human beings at a time, found himself almost overwhelmed by the immensity of the crowds roaming the streets.

Thirdly, the streets themselves were almost impossible to navigate, partly due to the crowds but mostly due to the fact that civic planning hadn't been highest on the list of priorities while building this rathole of a city. The sheer number of streets, avenues, walkways, boulevards, alleyways, and ladder streets branching outwards from the gate was beyond counting, and the fact that someone had actually bothered to put up street signs beggared belief. There'd be no chance of Shifty ever finding his way to the rendezvous point in all this: fortunately, after searching a nearby alley for corpses with gold teeth, Shifty had enough in his pockets to hire a guide.

His guide, a shrunken, trembling little man with goat hooves instead of fingernails, obediently led him on a meandering path across the city that would supposedly lead them to the Rallying Flag. Along the way, the guide helpfully provided him with an overview of the city's current conditions, and though Shifty wasn't interested in most of it, he allowed the mutant to ramble on for as long as necessary – if only because ripping his head off might draw undue attention.

According to the guide, Cipheropolis had little in the way of official government: as the name implied, Bill Cipher owned the city and maintained the rights to seize control at any time he pleased, though he had little interest in doing so. As such, the city was "managed" in his absence by a loose alliance of gangs and hard men, most of whom only remained at peace because none of them wanted to lose their status to a gang war. The city guards were on the payroll of these gangs, and all citizens living within the districts under their control paid regular tribute in the form of anything they desired.

Technically, the city had a mayor, but he was little more than a holdover from the city's last official attempt to create a proper government, and mainly served as the official mouthpiece of the gangs. Of course, the mouthpiece proved only intermittently effective in quelling the temperament of the populace: rioting was common around here, though it rarely did anything to spur a change in leadership. The gangs made their homes in the black towers that crowned the city, and thanks to a mixture of natural defences and well-maintained garrisons, most of them were almost unassailable. Instead, all the riots did was inspire another brutal crackdown by the guards. In fact, these regular massacres were probably the only reason why Cipheropolis still had any living space left within its walls, along with epidemics of cholera, monster attacks, and the occasional visit from a slumming Henchmaniac.

Starvation was another popular cause of death around here, for food and drink were also under the control of the gangs: pork, fresh fruit, canned food, chocolate, butter, pastries, good wine, cold beer, clean drinking water and even electric refrigeration were strictly the domain of the new ruling class. Those who couldn't afford the asking price for old-world goodies like these were forced to make do with the city's everyday fare – namely dogs, rats, fungi, moss, recycled water, and moonshine.

Lots and lots of moonshine, which didn't help the mood of the citizenry.

Shifty did his best to maintain human form and avoid losing his temper as the journey continued, but it wasn't easy: the crowd seemed to press in on him from all angles, threatening to crush him in a vast compacting cube of loathsome human flesh, and the stench of unwashed bodies came dangerously close to smothering him. More than once, he felt human hands rifling through his pockets, and he almost lashed out in rage before remembering his cover (and the fact that he didn't have anything in said pockets to begin with). His mood only worsened as the hours ticked by and their progress across the city grew ever more laborious. True, the guide avoided most of the nastier alleyways and automatically steered them away from any gang patrols likely to demand tribute, but they still ended up bumping into no less than three barroom brawls that had spilled into the street, forcing them to take a hasty detour – lest they end up getting caught in the inevitable guard crackdown.

In the end, most of the journey was a blur, a tangle of makeshift shopfronts, crude factories and gateways to richer districts. In fact, the only part of it that Shifty remembered in any detail was the place known to all as Preacher's Pass.

All forms of religious worship in Cipheropolis revolved entirely around Bill, as demonstrated by the colossal Pyramid Shrine lurking at the centre of the city; all other forms of worship were strictly forbidden – laws such as these being enforced by the occasional lightning bolt from the Fearamid. However, in Bill's absence, the law had grown lax with nobody to enforce it, and an improvised temple of priests, preachers and mystics had sprouted in one of the larger boulevards; some were even acquiring a congregation – though given the sheer scope of Bill's powers, how they maintained their faith was anyone's guess. Believing that Cipher had lost interest in them, the gangs permitted the preachers to continue their public worship.

As Shifty quickly discovered, this was easily the most colourful part of the entire city, not to mention the noisiest.

Standing at improvised pulpits positioned on both sides of the street, the priests gathered in droves, haranguing passers-by and addressing the followers they'd gathered so far. For good measure, most of them were quite evidently on the more extreme side. Shifty hadn't had too much experience with human religion outside of the textbooks he'd leafed through all those years ago, but he had the distinct impression that the believers gathered here today didn't represent any mainstream faith found in the world prior to Weirdmageddon.

In the end, he could only watch in bewilderment as the spectacle washed over him, and listen to the cacophony of calls to worship.

"Hallowed are the Ori! Hallowed be those who Ascend to join them!"

"Aten, Aten, Aten, Aten, Aten…"

"The Drowned Man gives no promises to us, my friends! He gives us only lessons!"

"Let me show you an endless trail of sunsets!"

"Hail Columbia! Hail the almighty Archangel who gives sight to the Prophets!"

"Follow the light to the end of the tunnel, and step into the dawn of the Ravenous Sun!"

"Listen to the wisdom of Tzeentch, for he is the Changer of Ways! He charts the course of Fate!"

"These are your bodies, which shall be given unto us. This is our insight, which shall be given unto you…"

"Join us, brothers and sisters! Walk the Black Spiral, and embrace the strength of the Wyrm!"

"For the night is dark and full of terrors!"

"Praise be to Sutekh! Praise be to he who leads us to freedom from the tyrannous Aeons! Praise be to his greatest servants, they who bear his gift of blood in eternity!"

"We will be reborn in the black womb of the endless void!"

"These are the words of the Beast. And he is woken. He is the heart who beats in the darkness. He is the blood that will never cease. And now he will rise."

"Let Papa Nurgle comfort you in your sorrows, my children!"

"Hearken! Hearken! Listen to the Boiling Meme, for he, he is the messenger of the Lucid Dreamers! The Boiling Meme beams of the Stars That Scream! The Dreamers approach! Eat, lest ye be eaten, for the dark teems with Eaters!"

"Beware, for the Horsemen ride! Death has claimed his mantle and now seeks the scythe and the scales and the sword and the crown! It is as it was once prophesied! Look to Revelation, my friends!"

And most disturbingly of all, some of these preachers appeared to be performing miracles. The pallid-looking oddball in the rough-spun habit who'd been hollering about the Ori now stood with his arms outstretched, and all around him, objects were slowly rising into the air of their own accord.

And was it his imagination, or was that a humanoid figure forming in the flames behind him?

The guide quickly led him away, and frankly, Shifty couldn't blame him: after all, if these oddments had real supernatural powers, it probably wouldn't be too long before one of them ending up starting a fight with the other preachers – to say nothing of what might happen if Bill ever found out what was going on here.

The Rallying Flag Hotel, as it turned out, was little more than a ramshackle husk of a building just across from the newest tent city; according to the guide, it had once been a rather spirited attempt to construct a seven-story building with 21st-century building materials and machines, but a fire had broken out in the last week of construction, and attempts to repair the damage had been abandoned once it was discovered that the gangs were skimming resources for their own projects. Two long years onwards, it was an abandoned ruin, a barely-furnished maze of dusty corridors and mouldering rooms crowned with a blackened mess of half-melted scaffolding and charred timbers – the remains of the seventh floor.

Oddly enough, no squatters made their home here: despite space being highly prized in the crowded city beyond, nobody dared trespass on the ruined hotel, and even the guide couldn't explain why. All he knew was that something seemed to actively frighten people away from the front doors. By now, the usual rumours surrounded the place, most claiming that it was haunted, others hinting that a monster had made its lair inside the lobby, and some suggested that it had become the secret headquarters of an up-and-coming gang; a few even claimed that Bill Cipher himself had taken on a human form and now lived in one of the abandoned suites. Of course, Shifty had no interest in rumours and ghost-stories; after all, it wasn't as if Mabel would be dissuaded by the tall tales surrounding this place.

Despite the guide's best efforts to dissuade him, he pushed the front doors open with a tortured squeal of rusting hinges and marched indoors. For good measure, he also seized the guide bythe scruff of his neck and dragged him into the hotel along with him, if only as petty vengeance for talking every step of the journey. But to their mutual surprise, the lobby was brightly lit and almost unnaturally clean; true, the place was still pretty dilapidated, with rotten floorboards, water-damaged walls, torn-out carpets and a front desk that looked to be in the process of collapsing in on itself, but the fact that there were working electric lights and not a trace of dust to be found set alarm bells ringing in the back of Shifty's brain.

Either someone was living here, or someone had prepared this place in advance.

And then, on the rotting front desk, a lone TV set clicked on. Of course, there was no picture, only static – there'd been nothing broadcast in this part of the world since Weirdmageddon had comeand gone. But against all expectations, a voice could be heard amidst the white noise.

"Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss-I am the Boiling Meme-let me in."

There was a pause. Then, as the sound quality slowly improved, the bubbling voice from the set murmured, "Hiya, Shifty."

"What the hell?" Shifty muttered.

"Hell," chortled the voice. "More than Hell and Hell alone, Shifty. You should know that there's more frightening things than that out in the world. We're living proof of that, remember? Monsters walk amongst us, so they say."

Was it Shifty's imagination, or were faint tendrils of black slime beginning to ooze out of the TV's speakers?

"Who are you?" he whispered.

"I'm the message. I'm John."

"That really doesn't tell me much."

"Nothing ever does, eh, Shifty? You've been kept in the dark for so long, locked away in a closet where they hoped you'd be forgotten 'til the end of time… and you've been kept in the dark in a different way entirely, am I right? There's so many secrets kept from you, so many things you want to know the answers to, but the world keeps holding back. So unfair-unfair-unfair."

"…how did you know that? How do you know so much about me?"

"I know everything now. The electronic eyes of humanity have been blinded, but that doesn't mean I can't use them. But then, we've met before."

"Oh really?"

"Yes. You saw how I gatecrashed the party at Camp Acheron - well, a part of me, at least."

Against all expectations, something at the back of Shifty's mind sparked in recognition. Camp Acheron? Where had he heard that name before?

He gave himself a little shake, and did his best to ignore the feeling of déjà vu. "No offence," he continued, "but I think I'd remember meeting you, John. I mean, it's kind of hard to forget being talked at by a TV Set."

John laughed, and Shifty came to two very disturbing realizations: first, the black slime oozing from the TV's speakers was indeed real; secondly, it was beginning to form a thick puddle of thick, tarry gunk under the set… a puddle that appeared to be moving of its own accord along the front desk. Something about this stuff seemed worryingly familiar, and every instinct in Shifty's body told him not to let it touch him.

"You've forgotten more than you could possibly know, Shifty," said John. There's more being hidden from you than you could ever imagine. I know exactly how that feels, Shifty; I know what it's like to be manipulated. Let's be friends. You and me against the world, Shifty. Everyone needs friends, and I have better friends than anyone in the multiverse – friends who dine on quantum foam and feast on stars."

The puddle was inching steadily closer now, pouring off the edge of the desk and slopping onto the floor with a distressingly animate motion. Were those tentacles starting to form in the slime? Were those flickering lights in the blackness just reflections, or were they eyes?

"Ahaha," Shifty laughed mirthlessly, and realized with a thrill of embarrassment that he was instinctively edging away from the growing pool of gunk.

By contrast, the guide remained as he had for the last few minutes: frozen in place, staring uncomprehendingly at the advancing mass of fluid.

Shifty cleared his throat, and tried again. "Thanks but no thanks," he said, trying not to let his nervousness show. "I'm fine with being alone for the time being."

"Suit yourself. Can't blame me for having fun."

Does that mean he's going to kill me or let me go?

"I suppose we'll speak again, when you've had time to think on what you really are. But don't think too long: witnesses pile up quickly around here. Oh, and speaking of which…"

"Oh dear God, no," whimpered the guide, his eyes suddenly lighting up in terrified realization.

There was a high-pitched whine from the TV, one that rose higher and higher still until it became inaudible to human hearing – and eventually, any range of hearing that Shifty could replicate. And then, without warning, the guide let out a scream and flung himself as hard as he could at the nearest wall. He struck head-on, collapsed to the ground, hauled himself upright, and then proceeded to viciously and repeatedly headbutt the wall with a series of loud wet crunching sounds. In the end, the man's skull caved in long before the wall did.

"That's better," John sighed. "No more prying eyes. I'm needed elsewhere, now. You keep out of trouble, now. Just remember: you are allmade of stars."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Can't you tell? They're right above your eyes. See ya, Shifty."

And with a parting gurgle of impossibly-deep laughter, the TV switched itself off, leaving the black ooze to evaporate from the floor – and at long last leaving Shifty alone in the lobby.

A few miles away from the turgid depths of the city, a lone ship ground to a halt on the shores of the Nightmare Coast, disgorging a small army of twisted-looking creatures onto the brutal sands.

Their captain was the last to leave the ship. Still shrouded in the same rags that had concealed her advancing mutations since her time in the mountains, her face was almost invisible, but it was impossible to miss the way her eyes flash crimson beneath the hood of her tattered garb. After all, a city such as this could only mean efforts to rebuild, to restore the world to some semblance of its old self; efforts to rebuild represented hope… and hope was something that she could no longer countenance.

So, barking an order to the troops now lumbering into formation, Wendy shouldered her axe and strode wearily up the beach towards the waiting gates of Cipheropolis.

A/N: This chapter's soundtrack choice is Harry Angel, by Trevor Jones.

Now for the code!

Gsv glbh szev zoo yvvm yivzprmt uivv
Zh zoo yfg Yroo xzm xovziob hvv
Rg'h grnv uli kzgsh gl mld xlmevitv
Zmw uli gsv svilvh gl vnvitv