A couple of feet away from the Guild stood Aiedo's prison. It was a high security prison build to contain rowdy Hunters and Zio sympathisers but nothing that important - the big prisons were all on Dezolis. A man and a woman were just about to wake up and find themselves in a cell. They didn't know why. emo woke up and washed her face, looking at herself in the mirror. It wasn't bad as prison cells went. It was clean and had the necessary basics to live plus, for some reason, a small television tuned irrevocably to a Mega Drive. Her lover was still sound asleep on the bottom bunk. She shook him awake.

"Do you remember doing anything illegal, Mat?" she asked him. The big man shook his head. He was staring at his hands. They were covered in blue feathers. Mat was very confused. I'm on drugs, he thought, really weird ones. That has to be it.

"Are you sure?"

"Well..." There doesn't seem to be anything interesting here, said the words in his head. They were coming from the corner of the room. The dim, patchy, blocky corridor. He could hear it hum. It was like being in all time at once. He wished he could clear his head.

"Where are we anyway?" asked Imo, "There's a prison a couple of train stops away from our house, right? We must be there."

"I don't think so..." He carried on staring at his hands and at the wall. From a great distance, as through his HP was very low, he heard footsteps.

"Well, well. Two billion meseta. I'm impressed."

Mat looked up. The jailer was a fairly young man with blue hair and beard. He wore a smart red tunic and armour. A sword hung by his side.

"What do you mean?" asked Imo.

"You tell me." said the guard, "How exactly does one owe somebody two billion meseta?"

"We? Owe two billion? To whom?"

"How much is a meseta?" asked Mat dumbly.

"Who cares, dear? It's two billion." Imo reminded him.

The guard laughed, "You're in here for a long time. Unless you can pay back that much. I'll leave you to think about it, yes?"

"I... I can't pay back... that much..." began Mat. The guard smiled and wandered off, singing the background tune to himself under his breath. He slumped to the floor, his head in his hands, "I don't owe anybody anything! I swear!"

"Mat, stay focussed! If we've been falsely imprisoned, we have to get out of here before something worse happens! We don't know where we are, we don't know what..."

"You don't remember?"

The room was beginning to darken. It was breaking up, becoming blocky, time becoming more and more intensive. Mat reached out, tried to find emo but was fumbling in the darkness. He saw someone far away... a pixellated image... was it Imo?

"You owe me..."

"Who are you?"

"You... owe... me..." the figure turned around and began walking through the cell wall.

"Hey, don't just walk away! Did you put me in prison?" he ran after her but fell through the space, through the place he wasn't supposed to be able to walk through, down and down... he felt the soil of his own world for a moment...

Imo shook him awake.

"Were you listening to a thing I just said?"

"I... I don't feel well..."

Mat fell asleep.

Silent as a rat, Dev sneaked through the entrance, rusty metal half-concealed by sand, into the tunnel. Such places existed everywhere in the desert, collapsed by time and wind and sand, ruins of a civilisation nobody remembered having existed, simply building up as more and more people threw their rubbish down there and the Motavians who lived down there scavenged, repaired or recycled it all like big blue feathery Wombles. The lower depths were Motavian territory, places that non-Motavians just didn't go but here near the surface Dev knew that he probably wouldn't even be noticed. He could steal some food and shelter here until the weather was less deadly and he could move on again, continue his search for the elusive girl in the black robes.

He had been roaming the desert for days now, almost a month. He mostly survived by keeping to these underground lairs; the Motavians had the right idea. They rarely came out except to trade in Tonoe, something they did on a rota. Dev had become quite skilled at watching their movements, sneaking around, stealing whenever he had the opportunity and running like hell whenever he was caught. He had run into monsters a few times and was forced to defend himself on occasion. he discovered he could use his bursts of agility to his advantage and he was uncharacteristically strong in a crisis.

He crept along the rusty corridor with severed wires dangling from the ceiling and onto a wide balcony overlooking a huge room. Bin bags were piled in large heaps in one corner of the room, tower units from broken computers in another. The walls dripped with mould and damp. He looked around for anything he could use; there was nothing in this room but there were two other exits on the balcony and underneath him was another cylindrical corridor.

He was alerted to the sound of footsteps; more than one person coming directly towards him. He ducked back into the corridor and waited. The lights flickered and grew dim. After a few minutes of talking, three people walked in. They were Motavians, slightly smaller than the average person with tufts of blue feathers poking out of their cloak hoods. Their cloaks were black, an unusual colour for Motavians to wear. The cloak colours were some kind of role division in Motavian society and black-cloaked Motavians were generally not well received by the others. The three were running and looking around them as though they did not want to be caught. When they reached the middle of the room, they relaxed a little and stopped. They started talking in a businesslike manner, their voices too low for Dev to understand what they were saying. Two of them were arguing with the other one, trying to persuade her of something but she was having none of it. She folded their arms and shook her head. The other two gestured sharply with their arms. One pulled at the third one's sleeve and pointed back towards the door. Angry now, the third one grabbed the first one by the hem of his cloak and pulled his face up to hers. He gave up. Gesturing to the first one, he reached into his pocket for something. His colleague stretched out his hands and a whirlwind of strange dark energy began playing about them. The air suddenly tasted like rust and shiver went down Dev's spine. The third one reached up and lowered the hood of her cloak...

It was her! Dev's heart raced. Without thinking, he ran up to the balcony and jumped over the side, landing neatly in front of her. The two Motavians ran off. She stared at him with those eyes that seemed to look straight through him and concentrate intently on him at the same time. She nodded as if verifying his existence.

"So you made it." she said, "I'm glad you came. It was a very important event in my life and I only invited my closest friends."

"But I don't know you!" said Dev. Ignoring him, the girl started walking down the corridor and seemed to disappear, her pixels merging with the blocky decay of the wall. Swearing loudly, he ran after her.

He did not notice how far into the Bin he had gone until he felt a feathered hand on his shoulder. He jumped and turned around, one hand going to the knife at his belt. Six black-cloaked Motavians stood behind him, their beaked faces unreadable.