Kingdom Crossovers

by HVK

A reformed Invader Zim has been chosen by the Keyblade and travels the multiverse alongside Calvin the magical alchemist and Hobbes the tiger knight, while in the shadows, a hidden conspiracy seeks to conquer the multiverse with monsters born from a dark titan with a hollow heart.

20. The Wretched Hive

Disclaimer: I don't own any franchise that appears here, or make profits off them.

---

Lights shone from the great sprawling titan of the Glukkon city of Lulu's Fortune, building-sized spotlights glaring up into the dense smoke above the city; spotlights, mounted on motorized carts riding along tracks built into deceptively shallow lines upon the highest of buildings, shone directly into the grim blackness over the great Glukkon city. More ships were coming in, and these lights herded them to their destination.

Through clouds so thickly entrenched with pollution and badly managed industrial byproducts that the sky above was invisible against its pallor, metal moved downward, the first sign of artifice-born behemoths coming from the stars. The clouds seemed to part for a moment, pushed aside by a large herd by the spacecraft coming through; star-flyers meant to move between the darkness where the stars did not shine, commercial liners and planet-hoppers for tourists on sight-seeing expeditions, skyjammers and even a military ship or two, all of them slightly corroded by the toxic fumes and polluted clouds they passed through.

The city, sprawling for miles and assimilating all in its path into its superstructure, rose from the ground in layers upon layers of dark and grim construction, and through its jungle-like density people lived (often on the streets), a vast and terrible sprawl of cramped corridors and rooftops that formed ground-floors for other buildings and catwalks the size of entire streets; ragged blankets set between walls formed brief shelters for the many vagrants who had nowhere else to go but much to fear, massive cramped apartment complexes and cheap hotels shaped like crude blocks providing just barely suitable comfort for others. Others, menial workers or technicians or foremen slaving under the corporations that ruled this world, didn't even glance out. The few who did were not from around here; tourists who had not grown used to the many ships constantly flocking to the city, merchants seeking deals to be bartered and had only just arrived, mercenaries simply following orders that required their presence.

There were still many people who looked up in awe as the latest flock of ships flew in, herded to a docking tower rising above even this city's massive skyline. That was saying quite a lot; the buildings, built upon each other and against each other and upwards with an almost savage perspective of forced competition, were so tall that literally thousands upon thousands of the poor and homeless, working menial jobs for minimum pay just enough to feed themselves, had lived their entire lives without ever seeing the sun or natural light, buried far beneath the notice of their economic superiors and suffering alone in the dark.

Here, there was a small quadrant of scientific laboratories that had since lost all funding, the scientists once working there leaving for more profitable arrangements (and perhaps lamenting that military hardware was the only thing the cartels cared about anymore and actually useful research was scorned). Currently, they were being occupied by a disorganized clan of squatters who supported their families by doing dirty but well-paying jobs for corporations with agendas that could be well-served by the likes of them. One of these buildings, originally an armaments factory until its workers had been sold off to a conglomerate war-factory, was missing part of the roof; the hole was clumsily patched up with scrap and blankets and broken plastic, scored where the acid rain had nearly melted through.

There was a large hole in the patch-work already. Big enough for a man to step through, a hunched shape was looking through sat in front of it with a mild expression of curiosity under all the equipment he wore; an elf wearing a heavy cloak, thick survival-issue bib overalls, and a variety of equipment (moisture-recycling baffles on the chest, an air purifying gas-mask, and other devices necessary to survive in this city's environment; the Glukkon's handiwork was not kind to the weak).

He was one of those watching the ships. A scarf pulled over his gas mask and goggles brought down over his eyes, his face was totally concealed. Dressed like so many other tourists and adventurers seeking to make a profit or advance their own agenda (and body concealing cloaks had become the new fashion in town), few would have given him a second look. Even so, mild as he looked, he seemed to project the sense that his personal space extended for at least a few miles and that it was a very stupid idea to annoy him. The squatters gathered away from the hole, so nervous the fear was practically a solid thing over them, looked like they wished they hadn't been given a first look now they knew who he was.

On the elf's shoulder was an otter-weasel thing, dressed just the same as his friend. The ottsel, Daxter, hissed at the sight of the docking ships. "This place stinks, Jak. No offense, squatter guys."

"None taken," they said.

The elf, who was of course Jak, grunted. "It beats me why anyone would want to come to this Precursors-forsaken nightmare of a world."

Daxter gave the squatters a brief look. They seemed mildly offended this, but didn't say anything. Daxter said, as if an afterthought, "Uh, we did."

"That's different," Jak muttered, refusing to back down on his argument, a habit enforced from years of being Daxter's friend. "We have an agenda."

"Maybe some of those people coming in do too," Daxter speculated.

"If you say so." Jak looked out a moment longer, and stepped away from the hole. The squatters let out a sigh of relief that he wasn't showing himself like that anymore; there was no sense in taking risks, even if no one could immediately recognize him. Jak turned to them, and bowed his head. "We'll only be here for a few more days. Until the heat dies down."

The unofficial leader of the squatters, a hulking Big Bro Slig (that is, a Slig who'd been fed a special diet of steroids and mutative chemicals until he was a gigantic brute tougher than tanks and twice as mean) named Big Greg who'd quit his job as a security enforcer when he couldn't stomach the brutal nature of his job, nodded rather quickly. "'Least we could do. Your guys helped a friend of mine out of a jam once."

Jak blinked. "We did?"

"You raided a factory. My buddy Mart worked there. You didn't kill him, just shoved him out. They figured he was dead because he didn't show up for roll call, so he got out of that crummy post without even having to die first."

"Yeah, thanks for that," said Mart, a Slig. He waved at Jak.

"Oh," Jak said. It was a little novel actually helping someone with his brutality for once.

Mart raised his hand. "Not that we ain't glad to help and all, but did you really have to crash your transport right into the security lounge when you got here? The arbitrators are all over the place now!"

"Well, how else were we gonna get in here without anyone trying to arrest us?" Daxter said pointedly. "This way we can lie low for a bit and get the hang of things, see how things work."

"Just give us some time," Jak reassured them. To Daxter, he added more quietly, "Then we find those crazy hyenas and find out what they're up to."

Daxter nodded. The squatters glanced at each other, openly surprised about that, and wisely decided that they didn't want to know anything more.

Jak glanced back at the hole, looking at the ships at the docking tower. He pitied anyone who needed to come here. Or worse, doing it because they thought it sounded like a good idea.

---

The herded ships, the Paragon among them, dove down through the vast docking shaft they had been directed down, a tight separation of several dozen feet maintained between them at all times so there was a minimum of crashes; a wise precaution, as even though the shaft was large enough to accommodate even all these star-faring ships (and size is a must among such ships), it was still quite crowded with all those ships in there.

Zim was mildly interested in the unusual variety of the ships around them, observing that their make and models were slightly similar to what he'd encountered in his home universe but only if he actively tried to compare them; it was parallel evolution in technological terms. Beside their ship he saw a narrow craft (shaped a bit like a fish) big enough to seat only a small party, suitable only for hopping from planet to planet and avoiding long star-passing journeys through the heavens of space. Slipping over it was a cluster of insect-like cargo carriers individually larger than whales, moving in rough concert organized by the individual pilots in each (and concert wasn't a metaphor; the pilots operated them by playing music as a large band, the music resonating with the carrier's sonic-based computer mediums and activating flight algorithms). And many more dozens of ships Zim only had moments to see before he could even analyze them; right past Zim's own ship went a small craft that looked much like his old Voot Cruiser.

Ahead of all the ships was a craft leading them to designated docking areas; a huge ship larger than any of them by far, a great blocky construct that was nearly as large as the shaft itself, looking quite a lot like a fairly ugly brick. Great clouds of smoke blasted out as it propelled itself at a steady pace, leading them pass rows and rows of recessed viewing areas where cubical workers took note of their presence as they typed down cargo manifests and updated the docking log, harried technicians clustered around the many cameras that lined the inside of the shaft from every possible angle, taking pictures every thousandth of a second that a ship was in view so that every single ship was recorded and remembered just in case something… unfortunate happened to its owner (and thus put the ownership up for grabs). The purpose of this ship initially eluded Zim, until a number of projections from it, facing the ships, caught his eye; they were gigantic guns, aimed right at them. If a ship disobeyed, attacked, or otherwise offended this armed ship, they would be blown right out of the shaft and killed.

Ominous, Zim thought, given that this was only a docking tower.

Through the shaft, there were equally vast holes in the walls, leading to different docking stations, great long lines of spaces and workers milling around like eusocial insects. Every so often a ship left the herd without any apparent reason. This mystified Zim until a voice crisply called through his radio, not bothering to hail him or any such politeness, and said, "Turn at the next docking station immediately."

"Who's saying this?" Zim demanded, reverse-tracking through the frequency, the Paragon's on-board computers synching with and hacking into the source with only a brief pause. Zim had of course extensively modified the communications, networking processes, and built the various (and increasingly powerful) computer equipment of his ship into a self-contained network of each dedicated terminal providing a specific function (and he had also improved virtually everything of the ship he could get his hands on during the recent days when they had just been traveling and didn't have much else better to do), and even though he was working with obnoxiously primitive machinery by his standards, he was still doing it with his extremely advanced technological expertise, and consequently pretty much everything he'd improved here was far beyond anything the Glukkons of this world had. Consequently, it wasn't hard for the Paragon to make a connection that couldn't be inverted or used by the operator on the other end of the line. (On the other hand, it didn't seem that secure a network, at least for Zim; for others, it might well have been nigh-impregnable, but Zim's network had the advantage of making calculations based on quantum mechanics.)

"What the-" The voice started. "How the spit did you get onto this- JUST TURN, YOU IDIOT."

A large opening appeared in the shaft, presumably the one they were meant to turn through. Grumbling, Zim cut off the connection with whoever he'd been talking to. The gun-ship leading them turned several large weapons towards them, power conduits lighting up ominously below. "I'm going, I'm going!" Zim squeezed the interface joysticks, transmitting his intentions into the ship's navigational systems; the Paragon veered away from the rest of the ships, halting in a crude turn as its momentum still carried it downward. It roughly came to a stop in front of the hole and then it's propulsion reactivated, pushing it right through.

Morte, floating within his head-jar mechanical harness and floating just above the co-pilot's seat alongside Zim, glanced worryingly at a screen displaying the ship's view of things behind it; the gun-ship was visible for a second, and then it, along with a brief glimpse of the screaming herd of ships, was gone. "Okay. This is a bit worse than what I was expecting."

"We have to go down a huge shaft with guns pointing at us?!" Calvin said from the side-seats. "The Guide didn't say anything about that!"

"Sure, I'm certain the leaders of this place would love to advertise that," Hobbes said sarcastically from next to Calvin. "'Come and visit lovely Oddworld! It only rains acid eighty percent of the time and the air is a lovely shade of brownish-pitch at this time of the year!' 'Come fly in and get giant guns pointed at you wherever you go just in case you do something funny!' 'Oddworld, you might not get killed!'"

"You realize that if they're this straightforward about intimidating tourists or traders," Zuko said, sitting across from Hobbes with a bench of side-seats all to himself. "They're either incredibly paranoid about their enemies and suspect everyone of being a possible threat, or they're so military-focused that it's bled into every aspect of their industry." Given the Fire Nation's militarized culture, Zuko would know about the second part.

"I'm thinking both, really," Morte said.

Zuko grimaced. "We should be careful," he said. "It sounds obvious, I know, but it's the best we can do right now."

The hole they flew into was long, and it opened out into a cramped space that their ship's database (wiring into planetary information networks and automatically downloading everything Zim's algorithms had calculated to be relevant, which still left room for misinformation) confirmed as a docking station; a square-shaped chamber of spaces for ships to dock into and be serviced, most of them filled but a few capable of housing ships much bigger than the Paragon. Several levels above that had more menial workers and technicians and overseers all watching the docking ships sharply, as if suspecting that every ship harbored unkind thoughts about their mothers. Several man-sized drones (of the sort that looked like tiny ships) flew in front of the Paragon, trailing holograms transmitted directly to the viewing screens on the Paragon and giving them extremely clear instructions on how to land. 'FOLLOW THE DRONES,' said a scrolling message. 'THEY WILL LEAD YOU TO A LANDING SLOT.' Zim followed them, his ship leaving bright colorful trails in the dimness between the large spotlights in the station.

The individual docking ports certainly looked like slots in the ground, arranged into long rows on each level. As Zim approached the one the smaller ships led him to, massive vise-like clamps, padded at the edges, extended from either end of the 'slot'. A bit cautious, he flew ahead and passed through them; the clamps latched onto the ship's fore and aft, holding it tightly but not enough to damage it, and retracted into the ground, neatly bringing the Paragon into the port and docking roughly with a faint grinding punctuated by an off-beat clicking noise (like the docking station had its own soundtrack, one with a lot of techno-drums). They connected with their bases, and there was a final rising of smoke from whatever was powering them.

"What now?" Zuko asked, tensing up and radiating heat.

A light on the radio panel lit up. A small log-screen stated that there was an incoming call. Zim flicked a switch, accepting the call and connecting to the network. "Yes?"

"Hello," a quiet and raspy voice said, every word slowly spoken as if carefully chosen from a long book of translation phrases. "You have successively docked, tourists! Kindly power down your ship's propulsive systems."

Zim looked at Morte, silently giving him the go-ahead to do that. Morte hesitated for a moment, suddenly aware that Zim had appointed him the pilot, and imperceptibly his expression changed to a more confident one, his jawbone aligning more cheerfully. He looked at the dashboard as instructions were transmitted from his on-board database (located in a cogitator engine housed behind his head-jar in his robot-body, and just installed the other day by Zim himself, who wanted all his allies to be as useful as possible) as holographic images on the inside of his head-jar. The instruction were clear and concise; several mechanical tentacles (or mechadendrites, as Calvin said) extended from ports on the underside of his robots body, small articulated digits extending and flipping off switches and powering down other systems. There was a faint humming below them as power was rerouted from the engines to more optimal configurations; the computers, mainly, and minor sub-systems, and the remainder was simply returned to the great engine-heart of the ship, which glowed slightly as its power went up a bit and routed the excess into various storage batteries around the ship (which Zim and Calvin had installed, recognizing that the ship's power was self-replenishing, and thought it useful to make batteries to store it; these were larger than Hobbes and unwieldy, but Zim could think of many uses for potentially unlimited energy.)

"Thank you. Feel free to leave your ship – right now, actually – and welcome to our fair city. Be sure to dress for our environment, mind you."

The voice cut off. Zim disconnected it anyway, just to be sure no one was listening in. (He hoped that they were disturbed at how easily he had done it.) Zim then sent several situational directives to the ship's main computer, and they were rerouted through the network just for the sake of redundancy in case the security was compromised. "Be ready," he said, and hit another sequence that produced a loud clanging sound from the cargo hold; the cargo doors had just slammed open. That said, Zim stood up and hauled himself off the chair, walking down the room.

Morte followed, floating after him. "What was that with the computer-stuff, Boss?"

"Activating the security," Zim said briefly. "If anyone tries to infiltrate our ship, steal it or go looking in here, they will regret it."

"Smart move," Calvin said, he, Hobbes and Zuko getting off their chairs and walking with Zim and Morte, all five of them moving out. "Do all five of us get to go this time?"

"If the ship is secure, why not?" Zuko said reasonably.

"It's always possible that things might go wrong," Hobbes conceded.

Zim snorted. "With my modifications? These rubes won't be able to so much as scratch the coding."

"Careful, your pride is showing," Morte said dryly as Hobbes scowled at Zim's open dismissal of the inhabitants of Oddworld. "We should bring weapons, too. Just in case."

Calvin raised his eyebrows. "What, really? I'm all for bringing the firepower, but wouldn't that be a little bit inflammatory?"

"Coming off the docks with weapons on display isn't the most diplomatic gesture," Zim agreed. His friends stared, astonished. "What? Certainly I can think logically some times, can't I?!"

Wisely, the others didn't rise to this (though Calvin did snort). Morte replied, "Honestly, boss? My info does seem a bit out of date, but I do know for sure…" he paused, checking something from both his database and the ship's. (As his cogitator was continually updating itself from the ship's while retaining backups just in case, it was pretty much the same thing either way.) "Okay, yeah, this one is for sure. Honestly, the fat cats in charge here – the higher-ups in mega-corporations mostly, but the big leaders are cartel heads all assembled in the hierarchy of something called the 'Glukkon Hegemony' – don't really care if you have weapons or not. They're so far removed from the daily swing of things, I don't think it's even occurred to them that it's a bad thing to let angry poor people run around with weapons and kill each other over scraps and credits. If we play it safe and don't blow up any more buildings, we'll be fine."

He paused. Everyone looked at Calvin. "It was just one building!" He protested.

"Right then," Zim said. "We grab weapons suitable for infiltration. We should find somewhere to set up a temporary base while we're here and get the rest of our weapons down there later. Send someone to pick up our stuff on the ship or something; I don't think it would work well to try to operate out of our ship here, unfortunately."

The rest of his crew agreed, nodded and mumbling.

The armory had to wait though; first they changed into different outfits suitable for Oddworld, heavy clothes worn over protective gear and various mechanical aids to help them cope with the harsh weather and conditions of an Oddworld city. Fortunately, they already had such equipment and clothing (Sokka's shopping trip having provided such).

Then they took their stop at the armory (really, just a spare room they had remodeled with more revolving wardrobes machines to store their weapons and armor, computerized to bring up specific items for criteria they requested). Given they were explicitly trying to look like cautious tourists and not would-be conquerors, they took more subtle weaponry. Hobbes took his new shield, Calvin equipped his fire and ice wonders on his arms (keeping their upgraded components in additional sections on his belt, having devised a means of compartmentalizing those components. Zuko sheathed the Dragon's Teeth laser swords, and Zim didn't really need anything with his power to summon the Keyblade, but he took a laser rifle he'd made the other day for the look of things. Morte didn't actually need any weapons, looking fairly intimidating as he already was, but he had permitted Calvin and Zim to install a number of ports and modules to install weaponry in a few days ago, and now Zim installed several small sub-machine firearms (with different types of non-lethal ammunition that could deal with armored or fleshy foes as warranted) into them.

Hobbes objected to the basic idea. "Guys, we're just going to go find out what that annoying pirate who won't leave us alone is up to. We're not going to go make war on this place."

"Some basic armaments is 'going to war'?" Zim asked.

"What? No, I just mean that maybe getting ready for violence is probably just thinking too much."

"Oddworld is a mean, nasty place," Morte said. "Tough, hard, cold, especially in the Glukkon territories and their allies or minions. Heck, the street levels and below are just hive-type hellholes owned by urban warlords fighting for territory and killing each other for fun, and there's things under the lower levels. And that's saying nothing of what the cartels that run these places do on a global level, or to their ancestral enemies… uh, or so I read in the guide."

Hobbes seemed disturbed by the notion. "And the guys in charge don't care that any of this happens?"

"I hear they encourage it! Keeps the population managed and tough for when they gotta gang-press for the military. And gets lots of bodies for the meat-factories, eh?"

"Ew, sounds like where me and Hobbes grew up," Calvin said, while Hobbes seemed confused why eating their dead was a bad thing. "..Wait, they eat their dead?!"

"They eat everything, and sell it too. They have a big thing about ripping everything they can find to shreds, merchandising it, packaging it and selling it to other planets, no matter how badly they hurt themselves in the long run."

"Okay, they're jerks," Zim said, satisfied at this point. "I say we do something about that while we're here!"

"Try to control your ambition," Zuko said as they left their armory and headed to the cargo hold. "At this rate you'll want us to recruit an army."

They left their ship, which closed behind them (a closed-circuit channel remaining open between the ship's computer and Zim's Pak) and walked down a wide bridge suitable for rolling cargo or luggage down, all of them (except for Morte, who was fine without other measures) dressed in outfits suitable for the heavily polluted and dangerous Glukkon cities; long hooded trenchcoats worn over thickly padded coveralls, articulated gloves and boots of matching material, and worn over the neck like an odd scarf were goggles and air-filtering equipment (just in case the air turned bad). Zim considered himself lucky that he simply needed to add a few things to his new outfit from Traverse Town, and the others had modeled their clothing on his look; the different outfits looked pretty much the same, with small variations on their different styles and color-coded for each of them. Zuko and Zim wore sun-yellow and red respectively, while Calvin wore dark blue edged with black, and Hobbes was wearing pleasant shades of bluish-green. Their equipment varied; Zim was used to environments like Oddworld, so he required only a rebreather and goggles, as did Calvin though more protectively so. Zuko had his whole body covered up, since he probably couldn't deal well with it. Hobbes needed a lot of sensory-dampening ear-plugs and nostril-inserts just so he wouldn't be crippled by overload, and that likely wouldn't be enough.

They were surprised by the horrible noise of the docking station; the ship's audio had diminished the noise factor, and it caught them by surprise, hitting them like a hammer as ships were docking and departing with roaring engines like feral beasts silenced by even louder clamps and vises grinding down on metal to hold the ships with booming clanks and clangings. The pneumatic roars echoing one another as liquid-filled tanks relieved pressure with titanic hissing, gargantuan doors opening and slamming loudly enough to replicate a small explosion… and all the people talking and shouting and arguing and crying, their sounds blending into a solid dull roar. Fortunately, they recovered before it got too bad. They dealt with it pretty well, all things considered; Zim was used to this, as was Calvin and Hobbes, and Morte could just mentally filter any sensory details that bothered him thanks to his mechanical suit. Zuko came off the worst, the Fire Nation's industrial revolution nowhere near the scale of this place. He stared wildly, clamping his hands to his ears and mouth uttering nonsense words as he tried to make sense of all the sheer busy-ness going on.

After a few tense minutes, Zuko managed to get up, wincing with every step, his teammates giving him concerned looks but unsure what to do. Hobbes provided him two spare ear plugs, which Zuko gratefully took; specialized audio receptors, they tuned out all extraneous noise instantly.

They started walking down out of the cargo hold, wondering what they were supposed to do next, and became aware of a new noise; a faint whirring screech, and rubber wheels against metal. They turned and saw a small motorcart approaching them from what was probably a central kiosk near their slot; narrow and low-slung, the cart was a pitted gray two-seater, the rear seat raised rather higher. At the front was a tentacle-faced grouch that their time studying the people of this world identified as a Slig (humanoid, green-brown colored, cybernetically augmented with mechanical legs, and a face-full of rigid tentacles). Behind him, riding in the seat and clearly in charge was one of the people that dominated this world; a Glukkon.

The cart came to a stop in front of them. The Slig scurried out, Zim raising an eyebrow at his 'Slig pants' mechanical legs, and opened the rear door. He was promptly kicked back by his boss as the Glukkon in question stepped out and acknowledged Zim's group, walking the six paces or so over to them; a fairly standard representative of his species, he was slightly shorter than Zuko, purple-gray skin looking a bit pale in the docking station's lighting. Bald, forehead high and sloping up into a large cranium, his deep-set eyes blinked at them in a head that looked a lot like a wrinkled potato. He muttered something to his Slig assistant, who came back with a small holo-slate that proved to be an enchiridion of sapient species. He had to lean over as his assistant identified their respective species in several flickering images (beaming the information directly into his brain via internal cybernetics, and Zim detected the informance transference); while he seemed humanoid, it was hard to tell, as he was wearing a nondescript business-suit with no sleeves and cartoonishly exaggerated shoulders, as if he didn't have arms.

The Glukkon got the information he needed in moments, and then walked over to them. Perhaps 'walked' was an inappropriate word; his shoes padded across the ground in an extremely quick pattering motion. Given that he was swaying slightly from side to side and looking ridiculously serious as he walked, Zim wondered if he was even trying to look impressive. Calvin snickered at him. "What's so funny?" The Glukkon, whose nametag read Mary (and made Calvin laugh harder), asked indignantly.

"Uh, nothing," Hobbes said, nervously elbowing Calvin. "He's just having a stupidity fit."

"He's definitely not laughing at how incredibly stupid you look," Morte said. Hobbes kicked him, not minding that Morte's robot-body was made of metal and plastic composites. "Ow!"

"Ah, well then," Mary said, buying it completely. He said to his Slig assistant, "Bring forth… THE PAPERS!"

"Okie-dokie," said the Slig. He scurried away to the kiosk. Zim and his team stared awkwardly at Mary for a long moment until the Slig came back with a stack of documents. Mary said, "I have these for you to fill out!" He walked to them as his assistant brought the papers. "Standard procedure, nothing too terribly invasive unless I decide to fetch the orifice probes, simply fill them out and file them in triplicate so we can do a background check and see that you aren't eco-terrorists or what-not."

"I hate paperwork!" Zim whined.

"Uh, what was that about orifice probes?" Zuko said uncertainly.

"Nothing," Mary the Glukkon said innocently. He whistled, glancing back and forth.

Zim grunted, resigned to this in his pursuit of making Darvhog's life miserable. "Very well, then."

"Okay!" Mary said. "What are your names! And no lying! Or its PROBING TIME." The Slig raised several extremely ominous instruments.

"Zim of Traverse Town," "Calvin Cadia," "Hobbes Fenris-Cadia," "Fire Lord Zuko of the Fire Nation," "Morte Rictusgrin," the five of them said quickly, keen to avoid probing. (Zuko suspected that Hobbes only wanted to avoid it because the probe-wielder wasn't a female he found attractive.) The Slig wrote down their names on their respective papers.

"Very good," Mary said, giving Zuko a long look over the 'Fire Lord' thing. "A ruler in exile?"

"Actually," Zuko started to say, and Hobbes slapped his hand over Zuko's mouth. Hobbes quickly said, "Yep, exile! Long story!" Zuko glared furiously at him.

Mary raised a bony ridge over his eye. He shrugged. "Curious, but we get all sorts. Now… age, species, approximate height and weight, it's important for things…"

They had to file those things themselves, especially since a few of them had to guess, not having measured or weighed themselves in some time or being sure how old they were. "Hey, that guy lied on his age!" the Slig said, pointing to Morte. "'Incalculable eons' is not an acceptable statement."

"But it's true!" Morte insisted.

"Ooh, probing…" Mary said menacingly. He stopped, noticing that Morte was a disembodied skull in a mechanical body; there was nothing to probe, or any orifices for it. (How Morte maintained a sex life in spite of that was a mystery best kept unknown.) "Bah, I suppose you look your age, then…"

Mary then forced them to answer a ridiculously long number of totally meaningless questions and bizarre trick questions, finally ending with "What is your purpose in coming to Oddworld?"

"Don't say revenge!" Zuko whispered to Zim. A paper was handed to each of them, with a number of choices present. Zim blinked, because 'Revenge' was at the very top of the list. Fortunately the next one after that was 'On a mission with nothing to do with the Glukkon elite', which he marked down. Calvin checked off 'Tourist', which was technically true. Hobbes checked 'I have no idea'. Zuko checked 'hunting down a fugitive'. And finally Morte checked off 'to buy cheap useless stuff' because he figured that's what the Glukkons wanted to hear.

"Very good," Mary said, after giving them a once-over.

"Now, if that'll be all," Calvin started to say. "Where's the exit!?"

"Not so fast!" Mary said. "I told you, you have to fill out the forms… IN TRIPLICATE!"

He gestured towards a large stack of remaining papers the Slig assistant had carted over when they hadn't been looking. Zim's eyes widened in horror. The stack was taller than he was. The Slig laughed maniacally. Mary permitted himself an evil chuckle.

"Do you treat every single incoming tourist like this?" Calvin said, exhausted, hours later after they finally finished filling out the forms.

"Nope," Mary said. "Just the ones who hack into the flight orders and talk back to us."

"…Ah," Zim said bitterly.

Mary indicated the exit; a row of elevator doors at the far side of the room. "Exit is through there. It will take you to the ground floor and out of the docking tower. Do try to bankrupt yourselves, that's always hilarious."

Zim's group left immediately, though not before Zim whispered to Calvin, "MAKE THEM SUFFER." Calvin nodded ominously, and slipped away when they passed by a group of miserable looking tourists that had gone grey-faced and whispered to Zim that they needed to leave before Oddworld claimed them too. In the commotion, none of the guards or workers saw Calvin sneak over to the computers and paperwork.

They were nearly at the exits when Hobbes said, "Hey, where'd Calvin go?"

"Right here!" Calvin said, walking briskly towards them.

"Where'd you go?" Zuko asked as Zim called up an elevator.

Calvin whistled innocently. "Absolutely… nothing at all."

As if on cue, there was a brilliant flash of flame far off that went nearly to the ceiling without harming anyone, a timed explosion igniting every pile of paperwork around there and consuming them in moments. "MY EVIL PAPERWORK!" Mary screamed in horror. "I WORKED HARD ON MAKING THEM MISERABLE!"

"Sixth time this day alone," his Slig assistant remarked. "Looks like it's bringing in less tourists and delaying more people and minimizing revenue. You'll probably be getting a demotion for this."

"No fair," Mary whined. "I liked being an obstructive bureaucrat!"

There was some commotion from upstairs. "Sir?" A technician said to Mary. "The background checking filters just went down! All the computers are doing is playing video games!"

There was a pause. The other technicians shouted, "HOORAY!" and went to go play video games, ignoring their responsibilities.

"Revenge be ours," Calvin said smugly.

"I refuse to believe that actually worked or accomplished anything," Zuko said stoically as an elevator came up. They winced as it opened up; it would have been cramped for just one person, let alone all five of them. Even so, they shuffled in and entered, and immediately regretted it; it was small enough that all five of them were shoved against each other in extremely awkward ways.

"Move your machine-y backpack thing out of my side!" Hobbes whined, forced against the wall and his elbow jammed into his side.

"That 'backpack' is the repository of my being, if you don't mind!" Zim said, packed between Zuko and Hobbes, intimately uncomfortable with how small he was compared to them.

"Ow!" Morte complained, trying to hit the button; he was shoved into the corner, right at the interface, and his mechadendrite appendages clawed at them, trying to hit a likely looking button. "All you guys are pushing against me, really not liking this."

"I hate my life," Zuko said morosely, packed between Hobbes and the wall and Zim smashed between him. Elbows and whining assaulted him from all corners.

"And I suffer nothing at all!" Calvin said cheerfully, lucky enough to be just in front of the door and not too close to anyone. One of Morte's new claw-attachments hit a button, the tentacle-like arm it attached to managing to extend just enough to hit it. The elevator, suspended by several extremely powerful cables over a tiny shaft going straight down to all publically accessible levels, immediately hurtled downwards, intense pressurized forces shoved the capsule-shaped elevator down like a bullet, and for a moment everyone in the tiny elevator was thrown up into the top, smashing painfully, and then came crashing back down as it came to a stop a few levels below. "This is less pleasant," Calvin wheezed, both out of breath and now under everyone else.

"I think I already hate this planet," Zuko said, sticking up slightly out of the groaning pile everyone had been knocked into. The others whimpered and moaned something in the affirmative. Consensus was reached; no one else liked this planet so far.

Zim poked his head out, pushing Hobbes' larger body aside enough for him to see when the door whooshed open; a large open space, about the size of the docking station they head been in. It was far more cramped though, hundreds of small spaces of glum workers placing together various components of ships much long the one that had kept its guns on them earlier; guns being assembled here, hulls soldered into place there; there was so much going on that Zim only had the barest glimpse of it, but it looked like this was some sort of manufactory, all done with manual labor, where parts were delivered and military-grade ships were being assembled piece by piece. The overseers, floating around on throne-like hoverchairs blinked at Zim, raising eyeridges in puzzlement. "Wrong floor," Zim said, and Morte hit another button.

The elevator jerked back into motion, and again they slammed into the ceiling. "Ow!" The five said as one, the ceiling no friendlier than the last time and even a little harder. Gravity sucked at them, the elevator shielding them from the worst of the pressure used to propel it, but it was tremendously inefficient and uncomfortable; even Zim, used to things like this, felt like he was having his stomach sucked out through a straw.

They stopped again, and of course slammed into the floor in a big pile. "My poor aching bones!" Hobbes exclaimed, unlucky enough for everyone else to land on him.

Calvin, to his satisfaction, was now on top of the pile. The door opened onto a small and badly lit chamber; sixteen Glukkons in dark robes were clustered around an alter made of clumsily but lovingly welding scrap metal, a totemic idol taller than them and all centered around a photograph of a moon with a massive three-fingered handprint upon it. "Great sigil of the spirits!" One of them cried as the others chanted feverishly. "Hear our devotions! May our faith feed your fate!" One of them banged on a set of drums. "Accursed be the smoke and blood of our people! Ten thousand punishments on the tainted quarma of our wretched ancestors who turned from your will! May the Mudokons rise up high again, and a new order of harmony ring true! In your name, machinery be awakened and the mechanical spirits live again! In your name, may our wretched campaign of dominance fall, and our honor restored in a tide of our forsaken blood! In your name, sixteen thousand lifetimes of plenty for those who survive by your goodwill! In your name!" The drumbeats beat faster and fast, rising up to a climax. Someone brought for a melon before the alter, and the speaker raise a orb-studded tomahawk up high. "May this offering reflect the doom of our foes!" The drumbeats came to a sudden stop as he swung, and the melon erupted into ghostly fire, rind and vegetable pulp and disintegrating in moment and leaving not even dust. "THE SPIRITS HONOR US! GIVE PRAISE!"

"HAIL!" The other Glukkons cried.

"What's going on up there?" Zim said. "I can't see!"

The Glukkons whirled around at his voice. "Damn it, I knew we should have had that elevator discontinued!" The speaker said.

"We saw nothing!" Calvin insisted.

"Oh, lucky that. It would really suck if our worship to the spirits of our world were told to the villainous cartels, since that would get us killed in horrible ways," The Glukkon cultist said. "…Please don't tell anyone."

"We won't," Calvin said.

"Oh, neat." Another Glukkon hurried over to a control panel, disabling this room's access from the main elevator routes. The doors automatically closed, and Calvin fumbled for a button on the access panels. This time, he actually looked at them, and not sure which to press, selected one that said 'GROUND FLOOR' as everyone else managed to get on their feet, and with how tight they were bunched up, this meant that they helped each other get up totally on accident.

The elevator went zooming down again. This time, they were prepared, and clung to the elevator's railings. It was still painful and a miserable experience, but at least they didn't crash into anything… at least until the elevator came to its destination with a halt that launched them into each other like a lot of pin balls.

When the door opened, they stumbled out, dizzy and in Hobbes' case distinctly sick. Even Morte was hovering back in the elevator distinctly wobbly, and he didn't even have organs. "That is the most stupidly inefficient elevator I've ever suffered in," Zim said, sitting down and shuddering while Hobbes crawled over to a convenient trash can and expunged the contents of his stomach in it.

All of them had to wait a few minutes to recuperate from the elevator, and they had a moment to admire the lobby they were in; at last, they had found their present destination. Precisely one moment passed (the head mechanist of the conclave of engineers and architects that had been chain-ganged into designing this tower being a bitter and vindictive sort) before a hidden spring-loaded part of the floor activated, and the elevator flipped up and propelled Morte out like a macabre bowling bowl right into Hobbes' head, knocking him over. Morte rebounded off a wall, hitting Calvin and then Zuko (dislodging Zuko's breathing equipment) in rapid succession, finally bouncing into Zim's back and both of them falling over.

"Yes, I'm very much starting to hate this planet," Zim said from the ground.

"Then go find another one and quit whining," said a passing Slig wearing black mechanized combat armor, a light machine gun slung over his back, compact sub-machine guns holstered at his sides and a belt of grenades wrapped over his chestplate.

Zim almost retorted, and had a rare moment of consideration; the Slig was armed to the teeth and clearly official, even military. For once he was silent, and vowed hideous revenge towards this world at a later date. The Slig seemed to smirk and went on his way, face-tendrils clicking out a jaunty tune. Zim watched him go, and the Slig's mechanical feet clanged heavily on the floor and it echoed in that vast space; the lobby was a cavern of an interior space, a vast and wide-open sphere-shaped chamber lined with elevators and doorways wherever architecturally possible (even when it interfered with proper construction) just to give all the different elevators in this docking tower a central hub. Thousands of people were moving through it, literally dozens of species all mingling together and mostly ignoring each other, seeking help at the various information kiosks stationed around the lobby and lining up at gargantuan vending machines for a snack or two and milling around and sitting patiently at benches to recover from the elevators and heading right towards a set of automatic sliding doors to exit the building.

The Slig officer joined a group of his companions, totally forgetting about Zim, and Zim forgot about him; focused on the exit, he stood up. "Aha, that wasn't too horribly painful," he said. Behind him, Morte was floating off the floor, Calvin was shakily managing to get up, and Hobbes and Zuko had regained a semblance of dignity, the tiger-boy's fur still a bit moist. "Behold, the exit!"

"Hooray," Zuko said weakly.

Hobbes sniffed, and winced. "Ugh… does it really stink in here or is it just me?"

Calvin frowned. "Come to think of it… it smells a bit like the hive cities we've been stuck in, hasn't it?" He scowled.

"I don't smell anything," Zim said.

"You don't have a nose," Morte said as the four of them started the long walk to the exit.

"I can smell anyway, and you have no nose either!"

"…Don't gotta get personal…"

Zuko shuddered. "Good spirits beyond and sideways!" He hastily shoved the goggles and air-filtration mask over his face, assembling it as quickly as he could. It came together with a snap, Zuko's long hair awkwardly brushed away from the large goggles and cleansing equipment that made a faintly steampunk mask for Zuko. "Ugh… thank the sun, that was foul! It was like getting punched in the everything."

Calvin snorted. "Bah. Rubes!"

It was a short while before they found a quick way to the exit; a sort of ground-level escalator, just a set of motorized rubber that one stood on to be carried there. Once they found it, though, it was a quick shot to the exit. The doors opened in front of them, surprisingly dim sunlight for early morning shining over them as the four of them stepped outside,

Past the doors, the padded metal of their respective boots (except for Morte's robot suit, it just made an interesting venting noise) making footsteps that echoed together against metal plating over looping frames underneath. The doors closed behind them as Zuko stopped in mid-step, one undamaged eye wide behind his goggles as the noise of a city in full-swing hit him (but thankfully diluted by distance. "Oh my spirits," he said weakly.

The others kept going, and Zuko caught up with them looking astonished. They were on some sort of upraised construction that arranged itself as a modernized plateau of sorts, two wide ramps opening down into access-ways at either side of the exit (or entrance, it seemed) to the docking tower, and they immediately felt a sudden crushing sense of terrible smallness. Zim stopped in front of the railing girding the plateau, looking down past a staggering array of gigantic buildings rising to incredible heights in the sky for unknown purpose and clustered suffocatingly close to one another. Zim looked down again into the great hollow they seemed arranged around to a 'shelf' of roads and walls all made by gigantic catwalks lined with tiny buildings, a moving mass of colorful busyness that was obviously a vast number of people so densely clustered together they seemed more like a single massive entity than huge groups of people. Down, to the levels below that; a twisting and turning crazy series of loops. Roads, he presumed, magnetic-controls keeping the massive lone of moving vehicles locked in and prevented from free-fall while the bizarre construction took as little space as possible. An immense flock of car-sized vehicles (one-seats, mostly) flew cautiously under the watchful eye of armored vehicles floating lazily around them with guns trained on likely targets. Zim saw the pedestrians walked on the far side of that road, looking extremely terrified of getting run over, but they had little choice; everything else was so winding and hard to navigate that it would have taken hours to make it any other way.

Below even this were more levels, going down for many hundreds of feet, alleyways and roads for pedestrian and vehicle alike arranged without much civic planning beyond obsolete needs of long-gone moments and arranged into a labyrinth of urban design and vast scale, everywhere electrical lights larger than even tanks fastened to every available surface and not yet illuminated. Holographic billboards and advertisements projected from seemingly unimportant apertures in the buildings that formed the very foundation of other buildings, displaying shamelessly blatant commercials aimed exclusively at making the viewers feel bad about themselves for not buying the product and indulging in the fruits of their labors. And down from there, more than over a thousand feet below (so vast was the scale), the sunlight did not penetrate well, and Zim saw the shambled suggestions of what might be shantytowns and clustered homes of the desperate and poor, and in the darkness many thousands of people were moving in quick and stealthy ways.

This was a gigantic view for Zim and the others to take in all at once. But beyond him; there was another single building, an office building nearly as big as the docking tower they had just exited, and it's superstructure alone would have fitted quite comfortably in that space. Zim looked up for a reference, and the sun was blocked out from him; thick and greasy clouds thickened by pollutants weaved around the upper reaches of the docking tower, the sun a faint light beyond them, and the top of the docking tower was completely lost higher into the sky. If it toppled down and fell into that area right in front of Zim, the entire place would be crushed like an insect before a rhino. He couldn't even see the vast rounded shape that had surrounded the shaft they had been in, let alone the needle-like thing they had flown into as entryway for ships.

The area before him was like a canyon recreated in a badly maintained urban aesthetic; buildings upon buildings for walls, thin fog moving around them, countless thousands upon thousands of soldiers and civilians and tourists all moving together and tending to their own business in a staggering faceless mass… and there was still more, buildings even large rising up on all sides, their purposes unknown, casting all before them into the shadows of the rich and mighty.

And directly around them was a huge collection of catwalks and passageways and smaller buildings swelling out from the docking tower like benign tumors, food sellers and street merchants and less clear salesmen hawking their wares and seemingly refusing to let anyone go without a purpose short of anything but a beating. Zim suspected that you could have fit the whole of Traverse Town's population in this docking tower and the catwalks… though they'd be seriously cramped.

"…I'm impressed," Zuko said momentarily. "It's like my great-grandfather's dream of industrial progress!" He looked longer, totally silent.

"So what's next, boss?" Morte said. "Boss?"

Zim said nothing. He was still staring down into the canyon-like vastness, like a man watching the abyss and waiting for it to blink.

"Boss?"

Zim was still silent. In a tiny corner in a road connecting two small buildings together, almost invisible by a mixture of aligning offices and a passing bus big enough to carry other buses, one of the armored military vehicles cornered a small car, which stopped in mid-flight. Without warning, the military vehicle opened fire and the smaller one ceased to exist in a blast of flame and light, and briefly, screaming.

Almost imperceptibly, his lips tightened. His hand started to go to a position to summon the Keyblade.

"Boss!" Morte said, not noticing what Zim had.

Zim stopped. "Eh?"

"What are we supposed to do next, huh?"

"Oh…" Zim looked away, reluctantly. "Go forth and… wander until we can think of something to do, I suppose. Find someone who knows a way to find out more about people who might contact Darvhog here?"

Hobbes snorted. Even so, they left, picking the left ramp by whim and walking down it, staring in wonder and mild caution at the vast city around them. Zim stared back a moment longer, and then followed his friends.

The city hurt to be in; screams and sirens and construction equipment and all manner of other sounds, the basic background noise of a city but turned up to insane degrees, was nearly an environmental hazard; all-encompassing, ever-present and painfully loud. They hissed with it, even the hardened hive-dwellers aching with it.

"This place is horrible," Zuko said, eyes shut.

"Whiner," Calvin said unsympathetically, though he was wincing too.

Zuko snarled, kicked him; Calvin nearly tripped, and the bit of metal grating he was standing on slipped right out of place. Combined with the kick and Calvin's movement, he ended up stumbling backwards and right over the rail. He shrieked, belly punching into the rail and his whole body leaning forward, slowly tipping over into the vast abyss below, and the thousand-fold variations of deadly industrial hazards all around-

Zuko grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back to safety. Calvin was still breathing heavily, gone a little pale in the face, and Zuko looked downright horrified. "Dude!" Hobbes said, ears flattened and fur bristling, his teeth bared. "You almost killed him!"

"It was an accident..." Zuko said, hands shaking a little.

Zim shuddered. "By the proscribed mechanical designs… that was too close. I suggest caution. This city's very construction is dangerous!"

They nodded, still shaken by what had almost happened. Calvin put his hand on the rail and looked down… and down some more, at the almost random arrangement of thousands of catwalks and ladders and crude escalators going down on this one docking tower along, linking into a large pedestrians'-bridge some hundred feet below, linked right to an open hub of densely packed moving masses that were undoubtedly all manner of people clustered there for some reason.

Calvin looked down past that, to the thousands of feet below and still going, harsh metal and industrial hazards everywhere in sight, just waiting for an unlucky fool to fall in and add their remains to the processing loads. He gulped and moved away, staying very close to Hobbes and well away from Zuko. He looked like he wanted to grab onto his feline brother's wrist and not let go.

They moved on their way, tempers gradually starting to get worse from a combination of shock at what had nearly happened to Calvin, the dizzying scope of this city (and the uncertain purpose of it) and just how abrasive the whole place was from the uncultured architecture to the overwhelming background screech. (Screams predominated, to make things worse.) They weren't made much better when exiting crowds from the dock tower, probably kept back on other business, came crowding down behind them and pushed them around and into the crowd and spat them back out with no idea where anyone else was, and just as soon as they found each other, another crowd came up and did the exact same thing. Luckily, this time they managed to stay together, shoving their way through and ignoring the infuriated and rather vulgar screams of excessively violent threats sent their way.

The five of them walked the opposite way from the crowds in a hurry, wondering briefly where they were going, and it took them nearly fifteen minutes of climbing down ladders and riding elevators down and wandering around a looping set of catwalks and somehow not managing to leave the same spot because they had no idea how this place was arranged and then running back into the same crowd full of people that were mad at them; of course, they were literally running, so they knocked even more people down by accident.

People went flying into each other, one or two hit the rails and at least four dozen more got trampled in the confusion, and small fights broke out before some idiot said, "Hey! It's those jerks from before! They knocked me down again!"

"Oh dear," Hobbes said.

"Pike it!" Morte said.

People screamed, whether in fear or anger or some mingled relief that something interesting was happening for a change. Several cantankerous sorts (so deeply dressed in layers of protective cloaks and coats and devices that it was impossible to tell what they were) took out rather nasty-looking guns that Zim judged to be ballistic slug-throwers, each large enough for Zim's head alone to fit in the barrels. These belligerents started pushing through the others for a shot at Zim and his crew.

Hobbes' jaw dropped. "They're going to kill us?! Just for being pushy?!" Zuko pushed forward, the insides of his breathing mask blazing with solar heat.

The gun-wielders pushed forward, their weapons at the ready… and Zuko thrust his arms out and a ferocious wave of fire erupted in front of him, twisting into a wall of fire from the 'ground' of the catwalk all the way to the bottom of the one right above them (so that it was a bit like walking around in a box with a plain view of the extremely long and nightmarish fall to certain death below, like something made specifically to terrify claustrophobes and vertigo-sufferers). The people with the guns immediately fell back and a panic broke out, and they started screaming about another munitions accident or some fuel-line had ruptured and Lady Margaret damn it this was just like the accident last week when the entire Mid-Eastern Ammunition Quadrant had exploded-

The fire vanished, with only a puff of smoke and some mild charring to the metal grating. The crowd fell over each other and stumbled and gradually realized that nothing as bad as another industrial accident had happened. They didn't know what had happened, but nothing terrible was going on. A few people were still hyperventilating, as if they thought the docking tower catwalks were going to collapse completely. Eventually someone pointed out that 'those stupid tourists' were gone. Grumbling, the fellows with the guns put away their weapons, and the crowd dispersed.

Directly below the catwalk where all this had taken place, Zim's crew was huddled together along with a faintly bemused Glukkon who'd kept quiet, waiting for their pursuers to give up. "That was close," Hobbes said, still a bit sore from grabbing Calvin and Morte and jumping off the side of the catwalks (hovering over all that way down for precious seconds) and swinging back into this slightly lower section with Zuko and Zim following suit.

"This totally makes up for the almost-killing-me thing," Calvin said to Zuko, teeth chattering and pale again. His fire wall had brought them precious time.

"You're welcome," Zuko said. "Spirits… I hope not everyone here is so irritable."

"Yes, I truly wish I was a Metalbender instead of a pretend Firebender," Zim said morosely. "Then I could have just wrapped up those fools in the catwalks! Or knocked the guns out of their hands."

"Am I the only one who noticed that everyone here has weapons out in the open?" Morte said. The others grumbled assent; of course they'd noticed, but hadn't considered it important until now. "I told you so!"

"You're new, eh?" The Glukkon said. The crew jumped, they'd totally forgotten about the Glukkon who'd happened to be there when they swung in. Zim turned around cautiously, and the Glukkon's mouth quirked indulgently. "No worries, I say. Least you didn't get shot and carved up and melted down into next week's rations for the soldier-gangs."

"Is that likely to happen?" Hobbes asked, worried.

The Glukkon laughed, dislodging a few small clouds of ash and dirt that he seemed totally unaware of. A loosely fitting pair of coveralls, bought from vending machines, rustled with his movements, and Zim realized that the Glukkons weren't entirely honest with their suits; he had thought them to be tall and imposing creatures, but due to the design of this man's outfit, it was clear that they were actually rather stunted-looking creatures; his legs were incredibly short, puny and withered things with surprisingly flexible digits, but the arms were long and broad, turned slightly inward and walking upon the hands with little grace but decent dexterity. "Hah. You are new!" He leaned forward; the Glukkon's outfits had no apparent shoulder details, the arms sliding inside the clothing and being unobtrusive, making them look a bit like amputees. "Good to meet you, eh? I'm Scruffy. Lead technician on the vending machines for the Express Arrival Towers Station, don't ya know."

"The what?" Zim said.

Scruffy chuckled. "Dad-gum, you are new, ain't ya? Follow me, then, ain't got nowhere else better to be, I'll bet."

Scruffy trundled off in the peculiar gait of the Glukkons; it came from walking on their hands, Zim thought. His crew looked at him and at each other for a moment, and with a mutual gesture of 'why not?', they followed after the old Glukkon.

He stepped down a short ladder in the catwalks, going down a few levels and briefly passing under at least three directly and cutting through two. "Yep," Scruffy said, nudging his head at the walls, which were boxed off with wiring here, thankfully. (Zim wondered why they were so negligent about safety.) "This is where cheapness gets you; tourists falling or getting attacked by grumpy locals. Costs too much to put in better railing, they say. Feh, bunch of cheap whiners in the cartels. Uh, don't tell anyone I said that, I don't actually care too much about living longer but I'd rather not get sneaky-fed to my buddies. Be just like the upper management to pull a stunt like that."

Where he indicated, Zim saw the city; the great sprawling and haphazardly arranged buildings, smoke pouring out and up into thickly pooled clouds of pollutants. Somewhere absolutely massive, even the size of smaller town by themselves; he wondered what such gargantuan buildings would be for, or what this city was centered around, and then he understood when he saw the smoke again, and the vast shapes upon the horizon that he initially thought were mountains but where even bigger masses of buildings going as far as the eye could see. "This is a city of factories!"

"Got it in one," Scruffy said, herding them into an elevator. They shuffled in, and it sharply rocketed it down, but more gently than the ones in the docking tower itself had ever been. "Welcome to our, heh, 'fair' city of Lulu's Fortune. Most call it Fortune, on account of irony makes everyone laugh." He paused, and said, "Technically this part of the city is more of a port; big place for ships to come in, you must've noticed."

"'Lulu'?" Hobbes asked.

"Yeah, one of the guys who funded the expansion of this place. Used to just be a regular factory-city, but then they really expanded the place. Lulu was a small-timer who made it real big some years back; traded it all for the latch batch of Gabbit eggs, the weirdo. Managed to get a nice chunk of money together even after he went broke and helped fund the expansion here. Made a heap of money, I thought."

"Factory town, you said?" Calvin said, his nerves calming down a bit at the mention of artifice. "What do you make here?"

Scruffy made a rolling shrug. "Wrong guy to ask that, man. I'm just the guy that fixes the things. Word from the news people is, heh, 'what do you want made?' Probably there's an factory-block for it somewhere. They ship materials, somewhere here they make it into parts, somewhere else they put it together, and ship it back to wherever they want it. Mostly military stuff, I hear." He shuddered. "Lots of military stuff, these days, and they're getting some right mean freaks to hold the guns. Watch your backs, is all I'm saying. Tourists aren't welcomed in the bad places of town… which would be hard to pinpoint, if I had to guess."

The elevator came to a stop, and before them there was a great wide open space of relatively nice looking metal ground; it expanded into a wide solid-looking road suspended in mid-air, rising up at the sides into blocky walls large enough to cast his own ship into shadow many times over. Dense crowds wandered to and from this road, rarely mingling and staying a good pace away from each other as vast tanker-fliers lumbered by overhead carrying shipments and casting everything below into shadows that blotted out the sparsely available light.

The road terminated into an even bigger space; a tall cylinder-shaped structure topped with a mess of holographic signs floating everywhere, in and out and just taking up a lot of space. Several of them were damaged or outright broken, displaying randomized messages that was plainly unhealthy for some people, showing nothing but blank static or more serious errors. Enough were working properly that it wasn't that noticeable, but it had to be causing problems. Large passenger-shuttles came in and out every few minutes, the crowd not lessening or growing significantly as scores of people left on the shuttles or were dropped off, waiting anxiously while mean-looking patrol units flew by with their weapons on the ready. A nearby holographic sign helpfully read 'EXPRESS ARRIVAL TOWER STATION'.

Beneath this sight, the light was only slightly filtered through the hologram, and the dirt in the air made the projection slightly thicker. It was still enough to make a shadow on the ground, far larger than it should have been.

Zim blinked, a sudden gust blowing grit right into his eyes. A hand came to his face, wiping the filth away, and he blinked again through irritant-tears; the shadows had diminished to their regular size.

Zim tugged at Zuko's belt as Scruffy walked out, apparently deciding to become a temporary guide to the tourists and cheerfully talking about how this bridge used to be an executive's only pass until the rioting got at least fifteen deaths over the legal limit of fatalities required before official business had to do anything about it. "Zuko!" Zim hissed urgently.

"What is it?!" Zuko hissed back. "I'm trying to listen-"

"The shadows! Look at the shadows!"

"What are you talking about- OH." Zuko froze in mid-step, and Morte bumped right into him, sputtering indignantly. Zuko didn't notice, staring ahead; they were just in front of the bridge, and in the position to see a narrow wedge between bridge and station; there was a space suspended under the bridge and below the station, likely to do essential maintenance on the structural materials (the environment being pretty mean on even the Glukkon's preference for robust building forms) and all of it was totally dark; the dim natural lighting was obstructed by the shape of the station and bridge, and all the lighting except for a solitary electric lamp was out.

A low-slung shape was moving in that darkness, staring directly at them with pale yellow lights for eyes. It's totally black flesh was nearly indistinguishable from the shadows, and there was a suggestion of writhing lengths like tentacles imbedded with rusted blades.

Beside it, a larger form appeared in the shadows, and stared with its own lamp-eyes. Two more pairs of glowing eyes appeared in the darkness, and then six more, ten silent horrors skulking in the darkness.

Zuko elbowed Hobbes. "Heartless!" He whispered, pointing at the dark things hiding under the station.

Hobbes jerked, his fur fluffing out and his hand going for his shield-weapon. Calvin, listening in, raised an arm already glimmering with magical flame that looked nearly solid. Morte's harness rustled with mechanical ball-point servos swapping out his concealed guns.

"And then I was standing right in the crowd when Vice President Mukluk of the Moderately Comical Cybernetics Corporation announced that his company was dumping in money to replace the bridge after a stray missile blew up right on it and killed thirty-two people (and at least three of them owed me money!) but all they did was rip off a huge chunk of scrap and polish it up into this here bridge and bolt it into place," Scruffy said, coming to a stop and noticing their aggression. "But I said… er, hold on. What's with the firepower? Story wasn't that boring, was it?"

"It's not you!" Zim said, powering up his laser rifle, the view finder on it locking onto the Heartless. "Do you know that you have horrible shadow-monsters in your city?"

"Huh?" Scruffy looked around and noticed the Heartless (still enough out of clear sight that their variety couldn't be determined). They hadn't moved or made any motion to attack, simply sitting there and staring; it was hard to be sure, given their complete lack of anything resembling true sentience or sapience, but in the hollow blankness of their stares there seemed to be a touch of dulled curiosity (like a predator noticing a competitor and wondering what it was doing there) and nothing more. "Oh, them. That's it? Put the guns away, please, you're making a scene!"

People walking by in crowds so thick Zim couldn't even see the walls were indeed pausing to stare, the collective masses of people-blurs halting in several-second lulls. A very few did notice the Heartless, but by the disinterested expressions they were giving, they thought it no more significant than pigeons in the park.

Zim did not put his gun away. "And you have no issue with horrible abominations skulking under your public transportation?" He said dubiously.

"No, no!" Scruffy said, now looking alarmed. "Look, please, put the shooters and stabbers away, someone is going to notice!"

A truck-sized flying craft was coming in; painted black and yellow in checkerboard patterns, the colors mixing in jagged and spiked shapes, it turned sharply in mid-air, looking something like a ray fish; a central hub with the cockpit in front, engines both antigravity and propulsion behind, a set of wide scything wings on the sides to stabilize the flight (and look scary) and infantry-scale weapons mounted on ball-shaped armatures. The Heartless stared fixedly at Zim as they slung away, vanishing into a shaft in the center of their hiding place and crawling deeper into the depths of the station away from any prying eyes.

"Put 'em away, put 'em away," Scruffy hissed, his calm voice belied by the wretchedly anxious gestures he was making at them. Zim glanced, puzzled, at Morte, and their guide-skull of sorts hovered back in fear, looking quite like he wanted to join the rest of the people around them who were suddenly moving as fast as they could away from the area (but as nonchalantly as they could, as if terrified that getting absolutely any attention at all would be fatal).

The ship was almost overhead; it wasn't particularly fast, but Zim thought it could withstand a full-fledged assault; the metal was bulked up at virtually every angle, and while he wasn't sure what the metal was exactly, it had barely any scoring on it at all from previous engagements but otherwise looked fairly old-fashioned. "Do it," Morte said, hovering towards Hobbes fearfully and all his various guns retracting back into place with a hushed noise. Even his various tentacles and mini-mechadendrites curled in, as if afraid that putting even a single chunk of metal out of his personal space would lead to losing it.

Growling under his breath but more bewildered than angry, Hobbes put his shield back. Calvin depowered his elemental-gauntlets, bits of ash and frost dinging on the ground in a fairly neat summation of his own disappointment. Zuko sheathed his swords a bit more forcefully than he needed to, standing totally still and silent. Zim deactivated his gun and holstered it, wondering what in the world was going on.

The craft, apparently some kind of military police vehicle, stopped overhead. Waves of antigrav force centered at them from the vehicle, hitting the bridge; to its credit (and the engineers, for it was just so much recycled scrap) it didn't so much as sway but stayed totally still, like a rock ignoring the wind. "Stay where you are or be purged," A terribly calm voice said, warped slightly by the communicator he was speaking through. The vehicle rotated, staying in place but shifting its axis so that the cockpit, seemingly made of solid metal but treated so that it was totally transparent, was facing them. The pilot, a large Slig wearing mechanized body armor bristling with integral weaponry – two sub-machine guns on each forearm, a compact plasma caster perched on his shoulder, and a grenade launcher on his other shoulder – and in the terribly cramped space around him most of it was taken up by even bigger weapons and ammunition loaded into every possible space. His hands rested on the controls of his ship, Calvin looking up and determining how all of it functioned in a single glance. The several dozen or so weapons mounted on this particular part of the craft moved onto everyone there. Scruffy took several miserable steps away from them, shaking and doing his hardest to stop himself from it.

A minigun the size of a small car, three grenade machinegun linked to each other like a Gatling gun, at least two actual Gatling guns, another two Gatling guns but designed to fire lasers instead of bullets (a rarity among the weapons, few of which fired non-ballistic projectiles) and four low-yield missile launchers (these actually built into the craft itself, subtle weapons seemingly part of the mere curves of the ship) focused on Zim alone. Even more weapons converged on his crewmembers, quietly powered on and rotating their ammunition centers and locking on. Zim had to admire the sheer overkill, and these people didn't even know who he was or what they were doing.

"Aslan forsake my shoes," Hobbes whimpered, staring at his feet and slowly reaching for his shield. "We haven't even done anything today and they're already trying to kill us officially. As opposed to the random thugs that don't like us. Is getting attacked by locals going to be a theme with us? I don't think I like this theme."

"Quiet!" Calvin said. "Calm down a second – and I can't believe that I'm the one who just said that – and wait, we don't know what's going on here…"

"Some jerk is going to shoot at us because we… don't like Heartless or something," Zim said. "Seems clear to me."

"Hey," the Slig said, his voice weirdly unfocused, as if he couldn't really be bothered to pay much attention to anything apart from hitting the kill-buttons. "I'm not a jerk. That's mean of you. Typical tourists."

"Don't shoot!" Scruffy cried… and ran back several steps until he was safely out of the firing range of the vehicle's current aiming field. "Okay, now you can shoot."

"HEY!" Zim's crew shouted.

Calvin shook a fist angrily at the retreating engineer. "We thought you were cool!"

"I'm still cool! Just really interested in keeping my life intact," Scruffy said defensively, still totally pale and shaking. "I… I can't… damn it!" He turned and fled for his life, too shame-faced to look at Zim and his crew.

The vehicle tilted very slightly at Scruffy. A plasma rifle swapped places with one of the Gatling guns, bigger than a human was tall; it discharged a bolt of ionized super-hot gas like a miniaturized storm, streaking right into Scruffy's chest and he stumbled forward, time enough for one brief horrified gasp – it wasn't supposed to happen like this, the look in his eyes said. The plasma bolt sank in, busily consuming his insides before the whole thing erupted and the air around him ignited into a boiling fire, disintegrating him in an agonizing instant, too horrifying quick for Zim or any of his crew to have done anything. Green fire erupted from where the plasma ate the metal floors, molten droplets of metal scattering around as Scruffy toppled over, already dead. He fell apart, his flesh and bones consumed down on such a level that it all became dust and even that dust was fused into a glassy chunk that melted away in the plasma's heat.

The plasma rifle retracted. "Making a scene and wasting Arbitrator time is punishable solely by death," the pilot of the ship, presumably an 'Arbitrator', said placidly, with as little interest as if he hadn't just killed one of his city's people but had merely wiped the dust off an instrument screen. He paused, apparently considering something, and did something to an input key.

A nearby screen, hanging right over Zim and his crew (still reeling from the suddenness of their temporary guide's demise) from several thick cables wiring in from a large box marked 'PROPERTY OF MUD-WALKER INDUSTRIES; TAMPERING IS PUNISHIBLE BY EXECUTION', crackled with static for a moment before it displayed a inappropriately cheery message that read 'ARBITRATOR KILL COUNT FOR INFRACTIONS AGAINST THE WILL OF THE CITY'. Below it was quite a large number. The toll went up by one with a small dinging noise, and a brief fanfare.

The Arbitrator's vehicle turned the other way. It's intercom boomed on, and in that same totally deadened voice, the Arbiter said, "'All infractions against the city or deemed such by an Arbiter are punished by death or service. Be pleased for both; the former enlivens the routine of the Arbiters, the latter does your duty for burdening the city. Making a commotion in sight of an Arbiter and being an accessory to the commotion are punishable by immediate execution and recycling, if a body is recoverable. All personal effects and property belong to the corporation responsible for execution. This notice is required by law. Thank you.'"

The vehicle flew away, apparently satisfied by killing someone (and perhaps that was entirely the point of it; the law required killing, and as long as someone unimportant was dead, the law was satisfied), and by all indication this seemed to be the high-point of the man's day. The glassy bits that remained of Scruffy tinkled in the ever-present wind (generated by the massive air-recycling baffles mounted at precise locations to prevent the air from getting too stale or toxic) for a moment before bouncing sadly away. The plasma-ignited green fires burned for a moment, and then went out, leaving a slight scorch and several ugly marks in the bridge. A random child ran out, grabbed the Scruffy-glass, and ran back to wherever he'd come from while rambling about how 'those Petrosapiens in the block' would pay handsomely for this meal.

A stunned silence was all that Zim's crew could manage while the crowd slowly went back to normal, hurrying around and moving carefully. Eventually Morte finally said, "What the hell was that!?"

"Police brutality?" Hobbes said morosely. He took out their copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide from an inner pocket in his coat and brought up the entries on Oddworld in general, and this city in particular. "…It doesn't say anything about stuff like that, or the law structure!"

"Are we surprised?" Zuko said darkly, looking shaken by the fact that they had almost died. Not for the fact that they could have been killed, but that it would have happened so suddenly, cut down by an indifferent law official if not for that poor frightened Glukkon drawing his attention instead. "Probably they punish people and keep them from saying anything that makes this place look bad."

Calvin stared at the smoking spot where Scruffy had been cut down. His mouth worked into something like a troubled grimace. "And stuff like just killing people like that is just regular business around here?" He made a disgusted noise. "We need to fix that!"

"We do?" Zuko said.

"We shall," Zim vowed. "A place with public policy for such brutality is not just an offense to our work, it is an insult. A vile social structure like that is an insult to everything we do, and an insult requires, no, demands correction."

Ordinarily, Zuko might have made a comment about how Zim was being overly ambitious. Now all he could do was stare at the smoking spot where Scruffy had been only several minutes ago. He didn't nod or agree in any way… but he didn't argue against it either.

They stared broodingly, perhaps thinking that the faint screams they kept hearing made sense (either further police brutality or attacks by armed thugs that made such brutality necessary), and finally went on their way, quietly talking among each other and trying to figure out where they were supposed to start fixing something as big as this entire corrupt city.

They went across the bridge without further incident (a thug or two tried to mug them as they crossed over but they were in no mood to have fun beating them up so Hobbes just shoved them into a weight-bearing pillar so hard they cracked it a tiny bit) and into the station. For a moment, the suggestions of what a violent place this was could be forgotten for a second, subdued under the largeness of the area. There was an impression of being under a gigantic metal mushroom; a huge pillar-shaped structure in the center of the station, many people going right to it, rose up several stories into the sky, expanding outward into multiple levels at regular intervals, thick supporting braces keeping the fragile-looking floors in place. At the very top there was a dome-shaped 'cap', a framework over thousands of thin steel squares to provide cover from the elements, reinforced with a cloth-like mesh flapping down in folds here and there through gaps in the frames.

Open windows in this structure, patterned on its sides, made it clear that there were many elevators inside it, going up to these different levels. It wasn't clear what else was going on in there, but the shuttles flying into the upper levels every few minutes (at least fifteen shuttles moving together at once and flying off in unpredictable directions) made it clear that this was something like a bus station but on a much larger level; passengers needing cheap transportation came here, waited for an appropriate shuttle to arrive, and went on-board to be dropped off at their destination.

At the very bottom, on the base level, most of the place was occupied by a weird mixture of a food court and flea market; hopeful salesmen had pitched up tents and kiosks while booming music advertising their wares drew in a few interested tourists. More established merchants and franchise-workers waited at special booths, lines of customers filing up and dining at their leisure upon several clusters of tables set at short distances from the bigger booths. Vending machines were places everywhere against the makeshift walls that the massive support braces hoisting up the upper levels made, offering everything from things Zim was used to (snacks, soft drinks, junk food) to more unusual choices (ammunition specifically for guns made by competing war profiteers, one-use outfits, protective gadgets) and some truly bizarre things (fold-up robots that impersonated popular celebrities, do-it-yourself organ transplant kits, spare machine parts specifically for someone that had just hijacked a speeder but sadly it had broken down on him in a stern chase). Not much in a mood for shopping or food, Zim's crew passed these things by (though Hobbes was briefly tempted by an automatic acid rain collector before remembering that he was supposed to be sulking) and went up to the main station, or rather the mushroom-shaped building in the center.

It loomed over them, much like everything else, and they stopped in front of a flashing screen on the front, one of several just like it. Shuttles both arriving and departing were listed, continually changing as they came and left, available passenger space listed and whether or not certain species were forbidden from riding on specific shuttles for 'publicity reasons'. (Fortunately, Irkens, humans, anthropomorphic animals weren't forbidden from anything. They weren't sure what Morte was, and Morte refused to give a straight answer, so they didn't look for him on the list.) The levels the shuttles were arriving at were also listed, and conveniently, it listed the shuttles primarily by which ones you should take for your next destination. Since they were so new, though, it was hard to figure out where they were supposed to go.

Calvin looked up at the dashboard, where the 18 Mucky Yellow was arriving from the two-hundred-and-twenty-second one wheeled variant production facility and headed towards the Royal Old Folk's Recycling And Soylent Green Market ('Bring Your Own Elderly and Get The First Two Helpings Free!'). "So, where are we going now?"

"Just wandering around at random will hardly serve us well now," Zim mused.

"Why not?" Zuko said sarcastically. "It's been our whole plan up until now."

Zim let it go; none of them were in good moods after their poor reception and the death they had partly been responsible for (and they still hadn't gotten a straight answer why no one seemed to care about the Heartless), and it would do them good to vent.

"Well, our whole reason for coming here was tracking down those crazy space pirates," Morte said slowly. "Best thing to do is find the scummiest place around and start asking questions; bunch of idiots like them, they'll be wanting to sell off what they got to whoever's willing to buy."

"Unless they get killed, or find someone higher up who's willing to buy, or went to a different city, or never came here in the first place after all," Hobbes said.

"Darvhog wanted us to follow him, I think," Zim said. "That whole 'adversary' thing. And this city is the only place on this entire planet that allows ships to land without being fired on."

They nodded glumly at that; the planet, when they arrived upon it, was guarded by a thick array of space stations and automated satellites armed to the teeth, along with a sizable stationary fleet, all forcing them to land. Fighting their way through would have been suicide.

"Maybe Darvhog just came in here, hustled his way out and found a cheaper town to do business in?" Zim suggested.

"It would have taken him longer than he's had to do that," Hobbes said. "This place is really big; too big for him to go without a ship or something."

"Then the chances are that he's still here, trying to sell his loot or those mummy things," Zuko said. "…Right?"

"Probably," Zim said. "I suppose it's the best we can do for now!"

Morte looked at a sign below the arrivals/departures board. "According to this," He told them. "New arrivals are forbidden from going around certain areas without supervision and approval from an established authority. The rich parts of town, namely. So that narrows it down a bit." He laughed. "So instead of searching an entire planet or a city the size of a micro-nation, we just get to look through parts of a city the size of a micro-nation. So much better."

"Oh, we shall find him," Zim said. "OR he will find us. He has ever since we encountered him, after all. What is the most likely destination, then?"

Hobbes looked at the list of destinations, reading them down. "…Well, one of them is called the Newbie's Quarter. It's a quartered section of the less populated part of town not far from here; it's where tourists and non-natives are legally required to live under pain of death, according to the sign."

"Then there we," Zim said. "And we start asking questions loudly! And by that I mean we find places full of evil jerks and scare them into telling us stuff."

"I think that was implied, yeah."

"Well, I prefer there not to be misinterpretation!"

---

Elsewhere in Lulu's Fortune…

Here and now, the towers above the city, built upon the sturdy formation of lesser buildings and manufactories extending as wide as an natural mountain range across the countryside, at the very heart of Lulu's Fortune.

Rising up so high that they created the skyline, they strongly resembled a crown set upon this monument to the Glukkons power, and indeed they were even called the Crown Towers. They loomed over the city, of purposes mysterious and left totally unknown to all but the corporate experts in the know and the most trusted of the Arbitrators, the hired muscle of the corporations who were the true power of Oddworld. Once, it would have been said that they were the power behind the Glukkons; now, the Glukkons and those who ruled Oddworld were the same.

The Crown Towers were among the most impressive in all of Lulu's Fortune, and the most well-guarded; primarily corporate offices that saw to the affairs of the cartel-owned businesses that were easily among the most powerful in all of Oddworld and certainly the mightiest forces in this city (and residence for the same), it also played host to trusted enclaves of the Vykkers, smaller creatures that tended towards biological and cybernetic work at the behest of the Glukkons, and within its vast depths huge laboratories where Sligs volunteered to series of experiments and testing to make them more able to serve their employers; captured Mudokons had their brains rewired and all possibility of rebellion ripped away (or tried to; none of that had worked but the Vykkers had fun doing it); bionic organs and limbs that were cheap to produce but intentionally inefficient were mass-produced and better versions for better-paying customers devised; androids and combat mechs of varying purpose and design were constructed on-site before being sent out to follow their programming; and many other such works, much of it beyond the simple administrators who did the leg-work here.

Few could say anything about all the things that happened here, in the secret depths of the Crown Towers, though word leaked out all the same. These buildings, reaching far into the skies as awe-inducing reminders of the cartels' power to make architecture like this a reality, were some of the most defining parts of Lulu's Fortune, and so it was perhaps appropriate that agents of those very cartels had been commanded to meet here, far from prying eyes or public threat, harassed and beaten down though it was.

The sub-levels went farther than public record indicated, assimilating the decommissioned buildings used as foundations below, using them as more space and going even further down, even underground and sharing space with the dreaded places underneath the city where all manner of refuse (literal and metaphorical, scrap and filth and misfortunate natives alike) was left to rot until such time as it simply couldn't be ignored and the City Sanitation force went down to cleanse it with flame and omnivorous cleaner-beast. Here, below legions of armed patrols flying in heavily armed ships around the towers and elite soldiers guarding the hallways and secret passages winding through the city near it, below all the business and daily affairs of the city above, below locked chambers and extremely private elevators and classified information, there was a secret chamber, more heavily protected than anything else the entire Oddworld save for Lady Margaret herself, matron of the Glukkons and sole reproducing female of the species.

It was not big, though the weight of over a thousand levels and massed buildings above gave the weight of claustrophobic heftiness; a round chamber lined with small screens and various luxuries suitable for the high-class executives who lived down here, safe from the dangers they had carelessly brought upon their home. All of it was centered around a slightly raised section of the floor that looked as though it had been bolted firmly over something underneath, protecting it from busy-bodies or intruders (if someone was crazy or skilled enough to somehow get down there).

Sitting at a large table on this part of the room, a mechanical and suitably impressive computer terminal and holographic projector capable of many different functions, was the hyena trio; Shenzi, Banzai and Ed. They looked nervous, and had good reason; sitting at the opposite side of the table were their immediate superiors, the respective ambassadors from the cartels who had entered into the service of Wuya and been granted the means to fully dominate Oddworld, and now were the masters of this world under Glukkon martial law. Beside these executives were several associates, the hardened bodyguards and adepts of fields so significant that their usefulness gave them a degree of autonomy unheard of in Glukkon society.

Shenzi stood at attention, muscles tensed and thinking hard. Social dominance was not her area of expertise, and she always hated these meetings. It was downright painful constantly having to calculate and weigh every single little thought so she didn't offend Wuya's allies or make any breaks in their alliance, to say nothing of how often they irritated her anyway. Honestly, she didn't see the point; these particular Glukkons were jumped up opportunists who threw in with Wuya when her messengers spoke with the cartels and benefited from being the first to try allying with her. She sincerely believed that they would try to usurp Wuya the first chance they got; they'd be crushed in an instant, of course, but Shenzi valued loyalty and loathed opportunistic treachery on principle. (Turning on a treacherous employer was a different matter.)

The Glukkons sat on big floating chairs shaped like big eggs with a large opening in the front but totally encapsulating its Glukkon otherwise, all the better to display their power and loom over them. That these chairs could plug onto dormant giant robots lying innocently behind them, and control those mighty juggernauts, was probably part of the point 'See the power I have' these chairs said, 'and be amazed!'. One of them flew down, even with Shenzi; the chairs were shaped in such a way that the Glukkon was propped up and his arm-feet against the controls (all the better to manipulate them), and the natural shape of the chairs combined with the extremely long amounts of time these Glukkon leaders have lived inside these chairs – as they came with life support systems tending to needs of nutrition, waste, sanitation and other matters – had curved them into bulgier shapes than the typical Glukkon, letting them spread out inside with more corpulence than was typical in their society.

The one that flew down was named Talich (originally he had been named Reggie, but he'd changed his name to sound more intimidating when he and his fellow cartel-ambassadors had formed this representative council) of the renowned Magog Cartel; his skin was fairly pale like most from the mining town he had come from originally and a radical health-extending treatment had attached a colony of barnacle-like symbiotes that kept him in the peak of health, building up his muscles and regulating his nutrition and even regenerating his organs, and these symbiotic creatures had a rather craggy appearance; combined with his pale skin, Talich looked a lot like a fat blinking boulder. To his lasting credit, he was the one who had brokered the first deals with Wuya's growing empire, opening the gates to full Glukkon domination. "So," he said, clearly disturbed by the news Shenzi and her men had brought to this council, and a small tube going into his skull kept trickling a calming hormone into his system. "You arrived at the site, and a raiding party of Mudokons was waiting for you. As we expected."

"They did not know what the Aetherite was," said another Glukkon cartel representative; named Baloret, he was an astonishingly bright combination of different colors; pale purple blended with striations of bright yellow over his eyes, mixing with splotches of green on his mouth and mixing into various shades of red upon his throat sliding over the back of his head to periwinkle-blue on the back of his head, and so on. His cartel, the Outlander-Walls, had gone through a fashion several years ago of implanting biologically-reactive dyes into the inner layers of the skin to alter their pigmentation into a more artistic design, giving themselves personal style and a way of identifying themselves without ID cards or retinas or fingerprints. Most had reverted after they decided it was a silly idea, but Baloret was one of the unlucky few whose body had totally adapted to the dyes and begun producing them on its own. He'd tried to mute his skin colors by wearing the absolute tackiest suits he could find, today favoring a pinstriped with gigantic shoulderpads and a checkered tie, to mixed results. Baloret was nonetheless respected; he had brought the first samples of a mutagenic substances called the Teragen Mists, famed for the powerful though unpredictable transformations it caused in baseline sentient life. The finest soldiers and trusted mercenaries in Glukkon employ had been transformed into meta-standard titans of godly might, all at his behest, and the trans-Glukkon philosophers of the time praised his forward-thinking, if not his fashion sense. "We can be sure of that!"

"Can we?" said the last cartel representative dubiously, an abnormally large Glukkon at least half-again the size of a typical Glukkon. Bent nearly twice over, he was disturbingly slender for his size, bony deposits over his body in the shape of his skeleton giving the impression that he was emaciated. This was Radix, representative of the Can't-Think-Of-A-Name Cartel (renowned for both their incredible straightforwardness and lack of creativity); in his heyday, at the very top of his cartel's success, he had become interested in the improved procedures that created the Big Bro Sligs and had gone through those very same sessions of regular steroid consumption, organ implantation and bone-enhancement surgery. Unfortunately, it had not gone well, and while he had grown tall he suffered a great deal of health problems from it, and was not expected to live for many more years. On the other hand, it was a success (of a kind), and despite his apparent frailty he was a good deal tougher and stronger than he looked; his wiry muscles produced strength even far beyond what they should have. Under his example, the process had been refined for use on the most physically superior Glukkons (not exactly a large number; the Glukkons disdained physical skill as a basic trait, though they disliked undue intelligence in the masses as well), and a new breed of super-soldier had begun to eclipse the long-time Slig employment contracts. "Somehow they knew about the convoy heading through that town. Perhaps it was only a coincidence… but it was that very town where we traced that specific deposit of Aetherite. Even if they did not see fit to collect it, as they certainly don't have the facilities to refine it, who's to say that they don't realize its purpose?"

"I dunno," Banzai said unhelpfully. "I mean, they weren't exactly in a hurry to grab it, if that's what you're thinking. They went after the captures and slaves as usual. Took some of our weapons and heavy vehicles too, the usual looting game. If they knew what the aetherite was for, I don't think they'd have gone for the stuff they did grab."

Talich's chair extended a robot hand, and waved a mechanical finger scoldingly. "Don't underestimate these savages and fugitives, my good hyena-sir!" Talich said, face creaking into a cheery grin. "Why, if our predecessors had given them due credit, and actually banded together to get down to brass tacks properly… why, perhaps we wouldn't be in this mess! Hem, hem!"

"Losing soldiers and potential workers is a bit of a loss," Baloret said, bringing up a read-out in his chair to check the numbers. "The six and a half hours it take to instruct new recruits into how to handle their weapons and armor, not to say costs for processing the corpses or grabbing anyone off the street who can hold a gun and then instruct them… wasted time if they just get killed straight off like that. And at this moment, we need every pair of hands that we can get; letting captures and slaves run off to join the Mudokon tribes before we can even put them out at market and make a bit of money off them is just tacky."

There was silence. Talich and Radix slowly turned to look mockingly at Baloret as he said 'tacky', as did Shenzi and her hyena-boys, and then so did the still-silent associates of the Glukkon leaders.

"Oh, you know what I mean!" Baloret said indignantly. "I know I look stupid, that's not what I meant by tacky."

Again, Talich waved a finger. "Prepare your words soundly, and speak forthrightly without a chance of misinterpretation… or else you look like a real idiot. As the masses would say. Hem-hem!"

Baloret snorted. Radix spoke next, his voice surprisingly soft and calm. "These are acceptable losses. Still, in our present situation, we cannot afford to throw any resource away, whether soldiers or workers or machines. Miss Shenzi, in the future, kindly endeavor to keep our assets intact, would you."

"Ah, we'll see what happens," Shenzi said noncommittally.

"If we can, we'll try," Banzai said.

Ed gibbered, and headbutted the table a few times, making some small dents. One of the Glukkons associated winced at the damage to precious machinery.

The three Glukkons looked cautiously at each other. "Ah," Baloret said. "Did he say yes, or…?"

Shenzi and Banzai looked at Ed, now staring in rapt silence at his palms, as if the striations on his fur held the secrets of the multiverse. "You know, I can't really tell," Banzai confessed.

"I gave up trying years ago," Shenzi said.

Another one of the associates coughed, and this one spoke up. "I beg your pardon, our noble and wonderfully fuzzy allies, but I don't think the gifts of the spirits agreed with his head very much," said the associate; standing right before the three Glukkons and an established bodyguard, she was a visibly female and humanoid sapient. Her name was Edhitha and she was an asari, a species native to another universe (but had migrated to many others in recent times) but had transformed quite drastically after earning a high place as a commando in the highest orders of the Glukkon Hegemony's military; she was one of the first to be permitted a bath in the Teragen Mists, and her entire physical form had been transmuted into a blob-like shape composed of a hyper-dense substance similar to neutron-degenerate matter, a substance normally found in the heart of stars. Currently, it pleased her to shape herself into a form much like her original appearance; a head shorter than Shenzi, humanoid and female, every movement and curve of her features instinctually by a psychically induced force field (that happened to prevent her unstable blob-body from touching air molecules and exploding) patterned to be alluring to nearly any sapient life-form, her figure stocky and molded into pleasant shapes resembling broad hips and fairly small breasts though she lacked definition. Long tentacles sprouted from her head like hair, lacking the traditional rigidity and flopping over her face and a rather somber expression. Parts of her force field had darkened to create the appearance of a fancy business suit, since it was impractical for her to wear real clothing but terribly tacky for her to look naked too.

"…No," Shenzi agreed after a moment. "No, it didn't."

The other associates, taking their cue from Edhitha's comment and almost certainly because she was their unofficial commander, mumbled their assent. "Why do you keep him around, then?" asked one of a pair of Big Bro Sligs; they were mostly identical, larger than most and wearing the same sort of powered armor suit (in this case, little more than mechanized body armor that amplified the wearer's abilities and equipped them with internal augmentations) with a set of arachnid-style legs below the waist instead of the usual 'Slig pants'. Before the Teragen Mists, there had been a single Big Bro Slig of great renown who'd volunteered for the Mist treatment, but during the transformation, he'd split into two Sligs that embodied different parts of his personality, and both were gifted with the psychokinetic power to manipulate weight and density in various ways. This one was named Inward, as his powers focused solely on manipulating his own weight and density, able to make himself an extraordinarily strong and heavy juggernaut at one extreme, or phase right through solid objects at the other.

Ed growled, and so did Banzai. "Hey, getting way personal there, man…" Banzai said, fur bristling. The air around him rippled, and inhuman shapes and faces shimmered around him, like the forms of something from outside stepping in for a moment.

Except for one, all the associates took half a step back, staring warily at this. The sole exception stared, fascinated by it.

"Knock it off," Radix snapped. "We got enough to deal with and you morons are already fighting. Save it for after this mess is over, then you can kill each other for ambition. Like normal sane people do!"

Reluctantly, the hyena men calmed down. Shenzi bristled, though, glaring at Inward with great dislike. "Please, forgive my other," the second Slig twin said hastily, waving his hands; he was floating slightly above the ground, held down by a set of arachnid mechanical legs that kept him still. Like his other, he had density-related powers; while Inward could manipulate his own density and weight, this one (named Outward) could do so with anything around him, whether objects or animals or sapient beings, to the same extremes as his 'twin', making them light enough to fly right off into the sky right through buildings or heavy enough to smash through the ground and squash themselves with their own immense weight, or even switch between those extremes with incredible speed. His skill and power at doing so had let others to believe that he was a master of gravity, and he cultivated the illusion in case someone tried to fight him using that erroneous conclusion; they would be woefully unprepared to deal with him properly. "He did not mean to offend-"

"Did a good job of it anyway," Shenzi said.

"He was merely stating the obvious! Why, I think it's quite nice that you keep him around! Here on Oddworld, we would have already eaten him if he was a Slig- oh dear, that's not making things better, is it?"

"No!" Banzai shouted, slamming his paws on the table and shaking it.

"Watch it!" one of the other associates cried, the same one who'd been fascinated by Banzai's spirit magic. "That is sensitive equipment!"

Banzai hesitated, just for a moment. He actually liked this particular associate. He settled back with a grumpy growl.

"Geez, so tense," Muttered another associate, a rather stunted-looking Glukkon with a strangely patchwork body, scales and feathers and fur and bony armor and other natural features sprouting from his body in uneven mixtures, shifting around and changing with every moment. His arms had thickened, more like legs than even the typical Glukkon, while his actual legs had lengthened and grown a few joints, the toes more dexterous than usual, and made fine manipulators. His face was oddly lengthened, various tentacles growing from the back of his head and his mouth hardened into something like a back, giving him a resemblance to the squid-like creatures it was thought that the Glukkons were descended from. Officially his name and title was 'The High Craftsman of Non-Sapient Resources and Bio-Weaponry' but generally he was simply called Fleshcrafter; originally a respected if eccentric biologist famed for breeding particularly savage and fierce animal soldiers and improving the biological technology the Glukkon Hegemony occasionally imported from other worlds, his bath in the Teragen Mists had turned him into a walking biological laboratory and storehouse of every animal he'd ever seen, able to shift a portion of himself into any capability or trait an animal had developed. He wasn't much of a fighter, though, but his real skill was in applying this same power to any non-sapient creature that he touched, permanently imbuing it with whatever qualities he could imagine, including massively increased size, strength, all manner of natural weapons or bio-technology. They passed these same traits onto their children, and he'd instituted a breeding program for creating an immense variety of soldier-beasts that bred fast, grew up quickly, and fulfilled the needs for tanks, heavy vehicles or infantry that would otherwise be a waste of valuable resources. Unfortunately, they didn't tend to live much more than a few seasons, limited their value. "You guys are going to, like, hurt yourselves or something. Be cool."

"But I don't want to," Shenzi said. She was standing up now, her fur on end and an eerie howling coming from the very air around her.

The representatives from the cartels frowned, but expressed no fear; they had no reason to be afraid of their allies. Their associates, though, might get killed, and that was a waste of resources. Silently, they wondered if just killing the hyenas now would be worth upsetting Wuya prematurely.

"Oh, stop it," said the associated from earlier who'd complained about hitting the table. There was a great mechanical clicking and whirling as she frowned at Shenzi. "You're acting like a lot of cannibal hatchlings! At least they have the decency to eat their siblings straight off, you're just making a lot of self-righteous complaining about it!"

Bang, bang went a set of massive mechanical legs designed like a crab's, tilting around a large machine similar in basic principle to the chairs that the Glukkon cartel representatives rode. It seemed a combination of heavy vehicle and life support machine, a slightly oblong craft bulging in odd places with exterior components and increasingly mysterious devices that were nonetheless as integral to it as a Glukkon's arm would be to him. The legs attached to ball-point joints on its underside, right under an assemblage of parts that could reconfigure into rounded wheels, and behind these were set of engines at both the sides and very back of the machine.

Mechanical tendrils of varying size and strength, ending in multipurpose tools and clamps and lasers, waved irritably from ports all about the machine. Its form was elegant and functional, the array of devices (sensors, analytical engines, aerodynamic surfaces, life support redundancies, nutrition synthesizers and waste-filtering baffles, and more mysterious things that even a highly skilled machinist could only begin to guess at) lending a curiously organic appearance to it; it was a living thing in its own right, a mechanical lifeform. At the front of this mechanical wonder, there was a small containment unit, part life support and part control center, shielding the core of the machine and its sole occupant, though now it was irised open, metal-and-glass interlocking panels spread open. Sitting in that unit was a rare sight indeed; a female Glukkon, though far smaller than she ought to be. An ordinary female Glukkon would have been a literal giant compared to the smaller males, and she was only a little larger than the other Glukkons present; more insectile than her counterparts, much of her was chitinous and terribly wrinkled, even desiccated in places, and it was plain that most of her termite-like body was concealed within her machine, and might even have been built around it. Her face, stern but not unkind, seemed permanently set into an unfocused glower. "Could we stop bickering and focus for a moment?" She asked.

"I don't know," Edhitha said dubiously. "Could we?"

Inward and Outward glanced at Edhitha, than at Fleshcrafter, and finally at one another. "Was… was that a joke?" Outward said. "Good grief, I don't think you've ever made a joke before!"

The glowing spots that had replaced Edhitha's eyes dimmed and brightened rapidly; a blink. "Was what a joke?"

"…So close, she was…" Fleshcrafter mumbled into his hands. Something whispered back. He giggled indistinctly.

The female Glukkon, who was sarcastically called Brain Lord by her peers and she'd liked it so much she'd legally changed her name to it, shrugged indifferently. Though the insides of her unit was exceedingly comfortable, she still shifted about; various cables and conduits plugging into her spinal cord flexed with her, a biometric-analyzing apparatus readjusted itself as she moved, and various calming hormones were pumped through ports in her skull and directly into her brain. The machine was a part of her, or perhaps she was a part of it, and a good deal of her was either cybernetic (wired directly as a processing unit into her wonderful machine) or was already mechanized.

A long time ago, she had been a very influential cyberneticist and scholar in service to the Hegemony; ordinarily, Glukkon eggs were put through conditions that caused them to invariably hatch as males to prevent any other queen females from appearing, reproducing and possibly usurping Lady Margaret, who was the sole Glukkon Queen and meant to keep it that way (so that all Glukkons would remain exclusively her direct children, and thus beholden to her), but somehow, impossibly, Brain Lord had survived as female. She claimed that she had been one of the thousands to volunteer for the Teragen Mists, and had emerged with intelligence vastly enhanced to the lofty heights of super-Glukkon levels as far above the baseline as this city's heights were above the lowest levels of its sewer processing facilities, and the slightest off-hand spark of ingenuity that she cast off in her many experiments was equal to the greatest labors of the past two decades of research and development; uneasy though the cartels were about her threatening Lady Margaret (and thus destabilizing their entire society, for the Lady Margaret was something that each Glukkon, from the lowest peon to the most glitzy executive, could revere and follow), she was simply too vastly intelligent and useful to simply terminate.

Shenzi blinked at her, mildly perplexed. The associates of the Glukkon cartel representatives had been slow to lower their defenses around the hyena trio, but Brain Lord was even more taciturn and withdrawn. For her to make such a sudden remark was unexpected.

Brain Lord stared at her calmly. Shenzi growled to herself, and after a moment, cool logic rose through the swampy regions of bloody-minded fury like a fortress of evil; it wasn't worth antagonizing them now. "Cool it, you guys," She said to Banzai and Ed.

"But, Shenzi-!" Banzai started.

"I said quit it," Shenzi snapped.

At such a direct order from a woman (their people being violently matriarchal), Banzai relented. He whimpered and flattened his ears.

"So! Baloret said, perhaps sensing that the argument had been mercifully forgotten. "So, back to business. Let's be clear; the Aetherite was shipped to the facilities specified?"

This had already been explained, but it helped to repeat important information. "Yeah," Banzai said. "Down to the letter."

He didn't bother asking what the Aetherite was for, since they already knew; the Aetherite was being refined, smelted and made into essential building materials for the Glukkon's latest fleet of ships. Quite why that was done had so far eluded the hyenas; aetherite was strong, but there were far stronger materials (Raritanium for one, as well as secondary adamantium, ceramite and plasteel, and many others) and they were already used in constructing ships, though were harder to find and recreate, and Aetherite was even rarer than those materials, and certainly impossible to recreate so far. It's use in interdimensional travel was its main selling point, as was doing harm to outsider-type creatures such as the Heartless.

Unless they really wanted to leave their planet in great numbers, or construct a fleet meant to specifically combat Heartless, Banzai didn't really see the point of it. There wasn't enough for that anyway. He'd never thought to mention this, not thinking it worth the trouble.

That going to so much lengths to retrieve the material, and the costs they'd made just finding it even before they were forced to fight over territory with the stuff, did bother him. "Don't see why we can't just buy the stuff from other planets," He said. "Not really enough in just this planet to work with the amounts you guys are demanding."

The room went very silent for a moment.

Eventually, with an air of great care, the Glukkon cartel representatives looked at Edhitha. She put her hands together, and carefully said, "The material is on our employer's own planet. It makes sense to being looking here, as we consolidate control over Oddworld."

One of the other associates, not a cartel representative, just an ordinary soldier that Shenzi had never spoken to before, seemed interested by this. And something about him didn't quite smell right, he didn't quite smell like the cities of Oddworld.

"Apart from the acceptable losses," Baloret said. "The mission could be considered a success, I suppose." His expression turned dark. "…Except for whatever attacked the city shortly after you arrived."

Shenzi snorted dismissively. "So some nut-ball tribal stole a ship and crashed into the city walls. Can't be a big problem."

"Hmm. I wonder…" Baloret shook his head. "You are certain you saw no one following you back here?"

"'Course not," Shenzi said proudly.

"Hmm," Baloret said again. "…Fine, then. We shall have patrols increase aggression protocols and do more sweeps of the authorized places we allow official control of, then. If anyone did intrude, they shall have to stay in the publically permitted warzones, which will keep them nicely occupied if not already dead. On to other business…"

Fleshcrafter suddenly said, "You did say Jak was there, right?"

"Yeah," Shenzi said.

The Glukkons and associated winced, and shuddered. "…So, he's officially allied with the Mudokons," one the cartel representatives said. "This bodes ill for us all."

"Did you find out what he wanted?" One asked.

Shenzi shrugged. "He didn't say. I'd guess he's just allied himself with the Mudokons for… some reason. Who knows? Maybe it's just because you're with Wuya's people, and it's a revenge thing."

"So how did he, and his raiding party, know how we were coming?" Fleshcrafter pressed on. For some reason, he glanced at Brain Lord.

Brain Lord stared at him. "Almost certainly," She said after a moment. "They have friends and allies within our ranks."

"What self-respecting Glukkon would ally with those savages and that monster?!" Outward spat.

"A particularly ambitious one?"

"Yes… well, we're all ambitious here!"

"An interesting notion, but not one we can investigate immediately," Talich pointed out. "Best to consider other affairs, then." With some reluctance, the others agreed, and as they discussed this, the guard from earlier raised an eyebrow thoughtfully. All this, mentioned in bits and pieces throughout the cartel representative's complaining, seemed news to him.

Radix found something about him odd. "Who are you again?" He asked in the middle of a conversation. "Who is that soldier?"

"I'm Sergeant Arlet," the guard said helpfully.

Radix grimaced thoughtfully. "Continue," He said to the others, still frowning at Sergeant Arlet. It might have just been his imagination, but he thought he saw the sergeant's eyes turn red, under the clear regulation-issue visor he wore, for a second.

Nothing came of it. The Mudokon problem wasn't something that could be addressed so easily; they were too useful as slaves to just kill altogether (though it was an increasingly attractive notion). "We will speak with our fellows of the cartels," Talich said after some discussions that went nowhere. "We must devise a new plan of attack for finding more Aetherite and tending to our overall agenda."

Sergeant Arlet, Shenzi noticed, looked like he quite wanted to know what that was. Which was strange; she knew for a fact that he'd been here, as a face in the crowd, so he ought to know perfectly well what the agenda was. Personally, she thought focusing so much on gathering Aetherite from every possible crash site and importing it from other worlds was a stupid idea, but she was just brute muscle that followed orders. No one ever asked for her opinion.

It was agreed, though, that the defensive position they'd taken against the Mudokons in recent times was working well so far; annoying though they were, they didn't pose any significant threat… yet. Jak's presence was ominous, but it wasn't like he was anywhere where he could do real damage. (As far as they knew, anyway.) The general policy for the Mudokons, as established by the cartels, was to bide time and play defensive until a moment to strike a single overwhelming blow presented itself. With all their spies and scouts across the world, squads leading independent attacks on suspected Mudokon tribe locations and those suspected of harboring them, a breakthrough was bound to happen. Of course, executing Abe and Munch, the leaders of the collective tribal nation, would solve it too, but first they had to be found.

Other business presented itself, less pressing than the problem of the tribes, and Shenzi soon grew bored with this minutiae. Eventually, it got so boring, a scout mentioned something about how a pirate had shown up not too long ago making deals and selling a long-lost means of producing extremely strong glass to various manufactories, with ancient relics that proved they worked. And apparently he'd managed to start taking over parts of the city (but only the parts where people were allowed or encouraged to have gang wars over territory) with some manner of undead army. The associates didn't think it meant much, but the representatives agreed that such deals needed to be brought under the control of the Hegemony, and made arrangements to see how useful the glass supposedly was; if it worked, it would resolve a few construction problems they had and save quite a bit of money on costs.

As things went, in the affairs of men who commanded an entire planet and were eager to make more, this wasn't particularly important.

But it was still seen and heard, even this locked-down place of ultimate security.

One of the guards heard it all, and later that night, he happened to mention it to a buddy of his (this aspect of his work not being walled away by biomechanical implants that prevented him from speaking of secret matters). The buddy told some of his buddies, and they told some of their buddies. The news spread, that a space pirate with a revolutionary means of making glass had arrived and begun conquering gang territory.

Some said the higher-ups were pleased that some measure of stability were coming over the gang territories. Others said that the higher-ups didn't care one bit. And still others devised ever increasingly elaborate stories around it.

In the days to pass, the stories met many ears, and were told many more times. It wasn't that important, as things went in Oddworld, just a funny bit of gossip to tell people.

But the point was, the news would spread in the coming days.

Eventually, it would probably find someone who was genuinely interested in hearing about a space pirate who had come recently, or even someone interested in selling that sort of information.

---

In the segment of the Newbie's District of Lulu's Fortune, at the shuttle station just above a local greenhouse (which hosted fungi that fed on pollutants and made a sizable amount of the diet for some of the less poverty-stricken workers that lived around here), the shuttle from one of the docking tower stations had arrived around fifteen minutes ago and left without incident, a large crowd of people exiting.

Among them had been five newcomers, their mission temporarily forgotten as they were shuffling into the crowd with a lot of things on their minds.

Zim, Calvin, Hobbes, Zuko and Morte walked (or floated) tightly together, keeping others out of their collective personal space (a rare commodity indeed in cities like this), brooding on what they had seen when that arbitrator had opened fire. The sights seen while in transit hadn't much improved their disposition.

They had wandered with the crowds into the bridge that led to an elevator system that would take them anywhere above the unauthorized levels (where dangerous things had been left to roam), gone with them two hundred levels down and wandered out again, drifting with the crowds without much concern where they were going.

This city was an eclectic mix of different species mingling together and building as they went; not dissimilar from Traverse Town, but under the oppressive and distressingly disinterested grip of a centralized authority who seemed to care nothing for the people under their care; Zim's crew saw many things as they wandered in perhaps search of what this city – and thus, this world - was really like from a first-hand look.

They walked down tunnels made where old buildings had come together and had holes knocked through them for transit, and saw scores of vagrants and isolated bands of orphans huddling for warmth and savaging anyone who got too close to their begging bowls.

They took an elevator ride back up a few levels, where sunlight had been totally blocked out by construction efforts and several dozen feet of buildings wedged together so tightly they had made an walled-off part of the city, and saw a broken-down tank that had been refurbished into a home. It was empty now, and an official note of eviction was stained with blood and weapon discharges.

They split from the crowds they'd been traveling with and stood at the balcony of a restaurant for quite some time, humbled at the dizzying scope of this city. There was no light that was not artificially made, here in the darkness under the Glukkon's strongholds. And still there were hundreds of feet below them and screams echoing from there.

They went down there to see what the screaming was, rappelling down with makeshift tools, and when they got to a narrow and cramped chamber right inside a large metal box of a house, there was no one there, but blood and assorted flesh-bits. The shaft they had come down into was thousands of other buildings and homes tightly pressed together, and all they could do was go down some more to find a way out.

They traveled through abandoned tunnels and pathways, past broken catwalks and bridges that had fallen down there ages ago, surrounded by dead bodies that hadn't been cleaned up yet and fearful prospectors looking for treasures lost down here. They went through power plants guarded by suspicious arbitrators and hummed with lightning across massive dynamic coils housed on the outside that funneled precious energy to various districts, and only a tiny portion of it was reserved for the poorer districts. For some reason, Calvin and Zim brooded at this misuse of technological power at length.

They went up past putrid pits where waste had been left to rot, up elevators that were just barely functional, and right up into the middle of a vast market places where a hangar had once stood, and now crude tents had been pitched for hopeful salesmen to offer their wares and be offered goods in return. To the city's credit, there was a dizzying extreme of different things to be bought, and most of it imported from other worlds; weapons from dented swords to slightly illegal high-powered assault rifles, suits of crude powered armor, schematics on reproducing virtually anything on record, flavored soy dispensers (critical on long journeys with a tight budget), very illegal bio-augmentation mods, various holotapes to be plugged into a brain port and teach one how to do virtually anything on the holotapes, and even more. They wandered through, not buying anything (none of them trusted anything to be sold here) but it was still an interesting diversion. They asked a few questions here and there, but it didn't seem the right place to look for Darvhog, and in any event no one knew who he was, or at least didn't want to say. They even hit up a bar or two for the traditional 'beat bad guys up and ask questions' mode of interrogation, but given that all of them except for Morte were underage by nearly all the bars (Zim was fifteen by his people's count, Calvin was a preteen, Hobbes was probably sixteen and Zuko was too), they didn't get very far. Hobbes wouldn't even let Zim or Calvin burn down a bar as retaliation, he considered it a real jerk move.

Eventually, they decided that the first thing they needed to do was find a base to operate from while they were here, and worry about other things later. Zim felt mildly disgruntled when they just kept walking for a long time, not really going anywhere besides getting a mildly good idea of the way this cavernous city was structured. "This seems a suitable place to begin our work," He said as they wandered into a residential complex.

The five of them, indistinctly feeling like they were violating some unspoken rule of heroic conduct that they should look like a wandering band of noble heroes but feeling more like a bunch of pretentious hobos (their actual funds being somewhat limited, in spite of Hobbes' expense account), walked onto a short bridge between a shaft descending from the area immediately above them and down into the residential complex; a wide neighborhood dominated by a complex series of walkways over an thoroughfare for flying people-cargo carriers (so named for a joke that they carried cargo, and the cargo was people). The object of their interest was an apartment complex of several boxy towers squatting on a broken-down aircraft carrier that had been rebuilt into housing an air purifier and a food recycling processing plant. On one side, there was nothing but a steep drop to the lower level, and on the other there was a defunct warehouse marked with gang-sign.

The air was clean here, if foggy from the processes done by hundreds of filters digesting the air and making it fit for breathing instead of choked with pollution. Zim found it very refreshing; the air felt like home, not with the disturbingly uncontrolled form of 'natural' air, but tinged with a lovely artificial taste. It was soothing, and reminded him of Irk before it had been destroyed. Passed through the innards of hundreds of machines, it felt purified of the disturbingly non-artificial aspects of nature in general; terrible though this world was, at least this felt comfortingly familiar.

Savoring the nostalgic feeling (and wondering why Hobbes was looking so repulsed by the air), Zim noticed that they weren't being crowded for once; from the shuttle ride and on, they'd been constantly pushed about and sucked into one smothering crowd or another, but the people had dried up near this place. This wasn't a good sign, though; if no one wanted to be near here, it was likely dangerous.

He grinned. That sounded like fun.

"I think we're totally lost," Hobbes said, grunting his distaste for the air here. "Wait, no, that's just this city giving me a headache. Ugh, it stinks…" He sat down on a metal grill set over a dark shaft. He shuddered at the masses of buildings above and below and sideways, this town was a sprawling claustrophobic nightmare. Against the tides of thick smoke riding against the sky of massed metal and construction around them, raising his voice over the clamor of the crowds and vehicles screaming around, Hobbes growled and added, "It's worse than a hive-city back home! At least then the oppressive weight of several billion tons of city above you had clean technology!"

Calvin looked at the grill Hobbes was sitting on. "Uh, I wouldn't sit there if I were you!" He said, recognizing the smaller vents around it, a few cables connected to power boxes all around and a few other tells particular to his line of work.

"What do you-" Hobbes started to say as a screaming whine built up underneath. A terrible roar began to sound, and Hobbes leaped off the grill just as a huge blast of heat vented out from where he'd just been sitting, streaking up into the smoking clouds overhead and pushing out a good portion of them.

Morte sighed. "Close one," he said to Hobbes, who was lying on his side and whimpering.

Zuko nudged the grill. "What is this thing?"

"Heat vent," Calvin said. "I think the foundation of this particular area is a large life support system, probably purifying the air so people can breathe in it. Generates a lot of heat, so it's shunted out of that vent and directly into the smoke overhead." As he said this (with Zim nodding in agreement at his diagnosis), the smoke dissipated even more, sucked up into various purification baffles above. There was still more smoke than it could handle, pumped up from apartment complexes and the factories that made the very substance of this city. "Probably condenses the smoke and makes it easier to handle. But putting it here like this where it could kill people is just lazy."

"I begin to suspect that the administrators of this city are in need of a good instruction in proper management," Zim said, possibly trying to make a joke. If so, he was failing at it.

"So… any reason we should be stopping here?" Morte said.

Zuko scratched his chin. A few scrawny hairs (the beginning of proper facial hair) burned away under fingernails that blazed flame for a moment. "If we're going to accomplish anything on this world-"

"We're lucky if we can stand this city, let alone the rest of this planet," Hobbes said pessimistically.

"We need to establish a base," Zuko said, ignoring him. "A beachhead, if you will."

"Makes sense," Calvin agreed. "Why here?"

"Not many want to come here," Zim said, gesturing at the lack of people around them; the metal, ordinarily singing with all the weight of people moving about, was relatively quiet here. There was still great noise, but it was more distant and slightly tolerable. "That gives us a minor degree of secrecy to work with. Once we establish a beachhead, as Zuko put it, we ought to be able to bring in things from the Paragon. Not much, but at least things so we can build what we need and carry out our work!"

"Small problem there," Morte said. "Aside from the idea that we can just do that sort of thing for however long we're going to be here, what makes you think they're just going to give us an apartment or whatever on short notice?"

"Besides, I don't think they're renting," Calvin said, and pointed. Graffiti stained the walls of nearly every available surface, so much of it either obscene and badly painted or obscured by more recent graffiti; either way most of it was illegible. Over the apartments, though, a row of very clear graffiti notes indicated that this place was the property of one gang or another, each of them crossed out except for a recent one at the bottom that said 'THIS TOWER IS PROPERTY OF THE NEWBIE DISTRICT FACE-STOMPERS'. Obviously, it had changed hands a lot over time, probably by one gang usurping the last for and so on for who-knew how long.

"Ah," Morte said. "We've entered into the 'gangs of violent urban savages fighting for territory and traumatizing hapless civilians' trope."

"Actually I did some editing on the Guide's glossary of terms and I don't know if that's actually a trope-" Hobbes started to say.

"Too much talking, not enough tackling!" Zim said. "Heh. 'Tackling'. I made a pun. Because tackling starts with the same sound as talking. That's alliteration!"

"Yes," Zuko said flatly. "Thank you for spoiling the joke."

"You're welcome, but I don't know why you would express gratitude for that."

"So we're just going to go in there and beat people up?" Hobbes said. "That sounds kind of… jerk-ish."

"They're a gang that probably killed the last gang and terrorize everyone around," Calvin said. "Why care about them?"

"Because we can't just stomp in guns blazing!"

"Most of us aren't carrying guns-"

"Not the point, I just don't want to be in a group where we go and beat up everyone when it's convenient for us."

"Bah, fine, okay," Zim said. "We will talk first. But then with the tackling. Hah! I made another pun! For that directly references my earlier joke, which-"

"I get it, we get it!" Morte said. Zim scowled.

Somewhat reluctantly, though it wasn't as if they had anything better to do, the crew walked under a series of pipes that likely carried various essentials, moved under the shadows of inactive gun turrets and stepped over power boxes receiving electricity, and climbed down a short step ladder to a narrow tunnel to this building's lobby; there was more graffiti everywhere, and various broken containers of unwholesome products lying around, glinting sharply. Zim was glad his boots were too tough to be damaged by all the glass.

The doors to the place was lying wide open, totally broken down by some previous assault. A guard on duty, a small Slig with a gun, stood up to stop them from coming in, pointing his gun at them and clearly about to open fire.

Zuko growled, flames gushing from his nostrils and spat a well-aimed burst of flame; it struck the gun and knocked it right out of the Slig's hand. He gaped at Zuko, considering the situation. He shrugged in defeat, climbing up the wall to run away and leaving as fast as his mechanical legs could carry him. The crew walked past where he'd been sitting, and past the aged mechanisms trying and failing to work the automatic doors as they passed inside. Calvin picked up the Slig's fallen gun as he passed it, resolving to remove the 'PROPERTY OF SLINKY' writing on the side.

They entered a large and open lobby that had seen many recent battles, and Zim's shoes landed on old and weary carpet that broke under his boots. Hobbes wrinkled his nose in disgust as he came in, and Zim was inclined to agree with the sentiment. Though it was fair large inside, lit fairly well by electrical lights and several doors leading to various offices, the walls were stained and broken alcoholic drinks and various drug paraphernalia was lying all over the ground. The whole room seemed arranged around a large elevator shaft that went up to the various apartment floors, and it was wide open; several Glukkons were playing cards in it, with some harried people of varying species standing in a line to speak with a Slig at a desk and looking scared. Zim presumed them to be tenants. Sligs and Glukkons and other thugs of various species were lying around amusing themselves in various ways, and at least two looked like elf-ish things, close enough to human to discomfort Zim. "Hey, what's with the strangers?" one of these elves barked. "Wasn't Slinky on duty?"

"He ran," Calvin said honestly. A few of the gangsters looked suspiciously at the familiar gun he was carrying. "Who's in charge here? We need to talk."

Just as Zim observed that most of the people in here were wearing a tightly wrapped bandana over their arms – a gang allegiance thing, he supposed – the Slig at the table stood up. He waved the tenants away, and though they looked outraged at being shushed away after all the time spent standing in line, they scurried away into the staircases at the back of the room. Muttering quietly as they passed through, a few of them looked at Zim with strangely sorry faces.

"Oh look, you've gone and made the wussies that live under our roof cry," the Slig, whose name happened to be Old Ben (he claimed it was because he was the oldest Slig he could remember, though he was clearly making it up), said. He put his hand on his desk, paper folders filled with lists of who to kill next to advance their gang's agenda rattling around. Behind him there was a large chart detailing territorial changes in this specific sector of the city in color increments from allies to deadly enemies. Zim eyed it with interest. "What do you want?"

"First, information," Zim said. "Explain what you are doing in this place."

"We're new!" Hobbes lied quickly. "We need to get the run of how things work around here and you guys seem pretty successful."

Ben laughed. "I wish! Well, if you're into joining our ranks, you got another thing coming. First you need a sponsor from our elites, and then you need to kill someone we want dead to show you're good at whatever you claim your specialty is, and do a run as a scout on a shadowrunning gig-"

"No, we're not interested in joining your group," Zuko said bluntly.

"Oh," Ben said, drooping a bit. He really liked coming up with stupid missions for recruits. "Then what do you want?"

One of the Glukkons in the main elevator looked up from their card game. An augmented reality jack covering up most of his head (a method of inducing network access by overlaying it on real things and interacting with them through special devices, a method typically called 'augmented reality') clicked. He quietly waved his hand in mid-air, activating a silent 'be on alert' alarm throughout the building's computer network.

"Oh, many things," Zim said airily. "Proper retribution, the spread of great Good throughout the multiverse, for Evil to physically manifest so I can cut its head off and put it on my ship as a trophy, a decent hoagie for cheap, to totally dismantle the corrupt administration of this world…"

"What was that last part?" Ben said, blinking.

"A decent hoagie?" Zim said innocently. He'd meant that last one as a joke, anyway. "Ah, but in all seriousness, we are curious how the structure of things work around here. I wish to know, how did you come into possession of this apartment complex?"

Morte added, "And what was with the tenants?"

"Uh, okay," Ben said slowly. "It's just… tenants, you know, they come with the place. And so whiny! 'Blah, blah, blah, my power's not on, my fridge is broke, our network access is disabled, we haven't seen good shows in forever, you keep killing us on accident because you're lousy with the guns'… bah, whiny! Sometimes I think taking over this place was a mistake." He shrugged. "You know how it goes. Everything below the open-sky levels is free territory. If you want it, you take it! Anyone else wants it, you defend it. That's how you get the right to do whatever you want."

"I see," Zim said after a moment, a crazed grin starting to split his expression. "I see! So if someone, say an incredibly handsome and charismatic stranger that you are talking to at this very instant, beat you all up and took over, there would be no official repercussions?"

"No, I guess not," said the Slig, who was apparently not all that bright. A few of his cronies waved desperately at him mouthing 'no!' and at least one guy facepalmed.

"Good!" Zim said, grinning like a maniac.

The rest of Zim's crew readied for battle. Zuko muttered, "Here we go."

Zim swung his arm back, as if for a heavy punch; fire and light erupted from his arm as he swung forward in a lazy arc, fist ripping through the table like it was made of paper instead of a plastic-metal composite and shattered it into several large piece that did not explode all over the room like shrapnel (because that would just be irresponsibly dangerous), but simply broke apart and bounced a few paces away. He struck Old Ben the Slig right in the chest, fire and light spiraling together into a compact ball against the Slig before it exploded and blasted him into the wall. Ben bounced, uttered a small squeal where all the air in his lungs was forced out, and fell onto the floor, wheezing a bit. Several charts and graphs and motivational posters came with him (along with a copy of the 'Do-It Yourself Propaganda' self-help book), fluttering over him. His metal pants jerked and whirred into life for a moment, bright radiance flitting around them; apparently Zim's light-based powers made machines more lively, or simply interacted with them strangely.

"Oh, Margaret damn it, we have a meta here!" The Glukkon with the augmented reality implants screamed. He scrambled up, tapping cyberspace commands to some very specific machines under his command. His companions in the elevator reached under their seats and pulled out their weapons; a few semi-automatic assault platforms of varying condition and size (large mechanized gauntlets fitted over a forearm or appropriate appendage, reshaping around it, enhancing punching strength and adding an array of arm-mounted guns and a few grenade launchers), a fully automatic repeating laser rifle, and even a small missile launcher.

"Strange, that table shouldn't have folded so easily," Zim said, not really bothering to acknowledge them (or, he had entirely forgotten about them). He glanced at his thickly covered fist. He winced, his knuckles still hurt and he thought he might have cut something from impact. "Ow, I should put some armor on there."

The Glukkons in the elevator rose up to open fire… and Calvin turned his cyrokinetic device on them, palm glowing and releasing a cone-shaped spray of frost right into the elevator. It washed over the gangsters and froze them in place, but with surprising delicacy, just enough to avoid damaging the elevator or the gangsters and locking them into place. Thin but strong layers of translucent ice rimmed their body, avoiding any mechanical portions of their augmentations (that could cause serious harm), preventing them from doing anything more than moving around. "The heck is a 'meta'?" Calvin wondered as he ran into the elevator shaft, melted the weapons free from the Glukkons and gathered his looted guns together.

"Slang in this sort of punk-ish world," Morte said, compartments on his harness sliding open and small automatic guns unsheathed. He opened fire on the few thugs who had been too slow to realize that a fight was happening and had only just gotten up; Morte used non-lethal ordnance, blunt bullets made of substances like rubber, and though it wouldn't kill them, it certainly stung. Two men so seriously transformed with outmoded augmentations that their original species was hard to identify went for cover, and three more got it together and grabbed their own guns, opening fire and spreading burning lasers through the lobby. "Means 'metahuman'… Or 'meta-Irken', I guess. No offense, boss."

"Some taken," Zim said, hoisting up his laser rifle, taking aim and firing. For some reason the lasers burst into fire. "I dislike generalism!"

"Basically, just means anyone with powers that humanoids in general don't have. Not speaking of the humanoids who do have powers naturally, or easily learn them through magic… yeah, I know it doesn't make sense."

"Cover me!" Calvin said, now wearing his transmuting bracelets and doing something with the guns he'd taken.

"Got it!" Hobbes said, stepping several paces in front of Calvin, swinging out his shield and clicking it into its defensive configuration. In the crowded space of the lobby, it looked unreasonably huge. "Everyone behind me!" Bullets and lasers and small grenades bounced against his shield as the remaining gangsters covered their friends that fled through doors to presumably get help, shooting at Hobbes with the small arms available to them. They did no damage to its incredibly resilient surface. Zuko and Zim hurried behind Hobbes, who slowly started advancing against the firing. Bullets crumpled into bits of metal at his feet and he winced when he stopped on them, the lasers dissipated harmlessly but heated up his shield painfully (its internal structure dealing with much of it) and Hobbes bounced his shield against the grenades, timing it so that they went places where they would hurt no one and exploded in small but shockingly loud blasts melting nearly through the walls.

"The hell was that?!" someone cried up from above. Hobbes recognized it as where the tenants had gone after old Ben the Slig had shooed them off. "Oh, damn it, is this another takeover?! Not more artillery again!"

"Everyone who isn't a gangster, hide away, we're not going to hurt you or interrupt your routine, we're just taking over this place!" Hobbes said. "…That sounded a lot less stupid in my head!" They didn't respond, but there was a lot of hurrying noises from their vicinity.

"Oh, hey, do-gooders," one of the gangsters said as the command from that one augmented Glukkon finally paid off, and to the horror of Zim's crew, several massive black-armored mechanical giants stomped in from the rooms where they'd been booting up, scooting into the room with surprising delicacy. "Haven't seen any of those in a while! Not since those Mudokons came in last month and stole a whole factory. Maybe they won't kill us if we lose! Hooray, bright side!"

The mechs slowly started advancing, great pneumatically powered musculature powering up for bone-pulverizing blows. There were five of them, so large they hunched over to avoid scraping their heads on the ceiling. The gangsters were firing all the while, giving the mechs time to advance, for the machine soldiers moved dreadfully slow.

There was a flash of light behind Hobbes. "Got it!" Calvin said, with the clanking sounds of machinery powering up.

Zim was staring at the mechanical soldiers, or rather at the unusually bulky shapes of their backs, and the cables running under their bony exoskeletons and exposing some of their innards (presumably to make it cheaper to make them, putting as little armor as necessary). He formed a fireball between his hands, intensified it until it forced his hands wide, and projected it as a missile right into the closest of the robots. He hoped it would disable it, and was sadly disappointed (though a bit relieved, he had forgotten to figure out if the robots were sapient or not) when the flaming projectile sizzled off its front, leaving deep scoring but not doing any real damage to it. Fortunately, before his projectile could melt through the floor, it exploded right under the robot's advancing foot; it was only a small explosion, pushing the robot off-balance and right onto its fellows; the gangsters cried as the fallen robots tried to get back up, too clumsy to do it well, their massive limbs waving around pathetically for purchase on the ground. Luckily, they were so large that they made a rough barrier in front of them.

"Quick question!" Zim called out as the gangsters cursed, trying to get around their robot minions. "These robots! Are they sapient?"

"What?!" A gangster yelled.

"Are they sapient? Self-aware? Can they think?"

"What? No, they're just machines to hit things! Drones, even!"

"Ah," Zim said. "Little more than trained animals, and not even self-aware! I CAN BLOW THEM UP!" Laughing maniacally, he leaped over Hobbes, bounced off his shield, and abruptly burst into brilliant light as lasers blasted out chaotically from his shining radiance.

He landed on the robots, shooting lasers at them without apparently making a mark. His current targets waved a ponderous arm at him, but Zim merely hopped over it, firing a laser that caught on fire into the space under its arm. By good fortune, that was not well-protected, and struck something vital; it's arm went limp, lifting up feebly. "Their insides are not so well-defended! A design flaw! You make lousy robots! No offense, robots." That said, Zim cheerfully went about blasting and trying to rip them apart for the sheer joy of it.

The gangsters fled as a few of them were swept aside painfully by the flailing robots. Most ran up to higher levels to rejoin their friends and find some proper numbers to fight with, and a few stood their ground, confident they could win. They threw themselves against the walls as far as they could, far enough from the robots to give a narrow window to shoot at Zim's crew (Zim himself protected by the massive bulk of the robots he was fighting, the few shots they tried had no effect on their strong metal) and pointed all their weapons at Hobbes, just waiting for them to make a move.

"I can get them, but I need an opening," Calvin said. "If I move, they'll blast me!"

"No trouble," Zuko said. "I have this."

He stepped forward, moved around Hobbes shield, his weapons still sheathed. The gangsters aimed at him, and he smirked; a crash-course in energy-based weaponry in the time since Traverse Town had prepared him for encounters like this, and he moved his hand to where a laser would strike him. It flashed against his palm and the laser's heat was absorbed into his flesh, Zuko's stance alone Firebending it perfectly. Zuko repeated this several times more, catching as many lasers as he could, most of them ripping through his thick clothes but dissipating harmlessly against him (as he was skilled at the technique for redirecting lightning, and these lasers were just projected beams of heat, they were even easier to redirect than lightning) and the gangsters stared in shock at this. They knew they had hit him, but he wasn't even hurt, those should have disintegrated him. Zuko swung his palm out, directing the lasers he'd soaked up into an unfocused burst he sent towards the wall behind the gangsters, diluting it so it wouldn't hurt them too much (Zuko didn't see the point in holding back, but Zim was having a thing about not killing enemies for some reason). The resulting blast knocked them over with varying degrees of injury; several of them were burned, though not severely, another had his hands over his bionic eyes as the light had overloaded them and blinded him temporarily, and one guy was so lucky he had been completely unharmed. A few others, the remaining gangsters there (only five or so) peeked out, weapons at the ready.

They cautiously aimed and then Zuko stepped aside for Calvin to march out. The gangsters openly gaped at the bizarre weapon Calvin had made from his looted guns, a massive bizarre mish-mash off all the guns molded into a pair of gauntlets similar to the assault platforms (and using them as a base) all the different guns merged to them and thrumming with lightning, power cells overclocked and ready to blaze, the energies of his own super-science wonders imbued into them so that they even glowed with elemental fire and ice. Calvin raised his arms (and his weapons were so heavy, especially on his wonders, that he was tipping over a bit) and opened fire, lasers and bullets from over half a dozen different guns he'd rigged for automatic fire ripping forward, each specially fired to cause maximum damage without doing any real harm; the bullets missed so narrowly that the gangsters panicked, and the lasers would not burn through but left quite nasty burns. They cowered just for a moment, bewildered at his technological power, and then the lightning hummed, and both weapons discharged the fire and cold energies they'd been overcharged with from concussive force blasters Calvin had jury-rigged into the weapons, blasting into the walls (and the gangsters) hard enough to leave a thick bowl-shaped dent with several thicker dents in random places. The gangsters slid down in a moaning and bruised (though very much alive) heap, weapons dropped.

"Our life sucks," said a blue-tinted lizard-like polar manzardill, wiggling his four legs about ineffectually and his shoulder-mounted humanoid-style augments (so he could hold guns and such) powering down.

"I hate power struggles when we're not winning," agreed a yellow cube-shaped ooze, speaking through a translator device imbedded in its gel-flesh. It extended a pseudopod to the polar manzardill, and they weakly high-fived.

"At least there's the robots to beat them up!" a human said, raising her hand hopefully.

At that moment, the robots powered down, falling over each other in an undignified heap. The cables running from their hunched backs, ferrying power to vital systems, had been burned right through and the robots had simply powered down without need to penetrate their powerful defenses. Zim sat atop a place where the robots fell together so that a head, a wayward arm, a hunched shoulder and a knee made a crude throne. "No there's not!" Zim said, and cackled malevolently. "A centralized power source is a BAD idea in your synthetics! I laugh at it. Look at me laugh!" He laughed some more.

Another one of the gangsters, a superintelligent shade of the color purple, flashed indulgently. "Yes," it broadcasted. "That's a very good laugh. I shudder at it!"

"You can't shudder," Zim said. "You don't have anything to shudder with."

"Bah! Mere bio-chauvinism!"

"That's for people who think meat is morally superior to mechanical life," Zim replied.

"Oh shut up," the living color said.

Calvin, Hobbes, Zuko and Morte checked the rest of the lobby and the other doors, finding nothing but a few deserted staircases, a spare elevator, and some rooms in which some hard-core partying had been done recently (and also an entire room full of tawdry romance novels). "The lobby is secured!" Zuko said as Calvin transmuted the doors into a thick solid piece so no one could escape, or sneak up on them through the entrance in case the gangsters had back-up, Hobbes gathered together all the weapons the gangsters had on them, and Morte gathered all the beaten gangsters into a group into a room and shoved them in there (including the ones that had been in the elevator, after they were defrosted; the augmented one was very upset to find that his robot drones had been so easily defeated).

"Very good!" Zim said, coming down from his throne of robots and not mentioned how achy he was now. His crew assembled around him, and he knocked on the door to where the tenants had fled. "Hey, it's us, the guys you probably hate less than the gangsters who terrorize you."

After a moment, possibly because the noise had died down without any horrible dying sounds, an elderly Glukkon dressed in a very tattered business suit he still wore because it reminded him of better days before his nondescript shipping company had been bought out, peeked out and apparently volunteered himself to be a spokesman for the tenants. One of his friends, a brutish reptilian that looked something like a humanoid wingless dragon (a dragonborn, specifically), held the door open and stood nervously, like he wanted more than anything to just hide in his apartment until the fighting stopped but desperately wanted to be by his friend's side. The large crowd of weary and anxious tenants, universally dirty and worn but of great diversity otherwise (Slig and Glukkons among them, and even one Mudokon who had earned his citizenship), seemed to share something of this stance. They stretched out into a long hallway lined with doors to their respective apartments, and several of them shuffled back to their broken down homes. Calvin frowned at the broken lights and rusted metal, the water dripping in the carpets, and worse; this gang were absolutely incompetent landlords.

"Yes?" The old Glukkon said cautiously, looking ready to run for his life if any of Zim's crew made a sudden movement. From the looks of him, he wouldn't be able to run too far, and the old bruises and scars suggested that he'd suffered quite a lot of mistreatment from this handicap.

Zim holstered his laser rifle and raised his hands to show they were empty. "We wish to take this complex over and establish a base to use for our own purposes," Zim said frankly. "So we need to kick out the gang that presently owns it. We took the guns of the ones down here. Do you wish to arm yourselves and help us defeat them?"

The Glukkon stared at Zim for a long moment. "Excuse me a moment," he finally said, looking frankly bewildered. He retreated to discuss it with his fellow tenants.

Zim waited patiently. He heard arguing and shouting, too indistinct to hear. At least for him; Hobbes tilted his hat up and quietly said to Zim, "Most of them don't like it."

Zuko raised an eyebrow. Calvin and Morte seemed indifferent. Zim shrugged, he could hear stomping and rattling overhead, and knew they needed to move out shortly.

The door opened. The old Glukkon stood with a much smaller crowd; more than half of them had gone, retreated to their apartments; Zim saw several doors open just ajar, and terrified eyes stared out before crawling back and locking the doors. It seemed rather perfunctory, though. They seemed far too used to this.

"We will help you," the old Glukkon said. "What will you have us do?"

Zim noticed the phrasing; they seemed unpleasantly eager to take orders. Even so, he gestured to the weapons they'd piled up. "Take those," he said. "Arm yourselves. We will move up and fight more of the gang as they come until we find their boss and defeat him as well. That is all."

"Ah."

"Are there any more of those robots?" Calvin asked, pointing to the ones Zim had beaten. "That might be a problem."

"No," A tired-looking asari said, shaking her head. The rigid tentacles on her scalp shifted slightly with the motion. "Those were all they had. I doubt they would fit upstairs anyway."

"Inefficient," Zim said, poking a robot with the toe of his boot. "They should have manned the front of the lobby, not been kept hiding away for emergencies. Such large and tough machines would make excellent front-line soldiers, not back-up!"

"We are dealing with thugs, not military thinkers," Zuko said. He looked at the robots, Zim's remark opening his mind to the possibilities. He entertained himself for a moment thinking of formations of infantry machines that knew no fear smashing down vast numbers of foes; even a smaller number of these robots would be vastly more effective than ordinary soldiers.

Zim looked at the downed robots, and he thought of what they could be, in the hands of competent engineers. He imagined metal soldiers, battling alongside him, and a dream planted itself.

The residents who had volunteered to fight (Zim was already thinking of them as conscripts) went for the weapons and armed themselves. Thankfully, all of them had a basic knowledge of using these weapons (if not how to maintain them) but the slight suspicion most of them had towards the energy-based ones suggested that such weaponry was fairly new to this world. They fought for them, too; several brief fights broke out over the best ones, and Hobbes and Morte had to break it up. In short order, the residents stood awkwardly, their weapons at the ready.

Zim had a short discussion with the old Glukkon, who told him about the way this complex was set up, the arrangement of levels and floors, the best strongholds for a defensive force and therefore giving Zim ideas for tactics. Zim told the residents who had grabbed the heaviest weapons to wait in that little elevator for Zim's squad (himself, his crew, and the more experienced of the residents in combat) to clear the way up.

They charged up the stairs.

---

Fifteen minutes later, and a few levels up…

Several of the gang's heaviest hitters, talented guards and fighters who had proved their worth in dozens of battles for territory and doing so as shockingly as possible, waited up the stairs, waiting calmly.

A mixed group, no particular species outnumbering the others, they shifted about in their body armor and weapons (mostly laser rifles kitted out for immense damage and power), keeping them pointed at the stairwell. Two others kept their guns on the elevators set into the walls each, just in case.

They breathed heavily. There had been a lot of noise underneath just a few minutes ago, but it was protocol not to rush in until they had a proper confirmation on the situation, even if they took some losses.

It had gone quiet. No one had reported back or called up, and none of the residents had been whining on the intercom, so something odd was going on.

The leader of this particular squad, a huge and hairy beastman of so many different sub-types that it was impossible to say what his progenitor species was (besides vaguely ape-ish and resembling a sasquatch), came back from the intercom. "Nothing from downstairs," He said, his voice surprisingly light and melodic. "First three levels are totally silent."

"You mean apart from the gunfire and screaming we just heard?" said the second-highest ranking of the squad; he was a drell, another sapient species from the same universe as the asari. Reptilian humanoids (and rather elegantly masculine) that were attractively similar to humans, green scales overlapping each other and large dark eyes blinking with worry. "This is creepy."

The beastman, who was named Yeoman (and no one had asked how he'd gotten a title for a name), grunted. Large sharp teeth glinted. "Yes. That is true." He pulled out a plasma rifle modified to shoot semi-automatic blasts (making it much larger in order to accommodate the mechanisms that made it possible) and kept it pointed at the ground. He gestured at the intercom. "Called the boss. Told him the situation. We're to corral the invaders, pin them down. Kill them if we can, push them out if we can't."

"No reinforcements?" said a human wearing so much mechanized armor, air filters and personalized environment equipment that he looked like a metal snowman.

Yeoman laughed, a harsh noise exactly like a bark. "To make a laughing sound! If we need reinforcements to fight a simple invading force, the boss does not want us in the gang. Adversity breeds strength, and strength promises success."

"That's mean."

Yeoman considered this. "Yes… yes, he is." There were quite a lot of stomping and charging sounds below… and a great mechanical thumping. They were used to that, the mechanical noise was just the background sound of their great city's many life-preserving machines working (usually more noisily if they were breaking down, costing hundreds of lives in the short time it took to have them repaired, but there were always more bodies to take their place), but it had been quite loud with battle recently, and only in the silence could the machine-noise be heard.

It was very worrying, like a great predator had just crouched overhead and made all the noisy things fall silent in the few moments before you felt its breath on you.

Something was moving up the stairs. Yeoman lifted up his rifle, bits of green lightning sparking from the bulky sub-components and the gaps between the spaces where he'd had to tape it together or bolt it. Ionized gas spun in the barrel, running hot, and a chorus of readied guns clicked up around him, ready to rain energized (or kinetic, or stabby) death on anything that came through.

The door, the one to the stairwell directly below, cast-iron and nearly a vault-class, shook on its hinges as something heavy and incredibly hit it hard. His gangsters panicked, opening fire, and Yeoman had to roar over the sudden squeal of firearms, "STOP IT, STOP IT, THEY'RE NOT THROUGH YET, YOU'RE WASTING AMMUNITION!"

They stopped, breathing hard and twitching in place as conditioning fought the urge to run, and the echoes of their firearms were still echoing when the door rocked again with fire-light from behind its crevices and cracks, and another massive blow struck it in a completely different area (something strong testing where different attacks wedged the door, Yeoman thought), and there was a five-second gap before the last blow come, and literally exploded right out of the wall on fire.

The men jumped back, justifiably scared to have a ton-heavy door flying at them. They needn't have bothered, it smashed a few feet away from the wall and clanged heavily into the ground, bent partially on the insides. A few fires burned, and then guttered out. More importantly, in the open hole where the door had been, there was a massive taking up the entire space and coming out at a slow pace, whoever it was holding it moving it ahead of them.

"Belay that last one, OPEN FIRE!" Yeoman said. His men obliged, and the corridor they guarded was briefly turned into a horribly loud firefight, bullets and lasers and all manner of projectiles blasting at the advancing shield, so large it could have covered several men. Yeoman opened fire as well, and green light sprayed across the shield and splattered into molten goo on the shield, and he snarled in irritation as it just bounced off and sizzled into the floor. It left marks and scoring, but the shield was unharmed. Bullets flattened, lasers left tiny burns, and none of their firearms did anything to it.

The shield shifted aside. The gangsters had a brief sight of a large tiger beastman teen moving so that the smaller human boy (a nasty burn on one side of his face) behind him could get into position and shoved his arms out, and elemental fire roared down the hallway, a single large fireball blasting right into the gangsters and exploding, casting down just under a dozen gangsters into the ground, blasting their weapons away and destabilizing energy blasts that came there way. The metal walls did not burn, and the splash of liquid flame soon extinguished without any fuel, but the hapless gangsters still panicked by being on fire (even in body armor) and rolled right out of position trying to put the fires out.

"Bah," Yeoman said, opening fire again. The shield moved into place before his plasma could hit the pyrokinetic fighter and casting it aside, and then the tiger holding it began advancing again. "Oh, stop him, will you? What are we getting paid for?"

"Mostly just to sit on our butts and harass residents," the drell said. "And we don't get paid so much as we get a share of everything we get tithed or-"

"That was a rhetorical question," Yeoman rumbled. The shield had already made it past the fallen door. "Look, at this point we are the only ones between us and the boss, don't screw this up." Getting the point, all of his men opened fire on the shield, concentrating on it and firing, totally ignoring everything else.

Which was probably a mistake, as the elevators went 'ding!' and powered up, calling the previously absent elevators from below, coming on up. "Damn it, we forgot about the elevators!" Someone cried. "Train your guns on them, set up a firing block to hold off these geeks with the shield and-"

The floor rumbled, and a section of it behind them shone with brilliant light for a moment, blue and radiant; the floor then unraveled, coming apart as thousands of metal threads spun together, and slammed down and out on the gangsters who weren't quick enough to get out of the way; it didn't hurt them, only stunned them for while it was heavy it wasn't aimed to kill. The metal swept aside to both sides of the walls, bringing the gangsters with it, and pinned them to the walls, half-melting into a web-like metal mess and freezing them in place.

The drell whistled. Yeoman, his reserve forgotten, gaped at the realization that nearly his entire squad had been disabled; those who had panicked when caught on fire had also been snared, leaving him less than half a dozen men. "What the f-" he started to say.

The hole bristled with motion, and about a dozen people in crude armor and carrying looted weapons came out of the hole from below and opened fire, hitting the drell. He gasped, a laser hitting him in the knee. "Agh! There goes my fighting career!" He whined, and laid down. Several other gangsters, equally panicky, laid down their arms at once and surrounded.

The elevators opened, and the metal had conscientiously not covered the doors; more men and women in assembled armor and weapons came out, shooting with poor aim but much enthusiasm, nailing what few remained of his men. None of the injuries were fatal, but they were so panicked that they too surrendered, with all the numbers against them.

A human boy with odd mechanical devices on his wrists that resembled bracelets popped up, along with a small Irken. "Surrender! Or fight!" The Irken, Zim, said cheerfully. "Yes, please fight, THAT IS FAR MORE FUN!"

"Cowards!" Yeoman roared at his men, casting them out of his way as he charged forward. Zim grinned, making a motion for the residents to cease fire, and let the beastman come. At the last possible moment, before Yeoman was about to run him over, Zim leaped up and landed a heavy kick in the inner part of Yeoman's kneecap; he fell over, gasping in pain as the weight of his armor made his injury worse. Zim grabbed a few dangling components and belts on Yeoman, climbing up right onto his neck and swinging his legs around so they went over Yeoman's thick neck. He blinked, and Zim abruptly pinched him right in the nose, one of the few areas Yeoman's combat helmet did not protect, and when it landed, a blast of holy energies and light discharged from Zim's fist in a spectacular display.

Yeoman stumbled back, harsh sounds and condemning roars echoing in his head. Zim's second punch nailed him in the chin, and another light-blast knocked him halfway across the hall. A third, and Yeoman sank to his knees, squealing in surprise. Zim's fists reared back, light swirling around them and condensing into solid constructs looking like ridiculously oversized pneumatic gauntlets (complete with fizzling circuitry and misty vents), more energy blazing out from them. "No…!" Yeoman squeaked.

Zim's fists flew. They impacted right on the top of his helmet (where Zim judged that the minimum damage would be done), and in the sudden void of lightning and radiance, the entire hallway went blind just moments before the explosion deafened a few people.

There was a thump. The light faded, and the colors of the hallway metal were somewhat washed out and bleached, and Yeoman lay unconscious in a deep crater that almost went right through the floor, his tongue lolling out and some nasty bruises already forming. Zim was still glowing with light, and he gave Yeoman a kick. "That is it? A big man like you, and that's all the fight you had? I grow bored now!" He snorted, gave Yeoman a kick, and hopped out of the crater. Several of the residents stared at the massive hole in the ground, the crater, the battle damage everywhere, and the problem that a lot of the floor had been turned into a metal moss pinning down gangsters.

They glared at Zim. "We can fix this," he said quickly. They gave him a look that said 'you better!'. Ignoring this, Zim waved a hand. "Standard procedure now, you know the rules by now." The residents did as they had done for the last several floors they had taken, removing the weapons from the beaten gangsters (or extricating them from traps; Calvin helpfully moved the metal out of the way with transmutation, and then considerately transmuted it back to the floor, restoring it to normal and healing the battle damage as well), tying them up and sending a few people downstairs to lock them up with the others. By now they'd amassed a fair amount of weaponry, and the body armor the gangsters wore was duly confiscated and equipped by anyone of the right size.

Hobbes lowered his shield, downsizing it from pure defense to its portable mode; he and Zuko walked over, and Zim nodded at them. "Excellent work with the distraction," He said.

Hobbes preened. "Yeah, we're pretty awesome," he said.

Zuko grunted, trying not to smile. He awkwardly punched Hobbes in the shoulder in a hopefully chummy way, looking slightly terrified that he was doing it wrong. "Yeah… we make a nice team." Hobbes rubbed his shoulder; that had actually hurt a little bit. Zuko was a lot stronger than he looked.

The residents took the last of the gangsters, apparently pleased that the corridor looked so good now. The drell went with them complacently enough, but said, "Hey, you guys are the losers that live here! The hell are you doing taking us over? That's no way to run a living shelter."

"Well, you guys are jerks, so we're taking over," Calvin informed him.

The drell considered this. "Fair enough," he concluded.

Two residents on either side led him away, he and the rest of his fellow gangsters stripped of armor and weapons. "Well!" Zim said. "Now all we have to do is take down the boss!"

The intercom buzzed. "That's convenient," a harsh voiced said through it. "I was just about to come down and fight you guys. We may as well do this properly. Come up here and do me the politeness of talking."

A door clicked open from the stairwell above them. The intercom buzzed again, signaling that it was off. "…Hrm," Zim said. "Trap?"

"Trap," Zuko said.

"Trap," Calvin agreed.

"Trap," Hobbes said.

"Trap," Morte said, floating out from an elevator after helping escort previous enemies into custody (and therefore unable to attend the brief battle) but so genre savvy he already knew what was going on.

"Okay then!" Zim looked at the door. "Well, I could charge up there and pummel him into submission… or I could do the civilized thing and talk as he wishes, assuming he genuinely means to talk. What do you think, my crew?"

"It would be unheroic to just attack," Hobbes mused. "We can't take the chance that he's just lying."

"But he probably is," said a resident. They glanced at him, and nodded; realizing that his comment wasn't unappreciated, the resident said, "Hooray, I'm helpful!"

Zim considered it. "Ah, why not, I'll go talk with him. Just in case."

"Aww, you're gonna get blown up," the residents said, a bit miffed that their ticket to a non-tyrant landlord was gonna die.

"Am not! Zuko, Hobbes! You're with me, bodyguard detail."

"Hooray," Zuko said flatly. "From Fire Lord to a glorified bodyguard. My career as an adventurer is the envy of trillions."

The three of them walked up the stairwell, and cautiously opened the door. As might be expected, a hail of gunfire immediately greeted them; Hobbes swung his shield and deflected the bullets and threw it like a discus, knocking out the shooters responsible and catching it.

Zim walked into the room, a wide open space that had apparently been the landlord's penthouse and serving as private suite for the current landlord since the building had begun switching hands; the metal floor was covered in some very fine furs that Zim stepped around (making a very expensive but pretty carpet), various tables heaving with the weight of computer equipment and multiple screens displaying views of the complex from every level, and many more were suspected from the ceiling and running data about the various enemies of this gang to calculate appropriate measures to take against them (as well as when their allies might turn on them). Surprisingly fine art decorated the area, portraits and caricatures of famous figures lined up on the walls amid fabulous paintings and wall-mounted sculptures, and the lighting had been specially calculated to be as relaxing and elegant as possible. The rows of guns and implant-mounted bio-weapons rather disagreed with the cultured look.

Four small soldiers lay unconscious on the floor, their weapons dropped from their hands. "Well, that was rude," said a man sitting behind a massive round desk that was (on closer inspected) an inactive hologram projector and computer hub. It was impossible to tell what species he was, he was so drastically augmented and covered in cybernetic implants that he looked like a vaguely humanoid assemblage of machinery with the odd bit of bulging brick-red flesh squeezing out through the gaps. Zim screwed up his face; the man was so large that he was twice Zim's size even sitting down at a table, and a multitude of weapons extended from various ports in tactically advantageous ways, so that no matter where you attacked him a gun would be pointed at you. Zim felt nothing but disdain, though; he delighted in mechanical implantation, but it had been sloppily implemented here, the mechanical components had been badly cared for and sorely out of date with unsightly patches of rust and the leaking fluids of malfunctioning bio-circuitry, and as the man stood up with grinding and clanking, Zim felt inexplicably attacked on a personal level.

"Well, you just attacked by building, went through my men like a knife through hot butter, stole their stuff, got those incompetent residents to help you-" The man said.

"Hey!" The residents yelled.

"Geez, it's nothing personal, get a grip! Also, you trashed a lot of my building and I have no idea who you are. This is honestly hurtful. Who the hell are you?"

"I am Commander Zim of the Returners, crew of the Paragon!" Zim said. "And these are my lackeys." He indicated Hobbes and Zuko.

Zuko briefly turned a fascinating shade of indignant purple. Hobbes growled and said, "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response…"

The man tilted his head. "Never heard of you."

"We're new," Zim said.

The man seemed to think. "Aren't the Returners a band of rebels on some world somewhere? They have magic critters called Espers, as I recall. And a real thing for steampunk tech, too."

"No affiliation," Zuko said, looking annoyed.

"Well, then it's just confusing using their name? You should use a more recognizable name, and-" He stopped. "Getting off-track. My name's Mukluk, I'm in charge here. You trashed my gang and trying to take over. Gotta ask, why?"

Zim said, "Because you're there, your gang are all jerks, and it's tactically useful at the moment. Do we fight now?"

Mukluk looked down at Zim, a single cyclopean mechanical eye scoping down and peering at him. Various mechanisms clicked, registering body language and movement, predicting motions and formulating responses. "If you want to die, go ahead." He shrugged his square-shaped shoulders as hatches opened and missile launchers emerged.

"But!" Zim raised a finger. The shoulders lowered. Mukluk looked curious. "I must know. Why did you take over this complex in particular?"

"Why not?" Mukluk asked. "It was, as you said, convenient. It changes hands plenty often, so the corporation that owns it won't care as long as the annual rent is brought in. It's isolated, so the arbitrators don't bother coming down here much and let us run out affairs however we want. It's a nice headquarters to boot. Good for keeping our turf wars organized and expanding."

"I see," Zim said. "And what of the residents?"

Mukluk blinked. "….What about them?"

"Why bother with them at all? Why exploit them? It would be far more efficient to gain their aid and convince them to work with you willingly. If you protected them, and assisted them, you would not be conquering villains to them but liberating heroes they would gladly help."

Mukluk just looked confused. "Why bother doing any of that when we can just make them do stuff? They're just… there. Resources, even."

Zuko's eyes flared. Literally, a harsh yellow glow came from his eyes. Mukluk paused, his sensors reading a sudden surge of heat energy. "That's all they are to you. Just… 'resources'. Not conquered people that deserve your loyalty and strength, just things to use."

"Sure, why not," Mukluk said. "Why do you care?"

Zim gave him a sharp look. "Someone must care," Zim said, unexpectedly cold. He glared up at Mukluk with a look of intense dislike. He thought of how scared and beaten-down the residents had been, how afraid they had acted when Zim had enlisted them, how horribly used they seemed to be about being treated as commodities by urban warlords. How so many had refused to fight, either afraid or unwilling or just thinking that it wouldn't make a difference either way, and hiding wouldn't get them killed. How jaded the gang was about doing that, like it was just such an ingrained part of their lives they did it automatically. And, of course, how frighteningly eager the other residents had been when allowed to fight back.

He thought of how the Irken Empire had been before its fall, and it made his stomach churn.

"Well, whatever," the huge cyborg said dismissively. "I'm sure we can discuss terms of surrender or whatnot once I clobber you-"

"I think not," Zim said, and thought about how odd it was that such things like the condition of this apartment complex were commonplace and the ingrained social order of this city… and, possibly, this entire world. Or for that matter, that he cared at all. He supposed that someone ought to. "I do have one question though. Do you know the whereabouts of a space pirate named Disco Darvhog?"

Mukluk stopped. "What? That's seriously someone's name?"

"He came here a short time ago to sell forging secrets and artifacts he stole. I am looking for him. Do you know where he is?"

"No."

"Ah, alright then." Zim's antennae twitched. "I have some bad news for you." He smiled. "We're taking over!"

He spun aside as Mukluk charged, weapons sliding out of ports at them. Zuko charged forward, shining orange as a halo of flames erupted out of his mouth and expanded over his hands, fanning out and so bright they were nearly blue-

Zim produced flames and shifted them into Zuko's own streams, and with Zim pumping up the flames as much as he could, it was a trivial matter for Zuko to shape the flames into a single massive bolt. Both Zuko and Zim launched the firebolt, briefly turning the room red. Mukluk buckled, looking quite astonished as the firebolt hit him square in the malformed chest (and slightly larger too) before it lifted him off the ground.

There was another explosion, following by a grinding squeal and a horrible shuddering sound. Cold air filtered it, and punctuated the noise was a long whooping scream that sounded more surprised than genuinely alarmed, cut off by a sudden crash.

Zim, Zuko and Hobbes hurried across the room through the large gaping hall that was now in the wall where Mukluk had stood, burned at the edges. They peered out through it and saw that Mukluk was lying several stories down on top of a crude warehouse he and his men had built for their weapons and vehicles, using several buses and a lost tank as the shell of it; Mukluk's great weight had ripped right through it, and he as now lying in a small crater at the very bottom floor of the warehouse, metal walls dented around him and several more holes where he had fallen through successive levels. "Owie," He groaned, before falling unconscious.

Zim scoffed. "Weakling."

The soldiers Hobbes had taken down got up, and hurried over. "Boss!" They cried out. "…Hooray, power vacuum!"

"No it's not," Zim said, and Hobbes lifted them up and knocked their heads together, and threw them after Mukluk. By now, attracted by the noise, Calvin and Morte came up, accompanied by the rest of the residents and a few gangsters who had volunteered to join up with them instead of getting beaten up.

The old Glukkon gaped. "You actually took him down! I… I didn't think that would happen."

"What did you think would happen?" Morte asked.

"Oh, that you'd die heroically, creating a brief opportunity for one of us to swarm in, incapacitate him and behead the gang and finally establish ourselves as our own power In the neighborhood for once." Zim stared silently at him. "Don't look so mad, we would rename the complex in your honor! A bit tricky, since I don't actually know your name, but details."

Zim grimaced. "Yes, jerk-ness is certainly ingrained into this city," He muttered.

"What was that?"

"Nothing." Zim turned to everyone else. "I want a squad down there to escort the rest of the gang out, and them shoo them off!"

"No executions?" The asari from earlier asked sadly.

"No, we're supposed to be heroes."

"Aww!" she pouted.

Roughly fifteen minutes later, amid a lot of whining and yelling and more things falling on him, Mukluk groaned back into consciousness. His eye refocused into operation, and found it looking into Yeoman's face. "Hello, sir," Yeoman said.

"The hell is going on?" Mukluk said, and sat up, dislodging quite a number of bodies off him. He blinked and realized that nearly his entire gang, for one reason or another, was lying on top of him. He shook them off and stood up shakily.

He didn't quite reach his full height and stopped in mid-stance, realizing that not only was he in the middle of his gang's warehouse, but the residents of his complex were standing around him in a circle with big guns pointed at him and his minions, and the five-strong crew that had beaten him were there too, looking smug. "Deactivate any weapons you may have," Zim said. "Or be killed now!"

Mukluk very carefully retracted his weapons; his armor was not thick, built to absorb certain kinds of energy to fuel him rather than protect him. His gangsters, getting the idea, threw their arms up in surrender once more. "How loathsome," Yeoman sighed.

"Good," Zim said. "Now…" he indicated the vehicles. Normally arranged in a grid based on the situations in which certain vehicles would be employed, they had been moved around completely out of order and several large transport vehicles were shoved right in front of the gang. "Under the usual rules of conquerors rights, I am confiscating your vehicles and weapons. You may have these, but you must leave immediately."

"But we like our weapons," the drell from earlier whined. Since he had defected and was with the residents now, this got him several stares. "…What? I was just speaking for my old gang."

"A bunch of old floaters and cargo-movers is no way for my gang to start anew!" Mukluk said indignantly. "Come on, give me something respectable."

"I'm letting you go with your lives, and trust me, it was hard convincing the residents to give you that," Zim said.

Mukluk considered this, and the bloodthirsty leers from the residents. Reluctantly, he sighed and said, "Point taken."

"Incidentally," Hobbes said. "We took the stuff the residents didn't want that was definitely yours – the territory markers and maps and personal effects we determined to be your personal property – and placed it in the cargo-movers." He indicated a large squat craft hovering above the ground, which could easily hold nearly half the gang if they squeezed. Since there were several of these craft, there was plenty of space for them all. "So, basically, all your stuff except the weapons. Including the information from your computers, we dumped that into some empty data-tracks we found for you. We're keeping the computers though."

"Why can't we have our weapons?" Yeoman said. "We're defenseless out there."

"…Come on, you're a gang with territorial ambition, I know you have a bunch of safe houses and stuff. And your leader is a giant cyborg and most of you are scary things one way or another. I don't think you have a problem."

Grumbling that Hobbes had a bit of a point, the gang reluctantly shuffled out and onto the craft Zim specified, getting in as quickly as possible; it was rare to survive a takeover like this, and they were grateful that they hadn't been outright executed as per the usual rules. Mukluk, less forgiving, said, "You haven't seen the last of us!" A laser from Zim's rifle burned off one of the antennae on Mukluk's head. "…Okay, you've seen the last of us!" He ducked into a cargo-mover, and one by one, his gang moved out and left the apartment complex behind.

Once the last of the craft were gone, the residents stared in disbelief. "They're gone… they're really gone…" the asari said, sounding amazed.

"I can't believe it!" a human said. "Free at last! And this time, not until the next jerk takes us over! They're really gone!"

"Except for that guy," Calvin said, pointing at the drell.

The drell, and several other gangsters who had switched sides, said "What part of 'defected' don't you guys understand!? Geez."

Morte raised a tendril. "Uh, hey, resident guys. Is it cool if we take the vehicles as spoils? We kind of have some war and stuff to do in general."

The residents conferred for a moment. "Perhaps we can do a seventy-thirty split?"

"Fifty-fifty," Zim said.

"Forty-sixty!"

"Done," Zim said. "…Wait, that's in our favor, right?"

"Yes," Calvin said before the residents could say otherwise. They went 'aw!' again.

There was a bit of the usual pointless banter before the residents wandered back to their apartments, making Calvin promise to help clean the stuff up before they left, seeming genuinely hopeful about their lives for the first time in a long while. Zim felt pretty nice about seeing them talk about a life where they had more to hope for than the next warlord being less cruel.

"Well," Zim said to his crew as they went back into the apartment complex, needing to do some organizing and send someone afar to gather information. "This was fairly profitable. We learned something of how this city works, we acquired weapons and vehicles, and we helped some random people in the process. Not so bad, I say."

"Yeah," Morte agreed. "Gonna take a while to sort out our winnings though. And fix them up, a lot of that stuff looked in really bad condition."

"I'm a transmutation alchemist, I can just fix that without any real effort," Calvin said.

"Point taken, but it'll take a while. Darvhog might skip town before we do any of that."

"Yes," Zim said. "A clear problem. We are partly responsible for everything he has done since we fought him, so we must take steps to fix that."

Hobbes frowned. "So… how do we get about finding him? This place is huge. Unless he does something really stupid, we won't hear anything about him."

"Excuse me…" The crew stopped and looked. The old Glukkon, who had been uneasily appointed as the new landlord (and thus the one to gather the rent and pay it to the corporation that owned the place so nothing unfortunate happened), was standing behind them and looking helpful. "I, ah, may have overheard what you said. You are looking for someone?"

"Yeah, a space pirate," Zuko said.

"A really stupid space pirate," Zim added. "He came here to sell loot."

"Well, even if he is a recent arrival, I know a number of contacts that would be useful in tracking down people. And, I spent a fair amount of years in off-world dealing, I know the ways where an outside trader would have to find the channels to talk to people and sell such things. And… it would take time as well."

Zim looked interested. "Ah, that is interesting! Tell us more!"

The old Glukkon chuckled. "Gladly! If you will return to Mukluk's penthouse… er, your penthouse, now, that is the right of conquest, we can get that old holographic map thing up and going and I can give you a list of my contacts to speak to, and show you the proper way to find things here in this city."

"Neat!" Calvin said.

"Not that I'm complaining, but why do we get the penthouse exactly?" Zuko said.

The old Glukkon looked surprised. "Why, isn't it obvious? You're in charge now."

Zim stopped. "Wait, what?"

---

Several weeks passed, and in the eyes of those who ruled Oddworld, nothing of great significance happened.

In the eyes of the heavens above, the mysterious entities that were pure Good of deed and will, the men who staked their lives and ambition on the future of the Glukkon Hegemony were sadly limited, and their vision myopic.

Just a few weeks, in a city the size of Lulu's Fortune, was far more than enough time for a hundred score worth of lives to be changed, won or lost. Time enough for new sub-routines to be implemented into the skin of the city, the bones cleansed and made anew against the never-ending battle of the Glukkon's ingrained refusal to ever give in to something as combative as their own pollution. Certainly time enough for the portions of the city not directly under the control of one corporation or another with enforcers and mercenaries so numerous and well-armed as to make military forces – and these portions were vast indeed, big enough to comprise cities in their own right – to shift and sway in the tides of low-scale urban warfare between gangs and warlords and clans desperately keeping their friends or family safe in the dangers of the city.

In those weeks alone, a long-struggling gang known simply as the Wasteland Weavers, once a corporation renowned for the violence with which their pollution practices wounded the world that had rejected the Glukkons so long ago (and thus earning the admiration of their peers, for a blow to the vicious eco-structure was a blow for the Glukkons) but since then subsumed and cannibalized in scores of hostile takeovers and their forces sorely damaged in various battles with the Glukkons, fell at long last. At the end, only a few hardcore soldiers and a weary ancient Glukkon were alive to remember the days when they didn't have to fight tooth and nail to secure a booth at the nearest food queue, holding mockeries of the old days splendor in a massive processing plant for scrap metal set like a crown upon a vast facility. Most unfortunately a troupe of Vykkers had bought the rights to the plant right under their noses and dropped the latest animal-soldier right on top of their heads, and for all their valor and fierceness, the Wasteland Weavers lasted only fifteen minutes before the bioengineered horror tore them to pieces. The last of them, a Slig who had been there when the Mudokon prophet Abe had broken out of Rupture Farms, had last been seen screaming like a madman and clawing at his own tendrils before jumping right into a smelting facility and diving into the molten fire as he proclaimed that he would atone for his failure with burning metal. The computers overseeing the process had paused, for a moment, and isolated the pieces of metal with his ashes mixed in. The attendant robots had buried it, for their own reasons. The plant was decommissioned and remade into a gladiator ring for fierce monsters deemed unsuitable for the war effort, and quickly became the subject of a mildly popular reality series about the lives of the monster's trainers.

In a small isolated corner of the city, buried deeply beneath eighteen metric tons of buildings lost with endless debates on who owned it, a small family of immigrant insectoids had hunched beneath crude shelters against a sudden spat of cold micro-weather when an air conditioner malfunctioned and set a bitter winter right on their neighborhood, burying the whole place in acid snow. For eight months they had labored to buy enough month for a ride on a freighter to a more hospitable world, but now all of their jobs were going to be missed because of this obstacle, and if they dared the flesh-melting snow they would most likely die, but if they missed their jobs, they would be put on the arbitrator's hit list for breach of contract. Awaiting certain doom, the snows suddenly melted, and a trucker came through with his flamethrowers, letting them pass through. He passed by them without a word; he did not know them, had never met them, and owed them no favors. Nevertheless, doing this cost him two hours of work and a chunk out of his paycheck. He didn't demand restitution from the insectoids, but went on his way, and never spoke of the occasion. Their eldest spawn wrote about it in a blog, and he had quite the popular one; in short order, truckers were given great respect and leeway, as well as the right of passing. Shortly many deliveries were carried out much easier, smoothing various problems that had gone on for time.

In the highest reaches of the city, in a particular segment where eighteen spires met in an proportionately thin bridge that was still larger than sixteen trains bound together, a pair of business rivals met, having plotting to assassinate one another. They caught the other by surprise, shocked they had planned this personal hit at the exact same time, and laughed about it, promising to never tell; their associates would scorn them for being so old-fashioned and inefficient as to personally carry out an assassination. They had a pleasant luncheon, chatting about the old days before the world had become smaller and it would have been honorable to slay another like this. They agreed to try again in a while, and left cracking jokes to the other how definitely one of them was going to get his company stolen after he died. Unfortunately, their building had been slated for demolishment, and when the demolition brigade sliced the towers up and blew the remnants up, the businessmen suffered a terrible case of explosions. Their companies had their military forces taken, and were tithed to Wuya's war effort as per the Glukkon's agreement with her secret multiversal empire.

On a particular dome-shaped office buildings that saw to the individual records of a subsidiary census organization that tried to determine who was coming in on the tourist ships these days and therefore suffered some crippling overwork status, an ordinary clerk who never really made friends or went out of his way to bother anyone listened intently to the gentle whispers he had heard since he was a small child from the beeps and whistles of sufficiently complicated electro-magnetic machinery. He thought of the great skies of metal and construction over the penthouse he rented from the company, the result of billions of engineers and architects planning in harmony, and thought of how it could be so much better. That night, he quietly took an application to enlist with the engineer corps of the 53rd Tertiary Maintenance Crew. They took him in, badly needing more men, and he resigned from his old job without any trouble. His regular visits to a psychiatrist ceased shortly thereafter, his troubled mind happy at last with the machines he loved so much, and the psychiatrist was overjoyed to have his immense workload relaxed a bit. The rate of catastrophic mechanical breakdowns decreased modestly.

Hundreds of lives changed by these events, and thousands more effected by the ripples that those lives made as they went on, dead or otherwise. Billions still would be effected by them, though by this point the social ripples had become so small they had no apparent relation to what had created them.

The interaction of billions of people was a tricky thing to understand and watch. It just seemed like things happened all at once, and had no real bearing with each other.

But then water looked still too, and shifted continually by influences outside and inside. So it was with the city.

The city looked like it was the same; expanding at the edges, parts of it going crazy all at the same time as veneer of civility on the surface, and all the while people lived their lives; some at the expense of others and still others simply making their way trying not to make themselves noticed. The city's sameness was the product of unmarked billions of people living and fighting and hoping and accomplishing and failing, all wound together into a vast web of events.

Great beings perceived this web, and saw the trends suggested by it, and unknown to those of the city, in the territories of the Mudokon tribes, an ancient oracle and wise being known only as the Almighty Raisin observed them and saw where they might most likely be going.

He wasn't awake enough to say anything about it, but his sleep seemed more distressed than usual.

---

"Eco?" Calvin said, several weeks since their arrival to Oddworld. "As in the prefix 'eco' relating to the environment?"

He grunted a bit as he said this; climbing down a ladder in a currently unused shaft (only a few months ago a secret entryway into a factory of uncertain purpose, built there by its owners before it had gone under) with a dozen feet below you and a hundred feet above was more than a little nerve-wracking. He had been… not born in a place like this, or at least that was what his parents had told him (and all the genealogical information he had been able to dig up over the years confirmed it), but he had spent the formative years of his childhood in a very dangerous hive-city even bigger than Lulu's Fortune that had covered an entire continent. In happier days, he had spent many months studying ancient secrets of machining and technological sciences in glorious Nocturne and with the blessing of the Salamanders, which was a fonder memory.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide makes note that the Salamanders are one of the original founding Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes, the gene-engineered super-soldiers that had been the Imperium of Man's most well-known weapons. They survived the ages since the Imperium's dissolution building a small but well-cared for mini-empire of planets with their home-world Nocturne at the head, some of the last remnants of the original Adeptus Mechanicus and Iron Hands Chapter preserved in their ranks, ensuring that they retained the vast store of scientific expertise that would be the envy of many. While the Salamanders had been few during the Imperium's time, ironically they had become quite populous since the Imperium gracefully fell, and today where among the most powerful allies of the Brighthammer Kingdom; while their brethren in the Ultramarines and Space Wolves are equally or even more populous, they lack the direct connection to the Kingdom that the Salamanders enjoy; the Ultramarines and their people live on a frighteningly gargantuan flotilla of ships with a population equal to many worlds and ignore the Brighthammer Kingdom for the most part, while the Space Wolves inhabit their old home of Fenris and many world in the former Imperium's strongholds; while they are considered allies of the Comic Kingdom, they are distant at best, but notably gave asylum to the survivors of the abhuman purges during the Brighthammer Kingdom's precedeccesor, most particularly the Kotirrim tribe who settled upon Fenris itself. Why this did this, given the Imperium's notoriously xenophobic attitude towards non-humans, has yet to be elaborated, though Leman Russ, Primarch of the Space Wolves, did once remark favorably on the Kotirrim's resilience.)

"Not quite," said the asari (who was named Gala) who lived in the Returner's new base, much further down the ladder than him. "You two get a move on! Best to be out of sight if anyone comes snooping!"

"All right, all right," Calvin said, moving down quick as a bug on the wall.

Above him climbed Zuko, grunting and mumbling to himself. He alone had come with Calvin on this little expedition that Gala had requested. Zuko, again, was a bit of a bodyguard for the two, since even though Calvin was almost certainly one of the crew's biggest powerhouses (as long as he had his wonders on hand), Zuko was simply a better fighter. "Stupid whiny ingrates," Zuko muttered, quietly so they couldn't hear, shimmying down the ladder and looking more than a little disturbed by how easy Calvin made it look. "Who can stand living at heights like this?! One slip and you're dead!"

"You can't have a giant factory and not have giant shafts," Gala said scoldingly. "It goes against the city construction guidelines!"

Calvin giggled immaturely. "Heh. You said 'giant shafts'."

Both Calvin and Gala giggled at that. Zuko rolled his eyes. The three of them descended down, deeper into the dark.

A short time later, though, not even halfway down the shaft, it was not so dark, and there was light blinking from small glass-orbs housed in the sides of the walls, a pleasant blue shade of electric-bright radiance that seemed almost alive. The lights illuminated a sturdy grating places into the middle of the shaft, bolting into the walls and strong enough to support their weight. "Come along," Gala said, dismounting the ladder and walking onto it. It clanged slightly with her metal-toed shoes, one step a bit behind the other, the limp she walked with making an almost musical pace. Calvin hopped off and followed her closely, keenly trying not to stare at her but having a great deal of trouble not; she was a good deal larger than him, and her rounded backside was roughly eye-level with him. She glanced back at him, smiling, and clapped him on the show as he got close enough. She gave him a warm smile, and behind them Zuko crashed into the grating on his back. "Ow!" He said as Calvin and Gala whirled around in fright. "I told you. One slip. Ow."

They helped him up, and the Firebender muttering ominous imprecations at lousy design sense, they continued on into a door smashed right through the side of the shaft (they were deep enough, now, to be within the factory's walls) and a framework around a sealed door bolted in. This door was locked into place, heavy pneumatic pumps bulging out of the frame, and an unobtrusive camera looked down at them, blinking slightly as it moved.

Gala waved at the camera and placed her hand on a print-reading terminal right next to the door. It analyzed her handprint, and chirped its acceptance. The pumps powered on, and the door slowly opened up, dislodging bits of rust that had acclimated from lack of care and the occasional acid rain shower.

The three of them hurried through it and into a twisting hallway built at jerky angles and odd bits of metal roughly hammered into place over a shoddy framework that had clearly been done at a very rushed pace. It moved downward, onto a more well-maintained elevator platform, set slightly at an angle on a rough but sloping surface. It seemed a little too big; Calvin winced at the deep gouges in the walls were the platform had pushed itself through.

In the darkness, the wheeled shape of large bulky security mechs bowed and retreated, hiding in the darkness to attack foes who might sneak in here. "Don't worry about them!" Gala squeaked as Zuko gave the glowing optics in the darkness a concerned look. "They're just here to make sure that anyone we don't want done here doesn't try to break in!"

"Huh," Zuko said as the three of them walked onto the platform. "Who don't you want down here?"

"You know… bad guys. Arbitrators, regular mercenaries hired by the corporations and cartels, Vykker press-gangs looking for people to drag into their chop-shops, Clukkers peeking around where they don't belong, spies of all kings, enforcers and other nasty trash like that… people that, like, jerks. Bad guys!"

"Uh huh." Zuko scowled as Gala pulled the switch mounting a waist-level stand, wires hanging out from a jury-rigged casing. "And what do happens when perfectly innocent people who don't know what's done here just happen to peek in?"

Gala stared down at the switch as the elevator powered on, and they grinded on downwards to the dimmer darkness awaiting them. She bit her lips, head lowered, and her shoulders slumped in defeat.

Zuko scowled worse, her silence telling a great deal. Calvin piped up, "And detailing things by species is kinda, well, speciesist."

"You guys are mean," Gala whined.

"And you're a coward," Zuko said curtly.

"Am not!" Gala frowned at him. "I'm bringing you guys down here to show you something I know you'll like a lot, you could act a little grateful."

Zuko said, "Well, you're growing a spine there, so that's a start." Gala pouted.

It was a long way down into the factory, but even so, it didn't seem to take very long. Soon, more lights beckoned overhead on a much larger space, and the darkness seemed deeper precisely because of the illumination. Their platform docked into place, sliding into a slot mounting upon a set of bolted-together frameworks that creaked ominously as the platform stopped. There was more evidence of low-budget remodeling here; there was a wall right in front of them, but it had been knocked out, and another sealed door like the one Gala had unlocked was in front of them. Spider-like robots crouched on the ceiling, bodies tensed for action but relaxing when they detected no intruders. Large back-mounted guns retreated into their bodies, and Zuko gave Gala a look when he saw that they were assault rifles and plasma cannons. Calvin looked at them thoughtfully and he said, "Those are some pretty quality robots and armaments you have here. What kind of set-up do you have going on that you can afford to get ammunition for that kind of stuff?"

Gala brightened. "You'll see," She said noncommittally.

She passed through the door. "This is weird," Calvin muttered. "This is… like revolution stuff!"

Zuko, though he had a distaste for the notion of revolution, said nothing about it. Instead he said, "You're the one he wanted to come down here."

"She wanted me to come down here," Calvin corrected.

Despite himself, Zuko laughed. "First that Jord on Darvhog's crew, now this Gala woman. What's up with you and older women?"

Calvin preened. "Natural charm."

Zuko thought of Hobbes and said, "Must run in the family."

Calvin and Zuko passed through the door. They quickly caught up with Gala, since she had waited for them, and soon determined that they were now in the actual factory itself. The lights were brighter, perhaps repaired or replaced, and the walls seemed cleaner and scrubbed down; they walked through what Calvin supposed was a makeshift lobby, several men and women of various species waiting for them. In this low-slung space, filled with desks and computer terminals displaying all manner of various maps and agendas and calculations of probable events in the near-future, there were control panels mounted under screens displaying the doors and elevator they had entered through. A play-back as one of the security guys here verified that it was the guys who'd come with Gala (because you couldn't be too careful) confirmed that they had been watching through the cameras, the screen showing Zuko and Calvin coming down with Gala. Near this was a computer system that issued instructions and situational responses to the robot guardians. Calvin judged it inefficient; if you had to give orders to the robots all the time just for them to do their job, they wouldn't be too useful.

Calvin thought of Zim, back at their new headquarters (and inexplicably none too pleased to be appointed the new landlord and boss of the neighborhood, though he'd arranged for payments and comfortable living conditions; he and Calvin used their superior technological skills to upgrade all the mechanical devices around there, from the life support systems and food recycling mechanisms to the entertainment network reception quality of in the area, and now everyone there enjoyed free food, electricity and running water, and all the entertainment videos and simulations they could want). He thought of the slightly shorter Irken hunched over those robots when he had time to spare, pulling out components and replacing them, getting Calvin to transmute plates of prototype metal exoskeletons based on what he'd learned from the pieces of the Umbra Eternis, doing small tests with experimental groups of synthetic muscles to test their strength, running simulations to test stimuli reaction and civilian protection protocols he had programmed for a basic AI, and though these robots downright sucked compared to what he was used to, Zim said he was building them into something better with his knowledge of robotics and mechanisms.

Darvhog had soldiers, undying zombie-mummy monsters. Zim had told Calvin that it would be good to have their own soldiers. Metal was stronger than dead flesh, technology more powerful than magic (or so Zim seemed to believe, and Calvin wasn't interested in telling him that arcane magic was scientifically quantifiable, it was just considered the softest form of physics around), and their metal soldiers would beat anything Darvhog had.

When they'd left, Zim had been building a little perpetual energy generation reactor based on what their ship used, what scant information they had found called a 'spiral engine', so named because the mysterious energy it powered and ran on was called spiral energy. Even before Zim had finished it as Calvin walked out, it had already been glowing with a light like viridian lightning, shining with a faint pulse like the beat of a newborn heart. One of the robots, or at least the unfinished mess of the very beginnings of a prototype Zim had made of one of the robots, already had a cavity to receive this engine and see if it could be powered by it. Experimentation, Calvin had agreed, was the heart of scientific endeavor.

Here and now, one of the people here stepped forward. "Gala, what's this about?" asked a tetramand woman; a nearly eight foot tall humanoid, skin red and leather with spikes in places, bulking with muscle over her broad body and four arms crossed over each other, her two vertically stacked pairs of eyes (four eyes in all) blinked at Zuko and Calvin. "You find some new recruits? Did we already do a background check-"

"No need, no need!" Gala said quickly as more people crowded around, suspicious and a little too happy to carry their big guns threateningly. "These guys are from out of town. Tourists! They kicked out the gang that was making my neighborhood a mess…"

Gala explained the situation to her friends. When she was done, they calmed down… slightly. "So, they wanna join?" The tetramand asked.

"Join what?" Calvin asked blankly.

"Nothing important," Gala said quickly.

"You live in an abandoned factory you've outfitted yourself to be protected," Zuko said, polite enough not to say that they were doing a lousy job at those things. "So it's important."

"Well, yeah, but… we have something here that I really wanted you to see! Not, uh, join us… unless you want too…"

The asari was sly, and almost hopeful. Calvin gave a noncommittal grunt. "We'll see," He said.

"Oh," She said sadly.

"You brought a bunch of tourists in here?" said a froglike humanoid. "Kinda dangerous… For what?"

"I wanted to show them the Eco," Gala explained as Calvin perked up. "Our Eco stores. The little guy is a scientist, and he wanted to know more, so-"

"Ah, it's a science thing!" The others relaxed.

"And also they might want to help make things better here," Gala added. "Help our goals. Make things work for us. Work with us. Or join us… wink, wink. Nudge, nudge."

"Ah," they said. Zuko and Calvin facepalmed.

The tetramand lady hit a button and a door in the back whistled open. Calvin wondered what sort of room this place had been before, and supposed it had been a terminal station. He had little time to ponder this, Gala hurrying them through the door.

They passed through several hallways and moved through a lot of rooms; Calvin and Zuko got brief sightings of firing ranges filled with people practicing their marksmanship, a reconfigured office now housing barracks filled with sleeping people who looked like soldiers, vehicle parts being moved around and shipped for assembly at a different location, a conference room where dirty children listened to a Mudokon preach eagerly about the horrors of the Glukkon Hegemony, and so on. There was a lot of things to be seen, and Zuko got the impression that they were seeing only the smallest fraction of something very big indeed. Gala made a point of getting them moving in a hurry and not talking to anyone, but they saw more than they needed to.

When they came to the elevator, Zuko casually said, "So… your friends here are revolutionaries."

Gala jolted. "What?! No… no they're not! Nuh uh!"

"Yeah-huh," Calvin said.

She hesitated, smiling awkwardly.

"You wanted us to see all that," Calvin said. "Why?"

"…Okay, this is a revolutionary place," she admitted. "But.. don't say revolutionary. It's such an ugly word. We're not throwing down the old hierarchy, we… um, I don't know what we're doing then, but it's not bad. We're not bad guys like the Glukkon Hegemony, we can't be bad guys! And revolutionary is kind of a dirty word."

Zuko groaned. "What are you trying to get us into!?"

"You've seen how bad it is here," she persisted. "Someone ought to do something. Why don't you guys help!? We could always use more soldiers-"

"Not now," Zuko snapped. "We can't… we can't make that decision for all our crew. Now just yet."

Gala bowed her head. "Okay," She said meekly, stepping into the elevator. Zuko and Calvin followed.

The elevator ride, Calvin noticed, was rather tense. Gala seemed nervous, like she'd tried to ask one of them out and had failed so badly that she was mortified to be in their presence.

Calvin thought that revolutions, by definition, involved getting other people killed. He felt uncomfortable about the whole thing. Zuko was silent, his expression mysterious.

Finally the elevator came to a stop, a good distance down, and they stepped out into a much larger space, the sense of discomfort fading. Zuko looked around while Calvin grinned at the sight of it; this area might have been a factory floor ages ago, and while much of the machinery was still in use and producing (massive forges smelting scrap metal into more useful forms, mechanized assemblers designing robots and piecing them together as programmers uploaded instructions to them, smaller workshops making scores of ammunition in automated processes, and so on), most of the space had been converted to a sort of supply depot. They saw heavier vehicles then the ones they had taken from the Newbie District Face-Stompers gang; small urban tanks, flying carriers, all manner of modular grenade machine-guns and rapid-fire artillery.

"Yep, revolution," Calvin and Zuko agreed. Gala said, "Hush, you two!"

She urged them over to a different area, where massive tankers sat isolated and protected from potential accidents. The tanks were gigantic, the size of aquariums fit for extremely large animals, and were filled with a glowing fluid, color-coded in green and red and yellow and blue. "Here we are!" She said proudly.

"…For what?" Zuko said, looking blank. The light from the tankers, seemingly generated from inside them, played over him in a marvelous radiance. The yellow flickered around his hands, glowing against his skin like flame.

Gala indicated the tankers. "That's what I wanted to show you." She grinned in excitement. "That's Eco!"

Calvin took a step forward, his eyes wide. Slowly, he walked to the closest tanker, which contained an entire lake's worth of this red fluid, this 'Eco'. And yet, fluid didn't seem the right word… "It's like my phlogiston," he said, palm pressed against the glass viewing-window. "Not quite liquid, not quite a solid, and certainly not like gas or plasma! It's like tangible energy, like what people mean when they say 'pure energy'!"

The red Eco shifted inside the tanker at his presence, moving in vibrant and excitable whorls. Rays of ruby and crimson and pink moved over him, painting his skin shades of red, and his skin tingled. It was moving like it was almost alive.

"What is it?" Calvin said.

Gala put her own hand on a tanker of green Eco. It flurried around, currents moving thickly and quick, like the after-images of wooden branches moving at lightning speed. It looked like a gentle thing, soft and warm, mostly a light green but darkened towards an almost primal shade of viridian at the inner folds of the currents. Green light shone from it, like colored light did from the rest of the eco, and for a moment Calvin fancied that eco looked like light made material. "It's an elemental power source from the worlds created by mysterious precursors called… uh, the Precursors. I don't suppose you've met any people from that world? The one world I know about, the people from there are elves… human-like, but with really long and dorky ears?" Calvin and Zuko shook their heads. "Oh well. Anyway, these Precursors seeded their worlds with Eco, to create life and terraform their worlds. All their technology was based around it!"

Calvin made an 'ooh!' noise as Zuko raised an eyebrow. "This stuff was used to terraform planets?!"

"Yeah! I dunno how, though. The elves who live there now, they don't know how to use it for stuff as big as that. They can use it to power machines though, generate electricity, mutate things in good ways… all kinds of cool stuff. Almost like magic, even. Some people can channel it, too."

"Neat! But why show me?"

She gave him a fascinated look. "You're a scientist, you tell me! I thought about you, and the experiments you're doing with powering those robots you and your buddy Zim are making, and I was wondering what you might do with some Eco."

Calvin stared up at the colored light. It shifted lazily in front of him. He smacked his lips dryly, and after a moment he said, "What can Eco do?"

"It depends on the color." She indicated the red Calvin was one. "Red is… uh, let's see… the Eco of strength. Sort of an elemental and technological representation of might. People make ammunition for really powerful firearms, and the very best augmentations use red Eco in the construction or power source. Sometimes you mix it with other Eco, and if you do it right, it gives a big kick. And injected into living things, it makes them… uh, strong and tough. Really, really strong."

Calvin considered this, wondered if it had any relation to the legendary Crimson Bands of Cyttorak he'd heard about (since they were both red and involved strength) which supposedly held the power of a juggernaut, and decided that it was an interesting hypothesis. "How can you make something like 'strength' an element?" Zuko asked. Gala shrugged, she didn't know.

Gala then turned to the emerald glory behind her. "Green Eco," she said, her blue skin painted more nature-themed shades by the green light. "It's associated with growing things, healing and regeneration; I'd say it's appropriate to say that it's the energy of life itself. It's one of the most common forms of Eco, so a lot of people believe that it was specifically implanted by the Precursors to encourage the evolution of sapient life. Animals that live around it do tend to be… different. Smarter, even. I once saw a bunch of robots around a pool of it, and it fixed their bodies up. It was pretty cool."

"So what does it do?" Calvin asked.

"It regenerates, mainly. Healing and stuff; just immersing yourself in it works, but medicine made from it is very common. It doesn't reverse mutations to your body, and if you have augmentations or mechanical parts it seems to treat them as natural parts of your body. We don't know why or how, but it does. It's also really good for adding into alloys; it strengthens materials quite a lot. It's a very versatile fuel source too, and it can be modified to induce benign alterations to the body."

"Keep going, this is really cool!" Calvin urged.

Gala indicated the next one. "Blue Eco," she said, and it looked like liquid lightning more than anything else, erratic and quick-shifting around itself. "The elemental energy of motion, I think. One of the very best fuels known to the multiverse-"

"What, the multiverse? Seriously?!"

"The Precursors were very good at things," she said meekly. "Blue Eco makes an extremely potent fuel; it's easy to use it to generate electricity or whatever you use to power things, and you can use a huge amount of power and hardly use up any Blue Eco at all, it's very energy-efficient. And it relates to motion, like I said; alloying it into things makes them move faster, more agile, and makes them lighter. Blue Eco is really popular for treating other forms of Eco too, very adaptable stuff."

"And the last one?"

"Yellow Eco," Gala said, pointing to it. It looked almost flame-like, and was moving in Zuko's general direction. He stopped moving, and it rolled away; Gala didn't seem to realize it, but Zuko had been unintentionally Firebending it somehow. He raised an eyebrow at the implications. "Yellow's the element of power-"

"I thought red was power," Zuko interrupted.

"What? No, red is strength. Physical stuff, this is more like… uh, powerful reactions, or things going boom. Sometimes it acts a bit like fire, but with less burning-" Zuko shied away from it, looking anxious. "And it's the most popular form of ammunition I ever heard of. Extremely efficient, and powerful. Plus it makes a very good fuel for vehicles, if you don't mind it going really fast. Red actually makes it go faster, but then it gets sort of rocket-ish."

"'Da red uns go fasta'," Calvin mused thoughtfully.

"What?"

"Nothing." Calvin looked impressed. "So… how exactly is this stuff used up?"

"Mostly through harnessing it or, hah, channeling it, really." Gala shrugged. "I don't really know the basics, but most of the technology they use to direct it sort of involves plugging in some Eco and manipulating it in some fashion. I've seen people do some seriously crazy stuff with it. It really does seem like a magical source of power sometimes."

"Nah, more like applied science, I should think. Which is much more interesting." Calvin returned his attention to the Eco. "Any other varieties?"

Gala paused for a moment. "Well… there's Light Eco, but I never have seen it in my life. It's extremely rare; supposedly all the true colors of Eco are used to generate it, so it has qualities from all of them, but no one has seen any in my experience. And there's…" Again she paused. "There's Dark Eco."

She shuddered.

"What's Dark Eco?" Zuko asked.

"You just… ooh, you don't even want to know. It… does stuff to people. If they're lucky enough not to be killed. It's not normal Eco, I don't know why the Precursors made it. It's used for power and weapons, but we don't use it down here, it's just way too dangerous. And you don't even want to know what happens to people who get mutated by it. If they're not lucky enough to die first…" she shuddered again. "I heard of a guy who actually channels the stuff-"

She stopped. "What about him?" Calvin said.

Gala started to talk, and shook her head. "I can't… no, I really shouldn't tell you." Calvin and Zuko tried to press her, but she refused to elaborate.

Zuko shrugged. "Well, all right then."

Gala brightened up, marginally. "…Thanks."

"So, where can we get a hold of this Eco stuff?" Calvin said.

Eager to change the subject, Gala started telling them about all the different markets they could go to.

Even afterwards, though, and as they bid farewell to the revolutionaries and hoped they wouldn't have to deal with them again, Calvin wondered what exactly happened to someone touched by Dark Eco.

---

Jak and Daxter, formerly of the village of Sandover and unwilling inhabitant of various diabolical laboratories where sacred eco-science had been twisted to make his life extremely complicated (for Jak) or just unlucky enough to drop into a pool of Dark Eco and somehow survive as a mutant ottsel (for Daxter), sat on top of a gigantic running from a liquid food producing factory to a shipping complex some eight fathoms below where it would be delivered to various shelters offering a food queue, as established by census takers. Due to the enormous flux of arrivals, tourists, and the constant death toll, there was either a surplus or lack of food, and it changed with every day.

That the factory was operated by slaves rather spoiled the idea for them, as did the audial hellscape screaming up from the city like the labored breathing of some multifaceted monster they were stuck inside.

Jak looked down the vast shaft the pipe ran through; the space was made of yet more massive buildings built right next to each other, and a space like a rickety canyon was open before him.

Metal grinded to them, and Jak leaped into the air into that canyon. An elevator was coming up, and he jumped right into it as it came, his cloak fluttering magnificently as he lighted atop it, waiting for the blur of metal around him to slow down. He jumped off before it docked into a threateningly flat space above, and landed in the middle of a crowd that was paying no attention, and hurried into a crowded marketplace established right in the middle of a wide space. Slightly upraised blocky constructions (air filters, he guessed, from the thickly pumping vents and visible windows of smoke being processed) formed a basic boundary around it, while sixteen catwalks of varying size mashed together into a ceiling overhead. Jak walked into this without fear of being recognized, and no one harassed him; he was in the dark depths, where few dared to go but many people had to live.

In this darkness where no light was natural, Jak walked with people who honestly wouldn't have batted an eye if he changed right here and now. They'd be reasonably cautious, but they wouldn't terrified like normal.

His cloak swished in the temperature-controlling cold air that was moving like a strong wind through this relatively isolated district; a short distance from here, at least a few streets over, there was a machine the size of a building, doing the double work of purifying the air thickened with industrial by-products and keeping things comfortably cool so that people would not die of heat exhaustion from the excess heat shunted off down here and up from more industrial machinery below. A lot of people got food and shelter here by working on that machine, and Jak understood that arrangements like this were common throughout this city and the countless others like it in Oddworld. Maybe it had been different before the Glukkons had finally seized control; it wasn't a question that interested him much.

Jak passed by a ramshackle booth filled up with automated cooking machines, piping raw product through pipes and various machines in a stage-by-stage refining process until what came out of a well-maintained refreshment engine was a piping hot beverage that while bland was filling and energizing. He passed the wary Glukkon manning the booth a few tokens worth about several dozen credits each (taken from the purse of a dead patrolman who had come too close to one of Jak's hiding places), and the Glukkon handed him a disposable cup full of the beverage (Jak thought it was called 'Nutri-Gulp', a sign that the Glukkon regime was using some lousy PR guys), giving it to him in such a way that he didn't have to touch Jak.

Jak gulped it down without any complaints, though it did warm him up some in the cold. He wondered grimly why these people didn't just give up trying to make a living and throw themselves at their oppressors in a final blaze of glory. It felt more attractive than this.

The idea that maybe they liked it, even if it was just because they had never known any other way of life besides scrabbling under the great machines that gave them life and avoided the notice of the corporations that frequently got them killed for minor profits, was a strange one to Jak.

"Hey, buddy," Daxter said, perched on Jak's shoulder under his cloak and huddling for warmth even through the heavy clothing he'd cobbled together for himself. "Got some of that for your old pal?"

"Sure, have the rest," Jak said, smirking at him and passing it over. "Don't blame me if you choke on the lousiness, though."

"Hey!" the Glukkon manning the Nutri-Gulp booth said. Jak whistled and pretended he hadn't heard.

Daxter took it, blowing on it even though the heat was a lot more welcome with the frigid temperatures of this area, and Jak adopted a swinging and steady pace, a rolling stride with his legs held stiffly above the knee. It was easy to slip into without thinking about it, and it let Daxter drink his Nutri-Gulp in peace without splashing it over himself by an unwary step from his friend.

"Yeah, that does an ottsel good," Daxter said, shaking himself around and grinning at having something hot in his belly. "You think our, uh, buddies here in the city could throw us some food, but nooo…"

By 'buddies', of course, Daxter meant the various forces here in town fighting against the Glukkon regime; revolutionaries, socialists, republic-supporters, Mudokon sympathizers, even foreign infiltrators intending to take over this world, and more; all of them people that opposed the Glukkon regime that the mega-corps embodied in one respect or another, and if they weren't constantly bickering and warring with each other under the pretext of gang wars, maybe they could have done something already. They certainly knew that Jak, no friend of the Glukkons, was an ally, but they certainly didn't want to keep him around unless he was killing one of their mutual enemies. And they thought Daxter was annoying (the occasional friend or good-hearted acquaintance in these groups not withstanding).

"Can't be helped," Jak grunted, choosing his words carefully. Even if he hadn't been found or suspected so far, he wanted to be careful. They didn't dare speak of their purposes directly, because someone might be overhearing them. "We're not a part of their group except as a resource. They don't owe us anything."

Daxter snarled. "Yeah, we're not a part of anything. Are we?"

Jak laughed sourly, thinking for a second how alone he felt even in a crowd so thick he had to push through for every other step. Shrouded in cloaks and equipment though they were, he saw them well enough to know that there wasn't a single elf here… or at least, any elves of his kind, like Daxter had been.

Even surrounded suffocatingly by other people, he felt alone.

He shrugged his shoulders and tried not to look at the rows of tents and crude shelters built right into the walls, entire family living in spaces not big enough for two. It was painful, seeing people live like this, and it wanted to make him force someone to pay for it-

His nails itched. His teeth ached, and his blood ran hot with a power that could transfigure him in moments. Jak forced it back by inches and bits, and every people moved anxiously around him even if they had no idea why.

The moment passed. Daxter totally ignored it, in no danger, and tossed his cup away into the crowd. It bounced off someone's head and Jak caught it as it rebounded. "Come on," he said. "Dax… littering? Seriously? That's low, even for this town."

Jak waded through a thick layer of discarded wrappers and junk food packages to deposit the cup into a recycling engine, various containers at its base ready to receive it and mold it into new and clean degradable plastic (not for environmental reasons, but because plastic that degraded was plastic you needed to buy things to replace). A voice to his side, corroded to barely above a whisper and ear-gratingly raspy for all of that, said, "Ah, socially conscious tourists. Don't see that often these days! Heh, heh!"

Daxter flinched. Jak resisted the impulse to cover his own ears. He turned aside, cloak brushing his shins as he stood still. Sitting on the steps of a down aircraft of uncertain origin (modified into a coffeehouse, by the sign outside and the chatty patrons within) was a… well, Jak had no idea what it was. It was roughly his size, if a lot broader, wrapped in layers of protective garments and cleansing equipment that seemed an extension of multiple out-moded augmentations. A cloak wrapped the speaker's body, arching up in the back at what was either a small hunchback or a fault power coil built into his spine. His body angled weirdly up at Jak in that sitting position; it gave the impression that parts of his body were sitting down and partly standing as well, but weren't in synch with each other.

Whatever he was, he definitely had a set of lips; fleshy, a bit protruding and almost reptilian, and the bionic eyes sat on either side of his head to face sideways, though by a trick of engineering they were capable of moving in different directions simultaneously. Presently, one was looking at Jak and Daxter and the other rolled around for threats. These lips slid over sharp monster's teeth in a surprisingly friendly grin. Jak said, "And who just sits around here and comments on random tourists?"

"We're not tourists!" Daxter said.

"Eh, close enough," Jak said.

The whatever-he-was chuckled with a noise like metal power scraping on sandpaper. "Just an immigrant that takes an interest." He gave Jak a slight smirk that suggested that he somehow knew exactly what Jak was doing here, and what his purpose of. "So, you looking for someone? I hang around here all day, know all the people."

"…Yeah," Jak said. He reached into his cloak and pulled out a picture. He consulted it and said, "Your name wouldn't happen to be… Urdnot Trog, would it?"

The fellow grinned. "Sure am!"

He rose up. Jak looked up as the alien loomed; he recognized him now as a heavily augmented krogan; no doubt there was reptilian skin under all that garb, though his species' legendarily strong muscles had gone to waste from malnutrition and his bulk kept intact by synthetic bundles of muscle fibers directly implanted into him. No doubt the hump on his back was a both a hunchback and a power coil generating power for his cybernetic mechanisms.

Jak flipped the picture around, showing it to Trog, before he returned it to his hiding place in his cloak. It was the face of a krogan, though one with much less augmentations then Trog had. "You don't look a lot like your picture."

The bulky krogan gave a shrug, mechanisms whirring around. "Bit out of date. Took a lot of hits a while ago, needed some emergency work." He shook his head and lifted his neck up; on his throat was a rattling voice synthesizer, rusted in places and vital components hanging loose or about to do the same. Now Jak understood why his voice sounded so terrible.

"Geez, buddy," Daxter said. "Fix your voice box or something. You sound awful!"

Urdnot Trog gave a laugh, that sounded like slime mulching up and producing swamp gas. Clearly unwilling to speak more than he had to, he gave another careless grin and a shrug, as if to say that if it was a choice between spending his extremely limited funds on food or fixing a voice synthesizer – funds he wouldn't see again in a while – he really didn't have much choice.

"So," Trog said after a moment. Both eyes snapped to Jak thoughtfully. "I know who you are."

"Yeah?" Jak said. He raised an eyebrow challengingly. "That bother you?"

"Nah."

"…You gonna report me?"

"'Course not."

Jak leaned in, and after he nodded, he said, "I was told to talk to you for information."

Trog paused a moment and looked around – his bionic eyes no doubt scanning for troublesome signatures or analyzing everyone nearby for body language and physical tells to see if they were listening in as spies or informants to his enemies – before he tapped the wall next to him. On it, nearly buried in the usual graffiti that rendered the original color of most surfaces in these parts of the city indecipherable, there was a small image of many abstract lines and whorls all coming together to make the shape of a humanoid figure standing upon a thick line. Jak had seen this insignia quite a few times in the graffiti, all in the places where his temporary allies claimed territory.

Trog then leaned his head up, to a sunken patch of preserved flesh below his voice box. He extended a small flashlight from his belt, and the light that came from it was invisible to Jak's eyes. Where it shone, though, a small tattoo appeared on Trog in the spot he indicated, a perfect match for the insignia. "On the level," Trog said, with an over-obvious wink.

"…That's what the marking means?" Jak said incredulously, giving it another look. The figure was, indeed, standing on a level surface.

"Bit of a way to go for a joke, or take it seriously," Trog conceded, clicking off the flashlight and the tattoo vanished. His credentials established (extremely loosely, but such was the practice of revolutionaries and guerillas all over the multiverse, and they had to use who they had), he stood up, as if to go for a walk. He gave Jak a look and muttered under his breath to Jak, "Wait a few minutes and follow me. Pretend you have nothing to do with me. Take the other way around, the path loops."

"Whatever," Jak growled, loud enough for several people to notice the overt hostility in his voice and scurried away. Even Trog look startled. "Just shove off, metal-head."

Trog looked like he had half a mind to pummel Jak for that; even if he didn't understand that reference, Jak put a lot of venom into the last word. Under Jak's cloak, just barely visible, Daxter winked at Trog. He stopped, his face slipping into surprised interest for a moment, and then he moved back into character as just another pedestrian. "Watch it, elf," he growled, his voice serving him quite well for acting menacing. He shoved through the crowd, knocking the unwary aside and the rest moving out of his way to create a wide but brief tunnel in the crowd for him to move through. He walked down a set of stairs, into a wide rounding platform moving around the rooftop in a series of vertical loops; sheets of metal were strung up from this, built on the back of the rooftop's building, and while not sturdy formed a decent series of alleyway-type shapes. Trog disappeared into this.

Jak sat down at a nearby bench, squatting down and looking for all the world like an angry young man who was doing his hardest to control his temper before he did something stupid. (Except for the look that he was angry at Urdnot Trog, this was an accurate impression.) He stared at his hands as people hurriedly returned to their business, at the thick gloves shielding his hands from the conditions of this city. He wondered dimly if the skin under the gloves was turning gray, or if the nails had turned black and were beginning to thicken into claws.

He never knew if the Dark Eco was going to come active; sometimes it came like the tide, rushing and screaming in his head, and other times it was as quiet as snow on trees, just waiting for the first thing to tip the balance to bring it all crashing down. (Jak was pretty proud of that metaphor, too.) It disturbed him, terribly.

Granted, there were other forces balancing that darkness, and with Daxter squatting on his shoulder and uttering silly insults at passerbys and watching them get into fights with the next person to them over it, it was easy to feel that light moving against the darkness. He winced, feeling the pain of that conflict, bits of his blood ripping into each other and melting inside him…

Jak endured it.

Before long, Daxter hissed into his ear that they should be going and they stumbled up, Jak looking like a man who was feeling irritated and just wanted to go back home and get away from this city. Since this was totally true, it was easy to pull off. He walked through the crowd, and without apparently realizing it people stepped around him and made way for him. Jak wondered if they subconsciously sensed his inner monster.

Daxter slapped him. "Hey! Are you thinking emo thoughts!?"

"What? No!"

"I bet you are! I can totally sense your emo!"

"No you can't!"

"WATCH ME, watch me sensing how emo you are! Does that sound creepy?"

"A little bit, yes."

"…Meh."

Jak walked down, moving the opposite way from where the krogan had gone. Sure enough, after the went on for a bit, just out of sight from the public marketplace, there was a corner covered by several sheets of metal fashioned into a crude cover. Jak walked around it, and kept going along the path. At the end of it was an large man-sized capsule, possibly a decommissioned suicide booth, sitting upon an arrangement of other discarded machines like a crude throne. Upon this was Urdnot Trog, waiting genially for Jak.

Jak walked over to him. He winced at the suicide booth. "Eh, you really sure you want your secret meeting place to be right on top of a suicide booth?" Daxter said.

"It's broken good and proper," Trog protested.

"It's a suicide booth! Kind of a bad omen, isn't it?"

"Bah, I made sure it's busted up. And besides, it's a Mark Six, straight from a parallel universe where Earth achieved high levels of technology and became part of a Neutral faction thing! That whole universe collapsed after the Heartless got in there, this thing is practically a collector's item!" He patted it, and a buzzsaw promptly jumped out, over-extended, snapped off its manipulator and went over the edge. Jak watched it clank and bounce on down until it stopped with a scream of pain.. Someone screamed, "NO, MY WHITTLING HAND! HOW WILL I TELL THE FUTURE WITH WHITTLING NOW!?"

Jak and Daxter stared at Trog. "I'll get that guy a prosthetic," Trog said quickly.

"…Right," Jak said, making sure to stay away from any suspicious parts of the suicide booth. Trog sat down, perched himself comfortably. Jak took a deep breath, steadying himself, and continued. "I was told you know the pertinent details for the people that directly deal with the highest levels of governance in this city, and more specifically… military operations."

"I know people," Trog said guardedly. "And they know other people. Things trickle down. I can't guarantee that it'll be genuine…"

Jak growled in irritation. "Figures," he muttered.

Trog coughed. "And you know… it isn't exactly easy, ferreting out information like that to our mutual friends in the 'not being evil jerkasses' business'."

"Yeah, I assumed," Jak said.

"…And giving information is how I make my money."

"Sounds like."

"…I'm asking you to pay me!"

Jak smirked. "I thought all the big revolutionary groups paid you to keep the information coming to anyone who needs to know."

Trog looked at him cagily… and then he laughed. "You're a smart one. Heh, can't blame a guy for trying!"

Jak held his hand out. "Information. Please."

"Well, let's get on with it." Trog was suddenly businesslike. "What do you need to know?"

"You know about the hyenas? The ones that showed up out of nowhere and started steamrolling over anyone who is a legitimate threat?" Trog blinked, mouth open. "I intercepted them a few days ago. They dropped all their slaves and lost a lot of loot, but they insisted on stealing supplies of something call aetherite and… you're not listening, are you?"

"Hyenas?!" Trog repeated, and slipped off the booth. "Those three… are real!? I thought people were just coming back with nasty stories! Those mercenaries I've heard about, those three hyenas with, bah, magic powers, they're real?!"

"Yeah, and they're real jerks, too," Daxter added.

"Yeah," Jak said. "They're real. Fought them."

"You fought them?!" Trog said. "But, everything I heard… those guys are monsters! You'd have to be a-"

Jak leaned in close. Just for a moment, when he exhaled, his breath was tinted with purple mist. It sparkling with violet lightning, and when it touched the ceiling, it melted through. "You'd have to be a worse monster." He laughed bitterly. "Trust me. I know."

The krogan shifted uneasily. His augmentations clicked together in his silence. Finally, his veneer of genial good humor punctured, he said, "Word has been trickling down from the bosses. The biggest of them. The representatives of the cartels that run this city and dominate the Hegemony, I hear."

"Go on…?"

"The bosses are planning something big. Something important." Trog paused, clearly thinking it could mean all the world, and he continued. "They've been commandeering factories left and right, converting them to ship production. And at the same time, they've been putting more manpower than they can afford into gathering supplies of aetherite. Stealing it from pirates, selling off huge amounts of weapons to buy smidgens off traders and geologists, putting all the big Vykkers labs on making artificial versions of without any real success… they're going a little crazy for it."

"They're making ships from aetherite?"

"Or using aetherite as a major component," Trog said. "Don't ask me, I'm not a shipwright."

"But why?" Jak asked. "What's the point?"

"Well, I'm an old hand in this business," Trog said. "I've been surviving in dumps like this since before this place was even a good notion. And I've heard from some very reliable sources that the bosses are gearing up for something big, and almost certainly the ships are a part of that plan, not the point of it."

Jak put his hand to his chin. "So… disrupt the ship-making plans, or find a way to derail it, or just use it to what I want… that would mess up whatever they're planning?"

"Mess it up, or threaten to with some good power backing you, and their whole game is smashed," Trog agreed. "Risky game, though. Here." He hanged Jak a small data-tube. "Here's all the information I have stockpiled on where all this is taking place. The factories, a list of brain lords behind the shindig… but I'll tell you, if you go after the aetherite, you're dead. They have it locked up nice and tidy somewhere no one is talking about."

"Well, it's good enough for me," Jak said. "…Thanks for your help."

"No problem. You're a nicer guy than the ones I usually get."

Jak thought of the patrolman he had killed to keep himself hidden. Daxter moved against him, and Jak shivered, thinking that years ago he wouldn't have killed anyone so casually. His stomach turned, and in an effort to think about something else, Jak said, "You mean like the ones who blew up the munitions factory south of the fifty-third slum district to slow down production and killed fifteen hundred people?"

"…Yeah," Trog said, faltering. "Like, like that."

Jak shook his head. He missed being a hero in Sandover; then, at least things had been easy. He didn't have to do things like that to stop the people he fought. He couldn't think of anything to say for a moment, and finally muttered, "Thanks," and started walking away.

"Take care of yourself," Trog said. "There's some weird stuff going around. I heard a space pirate came here with glass making secrets and he's selling the proof to secure the money rights to the patent. Taking over places, I think."

"Huh," Jak said. "That's interesting." He waved to Trog, and left without incident.

Trog waited a long time for him to leave. As soon as Jak was out of side, he let himself start shaking.

Eventually, when he felt up to it, he stood up to go back to the coffeehouse, perhaps to get some good Nutri-Gulp to calm him nerves, when a shadow fell upon him.

He looked up, shocked at the figure, who smiled benignly. He didn't say anything.

Trog stared up. "You here to kill me?" He said evenly. Trog looked around; there were no arbitrator ships, no gunners, no flying tanks, not the slightest signs of assassins anyway. That wasn't very helpful, considering you weren't supposed to see assassins.

"No," the figure said.

"…Then why are you here?"

"I hear you give information to people that are willing to buy it."

Trog frowned up at him. "…Who are you?"

The figure lowered his hood, revealing a handsome young teenage tiger-boy. "I'm Hobbes, special agent of the Comic Kingdom's elite forces, formerly of the planet Cadia and technically of Fenris but I'm not allowed there. High ranking member in way too many elite military units, and prior to all that nonsense member in good standing of the Knights of Aslan." Hobbes smiled winningly.

The Krogan was politely baffled by these titles and ranks. "…Huh," he said.

"Are you aware that your name sounds a bit like a slur used by some spacefaring people?" Hobbes said.

"Bah, yeah." Trog clicked his head. "What do you want?"

Hobbes tilted to the side; he was carrying a briefcase and he deposited it in front of Trog, nudging it to him with his foot just enough so Trog could see it clearly. Hobbes tapped it and it opened, and cushioned inside it were a little less than half a dozen different augments, freshly fabricated (by Zim himself, no less) from salvaged materials and still startlingly clean and several dozen magnitudes better than anything Trog would ever see in his life. Trog gasped, eyes wide at a pair of modular eyes with integral augmented reality sensors, a vocalization and communication (or vox, in the parlance of the Brighthammer Kingdom) unit with simplified structure a good deal cleaner than his own malfunctioning unit, a data-network jacking link to replace the one in the back of his neck that had very spotty linking these days; and more. It was like something out of a modding addict's fondest fantasy. "I've only seen some of this stuff in documentary-vids!"

Hobbes grinned, knowing he has the krogan's attention. "I'm looking for information on a space pirate named Disco Darvhog. I'm told you can help."

"…Let's talk," Trog said.

---

Now, in a small and largely unnoticed neighborhood in the Newbie District, for the people who lived there, life had been getting good.

In the weeks since the crew of the Paragon had decided on a whim to settle there until their mission on this world was done, the neighborhood had changed drastically. Gone were the battling gangs of thrill-seeking thugs and bullies, either cast out through threat of force or successfully convinced to follow the orders given to them (generally through threat of force again, or genuinely convinced that Zim's work would change their world for the better) and helped to clean up their home, and now the civilians here lived in relative peace without threat of being mugged. The machines that formed much of this area's structure and kept it habitable had been fixed or improved, and now the air was cleaner, the food production ramped up enough that they were making surplus food that could be sold for a little bit of money for this community in a joint effort.

For a team consisting of two extremely accomplished scientists, a well-versed planar traveler, and two guys that didn't know science much but certainly understood enough to do heavy-lifting, something like all that was fairly well expected. It was nearly trivial, something for them to occupy themselves with during their relatively fruitless attempts to locate Darvhog… though of late, Zim seemed more concerned with this town. If nothing else, he was prone to losing focus (as Calvin, Hobbes and Morte were coming to understand).

Their charitable endeavors had worked a change in the area; the metal was clean, the heating vents reengineered to be more effective and out of the way of anyone who might be accidentally hurt by them. Great siphons had been erected to suck the pollutants direct and process them into clean air or condense the particles of smoke into a crude material that was usable as a building block in various forms of construction. The apartment towers had been cleaned, all holes fixed up and electricity and running water free to everyone that lived there. As improving this city went, it was only a small step, but Zim thought this was sufficient proof of concept; the city was badly run, but it could be fixed.

Presently, up in the penthouse he'd been forced to inhabit, he was trying to create mechanical soldiers from the robots the Face-Stompers gang had (ineffectually) tried to use against him.

Zim's fingers worked quickly and fast, and the various technicians who happened to live in his current home base for Oddworld liked to watch him work when he didn't need them doing anything; they said they kept learning new things just watching him work, even if they had no idea what he was doing. Zim, using technical knowledge so advanced that it was nearly as ineffable to less technologically advanced societies as he considered magic to be, presumed that it wouldn't do them much good, but he still enjoyed the thought that he was teaching students in a roundabout way. Already, he had seen them tentatively produce a flying scout drone to guard the perimeter of their territory.

Zim paused in thought, one hand neatly over a hollow eye socket in the robot's head; one of four, stacked on either side of the slightly snout-like bulge on the front of its face where he had installed a crude sonic modulation system that could either allow it to speak from a selected database of words, or generate a powerful sonic weapon. Nothing as effective as he would have liked, not having access to military-grade hardware, though.

He considered it odd that he actually had a territory. The streets and layers directly adjacent to this apartment complex, both up and down and steadily expanding as they expelled gangs with force or coerced them into working for them (and Zim preferred the latter, he liked having muscle to do what he told him to), and as they went they had gone to work replacing the faulty or inefficient mechanisms of this city. Now, places that had been scrambling for power every day enjoyed running hot water, electricity, they didn't need to fear being mugged just as a natural course of things and actually felt safe. And their territory kept expanding.

With the heavy-hitters that now worked for them, Zim hardly needed to worry about keeping it stable. A message of 'don't be a jerk or I'll blow you up' tended to
work well on the gangsters around here, and they spread the message nicely.

While totally unrelated to his own mission here (both finding more equipment to locate Gir and retrieving Darvhog to amend Zim's errors in unleashed him), it was nice to improve the lot of people in this city. But there was still something wrong there, it seemed inefficient just fixing things bit by bit. It didn't deal with the source of the problem. He wasn't quite sure who he needed to blow up to fix this world's problems, but he suspected that it wasn't anything as simple as that. This world had more engrained flaws. There needed to be a bigger fire to purge the impurities that had caused such terrible things as this city's cruel order.

Musing on these things, Zim inserted an optical sensor into the eye socket. It clicked into the appropriate nerve analogues, sliding neatly into place and holding firm. Zim stopped away and gave it a hearty smack, hurting his hand a bit. The eye didn't jiggle or move out of place, and he was satisfied that it was stable.

Zim hopped off the robot, and as high as it stood, he had a bit of a distance to the floor. "Nice work," Calvin said from behind an array of equipment; a computer terminal and several mechadendrites tipped with soldering and bolting equipment. Zim nodded, stepping back to admire the results.

Originally, they had been the mindless robots the gangsters had used upon them; having realized their potential, Zim and Calvin had been extensively modifying them in their off time. The armor had been stripped away and the inner mechanisms rearranged for greater efficiency while additional weapons and more synthetic musculature had been installed. They altered the robots entire structure, moving more of their overall mass and vital points into the area of the hips and belly for greater stability, giving them a bit of a feminine shape and suggestion of curves, not helped by Zim installing an engine and array of central processors (each one for a specific task, such as information analysis, aiming and reaction, and self-operation, so as not to overwhelm any single one) there. The basic shape of the robot remained, a hulking humanoid form, and perhaps while not very efficient, the engine they used had been derived from their own ship, and while it produced power on its own, it did so more effectively when attached to a humanoid shape. Zim wanted to study this effect later.

After altering the head so that it's 'brain' (as it was still a non-sentient drone, not a true robot) was decentralized and had no obvious weak point, Zim and Calvin had engineered the head to be a collection of sensors; then they had created new armor that they had allowed with various types of Eco and fused it to the outer frame, a bit slimmer in the shoulders but far tougher than it originally was, engineered with their superior knowledge of metallurgy. Then they had mounted as many weapons as they could into various ports and modular spaces on the body: grenade launchers on one side of the shoulder, a special made twin-linked laser right on the other. Both were main weapons, and non-lethal, the lasers diffused into concussive force while the grenades were made to blast out a sleep-inducing gas. The robot's real power was raw physical strength; they were fantastically tough and strong now, their broad forearms lined with close-range heat-blasters and repulsor emitters built directly into the palms to draw from their power source. The three-digit fingers were broad and stubby, rather claw-like and similar to Zim's own hands, and the broad legs were equipped with crude jets to enable powerful jumps if not actual flight.

Zim, a skilled weaponsmith, had placed reservoirs of Blue and Red Eco within them to power their various weapon systems and internal capabilities, while Green Eco formed the primary power source along with a spiral engine. Blue Eco seemed like it would have been better, but Calvin and Zim had tested it on various small camera-drones, and while Blue Eco had great promise as a power source, it was more unstable than they thought, while Green Eco (though less efficient) tended to seal breaks in the outer frame and made them something like a perpetual motion machine provided the channeling systems were intact.

Zim looked up at it. Though inactive, it seemed to be looking back; a rough holographic projector mounted the front of its face right over its sonic-speaker, vertically stacked eyes on either side of this and additional larger optics on either side of its narrow and helmet-like head. Fully a head taller than Hobbes was, these drones were giants to Zim, metal soldiers that would flawlessly carry out his orders, and he grinned at the thought of it, admiring the weapons mounted on these bodies, how one arm had a heat-blaster built into it and another was studded with impact points and venting excess heat for the mechanisms to power a punch. For all their broadness, bristling with mechanisms of no obvious purpose and elegant builds, he had made an effort for them not to be fearsome looking; he had no wish for bystanders to be frightened of his soldiers, They were designed to look noble, their forms calming and reassuring if strange looking.

A technician (a specialist in Eco technology, much to Calvin's interest after he'd managed to buy a few small barrels of green and yellow Eco), glancing at the heavy armor of the robot's lower bodies, hesitantly raised his voice. "Uh, sir?"

"Yes?" Zim said.

"What are you building these things for?"

Zim gave him a look. "Why not?" He said innocently. "Robots are awesome! Everyone loves robots!"

"I don't," a random child who probably shouldn't have been there said.

Zim recoiled in horror and pointed at the child angrily. "Anti-synthetic! Away with ye, non-believer!" The child slunk away, chastened.

"But seriously," the technician said. "Why?"

Calvin said, "Well, we need something to do while we're waiting to find leads on our quarry. Might as well do something constructive with it. And it never hurts to give yourself more assets!"

"Like killer robots?" Morte said, floating overhead and watching the proceedings dubiously.

"Bah! More anti-synthetic rhetoric. They are not made to kill!"

"Well, their programming could go bad, or they could misunderstand your orders."

Zim laughed. "How ridiculous!" He tapped the robot's knee, and the joint made an echo. "It would be inefficient to continually give a number of robots direct orders in the battlefield, even with dedicated communication officers."

"I'm the one who told you that," Calvin reminded him.

"Whatever. I have something a good deal more elegant in mind; I am programming them to immediately and obediently obey all orders they are given to the best of their abilities, but I am primarily programming them to respond to stimuli so they will react defensively or helpfully as the situation warrants, invariably using non-lethal force unless the situation is extreme enough to demand slaying our foes, but their primary interest and purpose shall be protecting civilians and infrastructure at all costs, as well as our own lives."

Morte, though ancient and very well-traveled and a living encyclopedia of nearly all things known to the cosmos, was not used to technobabble. It took him a moment to process this. Then, with a noise from his head-jar like it was spraying condensation onto his head to cool him down, he incredulously said, "You're programming your robot soldiers to be Lawful Good?"

Zim blinked. "I don't understand the reference." Calvin whispered something to him. "What? Oh! Yes, I suppose I am, then."

Morte shrugged. "Well, you know what you're doing… so at least I bet they won't turn evil or whatever. I will bet that they'll end up becoming sentient, though!"

"Sure, why not," Zim said indifferently.

"Hey," a krogan technician said, giving the robots a suspicious look now. A heavy cable of Eco-channeling cables was carried under one of her arms. "Why so easy-going? You want your robots to turn sentient?! Look at how big and heavily armed they are. That's just asking for trouble…"

Zim stared at the krogan and walked over to her, making it clear that he was tiny compared to her. "And yet there you are, heavily armed and very big."

"Huh? What's that supposed to-" she stopped. "Hey! That's not fair!" She said as she put the cables down on a barrel of Eco.

"Irrelevant," Zim said. "And I seriously don't think they'll become sapient anyway. They're just drones! Or they will be after I install the central linkage nervous system in them."

"And what will that do?" Morte asked.

"Just the source of their programming that will instruct them on what to do," Zim said.

"It'll exist between them," Calvin said. "Sort of like every drone will be a 'brain' for it."

"What's that?" Zuko said, poking his head through the door. "Something about brains?"

"Morte thinks the robots will go sentient," Zim said. "And people seem to think that's bad."

"…Really," Zuko said, voice suddenly devoid of inflection. He knew better than to press Zim on robots being a bad thing, but he was very suspicious of Zim's little project with the robots; he'd grown up with stories of the golems the Fire Nation had made in the days before the Hundred-Year War (and his great-great-grandfather banning their creation due to logistics issues), and most of the ones his father had taken an interest in had too many golems turning against their makers for him to be comfortable with the whole concept. (Granted, his father, Ozai, was not the most trusted authority on such things.)

"Yes," Zim said, sounding pleased. "We're nearly done creating these prototypes." He gave them a thoughtful look. "I would like to make their weaponry even more modular… perhaps design the forearms so they are a melding of various weaponry, and the fingers fold in for close combat so they won't be damaged… hmm…"

"Well, whatever it is you're up to, you'll have to save it," Zuko said. He tapped a small communication device in his ear; it was on a private frequency, though since someone somewhere was probably tapping all communications, they spoke in code as much as possible while making it sound innocent. "I've gotten word from Hobbes. Your little gambit with those improve body-gadget things worked; he got a very good lead on where those pirates are holding up."

Zim grinned, and the lighting in the room got a lot brighter, the electricity humming more vibrantly than before. "Excellent," he breathed. "When shall we move out?"

"I think first we should scout the area and make plans to attack," Zuko said. "Rushing in blind will complicate things."

"But I like rushing!" Zim whined. Zuko raised an eyebrow. "Oh, fine, we'll do it your way! Spoilsport." A few of the residents chuckled at this. Zuko rolled his eyes long-sufferingly. Zim snapped back to business and said to the technicians in general, "You! Go and hunt up your people here who like working with us, I need someone who knows the streets of wherever it is we're going. Assemble a group so I can select the people to take with us. You! Go to the storage place and prepare us… hmm, yes, a suite of vehicles, speedy and light but inconspicuous. We are scouting, not going to war. Just in case, bring a supply of weapons as per the specifications I laid out in the protocols during our last training session yesterday. Laser rifles and stun guns for the militia-men, please. And the rest of you who are interested, continue modifying my drones to the specifications I have laid out there!" He indicated a data-terminal with a holographic read-out. At Zim's gesture, it displayed a thorough but easy to follow schematic of the drones, the finished steps grayed out and the instructions to be carried out high-lighted in blue. "Do that, and when we get back…" Zim's voice became coy. "Perhaps I can see about getting everyone free entertainment transmissions and access to all the good feeds?"

"Deal!" A technician said, and the people scattered to attend to their details or just go home; a lot of them liked hanging out around Zim when he did stuff but otherwise had no official deals with him.

Calvin left to go get their protective outfits and equipment, while Morte followed the militia guys to help organize things. Zim and Zuko left, and Zim gave the robots a last lingering look; they seemed strangely lonely as he closed the door, as if the idea that had begun construction in his mind when he had seen those fallen mechs in that first fight in the lobby was now anxious for these machine soldiers to be born and carry out battle in his name.

Zuko gave Zim a rare honest smile as they walked into the hallway to get to the computer terminals in the lobby so they could track Hobbes' whereabouts and meet up with him. "You know, I think we're really doing some good here," Zuko said.

"You think so?!" Zim said brightly.

Zuko smirked. "When we accidentally took over this complex, it was a slum bullied by a gang of idiots; barely any running water, the electricity was almost all portioned out to the gangsters… the place was practically falling apart, and the residents thought that death threats were part of daily life." Zuko indicated the alchemically restored walls, the fresh carpets, and the pleasantly lit hallway itself as a Slig walked by them and greeted them excitedly, already hyped up to be on another mission today. "Now, we got part of that gang actually joining the residents, they have clean water and reliable power, they actually feel safe, and we're spreading that out every day just as a hobby."

"Indeed!" Zim said happily as they came to the elevator. "To say nothing of the technological power we have restored for them, and gotten them off their reluctant behinds to do something for themselves. The ruling powers here have so much technological prowess, and they let it rust and leak down here! I think I did a good thing, convincing them to learn more about it to do it better."

Zuko nodded. "…I'm surprised you wanted to recruit the people here into a militia for doing things."

"We need numbers if we're to accomplish anything," Zim said. "And they seemed pleased to help. And I admit I'm surprised they listen to me."

"Their goals happen to line up with our own agenda," Zuko said knowingly. "As long as we can help them get what they want, they'll help us out."

Zim said nothing, but looked thoughtful. He was wary of overly imperialistic behavior, but the fact was that his crew had knowledge and experience that many of the residents here simply did not, or if they did they had it in much lesser amount, too busy surviving to ply the craft they were heir to, and seemed increasingly frustrated once they realized just how badly behind they were compared to what people in the less slum-ish of the city had. Zim had come to believe that he was not exacting authority over them so much as being a useful resource for them. He didn't mind; not all relationships needed to be emotional in nature, and a mutually helpful alliance was refreshingly honest. Besides, he had come to genuinely like them, and thought his allies here felt the same. Calling them a militia, while not strictly accurate, was at least easy nomenclature.

Thinking of this, though, even with all they had accomplished, gave him an uneasy feeling. He thought of the vastness of this city, the hours it had taken to move across a relatively tiny space, and his stomach churned at how long it would take to repeat the good he had done for this one complex for even a tiny section of it. It was simply too big to work, and to an extent, something of the sickness at the heart of this very society that had enabled such disgusting tragedy seemed more important.

"Zuko," Zim said, his voice calm and flat.

"Yeah," Zuko said.

"I have determined our goal here," Zim said. "Even after we detain Darvhog and do whatever seems a good idea."

"…What are you getting at?"

Zim indicated the elevator in general as they went into it and it descended down to the lobby. "Consider this street we have taken. This layer of a second, this neighborhood, this district. It is only one of many! This city is immense, well-constructed, a habitat for many scores of immigrants and natives alike… but so many live in squalor and fear. The machines that should ease their lives and raise them up only provide a menace if they break down, or are left to rust except for those at the very top, who care nothing except for their own advancement. It is, quite simply, too big! And yet, such injustice requires… no, it demands correction! I have the power to repair and avenge wrongs such as that, such that my people might once have done!"

Zuko was silent, but his eyes were narrowed in understanding, if not quite as intense as Zim's fervor.

"This world suffers," Zim declared. "Something in the society that had laid claim to it, doing wars of extermination with other aspects of itself, that crush down its own people for such stupid reasons as we have observed… it is wrong. It is worse than that, it's… evil. Selfishness and stagnation at the expense of others seems to have become the hallmark of this… Glukkon Hegemony!" He hissed out a long breath, and his exhalation was tinted with vapor.

Zuko frowned. "Ah," He finally said, understanding what Zim meant.

"These people could be so much more. But they are oppressed and used as a matter of social custom. I cannot stand by and accept it, now that I have the power to do something about it." Zim stood firmly as the elevator came to a stop. "It needs to go. I intend to dismantle the Glukkon Hegemony however I can, and have it replaced with a more benign order. Bah, I don't know how these things work, I'm just good at breaking things, and I know what I must break next!"

Zuko closed his eyes contemplatively. After a moment, he nodded. "Okay. I'm in."

"And I want you to… eh?"

"I agree. I think that's a good idea." Zuko said. "We can't just leave this world like this. Not when we can do something about it." He paused. "…Did I just agree to help effectively declare war on an entire industrialized world?"

"Yes!" Zim said excitedly.

"…Yeah, I thought so." Zuko stepped out of the elevator.

Calvin was waiting for them, their equipment piled up on benches and sorted by person. "Thought what?" He said.

"I want to destroy the social order that has made Oddworld a complete mess," Zim said.

"Oh, cool! I want in on that!"

"What's this about?" Hobbes said, walking through the door, fur curled up strangely with the thick fur on his ruff braided into long and elegant shapes, and also he smelled of flowers. They stared at him. "I crashed through a septic tank for this neighborhood, dove into a deodorant factory to escape the stench and found out too late that those places stink terribly. Fortunately, a benign band of beauticians discovered me in my distress and helped me out. True story."

"Hey, I got all those guys ready to be selected for the mission!" Morte said, floating in. "Hey, we're assembling. Neat, what's up?"

Zim made a hand gesture, instructing them to deactivate any equipment someone could be listening to them through. They did so. He urged them closer, since he wasn't sure if he could trust anyone of Oddworld just yet, they were a little too close to the problem for his liking. "I want to overthrow the Glukkon Hegemony, preferably without complete and distasteful warfare," Zim said.

"Ooh, I was wondering when we'd get to be revolutionaries," Morte said. "Count me in!"

Zim tilted his head. "Curious. Given the scale of my intentions, our previous mission to bring in Darvhog and our overall quest of locating Gir (and the rest), I would have expected greater recalcitrance from the rest of you."

"Actually, these seems exactly like the kind of thing me and the little guy used to do," Hobbes said. "Good times!" He and Calvin high-fived.

"If we're out in worlds clearly out of balance like this, we should do something about them," Zuko said.

"And doing Good because it seems like a good idea is my creed," Morte said. "Hey, not really a creed, more like an overall agenda. Not organized enough to be an agenda, really. A habitual occupation. A hobby, even."

"Good enough," Zim said.

They moved out, a keen sense of purpose now that they had a pressing goal to deal with apart from long-term issues.

---

There was darker work afoul in Lulu's Fortune, often quite literally so, and in the great tower the hyena trio stomped right through everyone in their way, in too foul a mood to be polite about it, still a bit scorched and damaged from being sent to pacify the more aggressive Heartless they let run loose in the lower sectors. Immediately after returning from another Aetherite run, no less, a waste of their talents (at least in the minds of the hyenas).

"This sucks," Banzai spat as he slammed the door opened into the hyena-trio's private suite (an amenity afforded to them by their loyal, if not enthusiastic, service, and perhaps an attempt to mollify them). "We're actually being stuck doing glorified errand boy work!"

At the very least, it was a very spacious suite; walking into the hub, they had to pause a moment to adjust to the much larger space compared to the smaller hallways they had just gone through. Shaped like a ball, half a dozen crescent-shaped floors of varying size sticking from the walls to create several layers of appreciable size and connecting to the doors to the rest of their suite, the suite-hub was almost startlingly bright, the walls and floors made of a slightly translucent plastic material with the strength of steel. Already they were making it more like home, thick and heavy furs draped over every possible surface to make a plush carpet over the hard surfaces, the electric lights covers with colored meshes to dim the light and tint it a variety of interesting shades… even skulls from various foes they had killed or beasts slain while hunting for food on missions mounted the walls, some decorated with carvings Ed notched into them as a hobby in his off-time, offering them to the spirits of the land to appease them and gain their strength.

Shenzi suspect that Ed wouldn't have much luck there; though she didn't care for the belief that cities and technological societies had no spirits or lived apart from the land, she wasn't entirely comfortable in a place like Lulu's Fortune. She had no truck with the superstitious notion that machines and artificial dwellings had no spirits (or inherently malevolent ones), and traveling through the city she could hear the whispering song of the mysterious spirits of mechanisms and machinery at work, so incredibly complex and advanced that their workings were like miniature eco-systems. They weren't much like the elemental powers, ancestors or animal spirits she was used to, nor much like the denizens of the land that she spoke with at times. These… machine-spirits, they were strange to her and she wasn't sure what to make of them. Neither of her boys did, and while Banzai had mentioned that he felt that they seemed depressed or angry most of the time, he wasn't able to articulate it. Ed didn't know how to placate them or earn their regard, but he made a good try at it.

None of them were in a good mood, and though it was probably disrespectful not to acknowledge the skulls, the three hyenas shuffled it, barking and snarling and generally with nasty demeanors. They slammed the door shut (right in the faces of the squad that accompanied them at all times, Shenzi was happy to notice, and she so hated having those soldiers around all the time).

Banzai threw himself onto a furry carpet. "Huh," He muttered. "So this is what it's like to feel wasted."

Ed gibbered something incoherent. Whatever he said, Shenzi agreed. "We're soldiers and saboteurs, not… not whatever you call dogs that go and bring shiny rocks to people!" She said. "What in the names of all the orishas do those gray-headed idiots think they're doing ordering us around like this!?" She sat down on the couch extending out of the wall of the ball-shaped hub of their suite (several floors mount on ball-attachment to be reorganized as they saw fit and giving the hub several layers to do with as they pleased). "Got sent to mop up the Mudokons, and we're doing their dirty work."

Banzai flopped down on the floor. "The heck do you think is going on, man?" He asked, staring up moodily at the ceiling. "They're up to something. And they're having us do their work for them, too!"

Ed thought hard for a moment and zoned out, following the elusive thought. Shenzi leaned back, sighing. "They're making a play, all right…" Shenzi said. "I'll be damned if I know if it's treacherous or they're just being idiots about ordering us around."

"Well, not like we can just ask, right?" Banzai pointed out. "We say anything, that's grounds for dismissing us and sending us back! Mission failed, man!" He growled. "And just imagine what'll happen if we screw up the mission because they're not pulling anything…"

Shenzi shuddered, knowing perfectly well what the opposite problem was. "But if they are, it's borderline treason for us not to stop it cold." She grimaced. "What are we supposed to do?!"

Ed blinked. He gibbered.

"What, Ed?!" Both Shenzi and Banzai snapped. Ed gestured wildly, arm motions managing to indicate what he wanted to get across. "Harlot… car lot… Arlet!" Ed gibbered happily. The relatively sane hyenas tried to figure out what that meant. "…Arlet… why does that sound familiar…" Banzai snapped his claws. "That one creepy sergeant from last meeting!"

"What about him?" Shenzi said, listening. Ed was more or less insane by most conventional measures, but when something was important enough to him to attempt communication, it was probably important.

Ed gibbered some more, somehow managing to convey that he thought there was something off about him, suspiciously so… that he seemed like an actor, or an infiltrator.

Banzai and Shenzi wrinkled their noses at this. "…Well, now that you mention it," Shenzi said, standing up and cracking her knuckles meaningfully. "I'm sick of running around fetching rocks and losing assets for a plan the cartels won't even tell us about. I say we find Arlet and ask some questions-" There was a loud crashing sound from an adjacent room they had been using for storing trophies taken from killed enemies they wanted to take home. "The depths was that?!"

The three hyenas turned as one. Their ears twitched as they heard something moving. With a nod at one another, they leaped from floor to floor, landing in front of that hallway and barreling down it in a reverse arrow formation; Shenzi and Banzai at the front to take whatever they were hit with their superior endurance so Ed could jump in from behind and attack, delaying them long enough for a counter. Down the hallway, everything was perfectly normal… save that the hatch-style door to the storage room was open, recessed neatly into the wall and the lid of it still poking slightly into the grooves that met the floor and ceiling.

The light was on in there, when they had turned everything off earlier. The door creaked slightly as they approached, a few of the mechanisms grinding feebly, as if the door had been forced open with such strength that the operating mechanisms had nearly broke.

Ed took a deep sniff. He mumbled, shaking his head and obviously concerned. "Yeah," Banzai said, sniffing. "Do you guys…?" The question was left hanging.

"Yeah," Shenzi said, her fur standing on end. "I smell blood."

That it was old blood, at least a few days old, didn't make her feel better.

Slowly, they crept into the bathroom, keenly aware of how terribly silent everything was, and peeked in, so tense they were ready to explode into combat at a moment's twitch. The three of them froze at the sight in front of them.

The bathroom, apart from some blood, was untouched and left where it was. The big exception, of course, being the corpse Sergeant Arlet, stripped naked and lying the massive communal bathtub at the heart of the room. He clearly been dead for at least a few weeks, and he'd already decayed significantly; though kept in good conditions enough to stave off the worst of decomposition, he was still rotted enough to make them rather hungry. It was easy to see what had killed him; his chest had been caved in, some monstrous blow ripping a hole right through his chest. Some blood dripped around him and into the bathtub; not as much as would have if he'd been killed right here, and there probably would have been more viscera all over.

Shenzi peered at that hole. It had gone right through him, slightly larger in entry than in exit wound; as though he had been killed in a violently sudden attack by a scatter-gun to the chest… or had been punched extremely hard by something very strong.

Perhaps a bit more ominously, he was wearing a placard on his front, covering the worst of the fatal wound. Upon it, written in blood (perhaps the only writing material available at the time) was a raven imposed over the crossed out heart sign of the Heartless; the sign of Wuya's organization, and those loyal to her. Arlet, a firm follower of the Hegemony, had been barely aware of her at all, and thus had no reason to carry such a thing.

The three hyenas crowded into the room. "The depths?" Banzai swore softly. "What the… how did he get in here?! What's going on?"

Ed barked something to the effect of 'what's with the sign?'.

Shenzi laughed unsteadily, wishing dearly that she had something she could kill to vent some steam and get back the comfortable notion that she had a veneer of control here. "Someone… I don't know, someone's playing a game with us! I don't like this, I'm going to-"

There was movement. She froze. At once, the other two hyenas turned around at a heavy creaking noise directly behind them, and as if on cue, Ed shrieked in horrified bemusement.

Shenzi turned around, ready to rip the toilet out and beat the intruder to death with it, and immediately stopped in surprise. Someone who looked exactly like Sergeant Arlet, all in dress uniform and a good deal more cheeky than she ever recalled, was sitting on the counter, patiently waiting for them. "Evening," he said calmly, voice oddly feminine and harsh.

"What the… no way!" Banzai looked from Arlet to the corpse and back again; there was virtually no difference, aside from one being dead and the other. Shenzi sniffed; they even smelled the same, and it was like having a serious philosophical dilemma considered the effect smells had on her. "What are you?! What'd you do with the soldier?"

Fake Arlet looked at them. "Soldiers of Wuya's empire to be, doing menial tasks below our duty. Lame!" He sat straight up. "Who are you loyal to?"

"What?"

"Are you traitors to Wuya?" Fake Arlet bounced off the counter and landed on the floor. It crumbled beneath his feet, buckling as if a behemoth had smashed into it (though considerably more narrowed into a smaller space). He glared at them, and his eyes glowed a baleful red. "If you answer wrong… I'll kill you on the spot as heretics."

The hyenas froze. "So, I'll ask you one more time." Fake Arlet twitched, his visible skin sliding around like liquid. "Are you traitors to Wuya?"

"Hell no!" Shenzi snarled. "Who do you think you're talking to?! I ought to kill you for breaking into my place and talking like that!"

"We're Wuya's soldiers, through and through!" Banzai agreed.

Ed snarled something, probably on the same lines of what they were saying.

The fake Arlet looked at them a bit longer, his expression carefully blank, eying them closely with an obvious mind to decide if they were lying or no.

There was a tense moment, a sense of terrible judgment being passed down. Then, mercifully, he started laughing hysterically. The hyenas stared and glanced uncertainly at each other as the fake Arlet tossed his head back, laughing long and hard and completely insanely. After a moment, Ed joined in, and the bathroom echoed with the harsh noises. Shenzi and Banzai shrugged and started laughing too, it felt like the appropriate thing.

"Why are we laughing?!" Shenzi said.

"I don't know!" Banzai said.

Eventually, the fake Arlet stopped, chuckling a little. "Good," he said. "Good! I was wondering, if I was gonna have any allies here or not. Good to work with partners, you know. Not good to be alone, not good at all." He chuckled again, a bit insanely. "You like my work?" He gestured to Arlet. "Thought it would be a good way to get your attention."

"It did, but who are you?" Shenzi said.

The fake Arlet bowed mockingly. He walked to them, and as he did, his form shifted and morphed, transforming into a total different configuration; the skinny form of a Slig slimmed and straightened out, muscle mass melting and reshaping into a different pattern. Green slimy skin paled to human flesh. The tentacles vanished into a melting mass as the head became a rather pretty, if cruel-looking, human face topped with a shock of long dark hair falling to the small of the infiltrator's back; by the time the stranger finished walking to the hyenas, Arlet's form had transformed into a pale androgynous human… or at least something that looked human.

The new figure held out a hand. "Nice to meet a friendly face! Uh, muzzle. Heh!" It grinned, with a mouthful of sharp teeth like something that lurked in a nest to steal away the babies and eat at their soft tissue until they bled out. "I'm Envy the Jealous. Wuya sent me to fix the problems with this world and our alliance with the Glukkons however I see fit."

"Oh? You're back-up!" Shenzi said. "Nice!" She shook the creature's hand and winced at how inhumanly strong it was. "So… what's with the dead guy?"

"Needed to replace someone to sneak in," Envy said casually. "Bad time for him, hah!"

Shenzi noted that Envy actually said 'hah'. That was odd. Banzai scratched his ruff, eyes blinking, and said, "Why'd you need to do that at all? What's the point?"

Envy gave them a significant look. "Because I have no idea where the Glukkons stand, you guys. I don't know if they're planning something against Wuya or working something or what." He shook his head in disgust. "I legitimately have no idea what's going on, and even sneaking into their meetings isn't helping. They're hiding something and I want to know what before I can do anything! Approach their leaders and give them assistance? Work around with this mess and force them back to Wuya's side? Exterminate the idiots?!" Envy grimaced, and extended his arms at them. "So… I'd like to know; don't you have any thoughts on this?" He smiled wickedly.

Shenzi thought of her own doubts, her own distaste for the tasks she had been forced into, and she grinned wickedly. "Let's talk, new guy."

"After we get this cleaned up," Banzai said, pointing to Arlet's corpse. "He's starting to stink!"

"Yeah," Shenzi agreed. She raised an eyebrow. "Was dragging his body hear and putting the sign necessary?"

"Nope, but it was fun! And besides, first impressions," And here Envy grinned, and though she was a hardened soldier of the Pride Land Territory Dispute wars, Shenzi shuddered at the sight of that awful thin-lipped fanged grin. "Are so important."

"Uh, question," Banzai said, ignoring Envy. "How are we supposed to dispose of this guy?"

"Uh…"

"I propose we eat him!" Shenzi said. Ed held his hand up eagerly.

"Wait, what?" Envy said. "HOLY CRAP!" He jumped back as all three hyenas eagerly jumped upon Arlet's corpse and started eating him right there on the spot.

Envy stood there, watching them in disgusted fascination. "…Huh," he said with a small shrug. With a touch of nostalgia, he muttered "Reminds me of my brother Gluttony."

---

Far from Lulu's Fortune, far from any Glukkon stronghold, nestled in the wild place of green growing things where the divinely ordained rightness of Oddworld still held sway, a great mind awakened.

Several pairs of large eyes opened in the secret chamber, far below the ground, luminescent fungi lighting it up for the rag-tag collection of Mudokon, Glukkons, Sligs, and numerous others of many different species assembled before it. Their clothes were largely singular, though they favored cloaks, and the Mudokons all had the feathery heads of their people in their natural state.

All of these men and women were members in good standing of the Mudokon Confederacy, all of them charged with being intermediaries between the very highest levels of their spiritual aides and the tribesmen who preferred to let them handle it in secrecy for the sake of protecting their interests. Few of them had been there since the very beginning of their war against the Glukkon Hegemony, though, and mingled in the crowd was the Mudokon who had been there.

The shamans and spirit-talkers stood on the grass as cool wind blew, the cavern light resplendent against the moss-covered boulders that formed stepping stones to the exit chamber high above. And above them, the huge and sessile creature above them stirred, a beak-like mouth smacking wetly as its enormous bulk shifted in sleep.

Finally, the first of the free Mudokons stepped forward. A lighter shade of blue than the green colors that characterized much of his kind, he was stunted from years of labor in the now-destroyed Rupture Farms, and when he smacked his lips as he thought, the stitches sewn into his mouth long ago were still a bit loose. (He hadn't bothered to remove them. He looked quite distinctive with them, and the spirits seemed to approve of the look.) He tapped his fingers together and finally said, "How long has he been like that?"

Murmurs moved through the crowd, to the point that none of them were really sure. "The Almighty Raisin," a Glukkon scientist lured to their side and gone darker-skinned by magical mean spoke. "Has been less dormant for a matter of weeks now. He talks in his sleep, but none of us can translate his words."

"Okie-dokie," the Mudokon, who was named Abe, said forlornly. He felt that he was doing a bad job of being a totally awesome prophet to his people (the 'totally awesome' bit being self-appointed, too). He straightened up and walked forward, listening intently. He considered as the Almighty Raisin mumbled more, nothing coherently, and finally Abe said, "How long, exactly?"

"Several weeks," a krogan shaman said. "Almost a month!"

Abe, not exactly the most well-informed of Mudokons, had to ask, "Anything important happening since then?"

More murmuring. "That was when Jak left us to pursue the hyena-monsters to the city of Lulu's Fortune." Abe winced at the name Lulu (since he felt bad about scamming that particular Glukkon and taking everything he had), but he continued listening. "He and Daxter broke communications, but we have received word from intermediaries that he is looking for information on what the Glukkon Hegemony is planning with their recent change in action."

"…Jak's a good guy," Abe said. "Scary. But good." He nodded, as if that said everything he cared to know on what Jak was up to.

"We are entering a vital stage of warfare," another Mudokon said. "Maybe we shouldn't have let him go?"

"Jak does what he wants," a human said. She shrugged. "What are we gonna do, tell him he can't? He'd do it just to be annoying!"

"Whatever he's up to, I don't think it's a coincidence that he left just as the Almighty Raisin started getting weird," a towering fungoid creature of green vegetation and muscle-like structures said, mushrooms sprouting from his back and a hump-like body structure with a wide mouth set in a prime position for biting. He was a fungal-orc, a sub-species of the orc-type throughout the multiverse.

Abe stared up silently at the Almighty Raisin for a minute. "…We have guys coming up with more freed people, we should give them the orientation and figure out where they should-

There was a small rumble as the Almighty Raisin stirred, and everyone immediately fell into startled squabbling and crying, involuntarily backing up and tripping over each other. The Almighty Raisin, the mighty voice of Oddworld's overseer spirits, cleared his voice, and all fell silent, staring up in surprise and wonder.

Thus spake the Almighty Raisin, "I have good news, but it's also rather bad news."

As divine proclamations went, it was a little disappointing. A Mudokon or two shuffled awkwardly. "What's the good news?" Abe said timidly.

A long moment, then the Almighty Raisin's sonorous voice declared, "He who bears the Key that do all things has come to Oddworld."

Abe blinked in confusion. He looked around for help; everyone else had a similarly blank look and shrugged helplessly. "Okay…" Abe said. "That's… good, huh?"

"That's also the bad news," the Almighty Raisin said. "He who bears the Key has come, and Oddworld may yet regret his coming."

"Oh no," Abe said. "…I shouldn't have woken up this morning, I should have just slept in-"

"And yet, he may wish to fight alongside us," The Almighty Raisin continued. "At a time like this, such chaos that he creates can free Oddworld from our problems, and free the Glukkons from their own doom. And… perhaps burn away the beasts of the All-Shadow that haunt us now."

"…The what?" Abe said, blinking.

"You sincerely do not want to know." The Almighty Raisin coughed and spat for a moment, mumbling incoherently before it spoke again. "…A monster has come to help the Glukkon Hegemony as well. Beware! Red light in flesh and blood, the souls of a dead civilization made to give life to Jealousy enfleshed."

"What about Jak?" Abe said hopefully. "Is this about him?"

The Almighty Raisin mumbled, sorting through its vast instructions, and finally said, "Oh, yeah. Jak. The angry guy who punches things a lot. Maybe he shall encounter the Keybearer and bring him to us. It remains to be seen."

"Oh… good?" Abe said uncertainly.

"Yes, probably." Suddenly, the Raisin gave a great shift. "WAIT. One is missing from our ranks, one who is very important indeed! Where is Daxter?!"

A long pause. "You mean the funny otter… weasel… thing?" another human said. "He's with Jak."

"Ah." The Almighty Raisin relaxed. "Well, as long as he is with Jak, it should be fine, then." He gave a heaving sigh and fell silent.

The tribesmen looked around awkwardly. "Well," the human woman said. "That was… odd."

"I have no idea what's going on anymore," Abe confessed.

"But what do you suppose all that means?" The krogan shaman said, scratching his head.

"Guess we'll find out," another Mudokon said, and unsurprisingly this didn't really comfort anyone.