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.

21. Mummies, Corp War, and Kamina the Mighty

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the intellectual properties or copyrights in this story nor make any claim for it. This is for my own personal entertainment and not for profit of any sort.

EDIT: edited for readibility and current plot threads I'm doing! I was rereading to remember where I was in the story, and got embarrassed at my writing from the time I wrote this. Yeesh.

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A single spark, a twirling ember on the winds slipping forth like the breath of this city and thick with the toxins of its ravaged filtration lungs, moved past Zuko's lips. It hovered in the air, singing against the mess of the air, and where it moved the air looked a little cleaner.

The burning smell reminded him of the factories back home, and that made him think of the capital Caldera, of vast scores of neighborhoods as ancient as the Fire Sage priesthood, rice paddies imported from the Earth Kingdom and the sprawling gardens of peppers and spices destined for the kitchens. The clatter of carts tearing along in the streets in races, nobles egging the carts to go faster, ostrich-horses pounding with all their might...

Zuko missed even the ridiculous things.

He thought of the vast swamps and marshy lands that formed a lot of the Fire Nation's farmland. Rice paddies cared for by people living in the towns floating on top of the swamp waters, the larger cities that grew from those places. The smell of hot spices and fire flakes, volcanic sulfur and the comforting thickness of the forges that built up their nation, and the factories exhaling smoke like something alive and breathing...

He missed his homeland so badly, especially here. This city was giving him the creeps.

Zuko instinctively sucked in a breath and gagged on it; he fumbled at his throat, tugging at his rebreather and pulled it back over his face, fastening the straps so that it clamped on properly, and sucked in more tolerable air.

He frowned, uncomfortably aware that on top of their apartment complex's roof like he was now, he could watch and hear the arguments of thousands of people in their streets and on the air and even on the radio waves (Zim's hacking protocols being a little indiscriminate and pulling in too much information). Hundreds of news stations feeding the listeners falsified information designed point by point to sway opinion towards what served the corporations interests and twisted emotions to fury at whoever they wanted dead or just ignored.

The beginnings of little wars in city blocks the size of towns or villages that left hundreds dead or dragged away to the dark places for the... things below to feed on. Between that and the scores of people vanishing in the night, this seemed a world berefit of heroes from what he'd seen. The idea that he and his team would have to be those heroes was unnerving; his country had spent too much time in conquest and nonsense wars to keep him entirely happy with the idea.

It reminded Zuko too much of the propaganda departments that kept his people in total awe of his father while knowing nothing real about him. Misinformation, deception and lies pushing people to hate who they were wanted to hate and fed bread and circuses so they wouldn't think about how wrong it was or even think at all. And there were still people here, lost and forgotten in the dark, even less than numbers now, living out their own nightmares and trying to live their lives without dying horribly. No one cared about them. A people without lords or kings or anyone to watch out for them, just these hardhearted corporations and stockholders who didn't care about anything but money.

His fists tightened. Flames swelled, briefly. The people responsible for all this would burn.

A hatch popped open behind him. Zuko didn't have to turn around to know it was Zim and sure enough, Zim crawled onto the roof next to him and lurked behind a relay dish, apparently feeling too exposed out there. He moved, Zuko observed, with the motions of a robot; smooth economic grace and a worrying precision. He was pretty sure Zim didn't used to move like that.

Not before the Keyblade had chosen him, at any rate.

Zuko glanced through the garden of signal receivers, local signal amplification assemblies and various other relays that made up the rooftop. Zim was hard to see, skulking and heavily clothed in so much gear that he looked like a robot.

Moved like one, seemed to be pretending he was one more often than not... maybe he was trying to find some identity in embracing the part of himself that was more sapient machine than organic creature. And Zuko still suspected that the changes worked on him might have done... something to Zim's physiology or even his mind: he had two brains after all, one organic and one that was mechanical. And it was the mechanical brain that was the true seat of his being, and Zuko doubted that Zim could have gained so much power without some consequences.

Zim angled himself around the balcony, edging outwards just a bit. Zuko nodded at him, acknowledging his presence. By this point Zim was staring out at the city around them, the ceiling of higher buildings and the darkness engulfing them from all sides where the illumination couldn't manage. The buildings were packed so tightly that they were very often part of the same structure, and from here they could see down, past the streets and catwalks and railings.

The sides of architecture were almost a straight line down. Apart from the sections where they merged with lower buildings to form roofs and streets and plazas, it was entirely possible to fall here and plummet straight down for miles. Past a certain point, below them was pitch darkness; Zuko was certain he saw extremely distant yellow lights down there staring at them.

Zim finally spoke, and he sounded more than a little distracted. "I had wondered where you'd gotten to."

"Just thinking." Zuko clasped his hands together, the various metal and leather bits of his outfit clanking together. It was probably just a fashion in this world but they really liked metal, leather, spiky bits on the metal and leather, boxy and clunky cybernetics, and general pointiness. It was like Traverse Town and zippers. Zuko pulled his hands apart, conjuring a warm flame and scaring a few bugs away. (A good thing, since the bugs here had big nasty teeth.) Zim crept closer and Zuko used the time to put some thoughts together. "I'm not sure I'm totally on-board for your whole..." Zuko waved a hand, cupping the flame with his other hand. He found his thought and hammered it down. "Conquest for the greater good thing."

Zim tilted his head, and then tilted his whole body, clambering onto a pipe and hanging from it like a money or spider. (Or a spider-monkey hybrid.) From a bizarre angle and painful looking contortion he said, "What thing? I'm not conquering anything! I think."

Zuko tossed the fireball about. "Fighting gangs, beating them and coercing them into doing what we need. That's not conquering?"

It took a moment for the dawn of understanding to rise for Zim. That was a problem, Zuko considered; Zim was extremely intelligent but it was a hard intelligence to steer, like a train. Getting him to grasp an issue he hadn't thought of, or acknowledge something potentially problematic in his thinking, could be very difficult. "I... don't believe so," Zim said evasively. Zuko grimaced; Zim wasn't looking directly at him now.

"They're attacking us, yes," Zuko said calmly. "But this isn't our world. We're coming here and using force to make them do what we want." He held up a hand to forestall an argument. "I know we have to do this to find Darvhog and, maybe, make this world a little better. But don't let it go too far."

Zim nodded glumly. A rare moment of introspection hit him and he stared into the distance. In Zim's perception, and his alone, a small angelic version of himself – Razael, of course – popped up and whispered some things into Zim's audio receivers and disappeared again. The faint imaginary pop somehow dislodged a loose tile.

"Curious," Zim said eventually. "It creeps back upon you, does it not?" Zuko gave him a questioning look. "Old habits, I mean. Old patterns you thought you had outgrown, or had tried to abandon entirely. They just don't leave you alone." He flopped off the pipe and slowly slid down the roof, stopping against Zuko's back.

Zuko picked him up and put him upright. "No," He agreed. "They don't. Ever." His tone became harsh. "The mistakes you've made and the terrible things you've done stay with you, always. You can't just forget them, or pretend they didn't happen. Stains like that can't just be washed out, you have to work to be someone different."

Zim's antannae twitched. His pod swiveled a few components. "Shockingly enough, that is not making me feel at all better about this."

"You shouldn't," Zuko said. His expression was grim, and in the darkness of the city and the flame he cast, pretty spooky too. "Redemption is hard work and I don't think any of us will ever really be there."

"Even Calvin and Hobbes?" Zim said.

Zuko paused. "No, they don't need that kind of thing. They're already clean. Morte... him I'm not so sure about." Morte, Zuko considered, was someone badly haunted by something even if he never spoke of it.

Now, in this manner, thinking of terrible sins committed and his own efforts to expunge them, Zim stared across the wall of buildings that defined the visible parts of the city. Something about it jogged a thought he had been thinking about, and perhaps not coincidentally what Zuko had been pondering in recent days. They were always busy these days, probably because too much downtime made them think about depressing stuff like this.

Now Zim worked himself up and said, gesturing at the city, "It is a shame."

"Yeah," Zuko agreed. "It is." He paused, rethinking that a bit. "What exactly are we talking about? Me, you? Various horrible stuff we like to pretend we didn't do?" He put a bit more power into his fireball, it was going dim.

Zim scowled. "No, no, I meant this world!" He gestured at everything around them. "Where did they get... ridiculous about it?! I say it is a shame, because they had gained so much knowledge and technological capability, and they live like this!" He spat in disgust. "It is too sharp a divide, too much life based on abuse and squandering. It reminds me of my homeworld."

"You're not talking about Earth, right?"

"No," Zim said, a little stiffly. "Not Earth. I was not grown on Earth."

Zuko shifted uneasily. Zim was looking a lot more gloomy than usual, and Zuko felt something powerful radiating from him, feelings and thoughts so strong they nested in the heads of nearby people. Intrusively, they stole away into him: thoughts of dead debris among the stars, homeworlds destroyed and the universe better for it, an empire collapsing mercifully as quickly as Zim's illusions. And then a lingering species drifting away into the galaxy. And perhaps now they are all doomed, the Heartless soon to kill them as well. "Ow!" Zuko hissed. "Zim, calm down, Zim, you're doing something weird to my head, I can feel what you're feeling!"

"What!" Zim backed away, a few stray animals flying away and getting smacked about like he had generated a bubble of invisible force. The intrusive thoughts and memories left Zuko. Zim plainly saw the difference in Zuko's face and had the decency to look panicked. "What, what just happened?"

"Don't know," Zuko said, rubbing his head. "Not sure I want to know. Your magic is weird."

Zim looked at his hands. They glowed – with light, Zuko noticed, not fire. "I concur."

Zuko frowned. "Your firebending. What happened to it?"

"I did not firebend," Zim said pointedly. "We agreed on that, yeah? What I do was never firebending! It just... looked like firebending. And behaved liked firebending." He frowned thoughtfully. "For the most part."

"Can't help noticing the past tense there."

"My powers are evolving," Zim replied. "I... can't make fire anymore. When I try, it aches." He clasped a hand to his chest. "As though something in here was rearranging itself. My... bah, I don't know the correct words for it, I suppose the pattern of me, the essence of how I exist and relate to the rest of the universe, has been continually changing since the Keyblade gave me these powers. I can't do the things I used to do."

"Show me," Zuko said, eyes glowing faintly.

Zim blinked. "Eh?"

"Show me. Try to make fire for me. I want to see what it looks like."

"I just told you!" Zim shuffled slightly in place, wary. "It doesn't work."

"Humor me as your instructor," Zuko said blandly.

Zim made a show of concentrating. Nothing of the kind of thing either of them was used to happened; no flames, no bursts of fire, no dramatic pyrokinetic displays. Something still radiated from Zim, and a tile levitated in the air, glowing a beautiful – if eerie – neon green. Something of the light altered it's material, crystallizing it and reshaping it. Zuko gave that a look while Zim did his best to pretend he saw nothing.

Zim, still not looked at it, gave it a push. It gently imploded into a fractal flower and dropped to the ground; before it shattered, it looked a lot like an opal as fed through the mind of the eldritch things that dwell beyond the mortal planes.

Then, Zim stood up, holding his hands up. He wasn't concentrating now, he was just letting it flow. From the Keyblade, perhaps, or a realm it draw power from. And again, there was no fire here; there might never be again. It was light that billowed from his hands, shimmering over his clothes and casting a plastic-like sheen upon his skin. Threads of colorful light or energized gas – glowing brightly, brilliantly, mostly green but shading into purples and reds and blues, randomly and flashing in their mysterious patterns – blossomed from him, very much like flame from its source.

Zuko sat up without comment or distress; the neon light washed over his body, illuminating his skin into a shade of bronze or copper, echoes of metal upon him. For a moment, briefly, the light looked like it might be flame, might have been embers once. Had become something entirely different now.

Zim had been right; his powers had evolved, despite his liking or his own wishes. The Keyblade's power was still changing.

"Is it safe to touch?" Zuko asked. Zim shrugged, the light rippling into a decidedly neo-cyberpunk take on an aurora. The colors were beautiful and strange. Taking that as a positive, Zuko placed a hand into their glowing depths. "Warm," he announced. "Not hot, just... sort of warm. And it's making force against my hand. Light shouldn't do that." He moved his hand back, the light still shifting like something solid or liquid. Zuko's hand gleamed like something not entirely flesh until he flexed his hand; his skin assumed it's normal tone, but flames crackled across his skin briefly. "That feels... nice." Zuko sounded as surprised to say it as anything. "Almost like being on the surface again."

His wistful tone caught Zim off-guard enough for him to depower; the lights faded from him, and it took the sound of his landing to make them both realize that Zim had somehow been levitating sevearl feet above the ground. Buoyed by his power output, maybe. "Wait, what do you mean on the surface!?" Zim said.

Zim moved to touch him and Zuko brushed the contact aside. Zim's fingers flamed, like he had caught firebending from him, but it reconfigured into light and went on. Images flared into Zim's head like the fire, both of them twitched, flinching, the sensation of their minds perceving each other as they were, berefit of flesh or physicality, seeing what was really there-

(This is not actually a fun thing, generally. People have their seperations and boundaries because too much exposure isn't something mortals are built to deal with.

Here and now? It showed.)

Dark here. So dark. Cold, bitter and too deep in hate. Burning him, freezing him, plunging him deep and stealing the fires away.

'Firebenders NEED sunlight', a distant teacher's-voice claims. It hurts to remember it, a memory of a world above, below the sun: a world of heat and hot, burning away the pain, the sickness, being warm again and flaming and good.

Needs to burn. Has to burn. Need to feel the heat again.

Cold inside. Dying inside. So cold it hurts.

A little voice inside, crying for the sun. And yet, muted-

There is fire down here. There is fire everywhere.

Reach out, like a firebender should. Feel it, embrace it. Become it.

And then.

He burns.

And with that, both of them snapped away, with a great motion and noise.

The first sensation either of them was aware of: hard metal below them. Following that was smoke and a lingering haze around them, like the residue of a lightning strike. Their apartment complex rose up before them, at an odd angle. They had been blasted off the roof, Zim realized, and landed on the catwalk in front of it. The rooftop certainly was smoking a lot; a large crater was sizzing gently, and bits of machinery were raining down.

"Zim, did you just blast off off the roof?" Zuko said weakly, in the same position as Zim.

"Probably, yes."

Zuko waved a finger scoldingly, without much heart. "Yeah... uh. Don't do that again. The, the brain whammy thing you did." An antannae snapped off and landed on him. "Ow."

"As soon as I figure out what I did, exactly," Zim agreed.

He stared into empty space for a while. He wasn't sure how to feel about having apparently gone into Zuko's mind. His powers apparently included a certain loosening of the boundaries between bodies, and he hadn't read his mind. It was more like he had perceived the answer to his question: how Zuko was intact despite the lack of sunlight. Even know he felt the odd sensation, Zuko's sensations of feelingforges and foundries pumping hot molten metal into shapes, the heat of them collected like a torch inside him. The spiritual ripples of creation, of a will to make things, it was a fire of the soul, and it blazed here. It burned in Zuko like a fuel.

And there was the ever-present electricity, buzzing and crackling like the thoughts of a city (and they often carried signals with them too, dancing in Zuko's head with whispers that he didn't understand, couldn't translate from the noise), and that was fire of a sort, and this city screamed with passion and desires, and it all was a heat of the spirit, and this city was like a star of those flames...

Light glimmered around Zim, the wavelength warping into true flames. He looked at his burning hand in shock, and the fires flickered out. Inside him, something shifted; his pattern, as he had explained to Zuko, shifting from... what? An imprint? Some echo of Zuko's abilities and shape in reality, mimicked or copied in some fashion. Impressed over him.

It felt weird. Like when the Keyblade had chosen him, in that great and terrible moment of transformation. Being changed all over again. No sooner did he think this than the odd sensation faded, and the flames died away.

He sat up with a start, snapping his fingers again and again, trying to find that feeling of a fire within like he used to have, and evoke it properly again. Nothing happened.

He adjusted the flow of energies. Light glimmered on his hands. With a frown, Zim released it, more bewildered and angry than before.

It was not the first time he had felt such things. At times, when he was crafting machinery, modifying weapons, working on his robots or doing anything that involved creating a functional device, he could hear music. Beautiful but hard to pinpoint, like he heard the wavelengths of function imparting to him the secrets of grand crafting. It guided his hands, and from them came wonders he could not fully understand or really explain how they worked or how to recreate them.

Another oddity of the Keyblade, it seemed. Though one far better suited to his true talents. Binary voices and echoes of creation, finding voice in him and giving new wonders a place to live in the world, through his works.

Zim stood up and pulled Zuko up after getting the antenna off him, trying not to think about the light inside showing him these technological miracles he could create. A window opened above them, out of a boxy module slotted crudely into the apartment. Zim had an involuntary start of dread that was instinctive after years of constant suspicion, and relaxed slightly when he saw that it was only Calvin. He had enough self-possession to know that it was odd to be relieved at the sight of a human child who was probably more dangerous unarmed than most people Zim had known in his long life, let alone dressed in the gear he used for battle or adventure in this city thus far. The usual heavy clothing that doubled as light armor, the life support equipment for the more polluted sections of the city, and several electronic modules to provide a personal force field shield. Zim had created his own version of this some time ago in his off-time; it seemed that the shake-down was ready and time to be put into practice.

And Calvin's arms were fully enclosed in the bulky elemental devices he was so fond of; bigger than he remembered, modified to include several intake slots. Calvin's gear also included several doses of the Eco substance he was experimenting with, presumably to combine with his weaponry. The arm supporting his cold-generating device tapped a finger covered in something that probably wasn't metal; the windowsill froze over at his touch but the metal of it didn't seem warped or harmed by it. Like a protective icy shell, really. "Are you guys blowing stuff up without telling me!? Again!"

He hopped out the window, cold anti-energy knitting around him. A bridge made of ice caught him and slid down to the ground, so quickly that it looked like he had just cushioned himself with a pod of quasi-organic ice. The shapes of the ice was very disturbing, all ominous looking faces and demonic leers and ground-propped supports like clawed feet. Calvin snapped his fingers as soon as he was up, and the ice all shattered into mist that would dissipate in hours.

"I've already said, let me record the explosions!" He gestured broadly as several people stuck their heads out of windows: mostly other residents of the apartments, but businesses and other homes as well. Most people were used to this by now, but the people who actually had to live with Zim and his team looked extremely miffed about something. "The blasts you guys make, it's beautiful. The pitch of the noise, the violence of the bursts without any physical injury resulting, it's like if poetry blew stuff up. Which it does sometimes, but not a metaphor in this case! I want that stuff on camera! Or choreographed, it's a shame I don't have them on video." He pouted. "And the stuff I did record, it's never as good as the unplanned things." A bit more thoughtfully, he added, "I suppose that's how it normally works in the business; the stuff you spend a ton of time working out is never quite as well-received as the fun nonsense you crank out for the joy of it."

"Ow," Zuko said again, more meaningfully. "In too much pain for your art thing."

"If you let me modify you so you didn't feel pain, that wouldn't be a problem!" Calvin said sincerely. "I know how to give you a good, honest twist! You'll look absolutely horrifying and threaten all honest people's understanding of physical normality! Skin like bark... no, brass, that fits your theme better." Calvin considered this. "Wait, on the other hand, no pain will probably cut your life expectancy very short. Never mind. I can still try something to give you skin of brass...?"

"No thanks," Zuko grunted, steadying himself.

Calvin, gravely disappointed at lack of opportunity to ply his skills, scoffed. "Well, if you're sure, might as well get yourselves cleaned up and ready. We've got a mission to go on!"

Zim, still a bit dazed, waved a hand in front of his eyes to dislodge the persistent image of multiple Calvins floating there. Now that was a dreadful thought. "What mission?"

"Hobbes managed to talk some of the people who live here and don't think we're completely obnoxious to come along and help us on our whole 'find out what Darvhog is up to' scheme." He made air quotes.

"Okay, I'm curious," Zuko said. "Why do they care?"

Calvin shrugged. "They're bored. Some of them think he's up to no good and should be stopped, and stuff like that, but mostly the ones coming along thing his stuff is cool and want to loot it if we can beat him. Hobbes may have kind of promised them first looting rights."

"But they'll get everything good before we do!" Zim complained. "That is terrible negotiation."

"Yeah but it was probably the only deal they would consider at all," Calvin said, doing his best to defend Hobbes' deal-making skills (or lack thereof; Hobbes was charming, elegant, classy and inexplicably attractive to virtually every known life-form or compatible orientation, but he didn't have a very good head for business).

"It's a start at manpower," Zuko said calmly, trying to soothe the others. "We came here to oust Darvhog and bring him to justice, not steal all his stuff." He frowned. "Or are we here to help out in a revolution?"

"We all have magnificent powers of immense destructive capability," Zim said. "If we're not making use of them to do a little constructive change, what are we doing?"

"I concur!" Calvin pointed at the door. "Oh, here come some of them now."

The hulking shape of the krogan who lived there, Gatatog Daliz, opened a door. Apparently she'd been voted the one to talk to the team because she was the first of a small but capable-looking crowd to nod at Zim grimly. "Heard you got a job for us." The crowd behind her looked expectant. They were a pretty diverse bunch; a creature that looked surprisingly like an Earth pony, the elegant and reptilian drell, robots of many kinds (some mechanical lifeforms, some silicon-based creatures, one or two native hardware that had advanced on their own to sapience, one that looked like a skeletal humanoid robot that the Guide would later identify as a necron), slender amphibians that didn't look dissimilar from Zim but about as tall as a human, and others Zim could not readily identify.

"I do?" Zim said. Calvin gave him a kick. "Ow! I mean, yes, of course. I do." He gave Calvin a look. "Clearly I know all about the situation at hand but to show solidarity with my team of certainly not obnoxious buffoons who have no sense of timing, I shall pretend I have no idea what is going on. Please clarify for us all, small and unpleasant human."

"You know, I've noticed that when you're annoyed you refer to people like they're test subjects," Calvin remarked. The crowd grumbled testily. "Okay, okay! Alright, here's the deal. A while ago, Zim here built a number of flying spy-bots and hid them in Darvhog's territory to figure out what he was up to."

"You did?" Daliz said. "When'd you do that!? When you'd even have time to do that? Or get the stuff for it?"

"You would be amazed what you can get from scrapyards," Zim said.

"We're pretty sure that Darvhog," Calvin began again, annoyed at the interruption. "Is claiming a lot of local territory. Ousting out dominant gangs, challenging corporate interests, and staking his claim through military force; his mummy soldiers are the main weapon in this. Since beating him requires finding a way to destroy them more easily or take them out of the picture altogether, we're taking an opportunity to exploit what some of us are pretty sure is a gap in his defenses to capture one of those mummies and bring it back here to be tested."

One of the people on the back – a technically minded sort, one of those amphibian-looking beings resembling tall Irkens, the Guide identified them as salarians – raised a slender hand. "A question."

"Yes?"

"What's this about mummies, again?"

"Our enemy has an army of extremely resilient mummies," Zuko said. "Mummy might be the wrong word; they're more like... 'dust constructs', I guess. But made from dead people. They're very fast, stronger than they look, and they regenerate from any damage I've seen done to them."

"This sounds... bad," the salarian technician said.

"Don't forget about the weapons and armor they have!" Calvin said cheerfully. "An advanced glass-like material; has an extremely sharp edge, unbelievably strong. Has incredible structural integrity, sort of like metal but far lighter. Our enemy's crew stole the secret of making this super-glass and they've used to to create some extremely strong armor and weapons. Mostly blades, from what we've seen."

There is a very special kind of look people share when they realize they probably in over their heads. Such a look passed between everyone who didn't come with Zim to this world. Someone swallowed heavily. The krogan seemed unbothered. "Okay, stabbing, that hurts but it's not exactly fatal."

"It is to almost everyone!"

"Everyone who isn't weaker than a sack of wet lard," Daliz said without a beat. This was not met with approval.

"It's just a recon run!" Zuko said, doing his best to calm people down. He wasn't experienced with it. "We shouldn't run into too much horribly stabbing death."

"Please don't say it like that!" Calvin hissed. "You're not inspiring confidence."

Zuko blinked. "Oh... right."

"Shh!" Zim waved his hands, drawing in attention. "I shall calm their fears."

"Please don't," Zuko asked, knowing full well how Zim handled 'calming fears'.

"Be calmed as well." Zim cleared his throat. "Meat-things! Robots! Cyborgs! Brain-cases, all of you hearken to me. ME, I SAY. I promise you, we will probably not even have to require any kind of fight at all. The chances are very low that anyone will be stabbed at all, maybe."

"Both of you, please stop talking," Calvin begged, eying the distressed looks on faces.

"Yes," Zim continued, remembering a few pernitent details from scouting reports. "The mummies have killed. Many people, lots of people. Perhaps for no reason, perhaps because they refused to sign on with Darvhog. Maybe the mummies slipped control and feed on death, and made some on their own! Perhaps they hunger for the ending of all life, exactly like what you have, and will not hesitate to run their sandy hands through your meaty, bloody guts! For the thrill value. And then they kill you."

Calvin covered his hands to block out the talking. There was little else to do and he wasn't wanting to look at the expressions of the crowd anymore.

"Hence, why it is only a recon mission!" Zim said. "For our safety and things. So you will not get killed or anything like that. We will not require any kind of armaments or expect a combat situation!"

A tremendous honking nearly blew out a few windows, not so much loud as just so big that it was nearly a moving thing. Those present turned towards the source, a small convoy of very big vehicles parked on the streets outside and all marked with the sign of Zim's team. Trucks, demilitarized tanks, road cages, outdated auto-chariots, the odd capture transport, and more. All big, all old, and old rescued from the scrap to be refurbished with new engines, remade internal systems, and so heavily armored that they looked like piles of riveted metal with some wheels below. The street was completely congested in them, and they looked so warlike that their presence was practically a declaration of hosility.

"Hey!" Morte said from a truck that wasn't especially big but had so much armor that it was a block of bullet-repelling metal. "Are we going or what?"

Daliz stared at Zim. "Why do we need an armored convoy for a recon mission...?"

"Ah, an excellent point!" Zim said loudly. He looked at Calvin expectantly. "Down to you. Why do we need those for a recon mission?"

Calvin sighed, his face still covered in his hands. "Because it's not just a recon mission, it's a capture mission."

"Oh?" Zim said. Calvin whispered something to him. "Oh!" Catching the looks he was getting, Zim added, "MY, THAT IS SUCH A LOT OF LOOT AND PRECIOUS THINGS, SO VERY SHINY AND VALUABLE. I BET THAT WOULD COST SO MUCH AND MAKE WHOEVER SOLD IT SO MUCH MONEY. A PITY IF VALUABLE ALLIES STAYED BEHIND AND MISSED OUT ON THE LOOTING."

They received even stares and some hurried discussions. An argument, honestly; it got quite heated at one point, outside their hearing. Then Daliz approached, expressions among her friends stony, and she spoke evenly. "All the looting rights?"

Zim looked at Calvin, who shrugged; Zuko didn't have anything better to say either, he knew when a deal was hanging by a thread. Zim turned back to Daliz and said, "Ah. Yes?"

She nodded, apparently expecting that. "Then we're in."

"Then let's get out," Zim said. "Roll up, pack your things and someone tell me what is actually going on here!"

"What?" Daliz said.

"Nothing!" Calvin said as he hurried Zim away to explain to him before anyone working with them came to some impolite if probably accurate conclusions about Zim's competence.

---

The area of the city that was the current object of interest for Zim and his crew (once things were explained to him, most likely) was essentially the outskirts of Darvhog's new territory. It was underground, by the standards of the city.

And when you're dealing with a city that is almost exclusively subterranean, that is saying a lot. There's a lot of implications of sleaziness, of poverty, places forgotten by official concerns and any kind of infrastructure. Rotting buildings and decayed supports, lost tunnels where terrible things dwell waiting to begin their schemes.

However that also described at least eighty percent of almost every bit of Glukkon territory in some respect so it wasn't too helpful. But it was still a pretty nasty neighborhood, all things considered.

There were big tunnels, in places between buildings, alleyways which might have been avenues until the rubble got too high in construction projects that didn't work out. A part of town below the slums of the division where the entry-level tourists were permitted and far from places where respectability was more than just a word, and below the awful areas where it really was just a word. Filth and grime, much and slime, garbage and refuse; lights did not shine well there, possibly because there wasn't anything there that liked being illuminated.

In one particular tunnel, the walls were dozens of layers crushed together by the weight of higher buildings, a distinctly urban cavern spraw far below the surface. There was blood there, dried and only days old. Where corpses may have lain, now booted feet and other appendages walked: several dozen men and women of varying species; few of them at all similar and plenty of them augmented to the gills (or even possessing actual gills) so much that they had become unique beings, a cosmopolitan situation not unusual in this city, proving that even horrible places can produce good results. Admittedly none of their weapons were good, their bionics and modifications little better, their recent spat of poverty not permitting very good stuff. This seemed to be on their minds, or at least brighter places were as they delved: several of these men and women glanced up longingly before they followed their friends, down into winding paths that had been cleared out of the rubble by earthmovers some time ago. Lights affixed to supports made their shadows flicker as they went.

The... thing about this particular city was that Hegemonic concerns only went a little past ground level, so to speak. They kept order in their cities by ruthlessly attacking anyone who posed an active threat to wide-spread public safety (or offered them a job at gunpoint, getting their skills and diverting their ambitions into a more socially useful direction), but they didn't particularly care what anyone did. If you waged gang warfare but did it quietly, kept the collateral damage down and most importantly didn't impact anyone's bottom line, the Hegemony didn't care what you did. All over the city but especially in places that the corporations saw no profit in, urban warlords fought for territory while vassal gangs and up-and-coming contenders fought their little wars, much as their ancestors had down in the world above ages ago. It got bloody, it got mean, and sudden shifts in power quos got frightening.

Zim's crew, upon their own arrival, had displayed how sudden surprise force multipliers could hit the more stagnant attrition-based fighting forces like a truck's wheel grinding on frozen jelly. Their coup, though destructive, had been bloodless. Not the case here.

A small band, the remnants of a gang ousted through Darvhog's own battles and the terribly pitliess blades of his newest servants, traveled with violence in their hearts and a lot of fear in their heads. They moved like people who knew this territory below many hundreds of layers: walls made of factories and cramped apartment and pay-by-the-night motel beds, traveling through the tunnels and sneaking through street for brief moments at a time. They were seen, sometimes, but not reported. No one was loyal to them, but they assumed it would be sorted out on its own. One such denizen shook their head sadly and quietly went home and locked the door, barring it against violence or hearing anything. Without a word, they vanished into a metal grate and the tunnels below, getting closer to their old home neighborhood.

One of them looked up at that grate from below, with a single cyclopean eye lidded in sadness. He was a living plant, standing on a great mass of prehensile roots and his head crowned by a protective shell-flap. His people were called the florauna, and they showed their health much as ordinary plants did. He did not look healthy; his slender frame was withered, thorns blunted and his seed pods too sickly to even grow. His single eye blinked slowly as he sighed. The toothy flaps around his head clicked like he wanted to hide inside it.

A friend urged him to keep going; a female humanoid half his size, wide and so smoothly bodied that she appeared boneless, skull broad and finned. As she moved, she smoothly divided into three more exaclty like herself, and one gave him a gentle push. (The Guide would have identified her as a splixson, a species of duplicators who could split into multiple copies sharing a link; if one died, so did the rest.) "Keep moving," she said in triple, but gently.

"Miss the sunlight," he said wearily, relaxing slightly at the open concern on her broad and slightly flat face, and the downcast fins at either side of her head. He looked up. "I remember when our territory ran all the way through a munitions factory. There was a shaft that went right up to the surface. I could sit there, listening to the sound of explosive testing, and just let the sun come down…" As he spoke, a few leaves fell away, crumpling to pieces on the ground.

She looked uncertain for a moment; one of her clones hurried up to keep pace with the rest of their group while she stayed behind. "You'll see it again soon," she promised, and hugged him tight.

The plant-man almost smiled. "I hope so," he said seriously. They moved onwards, invigorated.

They found their team waiting for them along the tunnel. Their leader greeting them first as the splixson merged with her duplicates. "Where the scrag were you?" asked Mean Joe (a Big Bro slig who was actually blessed with an amiable temperament, at least for someone whose day job involving shaking down tourists and crunching skulls with his bare hands). "Do not get separated."

The flouara nodded meekly. Mean Joe softened. He shook his head, augments rattling around and his face-tendrils slapping together. "Just stick together," He said gruffly. "Keep to the plan. Find the bastards that run us out and take our territory back."

Their group came down the tunnel, and emerged into a wider opening; a crossing-space between three other passageways going to upper levels, and in the circular space between them there were sixteen metal hatches. This had been the secret route to their old lair, and someone had learned off it; at last, this was how the dust monsters had entered their territory and taken them by surprise after Mean Joe had declared war against them for their effrontry in asking their loyalty. There had initially been questions of how they had undone the locks and they saw that there was no question of that: the locks wre broken, and the hatches popped open, forced open or sliced away. As Mean Joe directed the others to a particular hatch, the florauna noticed a symbol painted between them all; a crossed-out smiley face, over a grinning skull with an afro imposed over crossed magical implements. The florauna spat and struck out with a tendril, slashing out the mark. Another of their company, wearing an mechanized robotic exoskeleton so large it scrapped against the walls and ceiling, cackled approvingly.

They found the biggest hatch, able to accommodate the armor and larger people like Mean Joe. Mounting the ladder, Mean Joe spoke to them. "Right," Mean Joe said. "Here's the plan. We sneak down to the neighborhood under here, where we used to set up shop. More than likely, they've taken our old neighborhood as their headquarters. We scout the place, determine their defenses and a plan of attack, and then we kill those usurpers! Steal their minion things, if we can, and destroy them if not."

"Be a real shame," came the voice from the mecha, her tones distorted. "They're good in a fight."

"They're creepy," the splixson disagreed.

They made their arrangements and Mean Joe left with his detachment, fitting with difficulty and crawling down, the others coming down after him. Several waited there, the florauna among them, and he went to an operating screen beside the hatch; just below foot level there was an elevator lift in the hatch, because there was so much space to traverse that someone had installed an elevator hatch for expediency. The lift went down, and as Mean Joe raised a thumbs-up, dust got dislodged and they had to step back to avoid coughing fits.

Various 'HOO-RAH' type of declarations came from those assembled as they readied for their turn to go to war. The splixson looked thoughtful. "Since when was this place so dusty?" She asked. "The ventilation systems here are working, I know that." She looked up. Sure enough, there were several grates all over, blowing cool air just fine. Yet the dust remained where it had settled.

Frowning, the florauna poked it. The dust sidled away, rolling up into a small clump that almost looked like a shape. Perhaps a hand, or a carapace. It seemed horribly familiar.

From below, from the hatch, there was a squealing noise and the lift grinding to an slow halt. Something metallic slammed, stopping it entirely and there was a brief cry below.

He looked over, and below he thought he saw his friends, too distant into the shaft to make them out properly. "The lift is stuck!" Mean Joe said, faintly. He said something else that they couldn't quite make it. There was something like... television static. Another voice, and Mean Joe talking to it. Whatever he said, it sounded negative.

"What's going on?" someone asked.

"I don't know," the florauna said sincerely. "I think someone got into the lift and they're talking to the boss." Next to him, the dust moved.

There was no more conversation, just a lot of yelling, and abruptly cut off by a sudden sharp noise. Something heavy and disgustingly solid hitting meat, then metal squealing against metal.

Screams. Silenced too quickly.

"Guys!" The florauna cried, horror flooding like poisoned sap in his veins. "What's going on?! Guys? Guys?!"

Except for dust sliding against metal and coming closer, there was silence.

"…Guys?" The splixson said next to the florauna, her voice quiet and quavering. "Are you there? …Please say something. Please!"

She got an answer but not in the way she would have liked. The hatch-shaft rumbled with motion and something thick and gritty blasted up through it, like a geyser made of sand, with such force that they were slammed against the wall. all of them scrambled back, shrieking in surprise and terror, scrambling away as something small came with it along with a lot of blood and some bodies. It all hit the ceiling and rained down in blood-sodden lumps, a particularly large body slamming onto the florauna.

He stood up, tendrils popping him up and shoving the huge body off him. Mean Joe's body fell to the ground, one limb missing, a significant chunk of his head gone. Most of his torso was in pieces, seperated by over a dozen impossibly sharp swords. Muscles strong enough to pull a mudokon in half had been neatly split, his enhanced body broken beyond fixing. Around him, the florauna vaugely realizd people were screaming. Oh yes; those were his friends. Crying, shouting.

His friends were dead. He felt a blissful grayness about him. He couldn't think about anything. Suddenly, it ocurred to him that he was going to die. Nothing he could do would change it. He and his friends were all going to die. With the force that some ideas had, he felt strangely relieved. The worst that could happen was definitely going to happen; nothing else mattered.

He found it hard to care.

He became awre that the dust that had come up was moving like something alive, spinning away from the rest of the dust to collect into large piles, dozens of them. Not very high but wide, with enough mass to equal several hundred pounds each. Piled in most of these were shockingly beautiful creations; flexible armor plates in a design he did not recognize but employed layered sections of green-hued substance like glass with the structure of metal. Opaque, distorting things through it, and shaped into beautiful patterns with some kind of energy flowing through them like batteries. They were like glowing jewels, or precious gems. Of a similar design were swords made of the same material; most no longer than several feet, single-edges and very thick around the blade, well-suited for chopping and blocking, able to deliver horrific slashing wounds.

Each pile... stood up. It was probably more honest to stay that they rose up and transformed, transforming in substance as they formed undead muscles, sinews, skin and carapaces in layers as they grew upwards, flowing into their armor and taking hold of their weapons. But that happened so quickly that none there could see it happen, and it seemed like the piles simply stood up, and suddenly each was an undead warrior, a prothean mummy clad in glassy armor and carrying impossibly sharp blades.

They were also all fresh from kills, their weapons dripping with blood and other similar fluids. The blood of his friends, the florauna thought dimly. The eyes of the mummies shone with a negative power. The more scientifically inclined considered this private thought absurd; darkness and nothingness didn't radiate or emanate anything, darkness was just places where light was not, and nothingness was just spaces without matter in them. It was a ridiculius thought.

But still, those eyes glowed with utter nothingness. Not a black light, not any kind of color or pattern. Just the gleam of something that shouldn't exist, little holes in reality and out them some dread, dead force was animating these things like electricity in a battery. And that was all there was to them; no will, no drive, no motivation, not even the basest instinct or complication of life. There was nothing in those eyeholes exccept bloody drippings of wet sand or dust.

Down the tunnels feet pounded, in extremely economical and synchronized paces marked by faint ringing, like the sound glass bells. Behind them fell another company of the alien mummies, just as fully armored as the ones that had ambushed them, and a few of them were even more heavily armored, from crest to foot. All of them had blades, or claws mounted to their forearms. They didn't have shields, but most of them had an arm gauntlet bigger than the other and large enough to do shielding work, with serrated edges to slice and hold. These new mummies took position, filing all around to fall in and go to work with blades, leaving just enough space to charge without giving anyone a chance to escape.

A number of the mummies, the florauna noted, were soaked in blood. The splixson cowered, tripping over her feet and falling down, obviously expected to be killed on the spot. To her clear relief, the mummies did not react. They did shift aside, dozens of them (perhaps thirty, at least) moving with an eerie grace as one in the back advanced from the group that had ambushed the gang's leader.

The florauna craned over to see what it was. A few others did too, shocked by the sudden cessation of violence to be sure what to do. The advancing mummy came to the front, right in front of them, holding what looked like a tiny television. A little electronic block of plastic and glass, just small enough to be held and carried in two hands. It looked like the sort you could buy from a basic supplies store, the kind put up near most neighborhoods and sponsored by the big corporations to keep people buying as often as possible. What did not seem standard (and the corporations took an extremely dim view of anyone messing around with their intellectual property) was a small replayer with a record disk already in it, secured to the video unit by some bolted bars.

The mummy stopped, gesturing at the television with as much enthusiasm as it could imitate. The gang looked at each other uncertainly and the splixson asked, "Um. Are you going to kill us?"

The mummy said nothing. It probably couldn't. It tapped at the television.

"You... want to give us the TV?"

The mummy tapped on the TV again. It wasn't irritated, but it seemed that it should be; whatever it was trying to convey wasn't getting across. Some other programming seemed to kick in and it settled for clicking a few switches on the playback.

"Oh, you want us to watch this?" someone else asked as the screen flickered.

The mummy could not respond, but it seemed satisfied. It presented the TV for better viewing.

When the image settled, it displayed a recording; a gaudily dressed githyanki sitting in a room near and dear to their hearts, the CEO's office in a complex once belonging to a corporation that had come up second in some underworld argument and now was the home of whatever gang, organization, mercenary company or individual who laid claim to the territory, given legitimacy as long as they paid a sum to Pentex, the corporation that owned the surrounding areas of the neighborhood. (By paying off Pentex's interests and making a show of loyalty, they would be left alone by official concerns and be considered honorary agents of Pentex.) In their time, it had been a messy gladiator arena where pit fights had gone on most nights for fun and profit. Now it was... well, it looked like a dance floor, flashing disco balls spinning on the ceiling in beguiling patterns and multicolored squares where people were dancing, including some mummies (though without much enthusiasm), a number of huge crystals in the walls and displaying television images in their facets somehow. There were all kinds of trinkets and art things hanging in the background; he'd apparently taken a bunch of pretty things as tribute already, or maybe loot.

He spoke, ebullient and doing his best to sound like his pitch was the best thing ever. "Greetings, all! My name is Disco Darvhog, space pirate extraordinaire, entreprenuer, and master wizard." He winked, as if to say he knew that was all nonsense and he knew you knew too. "As you probably cottoned onto, these territories are mine. This neighborhood is mine. These streets are mine. Everything that walks, lives, is powered or does anything at all here is akk mine!" For all that, he didn't sound like he was bragging or that concerned. "But don't you fret too much about it, I'm not a demanding landlord."

He leaned forward. "Me and my crew aren't here to conquer, exactly. What we have here, is an opportunity to recruit willing crew members for our adventures! We seek fame! We take fortunes! We find rare treasures and we recover powerful relics to learn their secrets! We build powerful creations the likes of which have never been seen, and we get literally all the best loot. These splendid mummies holding that TV? They and the secrets of their gear is our most recent acquisition! Don't tell me you don't want some of that."

He held up a finger, grinning knowingly. A small sphere of energies shone upon it. "Join my crew! Take part in our amazing, even nonsensical adventures; fight giant sea cattle, joust with red dragons, do battle with inevitables enforcing the laws against theft, plunder the mightiest merchant fleets, and learn forbidden secrets of magic! We'll take anyone; come down to our headquarters-" Darvhog gave a set of coordinates and an address, "And take everything the multiverse has to offer! We'll take anyone, as long as you're willing to sign on and, uhh. Not worry too much about a few little blips on the whole 'killing your buddies and taking your house' deal. Don't sweat it." A mummy stepped up on cue and opened up a box, filled to the brim with gold and looted credit cards. "I'll pay you what I owe you in lives, and we will be your new buddies. Sign up now, and we'll get you a head's-up in life! What do ya say: for fame! For fortune! For fun! C'mon and get in on..."

Lights flashed. Fireworks went off. Pumped up music played and Darvhog finished, "The Funk Revolution!"

The message ended.

The mummy stepped back, and the other undead looked at them with something that, if not for their complete lack of any expression whatsoever, might have been expectancy. Far down the hallway, in the tunnels, the florauna thought he saw a blue light. He opened his mouth to say something about it and his comrade in the mecha shouted "NEVER!".

She advanced, various massive anti-personnel guns slid out of modular ports and opened fire on the mummies. On-board targeting ensured she could not miss: several dozen mummies, lacking in armor, exploded into dust, the impact shattering their limbs right off and falling over. Others went sent flying, their armor scratched but unharmed, and knocked over those behind them. The mummies quickly rallied, smoothly sliding into formation. The one with the transmitter stepped back and the rest surged forward, weapons at the ready and moving in coordinated silence.

The battle began as his friend in the exoskeleton charged, guns still blazing, shouting jubilantly at how easy they were to put down; scores of the mummies went down in single shots, their heads crumpling and bodies blasting from inside, armored mummies hurtling away as others climbed over them. But something was wrong; the numbers weren't going down, they will still charging...

His friend wouldn't have seen it. She was fighting too joyously, caught in the thrill of battle. The mummies weren't staying down, they were getting back up, their wounds sealing up.

Wait. His eye focused. He saw sand flowing back up, and the mummies rematerialize. Mummies he had seen get shot point-blank, with bullets that could put down a super soldier, were charging, and the ones knocked down weren't stunned at all. He put it together. "Stop!" He cried. "They're healing! Your attacks aren't going to hurt them! They're just regenerating!"

But by that point, the mummies had already vaulted over the power armored warrior and, her armor stumbling like a great beast brought low by rats, were doing the same to everyone else in that tunnel. The battle was already over.

The mummies were efficient. They killed fast.

Almost beautiful to watch, the florauna felt with a renewed fear; they moved so fast they were hard to track, inhumanly flexible and twisting in mid-air to land strikes before they rolled onto the ground and sprang back up, sinking their blades into another fleshy target. One swing: a dead friend toppled into pieces. The swing continued, the mummy's waist revolving like a top and carrying the blade behind it, right through another friend. Another swing: another friend, dead. A burst of gunfire, the mummy walked through the bullets lodging in its armor without cracking it and swung a sword; both gun and head came off. It jumped it to free its sword from the corpse and sprung away, spinning and slamming the sword right into the weak spot in the power armor's gaps between neck and shoulder-

Screams, everywhere, all over the tunnel.

It was already over in minutes.

The florauna recoiled from flashing blades and screams, and bloody bits splashing on the ground. He almost tripped on a few chunks of what had been, briefly, his splixson friend-

He cried out, fell down again. A few swords only nicked him. He wasn't in a state to be thankful. Ahead of him the mummies that had been 'killed' or injured stood up, dust flowing back into place, their limbs reforming and their weapons back in hand, and it was as if they had never even been harmed. Behind them was the rest of the gang. Every single one was dead.

He might have screamed. He wasn't listening to himself.

The power armored one was the last woman standing, stumbling hopelessly on one leg, the other broken away. She was too battle damaged to win now, her weapons largely useless and her strategies reduced to enraged rushing at the closest mummy; a poor tactic in the circumstances, and they simply swarmed her. Her furious cries were buzzing, distorted; her vocal intercom had been too damaged by a sword strike. She said things that might have been no, her armor's fists swinging bravely but ineffectual as the mummies crawled on and toppled it over like hyenas rushing a wildebeast. Their swords found her weapon ports and severing them cleanly. Thirteen blades piercing her containment-vessel, and then her body, and twisted. Some blood poured out, and her cries remained resolute and angry even as she perished. After her, those of the gang still alive fell as well, the mummies charging like a flood and washing them away.

The florauna actually missed this, having finally lost his nerve and trying to un, finding a shred of hope that he might survive after all. His friend's screams still ringing, he loped away as fast as he could. Light and ringing foot steps followed behind him, many of them, dozens of them. Up the tunnel he moved, tendrils slapping against the ground and useless seeds falling off him and breaking on the ground, going slightly at an angle, closer to the blue light down there-

He reached the source of it. He slammed right into something quite hard, and shiny, and rebounded right off the way he came.

He bounced on the ground a few times, aching in his front, and he looked up to a sight that froze the words in his throat and if he hadn't already been afraid would have made him perfectly sure he was going to die. Standing in front of him was what looked like a statue of an extremely curvaceous asari woman, her onyx-dark body like a humanoid star and engulfed in a solid layer of pure psychic energy. Whether it was this force field that had struck him so hard, or that the grand largeness of her was a lot more hard than it looked, he couldn't say.

Edhitha, bodyguard to the elite and supreme leg-breaker of the cartels, looked down at him with half-lidded eyes and mild detachment. She gave him a slight poke with her foot and when he cringed, she appeared to quickly loose interest. "And what's going on here?"

The florauna opened his mouth to beg for help, hoping against all rationality that she would save them, and it became a squeal as six swords pierced his insides. (Edhitha tilted her head, in the bored way that the truly invulnerable react to danger.) Coated with some sort of poison, or a vitriolic enchantment, his insides burned. His exterior wilted in moments, yellowing and drying. The cry he managed was a weak, sad gasp. He fell onto the ground, and whimpered as he became aware of something just outside his field of vision, dark and hooded and helpful.

The undead protheans raised their swords questioningly at Edhitha, who could not see the figure promising a freedom of a sort to the florauna. "Ah, so it's a territorial dispute." She gave a serious glance to the dying plant-man and her expression softened at his misery. She reached out and the force field around her arm expanded into a gigantic hand-like shape. When it curled around his body. It was bigger than he was. His cries stopped, muffled.

Her expression blissfully placid, Edhitha squeezed with a strength that could tear concrete asunder and shatter buildings. Green goo spurted between her hand-field's fingers, and the florauna mercifully went still, leaving the dark, hooded figure to attend to him. Her force field assumed it's usual shape and she went on, the blood sluicing off her. The mummies watched her silently as she walked down the tunnels, clearly someone on a mission more well-thought out than the doomed gang that had met their end. undead protheans ignored all this and retreated back down the tunnels to the hub they had come from, and Edhitha left the corpses behind and serenely moved past a body missing its head, following them with every sign of total assurance.

By the time she got to the hub of these tunnels, the remainder of the company (that is, the last remnants of the gang that had once ruled here) were all dead. The undead protheans stood still without anything better to do, though they became animate at her presence. Several of them readied their swords. "None of that," She said sharply. They halted, responding to her tone of command (and perhaps a bit of mental influence; when no thoughts existed within them, they couldn't help but act on whatever was put there). She pointed at the one with the receiver. "You. Replay that message!" It did so, and she quietly waited until he was finished; she sounded like she'd heard this sort of pitch before, but more effectively. She appeared to reach a conclusion. "I wish to speak with your master. Take me to him."

The undead protheans said nothing, but several of them moved towards the shaft (and one of them placidly went to look for some paint to fix the symbol the florauna had ruined). She followed them as they crawled down it, and she needed no such transportation but simply levitated into the air, floating down the shaft. When she came to the broken-down lift (sabotaged as a trap to the unwary), she grimaced at the mangled bodies upon it, and made a dismissive gesture that summoned a biotic field that snapped the lift in half and dropped the bodies out of her way. She made a mental note to get someone to fix that, and recycle those bodies. It did not do to waste, after all.

Eventually, the shaft terminated into a doorway, and it opened up on a larger chamber that had been colonized some time ago. Edhitha imagined (Since her knowledge of the city was incredibly detailed when it came to her official dominion, and then sketchy after that) that at some point, this had merely been an open space made by the forces of forgotten structures pushing against each other and opening up in a large space big enough for a small town, and the inhabitants had shored it up long ago.

Landing upon the ground, her spiked boots fell as dropped leaves and still made a sizable crater as her full weight hit, metal bending and rivets popping laborously. A few people of various descriptions (mostly glukkons, a few robots, the ocassional human, even a freed mudokon or two) edged carefully by her, doing their best not to attract attention. Mummies were there wherever she looked, patrolling down catwalks and scaling buildings for intruders or disturbances, wandering near groups or just laying down next to walls until something happened.

It was a quiet neighborhood, with little going on. People moved patiently, like they had all day, with few vehicles of any sort. Edhitha looked down, and then out, and there was a lot of both to see. The neighborhood was the classic sort where they had build outward until they ran out of room, and then built up until they hit the ceiling, and filled in the remaining space as much as possible. Even the spaces between walls and buildings were occupied by catwalks and suspended pathways, metal swaying in the air-condition breeze and dripping condensation. (The lower streets and rooftops were soaked through and full of holes.) Now Edhitha floated down again, into the depths of the neighborhood, vast scores of it going past her. It was a large territory, for certain; she saw many levels of apartments and market stalls and little stores, clinics and delivery chains and supply network nodes, around a dozen levels of inhabitation before they ran out of room to expand in all directions. From floor to ceiling it was filled, with all manner of hovels and tents and houses and recycling stations and generators and water purifiers and food converters all stacked on each other in a cluttered mess, all made from cast-off scrap and machines welding together or repaired to working condition, crude catwalks erected between the different buildings and construction scaffolds repurposed as pathways between buildings and open rooftop plazas.

She'd seen the last census-takes of the local businesses (the Hegemony's interests being what they were, what sort of businesses made or dealt in was more important than any amount of people except as resources or manpower), and a few new ones had appeared, local workers presumably gang-pressed into it. Edhitha's travels through the region eventually took her by hastily designed foundries, and no one had the heart to try stopping her as she went right into a factory taken for this purpose. A glassblowing place, it seemed, useful for this kind of work. The people there did not seem bothered, and did not notice her; they kept to their work, which she could not grasp. She saw forges and glassworks, highly concentrated lens arrays focusing searing beams into vats of molten glass. Large chambers of crude sonic engines, battering the molten glass passing through and doing something to it's structure, cooler areas where the glass was placed into shaped casts (for swords, for armor pieces) and still more work, but not complex, was done to see that it was up to spec.

They did the rest of the work elsewhere; they did not finish the blades or set the armor here, she supposed. The armor and weapons had been... enhanced, magically, and she doubted if the workers here would be chosen from people who would know those secrets.

Thoughtful, Edhitha eventually located the address the video had provided and, after traversing many lifts and walkways and took a rocketing burst up, landing explosively upon a high-rising plaza in a defensible but pretty location above the neighborhood, like a palace sitting upon a mountain overlooking a valley below. The building had been fancy; built to resemble a giant pagoda, it stood in twenty-eight beautiful sections of rooms, wings and apartments, and on the front was a symbol of some sort. She couldn't make it what it had been, as it had been too badly defaced by graffiti, but now banners and flags hung from the most dramatic surfaces, displaying that crossed-out smiling face over a magic-themed skull and crossbones. (The Pentex logo was discreetly minimized.)

She walked past platoons of mummies, all armed with more weaposn and armor than she had yet seen, and all obviously crackling with unique powers. Some of them were flying. There was a small crowd of people hanging about in the manner of recruitment lines, and some desks had been set up in front of the building, manned by a harassed-looking and extremely pretty frost giantess, taking the applications of the prospective candidates and trying to find them something to do. Not far from her, there was a round table where Darvhog and, presumably one of his crew, were sitting at and pointedly ignoring the applicants. One side was mostly occupied by a frost giant boy, who looked surprisingly human-like instead of the monstrous ogre she had been told to expect. Apart from the ice tones of his skin and his brutal teeth, he looked very much like a stout human boy from the Steppes. (If she knew what Mongolia was, she would have thought he was from there.) Next to him, trying and failing to look like he was incharge, was a githyanki dressed in an unusual fashion somewhere between 'dungeon-punk pirate' and 'disco dork'; all in bright pink and yellow, too. On the table itself was an organic-looking device with several crystals in it, a holographic and stunningly realistic image of lookalikes of the githyanki and frost giant as protagonists. From the controller-like mechanisms in front of the real pair, she assumed it was a video game of some sort.

The githyanki, Darvhog, looked up and saw her first. He took his hat off to her, smiling rather like a used zoomer salesman who knew that the customer understood that he was a scoundrel. "Hello, miss," he said cheerfully. "Whatcha doing down here in my part of things?" He looked hopeful. "Wanna join? We're always up for auditions. Well, not exactly auditions, more like just going okay with signing up on the roster..."

Off in the distance, the female giant, Jord, was apparently arguging with someone. "Yes, I already told you, anyone can join but you have to bring your own weapons! Yes, I know the mummy guards have their own weapons but we're outfitting them special! What kind of pirate crew outfits recruits? We're trying to run a traditional organization here! Wait, what? No, I'm not going to chain you two together to use you as a weapon! No matter how awesome it is, I promise."

"No thanks. I'm already on a real fine roster myself," Edhitha said. It became apparent to Darvhog that she had no face, really. Her eyes were glowing lights, her mouth a suggestion. The glowing hollow of her mouth twisted up into a small smile, her eye-lights turning in amiable crescents. "Pirate life isn't for me, no offense."

"None taken, but..." Darvhog looked sad for a moment. "Shame. You have an interesting look." He gave her a long look. "The heck are you, anyway?"

Edhitha's left eye-light became taller than it was wide, to approximate a raised eyebrow. The frost giant, Gunter, straightened up and looked affronted at such rudeness. Edhitha had to smile; with his chubby features, charming shyness, and how tiny the table was in comparison to him, Gunter looked like a good-natured child at a play table made for babies. "I am an asari."

"Really?" Darvhog seemed genuinely surprised. His pause contained a lot of unspoken comments about the incredible unlikelihood of a woman that looked like a living statue made of star matter was just an asari. "...Huh."

"You really think my hair would look prettier in pig tails?" Jord asked the next applicant, her skin shimmering like diamonds as she was dazzled by the idea. "Ooh, I'll try that!"

Edhitha waved her hand, and every unattended object for the next mile and a half hovered several feet off the ground for a moment or two. "I have… been transformed." She shrugged, and her biotic field shifted with the movement. With the shimmering surface of her body, spots of light like galaxies in miniature, the effect was curiously hypnotic.

"What in the name of Jotunheim are you doing here, anyway?" Gunter asked, apparently wary of his boss making any more blunders.

Edhitha held up a small badge with the iconography of the Hegemony. "Your super-glass. I'd like to make you a couple offers about it."

Gunter choked. Darvhog dropped his controller. The strange crystal sword at Darvhog's side said 'Ooh!'. Edhitha gave it an odd look but didn't say anything; talking swords, compared to some of the stuff she saw these days, weren't too strange. "You're what?!" Darvhog sputtered. "You're from… you're from the big leagues! The hells is someone important as you doing here?!"

"She's going to kill us!" Gunter wailed. Edhitha stiffened as the air suddenly got a lot colder around Gunter, and she remembered that he was after all a frost giant. "We stepped out of bounds, now we're gonna die!"

"What?" Edhitha said, startled. "No, not at all! I'm not here to assassinate you all!"

"Curses," Darvhog's sword complained. "So close to freedom!"

"You're not going to kill us?" Darvhog said. "Then why are you here?"

"I already told you!" She gave them plaintive looks. "I'm here on behalf of the cartels to discuss the..." She tried to find the right word. "Interesting glass you've created. Stronger than steel, can take an edge very well, has unparalleled qualities in conducting various energies? And simple enough to make that people can be taught to create it with minimal instruction." At this last she indicated the factories she had passed through.

"Well, yeah," Darvhog said, relaxing a bit. Gunter's frost dimmed a bit, since the boss wasn't worried. "It's not that hard to make, once you figure out how to mix up the-" He stopped, preventing the slipping of any manufacturing secrets, and coughed. "Uh, never mind that." He scratched himself uncomfortably; something about Edhitha's appearance was making him a bit self-conscious of his own organic body. "Um. Why do you care?"

"I don't really," she admitted. "But you have to admit... I've seen the things you've done here." She pointed at the noticably shiny buildings; the ones directly around the HQ had been destroyed and rebuilt, the super-glass making a significant portion of it. They gleamed like beacons in the direct lighting. It rather reminded her of the crystal spire cities of her homeworld, though much dirtier. "Your wonder-glass lends itself well to architecture... you can make superb weapons and armor with it... to say nothing of the technological uses." Darvhog snorted at that. Owing to the shape of his nostrils, it was like a slide whistle. "But I don't think you're taking it quite far enough; this kind of material has a lot of amazing applications." She frowned, remembering a few overly excited lectures from various scientists who had enough authority to ask her to do things (since they were too scared to order her). "Or so I'm told. It could be quite valuable." She leaned against a wall, denting it. "Sorry about that. But you really are sitting on something spectacular here."

"We are?" Darvhog said.

"I told you," said the sword.

Gunter cleared his throat. "I told you too. And we could be doing way more with it! Like..." he hesitated. "Making magic cannons that shoot magical effects? Channeling arcane energy through a spell matrix crystallized into the glass."

"What, like magic guns!?" Darvhog said indignantly.

"No! Like. Uhhh..." Gunter hesitated. Unlike his boss, he had no issues with scientific outlooks, but he tried to do his best to keep his boss in a comfort zone and that usually involved playing to those prejudices. "Like... a really big wand? That blows stuff up? Or drains their power to give it to you. Stuff like that."

"Ooh!" Darvhog relaxed. "That does sound interesting. Um. Right, Ms. Edhitha?"

"No 'miss', if you please," she replied, following the conversation like it was a mildly interesting cartoon. "I suppose that kind of thing would be useful in a fight." The warfare possibilities hadn't occurred to her, since she wasn't much for mass combat. "if you don't mind blowing up the neighborhood or anything like that. Please don't do that."

"Um." Darvhog shifted nervously. "Is that a 'I'll kill you if you do that' veiled threat or just a thing to say?"

"Couldn't say," she said dreamily. "I might. Might not. They tell me who to hit." She went blank and then chuckled. "Hah! Hit! 'Hit'! I can't believe I... oh, I love accidental puns! ...You know, I said 'hit'. Meaning to literally smack somebody but also the slang term for an assassination or-"

"I got it, thanks," Darvhog said. Gunter was starting to freeze over again. "Look, uh. About any kind of deals..."

"Yes?"

Darvhog was surprisingly good at looking sly. "Well… it could be that I haven't sold all the secrets I know… or even sold off all loot I gathered as proof of concept. Valuable relics, that would be a real easy deal for your guys to reverse-engineer. Or I could sell you my secrets, in exchange for a cut of the profits?"

"I'll put that down as 'opening negotiations'," she said. "They'll send someone else down a bit more qualified to handle things like that."

"You mean you're not a negotiator?" Gunter said. She shook her head. "Than what are you doing here? Why'd you come?"

"Because your mummy soldiers keep killing anyone who comes into the area," she said bluntly. "I was asked to make you stop them from doing that, and collegues of mine thought this would make a fine opportunity for acquiring a useful technology."

"...Oh." Darvhog twisted around and had the decency to look unnerved. "Look, I just... keep them battling anyone who attacks. Patrols, you know? And recruiting."

"That is fine. Not so much that they've killed several technicians and support engineers that need to repair vital components that happen to be in your territory. People are getting..." and she had that true intimidating gift for putting just the right spin on one word to invest it with all manner of horrific implications. "Upset."

Darvhog's smile faltered. "Oh. Ah. Oh dear."

The table nearly toppled over as Gunter staggered back to his feet, like a tree uprooting itself, and cautiously producing a shield of shimmering light and cold mist. "…Are you gonna kill us now for that?" Gunter asked timidly.

Edhitha looked at him, wondering briefly how someone just barely twice the size of a human and composed of biological structures more efficient than any machine and tougher than nearly anything that walked or crawled on land could be so... timid. She snorted. "No, again. Ordinarily, I suppose we might have to be, ah, 'firm', but in exchange for certain considerations in negotiations? Given a little advantage in acquisitions over any other bidders, I might be able to persuade our more zealous people from exterminating you and your undead pets."

"Uh, sure," Darvhog said, looking a little shaken. He brightened up, as if by force of will. "Good to hear, eh?"

"Uh. Yeah." Gunter looked around. "Jord?" he called out, hopefully. She didn't answer, at this point trying to solve an argument amount the recruits by aggressively flexing at people. What she intended to accomplish by this, if anything, was unclear.

Edhitha got up and cheerfully clapped Darvhog on the shoulder with a thunderclap: Darvhog's chair sank a foot into the ground, cast-iron floor bending under him as he winced. "Than it's a done deal! I guess?"

"I think my shoulders just collapsed," Darvhog said meekly, curled on the floor and eyes screwed up in pain. He crawled out of the collapsed chair, and Gunter hurried over to pick him up, oversized blue hand engulfing Darvhog's entire forearm in a flurry of dissipating ice magic.

Edhitha picked him up the rest of the way, like a boxer who had won a fight and liked it so much that they were honorbound to haul the opponent to safety, and dragged him into the building, and she called out for drinks the whole time to any nearby mummy. They left and returned with drinks, but it was unclear if they were actually listening to her, if it was a weird coincidence, if Darvhog's attitude towards her had somehow invested her with hierarchical status, or what.

As she went inside, she looked back to see if Gunter or any crew wanted any, and paused, seeing a bit of moving metal.

She paused, tilting her head and frowning at a sudden burst of movement, sliding away from her field of vision. She waited, but saw nothing more. Still frowning, she stepped inside after Darvhog and Gunter, returning her attention to business.

Cliffs of building and unattended windows provided ample space for a small, ball-shaped robot to float to safety; there were people out there, but rarely looking up. If anyone saw the robot, they didn't say anything.

Into a building still under construction by mummies presently called to other duties, the robot drone came to rest. It watched the three go, a multitude of optical sensors telescoping to watch the trio enter the building, just as it had been watching the patrol routes of prothean mummies moving around the neighborhood in formation.

Darvhog might have been aware of dozens of these small, home-made and glitchy robots routinely spying on his territory. Not much of that territory; there was too much space to cover, and the robots too few, too slow, and too prone to collapse at bad moments. But there was enough to learn important details.

Now, several hours of watching scrolled through its databanks, and was transmitted to a dedicated receiver. The mummies, it appeared, did have a routine to their patrols, though it would take some time to determine any gaps in their defenses.

Now, on the edge of a patrol route at the outskirts of Darvhog's territory, near a hub close to a train station, Zim and Calvin sat together in front of a small bank of folding computer terminals designed to be carried with them and set up quickly, a monitoring station for heroes on the go. It bunched together into single unified processing system by a mesh of wires and connections. Their faces were colored pale from the light of just under a dozen screens propped up on slim articulated stands with cords connecting them to the hub of terminals. Antennae and receiver dishes poking out just behind them, brushing against the backs of the screens and picking up the signals their seeing-eye drones broadcast.

They were squatting down in a currently empty paper-recycling plant, awaiting a shift change and giving them a short time for the mission. Various signs suggested that it was a front for a minor corporation that imported soap, piano keys and authentic human bone accessories (free with a purchase of authentic baby oil, made with real human babies). The local security hadn't noticed them, as Hobbes had done some smooth-talking to persuade them that the group was a pro-bono mercenary gang doing some light freelance security work. Apparently, this wasn't uncommon for padding a resume around here. It provided a convenient excuse for the security among them to deploy and hide the technicals deploying their surveillance, now presently working at their own home-made terminals by Calvin and Zim. Some had been supplied by Zim's crew, and others had brought their own from various similar jobs they did for hire. (Apparently a practice called Shadowrunning.) It wasn't a bad situation, if one pressed for time.

The Glukkons used an interface not too different from human computers, Zim had found, if favoring blocky shapes; their keyboards could double as blunt weapons, and probably were meant to just in case of exciting office situations. He wired it directly into his pod, bypassing the usual interface in favor of mental control and went through the data, reviewing the meeting with this 'Edhitha', or what little the drone could pick up of it.

Zim was displeased with how his allies kept flinching and murmuring in worry, and most of them were stunned into horrified silence by her presence on the camera. Calvin seemed indifferent. "Well at least he's staying put," Calvin commented. "We can work around that, corral him and press in. He's thinking a bit small, though."

"Bah," Zim said. "He is only selling the technological secrets he had uncovered for petty cash. Not even bothering to explore the potential of those secrets or build upon them or apply them in any remotely useful fashion to himself."

"And that bothers you?" a robot asked.

"Yes! He could do much with what he found on that dead world… and he doesn't even bother to think about it! He lacks ambition." Zim spat in annoyance. "Just carving out territory on this one world. Small thinking. Eh. No offense."

"But, isn't carving out territory and making bargains with the people here exactly what we have done?" Calvin asked reasonably.

A long pause. "No," Zim said. "It's different. Don't ask me how I know that. Your puny non-mechanical brains cannot possibly comprehend it. Not even the robots, you're not mechanical enough. Yes." Calvin, the robot and most everyone paying attention rolled their eyes.

A slender salarian pointed to a row of screens with a thin, elegant finger. A mummy moved at high speed in the camera view, of a drone that happened to be overlooking that very building they were in, chasing an orange blur. If you slowed down the video (which they didn't have time or reason to do) you would have seen Hobbes galloping on all fours, face grim and grouchy at being chased and possibly irked at a mummy being able to keep pace with him. Zim more sensed the video, playing in the background of his mind through his connection through the network via hardlines. "We have the tiger coming in! We got a positive on a dustman! Repeat! Positive on the dustman!"

Zim reflected that Hobbes had not been happy to 'volunteer' as bait, especially since someone had pushed him over the 'step past this line to volunteer' line. Zim might have done that. "Roger!" Zim spoke into a radio they worked up. "Zuko! Are we clear to fight?"

"Yes!" Zuko replied. "We have the area cleared out, at least for a few minutes. If we're gonna rush in and make a mess, now's a good time!"

Zim grinned, already fantasizing about the look on Darvhog's face shortly before he planted a foot in his eye. Behind him, Daliz the krogan, their last line of defense in the cast of direct attack, pounded her fists together and grinned toothily while Calvin shrugged on his elemental weapons. "Be ready to lay down fire blasts!" Calvin said. "I can work with the heat and take it down more quickly!"

Zim raised a hand. "A question regarding that strategy. What if I am no longer capable of making fire due to my powers unexpectedly shifting nature?"

"Well, I- wait. What?" Calvin blinked, utterly dumbfounded.

Zim's hand was still raised. A ball of light burned greenly in his hand. "Behold!"

Calvin's expression was blank for the brief time it took for him to process this. When he spoke, Zim's translation protocols completely blanked and he had no idea what Calvin had actually said beyond it being from an Orkish dialect in the region Calvin presumably came from but, based on the look on his face, the tone he said it in, and the harsh syllables, it was most likely a virulent swear of some kind. "You wait until NOW to tell me your powers are suddenly completely different!" Calvin shouted.

"Yes."

"WHY?!"

Zim shrugged. "You didn't ask."

"OH FOR THE COMPLETELY-NON-EXISTENT LOVE OF TZEENTCH AND ALL THE HAPPY COINCIDENCES!"

Hobbes crashed into the ground just visible through the windows of the room they had taken. He hit too hard to be seen, lost enough momentum to be just barely visible, and bounced a few times until he stopped. "There you are!" Zim said, and nudged him with his boot. "Up you get."

"I know, I know," Hobbes grumbled, hissing and standing up. "Get ready."

"And be careful," Calvin said, giving Zim a dirty look. "Zim's powers suddenly don't work the same way. Our usual strategies aren't applicable anymore."

"Wait." Hobbes' ears flared. "What!"

"Worry about it later, and remember what you saw on the screens!" Zim said as ringing steps came closer, at high speed. "Do not let it get close!" He held up a hand, glimmering with chaotic light. "And remember. I get to hit first!" Calvin paid close attention, frustration not standing much of a chance compared to his sincere curiosity.

The group scattered into an open fire formation as the mummy walked into view; taller than most of the mummies they saw, decked out in somewhat more elaborate armor than the others, though not with any apparent enchantments. Head to toe it glittered, the contrast of dusty body and gleaming armor making it look like a fishbowl full of dirt. As soon as it turned the corner it saw Zim and his crew, and their allies, all standing in a perfect position to slice it with firearms and close ranks for melee combat. It came to a full stop, glancing from Hobbes to Zim and everyone else in a single move. It's eyes focused upon the terminal behind them; as far as it had any emotion, it looked surprised.

"Bang," said Zim, and pointing his finger, fired a beam of light that turned the room blind with brightness after the explosion stopped.

(Two security guards, still on duty, looked up. Hearing the explosion, they moved out to investigate at a safe distance.)

"Okay, that is kind of cool," Calvin admitted, his goggles filtering out the light. The others had similar equipment, Zim assuming that he would blind people ahead of time. The mummy had been blasted into a wall, it's armor irritatingly impervious to even that powerful attack, though it was presently struggling to hold itself together and just concentrate on staying upright. Bits of it were healing slower than the rest; where Zim's light blast had hit it directly."Your fire powers are... light-based now? I don't get it."

"Me neither, just blast it!" Zim said. Calvin generated a fireball and aimed it well, hitting the mummy square in the chest. The armor was proof against it, and the mummy bounced once and came charging back, sticky flames over it's body and snuffed out against the weight of the bullets suddenly blasting into it from all sides. A few hit undead flesh and pulverized sand: most did not.

It was very light, but also very fast; the impacts warped it's step and it still vaulted overhead, right into the room. Zim thrust a short-range blast at it as the mummy fell, punching it right back across the room. Chunks of sand splattered everywhere and an arm fell off, still clutching a sword. "We got it!" Zim cheered.

"No!" Hobbes said. "Look!"

And truly, the mummy was unharmed, patiently striding forward. The severed arm dissolved into sand that rejoined the main body, so fast that it looked like it suddenly regrew a new arm, and the sword was carried with it. The wounds were healing strangely; Calvin's fire blasts were already healing, and Zim's light-based attacks were responding more slowly, as if hurt more badly, or interfering with the regeneration. Anyone who could hold a gun opened fire, bullets lodging in the armor or flattening against it with so many culmative shocks that the mummy kept getting forced back and pinned in place; it held up a hand, bullets piercing it like bees descending upon a threat to the hive. Four eyes with pupils like hourglasses looked past them, the tall and gaunt figure's expression totally blank.

The bullets ceased. The mummy instantly charged, with uncanny reflexes and speed. There was no thought or planning; it wasn't being shot at, so it attacked. Completely without instinct or thought. Consequently it didn't have a grasp on strategy at all, and when Daliz charged with a joyous roar and swung a crackling power fist at its head, it just tried to swing its sword. She was too big and too close for that to work and landed a blow square in the chest. Ignoring Calvin's shouts of 'don't do the thing we just told you not to do!', She grabbed it by the ankles and swung it high and into the ground, again and a gain, splattering bits of mummy everywhere. And almost instantly, again, it kicked at her and got enough leg room to wiggle free, spinning to the ground as it's parts rose to meet it; when the mummy landed, it was whole again, armor scratched from all the bullets but still intact.

The mummy swung at the salarian; not because he was any actual threat, he was just standing there and wasn't a known ally and was not dead; therefore he was something to attack. Zim had already been stoking a charge of light energy and powered up fairly quickly, distracting the mummy for a few precious seconds before a beam of light cascaded out and struck the mummy's sword right on its edge, leaving smoke and scorches and a slightly altered trajectory. The blade struck against the ground, just barely missing the salarian by moments. Calvin moved with surprising speed, rolling in front of the mummy, and that fire-power gadget covering all of one arm with his recent improvements (and Zim had the idea that Calvin was getting in a mood to change the name of it, not that 'fire gauntlet' or 'ice device' had ever been particularly good) came on-line, and his palm opened.

From the outside, it looked like there was a sudden blast of red light, as the slight figure of a Prothean mummy exploded out the side of the building, blasting out into the sky and crashing into the adjacdent parking lot, right next to the lazing security guards who really worked there.

"What the hell is that!?" A chicken-like being said, pulling out a gun.

"New guard, maybe?" a slig said doubtfully, getting out his own gun. The mummy turned to them, drawing a sword in case of attack. "Okay, maybe not." Tremendous blasts of fire and light, and a whole lot of bullets, streaked down with the mummy at it's epicenter, blasting a crater into the ground. "What the hell!"

The mummy charged out, on fire and baking but still very much unharmed. Burnt sand restored itself, bullet holes closed up, and it showed no pain or fatigue whatsoever. Another blast of fire from above caught it, sending the mummy bouncing on the ground several times, smoking, and as it stood up with several nasty burned patches like improperly blown glass (crumbling into dust and then regenerating gradually), Calvin hopped out of hole and landed noisily on a large metal shack near them.

The guards squinted. "Oy, kid!" One of them called. "What are you doing!? What is that... that thing!?"

"Horrible undying monster," Calvin said. "Trying to kill it now, or slow it down!" Daliz smashed through the side of the shack, toppling the whole thing. "Hey, watch it!" Calvin shouted through a falling pile of metal, to little avail; she smashed right into the mummy and began doing her best to beat it down. This had no apparent effect besides forcing it to regenerate its head a few dozen times.

The officers drew their weapons, taking aim. It was clear they weren't bothered about who they hit. Calvin instantly whirled around with his ice weapon aimed at them, projecting a wall of icicles as high as a truck between them and the battle. Whether it was to stop them from getting involved and potentially killed, or to stop them from shooting the krogan, that was up for debate.

He rejoined the fight. The officers scrambled around the wall, minding the sharp icicles, and gaped at the sight of Zim glowing, Calvin generating elemental destruction wherever he went, the small squad of armed civilians trying to put down the mummy, and the destruction ensuing. Hobbes, sensing a potential problem, intervened. "Ah, I see the fight's started pretty quick," he said cheerfully, striding over next to them.

"Battle!" said the chicken-like officer. "What's going on here!?"

"Secret R&D department was making a sand golem to sell to little kids," Hobbes said, congratulating himself on such a story so fast. "For going through beaches and digging up treasures. Like... ah," Hobbes racked his mind fast to think of beach things that the Hegemonic corporations would think of including in its demographic's valuables. "Lost change and credit cards and sea shells containing secrets that will end the world."

"Oh," said one officer, mollified. "Sounds like our secret R&D department."

"We have one of those!?" The second officier said, gaping. "Since when! I never heard anything about that!"

"Well, duh. Course not," Hobbes said loftily. "That's why it's a secret department!"

"oh." The slig frowned. "Why does a kid's fetching toy need to resist bullets and ignore being pounded on by an angry krogan?"

"DIE! DIE! DIE!" Daliz bellowed, smashing the mummy into a wall. It squirmed out of her grasp and bounded away. "And stop shooting me, you guys! Bullets still leave a mark!"

"Sorry!" Someone yeled.

Hobbes thought about the question. "Have you seen some of the neighborhoods around here?"

"...Good point," the officer admitted.

"So help us bring it down," Hobbes said. "It thinks brains are treasures! It'll steal your brains! And put them on a shelf!"

"Oh my God!" The chicken-like officer screamed. He dropped his gun, threw down his badge and ran off. "I'm taking my references and getting out of here!"

The slig officer blinked, turned from him to Hobbes and back. He shrugged and did the same. "You're on your own, pal."

Hobbes watched them go. He winced. "Oh no, I think I just lost those two their jobs." His muzzle wrinkled. "That's got them out of here, at least." His radio went off. "Ahoy-hoy?"

"It's Zuko!" The voice on the radio was distinctly crackly. "We clear to go yet?"

Hobbes calculated that the damage caused by sending them out would be no more worse than if they didn't. There were at least two more explosions in the time it took to think this. It looked like they were juggling the mummy. "Guards are away from this area, I say go!"

"Morte!" Zuko said. "You hear that?!"

"You got it!" Morte said from where he was coordinating the drivers and gunners of the vehicles they were using on this mission, in case of a quick retreat or mounted battle. "We'll be there quick as we can!"

"Open fire already!" Calvin yelled as Zim kept blasting rapid-fire laser bolts, piercing the mummy's shoulder, giving it a bit of a limb for precious seconds as it closed ranks, his own shoulder with deadly aim. Bleeding and snarling, Zim flipped and weaved out of it's incredibly fast swings again and again, firing bolts of light with great force but poor accuracy, bits of the building and street boiling away where the bolts missed. The sword caught him in the side, and in the leg in a misaimed jump, and he bounced on the ground, hissing in terror of the contagions this filthy place might breed. The mummy's shoulder straightened to full health, sword raised up high. Hobbes took up his new shield, the one made of the ultra-strong materials harvested from the Umbra Eternis in Traverse Town, and shifted it into it's compact mode and threw it like a discus, his arm perfect and his strength incredible, and it hit with such speeding force that it sliced through it's arms. It hit a good angle and bounced back to Hobbes as the mummy's armor and blade crashed to the ground, and the mummy again instantly moved away to avoid the hail of bullets. Neatly bounding off a slig that was standing too closely, it ran up the nearest security shack, evading volleys of gunfire.

"We'z running out 'a ammunition!" An ork shouted, the big and brutish gun in hand a match for the ork himself, teeth so big that it was modifying his speech. He gestured furiously to the increasingly sparse ammo clips of the group.

"I know!" Zim said. He concentrated a pulse of light energy, hold it oscillating until it reached an ultraviolet wavelength, and directed it right through the side of the mummy's head in mid-leap. It didn't cause it pain, but it did drop onto the ground from the impact. By this time, it's arm had regenerated, dragging sword and armor to it despite Hobbes attempts to grab them. Zim blasted it, forcing its attention. "Just distract it until the vehicles arrive!"

"It'd be better if you could hold it still!" Calvin said. His ice gadget was fully powered up. "I can get it with a single ice blast, but I don't want to catch any of you in it!"

"We gots enough for one more volley, den?" the ork said, looking at the others. They nodded. "Let 'im 'ave it!"

Calvin and Zim retreated, and Hobbes bounded out of way, leaving the mummy exposed to the shooters. They opened fire. Dust rained on the grating, falling through and floating back up as the mummy writhed in place, bullet holes and laser burns piercing it right through with all the frequency of hail hitting rooftops in a storm; Zim stopped against a wall, watching with suddenly analytical eyes as the undead construct jerked and twisted in place, pin-prick thin holes opening on its body from lasers and bullets. The holes began sealing up almost as soon as the bursts of automatic fire ceased, dust rejoining the mummy's body and regenerating it. Bullets were pushed out where they had lodged inside against the firm strands of tough material inside it, making dinging noises as they hit the grate and fell through.

Zim's palms flashed as he felt a stabbing pain of too much pushing too hard too fast too soon like drinking the ocean in one gulp and he powered through it, coasting on the pain and using it. Then, green light was pulsing from his palms, mixing with his recharged force shield, amplifying and condensing it into a startlingly dense surface around his hands, straightening out and forming angles. He felt the power, he took hold of it and pushed, and the green brightened, more geometric lines shaping themselves into surface forms. He could shape it, and he focused on what would be really helpful in the situation, and around his hands formed a pair of what looked weirdly like power fists made of green light hovering over his hands and forearms. Stubby claws extending out, and flexed in mimicry of Zim's fingers.

Calvin stared, his face a silent remonstrance of all nonsensical power boosts. He said, "What."

Zim readied himself. The mummy leaped up, impossibly light and fast – its muscle power had to be surprisingly good – and it plummeted down at Zim, sword held out. Already there was shooting, and the mummy was off-course, bullet holes and burns in its sides, when Zim stepped aside and waited for it to come within hitting distance before he slammed his hard-light power fists into it.

A flash of green, a muted explosion when one went nova and burned Zim's arm in backlash waves. The mummy went sailing as a full third of its body blasted out in showers of dust, skidding and bouncing as it hit a wall and fell to the ground, leaving more dust in its wake in splatters and drips. Shakily, it stood up one on leg as the sand moved to it, flying through the air to rejoin it. Zim, one constructed power fist falling apart from its constituent energies being expended and his sleeve smoking slightly with greenish embers, pointed at it even with the sudden awful headache.

From the nearest roof, there was a revving sound, of an engine powering up. Anti-gravity plates streamed on, with a visible blast of mechanically-harnessed telekinetic force. The oblong metal shape of a modified speeder screamed out from that roof, trailing the electric-bright bolts of blue eco discharged fuel. The mummy glanced up, looking startled for the few seconds it had before the speeder smashed right onto it in a blur of yellow and red, tilting to the side so that the mass of Eco drivers, metal-shod cables and computerized adjusters hit it like a sledgehammer on a melon. Dust bloomed and ice shattered.

A part of its shoulder and head was intact, crawling away from the sane as the speeder bounced. The mummy's legs, intact but for the savaged part over the hips, staggered for a moment before falling over. The speeder, resembling an mixture of a hovering motorcycle and a small tractor, skidded and bounced a few times before coming to a stop, the anti-gravity plates lifting it up powering to a lower power level. The speed-boosting propeller-jets on the back deactivated with a few lingering blue sparks, and as it bounced on the ground, Morte hovered out of the pilot's seat within his chassis-body, several tendrils connecting into ports on the driving interface. Zim was somewhat relieved to see that familiar metal and bone shape there. "Did I just do something useful?!" Morte said, shocked.

"I think so, yes," Zim said. He turned to the mummy. It had found the rest of itself and healed again, a few streaks of frozen matter imbedded in it. "Oh, come on now!"

There was even more revving, and the mummy staggered back as nearly fifteen speeders and larger land-boats smashed into the area, bristling with weaponry and carrying the entire contingent of volunteers that had come with Zim on this scouting mission. The closest ones to Zim opened up their doors; Zuko stepped out of a heavily armed land-boat that he had taken a shine to and painted the Fire Nation national symbol on it after asking Calvin to make it larger and more tank like, with nearly a dozen volunteers crowding behind him. Hobbes had taken a speeder, though one more heavily armored and slower than the others, most of its weaponry designed for piloted targeting assisted by on-board computers instead of automated firepower. Almost all of these were painted red and yellow with bits of blue, in accordance with Calvin's peculiar superstitions, though the finest remodels and modified vehicles have been painted a light green (like what might be found on dragon-scales) in honor of a respected stellar empire from Calvin and Hobbes' universe.

Zuko moved into the fray at once, as the vehicles readied their jury-rigged weaponry. Fires sparked around him from his proximity to so many industrial factories on this level alone (and thus giving him greater power to use) and he pumped power into the flames around him, amplifying them to sizes greater than a man for each individual flame. With minute thrusts of his arms, he directed each fire at a specific area around the mummy, and as he predicted, it twisted and flailed in a dodge. It was quick and agile, almost a beautiful thing to see in motion, but it wasn't very smart; the first flames Zuko sent were meant to miss, and misdirect it even without the frozen parts of its body constricting movement. The other four flames hit it, either melting right through or catching it in explosions. The mummy hit the ground in several pieces, though it didn't matter much, as it had pieced itself together before it had finished skidding.

"Alright guys, this thing is one tough bastich, but nothing we haven't seen before," Daliz barked. "Get around it and cut off any retreat for it! Lay down suppressing fire and force it back! Then hit it with everything we have! Let's see it heal from that!"

"Okay then," Zim said, his other power fist of light breaking apart and reabsorbed by his body.

The automatic turrets on the speeders rotated, small miniguns mounted on the land-boats clanked into position, autocannons mounted as primary weapons on the speeders moved in synchrony with the las-rifles aimed by automated gunner-systems, sniper cannons locking into the foe. All the guns opened fire, and the mummy exploded in the blasts and bullets and lasers, and the place it had been standing on became a small crater. Dust gently trickled down and crystal armor smacked off the ground, intact but useless to the mummy now.

"Well, shave a duck," Morte said. "Here it comes again!" He plugged in his tendrils, and more of his speeder's weapons came on-line, the volunteers with him and on several additional speeders aiming their guns, and it was with a positively manic yell that he opened fire, delighted beyond words to be joining in the fight for once. His shots were precisely calculated to push the newly regenerated mummy back, and getting the hint, the volunteers did much the same, and a lot of them seemed to have an inkling of what Zim had in mind. The mummy staggered back under the fall of firearm projectiles, pushing forward only to be turned away from a possible route to attack, and its empty face seemed almost confused for a moment.

And the mummy was no longer moving around. Now Calvin ran forward, his ice device powering up, frost forming on it and crawling up the ground around him, little icicles dripping off the people around around, the air so heavy with sudden mist that fog dropped...

Calvin slid a capsule of red eco into his ice device, causing secondary piping to glow a steady crimson. Little icy spikes sprouted from Calvin, tinted red. His hand came up, a matrix of absolute coldness igniting around his arm and condensing into his palm. A large crystal formed around his arm, growing nearly as big as Calvin himself and splitting a bit down the middle, like a missle about to launch-

It fired, it landed at the mummy's feet. The mummy stared down, uncomprehendingly.

The crystal did not explode, exactly. It expanded, violently, into a field around ten feet wide at every side and crystalizing it in porous ice cocooning the mummy, freezing it solid in red ice. Slowly the iceberg shifted upwards, still growing until it was about a few feet off the ground.

Every single bit of the mummy was ensnared, and not a single grain of sand evaded capture. And in that instant, the battle was over.

It seemed that the fighters couldn't believe it. A few people refused to put their guns down, and everyone stared at the mummy suspiciously. Calvin approached it jauntily and put a hand on the ice, the red-tinted blue device upon his hand glowing in response. The ice compacted and changed shape, growing small and smaller, shifting around the mummy's shape until it was an ultra-hard frozen layer around the mummy, over ten feet worth of solid ice compressed into a layer less than a foot thick, all that mass making it extraordinarily strong.

"Is it... dead?" someone asked hopefully.

"No, but it's contained," Calvin said.

"You are certain?" Zim asked.

Calvin frowned at him. "I know my limits!" He tapped the ice. "My ordinary ice creations are harder than metal and generate a temporary cold field that makes them even more resilient. This stuff is my supernal-ice infused with red eco on the molecular level, strengthing the material form! Red eco makes things stronger and tougher! I'd like to see even Hobbes punch through this stuff. It's bulletproof!"

"It is?" Hobbes said. Morte fired a shot at the ice. "HEY!" The slugs wedged into the ice and fell off, flattened into lumpy discs. The ice wasn't even scratched from gunfire meant to damage armored vehicles (or undead monsters).

"Heck of a way to be called out on my boasts," Calvin said. "What'd you do that for!?"

"Just wanted to confirm," Morte said snidely.

An argument broke out (Calvin and Morte bickering, some of the back-up arguging over how to kill the mummy for good). Zim ignored it and stared thoughtfully at the mummy immobile in the ice. He waited for a few moments, expected the worst, but the mummy did not escape, no dust slid out from its totally solid exterior, and it didn't so much as move. He sighed, and the rest of his crew and volunteers sighed with him, hardly realizing they were holding in their breaths.

Hobbes cautiously stepped over. "What do we do now?"

"Get that thing loaded up?" Morte suggested.

Zim nodded. "Precisely. We have our monster and return to home base and prepare a proper cell for it. Well away from the apartments," He added, noticing the displeased looks on the volunteers. They relaxed a bit.

"Um," Daliz said. "Why?"

"Why?" Zim grinned as Hobbes shoved it onto the top of his land-boat, some volunteers locating nearby metal chains and looping it around the rattling mummy-cage. "For science, my friend. We shall see what hurts these things the most… and how to make them die."

Zuko nodded. "Good enough."

"So what about here?" Daliz asked Zim. "Are we, uh, done here? Where's our loot?"

"Good question," Calvin said. "Give me a second." He shifted the ice around, moving the mummy's armor off it's body (Cleansing it of any dust in the process) and, along with it's sword, neatly deposited it in front of Daliz and her friends. It shimmered expensively. "If you don't mind us analyzing the material it's made out of for a few days, I'd say that this stuff would sell for pretty high! Good loot, or not?"

Daliz conferred with the others. "It'll do," she said, grinning.

Calvin levitated the frozen mummy into a truck, sealing the storage bay after it. Zim got into Zuko's own vehicle, and as they left at maximum speed, opened the radio to the rest of his team. "We will have to find relays to extend signals to the drones we have spying on Darvhog.

Perhaps hack into existing ones, or find a way to boost our signals. I would prefer both, if we have time. As of now, the best solution is to test our captive mummy to see how it can be best damaged or destroyed, and find a way to exploit any weaknesses in Darvhog's defenses that we can find."

"It's a start," Calvin agreed from another vehicle.

They rode home, or as close to home as they could get, and Zim considered the mummy struggling inside its cage. He thought of his unfinished robot soldiers, and grinned; if Darvhog wanted to bring soldiers into this, Zim would outdo him so badly that the space pirate would rue the day he had forsaken Science!

Zuko was more than a little annoyed about the manic way Zim laughed on the way home.

---

In days to come, news of a new ambitious team came to certain people, and scraps of that news moved up to higher levels.

The bosses of the cartels, the ones whose opinions changed the world and whose whims dictated national policy, didn't hear about it, as it was too small. Nor did their immediate underlings or bodyguards; they were too high up the corporate ladder. And neither did their underlings, or their underlings, and so on, on and on down the ladder. Such was the scale of their world.

But, they did have underlings who didn't work ground level but the levels before that; the people who handled matters so the bosses never had to, and got people to deal with them. They were so far down the ladder that they were barely even making the mega-bucks, and who dreamed of the luxuries of being Glock-Stars (or, if not Glukkons, backing a real Glock-Star), but they did have status, and a bit of pride swelling up their view of the world.

One of these people, a survivor of the destruction of Rupture Farms and who had developed a serious chip on his shoulder from the stigma of that, sniffed at the reports he felt were better suited for an arbitrator direction agency, not real estate management. He worked for the company that owned the territory Zim's crew lived in, and had been one of those who traced the team's actions to its source. His superiors weren't sure what to make of their latest tenant's actions, and were cranky about it. "More warlord wanna-bes on our stuff. Fabulous."

Another glukkon, of roughly equal status, waddled over to give the paperwork a look. "This should have been on my desk. How'd you get it...?"

"Never you mind!" Some cigar smoke was coughed and he looked over the reports of their more recent actions in the area. "Hrm... fixing up the water, ensuring basic utilities, cutting deals with the local gangs... well, well. Got us some genuine altruists messing in our stuff."

"And that's bad, is it?" The second glukkon, who was named Joulik, said innocently.

"...Nah. A bit weird, but they're doing our work for us." The cigar did a revolution of the glukkon's mouth. "Stepping on some toes, but nothing to worry about. A little gang violence keeps 'em sharp down in the dirt."

"So you say." It was a very polite condemnation.

"Keep that bleeding heart sludge out of my office-space, ya hear?" A few puffing snorts. "What I'm more concerned about is reports of some crazy elf attacking corporate processing facilities."

Joulik looked downright alarmed. "Really! Any of ours?"

"Nah, they're competitors... I think. But..." another cigar twirl. "Attacking our enemies directly, that'll do us nothing but good. Let him kill them all, I say, and we use what's left." He indicated a chart. "The next one to be attacked, based on our predicitive model... yeah!" He pointed. "It'll be...Slacking Aerodynamics. Hrm. They do government work, I'm told."

"Shall I alert the authorities?"

The other glukkon laughed. "Nah. Of course not."

Joulik frowned. "Uh, why?"

"Because he's not gonna really do it, obviously." The glukkon took a long drag on his cigar. "That place has got some connections; security there is lousy but no one would really attack them. The reprisals would be murder. Heh, see there, I might a pun. All accidental like."

"And if he does," Joulik said sarcastically. "We could clean up the scraps and make a mint, poach their customers and purchase their contract."

The other glukkon brightened. "Ooh, I hadn't even thought of that!" Joulik the glukkon rolled his eyes at this state of his kinsmen. "Look, don't sweat your pipes. It's just one elf thingy. What damage can he really do? Leave him be. Same with that gang we hear about. Let 'em be."

---

Opposite from Slacking Aerodynamics, Jak stood at the very top of what could be generously called a face-shaped incline atop an impressively large building block looming high over any surface, as if about to leap.

The people who had originally designed the building had once worked for the multiverse-spanning Torque corporation, and before they left the company had begun designing giant robots called Gunmen designed in the shapes of faces. The aesthetic had stuck with the designers and the building Jak stood upon had a solemn face, abstract blocks arranged by elements of the architecture, over the offices on the outermost wall. Jak stood upon the nose, right in front of the edge of a slope overlooking the urban canyons below.

Level drive-zones crossed at unexpected angles, streams of light from the vehicles turning them into neat lines detailing the life of the city. They were a very long way down, moving below like swarms of bugs, so far that he didn't think he could be seen. It was so far down, that if he fell the drops in altitude would kill him before he ever hit anything.

Jak peered from here, to a building far opposite the gulf below: the offices of Slacking Aerodynamics. Yes, he thought, it was just possible to make a jump between here and there. And in the same way that it was just possible to jump a canyon on a skateboard; it could be done, it was just so impossibly unlikely that someone would ever try it that no one put any guards against it, or considered that anyone would survive such a thing.

The right tools helped. At his side was a co-opted zoomer he had taken from a bounty hunter who had mistaken him for someone else by some strange chance, and seated on it was Daxter, looking through a datapad Jak had filled with the listing of every company that (to their informant's best knowledge) directly did sensitive business for the cartels. It was far from a comprehensive list, and Jak had still needed to scare information out of corporate flunkies to fill out the list. "Think you can make the jump, buddy?" Daxter asked, not really looking.

Jak looked down. Across the area, through a span of many miles, over the ships, there was an office building that mounted the top of another manufactory, a conveyor-belt fed mass of spires and smoke-stacks. On the front of it was the name 'Slacking Aerodynamics', and was bigger than an entire city block in the very first city he'd ever been to (Haven City, as a matter of fact). Unsurprisingly, this space was needed; it produced scores of military-issue flight-capable heavy tanks, speeders, and commercial comfort cars.

Shrugging, Jak sat on the speeder and made sure his goggles were fastened. "Might as well see."

"Whee!" went Daxter as the speeder tilted down the nose for precious moments before it broke off from gravity for a precious moment, and almost flew as it went down the building-nose. Jak's hair was nearly plastered down to his head; he accelerated, Daxter whooping behind him as the wind roared around them and everything around them turned into a blur. Buildings, runners and speeders below, and the countless metal supports that held up the layer above and grew from below all became a multi-colored blur, and then all was noise and light where the bike roared near the tip of the building-nose. Jak hit the blue eco booster, and a blue light shone through panels and conduits for a moment on his speeder, and a tremendous backward-aimed propulsion effect slammed out from the exhaust ports on the boosters.

One moment, the speeder was just above the nose, and the next, it wasn't. It was suddenly across the distance, threaded through hundreds of feet in such a short time Daxter couldn't even process it, a blue streak of energized eco slicing from behind it, moving so fast it seemed to have teleported. Daxter thought it was as though they had, one place one moment and then somewhere else the next, but Jak's enhanced senses saw every moment of it. His reflexes kept him in control of the machine, doing the split-second adjustments needed to move through the clustered gunships in front of the corporate building and the smaller security drones flitting around the main offices of Slacking Aerodynamics. The drones caught an extremely brief moment of his movement (and the unaugmented security officers, the company too cheap to spruce for cybernetic enhancements, just heard the noise and wondered what was going on) and dutifully sent an alert through the company's private network.

The explosion over the windows of the CEO's own office pushed up the alert considerably.

It all happened in only a few moments, barely enough time to take in a breath and blink at the confusion, and then Jak's zoomer crashed through the window of the CEO's office (mounted high and tall, like a perch to look over his little fiefdom), glass shattering as thousands of lethal fragments bouncing harmlessly off the Green Eco shield streaming out from ports on the front of the zoomer. Jak let out a solitary grunt when they bounced on hard metal under carpeting, anti-gravity generators beating in and out. The carpet ripped as a sharp edge caught it, and the snag rolled with them as they skidded to a stop right through a desk.

Jak calculated quickly, sucking in a breath as he hopped off, the faithful machine still exhaling puffs of eco and quite intact despite the damage. He gave it a brief pat on the instruments, turned around to the low-slung squarish room now littered with the remnants of a desk that had been both decoration and terminal to the company's private information network that was rather like its brain. The terminal was trashed, it's information lost. Jak winced at the sparking circuitry and coolant fluid splashed onto the ground, thick and glutinous like blood; he had gone to many worlds and troubles since he had been taken from the impoverished scavenger's village of Sandover, but he still viewed any technology as a precious thing to be hoarded, or reverse-engineered. Breaking anything at all felt like such a waste.

Also it made getting information significantly more difficult. Jak found another likely source; the CEO of the company, a heavy-set glukkon probably descended from swamp dwellers. His skin was brightly hued, his body so broad and his arms so wiry that he looked like a potato on stilts. Dressed in the extremely tacky and ostentatious business suit of a Glock Star (a social ranking particular to the glukkons, measured in terms of wealth and industrial adventure), he was quite tall and appeared deceptively broad. There was usually a huge wide-brimmed hat with that look but it had fallen on the floor, the enormous feather on it already burning. Jak wrinkled his nose and glanced at the floor, which thanks to both the zoomer's heat venting and friction from its entry, was now on fire. IT was only a small fire, so he ignored it.

Well, I'd say I was sorry, but that'd probably be insincere at this point, wouldn't it?" Jak said to the glukkon, who had apparently been thrown back when Jak smashed into the office.

The glukkon said nothing, still in shock. He was trying to get up, and watching glukkons get up was an exercise; it was like a ball trying to balance on bendy straws. "Ow!" Daxter said, hopping off the zoomer and landing on the burning part of the carpet. "Hot, hot, hot!" He stamped the fire out, and hurried over to Jak. He posed dramatically.

Jak eyed the glukkon, now standing up completely. The profile matched the description on his list; tall, broad enough at the main body that he looked shaped like a bulb. Recessed brow, prognathous jaw with signs of surgical work down, a loyalty tattoo of the Magog Cartel on his face like a brand... "Dreck Slacking, CEO of Slacking Aerodynamics?" Jak said sharply.

The glukkon, Dreck Slacking, looked up and scowled fiercely, his shock at the situation overruled by pure anger. "You dare?!"

"Yeah. Glare looks like a 'yes'. Right. Got some questions for you."

"You miserable street trash!" Slacking demanded. "Do you have any idea how bad you're gonna die?!" Jak approached him, walking slow and wary. It became clear that Slacking was considerably larger than Jak. He didn't seem like the personal combat type, though. "Who do you think you are?"

Jak and Daxter exchanged a look. Jak turned back to Slacking and smiled dangerously, or at least his lips rolled back over teeth that were a good deal more pointed and jagged than a normal elf's were. Slacking raised a bony eye-ridge. "I'm Jak of Haven City."

Slacking considered this. "…So?"

Jak's experience with the usual pre-beatdown banter failed him. He blinked, totally nonplussed. "You seriously don't know who he is?" Daxter said. "Really?"

"Nope," Slacking said flatly.

"Huh. Weird," Jak said. "You sure you don't know? Jak, spelled with a K? Scary monster from a Precursor world, Dark Eco-engineered super-soldier made of always angry? Good with a gun? …Looks really good in goggles and a scarf?"

"Doesn't ring a bell."

"Huh." Jak felt indistinctly disappointed. He didn't exactly like people being scared of him going crazy and killing everything for the hell of it, but he'd got used to it and it was funny when bad guys got worried around. "Well, uh, this is awkward." He shook his head. "Anyway, you're coming with me."

Slacking actually laughed at that. "You?" He said, managing to express his view that Jak (and the rest of the city, probably) was so absolutely beneath him that dirt would be a step up. There was a little disgust, a lot of sneering, and so forth.

Jak didn't like people looking down on him and he was genuinely annoyed now. Because of the chemical changes wrought upon his brain due to eco infusions, Jak experienced emotions differently than most, and certainly more intensely. Mild annoyance for Jak was what other elves would call 'skull-splitting rage like SET THE PLANET ON FIRE'. With more restraint than he felt warranted, Jak punched Slacking full in the face. Slacking left a small impact in the wall, breaking it a little bit (and probably breaking a few cartilage supports); when he got up Jak was still advancing, his eyes crackling with violet and pale lights even through his goggles lenses. The moment he started to twitch, Jak charged forward across the room too fast to be seen, taking hold of him and slamming Slacking into the wall again in a single movement.

"Trying my hardest not to punch a hole in your chest and smear you all over your office!" Jak bellowed. "Another comment like that and I won't bother holding back!"

He rammed him against the wall again. It was starting to crack, and so was Slacking. Over the bubbling cries, Jak said, "What are the cartels having you build! Are you evacuating the planet!? Making a mass fleet? What are you building!?"

Slacking's eyes widened. "How the hell do you know about-" he stopped. "Ah, no. You're the guy that's been hitting us making the back-up measures!"

Jak leaned in. "What back-up measures!?"

A door at the room spun open, and Daxter flitted behind the zoomer as nearly a dozen security officers came in, plasma rifles aimed at Jak. Their heavy body armor clanking in snugly fitting plates that made it impossible to discern their species; Jak felt some relief, not being able to see faces or identities made it easier to fight them.

Jak turned Slacking into the path of their guns. "You shoot, he gets hit!" He signaled to Daxter.

As Daxter acted, Jak hurled Slacking at his own guards, deeming that possibly losing an interrogation target was better than getting shot at. The guards jumped to catch their boss, who was shrieking a lot. Thus they missed it when a hatch opened on the side facing the guards, Daxter taking cover.

A small metal ball-drone rolled out, several flight-jets and turrets on its sides, and the guards focused on it. As Slacking ran for cover (Jak tracking him), they opened fire, bolts of plasma scoring into the ground (and making Slacking complain about the damage even as he crawled into the escape hole he'd been trying to get into), but the drone was already flying , coming to a stop about head-level, and opened fire, projecting dozens of rapid-fire coherent lasers of energized eco that knocked everything in the room wild.

The blasts had some impressive force and hit the guards like a bowling ball on pins. Their armor was tough, but Jak went to some very good engineers for little gadgets like this drone, and the blasts knocked them head over foot, toppling over each other. Their guns overheated in the grip of the destruction and became inoperative, and the guards were ineffectually trying to rush Jak while their friends were knocking them down and flying into the walls from the blasts. Jak grabbed the biggest chunk of the desk he could and flung it at them just as they evaded some blasts, knocking them down again with painful crunching noises. The drone hit the ground, reserves depleted, but it had already done its job. Daxter retrieved it as Jak piled the desk in front of the door, barring the way from the many people stampeding outside.

Daxter hurried over to him. "Jak, buddy! What do we do? What do we do about that guy?"

"…Huh?"

"That guy we came for. He's gone."

Jak looked around. Slacking had gone in the brief moment of distraction, no doubt disappearing through a secret elevator near them. "Oh, son of a crocodog!" He turned around. "Dax! I'll get that guy and find out what he knows. You try to subvert the security! We're on the top-guys level, you should be able to find a decent terminal for that!"

"Got it," Daxter said. "And maybe retrieve some more info about what they're doing here?"

"Goes without saying."

Daxter grabbed a morphgun from the zoomer; box-shaped from all the modular add-ons, sights, on-board computer and instruments, it resembled a bulky rifle made for Daxter's size. Daxter pulled out several ammo containers of blue and red eco, sliding in a blue one, and the morphgun expanded into a rather larger weapon, reconfiguring for rapid-fire and stabilized aiming, over six independently revolving barrels appearing on the front. "See ya when I do! Good luck nabbing that guy." There was a brief indignant murmur when Daxter hopped off the broken bit of desk and crawled into a vent. The zoomer went to auto-pilot, flying out the window past incoming sentry drones.

Jak grabbed his his own morphgun, loading it up and changing the mode to yellow eco ammo, producing a heavy blaster not dissimilar to a full automatic rifle. Holstering it on his back and his coat flapping, he hopped into the elevator and struggled his way through.

As it turned out, the elevator had exactly two stops; the office, and another point far below. Jak had to crawl down to it by himself, navigating the dark and cramped space of the secret elevator lift, all the way down to where the actual elevator still was. The Dark Eco surged in his veins and Jak found that he could smell Slacking's scent, pungent and irritating; blasting his way into the elevator, the smell was strong, and exited into a dimly lit passageway, electric lights flickering from poorly maintained strips.

There was evidence of a recent rush through here; the ground was seriously dusty, but Jak's keen eyes saw footprints on the dust, small and placed close together, and so many of them in a thin line. Jak smiled grimly; glukkons ran like other people tip-toed and made distinct treads. There was a single door in the passageway, already opened, and Jak stepped through. He took several more steps, moving quietly as he stepped onto more metal, and flinched as heat washed over him, and there was light bright enough to be so painful that he had to shut his eyes in self-defense. When he opened his eyes, the brightness of it hurt for a moment.

His goggles filtered out the light. Clanking and grinding sounds hurt his ears, thousands of factorial sounds blending into a roar, and no sooner had he made out brightness and heat that a massive vat whirled past on a massive chain overhead, bigger than a house and dripping shining materials with traces of aetherite's distinctive shimmer. He stepped onto a catwalk, heat-proofed and with blast shields over the rails, and cautiously looked around.

Above him, for he was clearly very deep down, perhaps in some secret sub-basement factory, there were lines of enormous automated smelters. Distilling and refining their ingested materials, sieving them and dripping the completed products into waiting vats. The vats, in turn, would halt over molds on a conveyor belt below to sluice them into shape, where large coolant vents set at regular places on these conveyor belts, finishing them as soon as they had finished pouring.

Jak watched the belt move along. Amid the dizzying complexity of this massive operation (he couldn't even see where the belt began, just a faint horizon), mechanized arms took the finished parts out and transferred them to different conveyors. He wasn't sure what to expect, but surprisingly enough he saw little that seemed meant for ships. There were engines, true, but they weren't flight-based engines and nothing here seemed design for flight machinery. He wasn't entirely sure what he was looking at; one particularly large capsule looked like it might store fuel sources and process them somehow, and it wasn't designed right to suit any ship he had seen.

Trying to block out the noise, Jak watched one pouring into a waiting mold. The workers maintaining the controls (and there were many of them, little wandering groups of people moving behind screens and wandering caterpillar machines moving on the walls like tanks with legs) didn't see him stealthily hiding behind controls and move around so that he evaded their notice. The scale of the place was staggering: he could barely even see the ceiling now, above him were many levels like this one, going up over each other and arranged into such dizzying variety and size that he couldn't grasp them all. Most of the machinery here was bigger than buildings, large enough to house at least a few families with space to spare, and the parts they were making were even bigger.

He saw, emerging near the vat he had been looking at, the side of what looked weirdly like a tube, or the core of some sort of fuel rod, going by on a particularly large conveyor belt directly overhead. He stared at the telltale shimmer upon it, and realized that it was made with aetherite; a solid shaped fuel rod of the stuff.

This wasn't something for a ship, but something completely different. Feeling that the situation was more complex than he had imagined, Jak looked around at the other completed things. He had a pretty good view and looked at the products moving down the conveyor belt and realized that they are all the wrong designs for ship designs. Ships were not being built here ,though he didn't know what was: one sections of a ecosystem stabilizer crawled down one belt. Another resembled components from a device he had once seen called the Garden of Eden Creation Kit.

This wasn't making ships like he'd expected. Jak felt the edge of some surprising revelation, teasingly close, but it eluded him. Further consideration was halted by the heavy clanking sound of many boots moving in unison, and a faint murmur of "Got you!" spoken across from him.

Standing in rank on the catwalk directly opposite Jak were rows of security officers, their guns raised at him. Behind them was Dreck Slacking, scowling fiercely at Jak. "I'm not done with you," Jak said, walking forward. "What are you building down here?"

"You're in too deep, elf," the glukkon CEO said gravely. "This is top secret stuff you've come into. Boys! Kill 'em!"

Jak was already moving when the guns fired, reaching down and pulling off an entire section of the catwalk, arm swelling with unnatural strength, and threw it into the path of the lasers coming at him. It intercepted the lasers and by the time it fell into the heat below, Jak had disapperaed.

"Stop him, stop him!" Dreck Slacking said, eyes wide. They flinched, waiting for a sudden attack. "Uh. Where'd he go?"

The officers swung their guns around, nervous but disciplined, and Slacking slunk back further and further to another door on his side of the foundry, increasingly certain he had lost control of the situation. A noise from the other side, something hitting one of the great girders supporting a bank of vats tending to internal structure parts; they all turned, a few of them shaking as they remembered stories of a slaving ring that had been destroyed except for one boy who had terrible nightmares about a monster that glowed violet and shouted with lightning. Another rattle, something grunting loud and landing on the side of a vat; they turned, someone shouted, "DON'T SHOOT, YOU'LL HIT THE PRODUCT!" and there was enough hesitation for the moving shape to be gone, leaping up to a conveyor belt too high for them to track.

Jak was on the move. As he leaped away from a vat on high, a careful shot from his firearm broke loose a mooring bolt from one of the mechanisms holding the vat up. It tottered and slowly revolved out of place, a twenty-hundred ton mass of metal flowing to the brim with white-hot liquid, and then it tipped over, all that molten metal spilling out and landing right on the conveyor belts. The officers shot wildly in sheer panic as the room got slightly brighter, the techs wailed in despair, and Slacking stumbled back protectively. The hot metal didn't do any damage, the rolling straps upon it treated to endure such damage, but when the vat came loose and smashed into the belt, the whole thing buckled, all several miles of it surprisingly delicate. It snapped loose, falling down into the abyss of the foundry. The vat kept going, smashing into more belts as it did. Shattered molds, coolant tanks and pieces of unfinished aetherite went everywhere, turning Jak's passage cloudy and a gory mess of industry, and the techs screamed louder than ever at the pay they'd probably be docked.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?" Slacking said, utterly bewildered. He got not answer, and shuddered. The sound of Jak's destruction lingered, and a wound seemed opened in the foundry were conveyer belts and a vat had been. The damage was still going, triggering a chain reaction, and the broken vat smashed into another one, not break it but still tilting it enough to scatter more molten metal everywhere, and this one had aetherite in it. "STOP IT, STOP IT, DO YOU KNOW WHAT THEY'LL DO TO US ALL FOR YOU DOING THAT!?"

One of the officers paused. "Ah, Mr. Slacking?"

"Yes?"

"What do you mean, 'what they'll do to us'?"

"Uh."

"Oh gross annual product, the cartel's enforcers are gonna kill us!" Another security officer wailed. "We got pulled into some kind of government deal, and we won't be able to deliver and they'll slaughter us in our beds! Or they'll drag us to our beds so they can slaughter us in them, or buy us bed so they can slaughter us in them! I always wanted a bed but not like this! Not like this!"

"Don't be ridiculous, they wouldn't go to that much trouble!" Slacking said. "They'd just kill you!" The enforcers glared at him. "Look, it's like those special contracts they make you sign to work down here. You get paid more but if you spill a word about what we're building down here or sell any secrets, you die horribly." They still glared. "Not helping, is it?"

"Nope," Jak said, standing right next to them.

The enforcers turned. Jak didn't even blink, or flinch at the noise of the damage to the foundry still going on from the chain reaction he had started. A pair of vats banged together behind him, swinging all the way apart and smashing into things. In the confusion, Jak charged, grabbing Slacking and leaping up the wall with him and rolled over a support away from a wall of blaster fire, and pinned Slacking against the wall at considerable velocity; the glukkon spun, propelled backwards, and crumpled with a gasp as Jak leveled his morphgun at him."What are you making down here?" Jak asked. "This is not stuff for ships, whatever it says on your sign outside! What are you making! And why do you need aetherite for it?!"

"Of course it's not ship stuff, you stupid-" Slacking stopped, remembering Jak had a gun and a sudden furious look. His mouth went shut and he stared at Jak, shaking with a rage that overcame the terror that kept him from standing up straight.

Liquid darkness boiled in Jak's veins, and he felt his nails thicken to hard points inside his gloves. Jak gave a long, whispery breath. "What," he growled, and it was made inhuman by the long teeth suddenly forcing his mouth. "Are. You. MAKING HERE?!"

His hand moved, and fingers fastened around the glukkon's neck, lifting him up high. Jak's fist rose, muscles of his arm bulging grotesquely and starting to split his skin. Underneath his clothing, black ichor dripped out and violet lightning radiated his hands, giving him a power that could pulp Slacking's entire torso into so much bloody pulp with a single punch.

A small tactical bomb landed next to them. Slacking shut his eyes tight. "Precursors damn it," Jak said.

The bomb went off, projecting immense vertigo-inducing waves. Jak wasn't prepared for that and nearly toppled off, while Slacking plummeted into the arms of the nearest enforcer, who carried him through a nearby door on their level. Jak hurtled down, stomping down on the armored goons and leaping after Slacking, firing two shots that melted the hinges off and allowed him to land on the door so that it fall off. He rode it like a board, skidding along into the room. "Where are you!? Hold still, I probably won't hurt you that much, maybe!" He growled, doing his hardest to keep the dark eco at bay and the light inside balanced, and moved in.

He had expected another escape hatch, or perhaps a tube going up to the surface of this part of the city; instead, it was a round room, with a high ceiling, and completely enclosed, with no other doors or exits. At the center of it was a large metal box big enough to house a car, with a small door, airholes, and feeding tubes pumping green eco into whatever was in the box like a life support system. The metal, too, was extremely solid and thick, and even with his eco-boosted strength Jak didn't think he would be able to rip it open without a lot of hard work.

Slacking was nowhere in sight. Looking around cautiously, Jak put a hand on the only identifying mark on the box; a large plaque, and engraved on it. Jak squinted through the dim lighting, uncomfortably aware of the eco sucking through the tubes and suddenly loud enough to hear. "'Chimeric Assault Model 221, Thank You For The Hard Work! Love, Fleshcrafter.'" Jak looked around for Slacking, and he was nowhere in sight. The door on top of the box, though, was wide open.

The box rumbled with a deep growl, his bones rattling with the bass. The green Eco was slurped away all at once, sucked through the tubes and into whatever was in the box: with a mechanical grating, one part of it swung open too quickly for him to dodge or predict, and something moved in the darkness. Jak swung his gun up, and a horned fist bigger than he was punched him full in the chest. Something cracked, sparkling as he flew right through the door, limbs swinging through air, and by sheer dumb luck he wasn't flung into one of the vats but had his fall arrested by the railing; it bent under him and Jak let loose a scream as he fell onto the floor.

He put a hand to his chest, and the broken pieces of his rebreather fell into his head. At least it wasn't one of his ribs that had been broken, he thought. Jak stood up, one trembling leg propping him back up. Dozens of workers looked up, brave enough to man their stations even with all the destruction Jak had unleashed but frightened enough to scream and run into each other as they tried to flee. The catwalks of their own levels went mad with noise when they all slammed into each other and fell over, squabbling and panicking.

They were silenced, bit by bit, as a tremendous stomping rang on the catwalk from where Jak had been flung away. A massive hand poked its way through the door, something leathery and covered in something that was like feathered moss, glistening with biologically-generated electricity. It was too big to fit through the door, and Jak wondered how it had even gotten there in the first place, then.

It felt around, and there was a low growl of frustration, in Slacking's voice. The hand fell back, disappearing into that room, and there was more and more stomping, the floor screaming with a massive weight bearing over it at great speed and force. Jak, forced into sensibility, ran for it and dove out of the way, bouncing onto the catwalk a few lucky moments before the wall over the room Slacking had retreated into exploded.

The walls burst apart as the massive shape smashed through. Huge feet clawed great gouges into the catwalk, and it stumbled to a stop moments before it might have fallen down. The catwalk creaked under its weight, a massive simian-shaped behemoth stepping out like a mash-up of all the worst monsters ever. Jak watched as it stepped back a bit, head brushing against the bottom of the catwalk above; nearly as broad as it was tall, the monster bristled with the chimeric traits of so many different animals that Jak had no specific term for it. The loping posture, broad shoulders and comparatively small legs suggested an ape heritage, but it's skin was green, covered in a bony metallic carapace. Feathers or fur grew from it, thick and shaggy and crackling with bio-electricity. It flexed enormous forearms swung from its shoulders, one absurdly thick for its size and swollen from the inside like a collection of meaty pistons, and the other held a cluster of extendable tentacles under a mass of narrow tubes like organic guns. A pulsating mass, swarming with nasty little things, beat behind them. Jak saw claws, he saw scales, he saw spikes and hornlets and protrusions of dozens of different applications, and he stared at the top of its almost totally superficial head. There was a set of four horizontally stacked eyes, and a gaping saurian mouth lined with rows of teeth, but the actual cranium (big enough to house a man) was an open cavity.

And sitting in this cavity was Dreck Slacking, his suit ruined as dozens of small and nasty tendrils had piercing or merged with his body, fusing him to the beast like he was piloting a robot suit. He groaned, and the beast groaned with him. He blinked at Jak, and so did the beast. "I have been wanting to test this weapon from my allies," the beast said in Slacking's voice. It rolled its massive shoulders, and raised its arms high in a primal gesture of glee. "And I must say…"

It took a step forward, the catwalk tilted, sinking low, and Jak slowly began sliding towards the brute. The monster grinned, reaching out and pointing the arm-tubes at Jak. He had a moment to think that they looked unnervingly like an organic Gatling gun before the barrels twisted, spasming and sputtering lubricating fluids as the mass behind them pulsed around, and then the guns fired with sprays of slime; Jak howled as the slime, biting and hot, sprayed on him, and then he screamed in pained horror as huge fist-sized tick-things chewed into him, acidic saliva sprayed from their jaws. He grabbed them and tore them off, losing a chunk of his skin and clothes in the process, lethal acids still dripping off him. But by then the monster was already moving, and the catwalk trembled, and Jak was seized by a massive fist. It squeezed the air out of him and smashed him into the wall. The metal dented, and Jak was knocked silly, and heard the beast finished, "IT FEELS AMAZING!"

It smashed him into the wall again, and threw him to the floor, making a Jak-sized dent in it. Jak gasped, still holding onto his morphgun, and Slacking's new body-weapon gave Jak a vicious kick, shoving him nearly over the railing on the catwalk. Heat boiled over him, and he felt his skin redden. "Don't leave your seats," Slacking said to his workers. "This won't take long."

"No," Jak agreed, already standing up. He took aim with his gun. "It won't."

The workers glanced from Jak to Slacking's new bio-weapon body. They glanced at each other, shrugged, and adopted a happy compromise; scooting as far away from Jak and Slacking as was remotely possible while still technically being at their work stations.

"I don't know who you are, or what you want," Slacking began, and several organs glowed through the skin of his body. Jak observed that they radiated Eco, and suspected he knew where that Green Eco had gone, pumping up this body for battle. "Or what the point of those snazzy goggles are for-"

"They're goggles," Jak said. "They don't need to be for anything, they just look cool." The fact that they had a variety of uses, from infrared to night vision sights and scope mods, went unsaid.

"Huh, yeah." Slacking nodded at the nearest worker, standing two levels above him and just barely visible through the catwalk. "Hey, you! Go ship me in some nice goggles. The snazziest pair around!"

"Uh, yes, sir!" the worker said.

Slacking nodded and turned back around, a fist raised. "Now, as for you-" He stopped. Jak was nowhere to be seen. "…Where'd he go this time?"

Jak, under the catwalk again and pleased he was able to get under there while Slacking had been distracted, climbed under it to behind Slacking. Morphgun on his back, he crawled up back over the railing, hand over foot one step at a time, moving quietly. Slacking looked around, but didn't turn around; he just peeked under the railing and looked suspiciously at the upper catwalks and the various things around there, convinced Jak had crawled up there. Jak stood poised on the railing, as the massive bulk of the chimerical thing stood up tall, and Slacking grunted in disgust. Jak paused at a sudden movement from below; a tech, gaping at Jak.

Jak mouthed, 'No!' at her. "SIR!" She yelled. "That guy, he's right behind you!"

Swearing dire imprecations at her hygiene and possible descent from a gator-shark, Jak gathered power in his legs and jumped. But Slacking had already been turning, and Jak had a brief moment to lament that this thing was a lot faster than it looked. The gun-arm swung, the tentacles uncoiling and whipped round Jak, three muscular tendrils at least twice as thick around as his body wrapped around him in moments. They squeezed, and Jak felt something start cracking. "Not my gun," he yelled. "Not my gun!" He felt around, and was relieved that it was just his ribs and not his precious morphgun.

The slimy masses of tentacle gave another squeeze, and Jak howled as his ribs bent inward. His muscles swelled, Dark Eco flowing through him, and he felt a peculiar stiffness in his sides while his ribs pieced themselves back together. Slacking grunted in confusion, and Jak felt all but one of the tentacles retract. Green furry-stuff met his eyes and the remaining tentacle hoisted him up many times his own height, and he was brought face to face with Slacking, the glukkon's head just barely poking out over the bony cranium of his monstrous weapon. Jak thought it looked a bit like a blast shield. "Who are you working for?" Slacking asked, infuriatingly patient. "Tell me everything, and I'll triple it! No, wait, you tried to kill me and my guys, forgot that. But if you have something I can tell to the cartels, maybe I can convince them to be lenient with you."

Jak opened an eye marred by a bruise. "Yeah?" He said, feigning weakness. He coughed, and didn't fake that.

Slacking raised him a little closer, bringing Jak up to his real face, the glukkon grinning wide and proud. "Yes?"

Jak reeled his head and shoulders back, even with how he was being squeezed, and thrusted his goggle-protected forehead directly into Slacking's high cranium with all the force his eco-enhanced body could deliver, just as a pair of horns sprouted from his head and his skull changed shape to handle the impact. The catwalks dented with the shockwave, and Jak roared, his teeth elongating horribly.

It was not a sound that should have ever been spoken by a sapient being. It was an ancient sound, a monster-sound; something that might have been heard before history began and the ground quaked with reptilian monsters. It went into their heads and instantly hit the primal terror buttons, smacking the part of their heads that said 'the monster is here'.

Slacking's massive combat-body, too big to fit easily on the catwalks, reeled back. Jak swung out his morphgun, changing it to red eco ammunition. The gun shortened, the barrel expanding, internal mechanisms forming a design for splitting energized eco into burst shots and what Jak held was like a combat shotgun. He fired, all the pellets of red hitting like a wave frying off the beast's skin from its face. It had no way to feel pain but Slacking recoiled at nearly getting his real head taken off and avoiding it by dumb luck; Jak was grimly amused by the beast-body scooted back, its jaw dropped in a nearly comical expression of horror matching Slacking's.

The back of the beast-body's head squirmed, swelled. A set of thick organic plates slid out of a sheath and closed over the open cavity of its skull, sealing Slacking away from view. Jak growled, firing again and again. The shots kept knocking Slacking back, hitting him like hammer blows, but kept advancing. He charged, blasts impacted against an armored shoulder with minor effect and gritting through the paint of a shot to his stomach, and charged.

The hulking mass of customized monster ran screaming at him, and various techs and workers cried out in abject terror; he collided with Jak, carrying him right through the railing, and the catwalk broke apart behind him, finally coming loose of the wall and going down, and broke into pieces where it smashed up various equipment below. They smashed through a conveyor belt; another belt, and then hit the side of a vat. Slacking raised Jak up high and smashed him into it, again and again, before the heat was too much for even his combat-body and he jumped to a wall. Jak met it first, Slacking smashing him into it again and again, leaving a few Jak-sized dents to show where he'd been hitting him around. Slacking clung to the wall, and looked back at the destruction in his path; the broken catwalk, the shattered conveyer belts, the dented vat, and the panicking workers. He growled, lifted Jak up. "Saboteur! This is all your fault!"

"I wasn't the one who wrecked those things this time," Jak snarled back. "You're the that smashed them!"

Slacking growled. "You…!" Unable to think of a better retort, his combat-body simply opened his jaws wide, some of the exposed teeth longer than Jak's arm. The gums pulsed with internal sacs of venom, but more pertinent where the very big teeth aimed at Jak. The combat-body jerked its face at Jak, opening around Jak's head and about to snap shut, and Jak still had enough room to shove his eco-shotgun down his throat and squeeze the trigger.

Red light flared and the combat-body burned from the inside, throat glowing heatedly. It coughed and gasped, clutching at its neck and squealing helplessly. Jak dropped and then jumped away, landing on a conveyor belt, and barely even noticed that the belt bent nearly double under his weight, grinding mechanisms coming to a slow stop but still moving him onward, perilously close to a vat. Smoke steamed up from his mouth. "Ahhh… what… what'd ya do to me…?"

"Just as I thought!" Jak said from the wall, clinging to a bar of plasteel that had embedded there from his destructive works earlier. His feet braced against the wall, and his other hand held his blaster. "Tough on the outside, but your big body is still soft and squishy on the inside."

Slacking's combat-body coughed again and again. Finally it glared up at Jak. "Really must send a note to the manufacturers about that." He rushed at Jak, moving like a train and looking about as big, it was suddenly right in front of Jak, the organic guns on its arm firing madly. Jak roared as a little under a dozen of those horrible ticks impacted him, burrowing inside him and spewing their acid into his flesh. A massive clawed hand closed around his body. A brief motion, being raised up high, and Jak saw the foundry slowly falling apart from the stresses of their battles, more chain reactions unleashing more of the same. Then, Slacking slammed him into the wall hard enough to smash him through it. He was pulled back, and then smashed again, and again, each time in a different direction. "STOP! WRECKING! MY! PLACE!" Slacking screamed through the monster's mouth, a tad hypocritically.

Jak roared back, punching and kicking like an animal. Slacking winced, looking surprised about it, that he could even feel these puny blows. Jak screamed as the ticks dug deeper into him, moving against the bone… and then they squealed inside him, swelling and dropping away. Jak blinked, and then screamed as they exploded in bursts of tainted blood, splattering against the wall and their innards sizzling into the metal.

Slacking blinked, rage ebbing away. He tossed Jak through one of the holes, leaving him to it as Slacking himself inspected the remains of the tick-bullets. Jak rolled, bounced, smashed through another wall, bowled right through a crowd of employees hurrying through the exit as someone ("Daxter?" he thought briefly, recognizing the voice), smashed through two more walls, dislodged the four or more people stuck on him after he had gone through the crowd, smashed through four more walls, and came out flying into a space that was probably a cafeteria of some sort; he careened off a glass-covered buffet table, shards of glass going everywhere and deflected by his protective wear and smashed into a massive circular table, snapped it in half and sending one half rolling away, the other standing improbably on its end.

Jak sat up, his head reeling. He shook himself and stood up shakily, brushing off shards of glass. "Had worse," he said indifferently to the roaring shape smashing through where he had come. Dust rose and fell, electric lights fell down from the ceiling and smashed on the floor, the wall burst apart where Slacking's combat-form came through, and the table fell on Jak.

The floor rumbled as the monster's massive back-bent legs took heavy steps across the floor, easily striding over to Jak with all the confidence of someone who had absolute authority over his domain and had acquired physical power to match. The gun-arm reached down, tentacles flinging the table off. Jak coughed, growling at the sight of that malformed face grinning down at him (not that it was a conscious expression on Slacking's part, the bared teeth look was just its normal expression without direct interface from its pilot) and he scooted up back out of the rubble, away he had made a small crater in the middle of the cafeteria when he had crashed in. He had almost crawled out of it when the giant fist closed around him and pulled him up high to that face, now settling into a politely inquisitive expression.

"I gotta know," Slacking said. "Your body repelled those ticks and killed them. That is… highly unusual. My company produced the first of those biological weapons before they were mass produced and we moved into starship manufacture, and I was there when we made the first batch and tested them out on industrial spies. How did you kill them?"

Jak just glared. The monster growled and squeezed him hard enough to make his bones grate together, but not hard enough to burst him as pulp. "Ah!" Jak wheezed. "Don't… know what you're talking about…"

"You're lying!" Slacking sneered, and on that monstrous face, plates of metallic carapace pulled up over that slightly pointed snout and that broad jaw system all the better to bite through whatever looked tasty, it was a disturbingly fearsome look. "I saw the remains of the ticks! I saw what was oozing out of them! I saw what was eating through the walls of my own building!"

He raised Jak and slammed him into the floor, rattling his teeth and making another crater there. Stone and plaster chips rained onto Jak's face, and Slacking screamed, "That was DARK ECO that killed those ticks! What in all the nine hells is DARK ECO DOING IN YOUR BLOODSTREAM!?"

Jak blinked, and from the faint reflection on that monster's face, knew that his irises had gone darker than reaches of space untouched by any star. He put a hand to one of the giant fingers curling around his body, and as hooked claws burst through the fabric of his gloves, gave the slightest push.

Claws extended fully, dark blades sliding through his gloves, Jak grabbed the nearly finger, and squeezed.

Slacking dropped Jak, clutching a bleeding finger, and Jak landed on his feet, making another crater. Purple-black energy spiraled around him, pummeling a heavy dent into the ground, and he growled low and deep.

Slacking paused. "…Okay, I genuinely did not see this coming."

"Most people don't," Jak agreed, his voice growling and alien, and tackled him headlong, a burst of sudden power propelling them through the room, the air, and then the walls.

Metal sundered. Concrete split. Automatic defense weapons powered up and missed, Jak and Slacking moving too fast to be targeted. Slacking's fist hit the ground and acceleration violently ripped Jak away from him and into another wall. Slacking was a blur, and his fist pounded into Jak again and again, punching him clear through the floor and through the next three ones. He barely felt it this time, and when Slacking was charging after him and shouting in desperation for Jak to just die already, Jak already had his morphgun out. For his troubles, Slacking's combat-body got a face-full of blaster fire, vaporizing a few teeth and scoring the metallic carapace.

Jak unloaded the red eco ammunition, and slotted in a Piecemaker mod, dark eco ammo shunting in; his morphgun swapped forms fluidly, growing into a portable bazooka. Exhaust vents sprouting on the top and sides, large power couplings mated with eco channels and amplification circuits. The barrel became massive, bolstered by internal acceleration coils, and over the barrel was a metal skull.

Slacking came smashing down through the ceiling, roaring with primitive triumph. He advanced on Jak, claws out and organs with an unknown but almost certainly violent purpose pulsated, and then he saw the gun in Jak's hands.

Dark Eco screamed out of the barrel, and for a moment it felt wonderful; hand and trigger were one, the machine in his hand alive, the source of his strength. Not twisted experiments, not years of painful training and survival, just good metal in his hands, blazing with the power of the Precursors.

In less than the time it took to conceive of it, the air between the morphgun's barrel and Slacking's chest became pure weaponized Eco, the air super-heating and exploding in a shockwave. The blast burned into Slacking, and he screamed through a monster's mouth, blasting through the wall again and bouncing to the floor. He groaned, slowly sitting up and clearly hurt.

Jak slowly approached, and when Slacking blinked painfully, Jak was already behind him, and a cold barrel touched the side of his throat. It nudged the fleshy part, where he was more vulnerable. "Like I said," Jak said, air rippling when he spoke. "You're still soft and squishy on the inside."

The morphgun powered down. Jak moved to remove Slacking from the monster body. A door slammed open behind him, and Jak made the mistake of turning around. He screamed as the massive hand grabbed him by the arm and squeezed until something broke with a nasty crack, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the beast-body stand tall, a gooey salve secreting out and pouring over the wound, hardening into a natural healing agent. In the open door, he saw more security officers, their guns aimed at Jak.

A blur of motion; they opened fire, and Jak screamed, hitting the ground and several bullets drilling into his shoulder. Slacking put a foot on his back and pressed down, to keep him there. "Sir, are you all right?" Asked an officer.

"Fine, fine," Slacking said hurriedly. "Working out this combat-body. Working good. Help me kill this lunatic before he goes berserk and takes our heads for trophies!"

"But sir!" The lead most of the officers came forward. "Someone's broken into the administration section! He talked the techs around, he got into the computers and he's stealing everything!"

"What!" Slacking stepped back in shock. Jak looked up and saw the wall. He saw that it was transparent, was in fact a window, overlooking the chasm between buildings outside. He grinned, getting an idea.

"And some things wrong; he's sabotaged the systems for assemblage and rigged the power receiver station in the building to completely collapse!" It would leave the building largely unharmed, but totally destroy its capacity to run anything, like seeding a body with a virus that destroyed the nervous system.

"What?!"

The loudspeakers came on. Daxter's voice rang through it. "Yo, Jak! Get a move on, buddy! I got this place ready to quit! Get out of here, buddy!"

The officer winced. "I'm afraid I told you so, sir."

Jak made a thumbs-up at the nearest camera. "Loud and clear, buddy," he rasped.

Evidentially, Daxter was listening. The loudspeaker said, "Gotcha, man! We're moving out!" The loudspeakers went off.

Slacking whirled around on Jak. "You… you stupid eco-terrorist!" He charged at Jak, and the smaller elf sidestepped him, missed by inches, and the moment Slacking was turned, Jak opened fire with the Piecemaker again, rocketing back from the force of the blast and nearly sending the glukkon through the ground. Slacking screamed again, back burning and carapace breaking, and went smashing clear through the windows. Glass shattered easily, and the monstrous hulking form went tumbling down, out of the building and into the chasm.

"Boss!" The officers cried.

There was a creaking sound underfoot, and Jak turned around in time to see Slacking clawing his way back up, one massive arm clinging to the floor. He roared, raising the tentacled gun-hand up, pointing it at Jak and not caring that it was aimed at his own men. They screamed in horror, realizing what was happening, and though it was useless to move they were already running. Jak heard those guns start squishing out more tick-bullets, and for a moment he almost ran for cover.

He planted his feet, gritting his teeth, and screamed as the tick-bullets bit into him. Behind him, and more dismaying, the soldiers fell dead, the tick-bullets biting through them in a matter of moments. "You killed you own men! You incompetent little-"

Slacking didn't pause to listen. "SHUT UP!" He yelled. The gun-hand swung, and the tentacles coiled out, wrapped around Jak. Slacking fell, tumbling down again, and the tentacle held taut; Jak was forced into the ground and slowly dragged against the floor, and he hissed as broken glass bit into his clothing, and screamed as he was forcibly pulled over the larger fragments still embedded in the window-frame.

The lip of the window passed him, and then there were only the buildings around him, the noise of rushing vehicles escaping the building (miraculously, with all the employees and security enforcers, having decided that this was all way too high above their pay grade), and the darkness below him. Slacking was there, and with a single mighty wrench, pulled Jak out with him, and they both fell.

Slacking reeled Jak over to him as they plummeted, the metal of the building falling quickly away and flying vehicles zipped around them. Slacking held Jak up, holding him firm with tentacles, and punched him with his other hand again and again, making small shockwaves that ripped out holes in the walls they went through. To an outside observer, it would have looked like parts of the building were bursting into open wounds. Slacking slammed Jak into the wall, and Jak bounced back, hitting Slacking in the chest like a torpedo, and delivering a vicious kick that improbably knocked the wind out of them.

Slacking knocked Jak away, and the smaller elf was spun out into the air currents, to fall alone. Slacking laughed… only to have nothing else to do now but look down, and see the depths approaching at terminal velocity. "Oh damn it, I really should have thought this through!"

He slammed a fist into the wall; it stuck and he kept going, and tore a fissure there as he gradually slowed to a stop, coming to rest and dangle helplessly in the air until he clung to the wall with all his limbs. He trembled at being so high up, shaking uncontrollably, but he sighed in relief.

Of course, he'd forgotten about Jak, who came hurtling into him at enormous speeds moments later, riding on a zoomer he'd taken off a shipping truck leaving the company building that he had crashed onto on the way down. Propelled by a powerful double-acceleration and self-powered engine, it hit Slacking dead-on at speeds well in excess of very fast, ripping him off the wall and flying fast away, air shrieking around them.

Jak grinned fiercely at Slacking, the glukkon shouting impotently as wind and force kept him from moving around to grab Jak right then. A tentacle slithered out, though, inching up to the pilot's seat and desperately grabbing the first thing it could; in this case, Jak's leg. Jak swore badly as he was nearly tugged out of the cockpit, realizing he needed to land and finish this fight now. He looked over the cityscape, and smiled darkly as he saw an appropriate target.

The two wrestled with this for a time; Jak speeding onward, Slacking struggling to get loose and something slipping away, only for Jak to hit him with the speeder again at a bad angle and moving onwards, trusting their velocity and force to keep Slacking pummeling. They went past arbitrator vehicles, fleeing enforcer speeders, and even mobile tanks that were just passing through, but Jak didn't bother stopping or taking any evasive measures at all, he just kept flying, smashing Slacking into buildings or nearby vehicles and holo-advertising boards to keep him stunned. They skimmed down a few layers, turned quite a lot of corners (and yet still in sight of the Slacking Aeronautics building, since they were in a pretty good neighborhood a lot of the important things were here), and were nearly halfway at Jak's destination before Slacking finally managed to peel his way off the zoomer.

He slid up, right into Jak's face. Jak had enough time for a startled yell before Slacking's hand closed over his face and squeezed. Slacking jumped, grabbing the zoomer in mid-air, and tossed Jak up. Jak had a single moment before Slacking smashing the zoomer right into him like he was a baseball, shooting him through the air and into the line-divided wall of a beauty salon. He sprang back up, running on top of the wall segment he landed on, and Slacking was already behind him, swinging furious at Jak with the zoomer, and finding that it made a pretty good improvised weapon.

Slacking was shouting the whole time. "Do you even realize what you've done!? How far back you've set us!? That stuff you wrecked alone will push our shipments to the cartels back by forty percent alone! That part you got thrown down was ready to be fitted! I was going to be free with that thing they were going to build with it! I was there when it was poured, and you're going to get the whole damn thing THROWN AWAY!" He screamed, in frustrated fury, swinging at Jak again and again.

"What in the name of the Precursors is even the point of those ships!?" Jak retorted. "They're just ships! Made from aetherite! What's point of using that stuff anyway?! Why are you so hung up over it?!"

"Not ships! Don't you realize?!" Slacking screamed. He crushed the zoomer in one hand and threw it at Jak on the spur of the moment. It hit him and knocked him off the wall and into the chasm below. Cursing, Slacking followed and slammed into Jak again, tossing the remnants of the zoomer aside, and his massive fists hit Jak with every pause in his words to punctuate whatever he was talking about, or perhaps just to make sure Jak was paying attention. More punching, more pummeling, and Slacking was building up to something big. "Those things are our future!" he howled. "THE FUTURE OF THE GLUKKON HEGEMONY, of every stupid species on this damn planet!It's the only future my people possibly have, and anything else will lead us into extinction! This planet is doomed, our alliance is going to get us killed, and we're working with people who are going to murder the multiverse and act like it's all part of the plan!"

The two them smashed into a rooftop, careening away through it through sheer momentum, plowing through several ship in their way, smashing through a local water filtration plant (knocking it down, tearing it apart from the inside and sending it crashing down onto a few unlucky pedestrians, but luckily they were undiscovered serial killers which was… a really weird coincidence), smashing through three more buildings so hard they collapsed, and finally they came bouncing onto another rooftop, careening on top as Jak got a lucky shot directly into Slacking's chest, knocking the increasingly crazed glukkon off him.

Slacking hit the door of the roof-escape, bending it inward and rendering it stuck. He got up, still mostly intact. Jak swore to the Precursors, smashing the gun into Slacking's head. Dazed from the impact over all those buildings, Slacking went down, falling down on his knees before recovering. "Not like this!" He declared. "I know how it's gonna go. There's nothing left for us here on this realm!" He stared down at Jak, so large than even on his knees his bio-weapon body towered over Jak. "Not for me. Not for you. They're going to kill us all. The Heartless or the Heylin!"

Jak's brain blipped. 'What are the Heylin?' he wondered faintly.

"I was there!" Slacking announced, raising Jak high and smashing him again. "I was there the day we made that deal! There were real devils there! We're working with monsters and lunatics! We've gone too far, we've made too many mistakes, we made a deal with the wrong people!" He raised Jak up to his face and hissed. Poison sprayed, mixing with airborne fluids distilled from a stomach like a chemical plant, and it became wet flame that hit Jak square in the face. Against Jak's screaming and flailing, Slacking kept ranting, "This scheme is too big! We're trying to grab too much, we reached too high and made our play at the wrong time! THEY'RE GOING TO FIND OUT AND WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!"

He slammed Jak in the ground, cracking the roof, and black-blue bolt crackled around Jak with each impact, and he began to growl like a revving engine. Fortunately, the impacts put the fire out. "We can't cheat this time," Slacking said. "We can't outfight them, they have millions of worlds under their control and all the firepower that brings! We can't out-gambit them, they have all the cards and all the plans, and compared to them we're bit players! This planet is gonna burn when they find out, the only possible hope we have it to out-run them and outlast them…" he raised Jak to his face, and screamed so loud Jak felt deafened. "AND YOU'RE RUINING THE THINGS WE NEED FOR THAT!"

He threw Jak; the elf's body pounded through the roof, digging out a long crater through it, and just happened to pass by his gun, and snagged it in the brief half-second he had for it. Slacking was weeping now, thick oily tears dripping from his face like droplets of putrid slime, slick and sad for their repulsiveness. He shuddered. "They'll find us. They'll end us. We have to run. That's all we have left. We need to grab all we can from this world and run before they send someone to infiltrate us. I hope like hell that the cartels see that before it's too late."

He gasped in a brief, and again he said, in a whispering voice like the most desperate prayer of a man who knew the gods had forsaken him for all the evil he had done, "We have to run. We have to run." Slacking shook his head. He raised a hand to finish off Jak and swung down at the relatively tiny elf like a hammer swinging at a particularly miniscule nail, reaching terminal velocity in moments and fist braced with enough force to splatter a man to so much bloody pulp for at least fifteen foot radius-

Jak's hand caught the middle finger on that fist with a curious gentility, stopping it and mid-swing, and the momentum and strength from that punch was deflected backwards as a shockwave that hit Slacking in the gut, making him gasp even as the rest of the roof erupted in fractures and pieces from the shockwave.

They sank slightly, the roof's integrity starting to give in. Claws slid out completely through special slits in Jak's gloves, long and thick and dark, piercing through even the hardened carapace of Slacking's bio-morph. He howled in abject misery, his veins standing on end as trace amounts of Dark Eco flowed through; smoldering smoke rose from his body where the tissues were ripping apart, and Jak squeezed again. The finger snapped, and Slacking stumbled back, gripping his bleeding fist.

"You kept saying something about running away," Jak said quietly, nearly a whisper. The air around him burst into a chaotic aura, twisting with purple lightning, and in its wake another shockwave blasted the roof up, ripping the side of it clear off and tumbling to the chasm below. It stood high and brilliant, nearly fifteen feet high and twisting around, that bizarre lightning crackling around and melting whatever it touched. And then Slacking heard the growling from Jak, the slowly rising rumble of a monster's voice, and Jak's body was twisting, changing, swelling slightly larger into a wholly different shape, and it all felt so horribly wrong.

Slacking took an involuntary step back as every single instinct screamed, 'get away, get away, run, don't look back, run and hide and never stop running, get away from this thing, RUN' and found that his legs were locked in place, like a little animal right in front of the monster and the only response possible was the desperate hope that if he didn't move it might get bored and leave him. He tried to speak, to cry, to beg for mercy, but his tongue wouldn't work.

In that darkness, Jak's skin and hair were doused, something else rising from within. Blonde-green hair paled, and slowly was tinted gray, and then white as the ashs. What little skin was visible became pale, ghostly. Jak grew nearly half again as big but hunched over, his body broader and arms longer. Claws burst from his gloves, dripping black and frighteningly serrated, and his hair rippled where a pair of large horns, startlingly black against the whiteness of his hair and almost like a set of organic blades, rose out and curved over the back of his head. Jak growled again, and his voice was different, deeper and echoing as if nearly a dozen people were all speaking at the same time and slightly out of synch, rippling with such power that it make more cracks appear in the building around them.

Jak tilted his head up, and at this tiny movement, Slacking screamed, brief and sharp, and for a moment, as a geographically tiny fraction of Dark Eco pumped into the lifestream of the world, for nearly half a mile every single computer screen read nothing but "THE MONSTER IS HERE", seriously confusing some browsers. Slacking's bones trembled and his heart nearly stopped; Jak's eyes had turned totally dark, pupils and iris and all the same shade of totally inky-blackness, like the surface of a pool where primeval titans had been laid to rest but where now emerging to slaughter everything that lived. They were unnaturally black, and almost seemed to glow with a terrible unlight. The opposite of light, a darkness that illuminated because of how impossibly dark it was that all other darkness seemed radiant by comparison.

Jak, darkened by one part of the power amplifying his impulses and rage into physical form, spoke, though it was difficult with his teeth grown so long and sharp that he had difficulty closing his mouth. "Too late to run. For any of you."

He crouched low, ground cracking around him. Slacking started to speak but then it was too late, and Jak moved. One moment, they were upon the rooftop, and the next they were not, and the rooftop exploded in the wake of Jak's leap.

The impact hit Slacking's bio-morph like a sledgehammer to sheet metal, his mighty carapace bending inward from the force of that impact, and the first punch Jak made, muscles enhanced by the Dark Eco flowing freely through him now, and then the next dozen punches, so fast Slacking couldn't even perceive them, the blows flowing into a single moment of pain. The bio-morph's massive paw scraped for Jak, but he was too small for Slacking to grab, and moving too fast, and kept clawing and punching.

Purple light glowing around them, bolts of Dark Eco streaking out and grounding on the closest bits of metal. Jak hissed as Slacking crushed a bony spike against his back, drawing blood. Slacking screamed as Dark Eco ate into his arm, sizzling and killing muscle tissue, until his arm went slack and lifeless. Jak roared, swinging his arms up in an overhead swing it and brought them down like the hammer of a titan, and the impact blasted a crater in the building they went past, and another bigger one when Slacking crashed into it.

Jak growled, a primordial noise, and shards of concrete thick around as a man smashed into him and were shattered, the fragments flying into Slacking's face and blinding him for the few precious seconds it took for Jak to hit him again, the resulting shockwave blasting them through the wall of the building, cracks gouging out as they went. The wall trembled as the cracks reaching the entirely of the side of a building nearly a half a mile wide. It's stability suffered, and trembled inward, and then the shockwaves from Jak ruthlessly pummeling Slacking, again and again, each blow sending another shockwave even greater than the first and carried on tides of Dark Eco, smashed through the wall they had entered through. The building's facade cracked, thankfully not enough to cause debris to fall. Buildings tilted, very slightly, for over six and a half miles.

But by then Jak and Slacking were far away, oblivious to the destruction. Jak's claws bit deep, and his teeth even deeper, and Dark Eco coiled around them and blasted off in bursts like massive twists of static, and everything in their path was vaporized. They blasted through offices and gun factories, through automobile testing ranges and apartment complexes, through a arbitrator's carriage and right through a towering prison-spire, ripping it in half and blasting it open, and Dark Eco hummed. Slacking raised an arm in instinctive ferocity, finally managing a strike to Jak's face; his wrist ripped on the horns and Jak dug them deeper, blood spraying and then a sickening crack where Jak dug his claws in and just tore.

The arm flapped uselessly. It was more useless where Jak's fists hit it at the shoulder, again and again, the shockwaves pounding out craters in the buildings they passed over a mercifully empty highway until it seemed that giants had left massive footprints in the city in his wake, and Slacking let out another panicked squeal when Jak's claws saw the arm come off, falling somewhere into the city below.

They smashed through a rooftop. As before, they kept going, and this time they went through eleven buildings, Jak not seeming to even notice them save as brief obstructions in his total ravaging of Slacking's bio-morph, and when they finally came to a stop. Again there was a crater, but now Slacking was at the bottom of it. He made small noises that might have been squeals for mercy, or just the air inflating from his bio-morph's massive lungs. Jak, or perhaps a different part of Jak, stared down at the small pit remorselessly, pitch-black eyes narrowed.

Slacking, against all the odds, hauled himself out. His bio-morph's massive jaws hung open, though dislocated on one side. His broken shoulder gushed a fluid similar to blood where the arm had been. Natural armor had been ruined, broken spikes and burned feathers crisp scorches all over, and when it stood up on one leg, it stumbled immediately. It peered up hopelessly at Jak, and he saw that the cranial armor had caved inward, broken through in some places.

"…Damn," Slacking whispered. "I wish I had been there when they made you. Not efficient to just make one; better to make… lots like you." He laughed, and coughed miserably inside the bio-morph.

Jak's jaws hung loosely, teeth wet with fluids. Dark eco pulsed within his throat, and he took a meaningful step forward. His claws itched. Not enough, he thought. Not for one like Slacking, all his wretched agenda-gripping cowardly kin in spirit, the same sort of people who saw everyone else as numbers and statistics to be expended. Who had made Jak into a monster.

He'd been a hero, a long time ago. Stalking to Slacking, hearing the horrible noise coming from the furnace of his throat, he didn't feel like one anymore.

Distantly, Slaking's company gently shut down. All systems went offline. Their networks collapsed. All contracts were rescinded, all final paychecks sent out. The production lines halted, and much of their product tumbled to its doom. The workers, not responsible for this, would find work elsewhere and speedily. Those in charge would face reprecussions. Either way, Slacking Aerodynamics was done.

Slacking heard it all happen, with a radio transmitter installed in his head. He stopped completely, gaping up, and when he cried out it was terrible: "My building! My company!"And then he said nothing. But his bio-morph's eyes were wide, and all the animation went out of him. That awful mouth opened, and it seemed so unusually dry.

And that was all. That was it. Jak let out a small grunt of satisfaction, certain that Daxter had done his work, and he spoke. It was not easy, with the dark eco pumping through him but he did his best. "All your work. All your sacrifices. Everything you ever did to get this far. And looked how easy I ripped it right up," Jak said, every word a ferocious articulation from a throat that was increasingly becoming unsuitable to speech. "It's gone, Slacking."

Slacking said nothing. He uttered a single solitary whine.

"And you can't run from that, either."

Slacking stared at Jak. For a long moment, Jak felt almost uncertain; those eyes looked dull, and empty, and yet there was a strange peace in them. He knew what was coming, and now that the very worst that was all that could happen, any trace of fear had simply drained away, just leaving the slag and the muck in him.

A blur of motion, a towering shape over him again; Slacking dove on Jak, knocking the two of them off the building and into the air. "RUN FROM THIS!" Slacking shouted, and his remaining arm wrapped its tentacles around Jak's body and hurtled down, down to the hard streets below, and at their velocity and size, they would both be shattered to pulp.

Jak's transformed body swelled and expanded, screaming again as muscle and bone grew too much, too fast, and nearly half again as big, burst through the tentacles. A clawed hand grabbed a tentacle, still too thick to hold completely, and Jak dove into the building feet-first. His boots broke great craters into the walls, skidding down with them, and their velocity peeled away. Jak roared, and swung; Slacking smashed first into one side of the wall, cutting off a surprised cry. Another swing, and he smashed into the other side, and he was too dazed to react even before Jak swung him into the first wall again, and his body neatly matched the crater he had made there. Dark Eco pumped into Slacking's bio-morph, and it visibly sizzled and burned with it, shrinking slightly as the whole thing started to disintegrate and boil away.

"No," Slacking started to say. "No, no, no-"

Jak slammed him into the wall once more. A tooth broke off and was imbedded in the wall, and Slacking muttered something too disjointed to understand. Jak tossed Slacking up and his legs tensed, shimmers of eco flashing out and pounding a six-inch-thick depression into the wall. There was another shockwave, greater than any before, and Jak was up in the air once more, moving at speeds so great there was no thought but only reaction and impulse. He hit Slacking in the back and carried him in front of him, putting enormous forces and friction on the bio-morph, and though it was very strong, it was simply not made for this kind of punishment. Bones broke, flesh tore, the majority of its armor was cracked into pieces that flaked off behind them like a distinctly organic trail. The building they had been on shattered behind them, broken down by the weight of Jak's force, and together they rocketed upwards along.

They moved nearly a mile upwards in less than fifteen seconds, over the very center of this very important part of the city, at its very industrial core. Jak saw the whole of the layer below them, the roof (and technically floor, of the one above them) less than a dozen feet over their hands. Jak's eyes moved over the panorama, and he smiled as he spotted where he had been aiming for, just barely visible over all the soldiers and armored vehicles standing guard against a heavily reinforced concrete barrier over the precious thing within.

In the haze of his altered state of mind clouding judgment and restraint, Jak still grinned at it, his plan coming to fruition. "Finally," he croaked as they dropped, heedless of the soldiers patrolling in dropships. Down they went, drilling through a reflector shield array, a six foot thick barrier of concret, power surging around them and klaxons blazing.

Just of the corner of his eye, just close enough for him to notice it, Jak saw a speeder, familiar and friendly, and coming from the ruins of Slacking's company. Jak thought, 'Perfect'.

He and Slacking picked up speed as Jak pumped in more Dark Eco, and then they were like a bullet, purple-black and going faster: not like a bullet, then. A comet, or perhaps a meteorite, and they blasted through nearly fifteen buildings before coming over to the power core: a spherical device dozens of feet in diameter, plates glowing with energy around it and a fierce blue glow from within, and scores of soldiers on heavily armed vehicles all around. They didn't notice Jak until it was too late, their sensors unable to pick him up due to his Eco interference, and for those he blasted through, it was terminally too late.

Slacking screamed, briefly and just for a moment, as Jak pierced through one of the plates around the reactor core that generated and distributed power for nearly forty percent of this great city's government-operated manufactories, and dove right into the core of it.

Metal melted around Jak as fierce yellow rained all around, a light like the sun directly ahead of him. He let go of Slacking as they fell into the power core, and not a single bit of it could so much as penetrate the Dark Eco shielding Jak. He let out a roar, pure and primal.

For one precious moment, the soldiers became aware that something was wrong, and the light of the reactor was tainted purple. All around them, lights and electronics flickered, and power reserves began to drop.

Dark eco flooded into the reactor core, stabbing like a knife into the matrices of its energies, and transmuted into something purely unstable, and then all was violence as the core exploded. Slacking didn't have time to scream; he was incinerated in moments, ashes scattered as the reactor exploded, obliterating it's casings and casting them far down to the ground, destroying the vast mechanisms drawing on its power for distribution. In that moment, for dozens of miles around power nets went out and back-up power sources activated on in moments. But it was too much, too quickly, and those quickly went out as well. Residential places and businesses, the unimportant places in the thinking of the cartel's leaders, they were unaffected as the blackout rolled like a tidal wave. The factories and testing ranges and weapon manufacturing places and all manner of infrastructure reserved solely for the leaders of this place: those places suffered, and fell into darkness a few moments after the power station exploded, and in that darkness even those miles away knew that something terrible and momentous had happened.

Perhaps nearly a third of the country-sized city went out, all of it in some way directly controlled or obliged to the cartels.

The soldiers directly around the core, still unaware of what had happened, didn't even have moments to turn as the secondary shockwave of the explosion buffeted them, giving them precious seconds before the explosion should have consumed them. Inside the erupting power core, as conduits died and the power to the city died, Jak opened his eyes, a sudden and terrible awareness of the men and women he had killed today in pursuit of his ambitions, of the soldiers simply doing their jobs for their homeland, that he was supposed to be a hero but all he did now was kill and destroy, and that he didn't need to be like this-

Black eyes opened wide, a single glint of brightness in them. Dark Eco twisted, shifted, turning purest white with a prism of green, red, blue and yellow at its core.

The shape of the monster changed; horns burns away, claws vanished, his form shrank to normal size as a brilliant radiance expanded outwards and shoved things apart for nearly a mile as if it were a phantasmal behemoth. Vast tendrils like wings bloomed.

Less time than it took for an explosion to happen. And that which was dark had become light instead.

The explosion happened, but not quickly enough. A force field outstripped it and moved around the expanding explosion, fusing into a perfect dome around the explosion. The shockwave still went on, obliterating the buildings around them for at least a city block and blasting away the soldiers (thankfully, with no deaths or real casualties), and those who were in a position to witness this gaped as a small star bloomed in the darkness of where the power core had been, the explosion perfectly maintained within a shining orb of purest light, enough to blind a man should he look into it directly. Fortunately, all their eyes were shielded.

"My God," one of them whispered, the hover-plates on his conveyances lowering to the ground. The night was banished, the darkness burned away under the light of this blazing sight, and it was as though he stood on the top soil he had never visited and saw a sun he had never beheld.

Through the radio waves, there came a loud chorus – "I'm alive?!" "Holy spit, we're not dead!" "We're alive!" "We're alive!" "Someone punch me, we've been saved!" "Okay." "Ow, the hell did you do that for?!" "You asked!" – and in that explosion, something shining and beauteous and embracing a terrible duality smiled, weeping glowing tears even through the labors of his feat of containing the explosion, howling as it tore at all his power.

The shield rippled and deflated, unable to contain the explosion perfectly… and then the flames within faded, and darkness slowly came in as regular as the tides. The explosion faded in full, and then the shield vanished, a small glowing figure briefly visible amid the ashes that included the remnants of Slacking's corporeal form, and then it was gone, unnoticed and unseen by any eyes or sensors as it vanished into the dark.

None of the soldiers saw it hit the debris far below, the battered ruins of the core. Certainly none saw a sudden burn of Eco, cushioning its blow before the last of power went out, leaving him powerless and drained.

Flying low and quick, a speeder approached, its driver scared, and stopped just above Jak's body, the deep darkness around them lit by distant buildings and the headlights of searching vehicles.

Jak groaned; light still flickered on his skin, glowing right through his flesh and shimmering in strange ways. His eyes blinked, light fading, and under him the metal twisted strangely, as if trying to grow. He didn't seem a Dark Warrior, or a hero of light; little more than a battered and broken young man.

With a grunt, as the zoomer docked, he stared blearily at the devastation all around him, the edge of a building directly under him, and then the lights went out, and everything was darkness for several dozen miles. "Well," Jak said. "That was a little more hard than I figured."

There was a nervous laugh; Jak looked up and smiled as he saw Daxter sitting on the zoomer, waiting for him. "Holy spit, man," Daxter said. "The heck did you do back there?!"

Jak tried to sit up. He fell back down and groaned. "Killed Slacking," he muttered. "Heard a lot of things. Blew up one of the most important power stations for this city. Didn't get anyone else killed. Pretty good, huh?"

"Yeah." Daxter hopped down. "You okay, buddy?"

Jak just barely managed to stand up, hauling himself over. Daxter helped, leaning against Jak's leg and helping him stay upright. "Pretty good, I guess." He shook his head, staring back up. He looked around on the massive pile of debris, covering this entire area where a reactor had once stood. There were shadows and then deeper shadows, the shapes of the many things that had been totally demolished in his rage. All around him was darkness, caused by him destroying a power reactor that supplied so much power to this cities vast stores of factories and more. Not residential, thankfully enough, and surely this would be a serious blow to the Glukkon Hegemony. And all around, thankfully oblivious so far, the soldiers, the people, that he hadn't killed.

Jak smiled. "Not bad," he said.

"And I got the info from his networks!" Daxter said proudly.

"Nice. And the building?"

"Nobody got hurt, but the place isn't about to be making anything for a real long time; the way this place is all cut-throat, they're out of the building biz. We set them back a ways!"

Jak nodded. He slumped. "'Kay. Good. Almost… feel heroic for once."

"Jak, buddy! You okay?"

Jak shook his head. "Went Dark. Went Light." He groaned again, slumping onto the chair.

Daxter helped Jak onto a seat properly before he took over the steering and turned on their vehicle. "C'mon, let's get out of here before someone comes snooping."

"Yeah, yeah…" Jak said, smiling quietly.

They left, and he thought about death. The soldiers he had killed in his attacks; the men and women he'd killed at the company. Slacking himself, though he surely had deserved death. All the people he'd already killed, and the ones he would surely kill another day.

But…

But, he had saved the people who had been here. They didn't need to die, and he hadn't killed them. He had stopped them dying, and he'd done it with the power forced onto him.

He could still do it.

He could still be a hero.

Jak smiled, and tried to think of his triumph; it was the only thing that kept him sane, some days. "Pretty good, Dax. Pretty good." A thought occurred to him, a relevant bit of data from the whole exercise. "Dax?"

"Yeah, ol' buddy?"

Jak sighed. "I think they're making more than ships. Something a lot weirder than just ships."

---

It took time for the damage of Jak's attack on that power core to be tallied up.

The complications were considerable: once the damage was paid off, the loss in production had to be tallied. Slacking Aerodynamic was removed from the plans. Scenario evaluations generated from the other companies that had been dismantled in an eerily similar way; it all drifted up through the chain of command, through the offices and 'net hubs and inboxes of many thousands of administrators and clerks who checked this sort of thing. Enough people to populate a small army saw these reports, signed them, passed them on, instituted measures to respond as per their respective ranks and authority, and up they went, up and up, like poisonous spiders climbing up a million links that all joined into a single chain at the very top.

Finally, now, due to the seriousness of the situation and the extremely delicate nature of their plans, and not to mention the death of Dreck Slacking who had been one of the top administrators in the big plan of the Glukkon Hegemony, all of this had found its way to the office of Radix of the Can't-Think-Of-A-Name cartel, and his beak-like jaw gaped in horror as he finished reading it twice again in order to fully digest what he had just read.

He was quiet for a long moment, and only the tentacles recently grown from the fleshy area around his jawline wiggled so rapidly as to suggest his tension. The reports slammed against the extremely fancy table made from the still-living bodies of treants, now covered in paperwork, and the egg-shaped hoverchair slumped backed for a long, long moment as he stared in silent misery into empty space, perhaps as empty as the grave waiting for him if news like this kept up. Finally, he croaked, "What the frak? What the actual frak!?"

No one answered. He was afraid that if anything was listening, it wasn't anything that wanted to hear from him.

He slumped against the carpet, face buried in his hands and shaking slightly. Finally he let loose a loud and primal scream, burst into a string of incomprehensible curses as inventively vulgar as they were senseless, slammed his head against the table until it pounded enough splinters to qualify as furniture, and he was forced to splash some authentic baby oil onto his neck; the smell made him feel better.

For once, it didn't help. "What's going on here?!" Radix demanded loudly, trying to drown out the terrified screaming in his head, and he procuded to scream in terror, with a bit of rage, for a while.

When it subsided after a long while, Banzai the hyena-man poked his head out through the door. "You yelled, boss?"

Radix stared blerily at him. "No. Not really. Ugh..." his hand banged against the splinters on his desk. He tilted his head up, reconsidering. This was a troubleshooting situation, exactly the sort of thing the hyenas had been brought over for, after all.

First he had to sort himself out, calm down. Very slowly, he shifted back up, wincing as various lengths of unsightly biomass (recently ossified into grotesque spines extending outward from his back) scraped against the back of his egg-shaped throne mechanism. "Slag all the grease-monkeys who didn't make this thing right! Short-sighted jerks. They totally should have accounted for the extremely unlikely possibility that my body would still be mutating in a way that they would have been absurdly unlikely to anticipate." He winced. "Gonna have to send in a crew to fix this thing up. And just watch how long it will take to drag them through security. Figures, slag it!"

Banzai waited, silently.

Radix was still trying to sort out his mind. "And the hells does this button do!?" He yelled, slamming a root-like hand upon a glowing section of the holographic interface where his hands would rest if they were not so dramatically changed in proportion. It sank into the liquid-light shape, and a portion of his throne reshaped itself as smoothly as water flowing into a different container and taking on its shape. From above the hollow directly above his head came a descending section of a solid container filled with a fluid, and several curved straws of a fixed forth gently stopped just short of his lips. "Oh. That's what it does." He took a sip, and made a happy smacking noise. "Ooh, it tastes like the damned!" he glanced back at the container. "Oh, ho, ho! So that's where I left my vintage soylent slurm; slum edition!"

"Why 'slum edition'?" Banzai said blankly.

"Because it's made from the freshly processed and still-living bodies of a whole city block of slums with deliciously horrible living conditions which I then demolished to make a bowling alley and use the complaints of their children as background music on repeat! Then I remembered that I hate bowling and had the thing air-dropped on their children. Freaking hilarious, that was. Until I put several businesses out of commission because I liquefied most of their workers on a whim." He relaxed, soothed by the memory. "Comedy is hard."

"Huh," Banzai said, not a hyena paid to pass judgment on what his employers did. Any particular annoyance he felt was that towards a potential traitor (as he had suspected, and Envy believed) who was wasting his time.

Radix was grinning at him now, presumably under the impression that Banzai liked him instead of merely tolerating his presence. Having spent most of his life (at least that which he had not deleted from his memory using Iskoort-issue psyche scrubs) being catered to, obeyed or generally in charge, Radix was mentally unprepared for not being surrounded by sycophants.

"Hmm, yes…" Radix pressed another button. A section of his desk lit up, a holographic projector plugging into the expansive data network that comprised the cartel's most sacredly secure means of giving commands from on high. It displayed an eye-achingly complex weave of ten thousand folded shapes, each one representing thousands more information databases or census archives or lists of registered personnel (having fought long and successfully enough to be legally considered actual people) or subjects of interest to the agenda over many decades of hard squabbling had finally culminated to decide the fate of Oddworld under the control of the Glukkon Hegemony.

Radix waved at it, and it revolved around and zoomed it. He waved more, making small gestures and each one zooming in and moving the display around, and somehow arranged it so that it became a map of a random slum in the middle of nowhere, of no interest to anyone. It was, however, located at the outskirts of the city, near the original part of the metropolis Lulu's Fortune had expanded from, and Radix raised a simulation-generated chart predicting the average use of the city's power, and he analyzed it with a fearsome thoughtfulness. A large circular graph appeared, explaining the chart in greater detail. Several more appeared around it, turning like gears as colors depicting the consumption of power turned round, staining the purple of optimum government power red. Radix scowled.

"Lot of ridiculous numbers," he said, giving the population census of that building a baleful glare, and it was probably very out of date, no doubt with even more people living there now. "Sucking up the power… only have so much with that generator gone. It was supposed to be safe, and it went and blew up and… damn the luck, we simply cannot handle this kind of problem." His gaze brightened. "So we clear up some!"

"Uh, what was that about a generator?" Banzai asked.

Radix ignored him, struck by a thought. "And another asset for our big plan was damaged too… thank the things that he didn't find our private factories or this would be so much worse… yes, yes, count my blessing, oh yeah, yes… but gotta make up the loss." He waved a hand, and several three-dimensional maps appeared; different parts of the city, all quite apart from each other and by happenstance on the power grid reserved for government use; when the power overflowed, it was directed to these places to make use of it, but now they were definitely not overflowing. Losses had been made, and action, by his standards, needed to be taken. Radix grinned as the maps displayed, in the faint shine of photorealistic hologram, corroded walls and rickety streets of catwalks linked together between apartments situated on poles over the business below, broken-down tanks fallen into market places and had been converted into both homes and businesses, empty factories totally rebuilt from the inside into communes for tourists that saw the disinterest the Hegemony took in governance (unless they were really bored and wanted to start oppressing to show off all the other overlord worlds) as an opportunity for relative freedom.

More streets, spreading out like a sprawling track of gradual expansion beyond their original parameters. Working against their needs now. They weren't his people anymore, Radix decided as he smacked his lips with relish, they were obstacles to be surmounted. "Banzai!" he said cheerfully. "I need to make a decision. Bring me my golf clubs."

"Uh, what?" Banzai said, and later on he wasn't sure if he was offended by being ordered to… fetch things like a common servant, or confused by the command.

"Golf clubs, they're in the… you know, the thing, the revolving-holdy-thing!" Radix said, still staring at a collection of private homesteads inhabited by thousands of people at minimum. Sucking away at precious, precious power. Banzai looked around, across the rough-surfaced walls and floor, his eyes moving past portraits and photos and embellished statues (every last one of Radix himself, at various parts of his life, and much more pleasing to the eye than the real glukkon was), various autographs to himself, a number of pictures of Radix at the sight of various battles where he had personally slaughtered scores of mudokons and put the rest to the slave-chain or the meat-grinder, and a huge revolving locker built directly into the wall, fashioned with microscopic clockwork and somehow larger on the inside, so exquisitely shaped it seemed part of the room until you saw how it didn't quite lock into place. Banzai saw a round sphere, made of tanned leaned and affixed to a angled frame on the inside, and it was hanging by a thick strap from a suit of powered armor Radix had long outgrown but liked too much to abandon. From a disheveled slot in this sphere a golf club protruded. Getting the idea, Banzai loped over and scooped it up by the strap, face blank as the armor was knocked over.

Radix winced. "Be more careful, will you?" Banzai kept his face blank as he held up the lumpy leather carrying case to Radix. "Ah, yes, which one… ah, the big badass one, if you please!" Banzai tried not to roll his eyes as his paw first hovered over a nine-iron with blood stains on it (signed 'Jack Ryan') and what looked like a fossilized flamingo, and then grasped the oversized handle of a golf club made specifically for Radix's tastes and shape, and certainly much too big to fit in the bag but did anyway. Banzai grunted as he pulled it out, placing the bag against a twisting table leg as he pulled out the club; a thick and slightly curved shaft of laminated wood (imported from an jungle world immediately before Radix had it burned to the ground to make the wood more valuable) bristling with all manner of bizarre protrusions and disturbingly organic bulges. Banzai kept pulling, yelping as a longer bit hit his shin, and after the club's shaft wound up being longer than it was tall, he finally extracted the whole thing, ending in a rubber-coated piece that, rounded and short though it was, resembled a scythe blade.

Radix held his hand out; Banzai lifted it, with some effort, into Radix's hand. The glukkon grabbed it and took it up. "Thank you~!"

"Not exactly good for golfing, that thing," Banzai volunteered, eyes fixed on how Radix raised it up to his shoulder, a particularly loopy extension going right over one of his warped shoulders. The tip bounced against a spike.

"But it is good for smashing skulls in," Radix said. "And golfing, murder, same thing when you get down to it."

"Murder tends to involve less point systems and announcers."

"Not in my experience!" The throne floated up, and the maps rose up as well, arranging themselves in a grid pattern; more than a dozen different residences, some with only a single family, others with thousands living together in a rough commune, low-land gangs existing in a non-violent feud, scientists engaging in peaceful experiments for silly things like what sort of chemical combinations made your hair perfect forever, and other things Banzai had no real interest in. Up the throne went, and Banzai had a quick glance of Radix inputting a command into the data-net, perhaps selecting a situational order to be instated once he had done whatever he was doing right here.

The maps locked into place. They looked unnervingly like a golf course, but somehow wrong, with all those little houses and homes and power graphs and, less considered, the lights that each represented a single person, and collectively they were so bright it hurt Banzai's eyes. The more populated places were closer to Radix, closer to the swing.

"They always say 'business before pleasure'," Radix said conversationally, a small device in the desk producing a series of shaped force fields, the utilitarian sort that weren't any good for defense but were often used to create screens or tangible shapes; Banzai had heard them called 'hard light constructs'. This one became a large golf ball, and Banzai realized had Radix had in mind before he finished speaking. "But I see no reason not to combine the two!"

"What does that even-" Banzai started to say.

Radix swung. The flat of the club hit the hard light ball squarely, and the ball deformed slightly from the impact, launched from the desk and over the neighborhoods prepped for destruction. The ball flattened slightly, taking a more aerodynamic shape as it hit the ceiling and bounced down, hitting the wall and almost going flat before it bounced off again, back at the maps. Banzai watched it fall, its arc unpleasantly simple for something that felt momentous at least for a lot of extremely unlucky people-

The ball hit home, right on a slum in the middle of the area where the poorest of the city dwelled, as well as where the tourists and newcomers were restricted to. "Ah, nice," Radix said. "Clean out the scum and fill up some space. Like tidying up a hard drive! I think that's how it works, I don't do computer stuff."

The ball came to a stop, the holograms giving it enough give to support it but not enough to stop its progress through them. Radix said "That one will do just fine!" The hologram buildings flickered as it rolled through, an unpleasant mirror as the command was automatically executed and sent through the appropriate channels, predefined orders given to a mercenary group to set out and kill everything in that area, knock it down, and clean up the power conduits to free up the energy reserved for that area; at the same time, falsified writs of guilt and terrible crimes would be pinned on anyone found dead there, assuming they were registered on any databases. If anyone investigated their deaths, the dead would already have been labeled criminals of the worst sort, deserving of death.

Banzai rolled his shoulders. He was a warrior, and death did not faze him; still, being part of something as dismissive as this left him feeling… unclean, and he felt an acute desire to find an isolated area to undertake a cleansing ritual as proscribed by his people.

'Filth', something whispered. It was in his head, it was on the sunlight so far above him, it was on wind he had not felt in a long time. It was in the stone around him and in the movement of his blood. 'Soiled. Traitor to the ancestors, traitor to the Unseen World.'

He shivered. "Uh… I don't do techie stuff, but…" Banzai spat. "Wouldn't it have been easier to just cut their power and let them fend for themselves?"

Radix bit back a contemptuous snarl, aware that Banzai was not an employee but an emissary of some extremely powerful people and had to be respected. "Then they'd be whining about power and try to get something done about it, and someone would listen! This way is easier; spends some resources, but we'll get more after we process their bodies and confiscate their belongings. Liquidation, that's the key for my efficiency plan! Oh my, yes." Smoothly slipping into the same tone he used to convince his board of investors in his latest progression scheme, he continued. "Every bullet in their guts is another sack of meat to make into field rations. Add in the scavenger rights to all their property and it all adds up. Besides," Radix added, tapping his beaky face. "If you don't indiscriminately kill a lot of people now and then when you have so many more, no one takes you seriously in the galactic overlord game. We have a reputation to uphold, you know!"

Banzai said nothing, certainly not voicing his opinion that the glukkon leadership (going by Radix's example) was depressingly stupid. Or insane. Or both.

"I actually feel a little bit better," Radix said thoughtfully. "Hah, yes." He smiled, fleshy bits around his beak sliding into a marginally more relaxed expression. "Alright, so. Regarding that renegade, I'll have someone put the word out. Get some of our best men on the hunt for this beast. Banzai, you get on that!"

"Huh?" Banzai said. He understood it perfectly well, but he bristled at being commanded like a… a servant. "Wait, do you mean you want me to fight him, or do you mean you want me to tell someone to go get him?" He still ached from the last fight with Jak and wasn't too eager for a rematch.

Radix mulled it over. "Both, I suppose. Go and authorize a kill-team. With big guns, really big guns. Take a list of our best men and take whoever you please. I want that thing put down as explosively as possible!"

"Gotcha," Banzai said wearily, slowly ducking out of the room. Radix paid no attention, now giggling faintly as he sent out conference messages with his fellows to address the fallout of Jak's actions more directly. There needed to be a lot of work done; assign a new factory, locate the aetherite stolen from the facility after the damage was done, and so on.

Banzai snorted as he left the room and entered the central shaft for the executive level offices; it was a stunningly immense space, with the space to fit many cargo lifting freighters if you didn't mind squeezing a bit. Doors to various office suites lined the walls, connected by a looping railway encircling the doors in a spiral, deliberately fragile and spindly looking. It rocked extremely unpleasantly when he walked on it. Banzai always felt like it was going to snap when he moved on it, another reason he hated making these reports and more than ever resented not being able to bring a personal staff to handle these matters. Shenzi was too important to handle these matters and Ed didn't like things like this at all, so that left him to do it.

Grumpily, Banzai walked to one of several elevators accessed at a level just out of sight of the offices, the railway terminating in front of them and a bevy of security officers. It was a long, boring ride as he descended hundreds of floors, and the path away from the executive suites was well hidden away from potential assassins: Banzai, leaving that part of the building, had to exit the elevator and make his way through dozens of passageways and corridors and take at least four more hidden elevators. Then the torturous and extremely boring security protocols, and a lot of walking. It was therefore with some satisfaction that, before leaving the suites entirely, he had activated a stealth device located in a pocket, sending a secure signal to establish a homing beacon pinpointing the location of the hidden executive suites.

He almost chuckled.

He went to a rendevouz point he'd been told to go to before this brief meeting. He eventually came to an escalator crowded with dozens of sligs and glukkons and various other species of Oddworld, even a few mudokons that had joined up with the cartels. There were a large number of other aliens as well, most them steering clear from him save except for a single glukkon that followed him as he left the escalator.

The two of them silently split from the crowd, going past trader posts and cubicles and various terminals, and found a relatively isolated elevator free from obvious surveillance.

They went into the elevator, which was the kind that reserved for specific employees; Banzai's status as a emissary of the Heylin qualified him. He and the glukkon went inside and departed, taking a long away around. The glukkon activated a device that would temporarily paralyze the surveillance devices in this elevator; the cameras and recorders and analysis engines that examined their biometrics every single moment and recorded it all while simultaneously analyzing it and running calculations on what it all mostly likely meant and whether or not they were threats (with automated kill-bots on standby to take appropriate measures). These machines had a limited AI spliced into their functions, and all the information they got was of Banzai and the glukkon engaged in perfectly normal and extremely boring conversation, everything nice and neat and non-threatening.

"Okay," the glukkon, really Envy in a disguised form, said in their true voice. "We got a few minutes. The hell did Radix need you for that he had to talk to you in person and not give you a message through the data-net?"

Banzai, in clipped tones, told his report; the things Jak had done, the damages done to some apparently random factories and corporations that did work for the government, and a great deal of seemingly unrelated accidents that had the cartel leaders in an uproar. "So now they want me to get a team together and kill him," Banzai said. "I'm almost totally sure they're up to something and whatever Jak's up to is messing with it."

"And what makes them think they can just kill him like that?!" Envy snarled. "Jak's our property! Just killing him off without clearing it with us is bad enough, let alone the suspicious stuff behind it." Their features flickered unpleasantly for a few moments. "I need to think about this." Eventually Envy's shifting form stabilized and they spoke. "Okay, I think I got it worked out. It's probably a good idea to contact the big bosses and let them know about the situation, but... maybe it might make us look bad. Especially you."

Banzai hissed.

"If Jak dies, that'll spell some trouble with the allies that loaned him to us." Envy drummed fingers against the wall. "Last transmission I got was clear; we need Jak alive. Dark eco subjects are ridiculously hard to stabilize and Jak is the most stable one ever even without the light eco in his veins. He should have exploded or burned out a long time ago; the techies want him back in the lab to pick him apart until they can figure out how to make more exactly like him. Killing him is not an option, no matter how much we want this planet of thugs stepping right."

"So... what, go along with it?" Banzai asked. "Make sure it's a no-kill order, just get him captured? Some expendable goons, maybe?"

"Exactly." Envy grinned, pleased Banzai had cottoned on so quickly. "This is bigger than lab stuff. Eco is some valuable stuff and that guy we got Jax from, Baron Praxis, he's our biggest supplier. would be ticked if we got his super soldier killed on my watch. The man… elf, whatever he is, he gets loud and mean." Envy gave Banza a studious look, which was fairly intense. Glukkon faces were concentrated, with the heavy jaws and brows. "War efforts march by their supply routes. Keeping our trade agreements going is even more important than getting more dark eco warriors in our armies."

Banzai, a guy who knew something about powerful warriors turning the tide of a war, nodded grimly. "Understood. So... how did your job go?" Envy had intended to go through the planetary archives, a node to which was located in this building. Specifically, to locate any possible loyalists to Wuya's cause; corporations that were subsidary to larger organizaitons in her employ, sleeper agents who hadn't realized the signs of betrayal yet, mercenaries that saw the way the wind was blowing, and so on.

It was a pretty open fact that the Heartless were going to eat everything. Except the things that Wuya's people and her allies had claimed as their own. And a fraction of all reality was still a lot to call their own, long after the Heartless were extinguished in the throes of their own hunger (as the theories went).

Envy grunted. "Hell if I know anything! You would not believe the trouble I've gone through; weeks of sinking into this cesspool, slipping into data-net archives and covering my tracks, having to make scores of contacts by killing people and taking over their lives, getting hundreds of people to tell me little things so I could piece them together, digging deeper and deeper into every last little database I could find without setting off any alarms, and so much damn technical work… and it was all I could do without tipping my hand!"

"And?" Banzai said.

"They're constructing things," Envy said. "On a mass scale. Global, at the very least. Maybe a couple of other planets too. Some transportation, but there's other kinds of technologies involved. It feels kind of random, all over the place, but some of it is..." Envy frowned, face twitching and mouth silently trying out different words until the proper one came out. "The kind of things used in dimensional travel. They're getting as much aestherite as they can to build something."

"Ships and stuff, right?" Banzai said.

"Yeah. Big ones, made only by the most trusted and government-owned megacorps around. But…"

"But what?" Banzai didn't like how uneasy Envy was looking. Envy was the boss, and had no business looking like he had no control over the situation.

Envy frowned. "Look, I'm not a tech guy but I know about logistics. I know something about this aetherite stuff and you don't build ships completely out of it; they tend to be a bit unstable. Aetherite is a material component, but it doesn't make a great ship building material. The shipbuilders here know that, they're not amateurs. I've seen the numbers of the aetherite that's been processed into ship parts, and it's tiny compared to the rest of the stuff they got." Envy hissed. "This is more than just ship building. The aetherite is being used for something else."

"What do you mean?" Banzai said, suddenly alarmed. A cold shiver went through his chest, and he had a horrible feeling he should have investigated all those missions to retrieve and defend aetherite deposits a bit more closely.

Envy didn't seem bothered, though. "I've found traces of... I dunno. Some weird requests, shipping orders and scraps of schematics from scientists who just disappeared. No real records otherwise; either that information is on a completely isolated network ,or more likely the cartel heads only discuss it in private."

Banzai nodded grimly. Finding out anything from those sources would be... tricky. "You tell Shenzi or Ed about this yet? Wait, where are they? I thought they'd be meeting me with you."

"Figured I'd work out the details before I told them anything. I've had them… go pick up a littlle surprise I brought with me," Envy said. "Big ol' canisters full of something very special and a good solid smack in the face for the Hegemony if they're playing under the table. Shenzi's working out places to put them up, get the city nice and saturated. If the glukkons are going against our bosses… well, they'll definitely pay for it. Like a warning shot, really."

"What's the point of that?"

Envy smiled viciously. "Insurance."

---

Zuko shifted his back as he walked down the make-shift warehouse adjacent to their apartment HQ, rather snug in the leathers and plastic shells of the environmental suit rigged up for him and enjoying the heat of the lightweight if bulky heater unit attached to the back that Zim had devised to keep Zuko's powers at optimum even this far from the sun (and perhaps not coincidentally, kept him warm and healthy).

It did throw off his balance and do things to his center of gravity. Zuko was learning to compensate and moved with almost no noise despite walking on clanking walkways with heavy metal-shod boots wearing layers of the kind of the clothing that rustled a lot. He was also starting to spook the neighbors with the way he suddenly appeared out of nowhere like a ghost. The warehouse had been opened up to a number of interested people, and Zuko now stopped at the specific part of it reserved by the team as a personal workshop and hangar for their armaments. He rapped his fist against the huge metal door with their team symbol upon it.

A intercom at head level, with a small monitor over a camera (both of them rescued from a garbage heap, and there was only so much even Zim and Calvin could do to renovate it from scrap so it only displayed black and white grainy imaging), went active. It presented Calvin hurrying into view and looking expectant. Zuko inwardly; ever since they had secured the hanger and they'd installed some security measures, Calvin had really gotten into the spirit of being cyberpunk revolutionary heroes. Calvin said, "Password!"

He hated this part. Zuko gestured at the camera. "Come on. You know it's me!"

"That's not how we're supposed to do it."

Zuko growled. ""Come on! You know who I am!"

Calvin was resolute. "You could be a shapeshifter."

"You should know when it's the real me anyway!" Zuko gestured wildly, igniting in a few random places, and surrendered to Calvin's sense of drama. He started palming his exterior jacket for a keycard. "We've been on the same ship for how long already?"

"See?" Calvin sounded smug. "A shapeshifter wouldn't know for sure."

Zuko growled again, and lifted up a keycard from his exterior jacket; he had a lot of things in there, mostly trinkets he found interesting or little devices he felt would come in handy, and it was a pain going through them. Mumbling to himself, Zuko stomped over to the access panel under the monitor and inserted his keycard into the slot there, feeling extremely silly. After a moment, a light beeped, and several ponderous clanking noises made ominous rumbling that was almost certainly for effect. When the door's opened (wide enough to permit any of the vehicles he and the neighbors had donated to the mummy-catching mission), Zuko hurried in. Automatic measures determined that that no one else was coming in after him, and closed behind him.

Hurrying down the corridor inside, Zuko might have found it way too dark if it wasn't lit by electro-lights; at least Calvin made it look nice when he had redesigned the interior for his own enigmatic reasons that Zuko believed were entirely aesthetic. Personally Zuko disapproved.

Stumbling through another door (doing another keycard pass, and certain Calvin had just installed that to annoy him), he finally passed into a much large chamber, the entirety of their portion of the warehouse arranged in several descending levels that were now almost all completely open but for sprawling catwalks overhead, terminating in securely mounted upper supports for vehicles either kept there or in maintenance, with ramps to drive down to the ground and out onto street-level doors away from where Zuko had entered.

Calvin, smirking at him from the station where the two-way camera was mounted, hurried over to where he had apparently been before Zuko knocked; a large desk with a vaguely familiar orb-like device clamped down securely, a variety of safety screens erected and various specimens mounted in cases.

Cameras were arranged around it, and Zuko saw something huge behind it; an unfinished heavy vehicle, missing most of its exterior and any armor, parts arranged around it in various stages of being finished. He wasn't sure exactly what it was supposed to be, but it looked a bit like a hulking personnel carrier, a bit like a tank, and a lot like a really big metal box. He thought he saw that energy weapon Calvin had devised aboard The Paragon sitting on a table next to it, waiting to be grafted on.

A little further along was several other tables that clearly belonged to Zim. There were robots on the table in varying stages of modification, several newer ones of the same overall design. Some of the other workstations sported weapons of various design, the spilled innards of a spybot, and between Calvin and Zim's workstations was a carefully drawn line between them. Given the melted streaks on the ground around it, Zuko concluded there had been some fight over space.

"You know," Zuko said loudly. "Some people are fine with knocking to get inside places where the guard knows them."

"Well, we have no guards here," Calvin said innocently. "So you had to make do with me! And besides, no reason to get sloppy or take risks."

Zuko, very dramatic and sarcastically, slowly turned to look at a large chunk of ice standing in the corner of the room, sealed in a completely airtight box and chained down, with automatic weapons fixed on it. Zuko didn't know where Zim had gotten them.

Zuko could make raising an eyebrow do the work of a sneer.

"Where else are we supposed to put it!" Calvin at least looked embarrassed. "Look, uh, nothing personal but I'm kind of busy here, so..."

"Hang on." Zuko wound his way around the various hover-bikes, jet-mechs, three-man speeders and other vehicles mounted up on crafting stations in an unfocused 'put it down wherever' scheme. Either Calvin was seriously prone to losing attention and liked working on whatever vehicle was closest, or the other mechanics that lived there kept their cars here and liked coming down here to work on them whenever. Zuko then had to move around the various desks, tables and other things laden with Calvin's various devices and practical experiments in progress, careful not to set anything off (he still got hit in the face with a perpetual motion mousetrap, almost burned by a miniaturized laser, and an extremely tiny tessarect sphere ate a layer off his jacket), and finally lifted a bag he'd been carrying onto the nearest table that didn't look like it would explode. "Here. Your lunch."

Calvin picked it up. "Oh, totally forgot to eat." He inspected it; a large bottle and some flavorings. "Oh joy. Soy. Again. Still. Not really anything else in this town if you're not rich..."

"I don't think it's soy, exactly," Zuko said. "Seems more like a generic term for extracts of nutrients from organic sources."

"Yeah, and I can just see that fitting right on a packaging name brand!" Calvin said; he was talking louder now, as he was feeding the soy into a special machine that hummed and vibrated a bit, processing the raw soy and thickening it into a solid and more palatable shape, filtering it with flavors. Eventually, the soy came out of a nozzle as what looked remarkably like small but thick sausages. Calvin ate them as quickly as he could, too hungry to care about the stale taste very much. "Ah, the glamorous life of the action scientist! Working with scrap at night, eating soy product in the day, all under the nose of a tyrannical government that could kill us at any moment! By the God-Emperor and all his Primarchs, this is fun!"

"The sarcasm wasn't necessary," Zuko said levelly.

Calvin blinked, innocent. "What sarcasm? I was serious!" He returned to his work, turning his attention to a flash of glowing goo on the table, and a nearby screen displaying presumably relevant data from whatever experiment he had been conducting. It didn't make any sense to Zuko, but Calvin got more visibly excited.

Zuko was rather reminded of a memorable occasion when he had seen a fire sage rocketing out of the Dragon Catacombs with an ancient scroll that he said told of ancient secrets passed down by the Lion-Turtles themselves, of the connection between a postulated 'true elemental Lightning' and firebending-style lightning; it never really went anywhere after his father's initial interest ceased after it became clear that it would have no immediate practical effects, but the sage's excitement over the possibilities had prepared Zuko for genuine scientific thrills.

He studied the boy; Calvin rotated the flask around, and various scanners went round it. Various screens displayed data from information being crunched, calculations, predictions being made, simulations performed with available data... periodically Calvin would look at those, punch in some new relevant information and completely rip all the data down and reconstruct new scenarios. This seemed to be thrilling to him. Finally Zuko said, "What, uh, what exactly is that?"

Calvin said nothing, for a moment, gazing with an expression that Zuko had learned to associate with the phrase 'just think of the potential!' and consequently awesome things resulting. His attention was on the orb device Zuko thought seemed familiar, beaming green energies into small chunks of meat and the flask he had seen before.

Calvin said, "You remember, when we fought Kimblee and that thing I made turned out to be able to siphon some sort of essence or energy? It short-circuited his shapeshifting trick."

"Yeah, of course," Zuko said. Now he remembered the device: the orb had been redesigned somewhat since he saw it last, standing noticably bigger and the scanning components removed. It glowed warmly, almost with an organic sheen. That same green energy Kimblee had employed now resonated in the machine, flowing within it without any apparent danger.

"Well, I've been keeping an eye on it. This... energy, essence, whatever it is, its not abating, and its safely contained in my device. So I've been, um, poking things with it. To see what happens."

The electro-lights flared until he forced himself to calm down. Zuko felt he ought to express how dangerous, or stupid, or dangerously stupid, that was. He thought better of it and kept his temper, only saying "Why?"

Calvin looked perplexed, and a little annoyed. "Why not?" Zuko didn't have an answer to that, besides ones that all felt silly. Calvin continued. "Check it out." He pointed at one of the test subjects: bits of what looked like meat, in little plastic containers. "From my last dinner; bits of synthetic meat grown in a vat somewhere, but perfectly identical to real meat from some animal they have here. Physiology is roughly comparable with the baselines in our group, except for outliers like Morte, who technically isn't alive, or Zim who... I haven't the slightest idea what Zim is, he registers as a robot sometimes but he's made of meat... probably some seriously extensive biomechanical augmentation I haven't seen yet... anyway! Experiments suggest any benefits should be applicable to us if carefully tended-"

"What benefits?" Zuko said warily.

A slight pause, to be brought so quickly to the point. Calvin indicated the meat. "Look close."

Zuko did. Three pieces of meat, their containers marked "CONTROL", "BIG EXPOSURE" and "SMALL EXPOSURE". The first one looked like any other bit of synth-meat; flabby, like a chunk of fat with fibers, a little greasy and perfectly edible if not exactly appetizing. "That first one is the control group, so I have something to compare the other results with. The other ones are stuff I exposed to the unfiltered radiated energies of my device, inducing a sort of uncontrolled but stable transformation-"

Zuko held up a hand. "You'd probably be better saying that sort of stuff to someone who actually understands this "

Calvin shrugged. "Okay, put it like this." He indicated the meat pieces again. "I basically made a way to infuse this... energy, I guess, into them. Not lethally, it shouldn't do anything bad to anyone for real, but I'm not dumb enough to take chances like that so we're strictly in testing at the moment but... well, definitely things are happening. Look, at the ones with lesser and greater levels of exposure..."

Zuko did. The 'LESS EXPOSE' pieces were still recognizable as the meat; but they were slightly larger, changed. They glowed faintly, a lovely shade of green like what he imagined the color of growing life was, and otherwise was totally transformed into something rather stranger. Not a single bit of it was the same as the rest; glowing bits like embers fading to a dull brick red bulging like muscle and then black striped with green like circuit patterns...

Zuko looked at the normal meat, and back. The difference was obvious, though there was almost no size or shape distinction between them.

The third piece, though, aside from a faint green and looking slightly bent, looked unremarkable. "The third one looks fine. 'GREATER EXPOSE'?"

Calvin brought up an video-file, dated several minutes before. Zuko watched as it displayed that particular bit of meat under the green; a bright glow, and Zuko's mouth parted at the sight of it suddenly swelling so much it almost broke the glass; red organically-fueled flames crackled and became something blue like ice, and the whole thing hardened into diamonds, and that became orange and furry, and that became blue with erratic blue lines, and then hard-shelled with a metallic carapace, and a constant fury of transformation, of so many different possibilities that there was no distinction, just general change... and then it shrank down, the transformative energy leaving it, a bit damaged but intact.

"More dramatic changes, yeah," Calvin said thoughtfully. "And more quickly; the lower exposures take a few minutes to finish transforming. But they last a lot longer; the big exposures burn out fast. Not much damage, but I don't know what it would do to something like us. It would be fun to find out, though!"

"What kind of energy is that, anyway?" Zuko said, carefully trying to steer him.

"I'm honestly not sure. I've seen references in the guide to a device called the Omnitrix that works pretty much like what this stuff is doing, so it might be from that device originally." Calvin indicated a screen, showing a number of wavelengths translated into DNA strands; by the look of it, they had been painstakingly tested to determine their species of origin, and a number of Guide-sourced creatures and related articles were placed next to the appropriate strands. "It's life energy, or energized DNA. By infusing it into something, you can transform it into the life forms encoded into it, or imbue them with their traits."

Calvin flipped to another screen. "The problem is, my new little... heh, transmogrifier, it can't differentiate and isolate specific ones. When it goes off, whatever it hits gets hit by a completely random number of changes." He pointed at a video of meat turning into a furry, chitinous, crystallized mess. It didn't look like that would have been painful, but it did look strange. "I don't have any way to predict exactly what would happen when it hits you. I might be able to work up a mechanism for limiting it to specific qualities in the creatures, or get a certain result by dailing it in, but first I have to actually figure out what creatures are on this."

"So what would use would that be?" Zuko said.

"What part of 'Transforms you with the strengths of random alien light forms temporarily' did you not understand? We could... geez! Amplify our strengths! Give super strength and limited invulnerability to random people! Devise giant growth formulas, and let me tell you, those are hard to deal with bone density and skin hardness and that stupid square-cube law. Give our allies superpowers for a fight! It'd be awesome!" He frowned, thinking some more. "And maybe making customized biological organs and implants by using alien physiology as a baseline? Creating new and completely awesome forms of life? Turning yourself into a chimeric super-thing with superpowers?"

One thing in that clicked for Zuko. "You could transform soldiers into superhumans," he repeated.

"Yeah!" Calvin thought about it. "You could revolutionize the bioaugmentation industry, do medical stuff with it I guess, and you could create the most avant-garde army of monsters ever. So, yeah, possibilities."

Zuko wasn't listening. He came from a long line of generals, commanders and warlords; such things spoke to his dreams. He smiled, not exactly in a nice way. "Awesome."

"I've found some other ways to isolate what's on here so we got a better idea of what sort of cool things we could make, or turn ourselves into," Calvin said, bringing up some data. "I've worked out that every single sample belongs to a sapient species; no animals, just people. So maybe some sort of bioelectric library of beings. I might be able to add to it, somehow."

"And you figured this out... how?"

Calvin pointed at the things infusing the energy into the meat bits. "Those things. I originally built them to measure frequency modulation, and it worked similar; I was able to analyze the DNA samples when they're transforming something. I modified them to work a bit more like my elemental transmogrification gadgets, only working with that morph-energy instead of elemental power, and now I can do stuff with it! So far I think I'll be able to come up with a pretty wide range of probable results, moderate the frequency to produce certain effects. To get the right sort of transformations."

"This stuff can turn you into aliens?" Zuko asked. "That... would be pretty useful for infiltration."

Calvin leaned on the table, taking an absent chew of his lunch. "Not with what I'm doing; that would be way too precise. No, I think it would sort of... infuse random alien traits into you? Monsterize you, kind of. Transforms you with the strengths of random alien light forms temporarily." Calvin pointed at the last thing, the tubes with green fluid. "That's low-grade green eco. The essence fuses with it pretty well; I'm using it as a delivery agent of the substance; safer than just spraying the containment sphere around."

"The what?" Zuko said. Calvin pointed at the round gadget containing the energy pulled out of Kimblee.

Calvin grinned; it was a surprisingly wholesome and youthful look from a boy that, stature aside, Zuko occasionally forgot was much younger than him. He simply acted more mature (in his way) and spoke more adult than any child his age had any right to be. It was... nice to see him being the boy he was. "Glad to hear it."

Zuko smiled too. "Anyway, I came by to see how we were doing. How are our supplies?"

Calvin grimaced. "We're doing the best we can with the stuff here, but... look. We need more of the things from our ship. The things we've been able to smuggle out, good enough, but... we need to get our ship out of docking. We need it fixed, we-"

"We need our ship back in our hands," Zuko finished.

A long pause.

Calvin nodded grimly. "Yeah."

Zuko grimaced. "Our ship."

"Yeah."

"Which is currently under guard in a highly secure government facility."

"Yeah."

"No doubt scores of guards ready to kill us if we get it, cause a disturbance, or do anything stupid."

"Yes."

"Our ship, which is, not to press the point, a space ship and likely to draw attention being brought here."

"Yep."

"So you say we need to get our ship from the ship docking station and all the way here, across a span equal to smaller countries, without us being noticed."

"...Yes." Calvin looked like he was well-aware of how stupid it sounded.

A long pause.

Zuko shrugged. "Okay. I'll see what I can do."

Calvin blinked. "What, really?"

"Yeah. Morte's been complaining about needing some 'quality crew bonding time' anyway." Zuko glanced away. "And Zim needs your help putting his robot soldiers together, and improving the containment system for that mummy."

A look of intrigue, through the grumbling of having his private time interrupted. "Oh, fine. Tell him I'll be there in a minute. Geez, we have intercoms, just use them..."

Zuko nodded. "See you later."

"Be up in a bit."

Zuko left. Security sensors detected when he had left, and so the hydraulics slammed shut and locked the door. Warily staring at the imprisoned mummy across the room (presumably dormant), Calvin still wasn't comfortable and slid a little curtain over it on the off-chance it could see his secret experiments. He returned to his work station and resumed work on a series of test tubes of green eco shining with a brighter light than normal.

He selected one. "Low exposure," he said aloud. "Safe to use without significant side effects. Okay. Cameras on!" Several of them lit up, focusing on him. video feed to my personal archives; 'Controlled Infusion Transformation' trials, number... um, what am I on now?" He considered, checked a screen. "Ah yes, forty-two!

"Rolling, on my mark." Calvin held up a finger, counting off. "One. Two! Three!"

He held the tube over his arm; the cameras focused and he uncorked the tube, calmly narrating the idiosyncrasies of this particular formula ("Diluted low-grade green eco, synthetic, exposed to electricity and treated with samples of my body to make it more responsive to my bio-signature, attunes slowly but effectively to my own morphic field, exposed to a low-yield radiation of transformative essence for several hours..."), undid the seal, and poured out a thin trickle over his arm.

Green fluid, like viscous light, dribbled thickly over his arm. It glowed, and so did his skin, and he felt a tingling for a moment, a warm and soothing feeling like sinking into a deep bath. The fluid sank in, absorbed directly into him, and he felt that peculiar sensation of morphic uncertainty where the green eco was assimilated by his body, its payload of biological essence distributed and infused into his arm...

His arm itched, suddenly. His skin tensed, his muscles clenched and then suddenly swelled to grotesque proportions. His skin sloughed, dragging forward by the sudden weight and nearly toppled him off his feet. His arm like a ball attached to his shoulder, Calvin murmured in discomfort but no pain. Little spikes grew over his arm, and then his bones caught up with the muscle growth, swelling up just as suddenly.

His arm was nearly as big as his torso now, insectoid chitin growing on his skin. His hands were changed as well, rin and middle finger fused into a single overlarge digit. The skin turned a brilliant red, and bursting into living flame around his hand, with lumps like magma. Similar changes extended up his arm, nearly up to the shoulder, and then stopped.

Calvin waited, with the patience and lack of surprise suggesting that he'd done this to himself already. He was excited though, and grinned as his nails thickened, sharpened, and grew into claws. "Um, um! Okay, this time, I'm seeing muscle structure like... hm, tetramand, mainly, some ork for sure, and there might be elements of others there as well." He wiggled his altered hand, and pushed against the floor, making a considerable dent. "Definitely enhanced strength in this specific frequency! And, uh, this time I got some sort of subdermal armor-" he picked at the skin. "Not sure what that's from. And pyronite flaming ability, some pyrokinesis this time. It might be a less prevalent essence pattern; I'll have to analyze the frequency to make sure."

He went on for a while, and eventually said, "It doesn't hurt at all. I'm still not sure how to make it work more conveniently. Exposing it to skin isn't really doable most of the time, and I don't know if ingesting it is a good idea or not."

He swung his arm around idly. It was already starting to shrink. "And maybe find some way to lengthen the duration.

---

And so it came to pass that, less than a day or two later, Calvin was experimenting with his new transformation technology in secret, Jak was up to his one-man war against the Hegemony's secret plan, and Envy's own crew were making inquiries. Of that last, there was some success.

With many schemes and tricks and manipulations that left much damage in their wake, Shenzi the hyena came into possession of a dossier, of many unrelated files that together spelled out something surprisingly significant.

Firstly, the use of transfer protocols and prisoner escort vehicles from facilities where incredibly important prisoners of war were studied. Always these prisoners had been reported killed in action on all official channels, but the bodies were never found and the transports put into action afterwards for undisclosed reasons.

Secondly, the shipping of vast amounts of food and similar resources.. The soy gardens mastered under Brain Lord's personal workings having huge amounts of their crops taken, and said to be stolen by insurgents feeding their minor rebellions. (Too much food for so little, it might be said, and Brain Lord's demands to investigate these were curiously half-hearted.)

And, less than a year or two ago, perhaps a bit more, an enormous amount of the finest construction workers and engineers and security designers and many more of that sort being called up for a huge project. And vast scores of metals and minerals and ores imported or mined to build... something. Something quite big. And afterwards, all of them disappeared. Official reports indicated that they were sworn to secrecy to a top secret project, and lived in comfort in exchange for never leaving their quarters in the very best residences of Lulu's Fortune, itself the shining jewel of the Glukkon Hegemony.

And then, most importantly. The prisoners. The prisoners of great battles far and wide that Oddworld's forces had a place in. Some captured, some defeated, and all missing, and all reported dead to the Hegemony's dangerous allies. Forces of great value to the secret empire the Hegemony was in debt to, all suddenly dead. Valuable pawns and political figures, reduced to statistics so suddenly that it demanded suspicion.

It had all added up, and had not been an easy thing for her to find.

Shenzi, after finishing her part in Envy's mysterious errands (of great canisters, many dozens or even hundreds of them, secreted and stored in every major population center of the city, and others of a different sort at the structurally significant parts of the city, found these files. They were hidden in plain sight, and not taken pains to keep them hidden. She was not the brightest of soldiers, she knew, but she was certainly not stupid, and she was patient.

She took advantage of her status and... found out things. The movements of extremely valuable prisoners before their supposed deaths. The presence of extremely valuable captives who were supposed to be dead, and they had she found extremely worrying and disturbing. Names like Ruby Rose, or Will Wedgewood, or Eleanor Lamb, or Susan Strong. Fugitives, enemies, and faces of resistence by force of influence, raw physical power or personality. Every single one of them had been reported killed in actions the Hegemony had taken part in, but on top secret government papers they had been briefly mentioned as captives, and then just... disappeared.

The presence of food that was going somewhere before it was vanished. And the rising numbers of enemies in places where enemies seldom had been... Shenzi saw manipulations leading them there, right before the food vanished. A scheme was at work here. She had talked to those in their gilded cages. They could talk to her, she was official. And she pieced things together, bit by bit, and it scared her worse and worse, made her jaws clench, and when she finally found Envy in the form of a skrull delegate and having arranged even nicer private quarters by scheme and seduction, Shenzi handed the dossier over as soon as things were quiet and they were unobserved.

Envy, current form reptilian and green in a humanoid configuration, large ears flapping back and impressively large chin rippling from internal flexing, took it. It was a good disguise; no one would say much about the random bodily fluctuations of a skrull diplomat coyly searching to get a piece of the multiversal dominance pie. Shenzi was silent and serious; from the typically flippant and bullying hyenoid, Envy took this to mean that she meant business.

As Envy read it, their body changed to match their mood. Bones grew thicker, spines swelled out, and the body became rather more alien and monstrous, and finally Envy said, making the same conclusions she had, "What the actual hell?!"

Shenzi said nothing, thinking there wasn't much to say.

She tried not to let her claws tremble. By the orishas of her home, she knew the worst of the names on those lists. A name that was supposed to be dead, should have been dead, needed to be dead. A name that had rocked the foundations of her true master's plans, a name that might end with all their hopes dead and their ambitions burned and everything she wanted broken down as if smashed by a giant mechanical foot.

In her memory, she remembered battle brought on, by a charismatic young human with too much bravado and too little sanity, who seemed less a man and more of a fleshy manifestation of metal will and unrelenting fury. She remembered cities on fire, slaves set free and turned against them, of entire campaigns grinding to a halt and then being brought low by machines and men, by men that fought like machines and machines that walked as men.

All driven by his voice, and his will.

She had seen the battle that had left him dead. He was supposed to be dead. She dared not say the name out loud. She couldn't.

He was supposed to be dead.

Jak, maddened and falling to the horrors of dark eco, was a terror. But this man, this name rising again from death, truly frightened her.

He was supposed to be dead.

Envy saw the name, and looked at her. She nodded grimly. Envy mouthed the name, disbelievingly, and said, "And... why do they have a man listed as a prisoner more than six months after he was listed killed in action!? An action that I know Oddworld forces were involved in!?"

Envy started furiously at it, as if getting angry enough would make the truth leave. But this was incontestable. The records couldn't lie now. Envy said, "This is crazy... this is insane... how in the name of my father do they have Kamina Jiha on their prison books!?"

Envy was right. This was crazy.

A long pause.

Envy growled, anger mounting, and said, "He was reported killed in action. Now we have him listed here as a prisoner when he was killed in battle. The glukkons captured him and lied about it! This isn't just suspicious, this is treason!"

In spite of her mounting disease, Shenzi still enjoyed an opportunity to poke fun at semantics. "It is really treason if they don't live in the country or empire...?"

"Shut up, you know what I mean!" Envy stood up, form sloughing away like mud off a hot blade. Again Envy glared at the dossier and, thinking about the second most horrible thing Shenzi had discovered, said "And they have something under the ocean. Where, and what?And what does it have to do with the prisoners they're lying about?"

---

The secrets went deep. Below the vaulting heights as great and mighty as the rich who dwelled in them. Below the ground where the disenfranchised lived. Below the factories birthing the war machines to feed the glukkon's eternal wars on their home world, and where the slaves toiled. Below where the continent of Mudos met the waters... and then, the sea.

Below the waves, below the city-sized airships bringing weapons to bear against the enemies of the Hegemony. Below the rusting remains of ships and freighters and cruisers that had failed. Below massive conglomerations of crab-coral, skittering things growing as long as they lived and accumulating in vast layers. Beneath even the tread of aquatic things so vast and heavy that they registered on earthquake sensors.

Set deep into a sub-oceanic cliff overlooking a particularly deep trench, at the edge where tectonic plates met, where the water pressure would pulverize almost any living thing , there was a building, adapted to this extreme environment. It rose up, like a giant cylinder nearly half a mile tall, perhaps seventeen or so separate levels spun like discs inside a perfectly sealed biosphere, maintaining a stable gravity and siphoning power from hydroelectric plants swelling from its base like roots.

The absolute finest redundant self-sustaining life support systems from seven star systems, oxygen and food/waste recycling routines, stealth systems able to passively shy itself out from the view of any reasonably advanced navigation or spying system that came within range so that it simply didn't appear to exist at all. A structure that could resist the crushing pressures. And a patrolling fleet dedicated to simply protecting this one area, guarding it from any who might even dare make the risk of potentially slipping its existence to any at all.

It was a fortress, dedicated to keeping everyone inside there no matter what.

It loomed, like a grim sentinel holding uncountably dangerous things within itself. Perhaps this was an appropriate metaphor, given its purpose. Light glowed from it, dimmed and hellish by artificial means, so that anyone who saw it would mistake it for an unusual coral growth before being vaporized by sentry guns hidden into actual coral. The seabed here, glinting white with a few dozen feet worth of skeletons picked clean by the wildlife, was testament to the hundreds who had died this way. Some trying to escape, too, much to their captor's extreme displeasure: You weren't brought here to die. You were brought here because you were too valuable to eliminate, too dangerous to leave alone, or too hard to kill.

Now, a ship docked, carrying a cargo of foodstuffs that could feed a small city for weeks (and had been reported stolen by bandits, as a cover story for any off-worlder that snooped; Brain Lord, in her official capacity in this matter, had advised more thorough covers but they preferred something simpler here). The sole pilot was given a direction to go, strictly to be carried out, and inside it she flinched before the enormous guard robots swimming in the depths regarded her ship with dispassionate suspicion before they processed her orders as legitimate. They nodded, a surprisingly human gesture from innocent drones operated by virtual intelligences, and she went down a lift with many enormous crates of process-ready soy-stuff, and she delved through the nameless prison.

Up one side, past a pressurized hull, though several dozen layers of nearly unbreakable glass that nonetheless showed signs of repair from a recent attack; several layers up and one inwards, past the private corridors that only most of the guards and maintenance workers were supposed to know, past graffiti of a green spiral and a flaming skull wearing sunglasses ('HOPE NEVER DIES!' proclaimed the graffiti), deep into the nameless prison that did not legally exist.

Deeper... past a seemingly endless set of corridors, of mostly self-regulating equipment, of well-protected information cores for the targeting data and intervention parameters relaying instructions to the mighty machine-guards and the stationary prisoner calming units, of life support equipment so complex and self-sustaining that it was almost an ecological system of its own but without the ruthless cycle of consumption and murder. Of enormous databanks, much like the ones owned by the greatest corporations to keep themselves at the top of the entertainment venue, of algorithms and creativity-mimicking code generating thousands of different entertainment series and formulas to be relayed to thousands of screens for the prisoners to watch the endless array of shows and cartoons the databanks generated to keep them amused and give something for them to occupy themselves with, filtered for any content that might engender thoughts of rebellion, violence towards each other or escape. (Never the less, some still got through. The theory went that the the algorithms were adjusting themselves to suit the prisoners' wishes.)

And past a shell of many layers; walls made from mighty alloys of raritanium and secondary adamantium and even stronger materials; a small and extremely powerful army of automatons programmed to observe and prevent the prisoners from escaping or trying to kill each other, calm and lacking hatred or contempt to their charges; security databases continually analyzing the prisoners for even the slightest hint of mass outbreak and directing the automaton guards when needed; various other important places where essentials were made or stored or simply kept out of reach of the prisoners.

A pressurized hiss as the lift stopped, and she walked into a narrow corridor as her cargo was shunted down a separate place and the crates divvied out to the appropriate places. She walked to a screen in a receiving station, holding a data-slate long enough that she carried it in one arm.

The pilot was also the courier. She was a turian; a humanoid avian with a metallic carapace, her frame slender and somehow sharp looking. She stopped in front of the screen and held the dataslate to the screen. In the light, her dark face paint, aligned as geometric markings indicating her colony of birth, contrasted so much against her pale carapace that they almost seemed to glow. They might have; she was experimenting with bioluminescent mixtures since glowing was the new fad in her net-circles.

On her sleeve, on the shoulder, there were two symbols showing her employer and master respectively. One was the insignia of the Glukkon Hegemony. The other was the brain-and-crown of the esteemed scientist and transglukkon heroine Brain Lord. "Deploying this week's supply of food resources and carrying out official inspection," she said, voice clipped and a little too fast, like she couldn't get the words out quick enough.

The screen lit up. The chirpy voice of one of the prison's administrative virtual intelligences hummed in acknowledgment.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide's article on virtual intelligences, or V-Is, goes as such: 'A VI is a safer alternative to the ethically questionable notion of creating a synthetic intelligence for the purpose of more complex jobs too menial for a sapient to handle reliably, but too delicate to leave to basic decision-branch-and-follow programming. While usually made to be polite and personable for the purpose of consumer interaction, they have no sense of self and all personalities are strictly simulated, as evidenced by attempts to get a reaction outside of their programmed bounds (resulting in nothing more than an apologetic denial). Rumors of corpses becoming mechanically augmented in order to fight on a basic level and using virtual intelligences to pilot them for cheap infantry by less scrupulous military interests are probably made up but you never know.)

The VI beeped, checked her status against the up-to-date rankings of authorized personnel in the database, and satisfied protocol when it confirmed that she was indeed listed under the departments under the direct authority of Brain Lord. Food stores were checked, schedules examined, prospective food requisition requests analyzed against a scenario emulation suite based on past food requirements for the prison and general consumption ratios within the past month and a half, and it beeped again. In a politely cheerful voice seemingly calculated for irritating someone as much as possible, it said, "Welcome, Varis Eudarian! We humbly accept your food offerings on behalf the Glukkon Hegemony."

If it was spoken to even by authorized personnel, it gave any requests or access protocols a check against various red flags to see if it was being intruded or not. Eudarian passed them without raising any ones over the appropriate threshold, and the VI said, "We humbly request that you permit armed security against the possibility of socially-oriented coercion from prisoners. They can be such scheming sillies!"

Eudarian winced; she hated that sort of personality. Describing the inhabitants of this prison, to the last number too dangerous to die or be allowed to die and invariably deemed valuable by profit-obsessed leaders, as 'sillies' was embarassing. Granted, they weren't murderers (for the most part, probably) and they weren't thugs by any means, but they were dangerous. "I agree with your request."

A true AI, something genuinely sapient, would have probably have given a response. The VI, sadly not so blessed, merely beeped out a code-burst. Several minutes later, five or so small pods floating at head-level and bristling with suppressant weaponry floated around her. She tried not to think about how several of those weapons were pointed at her, just in case.

And under her, the floor shifted; a barely detectable seam in the metal parted, and she gently began going down at a slight angle. Behind her, a pair of large construction drones (big and bulky humanoid forms, made from a modified chassis from purchased YMIR mechs) hauled her food away. Eudarian put her hands behind her back, business-like, and waited.

It took much too long, but eventually it docked, and a light appeared before her where a door unsealed out of the wall. She stepped out, bracing herself for the light and the smell-

She didn't do it well; she shut her eyes against the glare, and the curiously bland odor of well-kept cleaning solvents smelled wrong to her and was incongruous enough to dazzle the mind.

The air was different, in the wide open spaces of the prisoner centers. When her eyes opened, and she could hear the sound of thousands of voices, she was looking directly at a tent innocently arranged right in front of the concealed door she had arrived from. There were more tents afar, dozens of them, hundreds; fabric sewn into crude domiciles and all manner of different shapes and make where the frameworks of preexisting structures had been used as a skeleton. Most of the space seemed that it had originally been unadorned, but layers of graffiti and massive group-made scrap sculptures blurred the outlines already made hard to see from building-sized mechanisms of unknown purpose. Above her, seemingly miles up, there was a ceiling that was the floor of the next level, and around her she appeared to be in a box-shaped area where the walls met.

She walked by tents; indeed, the entire area seemed to be nothing but tents made from fabric stretched over various anchor points above and around, multicolored fabrics shadowing each other much like a forest of wild growth did; there was hardly any visible metal. She walked under dozens of overhanging layers like crude buildings that had more or less happened automatically, passed by several turrets currently inactive without anyone to shoot, shadow and light shifting constantly with the interplay of the electric lights mounted on strategic surfaces.

The place was loud. After the silence outside, the noise was startling; the crack of flesh and metal against more of the same, shouts and whispers and audible talk and similar merging into base sound, and most of all the tents going back and forth with the circulated air. It wasn't threatening, and not that bad, at first, but she thought that it could be maddening in time.

Several men and women of varying species, warming themselves over a metal barrel that had possibly once been a supply container abandoned at a dumb site here, stared at her in surprise. One of them, a swordfish fishman, reflexively stepped forward and her drones aimed their guns squarely at him. A robot-woman smacked him in the arm, and he backed down, looking wary. Eudarian said nothing but passed on her way. The robot-woman and her shared a glance and Eudarian noticed the tattoo on her shoulder; a flaming skull wearing sunglasses. The man had his own: the zodiac symbol of Aquarius and a seahorse with its mouth made to look like a harpoon, all in violet and fuchsia.

Eudarian went on, and the drone followed.

Eudarian moved onwards, fully aware of cloaked figures keeping an eye on her; big, swift for all their bulk, and gleaming metal underneath swept folds of fabric and uncannily like the patrol bots she had seen. Now they were following her with a subtlety and thoughtfulness beyond the drones as they bounced from one tent to the other like on trampolines, climbed up the wall of a food processing center and vaulted up to the next nearest level surface, which was several dozen feet away. Metal hands grabbed a free-hanging cable and swung from it thirteen feet in the air and swung to the next one. Eudarian glanced up, but then they were gone.

They were still watching her, she knew.. She kept going past a smoking furnace the size of an apartment with a number of cloaked figures (no relation to the ones following her) standing around it and carrying their own things to be smelted with the fires there. Others came away with... general eccentricity in metalwork, mainly. Some crude swords or armored bits to fit around various limbs, others were minor tools or decorations of some variety or another, and a few were more complicated instruments. There was not a lot to do, for the most part; blacksmithing as a hobby had become a bit of a fad here.

The tents faded, as she ventured onwards. The blocky shapes of vital maintenance components, food distribution centers and the gargantuan curve of a distant wall made the prison floor uneven and displeasing to the eye. The frequent landfills she saw there, full of outmoded machinery and scrap thrown away to be repurposed by the prisoners, made the smell rather worse.

(The glukkons, a species increasingly defined by the principle of 'whoever has the most moolah makes the world', considered that having a lot of money made your problems go away and left you free to ignore possible consequences. This had the unexpected result of glukkons throwing away the excess waste metals, slag, and broken down parts that ordinarily went to scrapyards down in this prison. The rationale, such as it was, had initially been that this prison was where things were thrown away to be forgotten; somehow, garbage and scrap had the same principle, even though it could be noticed with all those sea-trucks submerging down here. In any event, it gave the prisoners something to do; organizing sorters as under-caste gang members to find interesting or useful materials was something of a common agenda for gangs with ambitions in this prison. For the wealthy influential enough to be aware of the prison, it was a status symbol to be able to afford to throw your unwanted garbage out down here.)

It didn't quite stink, so much as it simply... smelled. A smell, of mostly unwashed bodies (bar the occasional leak rerouted into holding tanks repurposed as 'first come first serve' showers mainly used by those in good standing in the local gangs) mixed with smelting metal and who-knew-what sort of chemicals, the occasional blood stink of back-alley cybernetic enhancement or replacement overload with a hint of anesthetic, and a pervasive staleness to the recycled air. Combined with the constant noises of distant fights and arguments and crowd chatter and the throbbing growl of the prison's life support techno-ecology, it was the sort of thing that would be incredibly distracting and painful for the first few hours, and eventually just a part of the background.

Periodically, as she walked, she ticked down various notes on a personal data-slate; an abundance of crude smelting or two-man factories there, a recessed zone converted into a sparring arena with the help of scrap shaped into rough boundaries there (and even an amphitheater in one place, all high rows and rough seating with woolen padding scavenged from who-knew-where), a nutrition distribution center that even now had a fight raging over which gang claimed it as their property, and this last Eudarian watched for some time.

Silently, as a hulking robot and a smaller but no less mighty patchwork man arm wrestled while trading back and forth rhyming insults, she considered that things seemed... different than they were last time she had been here, about a month or so ago. There was never much bloodshed or overt hatred, yes (in no small part due to the fact that the security systems actively prevented any serious violence and of course because to put up the sort of red flags that got you exiled down here you had to be a fairly bright sort of person and disinclined to casual murder; thugs would just be executed or hired by the Glukkon Hegemony, while the majority of the people here were charismatic demagogues, scientists who didn't know when to stop questioning controlling authorities and officers who were just a bit too honest to fit in properly, not to mention bona fide heroes that the Hegemony couldn't afford to risk killing), but there had been a sort of total detente the last time.

No, she thought with a frown, considering the people going about with a sort of cheerful indifference to their imprisonment. The people last time... they'd been apathetic. Almost giving up, most of the time, and certainly too beaten down to try fighting back in anyway. Nothing much had ever been really happening, apart from a few enthusiastic people that were impossible to get down. But now... she watched the arm wrestlers stand up, admit a draw before comparing the results of previous contests. Eventually the robot saluted and left peacefully, her gang following while the patchwork-man's gang gathered around and set up a banner in their colors to display their ownership of their new territory.

They'd fought before, out of boredom. But it had been a desperate thing, not as... friendly or even polite as this. And certainly not competing. Certainly, this was the friendliest and most amiable prison atmosphere she had ever seen.

Clearly, the presence of her number one contact and possibly one of the most important prisoners had already done a number on this prison.

There were a lot of banners and color patterns associated with them, too; the gangs liked using them as a visual shorthand, painting their territories in them, and it was a bit of a competition for the most creative and interesting ones they could devise. Here, the blue and silver heraldry of the machine-worshipping Mechanisians (cyborgs, robots, synthetics and organics who simply revered the products of intelligent will), with a gear embossed over a flame. There, the circular lightning bolt around a grinning monster's head with neck-bolts and a first aid red cross upon the forehead; the Superurge Guild, those dedicated to preserving life and making more of it and generally being like a roaming band of doctors. It certainly made the place more colorful. She made notes of them, outlying the apparent territory arguments at present and they seemed rather amicable. ("The Superurge Guild has entered into an alliance of sorts with the Wish Maker Smithies who dominate the smelting rings and therefore also deal with the Junkyard Dogs who claim dominance over the scrapyards 'donated' by the most elite on the surface," she wrote. "The Red-Face Hero Machines, still currently maintaining an overall organizational structure not dissimilar to the 'sentai' teams of empowered agents from enemy realms, deal with everyone who seems friendly or might be friendly, and its hard to tell what their true agenda is besides overall cooperation and fighting with whoever looks like fun. Interestingly, they seem to have entered into close association with the Bloody Ocean Kings gang, rendering their territory more secure and desirable: the Kings were never a powerful gang but their ferocity was famous and their handling of the water supplies give them considerable influence and comfortable conditions that now belongs to the Machines...")

She continued, writing more to establish a pattern for the benefit of the drone dogging her and for genuine intel on behalf of her employer, and had devised a quite respectable report regarding the more overall peaceful atmosphere in the prison, the creative outlets the prisoners had taken and the uses they had put the scrap tossed in with them, and she established no apparent intent or predictable plan when she made her way into a less industrialized area, a more open place that seemed a display area for art derived from the scrap; paintings done with colored oils and more often than not done on the very buildings, small sculptures of unusual things or imaginary objects formed from broken bits of machinery forged into something pretty and new.

And everywhere here, the red colors of the Red-Faced Hero Machine gang; the flaming skull and sunglasses of their insignia fluttered from crude banners and sheets at fixtures and poles everywhere, a number of prisoners sporting rather clunky but serviceable augments were going about, and phrases like BELIEVE! looked so bright with the brilliant green paint from the walls. There were a lot of spirals carved and painted into the walls, abandoned mecha lying as if sleeping or in wait for a plucky passenger (a few people had done that actually; they didn't move fast but that hadn't stopped people from racing them or just taking them to their lairs to modify them for their own uses), and Eudarian saw a few security mechs wandering around, looking... different than the others. They seemed more aware, if that was even possible. Certainly, they carried themselves in a more relaxed posture than the others of their design.

Above, she saw the figures in red cloaks. They shifted the fabric aside, and saw that they were security robots in those cloaks, and with the symbol of the Red-Faced Hero Machine gang on them. Their eyes gleamed, as bright and alert and conscious as a sapient being. No... these, unlike the other security weapons, were sapient beings. They nodded at her agreeably, and raised small devices at the drone next to her.

Her drone paused, as if buffeted by some invisible wave. Briefly, its sensors glowed green. Not wasting time, Eudarian reached into her pocket and hit the switch on a small device and a brief but intense electromagnetic pulse smacked right into the poor drone; it hovered briefly before falling over on its side, knocked inactive.

The robots pointed her the right way; past an alleyway and into a block-shaped gathering of multiple empty metal boxes large enough to serve as buildings. A large sign over it informed that a sit-down was in progress ("PLEASE DON'T BOTHER US BECAUSE A PUNCH IN THE EVERYTHING HURTS") and hanging from this sign were banners: the red of the Red-Face Hero Machines, the purple and blue of the Bloody Ocean Kings, and the green-white of the Superurge Guild, their canvas flapping heavily against the regurgitated wind from a nearby wall fan. She braced herself, brush open the fabric hung over an opening like a bead door, and stepped inside.

Immediately, she had to recover from the change of light; it was dimmer in here, though lit by a scavenged electro-light clamped to a wall and powered by... something, she had no idea what, it had no fuel or outlet but it glowed green like something in the air fueled it. And inside, at a corridor were several guards keeping watch (a Discworld Igor or two, large robots in the colors of the various factions around, several fishpeople and even a water elemental that had apparently decided that guard duty sounded fun) just in case. They had been told about her presence and the water elemental nodded at her with a splashing noise. It raised a broad flipper-like hand, and waved her in with a sound like ooze sliding.

Standing in front of the door was a very pretty and equally gigantic woman named Susan Strong. Extraordinarily well-groomed in this harsh environment (she was in fact a premier beautician, and also extended that to 'biological augmentation surgeries' for what she considered logical reasons). She was astonishingly huge, and very attractively so: if the precise definitions for the amazon body type had it's own pictures, photos of Susan Strong ought to have been right next to it. There was also a certain not quite human quality about her: Eudarian supposed she was human (but then she wasn't too clear on the differences between humans and possible sub-species), and carrying herself in a manner which said 1. Important Lieutenant and 2. Total Badass. If it was a cultivated impression, and she didn't seem like she was putting on an act, she was very good at acting. Eudarian felt significant more nervous as she approached, intimidated by Susan's fierce beauty and quiet fierceness.

She swallowed, staring up into an impassive face looming over hers. "Hello," Eudarian said, flattening her mandibles against her teeth in a show of non-aggression. "I'm here to relay the intel to your leader?"

Susan did not immediately respond. It occurred to Eudarian that she didn't seem a guard exactly; she seemed too relaxed, not wary. She moved forward with a heavy tread, her arms uncrossing like tree roots coming free and lowered her head very slightly; long hair, so blonde it was nearly white, fell from shoulders several times as wide across as Eudarian herself was. The dimensions of her face were appealing and certainly mutated; she looked a bit like a fish mutant, perhaps a descendant of humans who had adapted to aquatic life. If so, she was an atavism bearing no signs of gills beneath the heavy red cloak she was wearing. A few hard-wearing cybernetics glinted from the top of her head, visible through her hairline and extremely extensive, so much that her brain might have been mostly mechanical. There were some other bionics, visible in her shoulders and arms, and perhaps all over her body, but it seemed more subtle.

And she was huge. The door frame behind her was fairly wide, taller than the average human, and Susan was so wide she would not be able to fit into it without turning sideways, and so tall she would have to stoop over first. Eudarian herself was about eye level with Susan's elbows. It was easily to imagine Susan being assembled in a factory somewhere or sprouting from underground fully formed like a mushroom; she was just too big and powerful-looking to seem like she had matured to adulthood. Eudarian wondered vaguely if her size was the result of transhuman modifications and decided against it; none of her visible cybernetics seemed to have anything to do with that kind of drastic redesign, and her file hadn't mentioned anything about.

Susan studied her, until she recognized her. Very slowly, Susan nodded, her stance relaxing slightly.

A hand landed on Eudarian's spiny shoulder, completely engulfing it. It was attached to an arm thicker around than Eudarian's whole body was, and she followed it's muscular bulk up to a massive shoulder, and than Susan smiled faintly, a few scars running across the jawline and mouth like she'd bitten a blender and come off the winner. Susan didn't smile but her expression softened.

Finally Susan started to speak. It took her a few moments, like she needed a head start first. A faint buzzing sound came from her and Eudarian saw a translation module on the side of her head, a matching secondary one along her throat. They did not look in good shape; at least twenty years old, casing wearing away and they had probably been bottom of the barrel junk when they were new. On the skin around them was the discolorations of cyber-rust, the signs of an implant that wasn't meshing well with the body. Now Eudarian realized something; that implant was interfering with her speech and language processing ability, though she had no way to removed it. Now she understood a bit in Susan's file she had been given and had been underlined repeatedly: 'DO NOT MAKE FUN OF THE WAY SHE TALKS.'

"You bettah... better come in then," Susan said. Her expression grew flustered and she glowered as if daring Eudarian to say one word about it. Eudarian declined. Susan became somewhat mollified and, hand still around Eudarian, gently and firmly guided her to the door opening it and letting her go, giving a little push that nearly propelled the smaller turian through it, and then stopped. "You here to talk to boss guy?"

"Um. Yes?"

"Hmm." Susan looked thoughtful. "You a fan?"

"Uh," Eudarian clicked her mandibles awkwardly. "Um. I suppose so, yes?"

"Okay." Susan looked about to say something. Eudarian waited for her to find the right words and assemble them appropriately, maintaining an attitude of expectant patience. Susan nailed down whatever idea it had been eluding her and cleared her throat. She spoke very steadily, like she was reading them off cue cards or practiced them daily. "Him might be a bit... different from how you might be remembering him. Susan just saying."

Eudarian nodded. "I know what he looks like now, though."

But Susan was shaking her head, the hood of her cloak flapping and her hair catching in the light like an extremely fabulous hair conditioner commercial. (Susan had truly ridiculous degrees of inherent glamour quality.) "Not what Susan meant," she said gravely. And with that, Susan led her into the room, through a dirty corridor like a pack of fraternity students had nested there.

Eudarian had expected... not splendor, but a rough approximation of it. She had expected battle maps, she had expected a floor littered in plans for war with the captors above. She'd expected books or contraband weapons or armor and litterbaskets filled up with abandoned letters to secret helpers like herself. She had a certain imaginative frame of mind, and she had already decided that when a great hero wound up in a place like this, of course he would have a meeting place turned into a military headquarters within even a short time. It was only a thought, of course; she hadn't been expecting much.

What was there fell short of even that.

She was led into what looked like a bedroom, or at least a bunkroom. The floor was now covered in lumpy sheets obscured by so many snack wrappers and emptied food boxes that the sheets were hard to tell at all. A few books were scattered around; comic books, it appeared, and reference volumes on the maintenance of macro-scale exoskeleton rigs. A small TV had been carefully built from abandoned junk and tuned to cartoons. There was also a great deal of... she peered. Tabletop roleplaying supplements? Yes, she used some of those books herself. Bunkers and Badasses, and at least a couple dozen supplements thereof. She saw boxes of miniatures and some sheets torn up and scrawled on to make maps, and notebooks possibly detailing a custom campaign world.

The mundanity was a little off-putting.

In the middle of the room there was a table; possibly it had once been an automatic shopping cart, the kind used to carry home big piles of heavy machines or the occasional corpse. Everything but the tray had been removed, and that was placed down as a flat place to put a number of drinks and a few books. Around this were seated three people, two out of them being tall enough that the third seemed small despite being average sized.

The largest of them, in width if not height, raised a metal fist; she wasn't just a cyborg, she was a transylian, a species which were uniformly cyborgs. "You would not believe the fits and starts we had synthesizing these treats from the swill they give us to eat," she said; various files had named her as Liz, an engineer who was the sole keeper of incredible technology from glukons who desperately wanted her engineering secrets.. Perhaps around Susan's size, and certainly with the same 'really big curves and big muscles' body type, her body was a patchwork of green and yellow parts joined by stitching, or at least the parts of it that weren't brass bionics that wouldn't have been out of place on a steampunk world. She superficially resembled a human, but the msuculature was different, her facial features wholly alien. Her eyes shaped differently, her nose too broad and flat and high; she nearly had a snout.

"Already heard all about it," said an Alternian seadweller troll; violet-blood, Eudarian thought. He was about as tall as Liz the Transylian, though very wiry. "You keep goin' on about it!" His throat-fronds flapped irritably.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide would note that 'Alternian troll' is a bit outdated. The planet Alternia, once home to an infamously brutal empire of horned humanoid believed to be distant descendants of a quasi-demonic creature called dremora, had been destroyed many hundreds of years ago by the Heartless prior to their recent attacks, and the term only stuck around to distinguish them from the many other creatures called trolls in the multiverse. Among other things, their many-hued blood colors determined an individual's caste, with purples and a singular fuchsia at the very top. Following their empire's dissolution, the species had scattered throughout many timelines, grimly clinging to life with no central homeworld, and had adopted a more peaceful outlook out of neccesity, to say nothing of the attitudes of the religious crusader who had become the figurehead of their people. Of note, the Guide's article on them adds, the rare castes of amphibious 'seadweller' trolls still survive, though much reduced in social status due to the decline of the blood caste system. Any troll who got serious about it would be considered a real weirdo.)

Liz apparently did not hear him, or just ignored him. "Just look at this thing!" She held up a chip between the clanking digits of one massive three-fingered hand. "Look at that craftsmanship. Hours of work, to refine our rations and rebuild them as surface quality snack foods. Modifying the textures and flavors to match what they should taste like. Processing and drawing power without our overseers realizing what we're up to and invitied suspicion!" She sniffled, dramatically. "This is a work of art. I am not even kidding."

"Uh huh."

"You scoff now!" She pointed. Again, needlessly dramatic. "But I don't see you abstaining from snacks!"

"I like snacks." The troll sullenly took a bite of candy. Eudarian's guide identified him as Eridan Ampora, though it was at a loss for why he was there; he was just present there, and it was assumed that someone ordered his transfer here. Eudarian's boss believed that he had been mistaken for a famous pirate called Dualscar, who Eridan had an uncanny resemblance to, though not as broad. Eridan had the look of a insectoid mammal filtered through fish, mainly sharks, his shell-like skin tinted violet, his wide mouth brimming with sharp teeth. If you took a 'missing link between fish and land creatures' sort of thing (or a Deep One), gave it mild insectoid qualities, taught it to walk and land, and put it through wizard school, the result would probably have looked like Eridan one way or another.

Eridan kept chewing, with loud crunching sounds that probably weren't necessary. He might have just been implying that the process from rations to snacks was inefficient. His eyes were a solid shade of yellow heavily tinted with violet, a quiff of bristly hair running down his skull and back like a mane. A pair of horns from his head, shaped like lightning bolts, seemed ideal for piercing and ramming.

Eudarian opened her mouth to speak. She stopped, her mandibles clicking shut. The people in the room kept talking, oblivious to her presence; Eudarian turned quesitoning to her guide, and Susan just shrugged, so Eudarian chose to remain quiet until a moment presented itself.

Eridan continued to chew. It sohuldn't be possible to chew maliciously but he'd found a way. Liz glared at him while the third of their number looked between them with half-lidded, mismatched eyes. Liz said, "Will you stop chewing like that!?"

Eridan swallowed, in a single obscene gulp. "No." He sneered. He stuck in another candy bar and began noisily chewing anew. "First you concede: you did not figure out the solution to my dodecahedron of doom puzzle!"

"Oh, come on!" She slammed a fist on the table, making a big dent. "I solved it fair and square!"

Eridan sat up completely, arms crossed. Wave-skimming fins at the side of his arms extended imperiously and his throat-fronds flapped around his face like his own personal fanning service. "I deliberately made it so that you couldn't!" He pointed a webbed claw at her. "That sphere of annihilation should have killed your character instantly! You foiled my run at the all-time record, damn you!"

"I did what now?"

"The Hitchhiker's Guide record for longest running series of consecutive Bunkers and Badasses sessions ending in a total party kill," said the third member of the group, a human cyborg who was so badly scarred and so ineptly modified that he looked like he'd been opened up, stuffed his bionics in, and sewed himself back up. "He was this close to making the record. Thiiiis close!"

"Don't remind me like that!" Eridan wailed, headbutting the table. "Stop reminding me!"

The human grinned. Some of his teeth looked filed to points. "Nah, fun to watch you yell like this."

Eudarian inwardly felt her enthusiasm for existence plummet. She stared at the human; she hadn't imagined her hero getting into a situation like... well, this.

"And you know what the hardest part of getting these snacks going?" Liz picked up an empty wrapper and waved it scoldingly. She shook her head; on one side her hair was dark red quills grown short, on the other it was long extension cables flapping around her shoulders. "The manpower. We got few enough guys willing to scrape as is, and I've got word that our captors are trying to get people to build stuff for them." She leaned back on the two chairs she required for support, the purple power crystals of her various parts glowing brightly.

"Was it really worth it all that work, then?" Eridan's tone might have been snide, or genuine. Hard to tell with him.

She scoffed. "Well if you feel that way, I'll just take these, then..." She leaned forward ominously.

"No, no!" Eridan clutched at the snacks and hissed at her. "I'm good." She leaned back, smugly.

Eudarian frowned. She had heard about some very high-level suggestions to take advantage of the boredom and metalworks of these prisoners to task them in mass producing very important parts in exchange for certain luxuries and considerations. She wasn't aware it had already gone through; then again, she only knew it because of her employer's influence.

"Look at it this way," said the human, who could plainly have come from the Japan of Earth that Zim knew, and Eudarian instantly focused on him. His skin was tanned and olive, horribly scarred and burned as well. Half-lidded eyes behind triangular sunglasses (who knew why he wore them indoors), pale blue hair worn in a bristly style, and bright red clothing that resembled the classic body suit of the sentai hero. He was not especially tall, nor very broad, and he had so much heavy cybernetic enhancement that it was hard to tell how much of him was his original human body; in place of a heart, a reactor fueled by willpower kept his body functional, most of his bones and muscle systems have been totally replaced or overhauled. The implants around his skull implied that his brain was at least half mechanical at this point, and according to her file, this human was at no less than seventy percent mechanical after a daring procedure to survive certain death; most of his enhancement being internal, a surprise considering how obvious the augments were.

Wearing a red cloak much like Susan, he glanced past the bickering two, plainly pondering the best way to egg them on, and noticed Susan standing with Eudarian. Grinning broadly, he gave her a wave with a battered hand glinting along the stitches. The eyes behind those shades beamed; the organic eye was red, the prosthetic eye glowing green around those scars.

She had seen videos of him from before the... incident. There was not much of a difference between Kamina Jiha then and now. The fire was muted (if even there anymore), the enthusiasm more restrained. The cybernetics did not make as much as a difference as might be expected; the biggest change was how quiet he was, compared to the hero who had raised a blade to the people behind the Heartless.

And going by the figurines he was toying with, he apparently played Psycho in Bunkers And Badasses. She honestly wasn't surprised there.

Feeling her moment had come, she cleared her throat.

"Go away," Eridan said vaugely, waving a hand in her general direction. Liz leaned over curiously. Susan cleared her throat too. Eridan looked over at that and blinked owlishly at the two of them. "Oh. Ah. Hello?" Self-consciously, he tossed a few snack wrappers away.

"Hello," Eudarian said. "Sorry, I think I interrupted your-" she stopped herself from saying 'slumber party'. "Uh. Meeting?"

The three of them coughed, the embarrassment of being leaders caught at free time entangling them. Liz, head of the Superurge Guild, shifted around awkwardly. Eridan, lord of the Bloody Ocean Kings, stared at the ceiling. Kamina, hero of the Red-Faced Machine Heroes, alone seemed unabashed but then he could be very difficult to read. Part of it was his face, seriously scarred by the same incident that made him need so much bionic modification. Those organs that had been excised from him after his transformation had not been doing him any favors at the time.

Kamina leaned forward, clanking faintly at her. "So you're from up top?" he said. "Y'know. We hear things down here. Not enough, though. Sort of sitting in the dark."

"Because we're at the bottom of the ocean," Eridan said brightly. "Where there is no sunlight. Ever. It's a stealth pun."

"Yes," Kamina said sourly. He crossed his arms; they were almost completely covered in sharp, blue tattoos that resembled flames. "Yeah. Thanks for spoiling the pun."

"I will happily spoil all the puns," Eridan said, crossing his arms and grinning nastily.

Kamina's face twitched unpleasantly, like he had an internal spasm. Eridan suddenly looked uncomfortable and, strangely for a troll who gave the impression of not caring much about anyone, pretended not to see it. It was painful looking at Kamina now; Eudarian was almost tempted to bring up a photo of Kamina, taken from his original team (the now defunct Team Dai-Gurren, or the Dai-Gurren Brigade depending on who told the story). It certainly looked very different from the brutalized cyborg in front of her; she followed his work for years, but it was still shocking seeing the man who many had thought the hope of universes so... damaged. The stitches on his forehead alone, suggesting that he'd had it cracked open or worse, had put something in there...

"You said something about people in charge wanting your guys to build things?" Eudarian said, trying to get her mind off that. "What do they want?"

"Cheap work so they no have to do anything?" Susan suggested. They looked at her. "What? Too obvious?"

Eridan considered. He pulled out some notes from the recesses of his clothing, perhaps from a hidden pocket, and read it. "Well," he said, trilling the Ws with the hint of a rather musical if unplacable accent. "Requests for the construction of parts that my minions in the technological sciences tell are used for environmental manipulation and alteration engines."

"Let me see those!" Liz said. Eridan handed them over. Eventually she said, "This is crazy. The kind of things they want... none of us could supply unless we had the entire prison totally repurposed towards makings these. It's just too big!"

"Probably why they're just getting guys to make parts at a time," Kamina reflected. "And wonder what it's for... still, it's on the low. Undetectable, don't have to answer to anyone. Think about what the things are for, huh?" He thought about it. "What would you get if you assembled all the requested things?"

Liz thought about it. "Just the casings? Hard to say. Ships with really advanced life support? Special housing for people that need very specific environments to live in? Heck, take a really extreme idea, they could... ah, well, it reminds me of a thing I got the chance to study a while back. A thing called the 'Garden of Eden Creation Kit'. A, a G.E.C.K., you know? Sort of a terraforming engine."

"Terra-what what?" Susan said.

"Machine that changes the world or the stuff on the world," Eridan translated.

"Ah."

Kamina said, "Huh. Maybe they're going for terraforming?"

Liz laughed. "That's crazy! Even if they were gonna do that, for who knows what reason, they're missing vital ingredients. For one thing, they have an assembly and housing for an elemental core but there wouldn't be anything we build or supply to fill them up."

Kamina put his hands together. "Ya don't say," he said thoughtfully, frowning. "Hey, real quick question. Did you bring more food?" Eudarian nodded. "Did you bring meat!?" She shook her head. "Damn it! I NEED MEAT, DAMMIT. Not soy. I mean, dunno what they make it from but... it's not meat."

"Technically it is," Eudarian said darkly. "Your soy comes from recycling plants."

A brief pause. "Isn't that where they take dead bodies-" Liz started to say.

"Anyway!" Kamina interrupted before they went down gross paths none of them wanted to think about (well, Eudarian and Kamina didn't want to think about it; Liz thought it efficient if a bit of a waste of perfectly serviceable spare parts, and Eridan just thought it sounded tasty even if he would have preferred the raw product, so to speak. Susan seemed indifferent on the matter.) "What have you got for us? Not food, whatever else you're down here for."

Eudarian inhaled, exhaled. "Things up top are getting worse. The Glukkon Hegemony is trying to crack down harder, people are leaving every day just for the slight chance of finding a better life with the mudokon tribes, and... the brass are scared. We're getting into something we really shouldn't, and I wouldn't be surprised if you guys are safer down here than anyone else who's free. At least potential enemies don't know about you..."

"That's the plan, isn't it though?" Eridan said darkly. "They throw us down here so they can forget about us until they need us." Susan made a harsh, snarling noise.

"For others, mostly," Liz amended. "Weren't you-"

"Not the point!" Eridan snapped with a click of his sharp teeth; he looked embarrassed.

"And they're going nuts finding meteorite sites and buying or trading huge amounts of a mineral at those sites from other worlds. Something called 'aetherite'. The boss is interested in letting you know... here, this says everything." She pulled out another, smaller data-slate and handed it to Kamina.

Kamina solemnly took it, pocketed it. For a moment, he considered the logo on it; a brain marked with a crown. "Your boss sure takes a risk sending people here, leading them back... not to mention putting the damn logo on everything."

Eudarian shrugged. "Pride. What can I say?"

Kamina shrugged back. "I dunno. 'Welcome'? 'Cause, thanks."

She nodded. "You're welcome."

"Aetherite," Eridan mused. "What is that?"

"Some kinda wonder mineral," Kamina said. "Real shiny, makes a perfect alloy for just about anything; light, strong, nearly unbreakable. Tastes like candy, too!"

Susan licked her lips. "Yep!"

No one asked how those two knew that. Liz piped up, "It's got all sorts of uses; mostly it has an interesting property of low-level reality manipulation. As an alloy? It sort of... bleeds out an atmosphere around it. It can do a lot of other things, make super-strong materials and so on, and it's a vital component in making dimensional rifts. It's a lot easier to use it to rip open holes and things."

"Wait, wait." Kamina waved a hand. "This stuff they're stockpiling, it can be used to create dimensional rifts? Like, traveling to other realms and stuff?"

Liz shrugged. "Yep, guess so." She considered. "Huh... maybe if you got enough of it and put it in those things we're being asked to create..."

Eridan frowned; he put his hands together and tapped his claws anxiously. "Could it be used to terraform the planet somehow? Put it into another reality? Transport the entire planet to another universe or plane?"

Eudarian gaped. Kamina stared. Susan raised an eyebrow. Liz did a few calculations and eventually shrugged and said "In theory, sure! Why not? You need a massive network of interconnected stations around the planet to shift it even a little. Do it wrong and..." she made a harsh crunching noise.

"What was that?" Kamina said warily.

"That was the sound fo the planet imploding and the pieces flying away."

Eridan made some squishy sounding noises.

"What was that?"

"That," Eridan said loftily. "Was the sound of all the land-dwellers suffering horribly in the vacuum of space. Or hell, whatever." He looked thoughtful. "And the sound of the sad sea-dwelling creatures, I suppose. How tragic. And what a shame." He looked dreamily. "With those machines, perhaps you could reshape the world as you wish it! Imagine, a world of water, without land filthying it up. That is totally a word now."

No one appeared to be taking Eridan's comments about that sort of thing seriously. Kamina said, "You sound like these Team Aqua goons I met."

"You'd need more than just one G.E.C.K.," Liz interrupted. "A lot more. And it wouldn't exactly be subtle, you'd need a massive amount of them, thousands, in a relay system across the planet to do any significant change. Ones that big, they'd have a wide range but not on a planetary scale, and for funding that, you'd need lots of money, like..." she faltered. "If you were... the government... well. Ah. I see."

Eudarian clapped her hands over her audial nubs. "I really don't want to know! Better off not knowing."

Susan nodded, but raised herself up and ventured to say, "That sound kinda wimpy."

She shrugged. "Yeah, probably. A lot of people up top feel that way, too." She gave Kamina a questioning look. "You're not going to say something like that too, are you?"

"I dunno." Kamina shrugged. "At the end of the day, I just hit things and drill open holes for other people to go through. What they do is their business. Your boss believes in me? Well. I believe in her doing what's right by her people. Not gonna ask more than that."

"...I never said who my boss was," Eudarian said after a moment, dreading she had slipped somewhere.

"Nah, I figured it out," Kamina said. "You going somewhere with that thinking, though?"

"Yeah. How do you expect to do a lot in a prison under the sea?"

"I dunno," Kamina said again, but his eyes gleamed. "Isolated and protected from anything up top? Alone with the people the Hegemony is too scared of for wrecking their ways? Left alone to talk them around to the way I do things? Heh. I can think of a lot of things I can do here. Mostly, I'm waiting. Biding my time. Sooner or later, I'll see a way out of her and getting things done again!"

"You think something is just going to happen and it'll work out?" Liz said doubtfully.

"No," Kamina said, flatly. "I think that things are going to happen no matter what, and the best thing isn't to plan for them or just sit around hoping, but use whatever comes next to make a difference."

Eridan shrugged. He ate more snacks.

Kamina grinned. Eudarian didn't know if that was him being the wild and unstoppable force of revolution that everyone perceived him to be, or if he was just putting on a brave face. Becoming more of an idea than a man, and breaking under it the whole way.

Eudarian nodded. She said, "I should go." She considered. "That robot is probably already up, I should get back to that sham of an inspection I was doing to get here." She nodded at them. "Good luck."