Delilah had never taken a vacation before, she realized.

Sure, she'd been taken on vacation before. A few times her father dragged her, her still-at-that-point alive mother, and both of her sisters to the 'scenic environs' of Northern Quebec, far away from the 'insidious and infectious influences of society' for camping trips. And while her sisters had thoroughly hated the experiences and swore upon their souls that they would never sleep out-of-town without a motel bed at the very least under them, Delilah actually enjoyed it. Shithead had only one set of eyes and one set of hands, and two of his daughters stayed very close to the camp, not wanting to deal with bugs and the conditions of the Boreal forest. And that meant Delilah actually got to have fun, out of sight, for hours at a time.

This was a very different experience to that. Unlike those, where solitude was paired with ruthless proselytizing to a particular strain of a particular faith that she could see was just patriarchal regressive bullshit even from the age of eight, now, she was now in a resort that overlooked not an ocean of evergreen trees and untamed wilderness, but instead the almost painfully blew seas of the Gulf of Mexico, clean sands, and very attractive Cubans looking to bilk them all of money.

She had half a mind to let them.

"You know, I think I actually needed this," One said. Per Hare's instruction, he and all of them had taken on a new face to slink out of the States and make their way down here, where, Hare apparently had a meeting with someone he called 'a provider of the strange and useful'. One had opted for a lithe and statuesque latino man who could well have been born here in Cuba, whereas Delilah had tried for something different and saw what she would look like white. And thus she came out blonde, curvy and looking waifish. And despite that seeming waifishness, she could still bend steel with her hands. Hare was right. There were perks to being involved in insanity.

"I wager we've all been having a rough few days. You more than all of us," Delilah admitted, taking a sip of her fruity alcoholic beverage. The entire first day that they arrived, late in the evening hours, had been just coming into this resort, flopping onto a bed, and catching up on sleep that exhaustion demanded of them. Frankly, it was lucky that Hare knew how to fly and could make a plane as he needed. And it was a he again, maintaining the mohawk but changing just about everything else to become the perfect 1980's American Punk. Delilah wasn't sure she could have countenanced flying with a plane full of idiots right now. And One certainly couldn't. "Are you alright, One?"

"I'm fine," he said with a dismissive wave, drinking a can of beer and staring at the beach.

"One, when I found you two days ago you were literally being tortured," Delilah pressed. "I'm sure as fuck not okay with that. So lemme ask you again: Are you okay?"

One shot a look at her, then sighed and rubbed at his face with his hand. "I… I need time to think, okay. I just lost everybody and everything I ever worked for. I lost my job. I lost my company. I lost my closest friend. And… and now something's out there wearin' her face and doin' horrifying shit. I think I need to stop her. I think it's gotta be me, or I'll never be able to live with myself."

Delilah was about to press when she caught just a glimpse of the look in his eye. She might not have been a social savant, the way Hare was, but she knew better than to press a man who looked like he was unsure whether to rage or weep. So she didn't. "Well, we've got plenty of time to think. It's not like Hare needs either of us to do his business here. He's got Lu."

"Yeah… what's their story, anyway?" One asked.

"I have no idea. I've only known her a few minutes longer than I've known you," Delilah admitted, playing with the little umbrella in her drink as she lounged, supine in a deck chair up here on the balcony. "I know she's a lot closer to Hare than we are. Because she was the first one he found, maybe. I don't know."

"She's on his wavelength more than we are," One said with a nod. And how true that was. While Delilah admittedly had little personal connection to either Hare or Lu, One was too painfully familiar to her own circumstances for her to ignore.

"Us fresh meat gotta stick together," she said, extending her fruity cup toward One's beer can.

"I'll drink to that," One agreed, tinking aluminum to glass and then both of them taking a hearty sip. They were not in the best room of the resort, but the fact that Hare had wheedled them into a place as nice as this on such short notice was nothing short of shocking. Still far be it for her to complain if they were jumping the line.

Rigid thinking would have gotten her killed that night in Halifax.

"Y'know, I don't know a fuckin' thing about any a'ya's," One noted finishing one can and cracking open another to a loud ptssh and a thin spray of foam. "How did you get wrapped up in all this craziness?"

"I was a police officer with the Halifax Regional Police," she said, feeling increasingly alien saying it. "And I got wrapped up in this because I tried to be a good cop and get rid of a bad one."

"That don't explain the demon-fucking," One said.

"That came later," Delilah said. Come to think of it, if she really wanted to tell the story properly, she would have had to start a long time earlier, with why she even chose policing as a career in the first place. And looking at it now from outside of her old circumstances, she found that she didn't have a particularly noble or inspiring reason for taking up the badge and gun. She just wanted to get away from Winnipeg and that shitty, dogma-blinded asshole who spawned her.

It was bizarre. She was the oldest of her sisters and still was the last one to get away from him. Judith literally ran out days after her sixteenth birthday, and then went silent, making the family believe that she'd either been abducted and killed, or just ran off and got killed, but in either case was still dead. She wasn't. She was just waiting until her sisters got away from Shithead to start to build bridges again. Delilah could respect that. And Mary had been much more subtle. Whereas Delilah torpedoed the 'arranged marriage' that Shithead tried to stuff her into, Mary's potential match was actually a somewhat amenable young man. Mary had managed to talk him into using the whole affair as a means of their combined escape. So when they married at seventeen, they then promptly left Shithead and whatever Ahmed called his shitty parents behind and refused to ever talk to them all again. They were still shacked up in Victoria, out on the West Coast, glad to be free of what others had wanted for them. Delilah was happy for them all. They all got out.

Delilah, though, had been stupid and stubborn and wanted to get out 'the right way'. To not vanish into the night or find herself beholden to somebody else for her own upkeep. So when she caught wind through a career councilor that police-officers are never deployed near where they trained, the plan was pretty simple. Sign up, get deployed LITERALLY ANYWHERE ELSE in Canada, and then promptly pretend that Shithead never existed, and that she popped into existence fully formed.

Pity the sent her to the only ruinously corrupt division of Halifax, an otherwise decent city.

Fucking Casper Marquis. She was so glad she made Blitz shoot his dick off.

"I worked for a superior named Marquis. He was part of one of those ridiculously named 'comprehensive crime units', who are given a shitload of money and no oversight and then told to justify their continued existence," Delilah continued. One nodded, no doubt aware of their ilk, considering that in a roundabout way, he had been one of them.

"Those shitheels ain't cops. They're gangsters with protection from the law," One opined.

"You won't find me disagreeing with that point," Delilah agreed. "Well, I learned that Marquis was pretty much the man behind the inflow of all of the cocaine and methamphetamine into Halifax, and had his fingers in a massive East Coast human trafficking ring from Halifax to Boston Harbor. And I took everything that I found out having to work in his unit and I gave it all to the local RCMP."

"The who?" One asked.

"The Mounties," she said.

"Those are real?" One asked, pulling a face.

"...Yes. Yes, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are real," Delilah said. Goddamned Americans not knowing anything… "They typically mount squad-cars and not horses these days, but they're the federal equivalent of local policing forces."

"Huh. Wonder why we ain't got something like that," One muttered, taking a moment to stretch his legs out before him and changing how he lay on his deck chair.

"Because your country is four weapons-manufactures and three oligarchs in a trenchcoat," Delilah said.

"That's rich, comin' from America's Hat," One snipped.

"If the US and Canada were in prison, you'd be our bitch, because we're bigger and we're on top," Delilah countered.

"And you got less people in all ya's than we got in one single state!" One volleyed.

"That state being California, which if I'm not mistaken is just Canada-being-held-hostage-by-Alabama," Delilah spiked. "So as I was saying."

"Fine go on," One abandoned the sparring they were doing and let her get back onto her spiel.

"Well, the guy at the RCMP I contacted about Marquis must have either been as corrupt as he was or else working for him, because word came back to Marquis pretty quickly. And he tried to have me gunned down in the street when I was walking my beat," she said.

"No kiddin'?" One asked.

"The only reason I survived was because a four-foot-tall hellspawn tackled my face and drove me out of the traitor's line of fire. And while I was stumbling around with my face full of demon-crotch trying to get him off of me, he shot Arsenault in his stupid fucking face, which solved the traitor problem nicely," she said. To be frank, she was disappointed by Arsenault. She thought he was a better cop than that. But reality saw no reason to treat her world view with gentleness. The rot ran deep in the HRP. "A day after that, the same hellspawn opens a portal into my bathroom, my slut of a cat jumps through it, and the 'unplanned demolition' of my apartment that that snake of a chief put in motion failed to kill me. I decided, might as well have sex with some demons then kill my boss. I was having a rough day. And, well, the rest is history."

"That's a hell of a story," One said.

"Well, what's yours?" Delilah asked.

"Fuck me, it's good that we've got days here. Where do I even begin?" One shook his head. "Oh yeah!"


Helldiver IV

Downtime: Cuba


Lou looked out across the streets of Cienfuegos, uncomfortable to be surrounded by people clamoring close to him and speaking in Spanish, a language that he could not speak. One kept chiding him to spend some time in the Controller installing a Wernicke's Gyre, but Lou had other things that needed priority. So he stomached being impressed upon and confused, simply walking at Hare's side. Hare seemed to love the attention he was getting from the hawkers and gawkers here on the rim of one of Cuba's less popular cities.

"Was it necessary for me to look like this?" Lou asked as quietly as he could manage over the sound of the locals. He was entirely too obvious for his liking, now Reset into striking if older features, a superhero jawline and eyes that could peel paint, hair losing the pepper war against the salt but still holding the line in terms of thickness. Lou didn't like standing out like this. He preferred to be nice and forgettable, to fade into the background, to be unseen. He had plenty of reason for it.

"Yes," Hare said. "That's a face that our contact knows and has had dealings with. We can't just wander in on this man like idiots off the street and expect to get what we need."

"Who was it?" Lou asked. Hare was silent for a moment, expression pulling into something of a restrained wince. But he sighed and puffed out his breath. "Bad memory?"

"You could say that," Hare said. "That was what Sharooq Mussa looked like before he Integrated. He broke out his old face when he felt a need to… assert himself."

Lou was quiet for a time as they finally pulled out of the masses of the poorer Cubans and were accepted into the bosom of the richer ones. Though there was no physical line that the two of them crossed, the locals knew well enough not to approach the part of town where men in crisp white shirts and MP5's were standing in visible locations. "You never talk about them," Lou said.

Hare hung his head for a moment as he seemed to be summoning the words to explain. "How would I? How could I explain Sharooq and Pat's chemistry? Or Baglole's brilliance? How do I explain that they weren't people, they were the Third Gen, some of the oldest of us still alive? It's like trying to characterize Enoch, or learn about the foibles of Herakles. They weren't just people, Lou. They were titans."

"Bullshit," Lou said. That got Hare to snap a burning look at him. "They might have done some amazing things, but so have you. So stop hero-worshiping them and talk about them."

"You don't know what you're talking about," Hare warned.

"You're right. I don't. Because you won't inform me," Lou said. He grabbed Hare's shoulder, pulling the now-shorter man to a halt. "Hare, if I'm going to masquerade as this man, I need to know who he is."

Hare chewed on his words for a moment, then nodded. "I hate that you're so often right," he said.

"I've had to learn how to be," Lou said. For him, finding the most-right thing had become a survival trait, when surrounded by swirling unreality.

"Mussa was… how do I describe this? He was a king who'd never needed to wear a crown. He was brought into the fold by Hasan Alinejad himself!" Hare stressed.

"I have no idea who Alinejad is," Lou answered him, and allowed Hare to continue walking them toward their meeting place.

"He was one of the Eldest, the Downfall's oldest living followers. The people who each wrangled an entire continent's worth of us rowdy assholes," Hare said. Then he barked a laugh. "And he was a real bastard, too. He had the highest turnover of Swarmborn of any of the Eldest, the most churn. New people died pretty fast under him. But he always got the mission done. Always."

"That sounds like a nightmare," Lou noted.

"Me and Betty jumped ship from the Machine to the Flame pretty quick. But Mussa, he was there, working with Alinejad until the Nuclear Man's disappearance. And he got shit done. I mean…" Hare paused, gesticulating as though trying to capture some essence of the man that mere words couldn't hold. He seemed to fail. "Mussa singlehandedly saved an entire Arcology from being overtaken by the Geman-Heiron during the Syncroncity Collapse. And since you don't know what that is, imagine several apocalypses happening at the same time, with the worst case scenario for all of them, and then raise it to a tower-power of ten, and you're close."

"Okay. He was a hell of a guy, I get it," Lou said.

"It's more than that," Hare stressed. "He was calm. He was Zen. He had seen the end of the world and after that there was nothing that could faze him. That's who he was. The man who gets the job done."

"So a hardass, then?" Lou asked.

"No. No not even that. I mean, the only reason all of us are here in this universe is because we were working with Mandvhi and Verne in Kolkatta. Mandvhi has a way of… softening people. Making you believe in the good of people again," Hare was quiet for a moment, stopping on the sidewalk, staring at his feet and chewing at his lips. He finally looked up, after taking a sniff. Almost as though he were trying to force away tears. "If I had to describe Mussa in a single sentence? He was somebody who took the best of the Machine and of the Flame, and dared to do something insane with it."

"He meant a lot to you," Lou laid a hand on Hare's shoulder, more kindly this time.

"They were legends. I was just the idiot who handed them guns," Hare said with an uncomfortable shrug.

"Then we should take some time to build up your legend for a while," she said. She gave him a playful shove. "After all, I doubt he would have wanted you moping over him for the rest of your life, not after you got all the way here, which I'm given to understand was a rather impossible feat."

"Oh, if only you knew," Hare said. He sucked in another sniff and then nodded, seeming to have regained himself. "So that's who Mussa was. Just be that, and keep to the script, and we'll get through this alright."

"You're going to have to tell me about the others, someday. I think it's a kindness to let their stories keep living on," Lou said. Because in the end, that was all any of them ever were. Stories, to be told by others. As long as she could keep telling the story of Sam Scailes, in her heart, he wasn't dead and he wasn't gone. And maybe if she could get him to tell the stories of Mussa, Baglole and Lyons, then they weren't entirely gone either.

There was more than one way to echo in this world.

The chosen venue for their meeting was a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, one that looked like it had gutted the first floor of a small family house and replaced it with a slightly cramped dining area that had seating for about two dozen. At the moment, not even long after noon, the tables were empty save for one which had what looked to be a local playing a game of solitaire with cracked, crumbling playing cards. Hare picked a spot near one of the side walls that had small windows overlooking a similarly cramped alleyway, dropping himself into a seat and motioning for Lou to sit opposite the table, with his back against the outside wall. That meant that whoever was coming would be sandwiched kitty-corner between them, which Lou didn't see the point of but hey, whatever works.

The man playing solitaire stood, abandoning his game to come over and asked something of the two of them. But since he was speaking Spanish, and Lou was a product of a Canadian public school system and not a southern American one, he could only give a stoic glance toward Hare, who gave his hands a clap and rub.

"Dos arroz con pollo, por favor," he rattled off. The local gave a nod and sauntered back toward the kitchen. "Chicken and rice done Haitian style. It's good eating," Hare explained to her.

"If you say so," Lou moderated his voice. The baritone of it seemed to demand attention and respect, and if Lou was going to use it properly, he was going to have to be careful with it. If Mussa was 'a king who needn't a crown', then he was likely the sort to let others speak on his behalf. The food took a shockingly short time to arrive, and true to Hare's platitude, it was a very good, simple, hearty meal of a chicken leg, rice and vegetables in a sort of pilaf.

It was shocking, that she'd eaten better in the month that she'd been with Hare than she had in the twenty seven years before.

Lou had almost finished his plate when the door opened to the restaurant again, this time admitting a man so dark of complexion that he almost edged into cobalt blue, wearing comfortably tailored suit and bearing a panama hat atop his head. He turned a glance at the restaurateur, who was retreating after handing over a second bottle of local beer to Lou and Hare's table, then to Hare, and finally to Lou. Or to this outsider's perspective, to Mussa. The African man quickly plastered a wide if tight lipped smile on his face, doffing his cap and holding it behind him. "Well, I suppose it was a matter of time before we shared a table again, Monsieur Mussa," the man said. His voice had a clearly French tilt to it, even though it was over a distinctly Central African inflection.

"You are merely annoyed that you have to share a table instead of oversee a hearse," Lou countered dryly in French with one eyebrow raised. The African flattened the fingers of his other hand against his chest in a, 'me, really?' gesture while trying and almost succeeding at stifling a chuckle. Lou turned a slight glance at Hare, who had a warning look in his eye but gave a slight nod. So this was Ngolo.

"I was not aware you were fluent in my mother tongue," Ngolo said.

"There are many things about myself you are not aware of," Lou answered back. Her French was passable, but paltry compared to her Greek. He gestured toward Hare. "My associate, Mister Leporin, has a particular need of your services."

Ngolo gave another chuckle and then sat in the chair that was beside Lou's own, but meant that he was wedged in a corner between the two shapeshifters. "You seem to have somewhat degraded in your choice of companions, Monsieur Mussa. I seem to recall your last, young Mademoiselle Hare, was a bit more… worldly," Ngolo offered, transitioning without complaint to English.

"Hare couldn't make it," Hare said. "Fortunately, she doesn't have to. You showed up a lot earlier than you told me to expect you."

"If I cannot surprise my friends, how can I expect to outfox my enemies?" Ngolo asked.

"I suppose that's true enough. I'm guessing your private jet is currently parked in Havana right now," Hare said.

"One cannot be 'Prince of the African Black Market' without proper accouterments," Ngolo said. He turned a look to Lou. "My uncle gives his regards. He was very content with your services in Cameroon, edging ever closer into retiring atop a pile of pure cocaine surrounded by naked supermodels. Someday he may even give up his 'throne'."

"And the sooner the better for us," Lou said with a stern nod, ignoring Ngolo's playful demeanor.

"Uncle Pierre will retire when his heart explodes in his chest, I'm afraid," Ngolo said. He shrugged. "Although at the rate he is currently eating Western garbage-food and inhaling cocaine, that day may come sooner than any of us are prepared. So what is it that you need from Africa, my deep-pocketed friends?"

"Uranium-235," Hare said. For a moment, Ngolo was stilled from stealing a sip from Hare's beer, and when he did finally take that drink, the expression on his face was a bit more rigid and stiff.

"I'm sorry, could you say that again?" he asked.

"U-235, as much as you can get for us," Hare repeated. The smile on Ngolo's face finally died then, he stared at Hare, then shot a questioning look to Lou. Lou carefully placed a look of distant unhappiness on Mussa's face and let Ngolo read of that what he would.

"There are many things which I can provide for you, Monsieur Mussa," he said, turning his chair to face Lou directly. "But neither I, nor my uncle, can be party to the creation of nuclear weapons. Even for us, that is a step too far."

Hare made a placating gesture. "We don't need maximally enriched U-235. In fact, the maximum enrichment that I'm looking for is 15%, which is far, far away from what is required to make even the most rudimentary of nuclear bombs."

Ngolo paused and turned to him, sitting back in his chair and fiddling lightly with his hat where he'd set it on the table as he was clearly running scenarios through his mind. While Lou couldn't exactly read his thoughts, it was clear he was much mollified by the percentage that Hare had offered. She didn't know exactly why. Uranium was uranium, right?

"So," Ngolo finally said, after a few minutes of thoughtful silence. "If I am to understand your request properly; you are asking for me to provide you vast quantities of nuclear reactor fuel," he stared at Hare for a few moments then turned to Lou. "Why even involve me in this? You could buy Yellowcake from far less costly intermediates than myself."

"I don't want Yellowcake. I want 5 to 15% enriched uranium pellets, in vast quantities," Hare said.

"Uranium of that purity may be useless in a bomb of traditional means, but I cannot be tied to the detonation of a dirty-bomb, either," Ngolo coached.

"Mister Ngolo, I have no intention of putting that uranium anywhere near a bomb," Hare said, his impatience showing. Or rather, he was showcasing impatience to prove a point. Hare was very adept at people believing that he was what he wanted them to think he was, after all. "My intentions are much more refined than that."

"Refined as in you want to hand-build a nuclear submarine?" Ngolo asked.

"So what if we do? As long as it's not being blown up, what matter is the ends of the uranium to you?" Hare asked. He shrugged. "Maybe Mussa wants to own his own aircraft carrier. Maybe we want to supply attack submarines to Switzerland. Who the fuck cares what we're using for, so long as we enact guarantees that it's not for a bomb?"

Ngolo was silent again, chewing lightly on his thumbnail as he once again ran scenarios behind his eyes. "And you want 'as much as I can provide'; how literal is that amount?"

"We can pay for up to one metric tonne of U-235. Which even with that metal's density is a fuckload of pellets," Hare said.

"Yes. Yes it very much is," Ngolo said. "South Africa would give you perhaps a kilogram before I got the door rather rudely slammed in my face. Which ordinarily would be my point of telling you that you were doomed to destitution and failure," he then slapped the tabletop, causing none of the people around him to start because they'd all been through worse in the last few days. "However! I do have one bit of very good news to offer."

"Which is?" Lou asked with apparent strained patience.

"Egypt has been stockpiling nuclear fuel for when its reactors come online. I can get you a hundred kilograms of it from those corrupt fools, if not easily, and certainly not cheaply."

"I presume that you trade in gold, as before," Lou began.

Ngolo held up a finger. "Ordinarily, yes, yes I would be very pleased to part you of your gold in exchange for another man's uranium… but not this time. This time, due to strange circumstances, my prices will be slightly higher."

"I don't like when people alter their deals with me, Monsieur Ngolo," Lou said darkly. Oh shit was this all imploding on them?

"Please, do not be so grim!" Ngolo said. He pushed his chair away from the table a bit and turned it so that he could face both of them, his fingers steepled in front of his face. "I am not asking you for traditional currencies. I want something that you and you alone could provide."

"Which would be?" Lou managed to moderate his dread into Mussa's impatience.

"You may have thought yourself clever in how you used your little devices," he gestured at Lou, "but I did see them. And I am very much a hobbyist in the development and spread of fascinating technologies."

"Wait a minute… you want to buy Hare's smartphone?" Hare asked, holding up the phone in question.

"I want what you are hiding inside of that smartphone," Ngolo said. "And of course that will be the gratuity on the price in gold that you will be paying for the Uranium. I cannot cause turmoil amongst dear-uncle's finances for the sake of my passion projects. Even I am not so bold."

"That's asking a lot," Lou said.

"But it's asking an amount which we can pay," Hare cut Lou off, as though being a bit contrite to do so. "We can always make more of these. Without that Uranium, we're dead in the water."

Lou turned a very flat, 'Gus Fring' stare at Hare. He subtly nodded, laying out his multitool. Even she didn't know what all technology he'd packed into that thing. Considering that he'd brought it with him from whatever stranger universe he'd come from… he was giving away a token of his actual home to get this deal. And Lou wasn't in a position to tell him he couldn't. Hare sighed and tapped the tabletop with one finger of one hand, and double tapping five with his other.

With that prompt, Lou turned to Ngolo again. "Very well. My companion's toy, and your uranium's weight in gold, ten-to-one," Lou confirmed.

"Considering that each kilogram should bring fifteen million American dollars, I would say you're trying to fleece me," Ngolo said.

"That kilogram would be pure, weapons-grade U-235," Hare answered. "I don't need weapons-grade. And most of the cost of U-235 is in the enrichment of it."

"True enough. So you want dross and slag of such lofty materials. For that, your price is not so outrageous, but I counter; eleven to one," Ngolo said. Lou didn't need to emulate his face-sake to glare at the opportunistic black-marketeer. "You're bartering down from billions to mere millions. but if you're willing to go to fifteen, I can get the uranium out of Egypt and to a place of your desire in six to nine days."

Lou leaned back. "You certainly went from 'impossible' to 'by next week' rather quickly, Monsieur Ngolo."

Ngolo spread a slow, tight lipped and apparently genuine smile across his face. "I cannot afford to live forever in my uncle's shadow. And feats such as this are what a good reputation are built from," he said.

Lou turned a look to Hare, who gave an urging gesture, since he wasn't in a position where it would make sense for him to make an accepting one. Lou puffed out a breath, then nodded. "Fifteen, delivery here in Cuba, an amount not in excess of one metric tonne, with Leporin's device as a gratuity for service. How shall payment be arranged?" he asked.

"I guarantee you could not afford at my rates a tonne. I also can guarantee one hundred eight kilograms are currently stockpiled in Egypt at a minimum without even looking," Ngolo said. He pondered a moment. "One hundred kilograms of gold, valued currently at five and a half million American dollars will be an acceptable deposit on the remainder, with prorated cost of the final total to cover the increased cost for faster delivery upon receipt. This is good business, yes?"

Lou took the hand that Ngolo offered, and raised up his glass of beer with the other. "Here's to your burgeoning reputation," he said wryly.

"I can definitely drink to that," Ngolo said brightly.


"I always knew there was more shit out there than what people wanted me to see," One said. "Even when I was runnin' round with my diaper draggin' the floor, it was obvious that the world weren't all that there was. And the older I got, the more I saw, and the less I could prove."

"How was it that hard? Everybody's got cameras in their phones these days," Delilah said, scowling hard as Smudge, still wearing his harness and leash, jumped up and quickly settled into One's lap, purring loudly while staring smugly at his owner in the next chair over.

"Maybe you Zoomers that's the case," One said. "I'm a Millenial. When I grew up phones were still on the wall!" She stared at him for that. "Okay, maybe mine was in a cradle next to the bread maker but it was still just a talkin'-on phone, not any 'a the shit yous got nowadays."

"I'm not a Zoomer, One," she said.

"Really, how old are you?"

"Twenty three," she said.

"Fuck me you're younger than you look," One muttered.

"Hey!" Delilah snapped.

"I'm serious. Usually when people look like you do… did… it's cause they took a back injury and decided to bulk up their cores, and that shit don't happen young," One coached. Then he made a box-describing gesture with his hands. "The Millennial generation stops at '96. And you were born 'round when the Matrix came out. Congratulations. You're Zoomer."

"I don't feel like a Zoomer," she said with a blink.

"...what were we talkin' about again?" One asked, pausing to scratch the purring bastard in his lap.

"How you ended up entangled in all of this," she said. "It had something to do with a lack of camera phones."

"Right!" One said, sitting back in his chair. "There were always things pokin' around in the less built-up parts of Joysey, if you knew where look and when to look for 'em. And I saw somethin' I think I shouldn't'a. It was made of light. Like, a figure that was light, but had weight. Maybe it was an angel or some shit. I don't know. I never saw it again. But after that night, I had to find out what it was doing in that run-down stripmall parking lot. I had to understand what was it that made shit from beyond the world keep diggin' its nose into our business."

"I'm guessing that you had few but very odd friends," Delilah posited.

"I didn't have friends. Not really," One said. "Not until I went through three schools and two moves, not until I met Two."

The one who had betrayed him. His former partner in all of his former madness. She simply nodded, waiting for him to continue.

"She was more savvy than me. Brains to my brawn, if you want to put it that way. And she knew how to find stuff out what people didn't want found. I think she was born with a LAN cable connected to her belly-button instead of her umbilical. So come Senior Year, she and me finally got our shit pointed in one direction, finally started lookin' serious-like. And we started findin' shit," One said, stabbing his arm-rest with a finger as he did.

"What did you find?" she asked.

"Well, foyst of all we found a lot a sex-trafficking, which we dropped dimes on every time it popped up," One admitted. "We found the shape of the drug network in Joysey, so that any time we needed money we just… um… borrowed it… from some folk what shouldn't a' had it in the foyst place."

"Funding your fact-finding expeditions with stolen drug money doesn't sound wise," Delilah pointed out the obvious problem with what she was hearing.

"Hey, we were young, we didn't know any better," One said with a dismissive wave. "And luck was on our side back then. We never got nailed for it. Lookin' back we really should have, all things bein' what they were. But we never did. Huh," he was pensive for a moment, petting Smudge and looking out to the Gulf. He finally shook his head and pulled himself back to the now. "But that all kinda went into the background when the CIA swooped in and put their rubber stamp on all me an' Two built up. Which looking back don't make a lick of sense: The CIA's not s'posed to do shit inside America's borders, yet they were the ones who came for us."

"If there's one thing I know about the CIA, it's that the world would probably a less corrupt and less dangerous place if there was no CIA," Delilah offered.

"I'm startin' to figure that," One admitted. "So now we're not just a couple a kids playin' around in our backyards and digging for fragments of what the real world really looks like. Now we're a fuckin' department under Homeland Security. Which meant that we had to start dividing our time between doin' what I wanted us to do – look for the hellborn scum that were sneaking around – and doin' bullshit work, like uncovering who was pulling the strings on what drug cartel, or who was a double agent for who, and shit like that. I swear to Christ if I had to dig through one more 'spy's personal files to make sure he wasn't actually workin' for Iran or some shit, I was gonna burn the entire office down!"

"So… what did you actually do?" Delilah asked.

"Figured out what people wanted hidden," One said. "There was three departments, see? Corporate was about rich people bein' rat-fuckah's and it was run entirely by said rat-fuckah's so it was outta my control. And they got first dibs on every year's budget, the bitch-lizards… Then there was Foreign, which was about dealin' with spies and politics and shit. The guy in charge of Foreign was decent. He listened to us when we talked, so we got work done. The Brass that gave us money was real happy with what me and the boys in Foreign kicked loose. And then there was the part I actually cared about: Special Phenomenon. Me an' Two ran that one hands on all the way. We were gonna learn the truth. The real truth."

Delilah leaned back in her own seat. "Wait a minute… were you actually good at what you did?" she asked.

"Of course I was. Why should that be surprising?" One asked.

"I'm sorry, it's just… the way Hare talked about DHORKS it made it sound like the shadiest fly-by-night to ever fly by night shadily," Delilah admitted.

"Yeah well. It was a lot of boring bitch-work for other agencies, and a little bit of doin' what I wanted it to be doing," One groused. He puffed out a breath, then nodded. "Shit changed in 2020."

"What happened in 2020?" she asked.

"That red dickhead started showing up. Like, consistent, he was showing up. All across the Continental US and Alaska. He might have even poked his nose into Canada, but we don't talk to CSIS so if he did we didn't ever hear of it," One said. "He and his little hellspawn friends pop outta nowhere, kill somebody, then poof they're gone. If they was more careful about security cameras and shit, I wouldn't have even known they was there."

"Okay, so you had a bead on him. What happened next?" Delilah said.

"Well, me and Two was doin' a late night when I hear somethin' get yeeted into a dumpster next t' our window. And lo and behold it's that red little demon!" One said. "He was a slippery shit, but we were able to knock both him and his little buddy down and drag 'em both inside. Really put the screws to 'em, tryin' to get answers outta what they was doin' up here in the human world. But no matter what we did to those two little shits, they didn't break. Had a couple a' funny moments, but they didn't break. And then their ladies arrived."

"I'm guessing then that the female is the dominant of the species," Delilah said with a faintly smug grin.

"You may be right, Lila," One said. "That little red chick was a goddamned three-and-a-half foot blender on legs. And the werewolf hell-hound thing didn't even need to use weapons to rip us to shreds – though that didn't stop her from usin' every gun what got handed to her! We lost a hundred and sixteen men and women in less than five fuckin' minutes."

"That tracks. Considering that two of the little ones massacred Marquis entire drug smuggling operation on their own – and those guys were loaded for war – I suppose it's only a miracle they didn't kill you too," Delilah said.

One was silent for a long moment, hand pausing above Smudge's head. Smudge, annoyed that he was no longer being actively petted, stretched his neck up to force the still hand to pet him.

"Is there a word for a bad miracle?" One asked.

"Excuse me?" Delilah asked.

"Like miracle, somethin' that shouldn't be possible happening anyway, but in the worst possible way? Is there a word for that?" One asked.

Delilah thought for a moment, then shrugged. "Well… the word 'disaster' comes from the words meaning 'evil star'. Maybe that's close."

"Describin' what happened next as a disaster is pretty fucking accurate," One said. "The shits ran out of guns. A bomb goin' off wedged the red bitch's axe into a wall. And we were finally turning things around. But then… well. Disaster. Evil star. Ill omen."

One rubbed at his face. "I was so flip about it. Like I didn't just see the corpses of my own guys draw a magical seal on the ground and have my best friend vomit up a demon king that could end the world with a wave of his hand. I thought that once the black bird grabbed his hellspawn and went back to where he was from, that it'd be over. That they'd given me proof that I could use to turn DHORKS away from the petty bullshit that the DHS was usin' us for and toward something meanin'ful."

"...I'm guessing that things happened first to Two," Delilah connected the dots. One nodded.

"She didn't sleep for the next week. Didn't know what that meant. Maybe she was afraid of nightmares was my thinking; she did just have a nasty hellbeast use her as a highway onto Oyth," One said. He shook his head. "It wasn't that, though. After that first week, she started to change. I noticed that she was pickin' at herself. Peelin' away skin around her nails. Pulling hairs out by their roots. But I just chalked that up to shell shock. We'd had a hell of a day. No. It was when her eye changed. That's when I knew things had gone wrong."

"Changed how?" Delilah asked.

One gesticulated, again reaching for a word he didn't possess so that he could find one close enough to emulate it. "It was… shit man, her eye turned into something that wasn't an eye. And she started talkin' different. It was still her, but she started knowing stuff that she couldn't have known, like she was in several places at once. Once her eyeball went meaty that was the last straw for me. I took her to the Doc. And that was the last straw for her. She rammed her fingers into his skin and… infected him with something. I think I should'a shot her then," One said quietly, his arm falling limp. "I think I should'a killed her right there and burned her body. But I didn't. I couldn't. And within seconds she was infecting everybody in the room, and they was holding me back from her. By the end of the hour, she'd gotten everybody in the building… or near everybody. Some people she tried to infect just kinda melted. Maybe they were lucky. They were dead. They didn't become whatever Two now was."

He started to pet Smudge again, and Smudge obliged by purring like a chainsaw.

"By the end of the next day, DHORKS was taken over, top to bottom, by those things. They shoved me into a cell and kept me there ever since. Sometimes they took me out, and did some weird shit to me. Like, experiments, but not the kinds that made any sense. 'Ventually they started putting those drugs into me so I couldn't sleep, doin' other shit to me, feeding me weird food and surrounding me with weird sci-fi bullshit for hours. Said they was trying to 'enhance syncronization' or some shit. I think they was tryin' really hard to make sure when they infected me like the rest of my guys, I ended up like Two and not like the puddle that used to be Morrison."

"And then we found you in Moncton, and the rest is history?" Delilah offered.

"...pretty much, yeah," he said.

"Yikes," Delilah said. One turned a glare at her. "I'm not joking here. Your story's much worse than mine. I just had a gunfight in a police station against my corrupt coworkers. You had a cosmic-horror experience straight out of John Carpenter's library."

"Heh, Giger's, more like," One said.

"Do you have any idea why Hare wanted you, in particular, besides what you've been through?" Delilah asked.

"Not a clue," he said. He shrugged. "I mean, I'm not mad that he fell outta the fuckin' sky to save my ass. But if that shit could happen to me, and somethin' close enough happened to you, there had to be other people he coulda' grabbed."

"I know why he took me," she said. "He says that I have a trace-frequency to Hell, and he can't get there without my help."

"Why would anybody sane wanna go to Hell?" One asked.

"Depending on what part of Hell you're in, it's actually not that bad," Delilah pointed out. "Although to my defense I only saw about a sixteenth of one palace in Hell, so my view of things might be a bit skewed."

"Why do I got a feeling like we're all little pieces of a bigger plan on Hare's part?" One asked with a grumble in his voice.

"Because you're paying attention," Delilah said. She reached out to try to boop Smudge's nose, only to have the fluffy bastard recoil from her touch. You absolute asshole, Smudge. "If the state of the world is actually what Hare says it is, maybe the solution to fixing it can't be found here. I don't know about you, but I actually kinda like having this planet still exist. I do live here, after all."

One barked a laugh at that. "I suppose that's one thing we can pretty much rely on. He's stuck with us, just like we're stuck with him, until we find a way to solve whatever problem it is he came here to solve."

"And the perks, as he mentioned," she gestured broadly to the beach ahead of and below them, "almost make it all worthwhile."

"I guess, Lila. I fuckin' guess," he said. He was silent for a moment. "I got a question for ya."

"Shoot," she said.

"Hare says this universe is 'tri-planar', right?" One said.

"He does," Delilah answered.

"And we got here, and we got Hell," One said, throwing up fingers on his hand as he counted. He then waggled his ring finger, not quite putting it up. "Does that mean Heaven is real?"

"At this point it wouldn't surprise me," Delilah said. She stood and scowled down at herself. She didn't like the way this body looked. Too skinny. Though it still allowed her all the power her actual body had gained, it didn't visually respect the amount of work she'd put into being the tightly corded hardbody she had cultivated. "Come on. We've sulked up here long enough, there's a beach with hotties abound to explore, and we have an essentially bottomless bar-tab."

"I gotta warn you, I don't fuck with Russians," One said as he got to his feet, displacing Smudge to a disgruntled 'mreerow'. "Those bastards are always up to something."

"Fine, we'll stay away from the Russians. There can't be that many of them down there," Delilah said.

"This is Cuba, babe; you would be fuckin' surprised," One answered her, then followed out of the room.


Hare was the only one who wasn't enjoying the surf, the sun, and the Caribbean rum.

Lu was worried about him, how he spent so much time apart from Delilah and One who were, as they deserved, relaxing from a very stressful initiation and mission. She had even joined them for a time up there, though taking in an eighth of the liquor and exactly none of the company of attractive locals. It was good that somebody could enjoy themselves here. Not like Hare, apparently.

He was in the Exploratorium, as he had been for the days since the deal was shook on with Ngolo. Spending hours sorting through hyperfrequency deviations and Renegade Data, trying to figure out what that thing under Moncton had been, where they should go next (which seemed obvious because the Hag Star were right there just north of them), or, as she presumed, trying to find some sneaky sideways-way of finding a way to make the Blackroom function again. To get his friends back.

Well, not to say the Blackroom didn't function. In its way, it was the most alien piece of technology that Hare had brought with him. Similar to how anechoic chambers could be soundproofed down to an ambient level of negative decibels, or how properly contained dark rooms could absorb all conceivable light, the Blackroom was something of a logical extreme of that. What if you took a room, and instead of simply cordoning off light and sound, but you cordoned off everything? The walls were made of exotic metamaterials that interfered with and deflected neutrinos. Outside of that were field generators that created a paramagnetic bubble that erased external electromagnatism whilst within its bounds. And capping it all off was a two-molecules-thick layer of material that had come, according to Hare, from the home of the Geman-Heiron, the supremacist Noumenon who dwelt within a realm of supreme matter.

That two molecule layer, complete and unbroken, was enough to diffract gravity, so that it grew weaker the closer to the center of the room you went. At the middle of the chamber, there was a vacuum of everything except air. And it was in that near-vacuum that Lu floated, eyes open uselessly as there was no light to see. Here, as nowhere else in all Creation, she knew that she was herself, and that she was present. Unlike out in the walking-around-world, where she had to constantly second-guess whether what she was experiencing was actually real or mere hallucination, here, she had certainty.

Anything she perceived here was hallucination. And with that certainty, she could root herself, and be herself. She could allow her old self out, drift with slender, delicate fingers lost to the darkness, feel the drifting sea-weed like extents of hair that was almost as dark when they wisped across her face. Blink with shockingly green eyes and see nothing.

To be in the Blackroom was to be back in the womb. To be back before those troublesome times of cogence and thought. The moment would fade, as all moments fade, but she took comfort that this was still here. That she could find herself again if she needed to. That the Blackroom was real, and was a place where Lulu Voss could be Lulu Voss.

She'd go out and mingle with Hare, with One and with Delilah again soon.

Soon. But not right now. Right now she simply enjoyed the simplicity of managing to impossibly be both Lulu Voss, and to be sure of something.

"I will find you, Sam," Lu whispered, and the room swallowed her words whole.


A week in paradise had done a lot to set One back on his feet. He still had his reservations about what all of this madness was about – come on! Who wouldn't? – but time to drink and to think and to blessedly relax had done his sanity some small miracle of restoration. He hadn't even seen Hare the whole time, which was a relaxing prospect in and of itself.

Having a chance to get his freak on with another tourist had probably been vital to getting his head screwed back into a proper place. So fucking weird, that he'd never come to Cuba before. As though just by dint of him working for the American government, even to the extent that he was, somehow made him beholden personally to American foreign policy. Still, the locals were welcoming (if probably more of his money than the rest of him), the drinks were plentiful, the food was decent, and the diarrhea was minimal.

One was in the midst of watching a local fixing up the swankiest looking car straight outta the Fifties that he'd seen in a while when he felt his phone start to buzz. He considered ignoring it, just watching the rig before him and the process of bringing it back to life. It was no secret that the Cubans had to keep on recycling their cars since it was so damned hard for them to get new ones, so that ancient pieces like this one likely had a hand-built, barely functioning engine running them but looked like they came outta a Rockwell painting. Still, the buzzing in his pocket was insistent, and he sighed, picking the thing up. It wasn't even Delilah.

"Hare wants all of us to meet up," Lou said, sparing all preamble. "He's already called up Delilah."

"I'm guessin' that our wonderful vacation's comin' to a close?" One asked.

"That is likely," Lou said. "Can you get a ride to the shore of Playa Azul up on the north coast?"

"That might be a bit tricky," Hare admitted. "I don't exactly even know where I am right now."

"Did you… drink yourself into a coma last night?"

"Yeah, and I ain't even hung ovah!" One gave a laugh. "I ain't bounced back this easy from a night since I was a fuggin' teenager!"

Lou sighed, clicking his tongue and then was quiet for a bit.

"Lou?"

"You're in the town of Maceo, One. I'll be there in ten minutes. We can make the ride together," Lou didn't sound altogether very amused by the situation.

"Lighten up. Enjoy what time in Cuba we have left," One offered.

"Ten minutes, One," Lou repeated. Well, whatever stick was up his ass must have been caught on something nasty.

There had to be something about this craziness that he'd been thrown into that he could bend to his purposes. And there had to be some way to get Two outta whatever the fuck happened to her. After all, one short dip in an evil bathtub, and One could wear a new face and fight like he had all the might of Hell and Anime on his side. Maybe the same thing could happen for her?

Fuck he missed having Two around.

Every day without her felt like he was failing her.

Pretty much ten minutes on the dot came along Lou, driving another brightly colored car which was several decades out of fashion. And Lou was wearing a new face again, as was his proclivity. This one was vaguely Middle Eastern, or maybe Israeli, with a dusky complexion, greying hair and icy eyes. "Lou?" One nevertheless asked, because it was only prudent when half of your coworkers never stuck to one face for more than a week.

"Get in," Lou said, showcasing an authoritative baritone voice. Once they were driving, he continued. "I trust you've enjoyed the last few days of our vacation."

"I really worked some stress out, if that's what you're askin'," One said. "Where did you even go, anyway?"

"You recharge in your way. I recharge in mine," Lou said.

Well that didn't answer much.

"Look, bud. You may have come outta the fuckin' blue and saved my ass, but I don't feel exactly comfortable doin' a long drive without knowing a goddamned thing about you," One said.

"Your performance on the flight down here pretty clearly showed that you can't sit in one place for any length of time without talking," Lou noted.

"I don't like lengthy silences!" One pressed.

"Silence can be worth more than gold or uranium," Lou countered.

"Why we bringin' uranium into this? That shit's only about seventy bucks a pound!" One said.

"The entire reason for this 'vacation'," Lou said sternly, keeping his eyes on the road as he navigated his way out of the cramped streets of Maceo and onto the ill-tended country road that lead to the north, an edifice equally pot-hole and asphalt. It was slow driving, no matter how robust your shocks were, "is because Hare needed to have a meeting with our Black Marketeer. Said smuggler needs time to perform arrangements to gain what we've asked him for."

"Which by your context is some uranium. We buildin' a bomb or something?" One asked. "'Cause I ain't comfortable playin' with no Demon Cores."

"Nuclear fuel pellets, not weaponized uranium," Lou clarified. That got One even more confused. "Hare needs radioactives to make some of the tools we've been lacking to this point. Including giving you and Delilah one of these," he shifted his collar to show the metal torq around his neck. "So you won't need to worry about your clothing ever again. Armor, yes, but not clothing."

"So how exactly does that thing work?" One asked.

"Ask Hare. He built it. I just know how to use it," Lou said.

"You're purposefully fuckin' with me so that you don't need to give long answers, ain't ya?" One sussed out.

"Just let me drive, One," Lou said. Fine then. Be that way.

The drive was uncomfortable both for the bumpiness and for the miserable silence, with the lot of them descending off of the terribly maintained road and heading onto an even worse maintained dirt path, navigating away from easy traffic and towards a barn that sat surrounded by cropland. The car managed to get to the barn, just as another car rounded the corner of the building and came to a halt next to a very old looking truck. One perked up and focused in on that, as Lou pulled up to the cluster of three. And he was modestly shocked when the door opened and showed not Delilah or Hare, but a very well known (in certain circles) African man in a bright blue suit and a white Panama hat.

"What the shit is this?" One asked. Lou gave a raised brow at that, as he parked their car. "You didn't tell me you was workin' with the Prince of Africa."

"We didn't think it was relevant," Lou said, and then got out. One wasted no time doing likewise, and the face of Jean Baptiste Ngolo pulled into a tight lipped smile. "You are later than usual, Ngolo. I had expected you'd have everything prepared before I arrived."

"Not for lack of trying," Ngolo said. He turned a glance to One. "And who is this?"

"A new recruit to my endeavors. Juan, this is Jean Baptiste–" Lou began.

"I know who he is," One said.

"My reputation is finally starting to precede me? I take that as good news," Ngolo said. Jean Baptiste Ngolo was a name that kept popping up throughout 2021 and early 2022, back when DHORKS was more than just a sock-puppet on the hand of a monster. Somebody who had his fingers in a shocking number of pies that the American Government was interested in. "Are there any other faces I should be aware of?"

"Lila is with Hare right now," Lou nodded at the barn door. Ngolo pointed at the latched door, then made to lift it, before pausing. One turned, hearing a steadily raising bbbbbbbrb sound. Ngolo moved away from the door and waved at a passing prop-plane. The plane immediately turned in its flight and descended, finally making a landing run on the field. "I had wondered about that."

"I am not a fool. I will not allow product to touch ground unless I vouch for it," he said, waving off and having the plane abort its landing and raise back up, performing another circle of the farm. Ngolo turned to Lou. "Show me, Monsieur Mussa."

So that was who Lou was to Ngolo? Best to play along. Lou opened the door, and showed within, illuminated under a dangling light bulb away from the jury-rigged but lovingly maintained farm equipment was a half-sized palette, stacked with bricks gold and grey. Ngolo's smile grew a little brittle at that. "You said the fifteen times the product's weight in gold."

"Slight change," A different woman's voice came. She was tall, slender, with black lips and eyes that were an impossible shade of orange. Upon seeing her, Ngolo's smile thawed slightly. "We couldn't cover the entire amount with our gold reserve, so to get it done today, we're covering the difference in platinum."

"So good to see you again, Hare," Ngolo said. He sauntered over to where Delilah was leaning next to the bars, gesturing her to give him room, and began to pick up bars. He played them in his hand, as though comparing them. "Yes. Yes this will do. One hundred eighteen kilograms of nuclear fuel, in exchange for the market equivalent of fifteen times that mass in gold."

"For eighty-nine million, I hope you deliver what you've promised my people," Hare said, her visage offering absolutely no mercy if he were not.

"You will be most pleased, Ngolo said. He pulled out his phone and fired off a text. The sound of the plane grew close again, and through the door they could see the thing actually not just land but taxi up to the barn. Ngolo gestured for Hare and Lou to follow, and One followed at least to the door. The cargo door of the small plane was opened, showing stacks of small cylinders of grey metal. "It took a bit of doing, but I managed to locate some… floating rods, as well as the ones that Egypt won't be using any time soon."

Hare pulled out that thing that she had instead of a smartphone, and ran it over the pile, ignoring the one piece that Ngolo was holding toward her. She gave a nod. "The enrichment is all over the place, but it's between 5 and 15 percent. It'll do."

"Exactly why my… gratuity… is the final piece of this deal," Ngolo said, looking at the device in her hands.

"If it breaks, you won't be able to fix it," Hare said.

"Then I will not break it," Ngolo said. He offered a hand. Hare was silent for a moment. Oh. Oh, that thing had come with him when she got here, hadn't it? It was a piece of her old world. No wonder she was hesitating. But the hesitation passed, and Hare placed the device, itself the size of a thick smartphone, into Ngolo's waiting hand. Ngolo gave her a respectful nod, then let out a high whistle. The pilot jumped out, revealing another African but a much larger one than Ngolo. "I suggest you unload the product quickly. As soon as we have loaded our payment, uranium or no uranium, we are leaving."

"I'll let Lila know not to kill you for running off with our currency," Lou said, following Ngolo and the pilot into the barn. One looked at Hare.

"So… where are we loading it?" One asked.

"Right here," Hare answered, extending her hand over it as though beckoning the pellets from above with her palm. And the entire pile began to quickly dissolve, vanishing from sight in a matter of only a few seconds. Hare finally cracked a smile. "Excellent. We're officially back to square one."

"Where were we before?" One asked, looking to see where the pellets could have one. There wasn't even dust left of them.

"We were in the negatives," Hare said. She turned a look at the barn, which now had Delilah exiting it. "It's a shame I had to give up my Omnibus, but I can make something nearly as good to replace it. And we really needed these volatiles."

"So what do we do now?" One asked.

"Well, we can either do some experimentation, to see if we can open a portal to this 'Hell' dimension, or we can go to Greece and see if the Gravekind are as big a problem here as they are… well… everywhere else they show up," Hare said. The door opened again, with the large man having a lightly-loaded armful of gold ingots and Ngolo tossing one up to himself again and again. The two black men looked at the empty hold of their little plain, then to Hare.

"A lady has to keep a few secrets," Hare said with a sultry smile. Ngolo actually smiled wide, flashing teeth that had a gap between the front incisors.

"I suppose a lady must," Ngolo said. He then turned to the pilot beside him and rattled off something or other in French, while Delilah quietly joined them in their scrum.

"It'll be a bit of a squeeze gettin' us all inside Lou's rig," One said.

"We'll make do," Hare said. She then turned to Delilah. "So; would you rather go to Hell or Greece?"

"Greece, obviously. How is that even a choice?" Delilah asked.

"Greece it is. Lila, Juan, go get your last day of vacation in and pack up. We leave for the Old Country bright and early tomorrow," Hare said.


Alignment and Synergy

There is a particular frequency to everything in the universe, or so the postulation of String Theory goes. And different frequencies, both in amplitude and resonance can cause different effects, the same way that the different configurations of the outermost shells of electrons clouding around the nuclei of atoms allow elements to be unique from one other. Most things in any given universe are co-harmonous with that universe's fundamental frequency, which could be detected even before the advent of Heavy Energy studies and the tools to pare down to its mysteries, as the subtle reverberations of gravity against space-time and the crackle of cosmic background radiation. These reverberations are also used to determine a universe's Weight.

Every universe has six factors which determine its 'alignment', similar to how electron shells do for structural physics or how proteins do for cellular biology. These Alignment Factors are Matter and Energy, which dictate how complex the forms of matter and energy a universe can contain safely, respectively. Life, which determines how far advanced of mere biology the forms of life in that universe can become. Information, which determines such things as the Speed of Causality (which in most universes is equal to the speed of light), and how much bandwidth there is for information within a given spacetime unit. Relativity, which determines how distances are related to each other and how rigid is the procession of cause to effect.

And then there's Dark.

Dark changes other Alignments, inverting them. It can turn hypermatter into Unmatter. It can turn the speed of light into the speed of null. It makes inscrutable all that can be known and makes hostile all that was believed to be safe. And at the same time it is vital, because it has important and inextricable ties to self-awareness and thought. There are realms that go to great lengths to purge Dark from their Alignment, and often that comes at a cost of minds.

For each Realm of Full Alignment Weight, there is such an agglomeration of power within it that it spawns itself a Synergy. Thus it was with you. Thus it was with I. And this paltry, narrow world will suffer under those heavier beings greatly, unless we do something about it. About all of them.

-Noumenon Phenomenon explaining Synergy to Arthur Flagstaff, location unknown, 2040.