The house was a shit hole, make no mistake about it. A rat-bag trailer-home with a veritable thicket for a front yard and a swamp for the backyard, it was a sad, sorry excuse for domicile that had been lost and neglected for more than a decade and a half since the house was foreclosed upon during the Financial Collapse of 2008 and left to go to seed ever since. It was just another corpse on the edge of Evergreen, Alabama that profligacy and mismanagement had struck down, and miserable environs had refused to see cleared away.

In a word, it was perfect for five weirdos to hunker down in.

Delilah had hated Florida for its muggy heat. Though the apparent heat-wave had broken and fall had settled in at long last, it was clear that such sauna-like environs were going to follow her where she went. It was sticky and uncomfortable here, and the entire region reeked of architectural poverty. There was no personality to the town of Evergreen, not like even Titusville had, let alone Bangor or Veria. It was just a strode-riddled, copy-paste pustule of lower-lower income American South, where the billboards declaring loudly that she was going to hell were only outnumbered by the furtive sex-shops selling porn and dildos, and even then it was a strong fight.

Though they had found this run down shack on the west edge of Evergreen more than a week ago, and had the Den bore out its familiar lay-out underneath its foundations, the time was starting to irk Delilah. Ordinarily, the moment that Hare landed in a new location, he would enthusiastically declare as to what dramatic catastrophe they'd just interjected themselves and what horrifying exertions were going to be demanded of them. But when Hare came to Alabama, all he told them to do was 'don't let the neighbors into the Den'. Then he went into the Blackroom and only came out twice or thrice a day, likely to eat, use the toilet, and perhaps sleep.

"Am I the only one who's feeling very off balance right now?" Delilah asked, as she sat on the recently repaired sofa on the recently de-molded floor in the recently renovated living room and watched a recently nanofabricated television.

"Tell me about it," One said, slumped against one arm of the sofa as the two of them watched trashy daytime TV, which was oddly stunted and censored, as though the state of Alabama was terrified what people would think if they heard a profanity or viewed something in the least bit morally unjustified. "We're usually covered in blood an' guts by now."

As Hare had mandated, they used their original bodies and faces, which was a bit of a transition from all the shifting between personas that Delilah had gotten used to doing. Lu seemed to be exempt from that mandate, as she had chosen a less stunning iteration of herself to appear as. And Vera was of course Vera. Said Vera was currently using an ottoman as a lounging couch, applying a clear-coat to her claw-like fingernails while holding a mug of coffee in her tail.

"Ah, but perhaps it is from the fact that whatever monster my employer is directed against is a more subtle one than those you've faced in the past?" Vera asked.

"Did he tell you something he didn't tell us?"

"Oh, he has told me a great many things I doubt he's told to you. He seems to have told the one called Lu, but you two avoid him as though he has a crotch-rot that is both spreading and festering. It stands to reason you would be ignorant," Vera said, using her tail to drink her coffee without messing up her fingernails.

"Then speak up! What the fuck are we even doin' here?" One said, straightening in his seat.

"Are you aware of the nature of the Heterax?" Vera asked.

"The what?" Delilah asked.

"Apparently not. They are a rare legend even in Hell, but some old crones do sometimes speak of them," Vera said. "The Heterax are mortal enemies of the imp, and have mobilized vast hordes into violent pogroms against my kind in the past. That we have survived as well and as long as we have is a product of their rarity, not of our resilience."

"What did you do to piss 'em off?" One asked.

"That, sadly, is either unknown or else lost to history. Although to be frank, the Heterax have been a part of Creation since the Rotten Kings Dynastic Period, which ended no few millions of years ago. What historical grievance they have against us is fuzzy at best." Vera gave an offhand shrug. "And why they would target imps of all things might come down to simple speciesism. As you have no doubt discerned, there is little respect given to the imp by the other denizens of Hell. That a Being From Outside would take that to its logical extreme and agitate to annihilate us is not shocking, though somewhat surprising."

"So what exactly are these 'Heterax'?" Delilah asked.

"That is an interesting question, because it has two mutually exclusive and yet both accurate answers," Vera turned so that she was now facing them on her ottoman.

"How is that…" Delilah begin.

"I will explain," Vera said. "The reason why Heterax are so rare in Hell is because of their natures; they are extremely effectively killed moments after their arrival in Hell via the Bleeding Pits. Very, very, vanishingly few of them, those clever few who know to hide, manage to escape and reach the wild. And even then, it is only 'so to speak', because they did not exit the Bleeding Pits on their own, and are not beings per se."

"...go on?" One said, brow furrowing.

"Heterax are shapeshifters of an extreme variety," Vera said. "They are mundane objects. And they are animated ephemeral spirits attached to those objects. They are one, or the other, technically both, but being able to choose between either form whichever best suits its ends in the moment."

"Wait, objects?" One asked. "Like… I dunno, a broom or something?"

"That is indeed an example of an object," Vera said with a patient tone.

"How in the fuck is a broom s'posed to rally a mob?" One asked the question which was coming to Delilah's mind.

"And that is where the true power of the Heterax lay; once one of their number has settled itself, it spreads out a miasma of mind-affecting magic, so subtle and sub-rosa that only the very greatest of the magical minds, such as The Bard himself, would be able to see it in action. And that miasma twists the psyches of those who are near it," Vera said. "Slowly, subtly, untraceably, it changes them into whatever form the Heterax wants. Then it sends them out, empowered by its magic, to do its bidding. A lone gunman opens fire in a Church of Satan. A pathetic sexless gimp stabs four Succubi in a brothel. A bereaved, separated mother sets off a suicide bomb in an office of the Department of Family Severance."

"Christ," One said.

"And then, the ripples of that action filter back, as people are driven into more extreme forms of maladjusted action, and the Heterax feeds. These new comers begin to act out its next ploy, being subtle spoilers and ruins for the world around them. Always small things. Hiding somebody's spare key so they have to sleep in the trash outside their home after arriving drunk. Plucking the shoe-laces from a dress-shoe so that a fiend will look a fool in a job interview. Stealing the spare change from a jar, so that a Consumer cannot do laundry that week," Vera said.

"So they go from suicide bombers to bein' annoying little gremlins?" One asked.

"Do they hold on to those bits and pieces they steal?" Delilah asked in his wake. Vera smiled and nodded.

"Exactly so, human," Vera said. "Those bits and pieces accumulate, and the people who gather them unthinkingly and unknowingly gather them together, forming an Icon, in effect, the Heterax using us fleshy beings as overlord parasite to our bodies to further its life cycle. When there is enough weight of ruin and misery, instantiated by garbage and detritus, a final act of maddened creation forms the Icon, and the cycle begins anew. Radicalization, extinction, accumulation, instantiation. That is the life of the Heterax."

"How do you know so much about these things?" Delilah asked, leaning back from the imp.

"I am an educator, sweet brown human; I have much experience in research and extraction of truth from noise," Vera said with a smug grin showing sharp teeth.

"Do you think that what you said is what Hare is lookin' for?" One asked.

"If his Heterax and Hell's Heterax are the same being, then yes. If they are similar only by homonym, then there may be differences," Vera admitted. "But given what he spoke of them while we were dissecting L'Enfant Terrible, I have every faith that what I say to you is accurate to what he seeks."

"Yeah, what was that thing?" Delilah asked, remembering the weird, twitching insect in a tube that watched them as they drove out of Florida and struck west.

"A symbiote to the Hag Star. Do not fret on them. That one cannot infiltrate your skull, as there is both not room enough for it, and your skull is too hard," Vera made an off-hand motion.

"I feel vaguely insulted somehow," Delilah said.

"Too sensitive, you are," Vera rolled her eyes.

"So what? We just… sit around? Waiting for Hare to tell us what the hell we're doing?" One asked.

"Enjoy such leisure," Vera offered. "You don't have a legion of idiot shitlings demanding your time, so can sleep to whatever hour, and have only one overlord, who is a master at the art of benign neglect."

"Y'know what? Fine. It's no Cuba, but it's a damned sight better than sleepin' in a corridor," One said. "I'm goin' out to get some grub. Want some Five-Guys?"

"There's no Five Guys in Evergreen," Delilah pointed out.

"A town of this size having four or less people? What has happened to your planet?" Vera asked.

"Fine, I'll grab some barbeque. I know we saw a spot like that on our way in," One said. He got up, groaning as he did, and shuffled to the door. Before he grabbed the keys to the minivan that Hare had made for them to get here, he paused.

"Something wrong?" Delilah asked.

"What happened to our space-ship?" One asked.

"You know, that's a good question. I haven't seen it since we landed in Florida," Delilah answered.

"It's in extradimensional storage," Vera said off-handed as she took the remote control with her tail – as she still didn't want to mess up her nails – and began to surf the channels for something more her particular taste. "You would be surprised how much more you would know if you simply asked Hare such things."

"Fair enough," One said, and departed the shack that, it seemed, was going to be their lives for a while.


Helldiver IX

Investigation; Heterax; Alabama


The days were beginning to grind past, slowly, but stressfully. One had already driven around the town of Evergreen a couple of times, which wasn't that hard because the town was small and pretty much the very image of American sprawl. Dollar stores often perched themselves on opposite sides of the same street, ill-used farmer's markets tucked into corners between either bankrupt or nearly-bankrupt businesses dealing in equipment, appliances, or obvious scams, and the number of churches vied to outnumber every other structure.

The place was almost pornographically poor. He wagered that the average wage was about two thirds of the way up to the poverty-line, and there were less people who lived in the town limits than DHORKS employed at its height in 2021. What these 'Heterax' were doing in such a remote place beggared One's imagination.

"I'm starting to think that Hare's chasin' his tail on this one," One said. Lu, who was in the passenger seat of the van, puffed out a sigh.

"You have to have a bit of faith in Hare. He knows what he's doing," Lu said.

"I think yous guys have way too much faith in him," One said. "Ever since we landed here, all we've been doing is driving around and lookin' at poor people bein' poor people."

"We're hunting the hardest-to-find Noumenon in all Creation, and you're annoyed he's not being snappy about finding them?" Lu asked.

"I'm questioning whether they're even here to begin with," One noted. Finally, the lifted truck with the scrotum hanging from its hitch pulled up and collected its glut of barbeque, allowing One's van to finally collect their own, which One immediately passed to Lu. It was lucky that they had the Evil Bathtub; ever since he learned that through Resetting obesity was not only impossible but encouraged so that one could slab on more muscle or even just become a taller guy, he had stopped bothering managing his diet as once he did. So this spot on the far side of Evergreen became a haunt for its cheap and addictive food.

"There's something going on here in Alabama. I can tell," Lu said.

"Really? How so?" One said, as he started to return toward the far side of the tiny town which held the shack they were squatting in.

"It's hard to explain," Lu paused. She frowned, and then seemed to look inward for a second before remembering something. "Do you remember how Vera wiped that black stuff into your eye during the fight against the Hag Star?"

"Oh that shit that let me see the ones that was hiding invisibly?" One asked.

"Yes, that," Lu said. "I have something that's kind of like that, but instead of seeing outside of the standard veils of vision…"

"Yer losing me, Lu," One said.

"Okay, fine. You know how some snakes can sense heat, and how some fish can sense electricity?"

"Yeah?" One asked.

"What Vera did to you was something like that. It expanded your repertoire of sensation abilities so that the one that was being actively targeted, your vision which couldn't see them, was bypassed by some other more magical sense which could," Lu said.

"Okay. That tracks, I guess," One said. "So what do you do?"

"I can see the wiring behind the scenes," Lu said. "And when I focus hard enough, I can even manipulate it."

"...That could be handy, actually. Could you show us how to do that?" One admitted.

"Apparently not. It's something that my 'secondary Synergy' gave me," Lu muttered, opening the top-most box of barbeque and taking a sniff at it. "This is going to have to remain a 'me-thing'."

"Nothing's ever simple, is it?" Hare muttered, as he turned off of the appropriately named Rural Street, and began down the meander which would lead them to their shack. Theirs, of course, was at the very, very end of the meander, flanked by tall trees blocking view from all but a single trailer-home that had a decomposing pick-up truck parked eternal at its front door. Surprisingly, Hare was out talking to Delilah in the shrubbery that was their front yard when One arrived, so One pulled the truck in beside the two of them. "Yo, what's this about?"

"We're going to do a bit of an expedition into town," Hare said. Now, his form was that of an elfin but gaunt young man, somebody who looked like he'd gone too many times without a sufficient meal and too many times without a good night's sleep. Frankly, people like him fit right in with the locals here in Evergreen. One was pretty sure a quarter of the population was hooked on legal painkillers, and another quarter on illegal ones.

"Why?" One asked.

"I just detected a Causality Dip," Hare said. "Is that barbeque?"

"And that is a what?" One asked. Then he paused. "What the FUCK is she doin'?"

She of course being Vera.

Hare pointed to her, "She's the reason why I could pick out the Causality Dip against Noise."

"Are we forgettin' what she is?" One pointed out. Vera, though, produced a blonde wig from inside a shopping bag and put it into place over her own dark hair, before making a flourish. "You're joking. Nobody's gonna buy that!"

"Well, we'll see, won't we?" Hare said with a grin that usually people put on their faces when they knew something others didn't. One remained skeptical. Such a paper-thin disguise was doomed to people with even a third of a working brain.

"I'll get in the back," Lu offered, and Hare took her place in the passenger seat, while Delilah and Vera took the rearmost seats so that the hellspawn would be furthest from sight. Not that it would help if god-forbid they got pulled over.

"So how about we circle around and go back to explaining what a Causality Dip is?" One finally said, as he turned the van around and headed back toward town.

"A decrease in local coherence between cause and effect. It's an extremely subtle effect, one that our facilities are frankly barely able to detect at all. And it's usually all of the warning that we're ever going to get when the Heterax have Infused one or more of their Proxies and sent them off to do some heinous shit. So we need to find this mad dog that got sent out before they do something destructive, and then see if we can find clues as to what Icon they were mobilized by."

"So we need to jump a crazed gunman before they go postal," Delilah summarized.

"That's usually how it goes," Hare gave a nod. The drive back to Evergreen didn't take long, since Evergreen wasn't exactly a big town, but instead of turning right to head into the town center and its many faltering businesses, Hare pointed that they go left. Hare gave a confused look, but followed as Hare directed, and quickly scooted onto the highway heading to the northeast. "We might be too late to stop the event, or we might be ahead of it. The 'Tarium was not clear as to the timeline of this event. So I recommend a bit of haste."

"Where are we even goin'?" One asked. Hare answered by pointing down the first off-ramp that they came to, a scant three miles down the road. "Are you serious?"

"Deadly," Hare said with a nod. One muttered and pulled over and down off of the highway that he'd just gotten up to speed on, out of the sparse traffic and down a gently curving down-hill road toward a gas station.

Hare and Lu seemed to be watching like a pair of hawks as One pulled in, but there was nothing out of the ordinary going on. Just a car and a big pick-up truck parked at the pumps, a few more cars parked alongside the station proper, and now that he was looking for it he could see a back yard for housing Semis and their trailers.

"Okay. Now what?" One asked, after parking them in a spot that gave them a decent view of the pumps in the front of the store and the truck-yard at the back. Due to their location, the van couldn't see into the building itself; the wall was a bit too much of a wall for that.

"Vera, stay here and watch our backs. Delilah, go 'buy some snacks'. Lu? Back yard. One, you're with me," Hare said, opening the doors and quickly departing the rig they were in.

One had no choice but to follow, posting up with Hare in front of an ice-machine between the doors to a sandwich shop and the doors leading into the gas station proper. Hare's eyes jumped to every car that ambled past, brows furrowing and gaze hardening with each of them until they either slipped past the curve of the road and out of sight, pulled in to start pumping gas, or had another, more 'suspicious' car arrive in their wake.

Hare was nervous, One realized. Nervous enough that he actually reached into a pocket and extracted a sealed package of cigarettes, ripping them open with no regard to how ciggies were supposed to be opened, and quickly lighting one through means unseen but likely related to his particular brand of bullshit.

"Is it that bad?" One asked.

"It is usually the worst thing any situation can be," Hare muttered around his smoke. He was dragging deep on that thing.

"Didn't know you smoke," One filled the quiet.

"I usually don't," Hare said. "I need to find this fucking thing."

There was a hunger in Hare's words that even One couldn't be blind to. "...why?" he asked.

"I don't like leaving things undone," Hare tried to demur, but One shook his head.

"No, don't give me that half-answer bullshit. I seen you stride toward hulkin' masses of meat and violence with a happy gleam in yer eye. But now you're sweatin' bullets. I want the truth!" One said.

"The truth?" Hare muttered, puffing out smoke from his nostrils. "The truth is that this was the last job all of us did together. And we had to abort, because something else came up. And then, one by one… well, the conspicuous lack of my superiors tells that story better than I ever could."

"Your superiors," One repeated.

"What? Did you think that I ran the show before? God no, One. I was essentially an intern," Hare gave his head a shake.

"So is that why you had to be such a bitch-nugget to us when you brought us in? To establish your new place on the pecking order?" One began. Hare blinked at him.

"Okay, that's some aggression I didn't expect. Are you still sore about the whole don't-be-a-dickhead-Lougendarmeaux warning? Because…"

"Yeah, I'm a still a bit pissed that I got shanghaied into doin' this job with a threat of death if I didn't fit your 'ideological mould'!" One snapped.

"And you're bringing this grudge up now, of all times?" Hare asked.

"You don't exactly make yourself a very approachable bastard, you know that?" One pointed out.

"Do you know what the Lougendarmeaux did to Italy during World War Three?" Hare asked, tones very flat.

"I don't care what those French-sounding fucks did in a war that by my history didn't fuckin' happen!" One said. "It don't give you permission to be a douche!"

Hare's eye twitched, and he raised a finger toward One, a sneer coming to his face for just a moment, before he stopped, sucked another lung full of air, and seemed to halt himself before he went on a rant.

"You know what? You're right on that one. My past doesn't excuse my bad behavior. While I don't personally view culling would-be authoritarians from any organization I'm a part of as bad behavior, it's obvious that in so doing I've done some harm to you, and for that I apologize," Hare said. One just blinked at him. How in the hell had things flipped to this so fast. "But for the moment, can we table your anger at my past actions and keep your eyes open on the traffic?"

"Fine," One said. This obviously wasn't over. Hare might be sounding contrite, but for all One knew it was only skin deep, and would seep out again later. People didn't change. Certainly not for the better. Standing on that catwalk, Hare gave Delilah and One a glimpse at who he really was. And when somebody shows you who they really are, you fucking believe them.

Hare nodded, then pulled out his replacement for that thingy he gave away in Cuba. This one was bulkier, not sleek like a smartphone but somewhat bulgy as though there were components that could not be miniaturized or streamlined into an aesthetically pleasing package. He frowned at what he saw on its face, and though he didn't hide it from One, he might as well have, because all he saw were wave forms and streams of numbers that changed in subtle ways, overlaid over a navigation map of the region.

"The wave-front is collapsing. It's going to happen soon. But I don't know where…" Hare muttered, glaring at his tool. He looked around, then tilted his head down. "Guys? Sitrep?"

"Nothing unusual in here," Delilah was the first to answer. "Did you know that Fat Jim has eleven kinds of jerky? That seems like too many kinds."

"All is quiet in the truck yard," Lu said.

"I see some strange magic gathering, but it is as seeing smoke in the wind," Vera was the last to answer, after a few seconds of her likely finding the right button on the car's center-console to give reply. "Whatever spellcasting this is is masterful. I cannot tell where it is coming from."

"Exactly what makes the Heterax so fucking dangerous," Hare said.

One spotted somebody walk into the lot, and he nudged Hare to look at him likewise. He was wearing a bulky jacket for the weather, so had to be sweltering in that thing. But as he got closer, it became clear that the person within was either homeless or else close to it, and was sweating terribly. The shaggy, sweating man said nothing, walking right toward them. One reached for his carbine, only to remember that it was shattered and useless. Hare, though, gently pulled on One's sleeve, tugging him out of the way. The shambling man went directly to the ice cooler, threw open the doors, then grabbed three bags of ice. Without paying for them, he propped two of them on his shoulder and held one in his fist, and started to walk away.

Hare frowned at him, then looked at his device again. He shook his head. This wasn't the guy? Then what the fuck were they looking for?

"Hey! You gotta pay for that shit, Johnny!" a man's voice shouted from near One's side. The cashier had come out to the door. And now 'Johnny', knowing he was being observed, broke into a run, successfully escaping the parking lot and stealing three bags of ice mostly because the cashier didn't bother chasing him. "Fucking degenerates…" the cashier muttered, moving back into the store as a customer left.

"It's so goddamned close. Which one is he? Guys?" Hare asked.

"Nothing," Delilah said.

"Nothing at the back," Lu answered a moment later.

"Vera?" Hare asked.

Vera was silent for a few seconds, as one of the cars pulled away from the pumps and made for the road. "Damnation, it's coalescing but I don't know where. Wait! The front! The magic is gone from the back it has to be…"

There sounded a loud bang, one that both Hare and One jolted a bit at, but it wasn't a gunshot. No, it was something very different; it was the sound of three tires bursting on the same side of a tractor-trailor. Instantly, the side of the frame hit the road and dug, dragging the vehicle toward the lot and the pumps within it. And the car that had just pulled out either didn't notice or was too stunned to react, because all he managed to do was put his flank directly into the path of the Semi's grill.

The crash was stupendous, the impact crumpling the car and rolling a portion of it under the front of the Semi, sparks flying and fuel igniting leaving a trail of fire behind the rig as the combined crash quickly came to a halt, its velocity petering out mere inches from one of the pumps.

There was a pause, as Hare flexed his hand and passed a pistol over to One. His eyes were locked on the Semi, hard and merciless. But even as One and Hare were joined by Delilah, who came sprinting out of the store, One could tell that something was off. A glance would tell that the car was annihilated, and the driver had about an honest man's chance in Washington DC of actually surviving that. Delilah went for the car, trying to peel away the now-opaque windscreen, while One and Hare rounded the wreck toward the truck door.

A door which opened, and a pale, horrified looking fat man leaned out, staring at the scene which was before him. "Oh god! Is the other guy alright?" he asked, turning to look down at Hare. One quickly tucked the gun he'd been given away.

"What the hell happened?" Hare asked.

"I think I had a blow-out. Christ almighty get outta my way!" the fat man said, dropping down to the asphalt without grace and running to the wreck. He started to look a bit green, looking at the mess that he'd made. "Oh… oh sweet Jesus. Somebody help this guy! Call an ambulance!"

One gave a stern glance at the back of the fat man's head, but Hare gave a stern head-shake in response. This wasn't the guy? Even with the trail of destruction and burning gasoline he'd left – which was now starting to consume the trailer?

"This… what the fuck just happened?" Hare asked. One followed him as Delilah finally dislodged the shattered glass and showed the driver. His head had an utterly lethal dent in it, legacy of the truck's bumper going directly through his driver window and having an intimate introduction to his skull. It was clear he was dead before the mess of the two vehicles had even stopped sliding.

"Everybody away from the pumps! There's a fire! Everybody clear out!" the cashier shouted from the doors.

"Hare, I saw…" Vera's voice came from One's side, and he started aside, glancing at the many, many witnesses.

"What are you doin' out here?" One demanded.

"No time," Vera shrugged him aside, pulling Hare's attention to her. "In the critical moment, I saw where the magic I was viewing was condensing. And it condensed into him."

The imp was pointing at the dead driver, not the trucker, who was now trying very hard to not cry, and failing.

"Wait. Wait," Hare said. "Why would… this doesn't fit their MO."

"You gotta hide, demon!" One said.

"Oh shit, girl, did you get burnt?" one of the other lookie-loos said while looking at Vera.

"Naw sweetie, that's just a sunburn. I got some aloe for y'all if you're sore," a grandma type said, producing a suspiciously large jug of it.

And they were of course ignoring the fact that she had red eyes and literal horns poking through that blonde wig she was wearing.

"We need to back off. Everything about this isn't right," Hare said.

"We can't just…" Delilah began.

"We can't just be here when the cops arrive considering we have no valid reason to be in Evergreen, you mean?" Hare stressed, his voice pitched low so only those nearby could hear it.

"...fuck," Delilah muttered.

One started backing away from the ruin which was now starting to emit a drifting cloud of thick black smoke, melting into the crowd with the others quickly joining him. One had no idea what was supposed to happen, but even he in his ignorance knew that whatever it was that Hare and Vera were predicting, it certainly wasn't this.

"What do we do now?" Lu's voice came through the earpiece, as she hadn't reached them.

"...I honestly don't know," Hare said. "We go home. We figure out what the hell just went off the rails. And we prepare for when the next Wave Collapse comes."

It didn't sound like a great plan, but it was what they had. It was with a feeling of defeat that they returned to their van, circled around through the trucker-lot and to the far side of the gas-station, far away from the bedlam and the sound and lights of approaching police and firefighters, and drove off into obscurity.


Time was creeping by.

It wasn't what Delilah had signed up for, but then again, she hadn't exactly signed up with the most complete knowledge of what was going on. The first few 'mission's since her being brought in were all loud, messy affairs, quick to the event and quick to their conclusion. This, on the other hand, was the farthest thing from it.

It'd been a week since the Semi wreck in the truck-stop gas-station. And Hare spent the entire time with a look of frustration and confusion on his face. Only now, after all that time, did he emerge from the Den and allow his Nanoforge to effortlessly rebuild the kitchen, which was hitherto-unrenovated compared to the rest of the building. And as he seemed to always do when he was frustrated, confused, or in need of thought, he started cooking.

"Hare… are you alright?" Delilah asked him, as he whipped up a bunch of stuff into a sort of soggy mixture, and then crammed that mixture into the body cavity of a turkey. "And are you making us a late Thanksgiving?"

"Figured I'd split the diff between your Thanksgiving and One's," Hare said, not looking his usual flippant, glib self. "I don't get it, Delilah. Every time the Heterax sends people out, they go down in a hale of gunfire. Unless something else is out there that intervened to send that truck careening into him, he would have gotten clean with whatever he was doing. Did One turn up anything from the fire department?"

Delilah shook his head. One had gone to a Fire Department barbeque a few days ago and asked some questions about the incident, but the answers that he got were frustratingly banal and ordinary. To the fire-fighters, it was just a case of the car being in the wrong place at the wrong time, an incident that couldn't even be blamed on the trucker because there was no trucker alive who could compensate in a split second for a triple-blowout on one side.

In fact, they called the victim's presence something of a grim-miracle. If that car hadn't wedged under the front of the truck, said truck would likely have taken out two or more of the pumps, and the body count would have been a hell of a lot higher than one.

"I had some words with the local PD," Delilah said. "The guy had no record, no signs of mental illness or distress. Didn't own a gun, which actually made him a rarity for around here. They mentioned that he was just an all-around good guy. Not the kind of person that you and Vera fingered for a Heterax Proxy."

"And yet Vera swears up and down that the Wave collapsed into him," Hare said with a grim nod. With a bit more violence than was strictly necessary, he slammed the turkey into a roaster and fired it into the oven. "It makes no goddamned sense. It simply doesn't."

"Maybe Vera was wrong? The trucker is probably five states away by now," Delilah noted.

"I looked into the trucker. He's from Texarkana, and I haven't detecting anything Heterax in central south USA. He has no ties to the local region, no family here, and the only reason he was pulling into that truck-stop was because his log-books had maxed out and he was required by regulation to stop driving," Hare said, beginning to aggressively peel potatoes.

"It's almost like a bunch of shit seemingly fated him to be there," Delilah said. "And to crash the way he did. Into the Heterax Proxy, I mean."

"That's a troubling thought," Hare grumbled. "I don't even want to think about what we're going to do if one of the Djinn is in this town. Mostly because we don't have a good way of fighting one. Or even locating it. Shit."

"So what? We drag our heels here?" Delilah asked. "I keep thinking that…"

"Yes, we drag our heels," Hare said, nodding. "Frankly, this is the operational tempo that most cells have to work with. The only reason your recruitment saw you traipsing across three continents and low-earth-orbit were because there were a number of pots that were actively boiling over and I needed to take them off the heat as soon as possible. This," he gestured around him, "is more the kind of operation we tend to run. Deliberate. Paced. Meticulous. And only giving a dollop of catastrophic violence every other month as a treat."

"I was going to ask, but I couldn't think of the right way to bring it up," Delilah said. She watched as potato-skins flew wildly and Hare filled a deep pot with their flayed contents. "Maybe we should do a walk around town. See if there's something we missed."

"You have my blessing, but good luck finding an Icon that's inactive," Hare gestured toward the door with a knife. "Something just doesn't add up. I'm not even sure what to tell you to look for at this juncture. But by all means. Stretch your legs. I'll have the equinox dinner of our chosen title ready in about… ohhh, five hours."

"I feel like I'm getting kicked out of the house and told 'not to come back until supper'," Delilah noted.

"Git, ya' little varmint!" Hare made a back-handing gesture, and Delilah chuckled as she departed the hovel that was far nicer on the inside than it was on the outside. Seriously, if not for Hare's Rule 1, he could have made a significant fortune flipping derelict properties.

The air was still wet when she pushed the door open without the metal shriek that it had offered when they had stolen inside in the dead of night. While the door still looked like shit, a metal, rusty thing with a pane of glass stained with tobacco smoke on the inner surface, it now at least functioned properly. And outside, while the air was still incredibly damp, at least it was no longer sweltering. Fall had taken hold in earnest, temperate winds making the air only a bit uncomfortable. She navigated the thicket of a front yard, passing the ramshackle van that ran ten times better than it appeared it should, before heading off of the road that led past other trailer-homes and through the thick brush.

The walk through the woods instantly brought her to a fine memory of her childhood, one of the few that her childhood contained. To hear the crunch of leaves and rustle of limbs against her jacket as she forged forward through untamed terrain. It gave her time to think. To think about quite a few things.

First of all, she found that she was feeling unexpectedly homesick. Not for Halifax, and certainly not for Winnipeg, but for a home that never was that she could have shared with her sisters, were it not for Shithead's existence and constant intervention. It shoved a bitter pill into her throat and bade her to swallow. She was the first to recognize that she did not exist as an infinitesimal probability from a forest of paths she could have taken. She didn't have so many branches by an order of magnitute. Growing up, she had choices stripped from her, forced down paths she wouldn't have chosen, and afterwards, it often came to be that scope of possibilities were winnowed down to a barest few.

Sometimes, she only had one decision possible to make.

Like pulling her gun in the chief's office.

She was a product of hostile predestination, and of blinkered thinking. Perhaps even still walking down a path least suited to her. After all, she could never have imagined being what she was now, doing what she did now. It only took one true impossibility coming true to finally shake off the blinders that she'd worn her entire life, even up to filling four HRP officers with bullets, and see that she was not some mathematical engine, which when given static inputs would give a static result. She was just an idiot.

An idiot who freaked out, shot some people, and was now on the run from the law in Canada.

It wasn't uplifting thoughts, certainly, but it was something she had to come to terms with herself. Only a moron clung to things which were verifiably false. And the step down from idiot to moron was not one that Delilah was willing to entertain.

She also thought about her sisters. Wondered if the news of her bout of insanity had reached them yet. If they had given their 'interviews' to their local media outlets and police departments. If they still had their incoming calls being monitored (which most police were told to never openly admit that they did). If they were, on the root of things, alright.

Delilah got snapped in the cheek by a tree-branch and that pulled her out of her doldrums. She was giving them both entirely too little credit. Mary and Ahmed were probably going through their lives slightly bemused and aghast that their stolid and self-controlled sister (or sister-in-law) had done something so obviously and unforgivably stupid. And Judith? Judith was probably waiting to give Delilah an either virtual or in-person high-five for coming around to her particularly anarchistic method of thinking, and killing cops in truth while she did so only with rhetoric.

They'd be fine. They'd all be fine. And Shithead got exactly as much consideration with this line of thought that he deserved; essentially none.

The path she was walking suddenly opened on a parking lot to one of the many churches that peppered this region. It seemed there was one for ever dozen people, near enough. This one was flat and spread out, not soaring like many churches did, but having the telltale steeple nevertheless. The sign marked it as a Baptist church. And the parking lot was full.

Which was a bit odd, for 2 PM on a Thursday.

Delilah considered walking further, into the town proper, but something forestalled her. She turned, and started toward the nearest wall.

She didn't do much to conceal herself, because skulking around at 2PM on a Thursday was every bit as odd as having this kind of congregation at such at time. But still, she paused to loop wide in her path, glancing into the windows of the congregation hall. And when she did, she paused for a moment.

The pews were filled with people, as could be expected, but there was someone walking the aisle who wore not the conservative clothing of a preacher or the vestments of a priest, but something like a cloak of black feathers, with a plague-doctor mask concealing their face.

Okay. She'd heard of snake-handling denominations, but this was a bit odd.

Delilah said nothing, heading along the building until she reached an emergency exit, which was propped open with a cinder block.

"Blessed be they who live in this, our Perfect World!" the masked, feather-cloaked one declared. "For all sins are washed away through Good Deeds and Right Action, actions that align with the Will of our Maker and the one who sets our paths through life! To stand here in our Perfect World is to be without disorder, to be without doubt! Who here has heard the call and sees the path?"

"I see the path!" a raw-boned, older looking man said, rising to his feet.

"Then tell us your path, brother," the crow-pontiff said.

"I've been tormented for years over all the choices I could have made, all the opportunities I've missed. All the regrets that dragged me down and chained me to my misery," the man said. But then he raised up his hands in supplication, his voice growing exultant. "But then I found the words of the Ministry and I am set free! I had no choice! It was all according to His plan, and I have the place He wanted for me in his Perfect World!"

"Blessed shall ye be who hath no choice," the crow-pontiff intoned.

"Blessed shall ye be," the crowd echoed.

"Blessed shall ye be, who follow the path laid by our Creator, who lives in Heaven, who has declared all and foreseen all. Who has built our Perfect World in accordance to His perfect design," the crow-pontiff said. "Blessed shall ye be, who has cast aside doubt and regret, for these are useless things before the might and glory of our Lord God."

"Blessed shall ye be," the crowd intoned in response. So no 'Amen's in this church?

"Father Raven?" a tentative voice came in the moment of silence after the crowd's litany.

"What is it, young sister?" Father Raven, as he was called, said while quickly striding through the crowds to come to a place far closer to Delilah's spying place than she was truly comfortable. Delilah ducked back around out of eye-shot, but kept her ear open.

"I still don't understand… I don't know what my place is, or what I'm supposed to do! How can I just… trust that I'm on the path."

"You are young, yet, child," Father Raven said. "And you are weak in faith. But faith is a seed, one that though small in its beginnings can grow a great and mighty tree. Have faith that, no matter how shrouded your future appears, you are on the path. And when your faith wavers, know that your community has faith in you. That I have faith in you."

What the fuck was this? Delilah didn't say anything, just listening as the crowd began to grow murmurous.

"Since the hour is getting long and you all are getting restless, go out and walk your paths, free from the weight of regret and doubt. You are in the most ideal of worlds, and your path was the only one you have. Go in peace. Go in sanity."

And with that, Delilah could hear people getting up and making for the doors that lead out the 'front' of the chapel, well away from where she was. She pulled out her phone, but scowled at it showing that she had zero bars of cell-service. Here in Alabama it was so damned random whether you had service or not. Only Hare's special toy always had reception, but according to him it wouldn't be wise to give everybody one of them. Proprietary technology not to be released to the public, or some such nonsense.

In the moment she was torn. On one hand, this was weird. But the fact was she'd seen weirder in Florida as they were getting ready to putter out to Alabama. She took a few deep breaths, estimating a bit of time, then leaned to peek inside the building again.

A plague mask was staring directly back out at her.

She backed away with a yelp and brought up her fists, only just managing not to activate her Elohim array.

"I thought I saw somebody peering in on our sermon," Father Raven said, as he pushed the door open, taking one step outside and staying three meters from her; he reached up and undid the clasp holding the black-feather cloak onto his shoulders, quickly sweeping it off and showing that under it he was wearing a pale blue business shirt, and his slacks were neatly pressed with a crease. "I don't keep that door open for nothing, young woman. If you'd wanted to listen, there are more than enough seats."

"What was that?" Delilah demanded. She pointed at the plague doctor mask he still wore. "What is all of that!"

"Symbols," Father Raven said. Then he reached up and pulled the mask off, showcasing spectacles, a hawkish nose, and stubble as though he'd forgotten to shave both today and yesterday. "The locals are used to a very particular flavor of sermon, one that values spectacle and bombast over substance. If I want to hold their attention, I have to do something bombastic, and I find raising my voice to somewhat strain my throat," he said. Now, despite the fact that he had a plague mask in one hand and a cloak of black feathers tucked under an arm, he looked like he probably worked at a tax-center or something.

"So you dress up like a crow and sermonize to them?" she asked.

"In a word, yes," Father Raven answered. He transferred the mask to the arm holding his cloak, then extended his now open palm toward her. "Call me…"

"Father Raven, yes I heard that," Delilah said, her fists starting to lower.

"No, I was going to say call me Bobby," he said. "Bobby Corff."

"Right. Bobby," Delilah said. "So… why exactly are you doing baptist sermons dressed like a bird?"

"I just told you," Corff said.

"No, you told me why you dressed up. I'm asking why you dressed up as a bird," she said. Corff finally dropped his hand, as it was clear that she wasn't going to shake it.

"Corvids are the cleverest birds in the skies. Some say parrots are smarter, but I would dispute that any day," Corff said. "If I want to spread a useful message, I'd rather have a symbol that speaks to wisdom than to extravagance."

"Why not an owl, then?" she asked the obvious. Corff blinked at her.

"...because until just now it hadn't crossed my mind," he admitted, looking slightly shame-faced. He sighed and shrugged. "And at this point, it's a bit too late to change my 'character'. I spent two hundred dollars getting this mask made properly from an SCA vendor in Birmingham. I will be blasted to only put this thing on at Halloween."

"Right," she said.

"You were brought here for a reason. You have that thought in your head," Corff said. Delilah leaned away from him. "Don't be so surprised. I minister to hundreds of souls. I can spot when one is in need of pastoral care."

"No thanks. I'm not in your denomination," she said.

"Ehhh," Corff shrugged. "Denomination is an artificial construct, created by certain higher-echelon individuals to keep the truth away from those in a position to minister it to those who need most to hear it."

"And the truth being?" she asked, inching a step back.

"That all denominations are one," Corff said. "There is no split between Baptists and Anabaptists. Or between they and Lutherans and Methodists, or even between any of them and the Catholics. We all live in the same world, crafted by the hand of the same benevolent and all-knowing God. To claim that we are not brothers and sisters is to create distinctions without difference."

"You must not be popular with the Presbyterians," Delilah said with a wry chuckle.

"I'm sure if they knew about me they would be rather furious with my message," Corff said. "Men are not perfect. They are flawed vessels piloting through waters that they do not know. Some have a bit more light to chart their path by, but all are as blind before God. God made a course for all of us. A perfect path, in a perfect world. And all we must do is trust in it, and follow it."

"I wouldn't rush to call this world perfect," Delilah said.

"Maybe not. But in time you'll come to see how much better than the alternatives it is," Corff said. Then he turned and walked toward the parking lot on the grass at the side of the chapel. "I have a feeling that the paths you and I walk will cross again. Until then, you have yourself a blissful life."

"Yeah. Have fun with that," she said. What a weirdo.

She waited until he vanished around the side of the building, then peeked within once more. The only person left inside was an old woman, stooped and walking slowly with a mop-and-bucket essentially serving as a walker. She didn't even seem to notice Delilah looking at her; she just started mopping the spaces between the seats.

Delilah wagered that in an hour, it'd be like this whole sermon had never taken place.

She shook her head. She'd never had a head for religiosity. Shithead had tried to hammer an internally-incoherent mash of political and religious extremism into her brain at an old enough age that she was able to quickly pick apart why it didn't work instead of unthinkingly digesting it, and ever since, she was consigned eternally into the legions of the quietly faithless. This was all just pomp and ceremony to her. She felt no draw to it. It was forever a strange ritual that she would be ejected to the outside of.

Delilah puffed out a breath and rolled her eyes, walking the other way to the 'back' of the chapel and moving toward Evergreen's town-proper. As she reached the road, her phone suddenly buzzed, and she checked it to find that she suddenly had a missed call and two texts from Hare. She read them quickly. No voice-mail, because Hare never bothered with them. The first message was essentially complaining about the state of the world that lack of reception existed in any part of the world, let alone the United States, until he hit her phone's character limit. It was essentially a small novel of anachronism-bitching.

The second was a bit more concerning.

'I've been sending texts to Lu for a half hour now. I know she's in town. Check to see if she needs help with something. It's unlike her to ignore me.'

Well, that was a call to action, now wasn't it? Delilah sighed, putting her phone away in a pocket. It was one of the great upsides of the Torq that Hare had produced for them; never needing to be a slave to 'feminine fashion' again, and subjected to such things as unspeakably thin layers, constant ripping any time she did something physical, and a distinct lack of pockets. She had made it this far in her life without carrying around a purse. She would be damned if Alabama broke that streak.

It didn't even occur to her that the entire spectacle and conversation she had should have been far more alarming than it ended up being. And it faded from her conscious memory far faster than such an event should have.

When she reached the main drag of Evergreen, the whole chapel-thing was firmly in her rear-view mirror. There were a few people out and about, though the combined small size of the town and the awkward afternoon hour meant that most people were off the road that served as an ersatz main-street. She walked, and looked at buildings as she passed them. Mattress store? No. Lu would have no reason to go into one of those. Auto parts store? Same reasoning. Second mattress store? That got Delilah to pause for a moment and look back at the other mattress store she just walked past, confirming that there were two of the same brand of store exactly two lots away from each other, which seemed a supremely stupid idea, fiscally.

She gave her head a shake. During the walk here, she passed a Dollar General, a Dollar Family, and a Dollar Club, which were essentially next door to each other. Whether a facet of Americana or just lackadaisical town planning, they would do what they would do, common sense be damned.

The pharmacy caught her attention, her gut telling her to stop in her transit of the town. She didn't like to admit to heeding her hunches as much as she did. She was a distinctly rational person at her core, and hunches were just magical thinking wrapped around instincts. But the thing was, instincts were installed into the human psyche as deeply as they were for a reason. That reason in the modern age was often silly and counterproductive, but they still had reason. Still, she found herself arrested in her movement, eyes narrowing at the pharmacy.

Well. Given she was told to canvass an area of several square miles, why not here first?

Her instincts twigged again when she entered the building, and saw taxidermied crows hanging from the ceiling. Ordinarily, chain-pharmacies like this one did not abet such 'personalization' of their stores. She then turned her head a bit to the left, and saw an entire rack – unlocked and open to the public – selling hunting rifles and shotguns. In a pharmacy.

America was fucking weird.

She was at least pleased to see that while the guns were on a shelf for a person to grab in passing, the ammunition was at least behind the counter next to the array of cigarettes. There was also an entire wall of things that were touted as cures for the recent pandemic that had made 2020 and 2021 so goddamned miserable. None of them were notably 'getting vaccinated', 'avoiding close contact', or 'covering your goddamned mouth when you cough'. She paused before one of them, carefully peeling away the sloppy sticker on the plastic, revealing a symbol denoting the compounds in the jug were both highly poisonous and slightly corrosive.

Then Delilah had a moment of realization, something sneaking up and occurring to her now. There were no signs for the election that these people had just had still standing. Ordinarily, one party in particular kept them up as a sort of totem against the world leaving them behind, or as an overbearing statement that they were supreme and all defection from them would be punished. And the entire walk over, Delilah had not seen a single sign at all. Not one knocked onto the grass, not one dug into an abandoned front-yard, not a single tattered remnant hanging from a building-side.

Delilah gave a moment of thought to that. Political disengagement might explain it. But for an entire town to be so apathetic? Strange.

She walked the aisles, and then almost walked past the one containing Lu as her mind, grappling with the oddity of this town (atop all of the other oddities that she'd been encountering) almost overlooked her.

Delilah started down the aisle, and was about to say something to Lu when she had her instincts chime in again, silencing her and slowing her two meters out from Lu. Lu was staring at a box of allergy medication, from the look of it. And she was staring at it as though it contained the secrets of reality. No. No, she wasn't looking at it. She was staring through it, and through the world beyond, her gaze locked somewhere on the far side of infinity.

She occasional muttered something. Disjointed words, as though strange things arose in her stream of consciousness and she didn't elucidate a tenth of them so the rest were just swept down the river.

Lu seemed distressed. And nobody here seemed to care.

"Lu? Are you alright?" Delilah asked.

Lu didn't answer her.

Delilah stepped closer, and gave the woman's arm a jostle. It didn't do anything to pull her attention to the here and the now. She then looked down at the box, and closed her own hand over it, stripping it out of Lu's grasp.

"Hypnogamma," Lu said, and then she started back, almost backpedaling into the racks behind her, glancing around as though shocked to find herself here. Delilah caught her before she caused a spill of nasal-sprays and eye-drops by catching her shoulder. Lu blinked a few times, seeming to see her surroundings for the first time in a sense of jamais-vu. "Delilah?"

"You haven't been answering Hare's calls," Delilah said. Lu still had a stunned look on her face, reaching for several of her outfit's pockets before finding the one that had her phone in it. That, too, brought a sense of alarm to the former officer; Lu always knew exactly where everything was. She was not the kind to lose something on her own person. She glanced at the thing for a moment, as though summoning up how to use it, before she opened it – on her second try, all the more concerningly – and saw that Delilah was not simply spouting wind.

"Right. Hare. Sorry," she said, sounding distracted.

"Lu?" Delilah said. She then held Lu still as she tried to put the box of pills back. "Lu. What was that?"

"Nothing. It wasn't anything of note," she lied poorly.

"Lu, if you're going to try to feed bullshit to me, at least put some salt and pepper on it," Delilah said. "You were completely out of it. Are you supposed to be… I don't know, on some kind of medication?"

"Strictly, yes. Practically, no," Lu said.

"Christ almighty," Delilah muttered. "How often do you get like this when we're not paying attention? Honestly, now, Lu."

"Less than I used to," Lu said. "It's easier not to get pulled into another world than it was before. This was… yes, I think this was the first time I've lost my way since… well, a couple weeks after Sam died."

"I take it Sam was a big part of pulling you back," Delilah muttered, guiding Lu out of the aisle, ignoring the looks that the shelf-stocker was giving the two women who had come in, acted very suspiciously, and then left.

"He always found me when I was… missing," Lu said, her head hanging as though in shame.

"And you hated that you couldn't do it yourself," Delilah offered.

"I found ways to. I just didn't want to be a burden on him. He had so much more to worry about. Bigger things," Lu said. "I wasn't his only friend. But he was mine."

"Considering what I saw in that other place in Florida…"

"Beauty is not a blessing," Lu cut her off. "Especially not when every other part of you is broken. I was not well, Delilah. In my mind."

And at that, Delilah was brought silent. Imagining somebody who looked better than any triumphant group of two hundred supermodels living with severe mental illness put a lot of weight onto one arm of the scale. "How long? How long have you been ill?" Delilah asked.

"Since I was a child," she said. "Or I think I was. That was seven worlds ago, now. It took a long time before I found bedrock, and it was Sam who helped me find it. Something that didn't shift. Something solid and firm. It wasn't good. It was cold. There were cockroaches and rats and black-mold, unemployment benefits were… meagre… and there was a… a landlord. A landlord who is fucking dead now. And good fucking riddance."

The vehemence she put into that last one told Delilah all that she needed to know about the landlord's sins. "Where was this?" Delilah asked.

"Halifax," she said.

"Get outta town," Delilah said.

"I did note how statistically unlikely it was that Hare would find two soul-bleeding women who dwelt within a half-kilometer of each other. He just laughed and said 'that how it be sometimes'," Lu said. She took a shuddering breath, then nodded, as though she finally were sure what she was seeing was actually there again. Her tentative steps became more purposeful, now that she seemed more confident that the ground would be there when her soles hit the concrete. "Alright. What did I miss?"

"Late Thanksgiving via Hare," Delilah said.

"Oh. That'll be nice," Lu said.

As they walked away, a few people on the streets and in the windows of storefronts watched the backs of their heads, nodding in contentment at something set right.


The proximity of the Heterax was digging underneath Vera's skin. If even a quarter of the stories that were told from the course of Hell's long history were accurate, then they were some of the most dangerous, focused, and ardent enemies of her people, well above the Elder Devils who were now essentially a race of endlings, a scant few thousand left of their once billions. Well above the fiends who swarmed into their place; well above anything else.

While it was true that human fire was utterly toothless against the imp, there were still ways to make an imp sweat. And what naked heat failed, nerves picked up the slack. She summoned up her memories of the stories of the last Heterax Horde, and if she were right, it had to have been hundreds of years ago. With the luck of imps being what it was, that meant that they were far overdue for another one to show up.

"Why are you up here fussing over trimmings when there are monsters in the shadows?" she demanded of Hare, who was leaning against a countertop with a pressed look on his face.

"I've been actively looking into those shadows for the last twenty days, near enough," Hare muttered. "Something about this is just… off."

"Off," she repeated.

"Yes. The whole situation is off. For one thing, Heterax infest population centers, not tiny towns out in the sticks," Hare said.

"The Heterax first came into Hell during the Great Bleeding, during the Rotten Kings Dynastic Period," Vera said, keeping her tone patient. "And they essentially stayed out of Pridefall, the then-capitol of the Ring, which even in those ancient days had populations of near a million."

"See? That's unusual!"

"And in the modern, Luciferean Age," Vera continued, "there has never been a case of a Heterax found in Lucifer's nascent Pentagram City, which at its height in 1930 had a population of one billion."

Hare nodded grimly. "And that is so out of character for them. They usually dig into the darkest recesses of a metropolis, then sift out the most credulous, most alienated, and most quietly violent, building up groups of fifty to a hundred brain-washed lunatics out of a population of five hundred thousand."

"It seems terribly inefficient, to accept only one in ten thousand when more are available," Vera said. "And why should they not infest an insular, separated community more fully?"

"Because we hunt them down and kill them, obviously," Hare said.

"If the effectiveness we've shown in the last twenty days is indicative of your people's hunt for your Heterax, then I would say that they are very safe indeed."

"Great. First One gives me attitude, and now my mercenary does too," Hare sighed. Vera narrowed her eyes, because he sounded less angry than defeated by that. She was about to say something but a buzzing sound hit the air, and Hare opened the stove to remove a roaster – using his bare hands, as an imp would – and plunking it onto a metal separator onto the counter.

"Are we, at this point, even sure that we each call the same beast 'Heterax'?" Vera asked.

"Your description of them is exactly how I would describe them to somebody who had never encountered them," Hare said. He puffed out a breath, brow furrowing. "...there's something about this infestation that's bucking trends. And I don't know what it is, not exactly."

"You don't say," Vera said, pulling herself up the stool that sat beside a mostly crumbled plastic phone that was bolted to the wall. "Is this related in some way to how all of your enemies seem twisted and grotesque to your observations?"

"Yes," Hare said. "I don't know the mechanism exactly, not yet, but I am sure that they're mutated the same way The Brood is, the same way the Hag Star are, and the same way that the Gravekind are. The problem is that there's no one factor that could twist all of those things at the same time. They all follow fundamentally different biological, electrochemical, and psychological rules! There's no one variable that, through its alteration it could change every single one of them… except…" Hare trailed off.

"Except for what?" Vera pressed.

"The Cognoscenti are still Cognoscenti," he said. He blinked a few times, a brightness coming to his face as he idly turned down the heat of a pot that was starting to overboil. "And I think that they might be the cock-up that breaks the Enigma Code."

"The what now?"

"Alright, history lesson for the human world," Hare said, enthusiasm replacing frustration on his face. "During the middle of the 20th century, there was a massive war between two power blocs. And one bloc developed an encryption system for their messages which was thought to be utterly unbreakable, meaning they could give orders with utter impunity, knowing that even if they were intercepted they couldn't be decrypted."

"A useful advantage to have in war, I suppose," Vera said.

"Incredibly. But the thing was, the way that it created this code wasn't by way of mnemonic or by code-book, but by the use of a mechano-electrical device," Hare said. "The Enigma Machine would take messages and encrypt them by using a mechanical algorithm to assign each key-press of the intended message to another letter or number or symbol in the alphabet."

"At random?" Vera asked.

"No, that was the clever trick of it," Hare said, his doldrums cast off as he got enthusiastic with explaination. "The machine was seeded. If you start from the exact same settings and hit the same keys, you will always get the same output. And it also served as the decryption algorithm as well. If you were to set the machine to the same 'seed' that the message was encrypted in, and press the scrambled output, key by key, into the machine, it would output the plain-text version of the message. Which admittedly would have been in German, but considering which side had it that was just perfect."

"I fail to see where this is going," Vera said.

"The code wasn't unbreakable," Hare said. "The original Enigma machines had a flaw in their creation. Due to the way that they generated their algorithm, it couldn't assign a key-stroke to its own letter. If you pressed, say, 'S', it could not return an 'S' in the code. Once their opponents figured that out, and a few other things which were much more technical so I won't get into them, they were able to create an electrical computer that could crunch through possibilities until it found an algorithm matching what the machines were hard-crafted to produce, and then through another crunching calculation figure out what seed each message was being sent with."

"And you believe that the Cognoscenti are an iteration of this same forced-divergence error that these Enigma machines lived and died by," Vera said.

"Yes and no. Later Enigma machines didn't have the flaw, but by then their opponents already had the savvy, technical background, the machine, and codebreaking experience to defeat it," Hare said, giving his head a shake. "But my point is this: the Cognoscenti and the Deus Vox are both from the Empyrean Realms… and yet the Deus Vox were also subject to the same fuckery that every other stripe of Noumenon is. So there has to be some difference between the Cogs and the Vox that can explain why Creation is so fucking weird. Thank you, Vera. You're a spectacular sounding board."

"Pleased to be of service. What is that lovely smell?" she asked.

"Letting the turkey settle before I carve it," Hare said.

"Perhaps I have another data point for you," Vera said. Hare motioned her to continue. "Why is it that they are so vehemently opposed to my race's mere existence?"

"To know the answer to that, I'd need to know more about your race. You're a Vanguard, but they're Noumenon. They should know you better already."

"You keep using that term; we are not the forefront of a great invasion of the realm. We are entrenched members of Hell's population, some fifteen billion strong," Vera noted.

"That you've acclimatized as well to Hell as you have doesn't make your origins any less what they were. You were born from that seething Abyss. Ergo, you're a Vanguard Race."

The door opened before Vera could offer a counterpoint, the two women entering the outwardly-still-ramshackle building, and immediately perking up. "Oooh, something smells good," The human-Fury, Delilah, said. But for a lack of a pair of horns and fire-like hair, she could easily masquerade as one of the native daughters of Wrath. Lu, conversely, had chosen a dumpy and puffy appearance, mundane and utterly lacking the startling grace she'd shown when Vera first encountered her. Still, she was a shape-shifter. She could be whatever she willed that she be.

"Dinner's almost ready to dole. Anything out there I should know about?" Hare said, turning and shutting off heat to his pots.

"Not really," Delilah said. "Why are there so many dollar-stores in this town?"

"A mystery we're not paid to solve," Hare dismissed.

"We're not paid at all," Delilah countered.

"I am!" Vera said happily.

"And when was the last time you spent it on anything?" Delilah asked, wanly.

"I don't need to shop when I can have what glorious bits I wish delivered finished to me. The hunt is not so edifying as the having," Vera said.

"What the shit, is that turkey I smell?" One's voice came from the 'interior' of the house, where the lift to the Den had been secreted. He emerged from the 'laundry room', and took another sniff in the air. "Ain't it like a month early for that?"

"It's late for us," Lu pointed out. "Sorry about going dark there for a second. I completely lost track of time."

"Did you find something worth looking at?" Hare asked, now of her in particular.

"Not really. Just distracted," she said. Hare gave a nod, a certain sadness coming to his eye.

"Ah. Distracted. Say no more," he said. "What about you, One?"

"I did some talkin' at the Sheriff's office," One said. "And there's nothin' tying the dead guy to anything. Guy was divorced, his wife had custody, but he didn't seem depressed about it. In fact, Greg – the Sheriff, his name is Greg – said that he would have expected Joseph – the guy…"

"The victim is named Joseph, yes, continue," Vera cut in.

"Right," One cleared his throat. "So Greg thought Joseph would have been utterly destroyed by the divorce. Joe and his wife were pretty much inseparable growin' up. And he was always bragging on his daughter. So when she cheats on him, splits, and takes the kid, Greg thought that Joe was gonna melt the fuck down. But no. He just keeps on like everything's golden. And he fuckin' loved his kid."

"Maybe there was more going on behind the scenes that 'Greg' didn't know about," Hare offered.

"I asked that. And as far as Greg can tell, this was the worst case scenario, like someone was specifically tryin' to destroy this guy. And he didn't even care," One said. Hare frowned for a moment.

"Did the victim recently catch religion? Start espousing some fringe religious beliefs? Agitate for non-specific but violent change?"

"No, no and no," One said, leaning close to the turkey roaster and taking a deep whiff. He gave a contented nod at that. "Joe was always a bible-thumpah. So unless these Heterax assholes was here forty years ago, that's out. And he's just another fuckin' Baptist in a state polluted with 'em."

"And he didn't even own a gun," Delilah finished One's point.

"Yet the magic collapsed onto him," Vera said, a pensive look on her face. "You were right in that this is a troublesome enigma. "Unless…"

"Unless what?" Hare asked. Vera started, then shrugged, sighing.

"Frankly, I haven't enough concrete to anchor that unless," Vera admitted. "Just a feeling that something obvious is being missed."

"Well, we're not leaving until the Icon is ground into dust," Hare said. "Vera, can you take a shift in the Exploratorium? Maybe new, inhuman eyes will shake something loose from the raw data."

"You finally trust a mercenary with the access to your deepest technologies? How bold," Vera said.

"The 'Torium ain't my 'deepest technology' by a half," Hare said. "It's just a very finely tuned set of… you know what, I'm sure you don't care. Yes, I am. I'm paying you enough that you should start branching out so that you earn that pay. There's not very much in there you can use to actively hurt us, after all."

"I feel so loved," Vera said flatly.

Hare hefted one of the pots over to the sink and dumped off the water, before handing it over to Delilah along with a potato-smasher. "Let's not get discouraged by this," Hare said. "There's a reason why most Oedipeans call Heterax missions 'Snipe-hunts'. I knew of one Cell in Vienna that spent two years looking for an Icon of Annihilation, but they finally got it."

"Is that what we're looking at, Hare?" she asked.

"The timeframe or the Icon? Because I hope not in either case," Hare said. "The Icon of Annihilation is something of a worst-case scenario. That thing's Resonance is higher than mine. I'm thinking that we're probably looking at either an Icon of Hatred or an Icon of Atrophy. I'm hoping Hatred. Hatred's easier to spot, and can't make Ministers as powerful as Atrophy can."

"So this is just what we do? We grind away at problems until something shakes loose?" Delilah asked, as she mashed potatoes.

"Typically, yes. There isn't a Cell in existence which operates at the rate we did when you all got roped in. Now settle in, one, set out the plates, and let's have that great North American excuse to consume way too much food in the autumnal season."

Vera, though, looked to Lu, who had been quiet this entire interaction, and hopped off of her spot to join the quiet woman. "I can see a fracture in your mind again, sorcerer," Vera said.

"What?" Lu blinked down at her.

"Did your 'incident of no importance' happen to be another transition of realities?" Vera asked, as Hare and the other humans got to work finishing the prep-work for their feast.

"Not the way it was the first time," Lu said. "More like the old days, when only my mind went…"

"Ah. I see. You have a madness afflicted to you," Vera said. Lu's brow drew down. "Don't be so sensitive; all of the best mages do."

"You seem fairly sane," Lu said with impugning tone.

"I am not the best of mages," Vera said without ego.

"How about we just don't talk about this?" Lu asked.

"No, we will talk about it if and when it is relevant," Vera said. "And at the moment, merely knowing that there's an issue is sufficient to my requirements. Tell me… when you were wandering, what did you see?"

Lu blinked a few times, and then sighed, seeming to deflate. "I saw… snow. Here, there was snow. And concrete cracked by artillery shells, never fixed. Signs in French. It doesn't make any sense now. It was probably why it was so easy for Delilah to pull me back."

"So you say," Vera said. A seer in their midst could be a boon unequaled, considering the last genuine seer-of-the-ways that the impish race had produced died in 1981. She would have to find ways to cultivate this in Lu, without Lu losing her way to her madness. And if nothing else, she had nothing but time right now.

The Heterax might be out there, dug in and waiting, but that meant that they weren't sending people to kill her. Which gave Vera time to prepare for them.


To Be Continued


Heterax Icon

Simultaneously functioning both as the living body of a given Heterax infestation, and their most powerful tool, an Icon is made of Harmony-attuned detritus from actions used to upset the flow of cause-to-effect in select ways. They can be made of anything from bone, to energy dense minerals and crystals, to objects used to inflict disharmony upon society-at-large, but their creation charges each of them with the Synergy of the realms of the Firmament such that they can begin to locally override causality and install what all Heterax want; absolute dominion over which causes lead to what effects.

The Icon, once formed, comes to a strange sort of double-life, both as the object-in-being, and as the idea behind the icon. Icons are notable as having immense power for their given Resonances. Serving as Cultivators for the Heterax, Icons being tasked with empowering the hordes of Ministers would ordinarily be limited to creating Proxies of a Resonance lower than their own, as all other Cultivators do. However, because of their unorthodox means of creation, and the Synergy they connect to, an Icon can produce a Proxy as powerful as the Icon itself, at an equal Resonance. Icons tend to have shockingly powerful guardians, to make up for the fact that the Icon, being 'living object', can do very little to defend itself.

Little, but not nothing. As well as creating Proxies of unrivaled relative puissance, every Icon in its active form emits an aura around itself, one that is subtle enough that only the most sensitive perspecta can detect it. This Aura both empowers its guardians, and hampers (if not outright cripples) its enemies. The effects of the aura can do everything from give its defenders immunity to flame and cause the Proxies to fight to their bitter end with their morale supplementing their bodily-integrity, to install ruinous touch to the Proxy against any who they strike. And invaders can often find themselves overwhelmed by lunatic rage, madness, terror, or critical distraction. And the aura has a lingering function, clinging to both victims and guardians for a short period, or until the Icon is itself destroyed.

Being a 'living object', Heterax are easy to damage and deactivate but difficult to completely destroy. They seem to be vulnerable to powerful electrical discharges however, as such discharges overwhelm the alien energies which bind together the Icon and allow it to infest its Harmonious infection into reality.

-'The Noumenon Threat, A Primer', by Arthur Flagstaff, New Philadelphia Press, published 2041