"One who meets a person worthy of speaking to but does not, misses a great opportunity. To speak with those not worthy of speaking to is to waste words." - The Gospel of Matthew


...Or only the earth.

A chill brought the hairs of Sydney's spine to stand on end. It was the kind of late winter's morning where the sun began to kiss the lip of the horizon at the hour where breath obscured the faces of pedestrians in well-punctuated clouds of condensation. The concrete heart of the city was helpless to thermoregulate nearly as well as the bush of the basin two centuries prior, and the people were left to see to maintenance of normothermia in their own private ways. In winters past, Marie Crawford would take to donning her school jacket as in the habit of any sensible thirteen-through-seventeen year old. This was no longer the case; in the time since, the masochistically-inclined merit of complaining bitterly of her own discomfort rather than ameliorating it had become apparent to her, and she took to dressing no differently than in mornings ten kelvins the superior of the concurrent.

Sonia rolled a fresh spliff, remembered her promise of abstinence, sighed, tucked it into her pocket.

"So I got to thinking. Now," the hand-form with which she conducted the symphony of conversation was marked by an unusual outward inclination of the first knuckles of the digitī secundus et tertius, diverging at slight angles one might find in a typical tobacconalian's habit sooner than a woman of Sonia's inclination, from whom the expected table manner would have been better suited by a thumb-and-forefinger bullhorn, "when it comes to Crawfordological analysis, I'm not the heaviest ball in the sack-"

"That's not a thing. Also, ew?"

"-but I have been capital-h capital-t Having Thoughts about what you were saying about your power."

"What was I saying about my power?"

"I don't know. Maybe it's what you weren't saying. Maybe it's something someone else said? The thing about ghosts."

"Yeah, I... don't think I've said anything to you about ghosts."

"Something about being haunted, though, right? I mean haunted basically equals ghosts."

"Does it? I mean you can be haunted by other stuff, too. Regrets. Mistakes."

"Those are kinds of ghosts."

"Macquarie's crush on me."

"That's a ghost in the sense that it's deceased. I think you trying to gouge her brains out might have turned her off?"

"Thank God."

"You'd hope so, anyway. Thing is, though, you basically hear stories of ghosts as spirits with unfinished business. Whatever 'comes after' aside, you sort of have to admit that's a bit of a weird idea."

"In what sense?"

"Well, what's the threshold for lingering regrets? Nobody carks it with nil to their name, ay?"

"I think it's funny that you say 'carks it'. Fearno says 'carks it'."

"Yeah. Take it from me, Marie, you'll pick it up, too. She gets all up in your vocabulary like that. But okay. That aside, what about... spirits of the deceased who wrap up their business and then just wanna stick around. What about them? Am I expected to believe there's none like that? Hell, I know if I had a choice between here and an afterlife... well, actually. Maybe fricken' Heaven or whatever has that fish and chippie that does those really crispy squid rings like the street down from the Citadel? But otherwise I'd stay here."

"How many theological hypotheses do you think have leaned on the nature of fish and chip shops?"

"In history?" Sonia sighed, shrugged, tossed her joint into a public bin they passed, even though she had, of course, only been carrying an illusory one the entire time. "Oh... reckon double digits? But more than you think."

"I'm sorry, I feel like we're circumnavigating the perpendicular plane to an axis on which you were going to make a point."

"Hm? Shit. Doesn't sound like me."

"Gh-"

"Ghosts! Yeah. I think, like, culturally, we're projecting all our regrets onto the deceased, you know. Hoping they regret it too. Regret shit strong enough to transcend life and death. But I think that's all our idea of a ghost really is. A regret."

"Do you think that factors into my powers?"

"Well, they're your powers. I can't exactly know anything about them that you don't. But it feels weird, don't you reckon, to act like we're being followed around by strange presences, when a haunting's actually..."

"Absences."

"Yeah. Shit that you lost, 'n' stuff. Marie? Marie?"

"Hm." She stopped at the zebra crossing, but made no motion to the button on the lights.

Sonia stopped too. "What are you thinkin'?"

"I don't know. I guess that just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I thought this was all about... God, who even knows at this point. Trying to fill a hole in my heart, maybe?"

"Phoebs tell ya that?"

"Yeah."

"Hah. Most Deckard thing I've ever heard be said. You know, you're like her in a lot of ways."

"Is that... good...?"

"See? She'd have asked that too."


Wai-Fong found Divineaux easily enough, though in the underbelly of Hong Kong, that could mean anything from "within two minutes" to "at wit's end, she arrived at its doorstep by virtue of arcane miracle". It hardly mattered which, because the process of finding the club was not terribly interesting, especially not in considering that which would transpire once inside.

It was 5:02 P.M.. There was no queue; if anyone was leaving work and making a beeline for the club, which was already an 'if' of indeterminate scale, they would only have begun to step out the door now. There was already a bouncer out the front nonetheless, which gave the establishment an air of professionalism it had not earned, and in fact had not tried to earn.

There was a sign above the bouncer, clearly dressed up to look as if it were a conduit for neon lightworks in the later hours, with its genuine hollowness betrayed only by the quantity of insects in various states of unceremonious decomposition. A shame, too – its name, for the purpose of sleaze optimisation, had been written in Latin text, in the quality of cursive which renders its lowercase x as two convex curves rested against one another. Wai-Fong couldn't articulate why this was a shame, but she did know for a fact that it was one.

"Sorry," the bouncer informed her with a subtle gesture to Kim-Wan, only perceptible by the shift in gravitational lensing that surrounded his tremendous biceps, "I can't let kids in here." Then, with another gesture to Professor Chang, "Or nerds."

Wai-Fong flashed the business card at him.

"Oh. Did she send for you? Right this way, then. And... condolences in advance."

He ushered them indoors, down a half-flight of stairs which suggested some architectural discomfort vis-a-vis sandwiching the main floor between the first floor above it (actually owned by the back end of an art gallery on the next street over) and the earth below. It gave the whole building the impression of a casket which nobody had bothered to bury in totality. The actual club - although it bore too many tables where a stage should have been to be comfortably called a club, but not nearly enough to be called a bar - was dimly lit in a way which made it look out of its natural habitat viewed through anything but early 1990's film grain. The music, at amplitudes to bid the floor to hum, could conjure clearly in one's mind the image of some record label executive erratically gesticulating with a cigar: "You ever notice how kids nowadays keep pumping that trance music? Shit's way too loud, get it, ehhh, some clean ol' jazz guitar or something. Teenagers and stuff are into that, right?"

And they were, mind, but the track never charted. The DJ believed himself a trendsetter in spinning this number for Divineaux's patrons, but the matter was that his taste in music was unbearably dull.

The bouncer escorted the trio to a small door at the back, taking care to constantly stand between Kim-Wan and a long-haired woman dancing on a table, loudly repeating, "DO NOT LOOK OVER HERE IF YOU ARE BELOW THE AGE OF MAJORITY." This turned the act of crossing the room into something more of a funeral march, and if the three distinguished guests had any idea what the Professor was like, it would have felt like one too.

A thin young woman whose face was marked not so much by the chronic gaiety of smile lines as they were evil grin lines ushered them in. Her back room was comically ornate - there, at its heart, was a dark hardwood desk she never sat behind, because the space beneath it only came up two centimetres above her knees; behind it, a broad (in dimension and in definition) fireplace of black wrought iron in which sat a small portable television displaying video of a fire; upon a narrow Bakelite credenza to its side were two stationery-chain-store paper trays (despite their loose-change price tag, stolen from an office one of Divineaux's employees was laid off from), each with their contents appearing to be held down by a salt and pepper shaker in place of a paperweight, inbox and outbox respectively, but on closer inspection these were in fact paperweights, and contained no seasonings at all.

Everything in the room was useless and existed only to imply status, but everything in the room was so cheap as to have none. The most expensive commercially available product in the room was a powdered mixture of various synthetic organic compounds and glass, currently located inside the room's owner's right nostril.

"You must be Yuen Wai-Fong."

Wai-Fong stood to attention. "Yes."

"And are you?"

"Well... yes."

"Come in."


Lara flinched to discover a hand placed firmly upon her shoulder. Too profoundly was she resigned to existence as a nonentity now that the prospect of her discovery appeared outside the sphere of possibility for some time now. Not even she had found herself.

She had taken to hiding under the guise of a sports bar's patron, and it didn't matter which. The kind pretending to be the late eighties when the late eighties was pretending to be the early sixties. The kind with no windows, and with hanging plants at the front, so that its customers' crepuscular habits overlapped immaculately with those of laying mosquitoes. The important thing to understand is that these places were all exactly the same, and also that they were anathema to Hope Fearnley.

Not simply because Fearnley had taken to teetotalling, although that certainly changed things. More because she was no run-of-the-mill zealous sports fan - she was a zealous sports fan who happened to be a butch lesbian, which meant that:

1. Her opinions and attitudes were crafted of a stoic zealotry no mortal weapon could pierce, forged in a flame of Bechdelian flamboyance, and

2. They were all completely correct. Stances fluked with crystal clarity by the aleatoric rationale of a countrysider's great-uncle a few too many under the table came to her fully realised like the Athena-form in her epoch of sobriety.

To condemn herself, as it became apparent she was doing now, to the atmosphere of the sports bar would call to Fearnley's mind an adage misattributed to Einstein, pertinent to precisely two infinite things.

It did, in fact, call to Fearnley's mind that very adage.

Lara flinched to discover a hand placed firmly upon her shoulder. She dreaded to think that it might belong to Hope Fearnley which, as is obvious by this point, it did. Worse still, it was attached to the woman herself.

"How's things, Macca?"

"Don't start with me."

"Sorry, mate. You're nicked."

Lara lifted her chin and squinted. A burning-out incandescent light formed an uncomfortable nimbus behind Hope's head. Lara sat up at this, because she was of an altitudinally-inclined physique. Watching Hope from such an angle was only possible as a consequence of her own slouching. Forget that for a moment, the path the light played through her dark curls could remind Lara that love was real, or-

"What? Crawford's here too?"

All three parties rolled their eyes, each for entirely different reasons.

"Look, Fearnley. I dunno your game here, but I'll come easy no matter what it is you're after. I just have two conditions."

Hope raised an eyebrow. "Bloody hell, alright. And those are?"

Lara pivoted on her barstool until she was facing Hope. It took Hope a half-second in turn to meet her eye dead-on. The corner of Lara's mouth took to smirking like it once had nigh-constantly, when she had an arrière-pensée or twenty in need of masking and/or adumbrating completely behind a miasma of pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain inveiglement and/or a punchable face. She had nothing so in need of belying any longer – the fact of the matter was looking like a smug prick was never a momentary decision: it was a lifestyle choice. "One is that once all's said and done, I'm free to walk. Keep an eye on me, if you gotta, but you can't hold me, and I don't even want to see you waste both of our times trying."

"Uh... yeah. Doable, I reckon."

"Two is that your pet over there is not allowed within five metres of me."

Hope glanced back. "Well?"

"Well...?"

"You heard her, Marie. Off you piss."

She gently shooed her away. All three parties were surprised that it worked, again for entirely different reasons.

Now back to Lara: "Are you sure about that one?"

"Of course. Come on, Fearnley. You've seen what she's capable of."

"Yeah. That's why I'm asking if you think five metres is going to change anything."

Lara did the numbers in silence. The fight where Marie tore away the crown of her own skull gave her a solid estimation of top acceleration from a standing start. How much time would it take Lara to incapacitate her with a circular saw?

"Six metres."

Hope nodded. "Six metres? Six metres. Back you piss, Marie."

She sighed and shuffled two paces her posterior.

"So, Fearnley. What is it you're after, anyway?"

Hope looked around uncertainly. When she spoke next, she kept her head down.

"You told me, back in December, that you were primed to start wielding a 'new kind of magic'. Yeah?"

"That's right."

"How's that coming along?"

Lara grimaced. "Look, knowing what I know now, I honestly don't like the chances."

"And the deeplighters?"

"They can try. And fail, of course. And effect one of the bloodiest epochs of human history as a result. And- sorry, did I say can? I meant will."

"What the f-"

"Ha, believe me, Fearnley. I've been trying to stop this one. Thing is, though, they're getting their resources worldwide. They've got a weapon going around, some kind of prototype gun or something, and I'm led to believe that once it gets to Berlin, that's it. Boom."

"From a single gun?"

"Hey, I dunno. Sounds to me like a load of shit. Sounds to me like the covering-up of something else, or like a bluff to make the reactionaries look more powerful, or really just some kind of posturing. Actually I've been running on the assumption that it is just kind of posturing."

"But you still wanted to stop it?"

Lara grinned, this time with unquestionable authenticity. "World's gonna know my name, Fearnley. For years the Empress's known that if I have to put her in her place for me to get that, I will."

"What's that about not having a chance at your new magic?"

"Hahaha, you think that still matters? I've got something better now. Thanks for this, by the way, Crawford." She flashed the coin of the Brass Knight and blew a kiss.

"Wait, Mari-"

She wasn't listening. Already her hand was raised, and a black tendril coiled from her soul gem and around her arm, ready to extend from her fingertip. "Thanks, I'll have that back now."

Not that this was the first these precise circumstances had arisen, even though the context had been altered by the collective difference in disposition between the two old rivals, from mutual antipathy, to a kiss shared in a moment of weakness, to now restraining new urges to slaughter each other in the street on sight - a task at which they were now both only barely succeeding. This, and perhaps, some would say, the roles of interrogator and interrogatee were the converse on the other side of their death duel, like the inescapable singularity of that fateful - and for our purposes, one we are still getting around to - moment caught threads of destiny as a camera obscura does rays of light. But this was not significant, nor was the principal fact of interrogation in the first place. There was nothing to be achieved in interrogation hence nor thence, when both parties' understanding of the cosmic forces surrounding the coin was so narrow.

Of the two of them, however, only one would die as an immediate result of this inscience.

"Where the fuck did you get this?"

Lara marched over and slapped Marie on the cheek. Marie tasted blood. Once again, her own. Disappointing.

Lara was holding the coin, of course. Marie contemplated at least attempting to kill her for it, and enchanted bindings to the chair and who knew how many Attendants keeping guard just outside be damned she stood a chance and she knew it.

But the time didn't feel right. She would play with her prey a little first.

"Ah. So you know what it is?"

"Of course I know what it is. Now tell me where you got it!"

"You want to know where I got a scale from the Brass Knight, yes?"

"Yes, you absolute protostome."

"A scale."

"Crawford..."

"From the Knight."

"Crawford, there's no way."

"Gosh, yeah, real headscratcher where that could have come from, isn't it?"

"Answer the question. I don't need you alive, you know!"

"Well if you really want to know, I got it from a friend."

Lara's face lightened up. "Oh? And where'd they get it?"

"From the Brass Knight."

"I-"

"Honestly! I'd swear on anything."

"You know what's on here, right?"

Marie didn't answer. Lara doubled over until she was at Marie's eye level.

"You know what's on here?"

"Enlighten me."

"Oh, that's never going to happen. But I can tell you what's etched onto the coin."

"Go on, then."

"The way to defeat the Brass Knight. The failsafe against his plans."

"Like a cheat code?"

Lara stood to her full height and turned the coin over in her fingers. "Less of a cheat code, more like..."

She put maxilla to lower lip and bid the words come to her.

"Mew under the truck."

"Mew under the truck?"

"Mew under the truck."

"I'm not familiar."

Lara pocketed the coin and made to stroll about what could only dodge definition as Marie's carcass by the fact that she was still alive and conscious. "Thank you, Crawford. Cooperative as ever; I give you an analogy like you ask for, and you don't learn anything from it."

"Okay, sorry for not knowing literally everything."

"I'll think about forgiving you."

"So what is...?"

"Mew under the truck? Right, sure. An old Pokémon urban legend. Supposedly, you could acquire this nigh-unobtainable little critter by following this lengthy sequence of rule-bending and power-playing steps. No secret codes or anything, just a course of action equal parts Herculean and unintuitive."

"So...?"

"Well, since you just dumped this in my lap-"

"You stole it from me."

"-I guess the, uh, moral imperative to murder a chaos god and dig up whatever omnipotent little engine makes him tick falls on me."

More concurrently with the sports bar's immediate relevance, she held this to be true. What Marie would go on to find, once she would proceed to the end of the duration between then and now, was nothing so narcissistically enlightened. Rather, what she would find, and with the assumption of concurrent reference frame once again, what she was finding right now, was a steak knife driven through her own palm. She swore and withdrew her darkness.

Lara smirked. "Okay, then. Are we done here?"

Neither of her interrogators said anything. She pocketed the coin again and turned away.

"Macquarie. Macquarie!"

"What now?"

"Mew under the truck. It never actually worked, did it?"

"Not without a bit of rom-hacking."


The Professor led her visitors to her desk, sat down, shuffled a stack of papers together, and hid them away in a drawer. The drawer was meaningless and the pages were blank. She did this for all her visitors.

"So! Welcome to my office."

"Thanks for having us."

"But enough chit-chat. Let me tell you why Hong Kong is the greatest city in the world."

"Wait. Hong Kong is the greatest city in the world?"

The Professor's eyes dilated in a momentary dissolution of nostril-content-fueled reverie. "Yes. Didn't I say that?"

"No, only that you were going to tell us why."

"Okay, so what you've done is interrupted me, then. Is that... is that going to be a thing that happens again?"

"I'd hope not."

"Right... right. Where was- ah! Yes. Let me tell you why Hong Kong is the greatest city in the world." She leaned over her desk, first just her centre of gravity, but then farther until her knee rested on its edge just as would be advised by one perspicacious in appropriate composure for billiards, farther until an extended index finger's proximity to the bridge of Wai-Fong's nose made her a little cross-eyed. "It's because of the efforts of women like you, Yuen."

"Me?"

She retracted mechanically, like the coil of a wound spring, and exhibiting every bit of potential energy to lash out again when next unfettered. Nobody in the room relaxed. "Yeah, you! I mean, here's the thing. You go to any major city on Earth, you find juvenile delinquents." She began pacing around the room. While neither Wai-Fong nor her associates dared to take a step in any direction, they all firmly kept their eyes on the Professor throughout her elliptical orbit. "I've done some reading, Yuen. You've got interesting friends. Your buddies in San Francisco have worked as hired muscle for gangs of magical inclination since ages sixteen and fourteen, and one of your Australian pals built a reputation for shutting down fights in juvenile detention. Any place with a high enough population and you've got kids more or less destined to get into trouble." Her first lap concluded here, but she remained in motion. "Teens succumbing to peer pressure or financial trouble or any number of things today and affiliating themselves with... well." A gesture to the room. "They're going to be tomorrow's thugs, dealers, unlicensed hookers, black-market traders."

Sensing a leading pause, Wai-Fong said, "And this has something to do with me?"

"It has everything to do with you! Young people get into trouble. Look at me. Last year I was a waitress at this place. And don't hit me with any of that 'aren't you a bit young?' crap, I've heard that all before." The professor rocked her head side to side uneasily. "The waitressing job isn't like that, save for a few misogynistic remarks from frustrated patrons. I tell you what was, though."

"What was?"

She stopped and spun on a heel to loom over Wai-Fong. "I'll finish that thought, if that's quite alright with you, Ms. Yuen?"

"Of course, I- I was just-"

"Were you now?"

"Yes."

Three years of recreational dex to her brain like litharge to a water supply, the Professor processed conversations at rates an internally consistent system of logic would have to fight to keep pace with. She put her hands together and smiled.

"Wonderful! So, yes. I worked evenings here as a waitress. Midnight shift, I was an innocent little girl knocking on certain people's doors and asking them for directions, so I could pull them into a back alley where two other goons would strangle them to death. Actually, you met my friend Lin on the way in? He was one of those goons!" She poked her head out the door. "Say hi, Lin!"

Wai-Fong watched the doorman politely nod over at her.

"Hahaha, Lin is just the greatest." The Prof. closed the door again, with a thud that would imply a burning rancour in the heart of anybody who wasn't a power-hunger-driven criminal mastermind, which, if such a thing was not yet clear as the matter really only dawned on Kim-Wan now, was so precisely what the Professor was that it dictated her every behaviour. She returned to her desk.

"You changed all this, Yuen. And... you other two, but let's not kid ourselves. Mostly Yuen. When the deeplighters were kicking around town, what were we? Poverty-stricken scum, I tell you what. Most of us homeless, too, and no offence, but hardly better if taken under the wing of someone like you."

"I don't think of myself as taking anybody under my wing. None of us had anything to our names, it was all mutual support."

"Yeah. Some sappy crap like that, exactly. But... I mean look around you. Those Attendants did have one thing right, and it's that we should never have been grovelling at the altars of bloody humans for loose change. It's just they never realised they were the idiots enforcing the fact that they were, the classist pigs. So while the rich got richer, it was the thralls of society like your good self and mine who had to 'keep those powers in check', or what have you. You know, our contracts burn the candle at so many ends, we should at least be entitled to our own radiance, don't you agree?" She wiped a dollop of spittle onto her sleeve.

"In... a way, yes. I think." Wai-Fong grimaced.

"Well, the deeplighters didn't. Then you murdered them all. Way to go, girl!" The Professor pumped a fist in the air and cheered. "Now we don't have to worry about anyone keeping us down, ever again."

The person in the room whose genuine legitimacy to professorship had been heretofore unmentioned, lest her more volatile host misconstrue it as boasting, whispered to her student. "You did what, now?"

Said host overheard. "Haha, didn't she tell you? She - and a few others, let the record show this was a team effort - butchered every single Attendant to the Deep Light in this beautiful city."

"Territory," Wai-Fong, quickly becoming the woman of the hour, asserted more or less on impulse. "Huh? Right. Yes, okay. We killed them. But it was out of necessity. And... for generally the reasons the Professor outlined. I had kids on the brink of starvation living with me."

Kim-Wan waved her hands in the air. "So, what? You killed for us, then?"

"Do you remember what you looked like, this time last year?"

"I don't like the idea of this blood being spilled in my name, sir."

The Professor scoffed. "Hey, kid. Don't think we're getting to washing our hands just because the Attendants have headed for the hills. The worst is far from over."

The worst, in fact, was negotiating entry with the doorman at that very moment. On his refusal of admittance, the worst placed him under immediate military arrest and escorted him inside.

The worst was a group of twenty men with army training, uniformed, each equipped with the basics of riot protection gear. Some carried canisters of tear gas. Some carried guns inaccessible to anyone without strict military clearance.

"So why don't you just accept that the- hm." The Professor glanced at the door.

"Hm? What's there to hm about?" Wai-Fong asked.

"Sounds to me like a fight happening outside. I should probably go, uh..."

"Break it up?"

"Win it."


The following transcript takes place in the Overseer's domain. As before "the Overseer" does not refer to any one individual, but what appears to be a singularly conscious crowd of people we're lost in. "We", in this case, refers to myself, the Narrator, and Theletos.

OVERSEER: I have a hard enough time understanding what Tweedle-Deontology and Tweedle-Dunbar's Number come here for. Why is the Abyss sending her boy-detective-looking favorite son to me? Is this how we're supposed to communicate now?

THELETOS: It's not that serious, heh. Honestly, you can pretend I'm not even here.

OVERSEER: If I could do that, darling, I would have long before you suggested it.

The speaking instance of the Overseer extinguishes a cigarette on Theletos's bow tie. He recoils.

OVERSEER: You understand, of course, that I utterly despise you.

THELETOS: Well, I mean...

She laughs. All of her laughs.

OVERSEER: Relax, boy! Not yourself. I mean what you represent. I find it loathsome that the Abyss is keeping eyes on her eyes on her eyes. It's a perverse sort of unpleasant, and so is you yourself going along with it.

THELETOS: Ah! Right, right... right.

OVERSEER: Get it?

THELETOS: No.

I cough politely. The gesture is especially passive-aggressive because I don't think I have lungs?

OVERSEER: Oh, excuse me. I'd pretended to forget you two were even here.

UNDERSTUDY: You called us here.

OVERSEER: Hm? No I didn't.

UNDERSTUDY: But the Narrator said you had a plan.

Several of the Overseer glare daggers into the Narrator.

OVERSEER: What makes you think I have a plan?

NARRATOR: Well, you do, don't you?

OVERSEER: Excuse me. What makes you think I have a plan worth divulging to the messiah among prep schoolers, a catburglar pun's organ grinder monkey, and a dialectically irresolute Pleistocener who thinks a vocabulary that'd get her banned from Scrabble matches is a substitute for intelligence?

NARRATOR: Okay, well that's, well. I say. Calling me a Pleistocener is a bit uncalled for.

OVERSEER: You're right, nonetheless. I do have a plan, and I'm going to confront the Brass Knight.

NARRATOR: A witch is going to take on the Brass Knight?

The Overseer half-smiles.

OVERSEER: Alright, so my two halves don't play as nice as yours. But if you think I need your immortality or your reality-twisting to bring down that ancient brute, I'd almost guess you don't know what I'm capable of.

The Narrator pretends not to hear.

OVERSEER: You don't, do you? Oh, you thought me being your superior was some pretentious symbolic gesture. Look at me when I talk to you, Narrator. Look at me.

She does. She's scowling.

OVERSEER: I'm not in charge of you to make you out to be some kind of mockery. I'm in charge of you because I really, genuinely am your better. Are you following?

NARRATOR: Who do you think you are?

The Overseer grins.

OVERSEER: I'm the best thing that ever happened to you. You, and your little secretary, and Boy Wonder over there.

THELETOS: Vetoed.

OVERSEER: Come again?

Theletos blinks like he just woke from a trance.

THELETOS: Sorry. That came from the Abyss herself. I... she doesn't want you fighting the Brass Knight.

OVERSEER: I see. Any reason why?

THELETOS: She, um, just says "the obvious".

OVERSEER: That's it, then?

Theletos swallows and nods.

OVERSEER: That's IT?! And she sends along her yacht-club-dress-code, hoarse-voiced, weedy, little errand boy, fresh from back out of his own grave, to come all this way and tell me no because of "the obvious"?! Now you listen to me, you bargain-bin excuse for an avatar of the Light - and you too, you old crone, who I'd bet is reclining on her throne right now, watching this all out of his good eye - you know what I'm capable of.

Theletos sinks back into a trance-like state.

(Strictly off the record, I think I notice black puppet-strings coming up off of him to a vanishing point out of sight. Come to think of it... every last one of us has these strings.)

THELETOS: But that's exactly why we need to stay our hand. The experiment hasn't concluded yet.

OVERSEER: Some experiment. Sit and wait for the results you want? It's been two million years. Pack it in already!

THELETOS: We're close. I can't have you contaminating the results.

OVERSEER: Oh, but the Brass Knight is no object.

THELETOS: Compared to you? No.

The Overseer steps back, then forward again. She points an accusing finger at him.

OVERSEER: And another thing. Who is Theletos, anyway?! Some pudgy, half-blind, and probably metaphorical teenage boy shows up and suddenly I'm expected to answer to him? Ha! The Abyss has enough trouble getting me to answer to HER!

THELETOS: I'm sorry. I swear I'm not doing this to make you angry...

This is what gets the Overseer to relent.

OVERSEER: Oh. Yes. Of course. You know I'd never accuse you of...

THELETOS: I know.

OVERSEER: Well, then. Plan rescinded. Thank you all, for... nothing.

The crowd disperses. We retire.

NARRATOR: So what do you suppose that was all about, then?

UNDERSTUDY: Honestly, your guess is better than mine.

NARRATOR: Well, I'd prefer not to speculate.

UNDERSTUDY: Really?

NARRATOR: Alright. You know I'd love to speculate. But it's better I don't.

UNDERSTUDY: Back to writing, then?

NARRATOR: Back to writing.

Transcript ends.


"Hey, hey, look. I'm the person in charge here." The Professor raised her hands in surrender.

Several guns pointed in her direction, and quickly lowered.

"Yeah. Yeah, hey... I don't know what's going on here, but I don't want any trouble." She reached for the soul ring on her right hand. "So what I'm going to do is gut you all on the spot."

She lunged forward, Wai-Fong only catching her by the shoulders and restraining her a moment before a minimum plurality of deaths within the next few seconds would have been rendered inevitable. The Professor, it became clear, had conjured some kind of Bowie knife, but with a wicked and terribly impractical curve to it. It did not look like the kind of weapon that would be drawn out of its victim's body in one piece without the utmost fine motor precision, nor the kind of weapon that could kill cleanly and painlessly without the same degree of precision. Watching its wielder's hands tremble, Wai-Fong assumed this was a deliberate choice of its design.

"Are you trying to get us killed?!"

"No, dipshit! I'm trying to get them killed!"

Two soldiers ran over and broke them up. The one who took the Professor pinned her to the ground and held a knee on her back. The other ushered Wai-Fong, her hands raised in surrender, to the corner of the floor where Kim-Wan had been escorted in a similar pose.

"Where's the Prof?" Kim-Wan whispered.

"The-"

"The real professor. Your professor."

"I don't know! I thought she was with-"

The doors to the club exploded inward, off their hinges. The engine screamed itself hoarse, and some gunmen had the misfortune of feeling the vehicle it was attached to long before ever seeing it.

Professor Chang put her motorcycle in a spiral the moment it hit the floor, its own momentum carrying it onwards long before the wheels regained traction. The soldiers blessed with enough near-human intelligence to get out of the way in time all turned and aimed their guns at their assailant from opposite sides, but couldn't fire off a single shot without risking hitting one of their own.

In a momentary distraction, the soldier keeping the false Professor held down failed to notice her pilfering a smoke grenade from his person, as well as a gas mask, and, for good measure, his kidneys. He only noticed when the smoke began to pool around him, its canister held in his captive's right hand. He took a deep breath, but the air shot out of his lungs in a moment when his back felt the sharp of the knife in her left.

The next-nearest soldier was too focused on the motorcycle, now unmanned and hurtling towards him. As he turned to remove himself from harm's way, the Professor was upon him and unsealing his own smoke grenade.

The first two were the most difficult, and they posed her no challenge at all. Two cylinders billowing out smoke made the room innavigable, and the smoke alarm's blaring and the sprinklers its war cry rallied to action did not assist visibility. To make matters worse, once the Professor was upon her fifth soldier of the night, she found her third grenade, then a fourth on her seventh.

Every officer wise enough to reach for their gas mask in time found themselves no better off. Someone had called to regroup, and the rest had all begun clam(be/ou)ring after whoever it was. It unsettled them each in a primal way they had never felt before to hear individual voices leave the din one by one.

The smoke cleared soon enough, even if the fire alarm did not. Patrons and staff found themselves to be hugging one another in fear, as did Wai-Fong and Kim-Wan. Only the two professors stood in the centre of the room, and all the soldiers were...

"Dead!" Someone was heard to say. "Did you kill them?"

The Professor scoffed. "No, of course not! Well, two or three are in critical condition. But the rest are alive! Just unconscious, is all. Mostly concussed." Firmly she kicked the head of the most unmistakably British soldier. "Don't like the over/under on Sherlock Holmes here ever walking again."

Professor Chang undid the clasp of her motorcycle helmet - its visor marked with blood whose native nose was not difficult to find among the bodies. She was visibly harrowed, shaking, as were her compatriots who rose to hug her.

"Hey. Hey!" The illegitimately ranked of the professors barked. "You, healer. Get on the dying boot boys, pronto. I'm not having anyone pass away today, alright?"

Kim-Wan nodded and ran to the side of the first near-dead body. "That's very noble of you to say, Professor."

"Yeah, and you should see what it saves us on insurance."

"So these guys are military, then?" Wai-Fong asked.

"Ha. Once their C.O. gets word, I'm sure present-tense 'are' is going to start doing some heavy lifting."

"No, let's hold off on the jokes for a second. These are Chinese uniforms and British uniforms. Is there a joint military operation going on here? Why?"

"Probably to take my soul gem and cover up Titania One. Why they only came here tonight, I don't know. Probably because they thought I'd talk to you. Which I did."

"Hold on, what do you know about Titania One?"

The Professor blinked, extraordinarily slowly. "What, I didn't tell you?"

"No!"

"Damn. I guess these guys wasted their time." She pointed and giggled. "That guy wasted his kidneys, too."

Wai-Fong arrested the Professor's callous demeanour, and indeed her body, by the collar.

"Titania. Tell me everything you know."

"What's there to say that you don't already know?"

"Well, I'd like to know if it actually bloody existed!"

The Professor pushed her off. "Oh, you don't know? Well, I guess you wouldn't. Yes, it's real. I suppose news hasn't gotten that far out of here since everyone else investigating this shit vanishes."

"We looked for a base of operat-"

"Yeah, I know you did, and that's adorable. Hey, Kyubey!"

The Incubator stepped out of her office. Nobody thought it worth questioning how long he'd been in there.

"Yes, Wing-H-"

"Names!" Wai-Fong and the Professor reprimanded him simultaneously. The latter (whose name, for purpose of further differentiation from the registered academic, was Ng Wing-Ho) proceeded: "Look, little man. I'm trying to prove a point. Can you count the soldiers in this room?"

The Incubator regarded it slowly and evenly.

"One."

"One?" Wai-Fong spluttered.

"Over there. Unconscious, with two scars on his lower back."

"Wahey! Our pal kidneys," Wing-Ho chortled. "So how's that for an explanation, Yuen?"

"That's not an explanation." She grimaced. "That's not anything."

"He can't see them. They're totally invisible to him and to him alone."

"How is that possible?"

"See, that's what we got to thinking too. We here is me, I'm the only one to ever get on their property and make it back alive. Figured out, the secret is the stab-proof vests. Make these guys both totally resistant to magic and completely invisible to the Incubator. Works out fantastically for me, by the way. Knives and such. First time I bumped into these guys, I had the foresight to sneak around and unclasp their vests at the back before they even saw I was there. It's really a force of habit when you're a serial killer with urban legends espousing your notoriety."

Wai-Fong took a step back.

"Or, so I've heard."

"But how do the vests work?" The genuine professor asked, her face betraying that she already knew, and feared, the answer.

"Same way I guess their base must work. You ever hear of the priestess Nedjem?"

"Yes."

"Well, some say she had this sort of black powder she used, to try and make herself invisible and invulnerable. Did the same shit these guys seem to be able to pull. Exactly the same shit, some might even say."

"Right. So... you're suggesting they stole some of this powder from... whoever has it, and they're sprinkling it on all their equipment?"

"Of course not!"

Professor Chang let loose a relieved sigh.

"There's no way Nedjem could have made that much. They stole it, then started manufacturing pointers."

"Pointers?"

"God. Get with it, Granny."

"Hey! I'm only like forty or fifty."

"Pointers, like in computer code and stuff. You know, all computer programs use variables. Stuff like numbers, chunks of text, true/false binaries, that kind of thing. But a pointer tells the code where it can find the variable it's looking for, and the code treats it all the same."

"So what you're saying is-"

"That the military have developed some kind of material which behaves exactly like whatever material it's assigned to."

"You're joking!"

"Obviously. That kind of 'tech' is pure magic, and they'd have stolen it."

Kim-Wan finished checking over the soldiers' vitals. "So, this... Titania One Systems, or whatever it's called. Do you know where they're located?"

A shark-toothed grin beset Wing-Ho's face like the clouds of a flash flood. "Ah. Now someone's asking the real questions."


The boat from Hong Kong to Kowloon was not the most interesting boat ride in the world. In fact, the most interesting boat ride in the world was already partaken in 1975, on the Shahar river, as the consequence of a peculiar dare. Compared to that, the Hong Kong-Kowloon ferry was absolute peanuts.

This was not to so expressly call it dull - rather, the whole arrangement it rested on was a boat done up with Brummagem furnishings and seating of disagreeable ergonomics put together with the express purposes, respectively, of making all the vain tourists, gamblers, and businesspeople who frequented the ferry service feel right at home, and remind them all that they would die one day. It was the exact sort of clientele who were drawn to this - the tourists, gamblers, and businesspeople - who did not so much make the experience boring as they did drain the interest from the room as if by some form of mitosis. It is well understood by the selfless that everyone you meet leads a rich inner life. This lesson may be abandoned at the harbour.

Kim-Wan kept to a window seat, so as to avoid seasickness.

"Can I ask a question, Sir?"

Wai-Fong had been trying to nap and failing. "Sure thing."

"Was it worth it?"

She double-took. "Was what? The deeplighters?"

Kim-Wan did not remove her gaze from the horizon. She only nodded.

"Well... I'd like to say it wasn't for nothing. But now it feels like we're out of the frying pan..."

"Hence me asking, Sir."

"Hm... well, I think it was, but if taking on Titania means we start facing another threat, I think I'm done."

"That's uncharacteristically ignoble."

"I'm at the end of my rope here, kid! I don't want to spend the rest of my life chain macing terrorists and warmongers to death."

Kim-Wan shrugged.

"Trust me, kid. Do what I have as long as I have, and you'll get it."

A collective deeming of the conversation as over. Wai-Fong turned to her professor.

"Hey. You know earlier?"

"Yes?"

"How did you do that, anyway?"

"What do you mean?"

"That thing with the motorcycle, where you swept a bunch of guys over. That was hardcore. That was Hollywood."

"Looks like you didn't do this week's reading, then."

Wai-Fong laughed until she noticed that Professor Chang did not.


THIS WEEK'S READING

Beyond Good and Evel Knievel: The Future of Humanity's Development and its Dependence on Sick as Hell Sports Stunts, by Dr. Reginald "The Steamroller" Wexley

Abstract:

Across barriers of geography and time, anthropologists have sought to identify universal arts. In virtually all recorded human culture, there have existed notions of music, dance, painting, and storytelling, as if humans possess some natural inclination or intuition to appreciating these media. Yet, so rarely grouped with its fellows is our fascination with displays of extreme athleticism, despite its omnipresence in human culture. You dig, brah? I'm smashing open the real dickshitting questions here. If dance is so readily accepted as art, on what grounds can we so readily divide the muses' Parnassus from other performative displays of physical prowess? Do we understand the subjectivity of the frameworks with which we view the recognised arts as fundamentally dissimilar to the phenomenon by which each culture develops its own games, and in fact its own epistemic lens through which it views sports? And why is it that when Richard Wagner writes an essay about which races are better than others at music, the most odious pissnoses under the sun laud him as a genius, but when I do a double honest-to-your-mama's-ass somersault over twenty exploding buses on a quadbike, nobody gives a shit? Examined, among other things, are symbols of physical strength and agility in the myths of cultures from across continents and across centuries, language and rituals constructed around sports (or lack thereof, in some cases), and various photographed diagrams of stunts I did for this paper that will rule your ass off, even if I couldn't fit them anywhere else.