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Time passed.

Mano, working in her sub's lab and garden, came up with an empathy drug, the same one that would be used by Rakim and Ogun when they'd first meet. She hoped to do it as a tribute to Eli, to contribute to creating the more empathetic world that Eli would have wanted to live in. She finally moved to North America where she tracked down Klein, who offered her emotional support to help her with her survivor syndrome because of Eli's death. Ogun and Klein missed Bridges and Shinai now that they'd gone to jail and to the army. Mano offered Klein her support for his losses in turn. Diaz kept seeing Mandrake, working his way up to going outside someday.

The Bolgia became Mano, Rakim, Klein, Ogun and Mandrake's hangout with each other.

One morning, Ogun was out practicing some of his Muay Thai forms on a boardwalk over a lake as he watched the sunrise. He lived so much of his life around technology. Mostly, he loved it. Still, there was something about getting away from it all every once in a while. Ogun had been thinking a lot about what it had meant to Rakim to have had to overcome his fear of fire to date a chimera like him, especially after what had happened. He'd found the bat inspiring.

Ogun hadn't admitted it to a lot of people, because it could often be a bad idea to have a lot of people knowing about what you were afraid of, but he suffered from a certain level of hydrophobia. He never drank water from his dragon head because, even though intellectually he knew that it would not happen, he was afraid that he would lose his ability to breathe fire somehow. And water would have ruined most of the technology he'd worked with as well.

So this morning, he'd deliberately decided to confront his fear by training on a boardwalk over a lake not too far from where he lived. It wasn't something he usually did, but it really motivated him to pay even closer attention to his footwork than he usually would. One misstep could have meant splashing down into the water below. He had always been too scared of water to learn how to swim. If he fell, he'd have to latch onto the side of the boardwalk, which was fortunately low enough to be reachable, to be able to climb back onto it, or to latch on to some of the nearby bamboo poles that protruded from the water around him to get back to shallow water.

Suddenly Ogun felt a hand grab onto his ankle from below and pull his leg down into the water next to the boardwalk. He grunted in surprise and effort as he put the whole rest of his body in charge of pushing up against the boardwalk to bring himself back up on the boardwalk. Reflexively kicking down with his leg that had not been grabbed, he forced whoever had grabbed his other leg to let go, just in time for Ogun to step back onto the boardwalk before...

Before the entire lake around him became electrified.

It only lasted for a couple of seconds, but he could still see smoke rising from the water around him after it had finished happening. If he had fallen into the water along with his attacker, he would have had much worse than his hydrophobia or lack of ability to swim to worry about. He would have been electrocuted and killed right away. Who would have been willing to become electrocuted themselves just to do him harm? It seemed so farfetched to him. But it looked like he was about to get an answer to his question regardless. He saw his attacker climbing out of the water onto the end of the boardwalk in front of him, shaking off algae that she was covered in.

She was an eel.

Though her arms and legs were dark green, a bright yellow frilled crest went from her forehead down her back all the way to the tip of her tail. A wicked grin split her face from ear to ear, and her bright yellow eyes looked like they'd rolled back into the back of her head. Ogun didn't remember ever having done anything to harm an eel in his life, let alone this particular one. He didn't even understand why she'd been attacking him at all.

He tried to run for the shore but, laughing the laugh of the truly mad, she jumped into an elaborate tumbling leap over him, leaving an electric arc and smoke trailing behind as she landed on the shore by the boardwalk cutting off his escape. She tried to knock him off the boardwalk with an electrified kick as he back somersaulted away from her shock therapy. Her eyes crackled at him as a threat display while his snake head hissed at her from behind him. As she dove into his legs he leapt into a diving front roll over her. Turning to face him as she got up from the ground, she extended an electric whip from her arm toward him, knocking him out senseless.

That was when Rakim showed up.

At first, the eel didn't quite seem to know what to make of the bat who had just flown in to land in front of her. She hadn't been sent to kill him specifically, but she'd been authorized to kill anyone who'd interfere with what she'd been sent to do in any way. Rakim didn't seem to pose much of a threat to her, she thought. She smiled a merciless grin at him and, falling back on her favorite threat display, electrified her whole body in front of him to make him drop his guard.

Rakim didn't flinch.

Without missing a beat, he turned his own body into an even more spectacular cornucopia of electrical arcs coursing all over his body, illuminating him menacingly with every color of the rainbow in a display that surpassed even her own. At this, she seemed somewhat dismayed. No one had ever done the same thing back at her before. What could this mean? No matter. She pushed both her palms onto his torso, shoving all the volts she could into his body.

He stood still. Then he looked at Ogun, looked at her, and, gravely, shook his head no.

Pushing both of his palms onto her torso just as she had just done to him, Rakim, having harmlessly absorbed the current that she'd shoved into him, sent the same voltage that she'd sent into him right back into her. She went flying back, landing in the water with a splash while a trail of smoke briefly marked her trajectory from Rakim to the lake. It seemed she couldn't take too much of what she dished out, he thought.

Rakim was stronger than he looked. In spite of his diminutive size, in spite of Ogun's much larger size, the bat grabbed him, and started carrying the chimera with him hurriedly to Soma's grove. It was a good thing that Scylla, Rakim's shark ex-girlfriend, had warned Rakim that the fish were restless, that they were planning something, and that Rakim should probably check on Ogun to make sure that the chimera was all right. Rakim hoped she wasn't in trouble.

He hoped he'd be able to bring Ogun to Soma in time to save him.

He hoped he'd be able to find who was responsible for this, and to make them pay for it.

***

Soma often wished that people took better care of themselves. It's true that his powers went beyond those of the average healer, but it was also easy for people to overestimate just how much he could do before running out of steam. He didn't want to get stretched too thin, or to no longer be able to watch over his grove. It was important that no one figure out how the magic in his grove worked, or there would have been dire consequences to it. He could perceive everything that his trees perceived. Trees were aware of things, at least on some level, enough to raise an alarm at a threat. Conversely, for all harm done to his trees, his life force was depleted.

His trees' perceptions, the twitching spider hairs on his legs and the heat pits in the side of his snake head informed him that someone was trying to enter his grove unnoticed. He climbed up into a tree and hid himself among the leaves. He wasn't sure that this new arrival was necessarily a threat. There was always a chance that it was only someone who was looking for him because they needed his services, or because they were lost. He certainly hoped they were. He tried to make himself as small as he could, bringing all the patience of snakes, spiders and plants to bear, creatures whose very survival depended on waiting for a long time unnoticed.

She kicked his tree so hard that he fell right out of it like an apple.

He shapeshifted one of his arms into a vine-web to wrap it around the branch of another tree and pull himself up into another treetop. He winced as he looked back over his shoulder on his way up and saw that the pain he was feeling wasn't just from having fallen but because her kick had set fire to his tree somehow, and he was feeling his tree's pain as it burned. How in the world had she done something like that, he asked himself?

It was Betta the red fish, the very same that Rakim had fought in the Bolgia that time.

He threw a vine-net down on her she fire kicked out of the sky. Hanging from a branch upside-down in spider-taur form, he pulled her up in a vine-web snare that she torched with a backflip. In two-legged form from the ground, he threw vine-web bolas at her legs that she ax-kicked to ashes. He created an 8-spoked vine-web between them that she went right through with a flying fire kick. Tripping on his vine-web tripwire, she kick-flipped him while landing safely. His green skin yellowed. He shifted to spider-taur to bicycle-kick her but she dove between his legs to try back kick him while he climbed a tree upside-down to drop back down in front of her.

His yellow skin turned orange.

Grabbing his vine-web whip on its way to her, she used her leg to redirect its momentum, throwing him on the ground. He narrowly rolled back on his feet away from her flaming kick-flip onto her back. As her twirling kip up traced a fleeting fiery sigil before him, he noticed that his body was turning red. Like autumn leaves, after green, yellow, orange, and red, the brown of dead leaves awaited him. He stuck out his forked tongue at her defiantly, transforming it into a small carnivorous plant that also stuck out its tongue at her in turn. He could barely stand and barely see straight by that point, but he wouldn't let her burn down his grove without a fight.

It began to rain.

Betta's fire kicking was rendered impossible, and she felt herself weakening. Some of the strength that Soma had been losing because some of the trees that his body was connected to had been burning started slowly returning to him. Betta stood breathlessly with her eyes wide as drops of water gathered up and down from the air and ground around her before all converging together from everywhere around her to knock her out from their sheer collective impact.

Soma let himself collapse to the ground as the rain around him reformed into Mandrake.

***

It was raining when Fugue found him in an alley.

"It's been a while, hasn't it... Klein?"

***

Mano was always harder to reach when she was on her sub. That was the point of it, to a certain extent anyway. When she'd first retreated into it, she'd felt like a hermit crab hiding in its shell herself. Aside from the times when she'd go to the Bolgia now and then, her sub had become where she'd spent most of her time, and she didn't go to the Bolgia as often as she'd used to these days. Being around people could take its toll on her, even people she liked.

Suddenly, she saw something fly right by her head, having come at her from behind her to come as close to hitting her head on its way as it could without actually hitting her. She turned around just in time to see a ninja carp, the most silent of all the animals, throw down a smoke bomb to vanish back off her sub. Looking at the shuriken lodged in the wall - it was shaped like a starfish - she saw it was stuck in a piece of paper with a note on it that it pinned to the wall.

"The Stars Are Right," it said.