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Chapter 1: Bat Outta Hell

Rakim and his mother moved to the West when he was but a child.

He only remembered bits and pieces from those days, the way one tends to half-remember things from early childhood, before one is even of age for kindergarten. Buildings, landscapes, certain people's clothes or faces, being taught how to tie his shoes, how to wash his hands, how to echolocate, sand as far as the eye could see. Scattered flashes of his mother here and there, but no details from that era had survived unaided. He'd been too young to really remember. Mostly, he just remembered that she'd been kind to him. He remembered her fondly.

Rakim didn't remember his father. As far as he could remember, it'd always been just his mother Irshad and him. She told him that his father had still been with them when he'd been very small, but that something bad had happened, and that he hadn't been able to follow them where they'd been going. She supposed that perhaps there was a small chance he might join them someday, but she told him that she did not believe he would, and that he should not believe it either. He didn't.

Irshad had to deal with the issues that came with being a single parent and with those that came with being a stranger in a strange land alike. From his perspective, she provided him with everything he needed. He didn't think of himself as missing out on anything as such, not really. It was only when he grew older that he understood just how hard she'd had to work to keep them afloat the way she had, and to appreciate how much that had meant. At first he took it for granted, but when he grew old enough to hear of others whose mothers had been far less good to them than his had been to him, it chilled him. He couldn't even imagine that.

There was an Arabic name and an English name for everything. People where they lived spoke English. Irshad understood this. Still, she didn't want him to grow up without a sense of where he was really from. It could already be difficult for a child to learn one set of words for things, though. How was she to make him learn twice as much as another child? Part of him wanted to learn both since it seemed to matter to her, but he struggled with it, sometimes only remembering a word in one language, but not in the other.

They had moved in turbulent times.

It was at a time during which this profession was being particularly celebrated in their new nation that Irshad decided to become a firefighter. At first he understood this in childlike terms, as a boy who liked to play with fire trucks as some boys were wont to do. She told him stories of their ancestors as she tucked him into bed in the morning. She told him that, in her youth, she'd trained with a Sufi dervish, with a moth who could spin herself into a cocoon of flames in her whirling trances, and that, before her time, their ancestors had fought the Ifrits.

"So the Ifrits were bad, mother?" he'd asked her with a child's innocence. "Only a few of them were, my son," she'd told him. "We dealt with the few that we needed to. The rest we left alone." "Oh, I see!" It'd seemed to have made sense to him. Why should they all have been bad? When he grew old enough to understand just how much of a risk she'd been taking every time she'd gotten into that truck on her way to a fire, his memories of those stories changed. He remembered them with the bittersweet irony of someone who understands that his mother had risked death almost every night, and had told him a story so that it wouldn't drive him insane. Still, her narrative drove him.

She taught him to play with fire.

When he first started going to gym class at school, the other boys beat him up in the locker room. They told him that he should've been in the girls' locker room, that he had no business being there. He didn't understand what they meant. They told him he didn't have 'what it takes,' that they were going to tell on him, that they'd have him sent back where he came from. He tried to hide it from his mother, because he was ashamed of what had happened to him, believing it must've been his fault somehow, but it couldn't escape her notice forever.

"It was the oddest thing." "What was, my son?" "They said I wasn't a boy." Irshad sighed, and shook her head. "Sometimes you'll meet people who don't understand what that means." "They said I don't belong." "They don't know you." "What am I to do then, mother?" Irshad tried to talk to his principal. The principal told her that she should remember that the locker room issue was still very contentious in a lot of places, and that while he could try to see where she was coming from, it still wasn't his place to make a stand for it. When he asked, unnerved, if Rakim had also been using the boys' restroom without permission either, she simply stormed out.

"Don't make me regret this," she'd intoned, standing before him after having somehow cleared a small area of their otherwise cramped living space. "I won't." "Good," she'd said. "Let me show you something."

She began to move.

He was mesmerized by her movements. What manner of dance was this? The way she rose and fell, the way she stepped and span, arms whirling around her dizzyingly without ever hitting her wings as they went, driven by a single-minded sense of purpose and direction, made her look like she'd turned into some kind of fractal, aquatic hydra, determined to show the world the meaning of fluidity.

She paused.

"All of these movements mean something, my son. These are not just random movements. They're an expression of our people. In time, you will learn that, with each of them, you can defend yourself from someone." At this point she put her hand on his shoulder, holding her finger up to him to make sure she had his attention. "Now listen to me very carefully, Rakim," she said. "Defend yourself. Defend people you care about, yes. Never attack anyone. If you attack someone... you'll make me very sad, my son."

So he did.

When the other boys came at him in the locker room, he was no longer afraid. After what happened, it was the last time any of them would come at him for a while. Despite her dislike of violence, she hadn't seen it fit to chastise him for it. What shame was there in standing his ground? Without standing their ground, they'd never belong anywhere.

He loved her stories.

Irshad not only told him tales from his homeland, however, but, especially after the locker room incident, thought it important to read to him stories from the West as well, so their new nation wouldn't seem quite so alien to him, and so he could feel more like he belonged in it. One of these that ended up sticking in his mind after the fact was when she'd first read him the story of The Little Prince. "'What's essential is invisible to the eye,'" she'd chuckle happily as she'd read to him. "You see, Rakim? There's hope for Westerners yet."

In high school he got into a more serious fight. Irshad argued angrily with the same principal as before. The other boy would need stitches and a cast, with a broken nose. When she heard accusations that he'd thrown the first punch, she denied them vehemently, putting her honor on the line for him. She asked him how things had really happened this time. "Did they attack you?" "They... They said things about you, mother." She frowned. "What things?" She didn't teach him so he'd start fights. "Terrible things." He wouldn't meet her gaze. "Rakim, did they attack you?" Gentle, but unyielding.

"They said you bite people, mother," he started shaking and hyperventilating. "The people you save from the flames." He shook his head, overwhelmed. "Every time you go out there and I'm scared for your life!" He held back tears. "They said you wear a veil so no one sees their blood on your fangs..." He could no longer hold them back, and she wrapped her wing protectively around him, holding him in her arms. "I can't blame you. Don't do it again."

He couldn't hold back his anger either. "What right do any of them have! What do any of them know?" She did her best to answer. "People here are taught to rely on what they see. They've made us bats a symbol of fear because we don't. The reason I wear this is so that people won't. We bats get to know people by listening. Listen to people, Rakim." Her blessing was also her curse. For her, the worst part of her job wasn't the flames at all.

It was the siren.

It was the most excruciating thing a bat could possibly hear. She knew it was only a matter of time before it made her deaf. She bore it all the same, for the sake of helping others.

"Kindness is the most important thing. It won't always be easy. Enlightenment rarely is. But I named you Rakim... 'The Merciful.' Please, for me, try to live this mercy in your life. Please, try to avoid hurting others when you can, even though they may deserve it. Please, try to help others when you can, even though they may not," she told him.

"Be kind, my son."

Chapter 2: With The Flow

'I hate this.'

Afternoon.

Cold skyscrapers hid the setting sun with their straight lines and right angles. Mano missed the reassuring ocean depths around her, the protective cocoon of her sub. The bus station was a river, the swarming masses, pieces of driftwood.

She had to make a conscious effort to only move her upper arms as she walked while her four other arms fidgeted under her cloak. She prayed to Ganesh that none of her nervous ticks would give her away. She'd become very used to being by herself after all this time, for good or ill. People's eyes on her felt like so many needles pricking her skin. 'You don't care what they think,' she tried to tell herself, 'who are they to judge you?' But the words wavered in her mind, as if she was looking at them through water's surface. She barely repressed a twitch from the third eyelid in her forehead under her hood.

The world never felt like there was enough space in it. It was built for people with two arms in mind, she often had to be reminded of that. Spaces had people crammed into them, packed like sardines, and herded like cattle, she couldn't help but think - even though she quite liked cattle, mind you.

'Beaches, seashells, oceans in my mind, will you drown out the crowd for me?'

Rubbing elbows. She'd rather people didn't, but she was too polite to say anything. She especially didn't want people to bump into her and notice her extra arms. Some people would just apologize and move on, but some people wouldn't, and they had a way of gripping the mind. Cephalopods were considered weird even for fish, and fish had always been a breed apart. There had been milestones in the history of interspecies tolerance. There had even been a time when mammals and reptiles didn't see each other as 'people,' a long time ago. A lot of people took hybrid rights for granted now. Hybrids themselves still knew better than to always expect them.

Even amphibians, like bisexuals and agnostics, had a hard time being accepted by fish or landlubbers, because they belonged to neither of two worlds completely, just as hybrids didn't. Among bugs, butterflies passed much better than spiders, but anything with extra limbs aroused suspicion. Who could use this many limbs for an honest purpose, people wondered? So Mano feared people, and knew that people feared her. If something bad happened to her, she knew she'd likely be blamed for it. While some parts of the world were worse than others, she often wished she'd had her third eye put in the back of her head, but such was not the way of things.

'I don't want to be here.'

Fish didn't need to sleep. They could sleep, to be sure, and most of them chose to do so now and then to recover energy, but any fish could theoretically have lived their whole life without ever sleeping, with no serious ill effect. Over-grounders found this unsettling about them. They feared that fish could use this advantage to sneak up on them while they slept. More mundanely, they feared that, if fish could work 24/7 at their jobs, while surface dwellers had to stop working to go home to sleep, fish would have an unfair advantage at work, and steal all their jobs. In practice, fish were hired rarely, fired often, and paid less.

What fish did need was to be able to stay moist. To do this, they had to be able to immerse their bodies in water for about 20 minutes at least 3 or 4 times a day. Some chose to do it more often when they could, but most of them had to skip some more often than they cared for. Missing one was just annoying, in the immediate. It wouldn't do permanent damage but it was irritating enough to affect your performance. Missing two was when the skin started changing color, mere discomfort jostling with outright pain. Missing three was when the skin would begin to crackle horribly. Missing one repeatedly caused subtler cumulative damage that still added up.

Miss too many, and you could die.

'Hell is other people, indeed.'

It was rare that fish died of dryness as such, but the knowledge that they would if they were careless still guided their actions. How could it not? Beyond that, dryness could also be a more indirect contribution to their harm, making them more vulnerable to bruising and disease, lowering their life expectancy. Surface dwellers made the most of this. As far as they were concerned, they had fish by the balls, or whatever it was that fish had.

Most workplaces weren't going to have showers just to make it so fish could work there. It was a cost that they figured that their fish employees weren't going to be making up for. Most work days were a full eight hours, without counting the time to get there and come back, which could be an hour or two there and back, if not more. Some fish tried to find a nearby gym to go shower at during lunch. Some who couldn't were so desperate they would bring moist towlettes to work to use them on their bodies in the washroom over the course of the day, but it wasn't the most effective stopgap measure. Some employers found it easier to simply not hire fish.

'Not looking forward to the bus ride.'

While some workplaces were open 24/7, since practically none were owned by fish, most were only open during the daytime anyway. Beyond a few places looking for people to work with bats and other nocturnal customers, maybe as a second job, the ability of fish not to sleep wasn't that much of an advantage after all. Any place where you may have to stay for a long time, like a hospital, without accessible showers or baths was functionally barred to fish. Some of them simply grit their teeth to grin and bear it, sacrificing their health to support themselves. Some of Mano's friends back in India who had worked in call centers fell into that category.

And those were just the problems faced by fish with only two arms, not even with six.

Stories like Jonas and the whale seemed to her to embody over-grounders' fear of being 'engulfed' by the ocean somehow. When she left the ocean for the bus station, she felt just as though she were being swallowed in the belly of a beast herself. When she was on the bus, she tended to get land-sick, the same way that surface dwellers could get seasick. She clutched the MP3 player with whale songs that she'd brought along with her to ward off the demons of urban cacophony. She wondered if she'd be able to sleep that night without the calming motion of the ocean's currents around her. The land always felt like it was trying to push her back out.

'I'd rather be somewhere else, doing something else.'

Mano slept.

When she had been a child she used to choose to stay awake all the time. There had just been so many things to do and to learn about. Why throw away any of her time sleeping when she could have been doing that? Today, she slept, as much or even more than some surface dwellers did sometimes. Living in a sub came with a certain distance from society at times, like a monk living at a remote monastery. You had to buy a lot of what you needed at once to make as few trips as possible. Most fish didn't have the training to build a sub from scrap metal by themselves the way she had, and even she hadn't done that all on her own, in a way.

Some of the fish who did manage to live at sea faced national territory issues. Whether or not they lived within certain boundaries affected which government would or wouldn't protect their rights, if they were endangered. Anyone who lived in international waters was suspect of doing so to evade the law. That could be the price of living where the water was. Paper, electronics and many other conveniences that fish had become used to using could not have existed underwater. Yet when fish slept, they often dreamt of a world built underwater, for their own needs, not for that of over-grounders, where they could have felt like they really belonged.

'Don't people know it's rude to stare?'

Mano had her own dreams. With practice and with the sophisticated mental abilities that octopi like her were known for, she had learned to master lucid dreaming. Dreams were a refuge from the harshness of waking life. There, she could deal with everything that she had to deal with in waking life on her own terms, taking apart and putting back together situations like the engineer she was, forming perspectives too deep under for her social conditioning to prevail.

It was waking life that was her recurring nightmare.

She hoped that seeing Klein again would do her some good. He had his flaws, but he could take her mind off things sometimes. She hadn't seen him since they'd met in Brazil all that time ago now. She hadn't heard from him in a while, and wondered how his return to North America had worked out for him. They'd met at an anti-capitalist protest that Mano had been covering as part of her job as a journalist at the time.

'Can't people look where they're going?'

"So, what brings you here?" she'd asked him. "I'm here to exorcise some old inner demons, I guess." She'd tilted her head at him. "What do you mean by that?" She'd brought the microphone back to him. "Well, this is going to be seen by people, isn't it?" She'd nodded yes. "I'd rather not say too much as part of the interview, if you don't mind," he'd explained. There could be any number of reasons for that, she'd thought, but she could imagine many valid ones.

"What about off the record?" she'd muttered to him with her mic quite away that time. "Maybe I could help." He tried to stall, wanting to know her better to determine whether or not he could trust her. "In what way?" He'd been deceived enough times to know enough to keep his guard up. "That depends on what it is," she asked him. "What brings you here?" he asked her in turn. She was more used to asking questions than to answering them, but it was interesting to have someone showing an interest. "I work for a leftist paper. I was a war journalist in the Middle East before I moved here with my girlfriend Eli." That got his attention.

'I just need some space.'

"You're with Eli? You mean _the_Elizabeth?" Mano was always surprised by how much of a minor celebrity her girlfriend had turned into. "The one and only." Eli had become a well-known poet and spokesperson in social activist circles recently, and her reputation preceded her. She was an outspoken opponent of religious violence, sexual discrimination, environmental destruction, and colonialism, among many other things. Her poems had stricken the art world, in an age when poetry was usually tolerated at best. Fans fought over their interpretations of her work. He'd have asked to meet her, if he hadn't known it would've been rude for him to impose.

"Well, then... If you really are dating Eli, I'm gonna assume that you can separate being a journalist from being an activist. Off the record, I'm not even supposed to be here. I hitched a ride on a boat to shed some light on a fabric factory here that's owned by a big North American clothing corporation that has it coming." She'd grunted knowingly, and nodded in assent. "I wasn't kidding about offering to help, you know." He'd smiled at her. "I'll keep that in mind."

'Is that so much to ask?'

"So how did the two of you meet, anyway?" Mano sighed. "Well..." What a turbulent life they'd led. "It all started in India, several years ago now," she'd begun, "when we were young..."

Chapter 3: Sources

Eli had always had body issues because of her shitty upbringing.

Half sea turtle, half hermit crab, she suffered from the intersecting stigmas of fish, reptiles and hybrids alike. She needed to breathe but also to stay moist to be able to stay alive, and her sleep cycles amounted to a lifelong sleep disorder. She'd been brought up to hate her body, and while she developed her own additional reasons for hating it over time, the original lesson had certainly stuck all of its own.

Her parents were from England, their line traceable all the way back to those who had first colonized Mano's homeland. While they did so under a more benign guise than before, they still benefited from perpetrating some of the same injustices as they had been from the start. As staunch Calvinists, they believed that their wealth meant that God was on their side. When they'd taken her on trips to India as a child, it had made her sick to her stomach to have seen just how much the luxury of their living conditions had clashed with the poverty of those who lived around them. She decided that if God was on their side, then God's side wasn't worth being on.

Limited forms of genetic engineering were available in the world they lived in. Mano's third eye had been a ceremonial gesture, using science for ritual body modification. However, it had been her decision to have it put in, when she had come of age to be considered able to decide. Eli's parents had her genetically engineered while she'd still been in the womb. They'd made her more resistant to all forms of disease and injury. The only sacrifice they'd had to make for it was to also change her genes in a way that made her more vulnerable to depression. They found it a fair trade. Pleasure was a waste of time, work was success, and success was God's grace.

They had moved to India altogether when she'd been a teenager.

They talked about how important it was for her to grow up to give them an heir often. They believed that the perpetuation of their bloodline was everything, and that all the money that they'd inherited from their ancestors' ancestors had to go to their descendants' descendants, to keep the line of their power unbroken in God's eyes. Her father was the model of an angry God, and she could never have imagined having had to deal with his reaction had she ever admitted to him that she had no intention of ever being in a relationship with any man at all. Her father believed in 'spare the rod, spoil the child.' She'd grown up to resent him deeply.

There was no one for her to turn to about any of it. When she heard her parents talking to other couples they had over, the other parents talked about the value of disciplining their child all the time. As far as she could tell, people around her existed as part of a culture that had conditioned them to ignore her suffering because it had been made to their disadvantage to acknowledge it for what it was. When one of her visiting relatives had taken advantage of the trust that she had put in him when she'd been just a teenager, she was told that it was important that she think about his reputation and about the reputation of their family business in general.

This event had cracked her shell more than any other before or since. Considering that she was already predisposed to depression, internalizing the silencing of the pain that she'd experienced shattered the dividing line between her mind and heart. Every emotion she felt in response to an unjust situation became stronger, more difficult for her to control. Under it, there was always the reminder that not only had she already had to endure her worst experience of all, but she also had to be subjected to the indignity of having had to deal with this on top of it too, adding insult to injury in the already cruelest world of all. It was just too much to put up with.

She wanted to think of sensitivity to others' suffering as a power, not as a curse, but it wasn't easy.

When they'd moved to India, they'd moved into a mansion where they'd hired Mano's mother as their mechanic and Mano's father as their gardener. When she was old enough to be allowed to work, they also hired Mano as help around the house whenever she'd be available for it. Mano's parents weren't rich as such, but they weren't poor and, compared to many around them, they were thankful for what they saw as their luck. Eli's parents were a little weirded out by the gender weirdness of her mother instead of her father being a mechanic. It was unheard of, but they came highly recommended, and they worked for comparatively little, so they were in.

Mano loved her parents.

Her mother first tried to encourage her to become a mechanic, like herself. Mano had enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together when she had been a child. Her mother had thought that she really had an aptitude for it, and informally taught her some of what she knew over time. Her father first tried to encourage her to become a gardener, like himself. She had clearly liked plants, stopping by to view, smell or even touch them whenever she would see them in the wild. She hadn't been afraid of getting her hands dirty, and her father had showed her the rudiments of his trade, in the hopes that she would follow in his footsteps as well.

Not wanting to disappoint either of them at the expense of the other at the risk of driving a wedge between them, when she had come of age, Mano went to college to become a journalist. While they had hoped to pass on their trades to her, they also made it clear to her that they were happy for her that she would have found something to pursue in life that was truly her own. She hoped they would prove as understanding when she would reject arranged marriage as a lesbian. As long as she did not end up having to work in a call center like her friends who were forced to give up their long-term well-being for their immediate survival needs, she would be grateful.

She'd been made to spill ink, after all.

Her mother would take her to the beach to teach her Kalaripayattu. Like silat, it was renowned for how far its female exponents could rise and gain respect in it, even in the midst of societies that could otherwise prove unfavorable to them. She taught Mano never to use violence irresponsibly, but to always be ready to defend herself if she needed to. They would bond as they trained before the rise and fall of the ocean's waves on the ocean shore.

Her father would invite her into his garden, and teach her yoga among the plants. He taught her that there was more to yoga than a simple physical exercise that was supposed to keep you healthy. Yoga was supposed to be a natural extension of the connection between people and their gods, a ritual expression of spiritual practice. Beyond that, he taught her to try to 'get into' the spirits of the animals that they imitated, to treat it as role-play, as an exercise in empathy.

What would you be like if you had been born in different circumstances? She was taught to ask herself this question relentlessly. Reincarnation meant that you could come back as anyone, so you should try to understand people because you could have been them, if things had only been just a little different for you. By becoming used to any difficult posture through yoga, he hoped she would also learn to adapt to difficult environments, even uncomfortable ones, by extension. By teaching her both engineering and Kalaripayattu, her mother taught her to adapt situations to her own needs. Mano strove to develop both sets of skills, and to use them right.

She was startled when she first saw Western kids kill insects. When her parents had found insects in their home, it had always been their custom to be careful to capture them without hurting them, and to release them outside. When she had asked about it, her parents had explained to her that they believed in something called ahimsa, that the first duty of every living thing was to do no harm to any other living thing. When she would find insects drowning near her, she'd developed the habit of taking them out of the water to put them back on land, and it would cheer her up whenever she would do it. What must have it been like to have been a bug?

Once, the building they shared with other tenants became infested by termites. They were eating through the wood everywhere so much that the structural integrity of the whole building was compromised. They needed to evacuate the building of all of its tenants so that they could safely perform the extermination that would put a stop to their ravages before repairs could be performed. One of their neighbors, a very pious man, was refusing to evacuate on the grounds that it was against his religious beliefs to cooperate with the extermination. At first, Mano was surprised that her parents criticized his decision, while agreeing to evacuate themselves.

"We understand how you feel, but this is not just a matter of what we believe ourselves. We live in a society with other people who may or may not share our beliefs. If it were feasible for us to move to a different building and to simply abandon this one, we would do it, but we are not rich, and many other tenants are poorer than we are. None of us can afford to. If science had progressed to a point to which we could communicate with the termites to ask them to leave, we would agree to it. Unfortunately, science has not, and we do not have this option. We'll always be proud of our beliefs, Mano, but it's still not right for us to impose them on others."

It was this level of nuance based on context that laid the groundwork for the kind of religious tolerance that Eli liked about Mano right away. She'd had crushes on other girls her age back in England, idle longings that she knew even while having them that they would always be the stuff of fantasy, and that it may be just as well that way than to bluntly find out a girl was straight. This was the first time she felt as though she fell in love with someone. It frightened her.

Love could be a scary thing sometimes.

Eli had always hated the maid fantasy. While she was made of flesh and blood, and liked eroticizing her fellow women just as much as the next lesbian did, she just couldn't help but look at it through a Marxist lens and see it as a projection of the straight male gaze. While it was usually thought about from the perspective of how interesting it could prove for the person being served, she couldn't help thinking about how reductive it could be to think of it from the perspective of the maid, having to treat what should've been a vacation as just an extra chore to slog through at the end of the day. What an entitled way of thinking that was.

When she fell in love with her housekeeper, she felt rather conflicted about it. Did this mean that she'd been wrong to judge others for finding something compelling about this concept that she hadn't considered? Did it mean that she really did have just the entitled way of thinking that she rightly criticized others for having? Did it mean that her disregard for the maid fantasy and her attraction to her housekeeper could be separated in a way she hadn't thought about? Or was that just a self-serving excuse to justify herself? She wasn't sure, but she was a little afraid to find out. How badly could she have internalized some patterns that had been inflicted on her?

There was more to Mano than being her housekeeper, that much was for certain. Eli paid attention to what she did in her off time. She saw Mano's workshop and garden as windows into her soul, as places where the ideas that came into the octopus' mind were made manifest, and marveled at the mind that she imagined having been able to come up with such things. She saw Mano training at both yoga and martial arts, and wondered at the time, skill and effort that it would have taken anyone to move as gracefully as she did, without even seeming to try. She saw Mano seem to get along with her parents and envied her that more than anything she ever had.

Mano was kind to her.

She went about their dwelling like well-oiled machinery, creating order from chaos, with a song on her lips and a smile on her face. Eli had always found it hard to smile. Her parents' smiles had always been fake, and the more they had tried to force her to smile to convince other people to like her, the more she had come to think of it as an unfair encroachment for others to expect it from her. But Mano's smiles at her felt like they were being freely given to her.

Mano had seen Eli cry one time. At first Eli had become angry and hurt at the thought of having been caught. She'd been taught to repress her emotions at all costs or else, and the idea of having someone else see her in an emotional state such as this one had been humiliating to her. At first Mano had felt guilty to have accidentally infringed on Eli's privacy the way she had just then. But she had also felt a surge of empathy for Eli that had rendered her unable to walk away. She had had to ask if Eli would be all right, if there was anything she could do. How could she have lived with herself if she didn't?

How could Mano see Eli's suffering, and not imagine what it would be like if it had happened to her instead, and not feel that same suffering in all three of her beating hearts?

There was nothing that Mano could really do. Eli was sad because her parents were abusive to her, controlled her life, taught her that everything short of perfection from her was unacceptable, and that the purpose of her life should have been to meet their expectations at all costs, no matter what. Mano could not risk confronting her parents' employers, throwing the lives that they had worked for into disarray. She had no leverage against Eli's abusers. She knew that the power dynamic she was in had come to be without her input, but she still felt so guilty for not being able to help that she felt that she had to apologize to Eli about it.

Even though Mano had no way to solve her problems, Eli was moved by the fact that Mano took the time to listen to her and to care about her. No one else had ever gone to the trouble of trying to understand what she'd been going through, and she'd never realized how badly she'd needed it all along before it had finally happened to her then. She'd never imagined herself as even worth caring about by anyone before. It was a first for her that she'd never forget.

Beyond that, in a world she'd come to see as cruel beyond any chance for redemption for her entire life, it was the first time that Eli had seen a sign of empathy in someone that had convinced her that maybe sometimes people could be kind to others after all. Eli had thanked her for her kindness, and they'd started to talk. Mano came to admire Eli's capacity and willingness to speak her mind a great deal, finding Eli an inspiration to her in her own journalistic endeavors. The first time that, sitting together idly during what little free time they had, they'd tentatively moved their arms toward each other's to hold hands, Eli's heart had leapt in her chest.

Mano wasn't fazed by Eli's atheism. She'd lived in a religiously diverse environment for most of her life, mostly around Muslims and Sikhs, none of which her parents had taught her to think less of because of their beliefs. She didn't particularly need someone she loved to conform to her beliefs for her to feel that they were being validated, as long as they didn't expect Mano to give up her own beliefs for them. Eli made it clear to her that she didn't.

Mano had not met many Buddhists. In practice, most of them seemed relatively peaceful to her, at least from a distance. In some ways, their beliefs were still more similar to her own than the beliefs of any monotheists. According to her beliefs, Buddha was even supposed to have been one of the avatars of Vishnu among many others, so clearly he was supposed to have had an important role to play.

Despite that, on an underlying level, she sometimes wondered what it meant that Buddhism, having started out from Hinduism to go in its own direction instead, presented itself as an 'awakening' from something. Did it mean that they considered her beliefs to mean she was 'asleep?' Of course, she knew that, on some level, the point was supposed to be to become awake to the suffering of others.

She would sometimes think about the story of Buddha, having grown up in a life of privilege, suddenly being 'awakened' from his sheltered existence to witness suffering, poverty, disease and death. She had certainly seen her share of poverty when she had been growing up. Even so, on some level, talking to Eli and trying to be there for her, to listen to her about her pain, always made her find the Buddha relatable. In her way, she'd been 'awakened to suffering.'

She understood not wanting to go back to not knowing. She could never think that the bliss of continued ignorance could be worth not being able to be there for someone who needed her, who she wouldn't have been able to help if she hadn't known about it. While it was true that she often found the news depressing herself, she became proud that she would be living her life as a journalist, in a way so as to bring knowledge about the state of the world to people.

Knowing was always better than not knowing.

When Mano had graduated from her studies, she came in contact with a leftist newspaper that offered her a job as a war journalist in the Middle East. She could have either accepted it to leave everything and everyone she'd ever known behind, or have tried to find another job in India, to have been able to stay in her homeland with her parents. Beyond that, she'd become attached to Eli enough that she didn't want to leave her behind by that point.

When Mano first mentioned the job offer to Eli, she talked about how she didn't want to take it. She knew she could find other opportunities where they were, and she made it clear to Eli that being able to be with her was the most important thing in her life. But Eli's depression because of her parents' abusive treatment of her was getting worse. She told Mano that, if she did take the job, Eli would very much like to go with her, if Mano would have her.

She said that she couldn't imagine having to spend another year in a place where her parents had as much access to her as they wanted to at all times, where they could always hurt her, where she could never do anything about it. She'd become used to being able to lean on Mano whenever they'd hurt her. Without her as support, or any chance of escape from such an untenable situation, Eli feared she couldn't make it through the year and would take her own life.

If she stayed, she believed she would die.

Even though Mano hadn't come out to her parents yet, she asked them whether they thought she should take the job or not, for what it was worth. She was afraid of getting them in trouble with their employers, or that she would be betraying them by leaving them behind in some way. "We just want you to do whatever will make you happy," they'd told her. She was grateful for their kindness, and knew they were saying what they believed parents should say, on some level. As part of her own reflections on the awareness of suffering, she wondered whether or not happiness was truly the most important thing. But she smiled, and thanked them warmly.

So she took the job, and brought Eli with her, to save her love from the grace of God...

Chapter 4: Concerning Flight

Like the other teenagers at his high school, Rakim took an interest in video games. While being in the lower middle class meant that his range of access could be somewhat limited, it became something he'd spent spare money on as soon as he had it, at least, for a while. With time, he found ways around some of these barriers to his access to those games now and then. He had genuine fun playing them when he did. They were games - that was what they were for. Through them, he sometimes even found common ground with some of the other kids. It was only after hearing some of the other teenagers who had bullied him in the past talk about those games that he realized something about so many of the games he'd grown up enjoying.

Castlevania. Metroid. Mega Man. Mario. Zelda. Final Fantasy. Spelunky.

All the games he played wanted him to kill bats.

At first each individual instance of it had seemed harmless to him. Games weren't real. They were things that people played for fun. Within game worlds, every being takes on a different, specific role for the purposes of the game. You had to be able to have a space to play with concepts like that. After all, no board game was really making a statement about how hungry hippos really were, was it? That seemed a bit farfetched. Just because a person would kill a bat in a game, one that would come back to life instantly when the game would be reset anyway, didn't mean that they'd kill a bat like him in real life. It was just a game.

But when he started hearing some of his tormentors talking about 'goddamn bats' around him, in ways that were designed for him to hear, talking about everything they wished they could've done to vent their frustrations on the bats in these games at great length, he began to ask himself some questions. None of them had tried to kill him as such yet, that much was true, but they did tell him he should go off to fly into a building. In spite of this, he wouldn't have wanted to have had to give up the connections that he'd managed to make with people through some of these same games, or the sense of respite that he'd gotten from playing them alone at times. Yet he couldn't help but ask himself if, on some level, for those who had been taught to fear bats, these games seemed to confirm what they'd been taught to believe. What if they did?

Rakim began to look for positive representations of bats in the media and found vanishingly few. His fellow students thought him a blood drinker, even though vampires were a very small percentage of all bats, but few people had the patience to sit down and learn about the differences between all the different species of bats. Wingnut was a joke. Gargoyles weren't quite bats, even though he sometimes tried to tell himself it was close enough. Batman wasn't played by a bat but at least he used bat-related power for good, he tried to tell himself. Their situations were reversed. Rakim was poor but his mother was alive. He thought himself luckier.

Rakim didn't need a bat signal. His crescent moon already lit up the sky.

In other ways, Rakim wished the moon had been kinder to him. High school wreaked havoc on his body. He hated having had to start binding, but the blood was especially intolerable. He trained harder and harder, almost as if to get revenge against his body. He was told that it was just nature's way. He remembered the first time he'd been called unnatural. He'd run off to hide into a forest clearing, looking up at a butterfly landing on a branch in the light, and asked himself, what is it that separates me from this? How am I not like this? In a way, the forest was a refuge from the city kids who bullied him, yet in another way, nature was also deaf to his plight.

There was always sound.

When he would be home, sometimes, before or after a day at school - daytime school could prove challenging to stay awake for, for the nocturnal - his mother would put on music from their homeland for them to listen to together, the sound permeating the space between them, almost as if closing the distance between them by how it filled the air. Hearing it, he felt almost as though he could imagine growing up in his homeland, if it had been at peace. She told him it was music that her Sufi dervish trainer used to play to her as they trained, that the ecstatic trance that dancing to it brought was the effect of the voice of God speaking to them through it.

He found such beauty in this sound! He wondered why he didn't hear more of it elsewhere. Did their sound evoke fear as well? He asked his mother about it. "It may surprise you to learn this, Rakim, but there have been those among us, just as among other believers, who believe that music is the devil." He was shocked to learn such a thing. How could anyone believe that there could be evil in such perfect beauty?

The subjects of beauty and evil came to figure more prominently in his mind as his teenage years marched on. When he began to contemplate whether or not he would like to ask out any of his classmates, he realized that those of them that seemed to him like he'd have wanted to ask were guys, just as he was. What would his mother think, he wondered? Certainly, he couldn't infer too much from the fact that she didn't find music's beauty evil itself. He tried to find a way to get her opinion about it other than admitting it to her directly to test the waters.

While she saw through his attempts, she decided to let him believe that he was being subtler than he was. "Judging people is God's job, my son. My job is to raise you." Still, he worried about betraying the homeland he remembered so little about somehow, sacrificed to his convenience. "Our homeland has a long history, Rakim. There have been times we've taken far different things for granted than we do now, without needing to have been told by anyone." Hard traditionalists would have thought him a girl anyway. How could they tell him not to date guys? Bats were meant to sleep upside-down. What could be unnatural about being 'inverted' so?

After the bullying he'd endured for being a bat, for not being a 'real' guy, and for his mother's clothes, his newfound attraction became a new catalyst for a fresh batch of bullies to decide to start to pick on him again. Remembering his mother's words, he strove to defend himself without causing serious damage to them as diligently as he could. He employed his growing skill to neutralize them with acrobatic dodges, locks and throws, but the more they came at him, the more difficult it became. Finally, he used his bat hearing to gather dirt on all of them from afar and blackmailed them all into leaving him alone lest their reputations be destroyed.

This time he'd done what she'd asked. He'd listened to them. He'd won by listening.

"Today," his mother started at their training one day, "I'm going to teach you something different." He looked up at her questioningly. "It's another way to defend yourself." Was there some aspect of his training that he'd been neglecting? "It's also a lot more than that." This, he could believe. But, what could it have been? "It's your birthright as a bat. Some of us no longer learn these days. There's some stigma attached to it. But it's natural, and it's beauty itself, Rakim." His heartbeat increased, waiting.

"I'm going to teach you how to fly."

For as long as he would live, Rakim would never be able to describe the sensation of flying to someone who couldn't fly themselves to his satisfaction. It was the most exhilarating feeling in the world. It was as though the world were opened up to him. Somehow the sensation of flight made him believe that all living things had to have been destined for complete, absolute freedom someday. He wondered why it had taken her this long to have taught him how to do it, why he hadn't seen more of his people flying to and from various places throughout their day. Why would have there been any stigma attached to such a harmless thing as flying?

"You have to understand that, for people who can't fly, our nature can become a subject of fear and envy. It can make the world smaller for us. We can escape from dangerous situations, like a mugging, by flying away. Some of them style us as cowards, or are afraid we'll drop things on them from above. Just think of if you fell out of a plane or out of a building. You could still be alive despite it, but someone who can't fly couldn't be. It's hard for them to accept that. Some of us... some of us have our wings clipped, to be seen as equal. Too often, they can never accept that they can't fly anymore. If you get surgery for that other reason someday, I hope you keep your wings. They're different. There's no shame in being able to fly, you know?"

He stopped, and thought about what she'd said for a moment. "... I wish _everyone_could fly, mother." She smiled at him.

"You're a good kid, Rakim."

Chapter 5: Feeding the Clothes

Klein had been a weird kid.

He didn't have a 'type A personality,' whatever that was. He was never going to be an 'alpha male.' He didn't enjoy team sports. He wasn't a team player. He was the strange, weird kid who would sit in the corner trying not to draw attention to himself. He kept most of his reflections on the world around him to himself, forming his impressions about things from a distance whenever he could afford to. He'd learned to mistrust drawing attention as negative.

Klein's parents owned a North American clothing corporation that owned fabric factories in China and Brazil. While they'd still kept the name Klein because of the market value that had become associated with it, they'd converted from Judaism to Christianity long before Klein had been born. When he was a child, it was to a church that he would get dragged, not to a synagogue. He had never asked them why.

He didn't want to assume that it was only because they'd realized that becoming Christians would make it easier for them to fit in among other Christians. Certainly they weren't the first to convert from one religion to another for their own reasons and, in general, he didn't think that it would've been right for him to have made inferences about their motivations. The reason it occurred to him was that his parents, in particular, would always encourage him to put a lot of effort into keeping up appearances among others and to do everything he could to fit in at school as well as in the world at large. Whether or not it was true, it would've been consistent.

Most mammals still had an incrementally easier time than most reptiles, although outright hostility between most mammals and most reptiles was a thing of the distant past. Even among the furred themselves, there were many who thought that not all mammals had been created equal. While there was the understanding that humanoid animals were different from their feral namesakes, it was easy to become categorized based on symbols derived from one's feral origin.

For example, people liked to try to scam, trick or otherwise deceive fish somehow, because they imagined, based on fishing, that fish were supposed to be especially easy to fool. Scammers liked being able to say that a fish had swallowed their lies 'hook, line and sinker,' reveling in the sense of superiority that they derived from their demeaning terminology. Religious fish were often accused of believing only because they were so easy to fool.

Klein was a skunk.

As a child, some of the other children bullied him by staying pointedly away from him and pretending that he stank, because skunks were supposed to stink. They told him that he would chase girls but that he would never catch one because they would always run away from him before he could get to them, because they could smell his stink from so far away. When allergies had made him sneeze at school, the other students had made fun of him by saying that they hadn't done anything to threaten him so he shouldn't have had any reason to spray them. He began to wash his hands obsessively, until they bled, afraid someone would smell stink on him.

He began to believe that perhaps life would've been better if he hadn't been born a skunk. If only he could've converted to a different species that wouldn't have made him be quite so made fun of. Of course, schoolyard bullies picked on reptiles, fish, bats, bugs, hybrids - anyone different, really. But it's the nature of bullying that it atomizes its victims, making them feel like their alienation separates them from everyone else to contribute to their alienation.

He wanted to paint his tail black, but everyone at school already knew him, and it would've seemed like something that someone would've done in a cartoon. With his luck all it would've done would've been to have drawn even more attacks than before. He knew people whose parents were far worse to than his were to him, but that didn't mean that he got along with them. In any case they certainly weren't going to help with bullying that they blamed on him in the first place. As far as they were concerned, it was his job to win his peers' approval and, if he failed, they would be disappointed because of the shame that his failure would've brought them.

They wanted him to take over their corporation when they would retire and, when he would, it would be important for him to know how to maintain the best image possible for the company as a whole. How could he ever manage this if he could not even learn how to maintain a good image around his schoolmates? So Klein began to think about how people managed the impressions that other people had of them, about how people communicated through images in daily life. They made clothes, and clothes made the man. Men like him were supposed to be obsessed with clothes anyway, but for him, it went a little deeper than the stereotype implied.

Even the white stripes on his back were an inadvertent symbol that communicated something to others when they saw it. Among feral skunks in the wild, it was a warning to predators to stay away, or that they would get what would be coming to them. As a humanoid skunk, though, the symbol's interpretation was turned back against him, branding him as a pariah like the Mark of the Beast.

It occurred to him that the stripes themselves were a kind of advertisement, just as the clothes that people wore were. He had never sprayed anyone, although he'd threatened a bully who'd cornered him with it once. The bully had been so scared of getting sprayed that he'd soiled himself and ran. But he blamed the stench on him on Klein, claiming Klein really had sprayed him. He wondered if he would ever find a way to make being a skunk work for him.

His parents tried to use their money to get him to behave. They would spend a lot on promises to buy him things to reward him for doing what they wanted, or they would threaten to take things away to punish him for not doing what they wanted. In the end he ended up finding perverse pleasure in wanting as few things as he could in the first place, to sabotage their attempts at manipulation. He strove to become an ascetic out of spite, and desire for freedom.

He did get attached to things, though. How could he not?

Since the bullying he endured at school had made it seem like a better idea to try to have a good time on his own than to waste his time trying to please others who would only hurt him, he ended up spending a lot of time on his own, some of it outdoors but much of it indoors. The more time he spent inside on his own, the more he couldn't help allowing himself to become attached to his books, movies, games, and plushies. In a sense, they were the companions who were willing to spend time with him without judging him, the friends he couldn't make at school. It became a comforting ritual for him to say good night to them before going to bed each night.

He'd still thought of himself as a Christian in high school, even though he wasn't always sure of what that meant. The first other belief system he'd learned about that'd drawn his interest had been animism. On an intellectual level, he fully understood that the objects he owned and liked weren't going to start singing back to him like they would in a Disney cartoon, but on an emotional level, still being able to treat certain objects like people felt like it was good for him. It seemed to him as though, as long as he could keep his expectations about the real world realistic themselves, there could be no harm in a bit of fantasy, daydreaming and roleplay, could there?

At the time, his conception of good was the one that he'd imagined based on his Christian upbringing. No killing - except in self-defense or war. No stealing - except from the rich to give to the poor. No lying - except lying to a Nazi about where a Jewish prisoner hid. He learned that, historically, Christianity had had a dim view of animism, which it had branded with the unflattering moniker of idolatry. He wondered if there could be extenuating circumstances for it.

Hadn't the law been made for people, rather than people having been made for the law?

Frustrated with this seeming obstacle to pursuing animism, Klein began to look for loopholes in his religion that would still allow him to pursue other ones. As a teenager, when he would be dragged to church, his attention became drawn by a griffin his age who sang in the choir. Half-panther, half-raven, the hybrid's voice made him sound like an angel. The skunk began to look forward to his voice much more than to any of the sermons he would hear there.

Tentatively, Klein went up to him and started talking to him after one of his performances. The griffin acted just like a normal kid, but he was very soft-spoken, with a gentle, slightly effeminate vibe about his demeanor that made the skunk suspect that he might play for the same team as he did. They started talking to each other about random things, as kids were wont to do, and they progressively became friends.

When Klein came out to him, the griffin called him a fag and told him to fuck off. He told the skunk that, if he ever talked to him again, the griffin would call him out as a stalker and have him excommunicated for being a pervert, before storming off in a huff. Klein knew that, if he could no longer come to the church, his parents would have wanted an explanation from him, which would have risked outing him to them.

Klein had cried, feeling spurned both as a friend and by someone who he hadn't even admitted to that he'd had a crush on. His bitterness toward dogma grew, and he began to question whether he truly belonged with other Christians. Sometimes he even wondered whether they could be right about him going to hell or not. He learned that the Latin word for skunk was the same as for the devil: mephit, the stinky one. He wasn't sure of how to feel about it. Part of him worried that it meant that sin was etched into his very nature. Part of him wanted to embrace it, and to draw from its power that he'd always feared so for his own purposes.

He began to feel that it wasn't safe for him to admit to being attracted to other men, as someone who lived in a world where people were going to be reacting to it the way that griffin boy had. He would have to come up with a strategic response to this. As painful as what had happened to him had been for him, he knew fully well that, compared to many others, he'd been relatively lucky. Many others like him who had come out hadn't fared nearly as well as he had.

There was always the risk of violence.

For a long time, he had resisted the notion of buying pepper spray because, if he were attacked, he didn't want to appear in some headline talking about a skunk having sprayed someone. It was this incident that finally made him reconsider his viewpoint to start carrying some after all. He realized that, if he died because he was concerned about how living would make him look, it would've been a cruel victory for the reign of appearances imposed on him.

He figured that his best shot at not becoming a target for anti-gay violence was to try to stop being gay altogether, just like people wanted him to. People talked about having done it all the time, it couldn't have been that hard, he'd tried to tell himself. In college, he'd started dating a lioness who had just joined the police force.

He grew to hate the police.

At first, he'd admired her because she'd been a woman working in a position of power that had traditionally been held by men, so he thought of her as one in a long line of trailblazers. In time he often had to put up with her rants about how much she'd loathed feminists. She'd say that she'd believed in the meritocracy above all else, that she'd personally fought very hard to deserve to get where she was. She didn't want what she saw as pity, and she didn't want other women getting through to meet some quota because men like him felt guilty about it. She was 'one of the good ones' and proud of it. Her male co-workers liked her a great deal for it.

At first, she had kind of liked that Klein had been sort of a pipsqueak who she felt that she could lead around. She'd liked the idea of being a leader, of being in control. In time, she became sick of what she saw as his weakness, as his inability to live up to her ideal of what a real man should have been. She'd believed that she drew her skill at catching criminals from her lioness hunting instinct, playing into the trope without a second thought. She'd talked about criminals, even minor offenders, as prey, as slabs of meat to hunt down and kill. He'd become disgusted by the way she'd talked about them, and frightened by her obsession with firearms.

And she'd hated his clothes. She'd criticized them all the time. She'd told him he stank.

She'd believed that, on a basic level, people were fundamentally evil, and would only do evil to others if left to their own devices. It was only by being subjected to strict authoritarian control that people could be forced to be good, she'd argue, so every control could be justified by the fact that it was the only way to have a society in which people would be good. It'd seemed to him that any control should've had to justify the restrictions it imposed on people's freedoms, but he'd known better than to argue with her about it. He'd never seen her change her mind about anything.

The more he'd thought about it, the more her view of the world had made him think about his religion differently. The idea that if you followed a certain set of rules, you would go to heaven and that if you broke them, you would go to hell began to seem like transparent manipulation to him. It occurred to him that whichever people were in charge of ascribing these rules to God could simply use it to blackmail everyone into doing whatever served their interests, even if it went against the interests of believers themselves.

Beyond that, even if he took the idea of the reality of God at face value, he began to question what kind of God would have used such a Skinnerian system of rewards and punishment to condition people according to a set of standards that made sense only to Him. If someone only helped someone because they would be eternally rewarded for it, or only out of fear of being eternally punished, was it really so generous of them? Or did it reduce every positive human interaction to mere calculations? He couldn't help but think that it would be better to help others because one _wanted_them to get better, because one _cared_about them.

He'd hated what he'd read about his parents' company. Their reputation for how they'd treated their workers was dismal at best, but they were doing well enough financially that they'd decided they didn't have to care. When he'd been in college, his parents had started temporarily putting him in charge of supervision at one of their fabric factories. He hadn't thought of himself as a leader, and hadn't liked the idea of having to be in charge of anything, but they hadn't cared.

He hadn't thought that he'd received enough of the proper training to know what he'd be doing well enough, but they'd told him that it hadn't mattered because he'd be going to learn on the job. Having to work in-between classes had been exhausting. At least his classes had been interesting. During one of his college history classes, an archaeopteryx teacher of his had projected a symbol on the chalkboard that had immediately spoken to him.

It had been the yin/yang symbol.

As soon as Klein had seen it, he had felt a sense of identification with it, because of the black within the white and the white within the black that were inscribed on his own body. The class about Daoism that followed had changed his spiritual perspective irremediably. Daoism could technically be either a religion or a philosophy. He figured that, as long as he thought of it as a philosophy, he could get away with adhering to it without angering an insecure, jealous God. Daoism had made him feel that it was okay for him not to want to be a leader, and for him to value people's freedom over other people's desire to control them.

It made him feel that he shouldn't have had to change himself to meet the expectations of others, that it had been okay to accept himself the way he was. It made him feel like the names that he'd been called growing up had just been words that bullies had come up with to describe the limits of their own minds, that the concepts that had been presented to him as absolutes like what it meant to be a real man had been completely relative. It made him wonder what else he'd never been taught at school, that he'd only be able to learn from experience when he'd go out into the world. If being a skunk had brought it to his attention, maybe it didn't have to be so bad.

One Daoist story in particular had stuck out in his mind when he'd first heard it because of how it'd resonated with his own life as well. It was called 'Feeding The Clothes.' In it, a sage showed up at a friend's house in common clothes, only to be turned away by the help at the door. After returning in his sage's robe and being let in, he began to stuff his pockets with food at the dinner table. When asked about it, he'd answered that 'Since it's clearly my clothes that have really been invited here, not me, it seems only fair that they should be the ones who should be fed your dinner, doesn't it?'

When his exhaustion and lack of training caught up with him while working as a supervisor in one of his parents' factories, he made a rookie mistake that caused one of the workers who worked there to lose one of his arms in one of the fabric machines. Wracked with guilt, Klein wanted to quit on the spot. Klein begged his parents to make sure that the wounded worker would receive worker's compensation from them because of what had happened to him.

His parents told him that the worker had been fired for his incompetence and that he would receive nothing. Any admission of guilt on their part would have made the company look terrible. They'd dismissed his desire to quit as a panic reaction that he should shrug off as well. They'd told him that it'd been more important for him to think about the long-term well-being of their company than about how he felt about a stranger right now, to get his priorities straight. Nepotism existed for a reason, and all builders of great empires had had to make sacrifices and to learn to put their own interests first. You had to break some eggs to make an omelet, didn't you?

At that point he really did feel like he had been 'feeding the clothes,' but in a much ghastlier, unanticipated way. He felt as though the entire fabric factory, and possibly the entire clothing industry by extension, was just this big, gigantic monster and that, by sacrificing their workers' lives to have them be engulfed by this monster, his parents were feeding it, like collaborators securing their own advantage by feeding other people to a dark and evil god.

He thought about the meaning of 'wu wei.'

All his life, he had felt rushed into making rash decisions that had ended up being bad for him and bad for other people because he had felt compelled to give in to social pressure. The idea that he could react to social pressure by calmly saying 'No, I don't think I'm going to do that' had never fully occurred to him, or at least never with this level of emotional clarity. If there had ever been a time for him to learn to make decisions on his own terms, it'd been now.

That night, Klein renounced Christianity, broke up with his girlfriend, quit his job, dropped out of college, and ran away from home into the wilderness.

Chapter 6: Promised Land

Eli's parents had disowned her for having moved away to the Middle East with Mano, but Eli hadn't cared. If anything, she'd been only too glad to cut them out of her life as well. Mano missed her parents sometimes, but children grew up, pursued love and opportunity, sometimes moved away - it was the way of things. As for Eli, she'd really been hoping that her emotional condition would improve from getting away from hers. Hope was a weird, new thing.

Eli had always hated being told that she was the one who was choosing to be depressed. Of course she would have chosen to have been happy if it could have simply been as easy as that. Mano and Eli had talked about how much they despised the fetishization of the 'depressed poet' as somehow better because of their depression, not in spite of it. The tendency to fetishize suffering for its own sake had always reeked of nihilistic, anhedonic Judeo-Christianity to Eli.

The point was that, if there was a chance for her to be happy at all, she'd been going to take it. She would never have stayed in miserable circumstances on purpose, as if to keep her situational depression going as though it would make her create better art. All the famous depressed artists would have done at least as well and possibly better if they'd gotten the help they'd needed, she'd been convinced of it. It was creepy to her to imagine outsiders not suffering from her condition who would have been willing to sacrifice her chance for happiness on her behalf to extract better art from her, like oil from a whale. She'd used that metaphor in a poem.

"I know all artists are self-conscious about how fans interpret their output, Mano, but for me, it still feels like it goes deeper than usual somehow," she'd told her girlfriend. "I mean, once art is out there, once you release it out into the world, it no longer belongs to the artists, it belongs to the fans, doesn't it?" The octopus had tilted her head at her. "Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?"

Eli had thought about it. "Well, let's take Lovecraft," she'd started. "You're just thinking about Lovecraft because you're looking at me, aren't you?" Mano had jested. "Kinda," the turtle had admitted. "Now Lovecraft was like a grade A asshole, you know?" Mano had seemed surprised. "Really?" Eli had nodded. "Oh yeah! He was a complete speciesist, and he wholeheartedly supported the colonization by England of countries just like yours."

Mano had seemed disappointed. "But Cthulhu!" Eli had smiled. "I know. But see, it's the fans that saved Cthulhu from his creator. He made Cthulhu to represent everything he was scared of and hated. His fans made Cthulhu hilarious and adorable. They freed him from his creator." While she was the one who was a cephalopod, it occurred to Mano that Eli might have envied and related to Cthulhu. She'd hoped to be free from her own creator for a long time as well.

"What about Darwin, though?" Mano had asked Eli. "What about him?" the turtle had tilted her head at Mano. As a staunch defender of evolution against creationists, Eli had some admiration for Darwin. She would even have said she was a fan of his, she supposed. "You don't care much for Social Darwinism, do you?" Eli had shaken her head. "No, not at all. Darwin would've abhorred it. He even wrote about it. Evolution was a scientific observation, not a moral prescription to weed out the 'weak.' In this case, it's other fans of his who took his work, which was good, and turned it into something evil."

They'd heard of the religious violence in the Middle East, but seeing it had been a shock.

"Sometimes," Eli had gone on, "I wonder whether or not the violence done in the name of religion happens because followers turned something good into something ugly... or because the people who came up with the religion were evil, and made good people do evil things because of it. And I wonder whether I'll be remembered like Lovecraft, or like Darwin." "So," Mano answered, "that's what you have on your mind when you sit down to write, isn't it?" Eli had nodded. "Well, no wonder you're stressed out," the octopus had caressed her girlfriend's face lovingly.

Eli had smiled. Mano had loved seeing her smile.

Eli had always been afraid of repeating the negative patterns of the past in her life. For one thing, back in India, Mano had technically worked as her housekeeper for a couple of years. Eli now published political essays, gathered support for activism, published poems about pressing issues and expressing her deepest emotions, and fought her fear of public speaking by giving public speeches against all forms of injustice, much as it rattled her. When she'd be too busy or shaken, Mano had often fallen back into her old habits of picking up around the house, doing random chores without even really thinking about it. Six hands made things a bit easier.

When Eli would feel that most of the housekeeping duties had fallen to Mano, she would cry, and feel terrible about herself. Mano would try to tell her that it didn't matter. It wasn't only that Eli felt that she had in a sense already been rescued by Mano once, that it seemed to Eli that she shouldn't have had to continue relying on Mano's help even after that. Eli felt that she, an English person, had gone to India to make Mano into her servant, just as her ancestors had.

"But we're not our ancestors, Eli!" she'd say. "I try to help you because I love you!"

For another thing, it was around that time, in her young adulthood, that Eli began to suspect that she might have been a man. It was often around young adulthood that people realized they were trans, she'd read, but it contrasted so much with the 'always-knew' trans narrative that she'd heard more about that she hadn't been sure whether she should have trusted it or not. She _wished_she'd been born a man, she was certain of that. The thought of transitioning was a whole other thought entirely. She knew too much about how much of a struggle it could be to even think about it, when she'd already struggled so much. Maybe someday, but not for now.

When Mano had offered Eli to start calling her 'he,' Eli had refused. Mano knew enough to be polite enough to accept, but Eli could tell that she was curious about why. "On one hand, it seems too... easy for me to give myself this thing I want right now. Part of me fantasizes about saving it for when I really will transition. If I start using it now I might never be motivated enough to push myself to do it." Mano had tilted her head at her. "And on the other hand?"

Eli had sighed. "In my body, in my heart, I'd rather be a man, but... in some ways, I'd still rather be a woman as an activist. If I'm a man, I'm just another man telling people what to do. If I'm a woman, I'm still the underdog. I don't want to seem like I'm going for a power grab. And if I have to keep bringing up that I'm trans to still be taken seriously as someone who's suffered enough to know what it's like... that means I can never be seen as a real man anyway. I have to always keep reminding people of the exact thing about myself that I'm trying to forget. So since I can't get away from who I am anyway... I may as well just stay like this."

Mano had hugged her. "I don't want to turn into my father, Mano. Don't let me... You see, if we're both women, then I feel like we're like two secret agents, who met in enemy territory but who worked together to escape to go start a new life together somewhere. It's silly, isn't it?" Mano had nuzzled her. "No, I sort of get it." "But if I'm a man, and you're a woman, I just feel like I kidnapped you away from your family to drag you here for my own interests."

Mano had shaken her head, vigorously. "You could never have done that! I was already studying to become a journalist when we met. This war is important. This is my own path. This is what I set out to do." Eli had paused, and had slowly nodded yes. It had been important to talk about why what they were doing was worthwhile. The news that they would see every day were so depressing that, on some level, Mano felt bad to have been a journalist, contributing to it.

"Do you think it's always better for people to know the truth, Eli? Even if it's a painful truth?" Eli had grunted thoughtfully. "I think it's important for people to know the truth so they can make informed decisions, I suppose," she'd said. "This is about your job, isn't it?" Eli might not have handled it the same way, depending on what it was about. "Among other things, yeah." When they would watch the news, Eli would cry. Mano would offer her to stop, but Eli didn't want to stop. She didn't want to stop the pain. Without pain, people would ignore injuries, then die, that was Eli's argument. She didn't want to become like an ostrich with its head in the sand.

"What else?" Eli had asked. "Well, I meant it's not just about how I feel about the news I'm reporting... It's about what those news might imply," Mano had sighed. "What do you mean by that?" the turtle had tilted her head at Mano. "Every day, I'm out there watching Christians, Jews and Muslims blow each other to bits over basically the same God, Eli," she'd winced. "God's a smokescreen," Eli had answered. "It's about land, really." Mano had scratched her head. "Do you really think that?" Eli had nodded. "We're just animals fighting over territory."

Mano had looked downcast. "I've been asking myself, not just as someone who tries to bring truth to others, but as someone who believes in things... If the truth was different from what I wanted it to be, should I still not want to know?" Eli felt uncomfortable. If she imagined herself to have been born Indian, and an English person had shown up in her country telling her to abandon the beliefs that had parents had brought her up with, she wouldn't have cared whether the person telling her to change had been a Christian or an atheist. It would've meant the same colonial aggression either way, from her perspective. Eli hadn't wanted to become that either.

"I can't have an objective viewpoint on religion, Mano," she'd said, "not only because of what happened to me, but because I don't know that there is_such a thing. We _all believe things because of what happened to us." Mano also hadn't wanted to be reduced to a subject of pity, truths kept from her out of the assumption that she couldn't handle it. It'd seemed vaguely insulting. She hadn't wanted to seem like she'd be accusing Eli of doing that either, though.

Sometimes Eli had briefly fallen back into the patterns of how she'd speak in her childhood, and talk about how evil religion was without thinking about who she'd been talking to. Mano had never brought it up, understanding that in context she usually meant monotheist fanatics, but Eli would catch herself, and apologize, which inadvertently had made Mano wonder if she really had meant her after all. That she could have still reflexively equated 'religion' with 'monotheism' had made Eli feel horribly ethnocentric herself, and she'd berated herself for it when it'd happened.

"Do you really think that religion makes people good or evil, Eli? Or do you just think that people are good or evil, and religion is just part of how that good or evil manifests?" Eli had sighed, and shaken her head. "See... For one thing, I don't trust how religion can take an idea that's evil, and enshrine it as part of a package deal with other ideas that are good, so that people who want the good from the good ideas feel forced to accept the bad along with them."

Mano had encouraged her to continue despite her reservations.

"For another, I don't like how people can take the ideas of old, dead people, who didn't know a lot of what we know today, and say that we have to make moral decisions based on what they used to say, even if we've learned more things since then that seem to indicate that a moral decision should really be something else. As long as someone can explain why they're doing something in a way that's somehow connected to the interests of living people, in a way that's in their best interests, in a way that can still make sense to someone who doesn't share their beliefs... let them do it for their own reasons for all it does to me, I figure, you know?"

Mano had nodded. "I understand." That didn't seem like too much to ask to her.

"Who knows," Eli had gone on, unselfconsciously, "maybe, in the end, it's you who will convert me." Mano had tilted her head at her. "What do you mean?" Eli had regretted having said it. "No, forget it." It was too late to take back. "No, what do you mean by that? I've never even tried." Eli had sighed. "You see, some people think atheists must be sad. I don't like playing into that. I don't think God would make me all that cheerful. I can be plenty optimistic about the cosmos, about science and progress. It's my own life that I'm sad about. I'm an atheist because I want to be an optimist, Mano. That's part of why Eastern beliefs speak to me."

Mano had shaken her head. "I'm not sure I understand." Eli had ventured into an unintended area. "You see... When typical Westerners first hear about reincarnation, they usually just think about how fun it would be to come back as something other than what they were in this life, like a little vacation from themselves. They don't get how it completely doesn't work from the perspective of the people who came up with it in the first place. The goal is literally to be a good enough person that you're no longer forced to come back... When I think about how deeply people must've suffered to understand what a hell this life is so well, it moves me to tears."

Mano would've never imagined that her beliefs could've affected Eli this way.

She'd known that Eli had still carried pain from what had happened to her, but she hadn't realized that it'd still been so bad that Eli had still thought of existence itself as this horrible curse that she'd wished could be lifted from her. She'd asked Eli if she'd thought therapy could help, but her parents had sent her to abusive therapists that had broken her trust in therapy in general, with or without drugs. She'd offered Eli to try to dull the pain with less conventional drugs but, again, Eli didn't want to dull her perception in any way, to risk missing out on something else in front of her.

"Do you trust me, though?" Mano asked. "Of course I do. I may never have believed in your gods, but I've always believed in you," Eli had smiled. "Do you want to try to talk to me?" Mano had offered. Maybe she could be Eli's makeshift therapist, even if she didn't trust an official one? "What would we talk about?" Eli had asked. "I don't know," Mano had shrugged. "What do therapists usually talk about?" Eli inquired, half-rhetorically. "I should probably ask you about your childhood," Mano guessed. "Oh God, not my childhood," Eli had half-winced, half-jested. "Was there _anything_about your childhood in England that you liked?" Mano asked.

Eli had stopped, and though about it. "Alice in Wonderland," she'd said.

"Why is that?" Mano had tilted her head at her. "It's the first thing I can remember that I knew came out of England that I didn't hate. I liked the mock turtle soup bit, I thought it was funny. The way the griffin dismissed the tears of the mock turtle made me think of how easily people would dismiss my own tears as unimportant. 'She hasn't got no sorrows, you know!'" she'd chuckled. "Beyond that... Well, I related to Alice, in a weird way." That, Mano had definitely seen coming even less. "Why was that?" Eli looked at her seriously. "Because I also sit, and dream of a better world that could probably never be. My impossible Wonderland..."

The Middle East had worsened her depression. After a couple of years in the Middle East, Mano heard that a position was opening up at her job for someone who worked there to become a journalist in Brazil. She asked Eli whether she wanted to stay in the Middle East, or to try taking the job offer as an opportunity to move out of the Middle East. There were enough social problems for them to tackle in Brazil for Eli not to feel like she'd be running away from other people's suffering. Maybe a change of air would do her some good, she told herself. Maybe, somewhere in Brazil, Eli could find a way to live that would let her escape from the pain somehow. It also wouldn't be quite so dry. A turtle could only grow as big as the tank it lived in.

So Mano took the job, and brought Eli with her, to try to save her love again...

Chapter 7: Sand in the Gears

It wasn't easy to meet people.

First you wanted someone who'd get past all the things that most people couldn't get past about you. That was already a big one, especially for someone like Rakim. Then you needed someone who'd be willing and able to get past the quirks that made your individual personality as unique as it was beyond that. You wanted someone who wouldn't act normal for a while only to get you used to them until you figured out they were the world's foremost severed finger collector and they'd always pictured you in their fridge. Finally, you wanted someone who made you feel good about yourself, who cared about how you were doing beyond your use to them.

Oh, it helped if you had enough in common with them to run into them in the first place.

Typically people in his situation would've gone to meet people at bars, for all the good that did him. Rakim didn't drink, and he wasn't about to start. His mother had never made a big deal about it one way or the other but after all the compromises he'd already made he figured had to draw the line somewhere. He'd never even had alcohol, didn't know what he was missing, and he just couldn't imagine caring about whatever it could bring him enough to make the decision to compromise for it. He had to hold on to something.

Once, a guy he'd gamed with online for a while asked him if he wanted to come over.

It seemed like an appealing opportunity to him. The gesture hadn't been _overtly_romantic, although they'd both talked about how they were looking for another guy openly. There was a definite possibility of it in the subtext, the way Rakim was reading it, but with an 'out' for them to keep it as a platonic evening of gaming, if that was all that naturally came of it. It was a way to put himself out there without having to really put himself out there, and a way to get to know someone before really signing up for anything, fitting for a skittish newcomer to these things.

His name had been Ogun. Ogun's dwelling had been an interesting place.

Rakim took in his living space, sitting perched on the arm of his couch like a gargoyle. Posters of Robert Johnson, Donna Haraway and Sun Ra shared the wall with Da Vinci sketches and alchemical symbols scattered here and there, giving the room a cheap, eclectic atmosphere. The living room, kitchen and bedroom were an open concept, the washroom barely separate from them at all. Everything seemed packed just a little too close together, as if it had been forced together just a bit too roughly for comfort, but it was being graceful about it and it promised you that you'd get used to it if you just gave it some time.

"Sorry about the mess," he'd apologized, looking around with suppressed panic as if he'd just remembered that he'd been going to have someone over but hadn't finished picking things up before he did. He belatedly moved a few things out of the way while the bat had walked in as if he had been vainly trying to empty a flooding boat with a spoon. "No worries," Rakim had reassured him, used to small spaces from his own apartment. "Thanks." Open books, tools, wires, disassembled pieces of electronic equipment and half-finished electronic devices littered so much of the floor that you could barely set foot on the ground itself around them.

"I'm kind of always working on something, you know?" Ogun gestured at the mess that his daily life consisted of. "So I keep putting stuff away but I keep having to take other stuff back out as I go," he grinned, "like a perpetual motion device." Rakim nodded. "That makes sense. Why put everything away if you're only going to have to get it right back out, you know?" Ogun chuckled. "I know, right? Oh, can I get you anything? Beer maybe?" The bat tried not to make a face. "Hmm, do you have anything else?" He tried to sound casual, not wanting to ruin his chances by seeming rude. "You don't like beer?"

Ogun did a facepalm, pointing his other finger at his guest as if he'd just realized something obvious. "You don't drink!" Rakim looked sheepish to have been found out. "Nothing wrong with that," his host waved aside. "You can drink if you want," the bat offered, "I can live with that." Ogun frowned. "No, let's see..." He looked around his dwelling briefly as if he was trying to remember something. "Ah! How about this?" Ogun pulled an old hookah out from a cupboard. "Have you ever had some of this?" Rakim looked intrigued. "I'm not sure. What is it?"

Ogun pulled out some green, dried up plant matter that the bat had never seen before. "It's new," he explained, "I got it off this octopus I know." His guest tilted his head almost like a bird when he was curious about something, he noticed. "What does it do?" Ogun grabbed some of the plant matter to start grinding it as they spoke. "She said it's supposed to make you more empathetic or something." This piqued Rakim's interest. "How does it work?" Ogun was now loading the hookah with some of the powdered plant matter. "It gives you, like, some kind of chemical boost for empathizing, so it makes you want to do it more to get more of the boost."

Rakim seemed impressed. "That sounds neat, actually!" Ogun was glad. "Feeling courageous, then?" He took out his hookah lighter. "You don't have to have some just because you're not drinking, just so you know," Ogun made sure to specify, not wanting to come across as pushy. "Nah, I'll give it a shot!" It seemed that he had the bat's enthusiastic consent for this much so far, in any case. "All right then! Let's see how this goes." Lighting up, Ogun started by taking a long draw himself before handing the hookah to his guest, breathing in then slowly exhaling at the ceiling as Rakim followed suit.

"Wow, this stuff's pretty good," Ogun admitted before taking in a second draw.

"Oh, you're switching!" Ogun looked puzzled. "The head you're drawing with, I mean," the bat explained. "I'm sorry, I hope I'm not being rude." A look of understanding dawned on Ogun's faces as Rakim's turn came again. "Oh, you mean my heads!" No one had ever explained head etiquette to Rakim. "I guess I sort of take it for granted by now," Ogun's lion head continued while his ram head drew and his dragon head coughed. "Well, when I'm not being reminded of it, I mean." The bat looked sheepish as he took the hookah back from his host. "I didn't mean to remind you, though." It could be unpleasant to be reminded you were different.

"Well, I know I have them," the dragon head rasped amusedly as it was Rakim's turn to cough. "Believe me, I've been reminded in much worse ways by other people before," his ram head continued bitterly as Rakim tried not to stare, fascinated to see the chimera bring the hookah so that even the snake head's maw on his tail could draw from it. "There's nothing wrong with asking questions when you're trying to understand something, right?" Rakim hoped that the Ogun's attitude would be as enlightened as that when he would realize that the bat could have his own set of questions to answer for him, he thought to himself. "I'm glad you think so."

Ogun shrugged. "It just seems easier to give each throat a chance to recover, I guess." Rakim nodded. "That's why you do it with talking too, isn't it?" All four heads nodded. "People tell me I never shut up," his snake head hissed, "I don't really have to maybe. I don't always think about what it's like to have to carry on a conversation with only one throat." Rakim couldn't stop himself from grinning. "You have throat privilege!" All four heads laughed. "Well, if I ever talk your bat ears off, check my throat privilege, Rakim." He discovered he liked saying his name. He liked how saying it felt in his mouths. "I'll make sure of it," the bat assured him.

"Oh, we were going to play something, weren't we," his lion head remembered, "that was what you came here to do, isn't it?" He handed Rakim the hookah so he could start digging around for his gaming devices. "I almost forgot," his dragon head apologized, "I don't know why, my mind's been all over the place recently," his ram head continued, "so it's hard to keep track sometimes," his snake head finished. "No problem." Some people found it disorienting to have to keep up with Ogun, but Rakim loved it. "It's all good." He loved listening to people. "So, what would you like to play?"

His guest gave a cursory look to his collection. "Oh, you have Aero! And Sonic, and Demon's Crest!" There were so few games where you got to play bats. "Firebrand's not quite a bat though," the lion head pointed out. "He's got leather wings, close enough," Rakim shrugged, "I take what I can get," he finished, tongue firmly in cheek. "They always have to give bats awkward controls, though," the dragon head lamented. "You noticed that too!" Rakim had always privately regretted this. "They should make a game where you play a bat who has awesome controls, don't you think?" "Maybe we should make one," he answered the ram head.

Rakim hoped to God that, when the time would come for it, Ogun would not find his own controls too awkward to play with.

"You guys don't have it easy either, come to think of it," the bat continued. "I don't think I've ever played a game where you played a chimera. Most of the time they just make you monster characters," he noted. "That's true," the snake head acknowledged, "there's a few where you can be like a lion or a dragon, but never the whole shebang. Of course when we do appear we're usually boss monsters," the lion head grinned, "not just regular enemies." Rakim grabbed a controller. "I'll show you who's a boss at gaming, buddy," he winked at his host, "if you give me a chance to." Ogun grabbed a controller of his own. "Challenge accepted," his dragon head smiled.

"Do you mind if I put on some music?" the ram head asked him after they'd been playing for a short bit, "or do you want me to leave the game music on?" While Rakim did enjoy the game music, he was more curious about what kind of music Ogun liked to listen to still. "I love music!" he chirped. "Go ahead." Rakim's mind drifted away from the problems in his life as smoke, gaming and music filled the air around them, giving him something else to breathe for a change. "Oh this is pretty good!" he exclaimed. "Glad you like it," the snake head said. "What is it?"

His lion head nodded at one of the posters on his wall, keeping his other eyes on the game. "It's called Sun Ra. The guy who played it was into some pretty weird stuff," his lion head began. "He was a trailblazer in Afrofuturism, well people credit him for it anyway," his dragon head went on. "I'd never heard of it," Rakim answered. "See, most of the time, people think of Africa in terms of nature, and the West in terms of technology, because the West has money, and Africa doesn't. Technology doesn't have a nationality, though," his ram head explained, "it just does whatever people make it to do," his snake head completed.

"Ideally," Rakim nodded, struggling with his controller to perform a difficult maneuver.

"So he tries to make us imagine a world where Africa does have technology, to show that they'd know what to do with it if they had it, to make other people picture it as something worth doing, to highlight the contrast that still exists for now so people will be likelier to correct it," his lion head picked up. "His name sounds Egyptian," the bat observed. "Well, he liked to talk about immortality sometimes," his dragon head replied, "it was one of his things." Rakim was putting two and two together. "And the Egyptians had that thing about how they had to keep people's bodies intact so they'd come back into them later on." Ogun grinned. "There you go."

Rakim came up to a point in the game where he was restarting from a saved state. "Video game characters are kind of immortal, wouldn't you say?" Ogun scratched his lion head. "I guess they are, aren't they?" The bat was amused with himself for having come up with the analogy. "Don't you wish you could save your game in real life? Be able to restart from before making a mistake?" The chimera had to admit that did sound like it would've been convenient to have been able to do that. "I guess until we can do that, we'll have to be more careful not to make mistakes in real life than in video games, won't we," his dragon head reflected.

A different artist came on when Sun Ra's smooth tracks came to an end. "This is 'Crossroad Blues,' speaking of mistakes," his ram head informed his guest. "What do you mean?" the bat asked. "It's a track about a guy who sells his soul to the devil to become a great musical success," his snake head answered. "After he made it people started thinking that's what he'd done to get as good as he did! Can you imagine?" Rakim couldn't believe it. "You mean people took it completely literally like that?" Ogun chuckled. "Yeah, people tend to do that with a lot of metaphors, it turns out."

This reminded the bat of something. "Someone once told me some people believe music itself is the devil." Ogun tilted his ram head at Rakim questioningly. "Do you?" Rakim smiled. "I did say I love music, don't I?" Ogun looked at him slyly. "Ah, but maybe you love the devil for all I know." Should he or shouldn't he? "Well, that depends." Too late, he did. "Are you the devil, Ogun?" He realized he liked saying his host's name too. He'd better have liked it - it was too late to take back. The chimera seemed surprised, but not for long. "Well, that depends," his lion head answered.

"Are you up for making some mistakes?"

Chapter 8: Rods and Cones

'Persistence of vision is the unique physiological quirk that makes the illusion of animation possible.' (Blue Man Group, Rods and Cones)

From then on, Klein had decided, he'd do the opposite of everything that he'd always done. Since he hadn't liked the way that his life had been going because of the kind of person that he'd been until then, to do the opposite would have to be the right thing to do, wouldn't it? Today had been going to be Opposite Day, if he'd have anything to say about it.

He would walk through the looking glass, and never look back.

He'd been sure that he'd have to end up somewhere, if only he'd walked long enough.

He'd ended up walking into a forest, which had only seemed like a very small portion of woodland when he'd looked at it from the outside. At first he'd thought nothing of it, assuming that he'd walk right out the other side before he'd know it. After hours and hours of having walked further and further into it, he'd begun to wonder if he'd somehow become smaller, or if it had been the forest itself which had been becoming bigger around him.

The dark foliage around him had been as beautiful and scary at once as only his newfound freedom and responsibility for his own survival could have made it to his eyes at the time. Bugs had crawled under logs, babbling brooks had babbled, and stumps of long dead trees had commemorated the location of those trees' lives and deaths like gravestones. Cawing, croaking and buzzing sounds had echoed in the dark from behind the ferns, leaving him to imagine what manner of creature could have been emitting each and every sound that he'd heard. It had occurred to him that he hadn't had as much survival training as he'd have liked.

So he'd begun to sing.

He'd sang softly and gingerly to himself, hoping not to attract the wrong kind of attention but singing to hold on to a sense of his own existence against the dark of night. He'd have rather have brought a machete to cut some of the lush vegetation out of his way, but for lack of one, a song on his lips would have to do for now. At least it had vaguely cheered him up.

'El cameleon cambia de colores segun la ocasion,

Tu corazon cambia de colores como el cameleon...'

He'd reached a clearing, and first thought that he must've been hearing an echo from somewhere. It had sounded as though the same song that he had just been singing had been being sung back to him from somewhere else somehow. So he'd stopped singing altogether and, when the song that he'd been singing had continued unabated, a chill had gone down his striped spine. Had he been dreaming or hallucinating somehow, he'd asked himself? Had he been on some kind of bad trip that he hadn't known about? He'd rubbed his eyes in disbelief as various multicolored pixels had seemed to have been coalescing right before his very eyes.

No, it had to have been real. There was just no way it hadn't.

As the humming had tirelessly continued, Klein had begun to be able to slowly distinguish them forming the outline of a person's silhouette, swaying like leaves in the breeze to the song that had been being sung. Swirling colors had finally settled on green as eyes that had been spinning around looking each and every which way independently from each other had finally both settled on him.

"That's a nice song," the chameleon had told him. "Where do you know it from?" he'd asked the skunk. "Uh..." The reptile had tilted his head at him. "Cat got your tongue?" He'd pursed his lips with his extensible tongue casually. "Who... are... you...?" Klein had asked him.

"Boko, at your service," he'd said with a flourish. "And you are?"

Klein's parents had taught him not to talk to strangers. "I'm Klein." His parents had taught him a lot of things. "What brings you to the forest, Klein?" Klein had scratched his head. "I'm not really sure. I had nowhere else to be." Boko had smiled at him reassuringly. "That's all right. The forest has a purpose in mind for everyone." Klein jumped as another mysterious animal sound resonated through the wilderness. "Sometimes I worry what that purpose might be." He had been walking for a long time, far along into the night. "Does the forest scare you, Klein?" The chameleon had clicked his tongue disapprovingly.

"I just like it better in the daytime, I guess," Klein had admitted, with a smile that had asked for understanding. Darkness hid the unknown. "Ah, we're all scared of what we don't understand, aren't we?" The skunk had certainly been on the receiving end of that. "We are." He was listening. "I'm sure that, if you understood the forest, you'd no longer be scared of it," Boko had assured him. "Are you offering to help me with that?" At that point, Klein would've been willing to get all the help he could get. "There are a lot of things I can help you understand, Klein... if you'd like," he'd winked at Klein. "And the forest is one of them?" Klein had asked.

Boko had grinned, changing his skin color back to meld with the colors and outlines of the trees around them just as he had before he and Klein had just met while spreading out his arms. "Of course I do, I am the forest, can't you tell?" The skunk had chuckled as the chameleon had innocently retaken his usual green color in front of him. "I like you. You're funny." Boko had shifted his skin to a bright red. "You lie," he'd said with false humility. "I like your singing," the chameleon had added while shifting his skin back to green. "Oh, it's not really that good," the skunk had waved off. "Do you sing, Boko?" But Boko hadn't heard his question.

"Oh, look... The sun is coming up...!"

Boko had announced this to Klein as though he'd made one of the most solemn revelations that someone could make. He'd only ever heard straight men reveal the scores of some of their sports games with this kind of level of reverence. It'd sounded as though Boko really hadn't been certain until that point as to whether or not the sun had been going to come up that day, as though the fate of all people had hung in the balance until the moment of sunrise.

In an instant, Boko had used his tail to propel himself upward up to a tree branch above him. Grabbing the branch with his arms, he'd swung his legs up between his arms behind him, bringing them back forward over the branch to swing his body up and sit up on it. Standing on the branch to face the coming dawn, he'd breathed in deeply with his arms outstretched and his palms upturned, enraptured by the light washing over him as he'd drank in its warmth.

He'd begun to sing.

It'd seemed as though every possible color of the rainbow had coursed through Boko's kaleidoscopic body as he'd chanted to the sun that he'd been so ecstatic to welcome into a new day. The forest had rung around them with a hymn that had seldom been heard since before settlers had come from across the sea. As a reptile, the sun was the energy source that Boko's body used to recharge its batteries. He was like a tree. Its warmth gave him life and made it holy.

At that moment, Klein so wished he could have been Boko himself! It'd seemed so fun.

When he had finished singing, Boko had used his tail to break his fall after he'd jumped back down to the ground from his branch. He'd looked rejuvenated. "Maybe you're right," he'd told the skunk, "maybe it is much better in the daytime after all," he'd winked at him. "Did you come up with that?" Klein had sounded impressed. "No, I could never have come up with that," Boko had shrugged off. "It's a hymn to Inti, the sun god of the ancient Inca."

There had been something so refreshing to Klein about hearing about the gods that had existed here before Christianity had shown up. "Do you actually worship him?" The skunk hadn't wanted to be rude, but he'd always been curious about other people's beliefs, and about how their experiences could have shaped them to have been the way they were. "I worship everything, Klein. I'm an animist." The skunk had gasped.

"You don't say! I'd never met another animist before." He'd been an animist after all, he'd decided then and there. For the purposes of this conversation, he had been. It was almost as though his prayers had been answered, paradoxically enough. "You must be tired after spending the whole night walking through the woods on your own," the chameleon had observed, "would you like me to help you find somewhere to get some sleep, perhaps?"

Klein had stopped and thought about it. It'd sounded like such a convenient lure to have come up at just the right time the way it had, on an intellectual level, but from an emotional standpoint, he'd felt completely at ease around Boko. He'd just gotten an incredibly positive vibe from him somehow. The chameleon had aroused his curiosity enough to make him want to see what the rest of his life must have been like. "Thanks, if you're okay with that," he'd answered.

"You must have quite a story to tell about how you ended up here tonight," the reptile had pondered, "You should write it down someday, maybe." Klein had never thought about that. "Why do you think that?" Boko had looked at him seriously this time. "You should always do everything you can to remember your past," the chameleon had told him, "It's the most important thing there is."

On their way back through the forest to Boko's dwelling, the chameleon had shifted his body's color to black and white in just the right way to make himself look like a skunk, just like Klein was. Klein had laughed, seeing a literal manifestation of the vibe that he'd been getting from Boko that he'd found a kindred spirit in him that would be a breath of fresh air for him. He hadn't been sure of whether he should've said anything about it or not after how things had gone the previous time that he had felt this way and had said something, but Klein had had to admit to himself that, whether it'd be reciprocated or not, he'd been developing a serious crush on Boko.

Chapter 9: Saltwater

'If I'm born again I know that the world will disagree... Want a little grace, but who's gonna say a little grace for me?' (Vampire Weekend, Unbelievers)

Mano had tried to have been just as optimistic about them moving from the Middle East to Brazil as she'd been about them having moved from India to the Middle East in the first place. Cephalopods were relentlessly curious creatures, always exploring and looking forward to discovering new things. Of course, some people also believed that this was the reason for which they could be lured into octopus traps.

"Look at it," Eli had said, almost with reverence, as they'd sat on the beach looking out at the ocean from a Brazilian shore after having moved there, "So much saltwater..." It may not have seemed like much, but it had been true that they had missed the ocean when they had been living in the Middle East. You could take the fish out of the ocean, so to speak, but you could never take the ocean out of the fish.

"Sometimes," she'd started, "I think about saltwater." It'd sounded like she'd been thinking out loud. "I think, if you have salt, and you have water, two completely different things, and you put them together, you get something else that's new and different from either of them: saltwater. One side quenches your thirst, the other side makes it worse. At first, it might not seem like you can get back either salt or water from saltwater, not the way they used to be anyway."

Mano had nodded, encouraging her to continue.

"But then, people talk about how if you use a filter, if you pour saltwater through a filter, you can get your water filtering through... and you can get your salt filtered out. Or if you have like a lab or something, you can make the water evaporate, contain it in vapor form somehow, get your salt, and condense the water right back." Mano hadn't been sure of what Eli had been talking about. Did Eli have regrets about their relationship? It'd seemed wrong to ask.

"What does that make you think about?" Mano had asked.

"Sometimes," Eli had answered, "I think back on everything that happened to me, okay, I think about the bad things, and I wonder, could there possibly ever be a way for me to filter out the harm it did to me, like salt from water, to get back what I was before it did what it did to me? Or have I so irremediably bonded with how it affected me, even bound up with the sympathy that drives me to help others... that it's a part of me for good, and there's nothing I can do about it?"

Mano had hugged her.

"We can never know that there's nothing that we can do about something unless we try," Mano had told Eli. "Someone had to be the first person to get salt out of water." Eli had grunted thoughtfully. "Can I ask you something about reincarnation, Mano?" Mano had nodded. "Do you think, if you and I came back as other people, that we could somehow find each other again? Do you think I could somehow not remember what was done to me in this life, but still remember the good things, the things about you that I liked, on some level? Or do you think that we'd just forget everything, and not care anymore?"

What a loaded question that had been.

"I think," Mano had answered, "that you would be in great danger of having been a good enough person not to come back at all. But even if I did believe that one lifetime is all I get, Eli... There's no one I'd rather spend it with than you." Eli had smiled. Mano had loved to see her smile. Maybe if she'd worked at helping other people with their problems for long enough, she'd have so much to deal with that she'd eventually forget about her own, Eli had tried to tell herself.

Brazil had had its own set of issues to deal with. Poverty had been a big one, and street urchins - often literal urchins - had roamed the favelas in search of something to eat, or anything at all. Slavery as such may have been outlawed, but you couldn't simply release people who had been enslaved for generations into a society that had no room for them, for which they had no way to be prepared, and expect them to turn out just fine. Many had ended up either starving in the streets or forced to break or at least bend the rules of society simply in order to continue to live.

The discrepancy between the quality of life of fish compared to over-grounders had been more glaring there than anywhere either of them had lived before. There had even been fishing boats that had used nets so carelessly that they had caught fish people as opposed to feral fish that couldn't talk. Efforts to get them to stop their careless practices through official channels had been going nowhere for a disturbingly long time.

As word about Eli's work had spread, disenfranchised fish, hybrids and transfolk had begun to look up to her, hoping that she could provide them both with a source of inspiration for personal drive to achieve their goals and in terms of serving as their representative to the outside world. Dryads, while they'd been only a small percentage of the population, had become more and more restricted in their movements and access to public life by rampant deforestation of the so-called lung of the world, since they only had the ability to exist in the forest at all.

Eli had come up with a poem inspired by her debates with climate change deniers, fish oppression and her negative experiences with therapy. In it, water, which she'd heard that psychologists believed symbolized emotions in dreams, would overflow to cover the world, just as her own emotions had overflowed from her heart. This way, her overflowing emotions would create a world in which all fish could live and breathe. It became one of her most famous works.

Even though they had moved away from more obvious forms of religious violence, Eli had still been able to see the destructive effects of religious dogma on social structures in the anti-choice legislation and culture that had made many women's lives there so much harder than they'd needed to be. Some of the other leftist activists who had already worked in Brazil had subscribed to liberation theology, had believed, against the current, that applied progressive politics had been the goal that God had set out for them. Eli hadn't shared their beliefs but it hadn't stopped her from working with them. Results in people's lives had been more important.

The more problems she'd run into in South America that had been caused by Americans somehow, the longer she'd tried to rally the population to resist, the more she'd wondered if her efforts would ever bear concrete fruit, fruit that she could taste. Perhaps it shouldn't have been up to the people who had been affected by these negative decisions themselves to fix them, she'd thought. Maybe that should've been the job of the people who had caused them these problems.

After a couple of years in Brazil, Eli had asked Mano if she'd thought that there had been any chance that Mano could ever get another transfer from the news organization that she'd worked for from Brazil to America. Eli had wanted a chance to go talk to the people who were making the decisions that were damaging the most of the rest of the world themselves, to tell them how the people they'd hurt had been affected by it to their face. When Mano had first asked about it, Mano had learned that they had, in fact, been looking for someone else to work there, and she'd applied for it. As the only applicant at the time, it'd seemed like she'd be a shoe-in.

When Mano had gone to the anti-capitalist protest at which she had first met Klein, during his own trip from America to Brazil, the skunk had been surprised to learn that she had been planning on moving there. He'd wondered if he'd been going to run into her again after his trip to Brazil would have been over. Meeting Klein had cheered her up. She hadn't had the chance to keep many Indian friends when they'd moved to the Middle East, had made fewer friends in the Middle East, and lost them again when they'd moved to Brazil. Klein had been the only friend that she'd made in Brazil at all so far. She'd hoped that she could meet him again too.

She hadn't gardened in so long. Gardening had reminded her of her father. The more she'd thought about it, the more she'd realized that, if she'd been going to live a life in which she'd been going to be moving from India to the Middle East to Brazil to America to gods knew where for gods knew how long, she hadn't been going to get much of a chance to plant something, and to watch it grow.

She'd supposed that it'd been the world that'd become her plant to tend for, in this life. Maybe if Eli and she took good enough care of it, it would grow into something better, something good, something that would last for a long time, she'd thought. She'd remembered what it had been like to practice the tree asana with her father in his garden, putting herself into the mind of a tree, what it must have been like to have been able to put down roots somewhere.

Reminded of her own roots, in what little spare time she had from her work and when Eli had been busy working herself - Mano still hadn't started sleeping as a regular thing back then - Mano had started gathering scrap metal on the beach. Shipwrecks would periodically wind up on the shore, left there for people like her to scavenge spare parts from. With her mother's engineering training, Mano had started building a small sub from them.

"Oh, this looks pretty cool!" Eli had said. "Do you think we'll be able to bring it with us when we move?" Mano hadn't finished it yet, but there had already been enough of it done for it to have been possible to tell how big it had been going to be when it would be done, big enough for about a half-dozen people to fit in with their stuff, if they'd needed to. "I was thinking we could move in it," Mano had answered. "That might be a good idea," Eli had agreed.

But the move never came. Another applicant had applied for the job, one who the news organization that Mano had worked for had believed would be more suited for the job than she would have been. They hadn't really explained why, but she hadn't really known what to say about that. With no steady source of income to support them in North America, there would be no way for them to move there and to have a way of continuing to exist there.

"Maybe it's just as well." But the expression on Eli's face had belied her statement. "Maybe I was just trying to run away from myself," she'd said.

It had come as a shock to Mano when she'd discovered that Eli had begun to study yoga. It had been something that people would often recommend that you do when you hated your body and were depressed about your life. 'You should try yoga!' All this time, Eli had lived with Mano, and she had never tried yoga. It had seemed vaguely appropriative. What if she didn't do it right? But the desperation of her situation had led her to reconsider this advice after all. She had gotten really into it. For a while, it had seemed to Mano as though it had been doing her some good after all.

Then Mano had found her dead.

Eli had been lying on her back on the ground with her arms on her sides. There had been no sign of disease or injury anywhere on her, but her heart had stopped beating. Mano had found a note on the table next to her.

'I'm sorry, my love. I kept reliving it. I couldn't get it out of my mind. It was like it just kept happening to me again and again, over and over on loop, forever. I just had to make it stop, to break the cycle... to find some kind of peace. I wish you could understand how hard I tried to live for you, how much I had to think you were worth it to force myself to suffer from continuing to live for as long as I did. You were the only one who ever really understood me. Forgive me.

Scatter my ashes at the Galapagos.

Your mock turtle,

Elizabeth.'

The autopsy had revealed that Eli had used yoga to stop her own heartbeat. If most people had felt what Mano had felt when she had found her girlfriend dead, they would have died on the spot. The excruciating pain that she'd felt would have killed them outright. For you see, when Mano had found Eli dead, Eli's heart no longer beating alongside hers, Mano's empathy for her lost love Eli had been so strong that her own heart had stopped beating as well.

Yet she'd lived.

As an octopus, Mano had been born with three hearts. With only two of them functioning, she'd be a lot weaker for the rest of her life, but at the time she hadn't cared. All she had been able to think about had been how unfair it had been that she would get to have two more hearts to lose, two more lives to live after having already lost her life, when Eli had only had a single heart to stop, a single life to lose.

'You see a turtle on its back. What do you do?'

Scattering Eli's ashes at the Galapagos, a pilgrimage site for all lovers of turtles and Darwin, Mano had remembered their conversation about saltwater, as Eli had forever joined the ocean below her, to always be every bit as much of a part of it as salt and water would be.

Mano had just finished putting the finishing touches of her sub, and had disappeared into it. She had dived underwater in it. She had been so ashamed of having been unable to stop Eli that she hadn't been able to bear the thought of having the people who she had helped, the people who had admired her, or really anyone looking at her face, and confronting her with the fact that she had been the person who had failed at it. She hadn't wanted to remember herself. She'd understood Eli better than she ever had. She'd wanted to disappear completely herself. But how could she altogether destroy someone Eli had loved, when she'd experienced how much it hurt?

So she'd begun to sleep. Six, nine, twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours in a row at a time.

Dreams had been a new experience for her. But with practice, and with some of her mental training to help her, Mano had become able to master lucid dreaming. She'd begun to dream of Eli, just as she had used to talk to Eli when she had still been alive. Many believers would say that God is love, but for Mano, it had been her love who had become the goddess who she'd worshipped every night...

Chapter 10: Idle Hands

Rakim had sort of told himself ahead of time that his date probably wasn't going to work out to guard against disappointment. He discovered that he didn't fully have a plan for if his date actually did work out, that he wasn't sure if he was even prepared for that. If things went further, what would it really mean for him?

"So, what does the devil do for a living, Ogun?" He strove to hide his nervousness as well as he could. The chimera had been a good host so far, and hadn't shown him any real red flags quite yet. One step at a time, he tried to tell himself. "Right now, I'm working as a DJ at a club downtown now and then," his lion head answered, "but what I really want to do is to work with prosthetics someday."

"Oh, so that's why you have all this stuff lying around!" All of a sudden, all of the scraps of electronics and mechanical devices scattered across the apartment fell into place. "How did you manage to get your hands on this much of it anyway?" Part-time work as a local DJ didn't sound like a wealthy occupation, and the apartment wasn't exactly high-rise.

Ogun shrugged. "Junkyards, mostly," his dragon head answered. "I mean, I guess it's not very glamorous for me to admit digging through scrap heaps to scavenge for bits and pieces of this and that, when it all comes down to it," his ram head admitted. "Still, you'd be amazed at what perfectly good tech people will just throw right out the moment it malfunctions, even only a little," his snake head explained. "It comes with the territory of living in a wasteful capitalist society, I guess" he shook his lion head dejectedly. "Often it doesn't even take all that much work to fix. Why throw something out when you can just repair it, you know?"

"That does make a lot of sense," Rakim nodded. "I know I might never be able to make it into anything official like that," his dragon head regretted, "I mean, even getting in seems to cost money I just don't have. But hey," his ram head went on, "a man can dream, can't he?" There seemed to be no harm in that. "At least it's giving me something to do right now, for what it's worth," his snake head finished. It was even how Ogun had met the octopus he'd bought the hookah plant matter from - she also scavenged junkyards. "I guess that's true!" Rakim conceded.

"People have been trying to build things that are almost like body parts but not quite without really being able to for a pretty long time, when you stop to think about it. Wings!" Ogun's lion head smiled. "People have been trying to build wings just like yours for such a long time, for example." The bat turned over what he'd said in his head a few times. "You're right, I think that goes all the way back to... gosh, it goes all the way back to Antiquity, doesn't it?"

He could tell that Ogun was trying not to stare at his wings. Rakim tried to look like he hadn't noticed. It was normal that Ogun's attention would be drawn to them, given what they were talking about, wasn't it? "People wanted to fly. Can you blame 'em?" This brought up complicated emotions for the bat. "Heh, I guess I can't." Rakim knew he'd done nothing to earn his wings. He'd just been born with them. Then again, he'd been born targeted by multiple intersecting oppressions, and he hadn't done anything to deserve that, either.

"Man, it must be so wonderful to be able to fly!" His snake head sounded so excited, oblivious to the emotions that he was stirring up in his guest. Yet, Rakim couldn't help but notice, there wasn't a trace of the resentment that he'd come to expect from non-fliers when they'd talk to him about things like this. Ogun just sounded happy for the bat that he'd have been able to. He clearly would've liked to have been able to fly as well, but Rakim didn't get the sense that Ogun would have just ripped his wings off his back to put them on his own if he'd been able to. It was somewhat refreshing, for what it was.

"... It really is. I've often wished I could share it with people."

The lion head chuckled, pausing the game to light up and pass the hookah to Rakim. "Ah, the best things in life are always better shared, aren't they?" The bat nodded heartily. "Still, there's been so much work put into it for so long... Sometimes I wonder if we'd have found everything else we found along the way while looking for it if we'd known how to fly to begin with." His dragon head frowned, seeming to have found something wrong with what he'd just said. "Actually, your people have been coming up with automatons since the early days, haven't you?"

Rakim had just been about to point this out, but he'd been glad to have been beaten to the punch. "We did! I guess you could make the argument that no one knows how to find artificial means of doing something like someone who's done the real thing themselves," the bat began, "if you wanted to be rude about it," he added, tongue firmly in cheek, "although that's not going to be true in every case either. I can fly, but I couldn't build any of this," he gestured at the room.

"Oh, let me show you something!" Putting down the hookah again, Ogun got up to navigate his cluttered apartment with apparent ease, seemingly as used to where everything was as though it were the back of his own hand, all messiness aside. "You'll like it I think. Well I hope! It's okay if you don't," his snake head smiled. "Show me!" Rakim found his enthusiasm communicative.

The chimera started digging through a few of the scraps that he had lying around. "Ah, here it is!" He pulled something out to bring up in front of his guest's eyes. The bat gasped, his heart fluttering as he thought about the amount of precision work that had to have gone into what he was seeing. "Oh, wow!"

It was a butterfly, just like the one he had seen when he'd run into that forest that time.

"You like it?" On some level, the look of wonder on Rakim's face was the entire reason for which Ogun really did any of what he did. What was the point of new technology if not to resurrect our ailing modern sense of wonder? "I love it!" You could see every spring, every gear, every nut and bolt that had to have been put together just right, ever so carefully, knowing that the slightest excess of force would have been sufficient to break it.

He reached for it with his finger tentatively, almost afraid to touch it out of fear of damaging such a fragile contraption. "It must've taken you so much time to put this together," he observed. "A bit," his ram head admitted, "patience is really important to any of this in general of course, but yeah, it took a bit. I like to think I've gotten better since then, but it was the first thing I made that made me think I could make things."

"So it's when you became a new person, in a sense," the bat smiled, "a person who makes things, just like a caterpillar becomes something that can fly." Ogun's lion head chuckled. "I hadn't thought about it like that, but yeah, definitely." This date was turning out to be full of surprises, and it wasn't over yet. "I like it. It's like the caterpillar went through a whole other phase of transformation after the organic butterfly, like it was just supposed to, you know?"

Ogun liked the way Rakim's mind seemed to work. "Just think about what must go on in a cocoon when no one can open it without wrecking it," the bat went on, "it's almost like alchemy, isn't it?" Alchemy had always been about personal transformation. "Your people came up with that too, didn't they?" Ogun said. It hadn't occurred to Rakim when he'd brought it up just then, but he had to acquiesce to that as well.

"It must be so disorienting, don't you think?" The bat raised an eyebrow, encouraging the chimera to elaborate. "Becoming something completely new and different like that. We don't really go through anything quite like that, you know? It must be such a big shift to adjust to for everything... I'm sorry, I don't mean to empathize with creatures that are basically bugs if it's weird or anything," his snake head apologized.

"No, I get what you mean," Rakim reassured him wistfully, "it must be awesome, though, on some level. I wish they could describe it to us." It had hit very close to home, for reasons he couldn't explain to his host quite yet. "Sometimes it's the world I wish I could transform," his lion head half-jested, "sometimes it's myself," his dragon head rasped, bittersweet. As used as he was to his own form in terms of using it himself as such, he would never get truly used to being seen as a monster.

The two of them gamed on into the night.

"I love playing old games, don't you?" Ogun was striving to keep the conversation on cheerful topics, as much as he was able to. "It's just like listening to old music, I mean, it sort of brings back the experiences that came along with them at the time, you know?" The bat nodded. "You're right, it does." They were playing Super Metroid. "You played this when you were a kid too, didn't you?" They were getting close to the end. "Yep, I did," Rakim nodded.

They were coming up to the part with the hatchling.

"Oh man, this part gets me in the feels every time," the bat admitted. "I love a man who can express emotions like that," his dragon head smiled. The hatchling moved away from Samus, whimpering its unearthly whimper as it realized what it'd done after having accidentally hurt her. It ran away with its guilt as the heroine bravely strode onward into Tourian. Rakim thought of all the trouble he'd gotten his mother into over the course of his life, of every fire that she had ever willingly walked into for the sake of others.

"This is so cool, actually," his ram head continued as Samus fought Mother Brain, "when you really stop and think about it. I mean, there she was, on a mission to exterminate every Metroid in existence, you know?" Samus was in dire straits! "Like they were all the same, and their very existence was a threat." At the last second, the hatchling barged into the room, throwing itself on Mother Brain to save the life of the woman who it had imprinted on after it had been born. "But just because she saved it, helped it be born, and took care of it, it..." Ogun turned a head toward Rakim just as Mother Brain was about to kill the hatchling, and paused.

Rakim looked like he was about to cry.

"Hey..." He put his arm around the bat's shoulders, careful not to hurt his wings as he did. "Are you okay? We can stop playing if you want, you know." Ogun tried to give Rakim a weak smile, one that he hoped would convey understanding rather than dismissiveness. "No, don't worry about it. I mean, thank you! Thanks for saying so. I'll be okay." He was feeling so self-conscious about this. It seemed stupid for him to get so emotional over something so small.

"Oh SHIT are you okay?!" Ogun panicked. "I told you, I'm fine!" Rakim said, standing up, more defensively than he'd meant to. "Your crotch!" A chill went down his spine. He'd thought Ogun had still been asking whether or not he'd been okay about the game, but it turned out that hadn't been it this time. "You're... There's...!" It was the bat's worst nemesis of all.

It was the blood.

"FUCK!" Ogun finally understood what was going on, just a little bit too late. He was disappointed with himself for his reaction, but he'd really had no idea, and couldn't go back to have a different one then. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK!" Rakim was having a complete panic attack, determined that his dating days were over for good, that he never wanted to risk having to go through something like this ever again. Ogun struggled to figure out how to react as his own heart raced increasingly fast.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to overreact!" He'd just been worried that the bleeding had been caused by a nasty wound. In a sense, it had. "I'm, I'm sorry," the bat countered through his hyperventilation, "I didn't mean to lie, I'm not a liar, I, I..." He found he could no longer speak as his meager attempts to apologize dissolved into uncontrollable sobs wracking his accursed body.

"Of course not." Rakim pushed away Ogun's attempts to get close to him at first, blinded by his breakdown. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry...!" Ogun persisted, gentle, yet unyielding. "You didn't, you didn't lie to me, Rakim." The bat finally let Ogun hold him in his arms, giving up his resistance as the chimera wrapped his arms around him. "You didn't do anything wrong." Time seemed to stop.

Ogun held Rakim close to himself as Rakim sobbed and bled in his home on their date.

It was true that, if someone had asked Ogun whether or not he felt ready for something like this beforehand, he may have not felt up to it. He may have been worried that he would do something wrong, that he would make his date's situation worse through his clumsiness somehow, and left the situation to someone better prepared for it than he was. But he'd already become attached to Rakim by then. He was glad to have met him. He wouldn't back down.

"Oh gosh," his ram head apologized as he tentatively removed his arms from around Rakim while trying to convey that it didn't imply that he was withdrawing his support as well, "where are my manners, let me get you something for that." Being cis, single and gay while living on his own meant that Ogun didn't exactly have tampons lying around the house in case someone happened to need one, but he ran nervously to grab paper towels, hand towels, bath towels, toilet paper, basically whatever he found first that seemed like it might help, and just brought it all as fast as he could.

"Uh, I can let you clean up in private, if you want." They hadn't seen each other naked yet, and Ogun assumed that Rakim would have wanted his date's first impression of his genitals to have taken place under better circumstances. "I'll go get you another pair of pants, okay?" He dashed off. The bat stumbled to the washroom, cursing himself for not having remembered his cycles better. He hated having to think about them so much that he often reflexively pushed them out of his mind, as if his mind recoiled from such a rebarbative task as remembering them when they shouldn't have been happening to him in the first place.

"Here," his host's ram head told him through the partially opened washroom door, "I hope these will fit you." Ogun was taller and heavier than Rakim, and the chimera's pants looked baggy on the bat, but they were better suited to going out in public than a pair of pants with a bloodstained crotch. "Don't worry, I'm going to make sure to have what you need for that around the house from now on." Rakim frowned. "You mean you still want me to come back?" Ogun blinked. "Well of course! I mean, do you still want to?" Rakim's tears dried up. "Well yeah! I mean, why wouldn't I?"

Ogun was relieved. "Next time, I'll take you over to the club I DJ at if you want. We'll have fun!" This sounded like an encouraging prospect. "Yes, I think I might like that." Ogun looked at the time. "It's getting to be late morning. Do you want to stay over today?" Ogun thought that Rakim may have needed time to recover emotionally from what had just happened. "Can't. Gotta head back." Rakim was already worried that his mother Irshad would have been worrying about him by then. He usually went to bed around 8:30 am, and got up around 3:30 pm. "Do you want me to walk you home?" The bat smiled an ironic smile at him.

"It might be a long trip. You see, Ogun... I flew to get here."

On their second date, Ogun took Rakim to the Bolgia to dance with him, just as he'd promised. Rakim finally understood the ecstatic trances that his mother had described having undergone during whirling while training with her Sufi master. As modern arrangements of tracks from their favorite video games permeated their movements while light and darkness fought for control of the dance floor as they always did, their arms flowed around each other's bodies like tendrils from another world, and they danced their hearts out to the unapologetic glory of being too many things at once...

Chapter 11: The Sincerest Form

Boko's lair had been unlike anything that Klein had ever seen.

They'd gone down through a trapdoor in the forest floor and climbed down a ladder into a large, open, cube-shaped room underground. Inside, there had been stairs on the floor, but also stairs on the walls and even stairs on the ceiling. The room seemed to have been built under the assumption that whoever would be in it would be able to move just as easily in three dimensions as in two. It had looked like a painting by MC Escher.

After they had reached the floor, when Boko had used his uncoiling tail to propel himself all the way up to the ceiling again turning upside down on his way up, Klein had understood that the reason for which it had been built that way had been because Boko had, in fact, been able to move in three dimensions as easily as in two, thanks to the way that his sticky hands and feet had helped him cling to the walls and ceiling on all four like a gecko.

Boko had started scuttling all over his lair in three dimensions, describing all of the objects that he had kept in it one by one on his way. Boko had showed him shelves, masks, candlesticks, capes, wrenches, robes, hourglasses, togas, beakers, uniforms, lamps, djellabas, bottles, loincloths, instruments, paintings, shoes, vases, canes, statues, boots, rugs, shoes, sculptures, and books about his favorite subject: everything. After finishing a series of mad dashes and explanations that had accompanied each of them, Boko had dropped back down from the ceiling to the center of the room he'd jumped up from, turning right side up on his way down.

"As long as you don't break or lose anything, make yourself at home," Boko had told Klein, "I don't have people over often, but I hope you'll like it here." Klein had been quite impressed with what Boko's dwelling had looked like. "I've never seen anything like this!" Klein had said. "What is this place?" he'd asked. "I call it Noah's Vault," Boko had answered. "Noah? You mean like from the story with Noah's Ark?"

Boko had nodded. "Why do you call it that?" Klein had tilted his head. "You see, Klein, I've collected all kinds of objects here to protect them, because there's going to be another Great Flood," Boko had answered, "and I don't want them to be destroyed by it." Klein had seemed surprised. "But I thought that the rainbow at the end of that story meant that God forgave people and wouldn't do it again?"

Boko had shaken his head. "No, that's wrong. God doesn't forgive anything."

Klein had stopped and thought about it. He'd guessed it hadn't been that much crazier than anything that he'd been brought up to believe himself. What had been the harm? "Do you ever get lonely living out here, all by yourself?" he'd asked. "With all of my little friends here," Boko had gestured to the myriad of objects around him, "how could I ever be lonely?" Klein had smiled. "I love that you'd think this way." Boko had smiled back at him. "Thank you." Boko had also believed that objects had souls, after all. "You must have so many stories to tell," the skunk had thought out loud, "there must be a story associated with how you got each of these things."

Boko had given him a strange look. "Did I say something wrong?" The chameleon's amiable expression had promptly returned. "No, I just have a strange emotional relationship to the past sometimes," he'd explained, "You understand, I'm sure." Klein had nodded. "Don't we all." He wouldn't have wanted his own past to catch up with him. "I am glad I have these objects to remember it by, though," Boko had said. "And there's always the future," Klein had added. "Yes... the future," Boko had answered thoughtfully. "So," Klein had said, "what was your future going to be before I showed up? I'd hate to get in the way of it."

Boko had smiled. "No worries. I'm a participatory anthropologist, actually." Klein had been impressed. "Oh, really?" Boko had nodded. "That means I go out among some of the only few remaining populations that still live out in the wilderness on their own, following their own traditional way of life. I try to find those that have already been studied the least. I've been observing a tribe near here called the Sahuagin, little known fish people who lived here before the settlers came, just like the Inca. I start out by observing them without revealing my presence there, using my color-shifting ability."

When Klein would meet Mano in Brazil later in his life, she would talk to him about how she'd used to use her own color-shifting ability both in the Middle Eastern desert and in the Amazonian rainforest to help her in her investigative forays for her journalistic reports.

"I do it mostly to get an idea of their language before I start talking to them," Boko had explained. "That way, when I do start talking to them, it becomes easier for me to earn their trust, since I don't have to go through as much of the process of trial and error figuring out how they talk that can cause a lot of diplomatic backlash, if you're not careful," he'd continued. "But, listen to me babbling on about work. I must be boring you silly," he'd apologized.

"No, that's fascinating, in fact," Klein had assured him. "Do you go live with them?" The skunk's tone and expression had certainly seemed engaged, Boko had thought. "If I can get them to trust me enough to let me, ideally, for a few days, yes," he'd elaborated. "Would you like to come with me?" Klein had gasped. "You're really offering me to? But I've never done this kind of thing before!" he'd said. "There's always a first time for everything," Boko had said.

That night, on their way to where the Sahuagin lived, Boko had gone off to gather firewood so that he could build a campfire for both of them to huddle near for warmth in the cold dark of night. They had lain down next to each other about to go to sleep talking together as they had looked up at campfire smoke rising to the starry night sky. Klein had begun to feel that his earlier crush on Boko could become something like love, if it'd been going to be reciprocated at least.

In the morning, Klein had woken up to seeing Boko return from having been away from the clearing that they had slept in. "Hi! You left?" the skunk had yawned. "Getting breakfast," Boko had replied, as he'd set down a handful of roots, nuts, berries, mushrooms, and what appeared to be a small dead animal of some kind, "most important meal of the day. Don't worry, I traced a circle of protection around you before I left."

It hadn't occurred to Klein that he should have been worried about having been left alone sleeping in the morning in the middle of the wilderness until Boko had brought attention to it. Klein had only noticed the strange circular symbol traced in the dirt around him after the chameleon had mentioned it to him. He'd wondered whether or not something like this would have actually worked, but it'd seemed rude to question it. Boko had spoken with such certainty.

Klein had been stunned when he'd finally seen Boko in action with the Sahuagin. After having observed them for just a very short time, the chameleon had already picked up enough of their language that he had been able to hold completely fluent conversations with them. Klein had not had anywhere near his ability with languages, but Boko had offered to Klein to translate for him. "I love translating," he'd told Klein, "it's almost like alchemy, isn't it? You take something which is one thing, then you turn it into something else, which is both still the same thing yet also something else altogether."

Through Boko, even Klein had been able to exchange words of his own with the Sahuagin. Klein had been especially surprised because, as Boko had explained to him, the Sahuagin had developed a reputation in anthropology circles for having been especially reclusive and mistrustful of outsiders. They had been taken advantage of at a formative moment in their history, and their culture had correspondingly encouraged caution in the presence of strangers.

"How in the world did you manage to get their trust so fast?" Klein had asked him. Boko had already gotten them admittance to stay with the Sahuagin for a week. "I'm not sure," the chameleon had shrugged, "I must just have a way with people, I guess." Klein had noticed that Boko's skin coloration had already changed to match the skin color of the Sahuagin themselves. "I offered them some practical help in exchange. It doesn't seem to have been too much to ask. Maybe I just got them in a good mood," the chameleon had theorized. "In any case I'm glad I did! It makes my job a lot easier," he'd rejoiced.

So they'd lived with the Sahuagin, for day after day after day. It had been the most unusual experience in Klein's life up until that point. Every point of reference from his previous life had been left far behind him, and he had to adjust to a whole new way of existence. While living there, his sense of time had become completely different, without any clocks around him to tell time. His sense of property had become different, with how people had shared around him.

Boko had helped them on their hunts, flawless with his bird calls given his natural skill with imitation of all kinds. Klein had helped with gardening and gathering, relying on a makeshift combination of body language and of the few words of Ichthian that he'd managed to learn how to use correctly. Both of them helped with building and rebuilding dwellings or furniture. In exchange, Boko had learned everything that he could about their culture, taking notes as though his life had depended on it. Just before their week had been going to have been up, Boko had come to find Klein alone in the wilderness while the skunk had been out gathering.

"He's dead, Klein," Boko had told Klein, seeming utterly distraught. "Holy shit! What happened?" the skunk had asked him in a panic. "We were out hunting, and the animal killed him," the chameleon had said, "some kind of mountain lion. There was nothing I could do," he'd lamented. "I had to run. This is very bad for us, Klein. If the Sahuagin learn of this, they will not like it. They will probably blame us. They must not find us. Run with me, Klein!"

Klein had had no time to let the full horror of Boko's statement sink in. A man had been dead! Yet there had been no time to mourn him. It had been the wrong time and place. For then, they had to run, as fast as they could, all the way back to Boko's lair, before they would be found. On their way back to Noah's Vault, the chameleon had suddenly stopped and raised his head, twitching as he'd sniffed at the air with a scowl of barely subdued fury on his face.

"The forest is in danger, Klein," he'd said through gritted teeth. "I can hear it. I can smell it. I can feel it in my bones," he'd gone on, any trace of meekness gone from his demeanor altogether by then. "I won't let them get away with this," he'd said, breaking into an even faster run than before. Klein had already been running faster than his limit to keep up with Boko and hadn't been able to believe that Boko had been able to run even faster. How would he be able to keep up? So Klein looked at Boko run, tried to put himself into the mind of Boko. What must it have been like to have been Boko, and to have been able to run as fast as this, he'd wondered?

Somehow, while having looked at Boko and having thought this, without knowing where he'd been able to find the ability to do so within himself, he'd still been able to keep up with the racing chameleon after all. Could he even have learned the power of imitation itself from Boko, if he'd stayed with him long enough? Despite the dangers that the chameleon had risked in the course of his life, could have it been worth it to stick around, if only to find out the answer to it?

They'd reached a clearing in which they'd seen beavers and woodpeckers working as loggers taking down trees with axes and chainsaws. Boko had smelled the metal of their equipment and had heard the sound of their chainsaws from a distance. The sound of chainsaws had always made Boko feel as though he had been a tree being sawed in half himself, and it had always driven him mad with rage.

So he'd leapt at them, his face a mask of demonic wrath. His body, far from his antics at Klein from earlier, had then seemed as though it had been covered in a million bees swarming all over his skin, scaring the shit out of the loggers before he had even had time to start doing anything else. Boko had attacked them, scuttling from one to the next as his color-shifting had made him seem to phase in and out of existence here and there, bouncing up high on his tail to drop back down on them, tongue lashing and tail whipping their axes and chainsaws out of their hands before crushing their axes and chainsaws in the coils of his tail. Just how strong was he?

Having just seen Boko do it, with an improvised battle trill, Klein had jumped in, and done the same thing. Even without having had any martial arts training, even in a situation in which, under normal circumstances, he would have been terrified to fight anyone like this, somehow, he'd still leapt into the fray nonetheless, driven off the deep end by passion and madness. He'd started taking down loggers left and right with kicks, punches, headbutts and takedowns, finally letting all the resentment that he'd built up from having been bullied over the course of his life rise up to the surface to unleash it on the world with everything he'd had.

It'd felt like blood had been running through his veins for the very first time in his life.

Boko had carjacked one of the loggers' vehicles to drive it back to Noah's Vault. After having disassembled it, he'd hung up the pieces that it had been made from around his lair like a trophy, as though the vehicle parts had been the parts of some wild animal that they had killed together. That night, their blood still pumping, Klein had admitted his feelings to Boko, Boko had enthusiastically returned them, and they'd made out on the floor of his lair like two animals.

If it'd felt this way to be a villain, Klein had wanted to be a villain for the rest of his life.

***

The first thing that Klein had heard upon waking up the next morning had been the sound of Boko's fingers typing at his computer terminal. "Ah, you're up!" the chameleon had chirped. "Someone stole a sculpture from Basilisk Museum yesterday. What a bunch of idiots must work there! If only I could've been in two places at once," he'd lamented, "I'd have showed them good, I can tell you that."

Klein had blinked a few times. "What's for breakfast?" he'd yawned. "You should get ready to go out," Boko had admonished him. "It's already late in the day, we're going to Basilisk Museum later today." Klein had rubbed his eyes awake. "... Huh?" Boko had scoffed. "Not a morning person, are you? We're starting work there this afternoon." Klein hadn't been sure he'd heard him right. "What? But how can that be possible? I don't have any experience with anything like that," he'd said. "You do now," Boko had smirked, indicating his computer screen. He'd hacked into a private computer system, giving them both top marks paving their way in.

He'd given Klein one of his best business suits, having donned one himself, and he'd taken Klein with him all the way to Basilisk Museum. Klein had always thought that museums had been kind of weird. He'd liked having been able to have access to the information they'd offered, but at the same time, it'd seemed weird to him how they'd embodied this strange urge to go into other people's cultures and gather all their objects in one place for people to gawk at. It'd seemed strange, that an object could go from something that was used as part of someone's everyday life, just like anything else, to become transformed into the status of 'artifact.'

When he'd be dead, was this what all of his objects would become, he'd wondered?

Every time museum employees had had a question for Boko, he had always known exactly which answer they'd wanted to hear, and Boko had given it to them. He'd sweet-talked his way past everyone, just as easily as he'd used his silver tongue to convince the Sahuagin to allow him to spend a week with them. He'd walked in like he'd owned the place. Klein had started to wonder if there had been anyone on Earth who could have resisted Boko's charisma.

Klein hadn't even questioned how Boko had gotten the security codes that he'd punched in to let them both through an unauthorized door by then. It'd seemed like Boko could simply find his way in and out of pretty much anywhere without even trying by then. Motioning for Klein to be quiet, Boko had shifted his skin color to invisible, and walked into the security camera viewing room. Spotting a seven-headed hydra security guard watching seven camera screens at once, Boko had used more tongue lashes and tail whips to knock him out in two seconds flat before becoming visible again.

In the next room, Boko's knowledge of the blueprints that he'd looked up before coming to Basilisk Museum had allowed him to avoid all manner of tripwire, laser, pressure tile, and alarm that could possibly have stopped him or alerted anyone as to his presence there. His claws had let him cut through glass casings like knives going through warm butter. Klein had already helped him carry the sculptures all the way back to his lair before anyone had known what had hit them.

"So you're also a sculpture thief, like, some kind of cat burglar or something?" Klein hadn't really cared, from an ethical standpoint. They hadn't killed any of the loggers or any of the museum staff. People who caused deforestation and made money from gatekeeping artifacts of cultures that they'd colonized had been kind of jerks anyway, Klein had told himself. He'd just been curious because he hadn't understood the thread binding Boko's behavior together.

"Well, look at it this way," Boko had started, "if you were one of these sculptures, and your museum had just been robbed the night before, wouldn't _you_rather be somewhere much safer than that, like here, yourself?" Klein had laughed. "I guess I would! Who's going to break into here?" Boko had been terribly excited by the sculptures that they had brought back and, that night, Klein had only been too glad to help give the chameleon an outlet for his excitement.

***

"There's an abandoned building slated for demolition today," Boko had shaken a groggy Klein awake the next morning, "so we really need to make sure to get there in time, you understand?" Klein had slapped on his clothes, scattered on the ground around them from their night, and run out the door before having had time to scarf down breakfast for the second day in a row. Even the most important meal of the day had to wait in emergencies, he'd supposed. Soon, the running duo had reached an abandoned building near a cliff and a wrecking ball crane nearby.

"Come on, do something!" Boko had yelled at Klein. "What? What do you mean?" Klein had heard of protesters occupying abandoned buildings that had been slated for demolition that were supposed to be part of people's national heritage somewhere or things like that. Had this been the kind of thing that the chameleon had had in mind, he'd asked himself? "The crane, take out the crane!" Boko had rolled his eyes at Klein who'd looked at him with a stunned expression.

"Ugh, fine, I'll do it myself," he'd said, briefly looking back to stare daggers at Klein over his shoulder as he'd dashed ahead toward the wrecking crane. Leaping up into a running jump, Boko had landed sideways with his feet and hands on the wrecking crane's side. Coiling his tail under him between the wrecking crane and himself, Boko had forcefully uncoiled it against the wrecking crane with full force and, pushing against it with both of his legs at the same time, had shoved the wrecking crane right over the cliff, the scream of the person who had been driving it echoing up to their ears on its way as it'd fallen down the cliff to its destruction.

"Oh my God..." Klein had been duly horrified. It had shown on his face.

"What's the problem?" Boko had stuck his landing like an acrobat. "What did you think_we were here to do?" His confusion about Klein's reaction had seemed completely genuine, like someone who is being forced to deal with the behavior of someone that just makes no sense at all. "I... You _killed_him? Did you _have to?" he'd asked understatedly. Boko had looked at Klein like an exasperated adult explaining something obvious to a child.

"To protect the building? Yes, of course. What would you have done? I thought you and I talked about this. You said you agreed with me." It took Klein a second of scanning his memory, furrowing his brow, before a look of realization had materialized on his face, aghast. "You mean animism." Boko had nodded. "Well, yes! Objects have souls. The rarest something is, the most valuable it is, that's the whole economy, isn't it?"

Klein, shuddering, had realized by that point that he would have to pretend to go along with Boko's view of things for then, or that Boko may have killed him as well. "Of course, you're right," he'd nodded. "Well," Boko had continued explaining patiently, "do you realize how rare that building was? They make cranes like that by the truckload, you know," he'd reassured Klein, "you don't need to worry about running out or anything."

Klein had tilted his head at him. "What about people?" Boko had laughed. "People are all the same. We'll never run out of people. Why bother to get invested in people when they'll simply die? What would be the point of it? But, if you protect an object, there's a chance it might just last forever! It's a worthwhile investment. When it all comes down to it, it's people who are nothing more than objects' way of making other objects. Objects' souls are pure, Klein. Objects never hurt anyone. That's why it's our job to be at their service, to protect them from the tyranny of the animate."

Klein had nodded. In his desperation to mimic the chameleon's mental and emotional attitude about everything so that the collector wouldn't kill him, Klein had paradoxically drawn his own inspiration for imitation from Boko himself, just as he had when they'd been running. 'I'm one of you - you will accept me as your own...' he'd striven to give off. For the first time, Klein had understood that the reason for which he had believed that he had fallen in love with Boko had been because the chameleon had used his extensive charisma on him, just as he had on the Sahuagin and Basilisk Museum staff, to get the skunk to go along with his own wishes later.

He'd understood that Boko had killed that Sahuagin hunter to take his 'artifacts.'

"I'm sorry." Klein had started wondering whether or not, if he'd gone along with Boko, the chameleon would have eventually killed him as well. "I understand." Klein would never want to feel bad for having said good night to his objects before going to sleep when he had been a child. "I'm glad you were able to handle it this time." Klein would never have killed someone to save his objects. "I'll do better next time!" Klein had only ever known Christian literalists over the course of his life. "You'll see." It had never fully occurred to Klein just how much any belief system, if you took it completely literally and at face value, could lead you so completely astray.

"I'm glad," Boko had smiled, "I'm still sure you can." Perhaps there had been hope for this one yet, he'd thought. "You'll get your chance." Klein had nodded. "We're on the same wavelength now," he'd assured the chameleon. "That's good," Boko had said with a wistful, bittersweet expression on his face, "I've been hoping to meet someone like you for a long time, who would understand me and help me in my quest. When I die, you can replace me," he'd said.

Klein had gasped. "Are you dying, Boko?" Boko had shaken his head. "Unfortunately, I'm not an object, Klein. I may not be sick or hurt now, but I'm a lot older than I look. I'm just another pathetic mortal thing, far too much like the rabble I kill for my own taste. Do you remember when I told you that you should write down your stories, Klein?" Klein had nodded. "I don't remember any of my past, Klein. I remember nothing that happened to me a long time ago. But, there are signs... I can tell that I've been alive for a really long time, longer than most people. When I die, I want you to take over, to save my objects for me... and to remember me."

Klein had felt so uncomfortable. There had been so much real emotion in how the terrifying murderer in front of him had been opening up to him. Klein had been horrified by what had just happened, but his emotions had still been screwed up from having still been in love with Boko just a few minutes before. Boko had seemed to care for him in his own perverse way. What manner of creature was he? What was it that had happened to him to make him the way he was?

Could he do this? He'd actually had to ask himself. If it had been the only way to survive, could Klein have gone along with this, pretended that he was okay with it, knowing that Boko's extraordinary powers would be there to protect him from any other danger, as long as he'd shrug off the people who Boko would kill and did what he'd be told to do? Looking at himself in the looking glass back at Boko's lair Klein realized that, no matter what would happen, he could not. How could Klein live with someone, even someone who would often act 'just like him' in a way because of his imitative skills, if Klein could not even live with himself in the first place?

It was Boko who found a note from an absent Klein on his table the next morning.

'I'm sorry, Boko. I didn't refuse one life of accumulating objects at other people's expense before to accept another life just like it now. Treating objects like people may be good for all I know. Treating people like objects isn't. I do want to protect the world, but people are a part of my world too. You have better social skills than me, but I think I'm still more of a people person than you. The only constant thing in life is change. You can't stop the world from changing, and you can't 'tell' people by artifacts, Boko. People aren't the same. They're the rarest thing of all. Who knows, if you really understood this, maybe you'd protect them too.

Good luck with your replacement. I'm sure you'll find someone.

Your erstwhile assistant,

Klein.'

Chapter 12: But Not Gone

It hadn't seemed like she'd been working there for such a long time.

She hadn't, in some ways. Against the backdrop of her entire lifetime, her time at the company she worked at would have barely registered as a blip. But that also would've had to have been looked at in the context of what a lifetime could mean for someone like her in the first place.

Still, the mind liked to settle places.

In her prime, she'd had the chance to get used to much grander settings than these, before she'd been forced out of them time and time again. This was an unglamorous occupation, to be sure, sitting in a cubicle day after day in an office building like many others, in sharp contrast with the temples, palaces and libraries of her youth. No one there had any idea of who she really was, but then, very few people ever could. The risks would've been just as bad for them as they would've been for her, when it all came down to it. In her world the power that came with knowledge was always a two-way street.

The job was a good way for her to draw as little attention as possible, which was exactly what she'd been looking for when she'd first applied for it. It was a good place to hide and consolidate what was left of her power, biding her time for as long as she'd need to. She was in no special hurry. It was an unglamorous job, but glamor was overrated. Most people would've found data entry mind-numbing, working at a computer terminal that in no way distinguished her from any of billions of other white-collar employees. Compared with some of what she'd endured, she found its monotony calming. In some small way, she was helping the world remember things, and that mattered.

For the time being, her mind had settled there and, for lack of a better alternative, it was almost home.

How long would they let it last this time? At first the question had been on her mind all the time but, after a time, it'd slowly receded to the back of her mind, waiting for a work shortage to idly resurface now and then before fading back into its dormant state. It was important for her to be alert to the extent to which she'd always be as ready as she could possibly be to respond when she'd need to, but beyond that, how crazy did she have to drive herself?

If her nerves grew more frayed with time, they could simply let her fester in her apprehension, even after they'd have found her, waiting for the stress to start their work for them so they'd only have to swoop in to finish the job. Better to stock up on trying to calm down while she had the chance, since she didn't know how long it might be before she could find another hole in the wall to hide in, she reasoned.

As long as she didn't take it too far, she also admonished herself. It was a catch-22, in a way: the more she became attached to her current situation, the more difficult it would become when she'd be forced back out of it, and would have no say in the matter. And yet, sitting in a cubicle like so many other workers, walking by the other workers on her way in and out of her cubicle every day, walking among the other passengers on transit to and from her job, it was only natural for anyone's mind to begin to wander, to construct random scenarios, to wonder what all their lives might be like, what it might be like to be the way they were. How could she not?

She felt haggard most of the time at best, and truly didn't know if she would have found herself attractive, if she'd been someone else looking at herself. It seemed so insignificant in the grand scheme of things, in the context of her day to day rat race for survival, yet there was the rub, paradoxically. She sometimes wished she could have been living the kind of life in which everything around her was scaled down a notch, just far enough that small matters such as these didn't seem insignificant by comparison. The irony of knowing that people who thought of themselves as ordinary may have fantasized about existing the way she did but that all that she wished for herself was a simpler, smaller life was not lost on her, for all the good it did.

There was this mouse girl who worked in her building.

It wasn't as though she had some sort of thing where she could only look at other rodents or something, mind you. If she'd been living the kind of life she wished for, she'd have probably looked at members of most other species as equal opportunity subjects. She may not have even been wary of cats! If she'd been a normal rat, in the kind of world she lived in, it wouldn't have really mattered. It wasn't like all cats were the same, or like the rules of primal nature still applied, at least not on the surface. She'd tried to look past the cat thing once before, but that had ended up serving as a cold reminder that she'd never have the kind of simple life she wished for. She didn't like to think about it, but of course it wasn't like she could forget.

She couldn't forget anything.

She didn't even know whether the mouse would've been the kind of person who'd have been able to reciprocate her idle imaginings or not, if she'd said anything about them out loud. Far be it for her to assume others shared her predilections, and it seemed uncouth to use her powers to determine whether or not the mouse was likely to show attraction to other... rodents, as it were. At first she strove to banish those thoughts from her mind, chastising herself - business before pleasure - but the thoughts kept patiently, persistently coming back. The mouse seemed so clean-cut in comparison to how 'ratty' she felt, to how ratty she was. The mouse seemed to belong in her environment every bit as much as every other computer mouse in their workplace did.

In any case, while she tried not to talk to her too much so as not to arouse suspicion, they did always get along. Whenever she felt too anxious she would just retreat to rethink her approach for when she'd feel more confident later. If the mouse had known everything about her, she might have found it amusing to think that such a being as she was could be plagued by such insecurities but, if she made a move on her and things went south, it may have become awkward for them to continue to work together after the fact.

Or it may have been what they were waiting for to intervene, out of their sheer cruelty. That thought wreaked havoc with her quiet fantasies whenever it popped into her head, and she developed a special hatred for these intrusions. In any case, for now, the mouse was friendly, unassuming and outwardly at peace with her life in just the exact right way that appealed to her. As long as she did nothing, she could keep what they had as it was, in a secret corner of her heart, and, well, maybe it could be enough, couldn't it?

Her heart leapt - there she was! The mouse had approached her cubicle surreptitiously, the same way she did everything. Every time it happened, for a split second, before she had a chance of reminding herself that she shouldn't think such things, the possibility that she was approaching her to ask her out flashed into her mind.

"Hi!"

Must shake off thoughts, initiate friendly facial expression in response. "Hey," she waved, almost seeming too noncommittal in her determination to appear innocuous. "Can you help me?" Shake off! She'll notice. "Sure!" She already sounded warmer. She loved how sometimes, when she spoke to mouse girl, this pleased lilt would creep into her own voice uninvited, just because she was happy to be talking to her. It seemed like such a small thing, but she'd always sounded so ragged. She wished she'd known more people who'd brought that out.

"There seems to be something wrong with our database." The mouse sounded concerned. How serious was it? "Could I ask you to take a look at something, please?" "Of course!" She wasn't sure what the problem was, or what she could do about it, but she loved to help, and knew enough there was a chance she could after all. "Thanks! Come with me." The lights flickered as she got up to follow the mouse, and her whiskers twitched in a way she didn't like as they did.

Every computer in the building went dark.

(Shit. Shit. No. Not again. Not here. Not this time. No)

People got up, yelping in dismay as their work was lost. For once, the mouse seemed panicked, out of place in this setting that was changing around her to become the kind of setting that she was not adapted to - the kind of setting that was meant for rats, not mice. While the rat was in some ways grateful that she at least knew what was happening, that she could in some sense do more about it in the immediate sense than the other workers could, even though she couldn't in the long term, in other ways she envied their ignorance. Please, my mouse, you're so confident all the time, you shouldn't be reduced to this, it's not right, you shouldn't be my damsel in distress. You should be my queen...

" Get out!" The amplitude with which she'd projected her voice was unearthly, she realized when the mouse looked at her agape, but the time for stealth was past. " All of you, get out, now!" In that moment, the mouse looked at her, and yes, there was some fear, some confusion, and yet... there seemed to be concern, not only for herself, but for the rat who had worked by her side so innocuously for perhaps too long. Would she... would she have been kind enough to understand, if she'd known everything? She shouldn't ask herself such things. "Will you...?" (Will you be all right?) All she wanted to do was tell her everything, her impossible life, her feelings for her, everything. "You too," she almost cried, "Get out."

He was there.

" Now!" the rat snapped, now downright afraid for the mouse's life.

So the mouse ran, as fast as she could through the cubicle maze, out of the building, out of her life, evacuating with the other workers like there was no tomorrow. He walked between the cubicles around him as casually as if he'd only been out for another midnight stroll. "There you are," he chirped, punctuating his overture with that fanged, cruel grin of his. She growled. "I've been looking for you," he went on, as all staplers in her workplace now hovered menacingly around them over the cubicles of their former occupants.

Her expression said it all. "Why didn't they send the big guns?" For all his power compared to mortal men, Manek was low in their hierarchy, and she never missed an occasion to belittle him by reminding him of this. "Who's to say they didn't?" He tried to mask his irritation at her barb, but she could see through him this time. Never again. "Did you forget last time already?" She egged him on. "I guess you don't put much stock in remembering things." Realistically, though, there's no way they would've sent him alone. She could've handled two, maybe three men like him easily, and the Cat's Eye knew it all too well. So who was his backup? She was taunting him, but also hoping to trick him into spilling the beans so she'd have a better idea of what to expect from whichever one it was.

"I remember some things quite well," he smirked as she 'pulled' on the ink in the pens on every desk to lift them up in the air along with the staplers that he'd taken control of. "Do you?" He winked at her creepily, and as a shiver went down her spine she understood that one of the reasons they'd sent him had to have been psychological warfare. "Ah yes," she answered coldly, "one of the few experiences I've had that have been more unpleasant that being repeatedly burned alive." She had a history with Manek. Manek wasn't just magnetic, she bore in mind, he was magnetism. "How could I forget?"

Under normal circumstances she'd have never let a cat, let alone a male_cat, get as close to her as she'd allowed him to get. She wasn't in the habit of doing such things. It was his power, his existence _as universal attraction that had made her lower her guard around him, that had made her trust that maybe, just maybe, he was just some random white cat who found her cute, and wanted to see if things could work out between them. It wasn't as though every cat was out to get her, was it? Intellectually she knew there were millions of cats on the planet who were perfectly harmless, who had never heard of the Cat's Eye and who never would - couldn't he simply have been one of them? He'd seemed amiable enough, and it wasn't as though she's signed a contract saying that she could only pursue women, had she?

She gritted her teeth. How foolish she'd been. By the time she'd figured out what he'd really been up to, he'd managed to get her in a situation that became more difficult for her to get out of than she'd anticipated by far. In time he became one of the reasons for which she felt that she couldn't afford to let her guard down around anyone at all, and she grew to resent him for it. "Nonsense," he slurred, "you remember me like a fine piece of cheese, you do." She stuck her tongue out at him defiantly, as though she were trying to chase a bad taste out of her mouth. "Get lost, Manek," she spat at him, gingerly drawing the ink pens closer to her as she did. "You rodents are the ones who get lost," he grinned, "and we," he went on as all the floating staplers turned to face her and opened wide like so many metallic maws at the same time, "we cats are the ones who find you."

Before she could think of another comeback, as the beckoning cat pointed his clawed finger at her, and all of the staplers started firing their staples at her, much faster than they'd had any right to by any means. Without missing a beat, she made all of the ink pens that she'd been gathering from around the workplace start whirling around her like so many satellites orbiting around a planet faster than the eye could follow, frustrating him by somehow always being in the exact right place to repel the staples even at their machine gun pace of firing, coming at her from every direction. When they'd finally run out of staples, while he realized that he could've simply lifted them from the ground to attack her with them again, she'd already humiliated him about having tried to attack her with them enough. He'd have to do better than that.

"You can find me, but you still wouldn't know what to do with me if your life depended on it," she retorted as oversized pigeon wings tore through her shirt sprouting from her back, "so why don't you find some kind of dimensional cat flap to run away through while you still can?" He brought the staplers nearer to him while she picked feathers from her wings as though she'd been picking flowers in a field to hold eight of them between her fingers like kunai, any of which would have made a fine quill in a bygone age. People had always called pigeons 'rats with wings,' as though that were a bad thing.

"Don't get-" Not letting him finish, she threw all eight of her pigeons feathers at him in rapid succession, each becoming sharper and pointier than any throwing knife as it flew toward him. Just as surely, the staplers circled around him as well, utterly destroyed by her piercing feathers certainly, but still stopping her projectiles in their tracks and protecting him from being reached by them. "Don't get snippy," he finished lecturing her as she retracted her pigeon wings back into her back through her now ruined shirt. "We _already_struck the first blow, you know." She hated how well he played into that prissy, arrogant cat stereotype, as though she'd have been foolish to expect anything else.

"What do you mean by that?" Gathering eight staplers that hadn't been destroyed by her pigeon feathers, Manek decided to up the ante by throwing all of them at her like so many projectiles themselves, making them open and close on their way as though they were chomping at her and were going to eat her alive when they'd reach her. Unfazed, she split her rat tail into eight different rat tails, all of which snatched one of the staplers mercilessly from the air on their way to her in its coils like a hunting snake. She stuffed all eight of them into a large, terrifying, fang-filled maw that opened up across her abdomen, emitting a large belch from it before her abdomen and tail both returned to their earlier, ordinary state.

"When we first came in," he strove to hide how unsettling he found it when she did that, "didn't you notice?" This time she was the one who had to hide when her heart sank. Oh no. All the data that she'd been entering into those computers for all that time... The data entered by her co-workers! It was gone. All of it was gone. That was why they'd sent Manek. With his power, he'd been able to become like a powerful magnet that had wiped all of the computers' memories clean. Every time data was lost - any of it - part of her died along with it, because it belonged to her, just as she belonged to it, just as the more was remembered, the better she'd be doing. It was just the way things were. That was why the Cat's Eye wanted people to forget.

Everything.

"You said 'we,'" she called out, "I knew they'd sent someone with you." She was trying to hide her discouragement by picking on something she knew he wouldn't like realizing he'd inadvertently revealed to her, but wasn't sure of how well it'd been going to work. "It's not like them to let you out to play without adult supervision." He shrugged. "Spoiler alert." Before she could reply, she saw multiple pebble-shaped objects swarm into the room out of the air vents, too blurry because of how fast they were coming in for her to have been able to tell what they consisted of at first.

"Peekaboo!"

A shiver went down her spine when she recognized who the voice belonged to. After their rapid swarming into the workplace, the floating objects paused, becoming perfectly still to let the menace sink in of what their presence there represented for her. There were too many of them for her to count, far scarier than any swarm of venomous insects could've proven. They were eyes.

"I see you!"

Clearly, the situation had become serious enough that it was now time for her to join her co-workers who had, in their wisdom, vacated the premises forthwith. "It took you this many eyes to track me down?" It was always a good strategy to come across as more flippant than you really were. "The Cat's Eye must need glasses in its old age." The black cat cackled at the rat's jest. "Haven't you always been one of my favorite cat toys," she purred, adjusting her pointed hat as she made her entrance riding on her broomstick. "So they sent the black and white to pick me up after all," the rat observed flatly. The feline witch shrugged, refusing to be insulted by being compared to a police officer while twirling her broomstick on the ground like a fighting staff. "We make a good team." Her black and orange striped shirt always looked too big on her.

"Well then, Candy," the rat intoned as the innumerable myriad of floating eyes edged toward her menacingly, "since you brought so many of your eyes with you..." As the eyes finally started making a beeline for her, all the sheets of paper that had been written or printed on in her workplace flew up off their desks, the rat's power over them as vectors of memory still as uncontested as they would've been before any magnetic memory wipe had affected anything, and began swirling around her at top speed like a perfectly controlled storm. "... I'll just have to give them something to read!"

With the sheets' trajectories all intersecting wildly in random patterns through the air all over the place, even Candy's optical cornucopia had a hard time seeing anything in the room with any amount of reliability, much to the cat witch's chagrin. When all the sheets but one fell back down to the ground limply, Manek and Candy were most displeased to notice that the rat who they were hunting had made the most of their confusion to leave the room without their notice. The final sheet folded itself into a paper airplane in midair, knocking Candy's pointed hat off her head to add insult to injury.

Before Manek could follow her, Candy had already dashed out of the room to follow the rat out of it, then out of the building itself, without wasting a single second. Barely making a turn around a street corner in her hurried escape, the rat spied a sewer grating in the gutter next to her. She quickly transformed her arms, legs, chest and head into six different feral rats, all of which scurried through the grating into the sewers, hoping to lose the cat witch for good before reuniting back into a single shape somewhere else later on when it would be safe to do so.

Coming upon the last place where she'd seen the rat run off into before losing sight of her, Candy figured out what the rat must've done to make her lose track of her. She growled, realizing that she couldn't follow, and braced herself for the only solution she could think of to that problem. After a third eye opened on her forehead, she reached up with her clawed hand to rip it out of its socket, bringing it to her mouth to chew on it like a piece of gum. Having imbued it with magic with her saliva, she threw it down the sewer, knowing it would continue to follow the rat through the sewers with the ability to see her and report to the Cat's Eye about her whereabouts until it would no longer be possible for it to do so.

The rat wasn't sure of what would happen if they ever killed her. Would everyone forget everything? Or would it take everyone forgetting everything for her to die? The only thing that she could do was everything she could to make sure that she'd never have to find out. She had lived for as long as there had been time itself and, even if she went on living for as long as she'd already lived as it was, she didn't know if she'd ever be able to shake them off for good, to make a life for herself that was no longer about resisting them. Until then, she would always be on the run.

Her name was Mnemos.

Chapter 13: Flame War

Despite his best efforts, Rakim's fears around his Irshad's ongoing holy war against the flames continued to grow. "Do... Do you think you're going to be a firefighter for the rest of your life, mother?" Her countenance darkened a bit at this.

"I know it's not easy for you, my son." After all, if fire won, even only once, where would he turn? What would he be to do? "You're growing into a full, young adult man, aren't you?" He couldn't deny as much. "And I taught you how to fight, and how to fly, did I not?" He nodded in assent.

"You did, mother." This was not something all mothers taught their sons, he gathered. "That's because I trust you, Rakim - I trust you to be independent." She was going somewhere with this, it seemed like. "Sometimes, giving someone a choice means they won't make the choice you want. I worry about you too, you know."

He gulped. "I know." He carried the worry he'd caused her with him. He wasn't about to forget. "I try to take every precaution in my job. I'm never out there alone. The others are always there with me." He shook his head. "It's just such a risk you're taking every time. It's hard for me not to think about."

She put her hand on his shoulder. "We all take risks, my son. When you'll have to take risks of your own, you'll want me to understand, won't you?" He thought of Ogun, of the dates that he'd gone on with him so far, of the ones yet to come, of what they had not yet done, but were thinking of doing. She'd always known him just a little too well.

"I don't take it lightly, if that means anything. You remember the Sufi poetry I read you about how those who seek God are like a moth being drawn to the flame?" He did. "You also said that 'trying to explain God to a mortal is like trying to explain the sun to a bat.'" He had seen the sun, himself, but he still understood the metaphor for what it was.

"That's right. On some level, it's just a metaphor - it doesn't have to be a literal flame. In my case it just so happens to be. But when I go into the light, Rakim... It's like walking into the sun. I'm not telling you to be reckless. _Calculated_risks, yes, but, it's often a risk to help others. People take risks for things they believe in, you know? They take risks for things that mean something to them."

He sighed. He hated it when she was right.

It was getting to be time for his third date with Ogun. It was almost the end of fasting month, but not quite. Rakim always strove to remain chaste during fasting month as much as he could, even though he'd grown to find it increasingly difficult as the years had gone by. He also knew what the third date typically represented in the West, which didn't make his struggle any easier.

The chimera had been a good host and, it turned out, a good dancer, and the bat was already becoming more attracted to him the third time they met. He always had a lot of extra energy during fasting month that he didn't quite know what to do with. He became so consumed with his training that he'd actually ended up gaining most of his new belts during fasting month.

He got the sense that, if he made the first move, Ogun would have gone along with him for sure. If Ogun had made the first move, he wondered if he'd have had to have come up with some excuse to put things off, or simply told him it was because of fasting month. He didn't want to seem disinterested or fun-hating and miss out on an opportunity that he craved more and more, but he also didn't want to be with someone who expected him to give up his beliefs.

Frustrated with the timing - why had he started dating someone so near to the beginning of fasting month, why? Because he didn't really believe that it would work out anyway, he reminded himself - he looked for other ways to burn off all of his extra energy. Much as he'd enjoyed gaming with Ogun before, he asked the chimera if they could return to the Bolgia that night. At first, Ogun seemed uncertain.

"Well, that kind of depends..." The bat tilted his head at him. "On what?" The ram head picked up where the lion had had left off. "Tonight at the Bolgia is a little different than last time. It's more than just a nightclub, it has, like, different functions at different times of the week." Rakim was a bit let down.

"So there's no dancing tonight?" Dancing burned a lot of energy. "Well, sometimes the Bolgia has regular dancing like we went to, but it also has contests, performances, concerts, demonstrations..." the dragon head continued. "Tonight's a fight night. I don't know if you'd be into that though," the snake head said, almost apologetically.

"Oh, would I ever!" Rakim answered excitedly. "Really?" Ogun seemed surprised. "Well, they don't kill each other or anything, right?" He stuck his lion tongue out. "I'd never take you somewhere like that," he assured his guest. "That's one of the few things people there can't do. They kind of turn the center stage into a ring and fight it out, though. You're sure you really want to go?" his dragon head reiterated, just to be sure.

The bat grinned toothily. "Absolutely! I've been training since I was a kid, you know? I'd love to see what some other fighters have been up to for all that time, I haven't met a lot." This piqued Ogun's curiosity. "How did you first start training, then?" his ram head asked him. "My mother taught me everything I know," Rakim explained. Ogun seemed impressed. "Your mother sounds like something else! I'd like to meet her someday," his snake head said admiringly. For the first time, Rakim looked at Ogun's dragon maw with new eyes.

He was a fire-breather.

The bat had never really thought of him as someone who literally breathed fire.

He was still privately negotiating what the implications of dating a fire-breather for a man whose mother was a firefighter could possibly have been when they reached the Bolgia all over again. Inside, most of the floor around the center stage that had been turned into a ring had been converted into a seating area, with seats placed on all four sides of it facing it so that everyone in them could follow the fight easily enough. Smoke rose to the darkened ceiling, only wisps of it visible in the light that shone on the ring.

People chatted, betted and elbowed each other while the fighters strove to impress spectators with their skill as much as they could. The Bolgia was supposed to be a place that most so-called 'normal' people didn't even know about, a place where strangeness was taken for granted that was to be a safe haven for freaks of every stripe, and the fight's audience certainly seemed to confirm that. Rakim saw a cockatrice and a manticore rubbing elbows with a hydra and a naga, and think nothing of it. He and Ogun were unlikely to stand out like sore thumbs.

They sat and watched a red fish spar with an otter. The otter's reflexes were clearly top-notch, and he seemed to react to her movements almost instinctively, but the red fish seemed determined not to be deterred nonetheless. Her resolve to break through his defenses remained steadfast and she continued relentlessly matching him move for move until she finally managed to catch him off-guard and send him out of the ring with a look of stunned disbelief on his face.

"Wow, I've never seen Bridges lose!" Ogun seemed to already know people there. Rakim hoped he'd introduce him to some of them later on. "What about her?" Rakim asked Ogun. "That's Betta. She's won about two thirds, three quarters of the fights I've seen her in. She's good, but I didn't think she was Bridges good," his dragon head exclaimed. "He's got, like, souped-up reflexes, I don't know if you noticed. He says his body 'does its own thing' and 'protects' him, he just sits back and lets it. It usually does just that." At that point the bat came to a decision.

"I'd like to fight her."

Ogun hadn't seen that coming. "Can I do that? Am I allowed to do that?" He couldn't help but worry about the bat - he didn't want him to get hurt, and for it to have been his fault for having brought him to the Bolgia and put him in harm's way in the first place. Then again, Ogun also didn't want to make Rakim think that he thought of him as any less of a man than Bridges was. He didn't want to damage the bat's confidence by holding him back.

"Yeah! If you want. I mean, are you sure you're up for it?" Rakim felt so much energy bouncing around inside him that he was desperate to spend some of it. He couldn't stand the thought of spending the evening watching other people move around a lot while sitting still himself. "If it's not rude of me, yeah!" He didn't want to go through life as an onlooker. He wanted to be a participant.

"All you have to do is go up there while she's still up there, then." She stood with her arms spread, facing the crowd near the ropes in different directions successively, inviting anyone else to come up to face her. "Just don't bet more than you're prepared to lose." Since no one else seemed to have been challenging her, Rakim stood up. "I won't." He walked into the aisle and, to the crowd's cheers, made his way to the ring as Ogun shook his heads in disbelief. The bat's build was relatively light, and the fish seemed physically stronger than he was.

Would he measure up to her, or end up regretting having tried his luck?

She looked him up and down as he ducked under the rope while climbing up on the ring, and he looked at her carefully while he seamlessly sank into his own fighting stance. The bullies who had made his childhood hell had long since no longer posed a challenge to him, but this was to be nothing like it. There was no enmity between Betta and Rakim. It was the first time he was going to get to fight someone for fun, not because he _had_to, and he was looking forward to it.

After parrying just a few of her punches, elbows and knee strikes, he had no trouble believing she'd made a name for herself there. His mind had absolutely no chance to wander off into any other territory than the here and now. He needed every scrap of his full attention to even remotely have a chance of keeping up with her, and it was like a full-body stretch after having been cooped up for too long. But her first kick going by his face sent a chill down his spine.

Her foot had been on fire.

What sorcery was this? Rakim had never seen anything like it outside of a video game. He had not believed that such things were possible. Was she using some kind of trick that he didn't know about? Or had the laws of physics been different from what he'd believed that they'd been for his whole life until then? Whatever the answer was, it seemed a question that it would be best for him to devote more mental energy to when he wouldn't have to focus on not getting fire kicked in the face.

This proved difficult. He feared fire so! Steeling his resolve, he remembered his training and the advice he'd received about taking risks. This was just a fight like any other, he tried to tell himself. He was not to be outdone. She picked him up to throw him over the ropes, but he opened his wings to glide back on the ring. Dodging a flaming acrobatic kick thanks to his bat hearing, he got her in a hold. Using his wing to amplify a bat screech at her, he made her tap out.

He stopped immediately, not wanting to do any permanent damage to her hearing. His heart was racing as they stood back up. The raccoon referee approached him to lift his arm over his head.

He'd won!

He almost couldn't believe it. He didn't think he'd been going to win, well, he hoped he would, but he didn't think he'd_really_ been going to. Yet there he was! She raised her index finger at him as the crowd cheered. "Don't get cocky, boy. I'll get you next time, you'll see" she said. He simply nodded. "Yes, I think you will." A mongoose helped her off the ring - they seemed to be boyfriend and girlfriend, but he wasn't sure. She seemed a little disoriented but mostly okay.

She'd called him 'boy'! He was privately excited about that. It was sort of validating.

"Wow, you did great!" It wasn't that Ogun hadn't believed Rakim when he'd said he could fight, but he was clearly impressed to have seen him win. "That was incredible! Let's do it again let's do it again," Rakim laughed. "Whoa, you really want to?" Rakim stuck out his tongue at him. "Nah, not this time. I've never done this before! I'm going to stay on a high note for now." It was about the middle of the night by then. "You wanna go get something to eat?" Rakim finally spent the energy that he'd wanted to by then - he was up for going out to get some of it back. "Sure!"

Ogun paused, and thought about their options for a moment. "Well, I don't know. I'm trying to think of somewhere that's still open in the middle of the night. We could always go back to my place and I could try to slap something together if you want." Oh God, Rakim thought, if we go back to his place when I'm still all pumped up like this, I'm going to have a very hard time putting things off until next time, aren't I...

"Well... There's technically another option, but I'm not sure I should bring it up." This got the bat's interest. "What is it?" Ogun stuck his ram tongue out. "The only restaurant I know that's open at this hour is a shawarma place downtown." Rakim wasn't sure he understood. "You don't like shawarmas?" Ogun seemed embarrassed. "Well, I didn't want to... I didn't want to seem like I'd assume you like shawarmas just because you're a bat!" he finally admitted. Rakim laughed. "They're great, though, aren't they?" The chimera seemed incrementally less tense. "We can go. It'll be a new experience for me - I've never been to it, if you can believe that" Rakim added, tongue-in-cheek.

"So you really liked tonight?" Ogun asked as Rakim enthusiastically chomped down on his falafel. "Oh yeah!" the bat somehow responded through his chewing. "It made me feel like I was a character from a video game, only for a moment." Ogun smiled. "I'm glad. I like that you like acting things out from video games," Ogun added. "We're usually brought up to be afraid of acting out the wrong ones, not to try to act out the right ones." Rakim shook his head. "I don't know what I'd be if I'd grown up without video games," he said. "With the other kids at school the way they were, having games to turn to probably saved my life, to be honest."

Ogun nodded his four heads pensively in response. He could relate.

"You know, when I was a kid, I used to want to be like an RPG character," his snake head started off. "I'd have all these friends, we'd all have special powers, and we'd travel the world killing monsters and saving the world, you know?" The bat nodded while chewing. "So when I grew up and it turned out life wasn't like that, at first I felt vaguely ripped off for a while. I didn't give a shit about flying cars, I wanted my RPG life, you know?" Rakim encouraged him to continue.

"I started meeting people online, often far away from me. Too far to travel the world with them. They didn't seem to have any special powers, but they were friends, you know? And they were sad. They were so sad. On most days it felt like the world was trying to kill them. So I had to keep putting off and putting aside my thoughts of a great big quest that would finally prove everything longer and longer, and just stay with them and listen to them, to try to keep the world from killing them, because I didn't want to have to live without them."

Rakim had completely forgotten about his food by then.

"Eventually, I realized I did have my RPG life after all," Ogun said, no longer as self-conscious as he usually was about talking too much for the time being. "It was the inner demons of my friends that were the monsters I killed. It was their lives that were the world I was saving, and my life that was the world that they were saving as well. It's the battle against despair that's the real adventure in life... It's those of us who fight it for each other who are the real heroes."

At this, Rakim got up off his chair, and kissed Ogun's dragon head right on the mouth.

Chapter 14: Share Alike

'Objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.' (Newton)

He could almost feel it starting.

It could be a vicious cycle. Sometimes it only had to start from a very small doubt as to whether or not he'd be going to be able to make it home without having to have it happen to him this time. Then, just a slightly larger moment of uncertainty about whether or not he'd be going to be able to suppress that very same first doubt. From there, it could keep building on itself, until it would snowball out of his control. He'd just felt so trapped.

He'd always hated being on the metro.

He'd started feeling that dreaded, familiar tightening in his chest, the butterflies in his stomach, hyperventilating. There had been so many people around him pressing against him from everywhere around him that he'd started having trouble breathing. The more he'd focused on how he had to make sure that it wouldn't happen, the more obsessed he'd become about what if it if did happen, the more his threshold would lower and his resistance weaken. He didn't know whether he would have had anxiety without it or not, but he'd never have the opportunity to find out.

He'd screamed, and everyone on the wagon had screamed around him, as spikes had abruptly erupted from his skin all over his body...

***

The more he had thought about it, the more Klein had realized that he'd needed to have some kind of plan for his own life, or that someone else - his parents, his ex-girlfriend, Boko, it didn't matter who - had been going to make plans about his life for him, and he hadn't wanted that. He'd thought about what he'd been running away from, and about where he could in fact run toward based on that. He'd wanted to get back at his parents' clothing business somehow.

It hadn't seemed enough for him to run away. He'd wanted to actually do something about the injustices that he'd felt complicit with because of his previous job. So he'd decided that he'd wanted to figure out a way to go on a trip to Brazil, where the heart of his parents' fabric factories resided, to find a way to sneak in, to gather evidence about how they'd mistreated their workers that would force them to improve their working conditions, and to escape back North.

Easy in, easy out - at least that had been the plan.

The crux of the issue had been going to be how to figure out a way to actually get to Brazil on such a limited budget as he'd had. He'd still had a bit of money that he'd taken with him when he'd first left home, but he hadn't brought all that much. What did people do when they wanted to go places that were very far away but couldn't afford to go in the stories he'd read, he'd asked himself?

Maybe he should become a stowaway.

It had come to him almost as a joke at first, but the more he had thought about it, the more he had thought that it really had seemed like the best way he could find to get there. He'd just have to make sure not to get caught. If anything, Boko had at least taught Klein a couple of things about how not to get caught doing things that he hadn't been allowed to do, he'd supposed. He may as well have made the most of what few skills life had thrown his way.

Money had been kind of annoying, it'd occurred to him. He'd have never been in a situation in which he'd have considered doing something so strange to be able to accomplish his goal if it hadn't been for money. It'd been the first time that he'd been confronted with just how annoying it could be, but it had really been changing the way that he'd thought about it. What a strange thing money had been in the first place, he'd thought.

As an otter sailor had walked past him carrying cargo aboard a ship at the dock, Klein had taken advantage of the fact that the mustelid's back had been turned to surreptitiously wall leap on a large net wrapped around cargo to hold it together, and had clung to it while it had been being used to load it. The skunk had hidden in a very small compartment, having brought only the items that had seemed most necessary to his immediate survival. When the ship would dock in Brazil, he would have to find a way to sneak back out without getting noticed then either. It'd seemed like his fear of drawing attention as bad while a child had been for good reason after all.

He hadn't been sure of how he'd be able to survive aboard the ship, the more he had thought about it after having boarded it, but it had been too late to change his mind and to go back to the shore by then. The ship had already been at sea. Even if he could have made it off the ship without being seen, there would have been no way that he could swim all the way to the shore without drowning by that point. He'd brought what little food and drink he could carry on his person with him, but that hadn't been going to last him for more than a handful of days before he'd run right out of it.

So what had he been going to do?

As the days had passed, and his supplies had dwindled, he'd become more and more desperate for some kind of solution, but the hungrier he'd become, the more frantic his thought patterns had become, and the more difficult it had become to think of a solution of any kind. Eventually, his supplies of food had run out altogether, and his terror of dying of starvation had become the only thing on his mind. The kids who'd used to bully him would probably have had a field day with how much he'd stank by then, but he probably wouldn't have paid any attention to anything they'd have said and simply tried to eat them by that point.

One day his stomach had growled so loud that a sailor on the ship had heard him.

Prying open the compartment in the wall that had kept Klein hidden away from the sight of others, the otter who the skunk had sneaked past when he'd made his way onto the boat unnoticed had finally found him, with a puzzled expression across his whiskered face. Klein had panicked at first. "Oh, we have a stowaway!" the otter had exclaimed. "Please don't kill me!" the skunk had begged him, not at his most rational because of what the hunger had done to his mind. "I'm not gonna kill you," the otter had smiled at him, seeming amused that Klein would have assumed that he'd do something so extreme because the otter had found him.

"How'd you get on here?" the otter had tilted his head at him. "I snuck on board while you weren't looking," the skunk had explained, "I'm sorry. Are you going to have me arrested?" Klein had known that it had seemed like the likeliest outcome by far. Certainly, it's what would have happened to him if he had been dealing with practically any other sailor at all. He had no right to be there, and there were always consequences for being places where you shouldn't be.

"Well, that depends. Did you do anything to hurt anyone on the ship? Were you going to?" Klein had firmly shaken his head no. "Why'd you get on here?" the otter had asked him. "You're going to Brazil," Klein had answered, "I had to find a way to get there somehow." The otter had seemed to ponder this. "And you couldn't afford to book passage on here, could you?" he'd asked. "No," the skunk had answered pitifully. "Why are you going to Brazil?" Klein had looked him in the face earnestly. "I need to exorcise demons from my past." The otter had raised his eyebrows at him. "What do you mean by that?" he'd asked.

"It's kind of a long story," Klein had answered. "Well, skunk... If I like your story, maybe I'll help you stay. How about?" Klein had never thought that he would get an offer like this. So the skunk began to tell the otter his story, starting from his childhood with his family, to what had happened because of his work at the factory, to how he had left everything behind because of it, and wanted some kind of closure.

"That's quite a story. May I suggest something to you, skunk?" Klein had been uncertain at first, and had considered a few wrong directions this conversation could go. He'd asked himself how far he'd be willing to go by that point, how desperate he'd really been. "Sure." If he hadn't liked it, he could always say no, and face the music. The otter had said 'suggest,' he'd tried to reassure himself. On some level, that implied the possibility of disagreement, if it had been said in earnest. "I basically work on this ship as an all-around janitor, gopher and housekeeper," the otter had started, "would you like to split half of my pay and duties with me for the trip?"

It had seemed to Klein like the offer of a lifetime. "Yes!"

The otter had had such a gentle demeanor, he couldn't help but notice. "Good," he'd said, "I knew we could work something out. And who might you be, if you don't mind my asking?" Everything the otter had done had seemed like it had been carefully calculated not to exert too much outward pressure on anything around him, but without a trace of restraint from him, as if it had simply been effortless for him to behave this way. "My name's Klein. And you are?"

"Bridges," the otter had said. "Welcome aboard, Klein."

***

The first time that Klein had noticed that something was 'off' had been a short time after Bridges had handed him the mop on the bridge of the ship. Bridges had been explaining to Klein how to use it while indicating the bucket to him as well and, after the otter had been finished, and the skunk had been about to get to work, Klein had suddenly noticed that he'd no longer been holding the mop that Bridges had handed to him at the beginning of their conversation. At first Klein had been confused. Had his sense of time become messed up from starvation and dehydration? Had he remembered Bridges handing him the mop earlier than he really had?

Then suddenly, while Klein had been mopping the bridge, he'd checked his pockets and panicked - he could no longer find his wallet in the pocket he'd left it in! At least he'd been sure that he'd left his wallet in that pocket. When he'd returned to the cabin that he'd now shared with Bridges, he'd found his wallet on his bed, even though he hadn't remembered having left it there. Had his mind been playing tricks on him? He'd wondered if he should bring anything up or not, but he'd already been hanging by a thread, allowed on board only at Bridges' favor, because the otter had told the other sailors 'he's with me.' Better not to make waves.

Furthermore, it wouldn't have made sense for Bridges to have taken his wallet and put it on his bed, he'd told himself. After all, what sense would it have made to steal something from someone only to leave it exactly where you knew that the person that it had belonged to would unerringly find it? There had been so many better places for the otter to have hidden it on the ship. Had Bridges been pranking him, making the most out of Klein's disadvantaged situation?

He'd asked a few of the other sailors about Bridges innocuously. Everyone had seemed to have had a really positive impression of Bridges. They'd said that they'd all traveled with him far and wide for years and years, and that in all this time, he'd never been anything but friendly to any of them, that he'd never hurt a fly. They all seemed to take his presence there for granted by then. Whatever his flaws may have been, Bridges had already seemed good steps above Boko.

"Bridges, have you seen my rations bag?" Klein hadn't brought much food with him, but he'd still had the bag that he'd used to carry it with. Or at least he'd thought he did. "Oh yeah, I put it on your bed," Bridges had said. "I've been looking all over for that," the skunk had said gratefully, "where was it?" The otter had looked at him expressionlessly. "I found it," he'd said, as if he'd hoped that it'd be enough for Klein not to ask him anything more. So Klein hadn't.

One day the otter had come to take over after Klein had been cooking and cleaning in the ship's galley for his shift. They'd started having a short conversation about this and that aboard the ship, how much time there had been left for the rest of the trip, how the weather had been and had seemed likely to be, how most of the passengers had seemed to have been doing on the trip so far, and minor work-related issues around the ship. It had only lasted all of a few minutes.

"I was wearing a watch!" Klein had finally exclaimed, eyeing his bare wrist incredulously.

Bridges had sighed. "I was hoping I wouldn't have to admit it to you while you'd be here," the otter had said, handing Klein back his watch as he'd spoken. "I guess it's come to this anyway," Bridges had said dejectedly, Klein surprised that the otter would have been acting so apologetic toward him when he'd only been there on the mustelid's favor in the first place. "Klein... I'm a kleptomaniac."

Klein had certainly not expected that. "How do you do that thing where I don't even see you do it while you're doing it?" He'd just had to ask. "I don't know. I've never known how not to do it," Bridges had tried to explain, "it just sort of happens." The skunk had raised an eyebrow at him. "You mean...?" The otter had looked downcast. "I have no idea I'm doing it. Sometimes not until hours later when I wake up with someone's lighter, or sunglasses, or shoe polish."

Klein had shaken his head. "They don't mind you working on the ship?" That had seemed hard to believe. "This isn't just any crew, Klein... I've lived aboard this ship my whole life. I've been here longer than any of the other sailors here, but they've all existed with me on this ship for years, sometimes decades. They've had a lot of time to get used to me." Klein had been intrigued. "What do they do?" he'd asked.

"Well, they all go through sorting when they first climb aboard, before the ship is about to leave on a trip. Someone makes an inventory of everything they brought aboard the ship, everything that belongs to them. So when the trip ends, even though everyone's possessions have become scattered all over the ship, with the inventory as a point of reference, going back through sorting on the way out, they get given back all the things that belong to them before they leave."

Klein had been starting to get an idea of the fact that the strangeness of some of the problems that other people in the world had had to deal with would sometimes rival even his own. "Wow," he'd started, "that's sort of... I mean, on some level, I'm glad that you'd have found a way to exist like this," he'd added, "with people who seem to accept you the way you are. That can be pretty tough."

It had to be pretty tough for his coworkers, but it'd seemed rude to Klein to mention it.

"Where are you from?" He'd been becoming more curious about this otter who had rescued him. "I've always lived on board this ship. Officially, I'm not a citizen of any nation. I'm a child of the ocean, and a citizen of the world." Klein had tilted his head at him. "But you've been on land before, right?" Bridges had sighed. "There have been specific people who I've stayed with in this or that port town here and there over time, but only with people who know me and who take adequate precautions. Going out into the world on land can be... messy for me," the otter had winced euphemistically. "I do less damage on here, the rest of the time."

Klein had nodded. "I understand." Bridges had seemed to become lost in thought, and a little sad. "We don't have to keep talking about this if you don't want to, you know," he'd assured the otter heartily. It'd occurred to him belatedly that it must've been rather depressing for Bridges to have to dwell on something involuntary that had been so disruptive that he had had to rearrange his whole life around it.

"No, it's important that I do sometimes," Bridges had responded. "A therapist once told me that the fact that I don't notice that I'm doing it when it's happening might be connected with my feelings of guilt about it. On some level I don't want to notice that I'm doing it because I feel bad about it, so I kind of stop paying attention to what I'm doing while I do. That's what gives my body the window of opportunity it needs to go around my awareness to get what it wants." Klein had tried to imagine Bridges trying to get through a whole therapy session without taking his therapist's notepad.

"But why do you think that your body wants it in the first place?" Klein had asked. "I just..." Bridges had had to think about it. "I wish I could explain it. Everything I see is just... inexplicably beautiful to me. I just, I'll be looking at any object, without really thinking about it, and it'll suddenly strike me just how wonderful it is. I think about the person who must've created it, I wonder what that person must've been like. I build a little story around them in my head. I imagine that the object has consciousness. I mean, intellectually, I know it doesn't, but emotionally, it feels like it does. So I just... want to get to know it. I want to become its friend."

Klein hadn't been a kleptomaniac, but this had still resonated with him somehow.

"But you like people too, right?" Bridges had smiled. "I love people! People are awesome. Some people think I love people a little too much," he'd blushed. "You mean those guys in those port towns?" Klein had asked. "Well, they all know what they're in for. I need a place to stay. They like having me over. It's for the duration of the trip. I never lie to any of them. They have other guys too. It's just sort of how we do things." Klein had nodded. "Nothing wrong with that." After the time that he'd spent with Boko, it'd been somewhat refreshing to Klein to imagine people being willing to share openly, without this sense of 'me and mine.'

"Once I met this guy in Japan who wanted to move to Brazil, so I cut a deal with him, kinda like the one I cut with you, come to think of it. He helped me on the trip, I helped him get where he was going. He lives there now. In fact I can talk to him about you staying with him if you want," Bridges had offered Klein. "The ship's going to be leaving for about a month. That's how long you have before it returns to Brazil, then goes back up to North America again."

Klein had duly taken mental note of this. He'd have to do some recon, and act fast.

"When I was younger," Bridges had gone on, seemingly still thinking about what he and Klein had talked about earlier, "I tried to live on land for longer than I do now, but it didn't go well. I started feeling really bad because of all the havoc I wreaked on the world around me. I even tried to kill myself over it." The conversation had taken a dark turn. Klein had wished that he and Bridges had already been close enough that he could've hugged him when he'd said that.

"That's awful..." Bridges had tried to force a smile in thanks. "The guy I was just telling you about was the guy who found me on the shore of Japan. I'd tried to drown myself, but I ended up on the shore, unconscious. So he found me, and nursed me back to health. He tried to talk me into going on living. Eventually, I started trying to guide my condition, even though I couldn't change it. I started trying more consciously to steal from the rich and give to the poor. It made me feel better about it. The restrictions that separate the poor from the rich seem so unfair in the first place that it was hard to feel as bad about doing something that bridged the gap a bit."

Klein had remembered his earlier reflections about how strange money had been, how he'd always taken it for granted because he'd been conditioned to, until it'd become an obstacle.

"You have to understand that I've never needed money," Bridges had explained. "Whenever I've needed something I've just taken it, without even noticing I was. Whenever I saw someone who needed something that I had, I just gave it to them. Deep down, after having talked with the man who saved me, I stopped believing that people could own things at all. I started believing that objects would get bored staying in one location, that they'd want to see the world, just as I had seen it. I don't know for a fact that it's true, but it's kept me alive this long... whatever that's worth," he'd finished.

"It also made you the kind of person who let me come on this trip," Klein had added significantly. "Hey yeah," Bridges had smiled, "I hadn't thought of that." Klein remembered how he'd used to think, as a child, that stealing from the rich to give to the poor hadn't been the same as what 'thou shalt not steal' had been for, that the context of it had made a difference somehow.

"What other kinds of beliefs do you have?" he'd asked. "I mean, you don't have to tell me if you'd rather not, but do you, like, believe in something?" Bridges had tilted his head. "Is this a sales pitch?" Klein had laughed. "No, I'm just curious. I've known people with all kinds of beliefs, I don't mind any of them really. I just get curious about the role their beliefs play in their lives sometimes. You don't have to tell me of course. It's not like you owe me anything." Bridges had smiled at him. "I'll show you mine if you show me yours," he'd jested. "I'm a Daoist," Klein had said. For the purposes of this conversation, he'd been a Daoist.

"Oh, cool!" Bridges had exclaimed excitedly. "Don't tell me you are too?" Klein had asked dubiously. He'd been willing to give Bridges the benefit of the doubt, but after what had happened with Boko, if someone else he'd run into in desperate circumstances had suddenly told him that he'd coincidentally shared the same beliefs as his all along, even after he had changed his answer from before, Klein had been going to have some serious questions. "Well... Yes and no, depending on what you mean." What an odd answer that had been. "What do you mean?" Klein had tilted his head at him.

"I believe in every religion, Klein," he'd said. "Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Voodoo, Daoism, Santeria, Shinto, animism, paganism, even atheism, if you decide it counts," he'd added. "Sometimes I go through all of them successively in one day. Most of the time I just kind of have all of them at once." Klein's mind had boggled at this a bit. "Don't you have to deal with a lot of contradictions between them?" Bridges had smirked at him. "Each and every one of those belief systems is already full of contradictions by itself. What difference does it make, for me to work around contradictions in all of them, rather than in just one?"

So Bridges would 'borrow' belief system after belief system, just as he would 'borrow' object after object before giving it back to a different person every time. Once, after Klein had settled in and gotten used to his duties for a while longer, Canon in D had started playing on the ship's radio while Klein and Bridges had been walking and talking side by side on the port deck of the ship. Klein had known people he'd liked who'd hated it, but he couldn't have described the expression that he'd seen appear on Bridges' whiskered face when they'd heard it coming on from the radio as anything other than completely enraptured.

"Oh, I love this song!" Bridges had smiled as if, after having been told by a doctor that he'd been going to die, the same doctor had suddenly announced to him that he'd made a mistake, and that Bridges had really been going to live after all. "It's the most beautiful thing in the world, don't you think?" he'd asked Klein. Klein had been kind of neutral on it, but Bridges' enthusiasm about it had been starting to prove communicative. Most of Bridges' moods were.

"It's like the music is telling us the only story ever told. See, when this part starts, it seems like it's only going to be this part, for this long. But then this other part comes in! It goes through some of the same trials and tribulations as the first part, but over it, sort of its own way. It starts just a bit later so you can see what's going to happen to it by listening to the first part, or it can remind you of what happened to the first part before while it's happening to the second one. Then this third part comes in! It's just like the first one. It'll never catch up to the first two but it doesn't matter because it's still trying to advance on its own terms, at its own pace..."

Bridges narrating Canon in D had sounded as involved as a boxing match announcer.

"... so by the time it gets to the end, it's the third part that's way in advance of the first two parts, because the first one is coming up to it right behind it! And the second one is all the way back at the beginning by that point. They all crisscross and intersect at all these different points so it's like they're aware of each other in some way, they're waving hello to each other when they're going past each other, but without ever getting in any of the other two's way! Somehow it all fits together like interlocking gears, like pieces of a puzzle that were always meant to fit together the way they did. Isn't it the most beautiful thing in the world, Klein?"

Klein had realized that he'd been moving his head to the music and humming by then.

"Don't you wish, Klein, that people, gods and objects all advanced and fitted together harmoniously like that...?" Bridges had asked him longingly.

Chapter 15: Dead Trees

She derived such a sense of peace from this place.

Taking a look around, she saw nothing but shelves and shelves of books everywhere around her. Every table was covered in stacks and piles of books and pieces of paper, scattered all over the place as though they'd been lazily lounging about on a Sunday morning, which they were. While she, unlike most rats, didn't need to sleep to live as such, when she would feel exhausted from her work and feel like at least resting with one eye open for a while, she'd just lie down on a pile of books and scraps of paper, gathering around her as if to serve as her mattress and blanket, and she'd feel safe wrapped snugly in them the way she would be.

Rats had already been scurrying around the ancient temples of Ganesh thousands of years ago, his temples having served as places where rats had been allowed to come and go as they pleased. She'd been to these temples a few times, but she hadn't seen them in a long time. She lived a complicated life, and often had to keep going just to stay where she was, so to speak. This library made a welcoming stopping point, one she hoped she could stay in for long this time.

She didn't think of herself as a librarian as such. On some level, it was up to her to watch over these books and to make sure that nothing bad would happen to them, so that they could meet new readers someday who, by reading them anew, would give them new life of their own. While her library was secluded, if someone harmless had found it somehow, and asked to check out a book, she probably would've agreed, as unlikely as that scenario would've been. As long as they promised not to harm it, and to take good care of it, she'd even have let them keep it, without having asked for anything in return. It wasn't that kind of library.

She was more like the caretaker to her own kind of aviary, as far as she was concerned - an aviary that required a unique kind of caretaking, at that. Because she was a necromancer, a visitor might have assumed that the reason for which the books that flapped their pages as they flew around from shelf to shelf just like birds flying from perch to perch flew the way they did because she was animating them in some way. In spite of this, nothing could have been further from the truth. The books flew because they had a life all of their own. She wouldn't have wanted to control them, even though she probably could've done so if she'd chosen to.

They were her pets. She wanted them to be free.

Most of them had been banned. They weren't seen as fit to be consumed by anyone, only to be consumed by the fires of hell. From her perspective, this put them in a similar situation to animals that had been reduced to near-extinction because of over-hunting. As she saw it, her banned books were the same as an endangered species, and her library was really a nature preserve in which she hoped they could thrive. The Middle Ages had seen her spend a lot of time working as a scribe by candlelight secluded from public society, pouring over and copying page after page of manuscripts that, if she hadn't copied them, would've completely disappeared.

It wasn't that she agreed with the content of every single one. There were so many contradictions between all of the different points that their authors had all been trying to make that she couldn't possibly have agreed with all of them, even if she'd wanted to. It wasn't a kind of package deal like that. But just as for biodiversity, she felt that it was important that no species of books be altogether eradicated, because every species played a role in its ecosystem, however troublesome it could be. She sometimes had to separate some of her books that disagreed the most with each other from fighting, as one separates a cat and dog that one both keeps as pets.

On some level, she accepted all of them, even though some of them had caused harm to others because of their existence. She was not all goddess, but half-goddess, half-demon, after all. Memory was good, she believed. Knowledge was always better than ignorance. But everyone also carries painful memories, memories that they sometimes wish that they could get rid of, even if it meant losing some of the good memories associated with them. She didn't always know if she could have defended her existence as ethical, but she existed. Like everything else that existed, she had a survival instinct - she did everything she could to continue to exist.

A fidgety notebook came fluttering into the room through one of the library's windows while she was using one of her own pigeon feathers dipped in ink to write on a piece of parchment by candlelight. Putting aside her work, she extended her arm up like a falconer so that the notebook could come down to her from the window and could perch itself on her finger. The notebook was reporting back to her from a scouting mission that it had gone on, exploring their surroundings for signs of danger for her to watch out for. She'd been awaiting its return with some measure of trepidation, and whatever it had to communicate to her seemed important.

The notebook positioned itself so that she could hold her ink-dipped pigeon feather in her other hand near it in a way in which the notebook could scratch its own 'back' made of its own pages against the feather. The notebook looked like it was trying to scratch a persistent itch, but what it was really doing was that it was using her feather to write against its own back, having learned how to do it so that she could read it. The notebook struggled in its nervousness not to shake too much, so that the writing on its papery back would remain legible enough for the rat to have been able to read it well enough, but it wrote fast, like its life depended on it.

Which it did. They'd found her, just as she'd always lived in fear that they would in time.

She was always trying to stay just a step ahead of them, but they'd never made it easy on her, and she knew they weren't about to start anytime soon. When they'd sent Graograman the Rainbow Death after her back in ancient times, with his quicksand shapeshifting abilities and his theoretically infinite color-based elemental powers, she'd had no choice but to release all of her books by using a secret mechanism to open up the ceiling of the library that she'd kept them in at the time. Every time she'd hear people talk about 'releasing books' around her, she'd been grimly reminded of when she'd been forced to do that.

If it had been for a better reason, it would probably have looked quite beautiful from the outside, she couldn't help but muse. At the time, the Romans had loved to release flocks of doves at major events. It had represented a form of celebration to them. In some ways, her release of books would probably have looked at least somewhat similar to those events from the perspective of an external observer.

Of course, the reason she'd had to release them had been that, if she hadn't, the Cat's Eye would have captured them and would have burned them all. Her books had all flown away from her library to go hide in different locations because it had been the only way that she'd had to save them from utter destruction at the hands of her pursuers. She certainly hadn't felt very celebratory about it. It had been very difficult for her to track them back down after the fact.

As inconvenient as it had been for her, she still would have gladly taken having had to do it again to the risk of losing them for good. Be that as it may, this was not an option that was even available to her this time. The Cat's Eye may have wanted to destroy her, but they sure seemed to have memory when it came to remembering the tricks that she had used to evade them before well enough to be prepared to counteract them if she ever tried to use the same trick to get away from them more than once. She always had to dig new rat holes in the walls around her to serve as escape hatches when their whiskered noses would catch a whiff of her scent once more.

This time, they had sent as a duo Sieg the fascist white tiger magician with his fire hoops, smoke and mirrors, and Cali the four-armed calico with her fire swords and flying skulls. They loved fire, burning books, rats and witches eagerly. Seven out of nine members of the Cat's Eye would have posed no threat to the rat one-on-one. She could've handled any of them on her own without any problem. Two of them, she was able to sort of juggle for a certain amount of time that could partly depend on various outside factors, and also on which specific combination of them they would have sent against her. Some of them made better teams than others.

They were always experimenting with different teams. When they'd send three against her, she couldn't stick around and stand her ground nearly as much. Three was her limit. When they would send three, all that she could do was to run, run as fast as she could, and not look back, even if it cost her because she had to leave something behind to be destroyed to do it in spite of the regrets that she would know that she would have about it after the fact.

The only ones that were able to pose a threat to her on their own had been Graograman and their queen Entropy. Entropy's abilities against memory were so powerful that the rat had not remembered any of the times that she had been up against her. Out of everything else, the rat remembered all of her own life in minor detail ever since when whatever it was that they all were had come into existence.

There were only a handful of pockets of time in her life that the rat didn't remember, that had been completely 'blacked out' of her mind. She'd reconstructed Entropy's existence by a process of deduction based on what she did remember that she had been doing before and after these blackouts had happened to her. The rat had perceived Entropy only by what she didn't see, the way you make out the silhouette of someone whose image was cut out of a magazine.

What this amounted to was that she had to come up with a new way to protect her books from them while still escaping from them herself that they hadn't already seen coming and prepared for. The times when they'd caught her before had been extremely unpleasant, and she was not looking forward to ever repeating the experience, if she could avoid it. She thought about it intently as precious seconds ticked by, and finally came up with something.

She grabbed her flute and, bringing it to her lips, began to play.

The books, notebooks, and pieces and scraps of paper that were scattered all over the library around her rose off the ground and, slowly, began to swirl in the air around her, as if she was creating a small whirlwind around herself to draw them in. After she had been playing for a few seconds, it became apparent that they were picking up speed, moving in the air around her faster and faster as she played. For a moment it seemed as though she was going to go off running away from the library to be followed by her books where she would go, just as the pied piper would have been followed by rats, even though she wanted to save books, not drown them.

This would have drawn far too much attention for what was required by the circumstances of her current situation, though. The Cat's Eye would have spotted something like that a mile away, so she'd had to come up with something else, something that they wouldn't have been able to see and track quite as easily. No, instead of that, she was going to leave the books right where they were, to hide them in plain sight, where the Cat's Eye would never find them, where they would never even think to look for them, until she could afford to come back to pick them up where she would have left them later, when they wouldn't notice that she would.

The books, notebooks, and pieces of paper that were swirling in the air around her as she played slowly began to merge with the shelves, tables and the columns that formed the library that she had been living in with them itself. The wood and paper that they were all made from melded together into different, discrete shapes than they had become used to by then, shapes that they had not known for longer than most of them could even remember. She was a necromancer.

They were trees.

All of her books and library had coalesced back into the shapes that they had first known during their previous lives, before they had been known as books and library, back when they had first been the trees that all of her books and library had been constructed from after they had been killed. All necromancers could bring back the dead to a semblance of their former lives. She was just the only necromancer that she had known who had ever brought back to un-life such a large amount of dead trees. Out of all undead armies, hers would be the least likely to ever be detected by anyone, just as she'd wanted it to be.

When she had remained as the only one remaining who had not been transformed yet, still playing her flute in the middle of what was now a forest around her, the maw of a large snake made out of wood seemed to come up out of the ground around her feet. As it seemed to swallow her up, hiding her in the hollow tree trunk that was formed by the body of the wood snake, the wood snake's maw opened up wider and wider until it started splitting itself into various branches over her head. Using the last of the flute's magic, she transformed her head and arms into three feral pigeons, and transformed her feet and torso into three feral rats.

The feral pigeons flew up to the snake tree's branches and the feral rats scurried to its roots as she started thinking about where she would go next. All three pigeons and three rats would have to split up to take separate, unrelated routes only to rejoin at a single location much later on, to reduce the likelihood of them being spotted and tracked to the rest of them, because it would be less conspicuous that way. But which location should that be?

She would have to find somewhere where she would not draw too much attention, somewhere where even a creature that was as unusual as she was would seem commonplace...

Chapter 16: Second Nature

"Oh, they came up with something new in prosthetics just last year, it turns out," his dragon head turned to the bat as they gamed, back to sitting side by side in his apartment facing his screen, just as they'd been before. "Oh, what?" he tilted his head at Ogun. "They came up with a prosthetic hand that can feed sensations directly to the brain," his ram head continued. The thought of it almost made Rakim's head spin. "Wow, imagine the possibilities from something like that!" he answered excitedly. "I thought you'd like that," his snake head smiled. "They're some of the same people working on video game neural interfaces," his lion head gestured at the screen in front of them as they played.

The bat shook his head, almost disbelievingly. "Man, imagine being able to just think something, and have the game do it," he said. "It'd sure make all those really complicated special moves a lot easier, that's for sure," Ogun concurred. They were playing a fighting game. "Now all I need is an interface where I could think something and have the industry do it," Rakim smirked. "That'd be nice, wouldn't it," the chimera chuckled. "I mean, how many Arabic characters in games can you even think about, without checking?" Ogun strove not to get so distracted thinking about the question as to lose the match to his guest. It proved a challenge.

"Well, the oldest one I can come up with offhand would have to be the Prince of Persia games," his dragon head said. "Nu-uh! Persians aren't Arabs, though," the bat grinned. "No shit? Aw, damn!" He'd just lost the round to Rakim after all. "A lot of people don't know that, though." His snake head nodded pensively. "What about the Aladdin games?" he asked while picking a Thai kickboxing character, determined to win this time. "You must be shitting me," the bat answered, "with that line about the hand-cutting?" he finished. "They took that out!" Rakim gave him a dubious look. "Well, you didn't say it had to be a _good_game or character," Ogun replied, tongue firmly in cheek, pulling off a series of knee and elbow strikes.

"The West loves Aladdin, though," Rakim gritted his teeth in frustration as his character took damage in spite of blocking, "that and Ali Baba. Our only two stories where the hero steals something instead of having it bestowed on him, like, ever, and those have to be the only ones that people even know about," he stuck out his tongue, having just failed one of those elaborate throwing moves he always failed. Who had thought of those anyway? More to the point, why did he keep trying them, knowing they probably wouldn't work? "I always wanted to see a silat character in a fighting game! I know I could win if I was fighting with my own style," Rakim grinned, having just lost to the chimera who_had_ picked a character with his own style this time.

"You probably could," his snake head admitted, "have you ever played Mace?" The look of recognition on his face indicated that he had. "Oh yeah! I liked Namira as a kid. She was a strong female Arabic character in a fighting game, _and_she was one of the good guys." His lion head raised an eyebrow quizzically. "What changed?" The bat shrugged hesitantly. "Eh, I still can't hate her, it's just... you know her ending where she takes power and changes Islam so it's men who have to wear veils?" His dragon eyes widened. "Oh gosh, that's right." He hadn't been sure what to think about it at the time.

"It's not that it'd be wrong, it just... makes it seem like this bad thing she's revisiting on them? It's not supposed to be a bad thing, you know? It makes her seem a bit like a Western mouthpiece. The West loves Arabic women when they take their clothes off, but less with their clothes on. I'm ranting though." His ram head nodded. "No, I get what you mean." It occurred to Ogun that he was negotiating contested territory. He hoped he wouldn't fumble. Rakim seemed to be an understanding guy, he tried to tell himself. It seemed like simply avoiding these topics would've ultimately done them both a disservice. "You know, it's funny," the bat went on, "when I was a kid I wished men did wear veils. It would've made it easier for me to pass."

He shook his snake head. "I bet it would've!" He realized he could go for long periods during which he basically forgot the bat wasn't cis. It reminded him of their first conversation about his heads, about how sometimes he just forgot, until something reminded him. Rakim was just this guy, you know? It didn't feel artificial to the chimera to think of him as that. But then his relationship with the artificial was complicated too. "Al-Rashid was sort of cool, in the sense that he was well-done as a character I mean, but he was still a villain and an assassin," the bat continued, Ogun wincing as his guest landed a vicious-looking kicking strike on his character, "so there's that. _He_got away with being covered up from head to toe, don't ask me why that is."

This seemed to jog Ogun's memory. "I'm really looking forward to Rashid!" his lion head said. "Oh, you mean from Street Fighter! Yeah, me too!" Rakim grinned, "better late than never, I always say." The bat had also just mentioned assassins, which had also reminded the chimera of something else. "What do you think of the Assassin's Creed games? I heard good things about those," his dragon head asked. "Ah-ha! I win again, Muay Thai man," Rakim flashed a toothy, victorious smile at him. "Dammit!" his ram head cursed. "Yeah, I heard those had the historical accuracy and attention to detail down at least, Arabic good guys and bad guys, not too bad for what it is. I don't usually play that kind of game as much myself. But still!"

This time the chimera picked a character with a fighting style that was radically different from his own, just to see what would happen. "The last one I can think about that's not cannon fodder in some FPS would have to be Sadira," his snake head said, mentally going over his new, unfamiliar command list. "Oh, her!" The bat had picked the same character as before. "Still a villain and an assassin, but in a game full of cool, villainous characters you're sort of supposed to like. Mixed bag, I guess. I love the spider thing!" Bugs also kind of got a bad rap. It was a thing. "It works with the dervish spin. I wish there was a moth-based character that did that, but you can't have everything." The cocoon that imprisons was there, but not the one that transforms.

"I know what you mean! I feel the same way about Aria," Ogun said. This time it was Rakim's turn to raise an eyebrow at him. "You do?" His dragon head nodded. "Yeah, they often demonize cyborg characters, don't they? Especially those who want to 'help' people by making them cyborgs." Gears seemed to turn in the bat's mind next to him. "You work with prosthetics!" he put together. "When I'm not plotting the downfall of civilization as we know it, yeah," the chimera chuckled. "People tell me it's weird how I fetishize technology. I think it's weird how they fetishize the 'pure, authentic body,' but that's just me," his lion head said. "If they don't like it, they don't have to use it. I'm the one ranting at you now, though," he apologized.

"No, I get what you mean," Rakim assured him. "I sorta relate to cyborg characters sometimes." Ogun tilted his ram head at him. "You do?" The bat nodded. "Yeah! They're trying to be accepted as counting as a person, as 'real.' I'm trying to get people to treat me like a real man, whatever that is. I mean, I know it's not the same thing, but I sorta relate, I guess." He felt weird admitting to this. "I guess I'm also trying to get the world to accept I was 'built for my own reasons,' the way cyborgs are, but machines usually aren't," Rakim elaborated. Was he supposed not to be talking about this? Would the chimera assume that everyone like him felt like this, even though they may not? He liked to give Ogun more credit than that, but he wasn't sure.

His host smiled. "I get that. That makes sense to me." How could he not be real to him? "I mean, people are basically machines made of meat, aren't they?" his lion head asked. "We're just made of all these parts that connect to all these other parts with wires and electrical impulses. We even talk about how we're 'wired' this way or that way, you know?" Rakim thought about the implications of what the chimera had said. "Do you mean that there aren't souls?" He was playing completely on auto-pilot by then, having played so many times before, as if he'd been programmed to do it. "No, well, I mean, I don't know whether there are or not, really. It just seems to me like, if there are, they're software. The body's just hardware, you know?"

The bat seemed contemplative for a moment. "Hey, Ogun?" The chimera turned his snake head at him inquisitively. "Do you think that, if there's an afterlife, people with cybernetic body parts take them with them when they die?"

***

Rakim got a phone call. His mother was in the hospital. His heart raced at full speed in his chest as he flew there every bit as fast.

"It's my arm..." She sounded almost ashamed to have been burned. "I'll live." Irshad shook her head. "I was trying to pull him out. The beam was more burnt than I thought. It collapsed." She sighed. "I tried to get it off with my other hand, but I still couldn't reach!" He wrapped his wing around her protectively, just as she had for him when he'd turned to her about the bullies who'd picked on him as a child. "Oh, mother, how many times have I told you, don't be a hero..." She looked bitter. "You may get your wish. I don't know how I can do my job like this. They can't save the arm. It'd cost me twice my yearly salary just to have it removed, and several thousands more to have it replaced." He didn't know what to say to her about that.

She just didn't have that much put away to fall back on. She was tired from everything that what had happened had taken out of her, drifting in and out of consciousness now and then, he got the impression. He texted Ogun frantically about what had just happened a few times, cursing himself for not knowing what to do to fix the situation that they were trapped in. 'I might know someone who can help,' Ogun texted back, 'if you're open to it, I mean.' It seemed like an opportunity that they couldn't afford to dismiss. 'He'd probably do it for free. Well, he owes me a favor, and I'd owe him another one after this, but he'd trust I'd do him one when he'd need me to, I think.'

'Do you think he'd do a good enough job?' Beggars couldn't be choosers, but Rakim still didn't want his mother to suffer because of what they lacked more than she needed to. 'He's operated on me before, if that means anything. Eventually, I made it up to him. Now he's the one who owes me one, for now.' The bat hesitated. 'Do you feel ready to meet her, though?' The truth was, Rakim hadn't even admitted to Irshad that he'd been dating the chimera for the past couple of months. He'd been worried about what she'd think of Ogun as a prospect for him, of what she'd think of Rakim for dating him, that she'd worry that Ogun wouldn't be good enough for him, even though Rakim believed that he was. 'Desperate times call for desperate measures.'

"Hey, mom?" She groggily opened her sensitive eyes at him. "Yes, my son?" They kept the lights so bright, too bright for a bat, they did. She didn't complain. "If I told you I knew a way we could get your procedure done without having to have all that money we don't have, would you be willing to consider it?" It felt awkward for him to ask, but he had to push through it somehow. The stakes were too high. "Would it involve hurting other people in any way for it?" She didn't like having to ask - she thought better of Rakim in general. Still, she didn't know just how much he'd be willing to do for her. Sometimes it scared her. She didn't want him yanking someone's arm off on the street for her, whatever it was that kids were up to these days.

"No, of course not," he reassured her. He was sure that Ogun wouldn't have offered him anything like that, and expected him to go along with it. Rakim knew him better than that. "What do you have in mind?" she asked him. Rakim texted Ogun, asking him to join them. "You'll see." Rakim waited anxiously until the man he was dating finally showed up at the hospital after moments that felt like an eternity. "Hi, Mrs. Zahed." She looked him up and down, a four-headed giant who seemed hesitant to meet her eyes like a schoolboy. "Are you my son's friend?" Even in a weakened state, her eyes seemed as though they could stare right into his soul, Ogun couldn't help but think. "My name's Ogun." It seemed important for him to introduce himself. He didn't want to seem rude.

"You're here to help me?" She half-turned to her son as they spoke, seeking him out for a clue as to how she should best approach this person, whoever he was, but Rakim also seemed hesitant to meet her gaze. "Not me as such, but yeah, I know someone who can." The things she had to do because of the life she led, Irshad thought. "They couldn't come here themselves, though?" she asked him. Rakim idly wondered if he should've asked Ogun more about who his associate was before referring Irshad to him, but what was done was done. "Not really, no. He can't leave where he lives ever, for any reason. It's kind of a long story. I can take you there, though." She tilted her head at him, regretting that it sent a shooting pain through her shoulder.

"Where does he live?"

***

The first thing that hit you when you walked into Soma's grove was the smell. At first it was mostly something somewhere between the smell of freshly cut grass, the smell of dried leaves on the ground in the fall, and the smell of the dampness of earth after rain, a gripping, natural scent that commanded attention as much as any visual or auditory input would have. If you stayed longer, though, and really paid attention, there was something else underneath it, something almost like a version of the smell of ether in hospitals that wouldn't have been quite as sickening, if that was even possible, with a hint of the smell of burning firewood through it.

As bats, Irshad and Rakim could hear more of what was going on in the woods than Soma's average visitors could've. They heard crickets, dragonflies, rats, snakes, birds and squirrels in the trees, the croaking of frogs near and in the ponds and streams, the babbling of their brooks, the rustling in the leaves as the wind and light filtered through them, an entire ecosystem teeming with life mapping itself out in their minds through their ears. It reminded the bat of the forest he'd hidden in from bullies as a child, only more so. Rakim wondered if Ogun would've taken him there for any other reason. If the bat had ever gotten hurt at the Bolgia or in a street fight, this would definitely have been where Ogun would've taken him as well.

Soma had an unofficial arrangement with the Bolgia about fighters who got hurt there. Soma was a snake with arms, legs, a few vaguely spidery characteristics, and hints of something that was harder to identify. He was another kind of hybrid, just like the chimera was, but lived secluded from the city, not in it. "You must be the healer," she deduced. "What animal do you see on every hospital?" he smiled at her. "This looks nasty, though." This time he furrowed his brow. "I don't know if I'll be able to save this arm, Miss," he hissed, looking at it dejectedly. "They already told me it couldn't be salvaged," she explained, "so I'm here to have it removed, if you can do that." He nodded. "That should be doable, at least."

She looked around. "Where's your equipment? How are you going to do it, I mean?" He also looked at the forest around him as he spoke. "This is my equipment," he said. "Most of the chemicals, materials and substances that are used in medicine today are taken from the plants and animals in places just like this," he went on. "Everything comes from somewhere. I just get it a bit nearer to the source that it comes from than most, and modify it for my use myself." She turned what he'd said over in her mind a few times. "And it's served you well?" The snake gestured at Ogun with his head. "It was good enough for him, in any case. I have several clients. Not too many. My means and needs are both limited, by necessity."

She looked at Rakim. He seemed to trust Ogun. Ogun seemed to trust Soma. "Proceed, then." So he bit her other arm, and she passed out in his arms. "Hey! What do you think you're doing?" The bat had grabbed one of the snake's arms and was raising another hand near his head, dismayed and unsure of what to do next. "Relax," Soma patiently explained through gritted teeth, "I merely anesthetized her so I could operate on her without causing her unnecessary pain." Rakim took a breath and a step back, embarrassed at his reaction. "Sorry. I appreciate what you're doing, really! I was just surprised because I didn't expect that." The snake strove to show him a bit of understanding. "Of course. I'd like to get started now, if you don't mind."

Soma used various unexpected implements - sewing thread made from vines and spider thread, pine needles, cutting implements made from sharpened wood, bone and rock, all disinfected with his diluted serpentine saliva - to amputate Irshad's burnt up arm as safely as possible. The bat started by wanting to watch to make sure that he was doing the best job that could be done, but became squeamish partway through the procedure, looking away but asking Ogun to make sure to keep an eye on what he was doing, with the chimera doing his best to take Rakim's concerns seriously without insulting his friend who was helping them. When he was done, they waited, the bat most anxiously of all but not by much, for his mother to wake up.

"What... What do I owe you for your trouble?" she asked him groggily as she finally came to. "Nothing," he looked at her simply, "I owed him one. This goes a bit over that, but Ogun will compensate me later in a manner we'll agree on." She was struggling to speak, but seemed determined to do so. "If I... can cover for him somehow, let me know, won't you?" He nodded, surprised at her generosity, even though she had so little. "If I think of anything, I will," he assured her. "You should be focusing on recovering for now." Rakim hoped that she'd take the healer's advice. "In the meantime, make sure to help her with anything you can." Rakim nodded. "Thank you. I intend to." She'd resist being cared for - he'd have to be persistent...

She tried to adjust to life with only one arm, but it wasn't easy. She was used to doing a lot of things by herself, and this had a way of putting a crimp in that. "Sometimes, Rakim," she'd say, "when I stop thinking about it for a while, it feels almost as if my arm is still there. I try to move it, only to remember that it's no longer there for me to move after that. I guess that's what they mean by having a 'ghost limb,' isn't it?" She'd shake her head. "It's almost as if my arm's soul is still there, but it no longer has somewhere to live. It probably sounds kind of stupid like this, but I just don't know how to put it better than that." He was grimly reminded of his earlier conversation with Ogun about it, and shuddered at the perspective that this had put it in for him.

Not so long after what had happened, the chimera asked him if he still wanted to come meet him for a date sometime soon. The bat explained that at that point he didn't want to have to leave Irshad's side for anything, if he could avoid it, but that he'd really like to see Ogun again when he could. Rakim was grateful for the help he'd given them, and still attracted to the same things about the chimera that he'd already liked about him before any of this had happened, at that. Ogun offered to come over to Rakim's place instead. The bat was nervous, but figured that, after what had happened, it would've been weirder for him to refuse to let him see his mother again than not to, so he agreed.

"I brought you something, Mrs. Zahed. If you want, I mean! You don't have to accept it, of course," the chimera pushed himself through his anxiety to say. "I hope you didn't feel obligated to," she raised her eyebrow at him. "You already did quite a bit." Even with her mouth concealed, so much of her expressiveness passed through her eyes, Ogun thought, seeing her look at him again. "Well, you can look at it before deciding whether you want it or not," he specified, handing her a box under Rakim's curious gaze. "Uh, do you need help opening that?" he offered. "I can open a box, Rakim," she said smarmily. "Now let's see what in the world this is..." she wondered as she began tearing it open with her arm. She gasped.

It was a prosthetic arm.

"Where did you get this?" Her eyes widened. "I made it for you, Mrs. Zahed. It might not be as good as what you'd get for top dollar," Ogun almost apologized, "but if it works right, it should still be able to get the job done, at least." Rakim was speechless. "You made this? But how?" Ogun shrugged. "That's what I get for collecting trash and playing with it my whole life, I guess," he brought his hand behind him to scratch the back of his lion head. "One man's trash is another man's treasure, it seems," she euphemized.

"Well, you should try it on and make sure it works before being sure it's going to, but I should be able to help you do that. I should be able to without Soma's help, but I can afford to owe him another one if I can't, and he will for sure. The key is to get the right parts of your shoulder and the right parts of the arm to recognize each other's electrical impulses as valid. Once we 'translate' that, they should be able to 'talk' to each other, just like computers that are connected to each other can."

It was a weird adjustment for her at first but, with time, she became more and more used to her new arm. It wasn't quite the same as the previous one, and there were situations in particular in which she was forced to confront just how different it was, just as most people in her situation ended up having to. Still, once she'd gotten used to it, she found that there were increasingly fewer of the things that she'd been able to do before that she was no longer able to do. It was only a stand-in for her other arm, not a real replacement, but it was still far better than nothing by a long shot. In most ways, she was finally able to feel independent again. She returned to her old job as a firefighter, where she was welcomed with open arms.

Sometimes, she even became so lost in what she was doing she forgot it wasn't a real arm. Rakim found her training again in the living room one morning, performing some of the same jurus that she had taught him as a child with her new, metal arm substituting for her old one, almost looking like an ancient silat weapon grafted right onto her body. "I saved a child with this arm earlier today, Rakim," she smiled at him. She looked so happy! "You can tell your boyfriend he did some good work." He blushed. "Mo-o-om, he's not my boyfriend!" She chuckled. "Whatever you kids are calling it these days. You know what I mean." Irshad was no one's fool.

It did beg the question - was Ogun, in fact, his boyfriend by then? They'd never really talked about it as that. They went on dates. They fooled around a couple of times. That was as far as he knew what they were doing. "Hey, Ogun, can I ask you something?" He was nervous about Irshad being back to work, but while she was out of their apartment anyway, he may as well have been back out at the chimera's place, he figured. At least it gave him something to do. "Shoot," his dragon head had responded. "Are we boyfriends? Is that what this is?" The chimera paused the game that they were playing. It seemed to be an important enough conversation for that, so he wanted to be able to focus on it. "Hmm! That's a good question. I guess that depends!"

He'd been trying to see how things would evolve on their own, but he was glad that the bat had brought it up. He figured that was part of how that happened. "On what?" Ogun put down his controller for then, half-turning toward his guest. "What does being boyfriends mean to you? Is that something you'd see yourself doing with me?" Rakim strove to think carefully about the implications of his response before answering. "I guess first of all I should say I don't want to lose this, what we have right now, whatever this is. So if one of us wanted to be boyfriends but the other one didn't, I hope we could still keep hanging out like this regardless, you know?"

The chimera couldn't tell whether the bat wanted to be his boyfriend but was afraid that Ogun wouldn't want to, or if he didn't want to be Ogun's boyfriend, but was afraid that his host would be offended that he didn't. Unfortunately, this was exactly the kind of uncertainty that Rakim was trying to maintain. He didn't want to seem like he was coming on too strong and push Ogun away if things weren't supposed to be that serious, yet at the same time, if the chimera did want to be with him in that way, he didn't want to seem disinterested and miss the opportunity to be with him either. He didn't want to project or impose either way, but the stalemate could only last so long. Sooner or later it had to break.

"Deal," his lion head smiled.

Rakim could at least rely on this much, he was relieved to find out. "So, what would that mean to you?" Things must have been so much simpler for straight people, the bat imagined. 'Maybe that's what they think about us, for all I know.' "I'm not sure. I've never been boyfriends before." He felt it was a good start to admit this. "I guess it's someone who wants to spend the rest of his life with you, unless for some reason something eventually happens where he can't?" Ogun was resting his hand on Rakim's thigh as they spoke. "I guess it's not easy because sometimes they live together, sometimes they don't, some of them still fool around with other people, but for some of them it's really important that they don't... What about you?"

He hoped the chimera would have an easier time answering than he was having. "Oh gosh," his ram head said, "was I your... first?" The bat looked down, embarrassed, and nodded. "No, there's nothing wrong with that!" his lion head tried to reassure his guest. "Gosh," he shook his dragon head. He'd suspected as much, but he hadn't been sure. It was a lot to live up to, in a way. "Well, I haven't seen anyone else in that way since we started seeing each other, if that's what you're worried about." Rakim raised his head back up at him to answer. "No, it's nothing like that. I just don't have much of a point of reference, so I was hoping you could give me one." This seemed reasonable enough.

"Oh, I see. Well, let's see... I've never done the closed relationship thing before, since you're asking. I've always kind of had guys who were my friends but who I also fooled around with. It wasn't the main reason I knew most of my friends or anything but it was just sort of this extra thing we did together for fun, you know?" The bat nodded. "But you haven't since we met?" Ogun shrugged. "Well, no. I guess I wanted to see where things went. I'd have been okay with either, but I figured maybe you'd end up wanting something exclusive, so I wanted to leave the door open for that. I didn't want to risk hurting you if that was what you were looking for. Besides... If I was going to try that, you didn't seem like the worst person to try it with."

Rakim appreciated that this wasn't easy to talk about. "So do you see me as boyfriend material, now that you know me?" He was grateful to the chimera for making it just a little easier. He thought it spoke well of Ogun that he'd been willing to reconsider his way of life for someone like him, whether that was how things turned out or not. "Well, yeah! If you'd be into that, I mean." It was difficult to inconspicuously look away in shyness when you had four heads to look away with, he found out. "I think I would," the bat smiled, putting his own hand on the chimera's thigh. "Are you sure you want to do the exclusive thing at first, though? I don't want you to find out it's not for you because it doesn't feel right to you, and lose you because of that."

Ogun thought about it. "I'm kind of weighing the pros and cons right now. I mean, if you've never been in a relationship, and you've been in situations that made it hard for you to believe that people could care about you a lot, I wouldn't want to do anything to play into that. I don't ever want to make you feel like I need someone else because you're not good enough for me, or that you're not worth spending time with on your own, you know? So far I've liked the time we've spent together better than the time I've spent with anybody else, to be honest. I don't want you to feel, if something exclusive is what feels right to you, that you have to pick between me and that either. Between it and you, if I had to pick, I'd pick you." That did feel good to hear.

"But we don't technically have to pick, do we?" Rakim asked him. "Not if you don't want us to, no. You're a young man, and like you said you're pretty new at all this. So if you want to have me as kind of someone safe, that you know will be here for you to be able to turn to no matter what, but still explore around a bit to figure out what you're into around that, to find out things about yourself that you couldn't possibly know about yet because you've never had the right experiences to figure them out with... I'd be okay with that too. If you ended up wanting to change your mind later, we could always talk about it and figure out what we do then." This seemed like a compelling prospect. The bat finally decided that he liked the sound of it after all.

"Sure!" he chirped.

Rakim wondered about the spiritual implications of having more than one partner at a time for a moment. Looking up ancient facts about his belief system, he found out that some men, such as him, traditionally used to have up to all of four wives within it, without being told that they were doing anything wrong by it. The bat told himself that, as long as he restricted himself to four partners or less, he was probably in the clear.

He was curious about how Soma and Ogun knew each other. He'd been intimidated by the snake at first, and the situation had been too dire for him to have really been thinking about this kind of thing when they'd been in his grove the first time, but with their new arrangement, he decided that a date with the healer may have been a good way to get to know what kind of person the chimera was through some of his friends who knew him. Soma and Ogun had a platonic friendship themselves, but Rakim had found the snake weirdly attractive in spite of how odd he'd been, or perhaps precisely because of it. Hopefully it wouldn't ruin the chimera's friendship with Soma if he and the bat didn't really hit it off after all. That was just life.

The first time Rakim visited him at his grove for no medical reason whatsoever, Ogun went out with a weasel called Shinai, each of them having told each other that they'd tell each other how their dates would have gone when they'd reconvene after they'd be over. At first the snake was a bit weirded out to see the bat arrive unhurt - he didn't get a lot of visitors who weren't either about to ask for a favor from him or pay one back to him because of something that he'd done for them before, 'just because.' Rakim learned that Soma also had a boyfriend who he was in a more serious relationship with, but that they were still allowed to see people on the side here and there, just like he and the chimera were, an otter called Mandrake.

"So how was your date with Shinai?" Ogun shrugged. "Eh, mostly good. He's good company, really." It almost sounded like there was something behind that. "Anything wrong?" The chimera smiled, realizing he must've seemed even more lost in thought than he was. "Well, it's not the first time I see him. He's always trying to keep one foot out of every relationship, you know? He's always talking about how he's going to join the army someday and he says he needs to keep people at arm's length so they won't miss him too much when he'll be gone, which is a lot simpler on paper." Rakim nodded. "You'll miss him, won't you?" Ogun sighed.

"Well, I'm grateful to have you, for one thing. To be fair there was always going to be some distance between he and I anyway. Klein's hopelessly in love with him, though. Shinai keeps saying if things were different he might, but with things being the way they are, he won't. It's kinda hard to watch, really," his ram head stuck its tongue out. "Oh, you talk to him about his other dates, too!" the bat noticed. "Well, yeah," his snake head answered, "why not? People are just people, you know?" Rakim realized he hadn't felt that weird talking about Mandrake with Soma either after all. He hadn't even thought about it. It was just a part of their lives.

Soma was interesting. Rakim's dates with him were nothing like his dates with Ogun at all. The chimera usually organized their dates around a neat spot in the city that he knew about, or around various forms of technology in his apartment, but those options weren't available to the snake, who couldn't leave his grove for any reason, the bat learned. It wasn't that he didn't want to - he literally couldn't. Soma loved the natural world in all its forms, and never seemed to get bored of it. He'd take Rakim on these protracted forest walks, and just talked. One thing that Ogun and Soma did have in common was that, even though they were both reserved offhand, they loved to talk, when someone was actually listening, and the bat loved listening to them.

He'd spot as many of the small animals who skittered around them as they walked and tell Rakim everything he knew about them, their foraging habits, their life cycles, what they did in winter, how they strove to avoid predators, how they interacted with others of their own kind, their personalities around different other kinds of animals that he also knew about. He told the bat about the many different kinds of trees and plants that grew everywhere around them, in which conditions they flourished or perished, which ones needed more care and which ones it was best not to mess with, how people had used them to heal and harm others throughout history all over the world. His grove was like this improbable cornucopia of so many living things.

Soma was very dedicated to protecting the grove where he lived. He was a passionate environmentalist, with a very direct stake in the outcome - the natural world was the only place he could live, so it gave him quite a horse in the race. He'd talk about how much fewer trees there were than there used to be, about how much more intelligent and emotional most animals could be than most people gave them credit for, about the web of life, and how interconnected everything in the ecosystem was. He showed Rakim how to tie and untie various kinds of knots from vines, what they could be used for, and even shared some of his medical knowledge with him, explaining to him how he was able to use materials from the world around him to heal.

Soon it seemed normal to the bat not only that Ogun and he would talk to each other about their dates with other people, but that he and Soma would talk about Rakim's dates with the chimera and about the snake's dates with Mandrake as well. As he kept going to the Bolgia on his dates with Ogun, getting to know more people than he ever had, he began to think about the community that he was beginning to exist in as another kind of ecosystem itself, with its own set of rules, checks and balances, and its own kind of interconnections between everything. Klein affected Shinai affected Ogun affected Rakim affected Soma affected Mandrake, and vice-versa. Everything affected everything else far enough down the line, like the wings of a butterfly.

Rakim had never dared to walk into a mosque. He'd always wanted to, but he'd always been afraid that he couldn't pass, that someone would notice that something was 'off' and expect him to put on a veil, which he would've been determinedly against, not because he thought any less of his mother for it, but because it was this symbol of him not being a man that he'd always reject. When he'd tried to join a trans group for support, without even asking about his beliefs, the other members of the group had congratulated him on having thankfully abandoned the old superstitions of his homeland to dedicate himself to assimilating into their new, superior, rational Western society instead. He said nothing and, feeling terrible, had to leave. He never went back.

All of this added up to the fact that he'd never felt like he'd really belonged anywhere. But the more ensconced he became in the community that gathered at the Bolgia, the more he finally felt like he belonged somewhere, as fully part of an ecosystem of his own, just like any other lifeform. Like Ogun, the Bolgia welcomed people who were made of maybe too many different parts that didn't always fit together as well as they could've. It proved tremendously validating to him, and he wanted more of it.

Scylla, the shark girl he met there, turned out to be the first trans friend he made in real life, he was almost shocked to admit to himself. Neither of them really saw it coming - she was practically a lesbian and he was almost completely gay - yet they ended up experimenting with each other a couple of times after all, more out of scientific curiosity than anything else, or at least that was what they called it. Since they were both pre-op, they were each in just the kind of body that the other one wanted, yet didn't want it for themselves. They talked about how they wished they could trade places, and compared each other to an air-breather drowning next to a fish gasping for water on the shore. It was enlightening to compare notes about these things.

Things went well for what they were, but ended up not going very far between them. Rakim felt weirdly guilty to be attracted to her for traits that he knew that she wanted to get rid of, and wondered if he'd be able to maintain the same level of engagement with her after she'd have transitioned. Similarly, he could tell that she was more interested in aspects of him that would be gone if he finally made the plunge himself. He'd always thought the mind should be the most defining factor in such things, and it was the first time he had to navigate things being messier than that as far as that went. He knew he'd have resented holding back transitioning out of fear that someone would lose interest. It seemed fair to accept that she'd have felt the same.

Sometimes, when Shinai wasn't available while Rakim would be going out with Scylla or Soma, Ogun would go out with Bridges instead. Bridges could be kind of a handful when he got out of hand, but the chimera found him relatively easy to deal with, provided he kept the otter as far away from his apartment as he could. He'd been around the block at the Bolgia more than a couple of times. Ogun and Bridges always had good conversations, which went a long way as far as he was concerned. Bridges also went out with Klein. Shinai would say it was only a matter of time before Bridges ended up in jail.

Aside from the Bolgia, Rakim also met someone online, someone who knew people from the Bolgia but never went either, but for different reasons than Soma did. When the bat got to their place - they went by the singular 'they' - he discovered that it was completely dark. At first he wondered if they were simply blind, but he soon understood that he was dealing with no ordinary creature. He thought himself fortunate to still be able to tell where they and almost everything in their apartment were, thanks to his echolocation. When he moved to run his fingers through their hair, it erupted into a mess of hissing, and he finally understood why they'd invited him to meet in the dark, where a bat could still appreciate their beauty without being petrified.

Everything always came back to sound.

He wasn't sure, but he was beginning to suspect that his mother had started to lip-read...

Chapter 17: Do No Harm

"So, you're here for a month, then?"

Klein had sometimes wondered just how much you could and couldn't tell about people based on what their living quarters had looked like. Sometimes, it could be easy to jump to conclusions based on assuming too much based on too little, he'd reminded himself. Be that as it may, there had also been times when what people's dwellings had looked like had provided meaningful clues about the lives of their occupants after all. It'd depended on the situation.

"If you're sure that's not too much to ask, yeah!" Klein had felt self-conscious about having accepted Fugue's offer to let him stay with him in Brazil for a month. Bridges had introduced Klein to Fugue at the docks before the ship was to leave again. Klein had asked Bridges if the otter wouldn't rather have stayed with his port town friend himself, but Bridges had explained to him that he'd be going to be needed on the ship until its return a month later.

"Not at all," Fugue had assured him. Fugue always had a great deal to do around the house. He'd valued cleanliness greatly, but he'd led a kind of life in which he had always been kept busy to the point of over-exertion for far too long, so his apartment had not always reflected this to the best of his capacity. With Klein around to help with cooking, cleaning, and errands for a month, Fugue had been looking forward to having been able to have more free time than usual.

"Have you been here for a long time?" Klein had asked him. They'd been sitting on the floor facing each other, sharing their first dinner in Fugue's apartment. "Ever since Bridges helped me come here after I found him on that beach that time," the blowfish/urchin hybrid had explained to the skunk, "right after I came out of med school basically." Klein had tilted his head at him. "What made you decide to become a doctor and to come to Brazil in the first place?"

"When I was growing up then studying to become a doctor in Japan," Fugue had started, "I'd keep hearing about just how bad fish had it here. I knew fish were being discriminated against everywhere in the world, even where I'm from," he'd admitted, "but from everything I'd heard, it was especially bad here, especially in term of access to medical services for the poorest among us, who were often left to die when treatable simply because they were too poor."

Fugue had sighed, bringing his chopsticks up to his mouth as he'd finished speaking. "So you came here to help them?" Klein had asked admiringly. "Yeah!" Fugue had answered as he'd finished swallowing. "As much as I could, or at least that was the idea, anyway." Klein had raised an eyebrow quizzically. "What do you mean?" he'd tilted his head at the fish. "Well, it's a high stress job," he'd euphemized, "often in less than ideal conditions. We do what we can."

Klein had noticed the caduceus hanging on Fugue's wall, two snakes entwined around the same staff facing each other. Even though he'd been at home, not at the hospital that he had worked at, he'd had it up on his wall like Christians who had kept a cross on the wall of their apartments, because healing had been something that he'd believed in. "I really respect that! Bridges was right to speak highly of you," Klein had told him.

"You're too kind." Klein had never seen a blowfish blush before. "Bridges always tries to see the good in everyone, really." That much had certainly seemed to have been true, the skunk had thought. "What brings you here, yourself?" Klein had not been sure whether or not it would have been a good idea for him to admit what his plans had been to Fugue after such a short time. Would Bridges already have told Fugue? Could Klein trust Fugue just as he'd trusted Bridges?

"Just some unfinished family business," he'd summarized. "Family business?" Fugue had tilted his head at him. "My parents are in the clothing business," Klein had answered. Technically none of this had been all that incriminating, since it hadn't revealed anything about what he'd actually been going to do, but it had said enough not to have seemed too conspicuously evasive, and it did have the merit of having been true.

"How well do you get along with them?" Klein had groaned. "Ugh, not very." Fugue had nodded knowingly. "Well, sometimes with family, you gotta do what you gotta do, you know?" Klein had chuckled. "I guess that's true. Oh, these are nice!" Klein had noticed a handful of plushies nearby on the floor of Fugue's apartment. "That's high quality fabric by the way, where did you get these?" So Klein really did know fabric, Fugue thought. Maybe Klein hadn't lied.

"I made them. I got the fabric for them at a place that ended up closing down," he'd said regretfully, "so I have to be careful not to waste too much of it now." Klein had seemed impressed. "Oh, that's pretty cool! I wish I could sew like that," he'd said. "What made you think to start making plushies like that?" Some of them still had thread and needles going through various parts of them, almost looking like little Voodoo dolls in their early state.

"Honestly? I had to get good with threads and needles," he'd explained. "I'm a surgeon, you know?" Klein had nodded in dawning comprehension. "So you figured that you'd start by practicing on these, then get good so you could sew up people once you'd be good enough at it?" Fugue had nodded as the skunk had brought food to his mouth. "Don't get me wrong, I do get attached to these little guys," Fugue had said looking at his plushies fondly, "they're more to me than just practice. They comfort me, as plushies are wont to. It still seems like, if I'm going to be making a mistake, it'd be better for me to make a mistake with them than with people, though."

Klein had nodded. "I wonder what it'd be like to be a plushie sometimes," the skunk had thought out loud, "to be someone's little comfort object, and to cheer them up when they're down," he'd smiled to himself. "It might be sort of nice if you could." Klein had chuckled. "I'm sorry, I'm talking nonsense at you." Fugue had laughed. "No, it's okay. It's been nice to have you here so far, really." Fugue had met a lot of people at work, but very few in his 'off' time.

"Thanks." Klein had also noticed a gaming console on the floor of Fugue's apartment. Fugue's apartment had very little furniture, basically just the futon bed, kitchen appliances, and a few low tables here and there. "You play?" Not that it had seemed out of place, but Klein had wondered how much time Fugue could find to play video games with the busy schedule that plagued him so.

"I started during training back in med school, actually," Fugue had explained as Klein had taken a swig of his drink. "The people teaching me told me there had been research studies according to which doctors' reflexes during operations had been demonstrated to have been measurably higher in terms of success percentages when they'd honed their reflexes by playing video games to improve their hand-eye coordination." It had been so much like Fugue, Klein had grown to believe over the month he'd spend at the fish's place, that Fugue would only have allowed himself to really know a form of leisure if he could justify it to himself as part of his job.

"It's all about precision."

Klein had noticed something else that connected both of Fugue's hobbies. For the first time, Klein felt like he'd been being exposed to the concept of someone who'd used temporarily treating certain objects like people - like plushies or game characters - as a means to an end, as a way of practicing getting better at doing good for real people. He'd wondered if religion could be useful after all, if it was used as a known lie to practice being good for the real thing.

While Fugue had been away at work, Klein had worked as hard as he could've. He'd gathered as much information as possible about where the nearest fabric factory that his parents owned in Brazil had been located. Using some of the very skills that he'd learned from having lived with Boko, he'd tracked down its blueprints, and found its guard schedules, employee databases, and security measures.

He'd tried to find a way around every obstacle that could stand in his way, and had procured rudimentary equipment to help him on his quest. He would wait until the last day, infiltrate the factory, get evidence, get out, and leave the country the very next day. He couldn't afford to stick around for too long after that because the longer he'd stay, the likelier he'd have become of getting caught. Once he'd gotten all the information that he'd known that he could possibly need, but realized that he'd still had time to kill before Operation Mephit, he'd started looking for something else for him to do.

Then he'd seen capoeira on the street.

Klein had been mesmerized. The handstands had captured his imagination most of all. Just as when the black and white of the yin/yang symbol of Daoism had caught his eye, capoeira's handstands had seemed as though they had been designed specifically in order to make skunks feel good about themselves. Like most skunks, Klein had found that with his center of gravity the way it had been, it had been fairly easy for him to walk on his hands upside-down.

It had reminded him of his coming out/apostasy. Do the opposite. Go upside-down.

It had occurred to him that it had been likely that his mission might have been going to involve elements of physical danger, situations in which he might have to defend himself that his pepper spray would not have been enough to prepare him for. He'd always hated team sports growing up, but he'd thought that it would probably have been a good idea for him to become more at home in his own body, in a setting that would have made him feel like he'd belonged in it. So he'd started taking capoeira classes from a stingray who'd happily taught it to him along with her other students in the studio she'd lived in. She'd liked Klein, she'd talked to him a bit.

Klein had found the philosophy of capoeira particularly inspiring. In our capitalistic era, in which all of us had still been in a sense wage slaves, he had found nothing more valuable than the lessons to be learned from people who had valued the freedom from slavery that they had had to fight so hard to get back more highly than anything else. He'd hoped that, if the world were to listen to them, perhaps one day we could all aspire to greater freedom than that as well.

His stingray teacher had taught him about candomblé, the syncretic faith of those who had escaped from enslavement. The way that they had combined their ancient gods with the saints of the conquerors so that they could continue to worship their own gods while still appearing to and, in a sense, honestly worshipping the settlers' saints as well without contradiction had really spoken to him. Of course, they had had to do this because, if they had not worshipped the saints, they would have been severely punished, but they had not wanted to abandon their gods, or to become dishonest in their practice. So they had carved out a third way.

It had reminded him of the way that gays and atheists had used coded language among themselves among straights and Christians, so that the same words could be understood on two different levels based on who would be listening to them without betraying too much. It had embodied such a rejection of the taken-for-granted Western principles of 'spiritual copyright,' the 'us against them' mentality, like a sport in which you could play on both teams, make them one, and reinvent the game. He'd asked his teacher if it would've been offensive for him to adopt candomblé along with animism and Daoism. She'd told him her gods had not been jealous gods.

"Do these mean anything?" Klein had asked Fugue about short strips of paper with Japanese characters on them that he had noticed had hung here and there in the fish's apartment. "They're ofuda," Fugue had explained. "I put them up to protect my apartment from Ekibiogami, the god of disease." "Oh, you're Shinto, that's right," Klein had nodded, "I should have been able to tell that's what they were for."

"Some people think they're just for decoration," Fugue had added. "Sometimes, I just let them think that. I try not to bring up things like that unless someone else brings them up first. I can't help but worry that people might find some of my beliefs a bit silly, if they don't share them," he'd almost apologized. "No, not at all," Klein had reassured him. "I'd never think less of you for something like that." "What about you?" Fugue had asked him.

"I'm candomblé," Klein had said. For the purposes of this conversation, he had been.

"Ah, because of your capoeira, of course," Fugue had understood. You didn't live in Brazil for years without learning a thing or two about things like that. "It's quite beautiful, isn't it?" Fugue had smiled. "Thanks!" Even with all the work that Klein had been doing around the apartment, he'd still had time to practice in it briefly now and then. Fugue had enjoyed watching him. "I often wondered what it'd be like to be able to dance like that," Fugue had thought out loud. "So, what's stopping you?" Klein had asked him.

Fugue had looked a bit embarrassed. "Well, Klein... You see, in my job, I always have to make sure that my hands are clean at all times. It kind of comes with the territory of being a surgeon, you know?" Klein had still carried the habit of having washed his hands too much, sometimes until they would bleed, because of the shaming that he had received from the other children for having been a supposedly stinky skunk as a child. He'd just realized that Fugue had been one of the only few people that he'd met who had washed his hands just as much as Klein did, and who had seemed to think nothing of it. They'd partly bonded over their shared OCD.

"As Shinto, I've also grown up to value ritual purity. I have a strange relationship to the concept of purity, though... You see, I'm a hybrid, Klein, both a blowfish and an urchin." Klein had nodded, encouraging him to continue.

"There are those in this world who say that fish like me aren't 'pure,' that we're 'contaminating' the species that we belong to. I fear contamination in fact, but I'm no one's 'dirty hybrid.' At the same time, people really are careless about germs. They act as though they believe that germs aren't real because they can't see them, just as they believe that the gods aren't real because they can't see them either. To come here and to do the work I do, I had to be willing to 'get my hands dirty,' rather than to stay home to keep them clean, but... In short, I can't do capoeira because I'm afraid of putting my hands on the ground!" he'd blurted out.

"It was weird when I met Bridges," he'd gone on, "because at first his thing where he takes everything and puts it somewhere else really threw me, you know?" Klein had almost gasped. How difficult that must've been to deal with for someone like Fugue! "At first, all I could think about was how he was making it easier for germs to hitch rides everywhere all over every object he'd move from place to place without washing anything," he'd confessed, "but at the same time, he was the same man whose life I'd saved, who I'd convinced it was worth it to live again. I told him he was doing more good than harm, and I meant every word of it."

Klein had smiled at him. "The thing is," Fugue had continued, "it hasn't been all one-sided either. I've had more times than I can count when I felt down and didn't know who to turn to. When I turned to Bridges, he always found a way to help me feel better about myself. He always told me that no one could find what was good inside an urchin that they rest of the world didn't see because they were stuck at the outside as well as an otter could," Fugue had chuckled.

Klein had found it heartening to think of someone willing to push past something that would have legitimately bothered them like that for the sake of someone else's well-being. "You don't have to put your hands on the ground to dance, you know," Klein had told Fugue. "You can do anything you want with them, really!" he'd chuckled amiably. Fugue had stopped, and thought about what Klein had said.

"Maybe you're right. I did always wonder. Maybe I should try it someday." Fugue had scoffed at himself playfully. "It may as well become one of those many things I'll get around to doing someday, can't it?" Should he or shouldn't he, Klein had asked himself? He may as well have asked, he'd told himself. "Fugue, do you want to try to go dance somewhere right now?" Fugue had raised his eyebrows at Klein's suggestion.

"... Yes!" What a snap decision that had been. "If I don't do it now, I'll never do it."

So they'd taken the metro together to a nightclub downtown after all. It had been something that neither of them had ever done in their lives. They had both been the indoorsy type, and they had both spurred each other on to motivate each other enough to try to push past their respective resistances to going out into a setting like that, for once. It had been okay to go out and have a good time if someone you respected had given you 'permission' to, hadn't it? Fugue had seemed just a little nervous on the metro, but Klein had held his hand, and Fugue had gratefully accepted the skunk's offer of emotional support.

When they'd been at the club, Fugue and Klein had wondered at the beauty of the multicolored lights shining all over the dance floor. The sea of writhing arms had made it seem as though they had been watching algae swaying underwater in some kind of stunning coral reef. It was as if they'd gone on a big journey, like salmon would go on, only to finally reach somewhere where they'd felt they'd belonged the whole time. Klein had often disguised his anxiety as a resistance to the stereotype of the raving gay guy, but now that he'd finally overcome his anxiety and had embraced a trope that had actually fit, it'd felt ever so right!

They'd both had a little too much to drink. People around them had danced raucously, rowdily, and their exuberant sensuality had become increasingly contagious to the two usually shy, newfound ravers. After having eased their way onto the dance floor among the twirling glowsticks the way someone skittish slowly tiptoes their way into a pool that seems too cold for them at first, they'd begun to feel more and more at home where they had been.

Their inhibitions had continued becoming correspondingly lower. They'd danced closer and closer to each other, unselfconsciously waving everything they had at each other with everything they'd got, pressing against each other without moving any less than they had been when they'd had more room, without holding anything back. Eventually they had gotten even a few frequent goers' attention, who'd begun watching them and enjoying the show they'd given.

When they'd gone back to Fugue's apartment after it, they'd sang songs they'd heard at the rave that night to each other on the street on their way back. All of the warm, sensual energy that they'd been accumulating throughout the evening had kept pleasingly, frustratingly bouncing around inside their bodies looking for a way out as they'd gone. They'd each ended up finding a way out for it with each other on the futon before passing out on top of each other on it. Removing his arm from around Klein while lying on his side, Fugue had turned around in bed as he'd yawned himself awake the next morning to look at the time on his alarm clock.

"Oh, shit!" he'd screamed. "I'm late for work!"

As soon as he'd said it, spikes had suddenly erupted from Fugue's skin all over his body.

"Ah!" Klein had yelped, doing a side rolling dive out of the bed onto the floor to roll back up kneeling on one knee, having turned to face the bed on his way down. As Fugue had precipitously jumped out of bed as well, Klein had grabbed his arm and had looked at it. He'd seen that one of Fugue's spikes, having been ripped out of the blowfish/urchin's body, had become embedded in his arm, and his eyesight had blurred. As he'd seen the fish rush to open his medicine cabinet, the skunk had begun to feel a little woozy, and it'd become difficult to move.

"Don't worry, I'll be right there!" Fugue had assured him, rummaging through his medical supplies in a panic before finally finding what he'd been looking for. "You'll be all right," he'd said, carefully bringing Klein up from the floor to lie him down on the bed as well as he'd been able to in spite of the encroaching paralysis that had been resolutely making its way through the skunk's metabolism by that point. "I'll handle this."

'Just lie flat on your back,' Klein had almost wanted to add mockingly in his blurring mental state, 'and do what the nice doctor tells you,' he'd also realized that his mouth had been too numb for him to have been able to say by then. Had he been right to trust Fugue after all, he'd asked himself? If it'd been a mistake, it'd been too late for Klein to do something about it by then, so he'd better have hoped that it hadn't been, Klein had answered himself grimly.

Klein had seen Fugue take a small syringe out of a small med kit that he'd thrown over his shoulder on a sling, only to realize it hadn't been an ordinary syringe, but that it'd seemed to have been made from one of his body's spikes themselves, which had quite retracted by that point. Gently inserting it in Klein's arm, the solution in it had felt weird to Klein as it had made its way into his body. However, it had also seemed to dampen the impact of the previous substance that the spikes that had erupted directly from Fugue's body had inadvertently injected into Klein, so Klein's body had seemed to welcome it. He'd become tentatively less panicked.

"It took me a while to come up with this," Fugue had told Klein, indicating the now empty spike syringe that he'd just injected him with, "but it was really worth it. You'll be up in an hour or two. Before I came up with this, that would've been in a day or two!" he'd explained. "But I diluted some of my venom and combined it with something else to come up with an antidote. It's not perfect, but it'll have to do for now. I'm sorry, I have to run! See you tonight."

Klein had had time to think about what had just happened to him as he'd been lying on the bed completely unable to move, but knowing that he should be okay in a relatively short time nonetheless. He'd understood why Fugue and Bridges would have related to each other. They'd both been people whose conditions had made them unintentionally hurt others, but who'd been trying to do everything they could do intentionally to try to mitigate some of the harm that they'd been causing. In the context of his life, remembering the factory worker who had lost a limb because of him, Klein had found that, in his own way, he could relate to them as well.

A lot of Fugue's anxiety around people had made more sense in the context of knowing this. The fish had always been operating under the knowledge that, if he'd had a panic attack, the consequences could be too surprising for the average person to know how to deal with. He'd always been working knowing just how much he'd stood to lose, perversely making him likelier to panic because of it in turn. It had been something that would have driven some people away.

Yet, if he'd thought about his life until that point, supposing he'd had to choose, Klein had thought to himself: a lifetime of doing what his parents had wanted him to? A lifetime of pretending to be a straight Christian to fit in around the griffin and lioness? A lifetime with Boko? Even Bridges' kleptomania, while comparatively easier to deal with than the rest of them, had been no picnic. So far, Fugue had still been the easiest person to deal with that he'd known.

How about that.

Fugue had been super apologetic when he'd come home that night. "I hope you were okay!" Klein had nodded, rubbing his arm, still a bit sore, but alive and moving. "You were right, it only took about an hour or two," he'd said. "I'm sorry, I take my job very seriously, as you know, so I panicked when I saw I'd overslept. I hadn't set my alarm because I'm not used to this. I'd never... I'd never done this before, Klein." Klein's eyes had widened. "You mean...?" Fugue had given him a meaningful look. "Sleep! I'd never slept before." That's right, Klein had suddenly remembered - fish didn't need to sleep! "No, I'd done that!" Fugue had laughed.

"That must be a pain to deal with," Klein had said, indicating one of Fugue's now-disembodied spikes on the floor near them. "You have no idea," Fugue had sighed. "Public transit is a nightmare. I tend to get really agoraphobic and claustrophobic on public transit, and when I have an anxiety attack, they just... come out. I've gone to multiple doctors and mental health specialists, but no one's managed to help me find a way to hold them in for good so far." He'd never left his apartment without multiple antidote syringes on his person, just in case something would have gone wrong and he'd have ended up needing to use them.

"And nothing's ever made it better?" Fugue had stopped and thought about it. "Before I went to the club with you that night, I never would have been able to be around so many people without having a panic attack. I wouldn't have been able to breathe. I'd have been terrified." Klein had been surprised. "But you were able to that time?" Fugue had nodded. "Yeah! I'm not quite sure what it was, but it was amazing. I wasn't even scared they'd come out by the end."

"Wow."

A few days before his plans were to be set in motion, Klein had met Mano at an anti-capitalist protest that he'd gone to, he'd learned about her connection to Eli, and he'd talked with her about their respective pasts and plans for their futures. By that point, Klein had become attached enough to Fugue that he'd begun to feel bad for not having told the fish the full story behind his visit to Brazil. So, he'd eventually decided to trust him enough to tell him after all.

"Ah, so that's why you're leaving right after," Fugue had nodded in understanding. "Good luck, then." Klein had to admit that he'd been going to miss Fugue by that point, but he'd already felt guilty about having imposed on him for that long. He'd worried that, if he'd gotten caught trying to pull the stunt he'd be trying to pull, that Fugue could have gotten in trouble for having let the skunk stay with him. All good things did have to come to an end, after all.

"Before you go, can I show you something?" Fugue had asked him. "Sure," Klein had nodded. Fugue had interwoven his fingers in front of Klein in nine complex, successive patterns, mesmerizing him. "What is it?" Klein had titled his head at him. "It's called kuji-in. If you're ever in a situation in which you need to really focus your mind, to break through something that's being used to cloud your mind somehow... Concentrate, perform it, and think of me."

Klein had smiled, and nodded yes.

Soon after, Klein could have been found dangling upside-down by his legs in the dark taking pictures in the fabric factory before dropping back down to the ground right-side-up unnoticed. He'd covertly parkoured around various obstacles on his way back out. The next day, he'd already been back on Bridges' ship, which had been on its way back to North America, where his parents' unethical clothing business had been about to undergo the reorg of a lifetime...

Chapter 18: Common Ground

'I don't need God! All I need is an amoeba.' (Greater Than One, I Don't Need God)

Mandrake had had a complex relationship with his father when he'd been growing up. His father had been both a prominent psychologist and a deeply pious Jewish man. It had therefore been difficult for Mandrake to disentangle his relationship with his father from his relationship with Judaism and with psychology, which had both been fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity. The otter could not reject or accept anything wholesale about any of all three.

Mandrake had gone to see psychologists when he'd been a child. He hadn't really cared for it. He hadn't really been sure of why his father had encouraged him to do so at the time. Had his father seen something broken and horrible in his mind, something so wrong that it needed to be fixed by someone whose job it had been to fix people's minds when something went wrong with them? His father had insisted that it had just been good mental hygiene. He'd told Mandrake that he'd believed that, in an ideal world, everyone would be able to afford to see a psychologist, just as everyone should have been able to see a doctor for physical illnesses.

When he'd become a teenager, and had started realizing that he'd been attracted to other men, Mandrake had become even more embittered toward his father's beliefs and profession. Mandrake had kept going to the synagogue, and he had still believed in God in his own way, but he had become increasingly cynical toward any earthly authorities who had claimed to speak in His name. Mandrake had believed that there should have been a commandment to honor your children if you had some just as there had been a commandment to honor your parents. Else it had seemed to stack the deck against him in a world that had already disfavored him enough.

When he'd started making pagan friends, he'd become disgusted with the notion that 'thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.' Psychology had uncomfortably echoed some of passages from Leviticus that had encouraged people to kill people for having had the 'wrong' sexuality. He'd decided early on that there would never be a context in which he'd make excuses for such words. These were no word of God but the words that narrow-minded men had put in His mouth.

When Mandrake had been a child, his father had taken him on vacation to a port town. In one of the souvenir shops, Mandrake had asked him to buy him a lobster plushie, and had begun to sleep with it every night. He would ask his little plush lobster to tell him astonishing tales of the sea before he would drift off to sleep, happy with his little fuzzy friend looking at him cutely. When he had first seen people eat lobster around him, he had broken down in tears.

It had been hard for a lot of Jewish otters not to eat shellfish. Shellfish had been renowned far and wide as the favorite food of otters. The expression 'he had cracked it open like an otter cracks open a clam' had not been invented in a vacuum, after all. Mandrake had been utterly unable to eat shellfish. The very notion of it had made him sick to his stomach. When he'd grown up, he'd wondered where the injunction not to eat shellfish could have come from. A lot of people had believed that it had been a health thing, just as for pork. But a lot of things could be unhealthy. Why shellfish specifically?

Perhaps God had secretly been a mollusk Himself, Mandrake had speculated.

In any case, Mandrake had started refusing to wear mixed fibers as well. He had studied fabric to know it well enough to always have been able to tell when someone had been wearing mixed fabrics. He would never point it out in ordinary circumstances but, if a bigot had accused him of being someone who would go to hell because of his predilections, Mandrake had taken it upon himself to have been able to tell them which mixed fabrics they'd been wearing every time.

When he'd reached the end of high school, and the time had come for Mandrake to decide what to do with his life, his father had tried to influence him in the direction of becoming a psychologist himself, just as his father had been before him. Mandrake's father had been disappointed when Mandrake had chosen to become a scientist, both because he had wanted his son to follow in his own footsteps, and because he mistrusted scientists as an impious lot. For a long time, he'd claimed that Mandrake's pursuit of science had been nothing but the result of a psychological disturbance to get back at his father and at authority in general, out of spite.

Pushing himself further and further into unconventional, 'left-hand path' thinking, Mandrake had graduated until he had earned the highest degree in science that he could possibly have received. For a long time, he had become known as a respected scientist among his peers because of his intelligence. Mandrake really had pushed the envelope further than other scientists in a lot of ways, just as he had in terms of religion, mental health and sexuality, that had been the thing. After a few years, his research had become so controversial among his peers that his unorthodox ways had earned him the unflattering, hackneyed appellation of 'mad scientist.'

He'd put their criticisms out of his mind. Holy men had always been 'kadosh,' outcasts and pariahs. The average person had not been holy, so if one had been to be holy, one had to resolve not to be merely like the average person. He'd comforted himself with the words of Einstein, that men of brilliance had always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The spirit of science, as he'd seen it, had been one of infinite discovery, not one to be circumscribed.

So one day he'd been almost devoured by a giant amoeba.

Apparently this had been the kind of thing that had happened. His body had become merged with the amoeba's. Mandrake had inadvertently become a shapeshifter. He could turn any part of his body, or even his entire body into water and back to flesh at will. It had not taken more effort for him to exist in a liquid state than in a solid state. He'd even been able to make his body evaporate and to condense himself back down to liquid then solid state without problem. It had taken him some measure of effort to execute complex water movements while shapeshifting, but no more than it would have taken the average gymnast to perform various acrobatics.

He had become able to split his own body in half like the Red Sea.

Many of his peers had taken this as a definite proof that everything bad that they had thought and said about Mandrake had been true, that he'd been a wild card so desperate to prove something and to appear original that he would have done literally anything to get attention for his research, even the unthinkable. For a moment, he'd accepted their verdict as true about him, and he'd developed a bit of a drinking problem as a result of his depression. More than anything he had been afraid that, when he would face his father having learned about what had happened to him, his father would say that it had proven everything bad he'd ever said about him as well.

This had not happened.

Instead, what his father had told him when Mandrake had faced him after having made the mistake that had turned him into a freak had been that the fact that he had been transformed into a shapeshifter had been just a fact. It had been merely an observation. For all he'd known, even though it had happened to him by accident, it could just as well have been the kind of thing that another researcher would have worked for their entire life in the hopes of achieving, without ever having been able to. What Mandrake's experience had meant about him had been something that had been for Mandrake and for Mandrake alone to determine, his father had told him.

This had been the most significant event that had made the otter's father earn his respect.

Mandrake had started going to a bar and nightclub called the Bolgia. He had heard about it because of his new condition. Apparently, it had developed a reputation as a place where the strangest of creatures could go, and find a place that would not make them feel like they hadn't belonged. He'd started making friends there with time. Mandrake had had a gentle personality and had loved listening to people.

The unusual kind of friends that he'd made at the Bolgia had had their own unique sets of problems because of their own conditions. Mandrake's father had been a single parent and, sometimes, Mandrake had felt as though he'd had to learn how to act as his own mother himself, giving himself advice and taking care of himself when his father would not. He'd fallen into the role of caretaker with his friends naturally, and many of them had developed the reflex of always turning to him whenever they'd had problems that they hadn't known how to deal with on their own. Sometimes Mandrake had felt challenged by them, and had looked for advice for himself.

Then it'd hit him. He'd become his friends' therapist!

At first he had been outraged. How had he allowed his life to maneuver him into a situation in which he had ended up becoming exactly what his father had wanted him to become even though he had never wanted to when he had been growing up? Yet at that point the alternative had become for him to act in a way that his friends would have experienced as him having stopped caring about their problems. They'd have felt horrible. He hadn't wanted that. Therefore, the only option that he had felt had remained open to him had been for him, on his own terms, in his own individualistic way, to embrace and study dreaded psychology after all.

Mandrake had soon realized that, despite psychology's Freudian roots, he had not been the only psychologist who had chosen to explore psychology in a way that had challenged societal norms rather than having merely reified them. When he'd learned that Jung had believed, even as long ago as he'd lived, that the job of a homosexual's psychologist had been to make sure that they were happy more than to convert them, and that the point of psychology had been to teach the individual to develop critical thinking skills about the collective to decondition themselves from social conditioning, he'd become a Jungian. He had never looked back since.

Mandrake had found Jung's approach to his patients' religion interesting. While most of psychology had tended to take either Christianity or atheism as default or 'normal' depending on whether the psychologist in question had been an atheist or a Christian himself, Jung had taken great care to encourage psychologists to meet their clients on their own terms. It would never be the job of a psychologist to make sure that their client had the 'right' religion. There had been no such thing.

Although Jung had been a Christian, he had never dismissed the religion of pagans as worthless. Instead, he had looked in it for some of the same social signifiers that had existed in monotheistic belief systems, while trying to 'translate' them from culture to culture. While he had become disenchanted with Kabbalah after having liked it as an imaginative journey as a child, partly because of its popularity in circles that had not taken spirituality seriously, Jung's approach to it had rekindled Mandrake's interest in it. Jung had believed that all of it, just as most belief systems, could also be seen as a useful set of psychological metaphors.

Every god had really been an expression of a specific part of someone's personality, on a very basic level, according to Jung. To worship the god of love was to honor the part of yourself that needed to feel love, and so on and so forth. Polytheism and perhaps religion in general had really been only giving names to the different parts of yourself to make sure that you wouldn't forget some of them that could be easy to forget but important to remember to take care of. No useful psychological advice could hinge on whether gods had existed or not. To be valid at all, it had to have been valid if the gods had been real, and valid if they had not been.

Mandrake had taken to this.

On a walk through the forest, Mandrake had met a man named Soma. Soma had been a snake, spider and dryad, all at once, who had used his knowledge of hedge witchcraft to work as a doctor. Trapped by his status as a dryad, Soma had been unable to leave the grove that he had lived in. People would come to him, or would bring wounded to him, and he would treat them. Soma hadn't believed in money, but as a dryad he'd needed a lot of favors, so he'd used barter to ask people to bring him things he'd needed from the outside world instead. Mandrake had related to Soma as a fellow healer that some people seemed to take for granted too much at times.

A dryad and an otter made of water had been a match made in heaven. Mandrake and Soma had become a happy couple quickly, and remained one to this day. They'd understood each other well enough, partly because of their considerable experience dealing with other people's problems, that they'd managed to avoid a lot of the problems that they'd known that many other couples had had to deal with. Mandrake hadn't minded that Soma had been poly, but he'd only had Soma himself. His clients kept him busy, and so many of his friends had also been his clients that it hadn't made it easy for him to date any of them, so as not to date his clients.

Soma had sometimes worried at the thought of asking Mandrake for help. He hadn't wanted to take advantage of the otter's training and to have started to date him only to become his client afterwards, as if he'd been looking for a loophole in the system. On a private, selfish level, though, Soma had found it refreshing that Mandrake could shapeshift the way he could. For one thing, it had meant that Soma himself would never have to heal Mandrake.

When Mano, after her disillusioning time in the Middle East, had met Mandrake the Jewish otter and Rakim the Muslim bat at the Bolgia once she'd moved from Brazil to North America after all, and learned that they'd both been in a relationship with Soma the pagan without either of them having had a problem with it, she'd been weirdly moved to learn that they'd both have been willing to have made Soma's grove their shared, common ground.

Chapter 19: With Strange Aeons

'That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.' (Abdul Alhazred, Necronomicon)

Irshad was not easily shaken. She'd been through enough that it took a lot to faze her by then. Rakim had only seen her cry twice. Once, when she hadn't been able to save someone from a burning building in time, and had lost them to the flames in spite of her efforts. The other, when they'd seen a report about an attack by their people on the news.

"When these people kill people in our name, Rakim... It feels as though they'd killed us all."

He still remembered the way she'd shaken her head, the way her hand had covered her mouth behind her veil as tears had streamed down her face.

"Never let the worst elements of a group you belong to define it for you," she'd told him.

He lived in the world. He couldn't help knowing that there were people who would have thought that God would judge him very harshly, himself. In his most insecure moments, he sometimes privately wondered whether or not they may have been right.

"Mother... Do you think I'm going to hell?"

He had looked at her so seriously. "Oh, my son..." She'd approached him and wrapped her wing around him protectively. He'd always felt safe when she'd done that. "If I believed that you were, do you really think I wouldn't do everything I could do to stop it? I put out fires for a living, Rakim... I'd never leave you to the flames. You're my son."

***

Ogun flicked on his lighter, lighting his hookah as he gamed with Rakim. His dragon head had sometimes breathed fire outdoors, but he never did it indoors. Fire safety was important, after all. Their gaming nights had become a regular thing.

"See, I always thought there was kind of a weird anti-transhumanist vibe around Frankenstein, myself." The bat had been the one who'd uttered these words. While the chimera had introduced him to the term, he'd started developing his own opinions about it. "Oh?" He tilted his ram head at him. "I hadn't seen it like that." Having grown up as a hybrid, looking as if he had been 'put together from different creatures' himself, Ogun had mostly grown up identifying with the monster, and seeing it in terms of demonstrating how people judge others based on appearances rather than on their behavior.

"Well, yeah!" Rakim went on as the chimera struggled to kill Frankenstein's monster in Castlevania in front of them. "I mean, think about it. He tried to break the laws of Nature, God and Man to try to extend life beyond what it's 'supposed' to be, so the monster 'came back wrong.' It's a total hubris story, isn't it?" Ogun paused and thought about what the bat had said as Igor danced gleefully over poor Simon's mangled corpse.

"I guess you're right! It's weird how long I could have known about that, and never have seen it before just now." Did it bother him to see it in a new light? Rakim wasn't sure. "I'm sorry, should I not have said that?" The chimera shook his snake head no, his lion eyes firmly on the screen as he took on Frank again. The monster. Whatever. "No, it's interesting. I've been thinking about a lot of earlier games differently since what happened these past few years."

He had a different subweapon this time - he hoped he'd have better luck with it. "That's part of why you like replaying old games like this, isn't it?" His dragon head nodded. "I've been questioning some of my earlier influences, yeah... I wanted to see for myself how they held up. It's like I notice things I used not to notice now?" Ogun looked grim. The bat could see that his boyfriend was very unhappy about some of what had happened to the gaming world recently.

"Well, not everyone is going to be affected by the same games the same way," Rakim offered, "just like with anything else." The chimera couldn't argue with that. "That's true, but it's still important to think about more than one way in which they could be taken though, don't you think?" The bat nodded. "I would know," Rakim stuck his tongue out. Too many online 'gamers' had asked him to show them 'her' boobs.

"At the same time," his ram head went on, "when I was growing up, I remember suddenly finding out that Samus, Birdo and Sheik were girls, and not really being fazed by it... It seemed like having a character seem to be one gender but turn out to be the other one was something that just sort of happened, you know? It wasn't such a big deal," he shrugged. "I don't know what it is that makes some people take something one way, and other people take it another way," his snake head continued as he finally killed Frankenstein.

"Well, never let the worst elements of your group define it for you," the bat told him. "Oh, I love this song!" he chirped. "It's one of my favorite ones in any of the games," Rakim added. Ogun couldn't help but smile, seeing his boyfriend smiling over something as simple as his favorite song in an old game. "Game music tends to be underrated in general," the chimera opined while struggling not to get hit by bones thrown by skeletons at different heights than he was.

As the bat started unconsciously bobbing his head to Heart of Fire throughout the level, Ogun smiled, saying nothing so he wouldn't become self-conscious and stop, finding Rakim's cheer too communicative to want him to stop. "Ah, what a great song!" Rakim closed his eyes, falling back on bats' beloved sense of hearing ever so briefly. "When I hear it, it makes me feel like I can have the courage to overcome just about anything." It was as though it made him come alive.

"My mother used to say that, if you couldn't hear music, but saw someone dancing, you would think that they were a crazy person. I mean, what are they really doing, you know? On its own, dancing doesn't seem to make much 'sense.' But when you hear the music, when you can see that the person dancing is moving to the music, following it, surrendering to it, in a way... then, then dancing starts to make sense."

It was time for Death.

The chimera strove to dodge the sickles as he whipped and threw crosses across the screen, but there were just too many of them, and they were so fast! Try after try, he still couldn't quite make it. "The problem is you get there with too little health after that last corridor," Rakim observed. "I know. I have to figure out how to get around their patterns though." Ogun made it there with axes that time, hoping to have better luck attacking from below.

For naught.

"I can never beat Death," his lion head sighed.

"You'll figure it out," the bat jested as Ogun handed him the controls, "I mean, it's what you do, isn't it?" His dragon head gave him a sly grin, but his ram head seemed to frown in thought. Rakim was never sure how to interpret what it meant when different heads had different facial expressions. "I mean, not to imply anything mean about it, mind you, y'know?" His snake head smiled. "Don't worry, I was just thinking about something." The bat titled his head. "What?"

He shook his lion head. "Shinai offered to help me get a job working with the military. He said he could get me in, that I definitely have what they're looking for, for sure." Rakim wasn't sure of what the best way for him to react should have been. "Well, then... Congratulations, I guess?" The chimera looked pained. "I don't know. I told him I'd think about it." The bat wasn't sure at first, but he was starting to put two and two together.

"Ogun, I understand exactly how hard it is for people to find work in this economy, believe me." His dragon head actually growled - a sound that Rakim hadn't heard from him often. "I could never work with people who kill your kind, though!" Ogun almost snapped. "I mean, what if I built some soldier a prosthetic or some sort of machine that helps him kill one of your long-lost relatives?" Ogun couldn't hold back the emotion that had crept into his voice. "How could I live with myself then?" The bat gulped. "I started creating machines and prosthetics to help people... not to kill them," he finished dejectedly. Of course Rakim understood - how could he not?

"Well... My mother can still count on her new arm to this day... for what it's worth."

His ram head looked at him, its grieved face letting his gratitude to Rakim show. "How is your mother, anyway?" Ogun inquired. This time it was the turn of the bat's countenance to darken unexpectedly. "She seems mostly good," Rakim said hesitantly. "Mostly?" he tilted his snake head at him. "Well, I'm starting to think she might be losing her hearing." He nodded his lion head in acknowledgment. "Do you think I should try to build her a hearing aid?"

This made Rakim's face light up. "Yes! Yes, I think that might be a good idea." The bat had reached Death with the holy water. "Aw, you have the crappy subweapon!" the chimera lamented. "Wait for it," Rakim smiled knowingly. When Death showed its face, the bat started throwing the holy water where it would be, just before it showed up, never relented as he threw more and more after it, and kept it frozen in place taking damage until it ran out of hit points.

"Holy shit, you beat Death!" Ogun exclaimed with genuine surprise.

"There's a trick to it," Rakim smiled at his boyfriend over Simon's victory song, "of course..."

Chapter 20: Fear to Tread

Life had been strange for Klein after he had moved back to North America.

His trip back on the boat with Bridges had gone swimmingly. He'd known what to expect, and he'd had to deal with none of the stress of having started out as a stowaway the way he had when he had climbed on board of Bridges' ship the first time. Still feeling strange from having developed an attraction to Fugue so soon after having had to move away, Klein had wondered whether or not he'd started having a crush on Bridges, or if it had just been his frustration at having left Fugue behind that had manifested itself by displacing his feelings onto another object of affection.

When they had reached North America, Bridges had gotten off the boat onto land for a short time to bring Klein to a place that he'd called the Bolgia. The Bolgia had been a bar and nightclub where people could go even if they were so weird in some way that they often couldn't go anywhere else, at least nowhere near as easily a lot of the time. Bridges had been well-liked there.

Now and then, the Bolgia had put up a ring and held sparring matches where contestants could earn prizes. Klein had enjoyed watching some of the Bolgia's other customers pit their skills against Bridges' Jeet Kune Do. Bridges had almost always won, except for when he had been beaten by that Thai fighting red fish that one time. Klein had been impressed with her, even though she'd been beaten by a bat soon after. He'd have to spar with that bat sometime, maybe.

It had been at the Bolgia that Klein had first met Shinai. Klein had first known Shinai the weasel as a contestant in the ring of the Bolgia, who would go there to test his skills against all comers, even though he would sometimes lose. Fighters at the Bolgia weren't allowed to kill each other, but they came from all walks of life, some much less well-known than others, and they'd presented a set of unique challenges to train against.

Shinai and Klein had become friends with benefits while Bridges and Klein had still been friends with benefits as well. Shinai had also been seeing someone named Ogun on the side. One day, it had been Bridges who had become the object that Klein mysteriously couldn't find around him. Certainly the otter couldn't have stolen himself! But where could he have gone? This sort of thing had never happened before. Bridges came and went, flitting about like a butterfly, but with Klein around, he'd at least usually tried to let Klein know what he'd been up to and where he'd be going, so that Klein wouldn't worry too much. This time he had said nothing.

Klein had been shocked to learn that Bridges had finally ended up in jail. Shinai had been cynical about it, even though he'd tried to be understanding of Klein's feelings about having lost someone that he'd cared about. Shinai had always believed that Bridges would end up in jail. Klein just couldn't believe that, after an entire lifetime of having deftly evaded the long arm of the law, Bridges would have finally gotten caught after all. How could it have been possible?

Klein had gone to visit Bridges in prison to talk to him about what had happened. "How did they catch you?" he'd asked. "I let them catch me," the otter had answered the skunk dejectedly. "But why?" Klein had shaken his head in disbelief. "Because I deserved to be caught." Bridges had looked downcast. "Why now, after all this time?" Bridges had sighed. "Because I finally took something from someone that I really shouldn't have taken."

Klein had had to think about what Bridges had said. Clearly, there could be multiple situations in which Bridges could have accidentally stolen something from someone that would have made a really negative difference in their lives. In some ways it had only been a matter of time. But what could have been so bad that Bridges could have decided that it was the one mistake that would be the last straw? It had been so bad that Bridges hadn't wanted to say.

"It's not so bad, here," he'd tried to reassure Klein on his visit. "I can finally exist somewhere on land in the same location and not have the authorities looking for me because of something I stole. I can just stay where I am for once. My body protects me. The prisoners can't touch me. I've already completely destroyed the underground cigarette economy in jail by now... I have sixteen cigs on me right now, I can give you some now before I give them away to the prisoners who have the fewest cigarettes if you want." Klein had tried to force a smile. Bridges had been so equal to himself. "I'm sorry, Bridges," he'd answered gently, "I don't smoke."

Bridges had shrugged. "Neither do I."

***

Shinai had grown up in Arizona. He'd always liked the desert because of the relentless challenge it presented. 'Try and cross me,' it would dare you, 'just try.' Shinai had been a man who had loved challenges. Growing up as a teenager, he had found the Bolgia early, and had made it his home away from home. When he had moved out, it had become the main way that he'd started making a living, along with just a few side jobs. He'd fought to continue to exist.

He'd found his first love on the Bolgia's ring. He'd seen a scorpion in it, looking like a fierce warrior in shining armor from another world with his glistening chitin. Somehow, even in the midst of battle, the scorpion had always managed not to have hit the other contestant with his tail. One strike of his tail could have killed someone, which had had a way of gripping the mind to be sure, but he had always been perfectly careful, getting it out of the way just in time.

They had shared their devotion to Greco-Roman paganism together. They had worshipped Mars, the god of war. To them, this had meant not only actual warfare and one-on-one combat. It had been a symbol for the courage, skill and effort that anyone had to have in them to be able to overcome all forms of adversity and obstacles. Everything was kind of like a war, if you only looked at it the right way. Every war could be won, if you fought hard enough.

They had often talked about how they would join the army someday. The scorpion had been proud that he could openly get into the army without having to neither ask nor tell, and looking forward to making the most of this new advantage. He'd hoped that Shinai could follow him to the front, and that they could do battle with each other side by side, spurring each other on to greater and greater feats of bravery and glory on the battlefield as the Spartans of old had.

When time had come for them to enroll, the scorpion had made it through, but Shinai had not. He'd twisted his ankle and broken his arm during his entrance test, and had been unable to complete the physical portion of it until after having waited for them to heal. He would have to reapply another time, as he would have been no good to them the way he had been then regardless. Shinai had cursed his luck as his scorpion had regretfully waved goodbye to him.

At first the weasel's scorpion boyfriend had sent him news from the front. It had been a bit of a shock but he'd been getting used to it. He'd been looking forward to seeing combat, but actually seeing it had been very different than he'd imagined. He'd been respected for his skills by his peers, something for which Shinai would always be proud of him. Then, there came a day when Shinai's boyfriend had become trapped on the battlefield by a circle of fire around him.

Scorpions had never reacted well to that.

Shinai's heart had shattered into a million pieces. At the Bolgia, he'd started going after more and more ridiculously overpowered opponents with the desperation of a drowning man coming up for air, hoping that one of them would make a mistake and accidentally kill him just because of the sheer power discrepancy between the two of them. He'd thrown himself against robots, witches, golems, shapeshifters, entities from beyond space and time who ate stars whole.

He'd wanted to die.

Eventually, Shinai had decided, in a last ditch effort to make something of his life before he would die, to go on a trip to the Himalayas. He'd wanted to find a hermit monk who he had overheard someone at the Bolgia talking to someone else about. Apparently, this monk had been exiled from his Buddhist temple by the other monks because of his ideology, but he had been grudgingly known as one of the most skilled in battle and even in terms of mental discipline. He had been known to gladly accept students, even though he had been a recluse, since he had seen it as an opportunity to spread his ideology while getting help for chores and of course to train.

His name had been Rajiv.

Shinai had painstakingly made the journey up the snow-covered mountains to Rajiv's isolated, diminutive temple away from the other, bigger temple on a more prominent peak that other visitors to the mountain would go to. Shinai had gone from having been at his lowest, hottest point at the bottom of the Grand Canyon to having been at his highest, coldest point in the Himalayas. While Rajiv had acted predictably eccentric, he had accepted Shinai as his student.

As Shinai and Rajiv had trained, Rajiv would often talk to him, sharing his own beliefs about the respective values of war and peace. The other monks had excommunicated him because they had told him that his beliefs had not been truly Buddhist, and that while he may have meant well, he had been too misguided to do good. Shinai's informants hadn't lied, though: the snow leopard's physical training and meditation techniques had been at a very high level.

As they had trained and talked, Shinai had learned that there had been a man who Rajiv had loved before as well. When this man had been killed by one of those who oppressed his people, Rajiv had gone into a frenzy, and had killed the man who had killed his boyfriend. Delving into Buddhist texts for solace from his ordeal, Rajiv had found the condemnations of the monks for his violent revenge grating and misplaced.

He had also come to believe that the bodhisattvas had been very literal entities that could be summoned from where they'd resided. Throwing aside the philosophical interpretation of Buddhism as insufficient, he had become a proponent of the belief that the powers that had been rumored to exist for monks who had trained hard could be attainable by all of his people. Rajiv had come to believe that, if all of his people had trained and meditated hard enough, they could have become impervious to bullets, and could turn the wrath of their bodhisattvas against their oppressors themselves, reducing them to dust as they would beg for mercy.

Rajiv had not wanted to wait for someone else to free his nation. He'd do it himself.

The monks had told him that the loss of his love had clouded his mind. If they had attempted to rise up against their oppressors the way that Rajiv had been advocating that they do, they would have been massacred, they had told him. Even if Rajiv's literalist interpretation had been real, they had told him, then the same bodhisattvas could just as well be summoned against them by their oppressors. In the long run, Buddha did not take sides. He had wanted everyone to reach enlightenment someday. Why not leave his people the dignity that their continued belief in the value of peace had still granted them after all, the monks had attempted to reason with him?

So he had gone off to live on his own, thinking himself misunderstood by his peers.

It had been a twist of fate that, paradoxically, it had been through hearing about Buddhism through Rajiv because of his disagreements with the other monks that Shinai had left the troops of Mars to march with the Buddha himself. Rajiv had naturally been frustrated by this to an extent, but he had also taken the philosophical challenge that it had represented for him as one to be approached as eagerly as he would have approached any physical challenge all the same. The more Rajiv had learned about Mars from Shinai, as the weasel had told the snow leopard about the story of his own life, the more Rajiv had come to respect this foreign Mars.

It had been while meditating with Rajiv that Shinai had finally had an epiphany.

The military had been a cult. All forms of military conditioning were a form of cult conditioning. His scorpion boyfriend had died because he had joined a cult, and this cult had led him into a twisted mass suicide, just as all true cults eventually did. Shinai began to think of himself as someone who had narrowly found a way out of a cult, and to think of it as his mission in life to help those whose lives would also be destroyed by that cult if he did nothing to stop it.

When time came for Shinai to return to Arizona, he had already decided that, the next time that he would attempt to join the military all over again, it would be to figure out a true way to destroy it from within. Not just his own nation's military - the very concept of the military for everyone, everywhere in the world. Killing had always been murder, regardless of where anyone involved had been from. Anything that existed to pretend otherwise had to be destroyed.

Shinai had become determined to use the mental training that he'd received from Rajiv to try to figure out how military conditioning worked from the inside, so that he could learn how to reverse-engineer it and destroy it. Shinai would have to figure out a way to do it everywhere, in a way in which every soldier at the same time would be exposed to it, but he'd been convinced that, if it had been exactly the right form of sensory input in just the right context, he could deprogram all soldiers at once. When Shinai, back, had started seeing Klein, he'd always talked about how he'd been going to join the military. Klein had always tried to talk him out of it.

The two of them would spar physically at the Bolgia, then spar verbally about whether or not Shinai should join the army, so that they were always sparring, in a sense. Their antagonism had even perversely fueled some of their feelings for each other. The more Klein had felt like Shinai had been going to be taken away from him, the harder he'd fought to convince Shinai to stay. On some level Shinai had liked that someone would have cared, but not enough not to go.

It had been the day before Shinai had been going to enroll.

"So you're going," Klein had said, "Just like that. What does war have that I don't, after all?" Shinai had sighed. "Do you really want to know?" Klein had nodded. Klein had always been a pacifist. The truth was that he couldn't understand why anyone who had another option to continue to survive available to them would choose to join the army of their own free will. It had been unimaginable to him.

So Shinai had finally told Klein the story of his scorpion boyfriend and Rajiv.

"So, Klein... Do you understand now, why I have to go?" Klein had shaken his head. "I understand that you're not a bloodthirsty killer, just like I always knew you weren't. I even on some level appreciate what you're trying to do. I can't understand why you need to join the army yourself to be able to do it, though." Shinai had seemed perplexed. "What don't you understand about it?" Klein had looked at him thoughtfully. "It seems to me that, if you want to break military conditioning, you should study psychology, or research cult deprogramming, or historical cases where soldiers have dropped their weapons. There are other ways to do that."

Shinai had looked displeased by Klein's assessment. "What were you doing when you first realized that you no longer believed in war?" the skunk had asked the weasel. "I was meditating," Shinai had replied. "Well then," Klein had told him, "don't you think that it might be better for you to meditate more to figure out how to decondition other soldiers the way you dream to do?"

Shinai had scoffed at him. "You Daoists are always looking for opportunities to postpone important decisions," he'd teased Klein, as they'd done. "No, we're not!" the skunk had defended himself. "But no matter how much you've heard about the military, actually joining it and going on the battlefield is going to be radically different from that! How can you possibly know that you're prepared to do something like that, for any reason, even for a good one?"

"So you do admit it's for a good one," the weasel had said. He'd always gone for the openings in Klein's guard. "You just said it yourself: I don't know what it's like. How can I know for sure that my system to break military conditioning works if I'm not willing to test it on myself by joining and breaking out of it myself?" Klein had looked exasperated. "The doctor who experiments on himself has a fool for a patient, Shinai!" he'd said.

"Then maybe it's time for me to be The Fool," Shinai had mused. "It's not really such a bad card deep down, you know. Sometimes, you have to be willing to be The Fool, if that's what it'll take to get things moving." Shinai hadn't been a pagan for so long without having learned a thing or two about Tarot cards.

Klein had sighed. "We Daoists also believe that weapons are always funeral implements, and that if every person on Earth was unwilling to let harm come to a single one of their hairs, the whole world would be saved. Charity begins at home, Shinai. What if you fail, have you thought about that? What if your mind isn't strong enough to withstand the horrors you'll face? What if in the end it's the military that corrupts and destroys you?"

The weasel had shrugged. "I've lived a good life." The skunk had frowned at him. "Have you? I don't think you think you have. I think you still want to die, to go be with your boyfriend in the afterlife."

"SO WHAT IF I DO?" Shinai had snapped at him.

"You're the one who always accuses me of running away from things," Klein had answered as calmly as he'd been able to. "But this isn't about me trying to convince you to run away from something. This is about you trying to convince yourself to run away from something, and me trying to talk you out of it." Shinai had tilted his head at him. "How do you mean?" Klein had spread out his arms. "This is what you're running away from, Shinai! You're afraid that, if you stay here, and we keep seeing each other, what we have might get deeper than sex. You're afraid of loving someone again, and of losing him again. So you're running away."

Shinai had stared daggers at him. "So what if I am...?"

Klein had sighed. "You shouldn't let the dead bury the living, Shinai... They have a way of doing that, if you let them. They outnumber us by far. We wouldn't last long. It's being willing to stick by people through the hard times, being willing to be with them from day to day for better or worse no matter what, to convince them to continue to put one foot in front of the other even when it gets as bad as it can get... That's what really takes courage, Shinai."

Shinai had seemed to have stopped, and to have really thought about what Klein had said.

"... I'll send you a postcard, Klein," Shinai had kissed the skunk goodbye.

Chapter 21: Uncarved Block

'Thou shalt not carve any graven image.' (Ten Commandments)

Clients would come to Mandrake for help - he wouldn't seek them out. People would hear about the fact that he'd been someone who'd listened to people, so when they'd had problems that they'd wanted to talk to someone about that they hadn't known who else they could have talked to about, they had tracked down Mandrake to ask for his help themselves. After his upbringing, it'd been important to Mandrake to know for sure that his clients hadn't been pushed to him by people who had thought that they were crazy, but that they had decided to come to see him of their own volition, because they had actually wanted his help themselves.

He only ever made one exception to that rule.

One of his clients had been a lifelong shut-in. Literally, he had been born in one room, and had never stepped out of it, for his entire life. In this case, Mandrake had believed that it could have been important for him to have taken the first steps in offering this client his help, since it had been basically impossible for this client to seek Mandrake's help himself, because he would have had to have been able to set foot outside of the room that he'd lived in to do it in the first place. How could anyone have opened a closed box that had been locked by a key if the key that could unlock it had been located inside the box?

Someone made of water could have, perhaps.

When Mandrake first entered the room where Diaz lived, it was the strange, old beauty of the place that struck him. Finely sculpted Greco-Roman columns went all the way up to the ceiling, gold-lined red carpet covered the floor, gorgeous paintings hung on the walls between dark blue curtains, and precisely chiseled sculptures stood on pedestals between columns at various intervals. It smelled of paint, plaster and wax, like an artist's studio might've.

When Diaz saw Mandrake, the first thing he did was scream. Mandrake had seen him.

Diaz had lived all his life believing that he had been the most horrifying-looking creature that had ever existed. When Mandrake saw him, with his marble upper body, the marble snake tail that he had instead of legs, and the rubies that his eyes were, Diaz was certain that the only reaction that the otter could possibly have to his appearance had to have been one of shock and disgust. Panicking at the idea of being forced to live with the thought of having left such a hateful impression on someone's memory, Diaz desperately tried to hide, even though he knew it was in a sense too late because Mandrake had already seen him.

In his state of panic, Diaz used his snake tail to slither his way all the way up one of the columns. When he saw that Mandrake was still looking up to the top of the column that he had climbed to reach in the hopes of escaping the otter's notice, Diaz's anxiety scrambled his usually better reflexes. Under normal circumstances, he would sometimes climb some of the columns with his snake tail in just such a fashion and even jump from one to the other, alternating between grabbing columns with his arms and tail like an acrobat. When Diaz's coordination was short-circuited by panic, he was not quite so dexterous, so he lost his grip, and fell back down.

Right on top of Mandrake.

When the otter splashed into an expanding puddle under the golem's fall on him, Diaz looked around himself in dismay, trying to find whatever could be left of Mandrake while his heart sank at the inevitable conclusion that he had killed his first visitor in longer than he could remember. This was so horrible. This was why no one should ever have tried to go anywhere near him, why he wished that he had never existed in the first place, Diaz thought, grief-stricken.

Diaz gasped when he saw the puddle of water that had formed around him after he had fallen rapidly evaporate in order to coalesce back into a cloud near the ceiling of his lair. As low thunder rumbled from the cloud, rain started to pour down from it. The raindrops assembled to reform Mandrake's feet, legs, torso, arms and head successively as they fell, continuing until all of the otter was back to just the way he'd looked when he'd first walked in.

"You mean I can't hurt you?" Diaz gasped.

"You could hurt my feelings, if you really tried," Mandrake shrugged. Diaz was already strangely feeling himself calm down. He hadn't imagined that he would ever have been able to calm down like this when he would panic this badly, but there he was. Mandrake noticed that the golem already seemed less tense, and was glad. He'd known that there was a risk of temporarily intensifying some of Diaz's anxiety if Mandrake tried to offer him some of his help, but he certainly hadn't wanted it to have been permanent. Mandrake was hoping that he could help Diaz reduce some of his fear reaction when he would go out to meet other people as well someday.

"What a relief! I thought I'd killed you."

It was strange to Mandrake in some ways, knowing he would be trying to help someone out of being a shut-in. In his boyfriend Soma's case, 'staying at home' was just something that he would always have to do no matter what. As a dryad, Soma couldn't venture out into the world, had to stay in his grove simply to continue to live. There was no narrative where Soma would ever have to leave his grove to 'get better' from something. It was just part of the way he was. People came to Soma, so many that Soma complained to Mandrake about it sometimes. Diaz refused to go out because he believed that people hated him, and it made him miserable.

"Don't worry, I'm just fine. I'm Mandrake! Who are you?" he smiled.

Diaz looked him up and down as if the fact that anyone would have been talking to him as though he had been a person and not an object had itself been unlikelier than a golem or shapeshifter interacting in any other context that could be imagined. "I'm Diaz," he finally said. "Why did you come here?" Diaz was not where he was because he found it particularly pleasant. He did not know why anyone would have chosen to be there if they had had a choice not to.

"I wanted to see you." Had someone indicated Diaz's existence to Mandrake so that the otter could come here to gawk at him like a freak, the golem asked himself? "Why would anyone want to see someone like me?" he asked Mandrake dejectedly. Diaz meant it almost as a rhetorical question, but Mandrake tried to encourage him to treat it as a legitimate one. "Why wouldn't_they?" he tilted his head at the golem. "Do _you_not want to see them? To see _me...?"

Diaz shook his head. "Well, no, I mean, yes, but... Other people don't look like me. I certainly don't look like other people," he added sadly. "Other people look like people that people would want to look at." Diaz looked at the sculptures and paintings that represented many other species of people longingly, wishing that he'd been born as any of them instead of as the person he was. "And you don't?" Mandrake asked him.

"I don't look like someone I would want to see, if I wasn't stuck like this and had to see myself like this every day, I can tell you that!" Diaz almost snapped. "Why would you say something like that?" Diaz already hated his appearance enough without having to explain why to someone humoring him, the golem thought, frustrated. "How could I not?" Mandrake looked so genuinely sad to see that Diaz hated himself so much that it became more difficult for Diaz to dismiss Mandrake's emotions about his situation as not real. "Can you blame me?" Diaz almost felt guilty for bumming out Mandrake then. It seemed almost like he should apologize for it.

"I'm not here to blame you for anything, I promise," the otter answered him gently, "I'm here to try to help." Diaz scoffed. "You can't help someone out of being a freak," he'd said, "when you're a freak, you're a freak for life, that's all there is to it." Mandrake was glad that his psychological training had helped him build a bit of an emotional distance from that mindset over years of practice. There'd been a time when he'd have internalized this himself, badly.

Mandrake raised his arms over his head, spinning in a circle like a top as his legs fused into a watery snake tail, looking very much like Diaz did except still with an otter's upper body rather than a lion's. He stood on his new snake tail facing his newest client, showing Diaz that he was figuring out how to move with it. It was a little unusual and took a bit of practice but it wasn't so bad, Mandrake decided.

"Do you find me ugly like this?" Mandrake asked Diaz. A look of amazement at the otter's transformation flashed across Diaz's face. "No..." He found Mandrake lovely like this, if he was honest with himself about it, but he felt very uncomfortable admitting it to himself. Beauty was something that, by definition, excluded him, Diaz told himself. It wasn't appropriate for him to think things that implied that he could be included in it somehow. Those thoughts were meant for other people than him, people who actually deserved it. "You can just turn it on and off like a faucet, though... You're not trapped this way the way I am."

It occurred to Mandrake that it may have been inappropriate for him to have temporarily taken on a shape that he did not have to carry through everyday life to make a point. He could have chosen to appear as a watery snake or spider in front of Soma, but no matter how much he could shapeshift, Mandrake would never know what it was really like to be trapped in the same location like a true dryad the way Soma was. He shifted back to his otter legs, embarrassed.

"I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to imply that things are as easy for you as they are for me." Certainly things were often not easy for Mandrake, but about this specific issue, he did have a kind of advantage over Diaz that he felt it wouldn't have been fair to the golem for him to deny. "Can you teach me how to do that?" Diaz asked him. "Or is it something that only you or that certain people who were born with the same powers as you can do?"

Mandrake covered his mouth with his hand in thought, and furrowed his brow. "Well, I wasn't born being able to do it, I can tell you this much... I've never met someone else who could do what I do as such, but I've never met anyone else who tried to go through the same procedure that I did, which was kind of a fluke in the first place anyway. I did meet several people who have things about them that you've probably never seen, things that most people probably wouldn't even believe could be possible, if they weren't faced with having to acknowledge the reality of it by having it put in front of them for them to have to deal with."

Diaz processed this. "So you know other people who can change their shape?" Mandrake nodded. "I've always wanted to be able to change how I looked like," Diaz said longingly, "but I can't." He looked at a hammer and chisel in the corner of the room. "Believe me..." Mandrake thought he saw a lone wax teardrop roll down from one of Diaz's ruby eyes onto his white marble cheek. "... I've tried," the golem finished bitterly.

Mandrake whimpered, and actually stepped forward to hug Diaz after he'd said that. Diaz was so startled. He never imagined anyone would seem moved by his suffering, especially not a therapist, who were supposed to be so cold and distanced from their clients' emotions. But Diaz hugged him back. It was the first time that Diaz had been hugged by anyone. Ever. He didn't feel like he deserved it, but he decided he liked it. The thought of Diaz taking a hammer and chisel to himself had gotten past his defenses just a little too much maybe, Mandrake told himself. He hoped he hadn't overstepped his bounds. Mandrake doubted himself as a therapist sometimes.

"So you... But your body stayed the same?" Mandrake had asked him. "I tried to chisel off the snake tail a couple of times, but... whenever any part of my body comes off, it just comes right back. The chunks of marble and drops of wax just slowly slide across the ground back toward me like they're drawn to me by an invisible force, and go back where they were. So I can't die, as far as I can tell, but it also means I can't grow... I can't change. Anyway, since I can't die anyway, it doesn't really matter whether you help me or not. It's not like I'm going to kill myself. It'll never work. So I'm sorry to have wasted your time."

"No," Mandrake said, "you did no such thing. There's more to helping people than just making sure they won't die." Mandrake thought about Soma again. "I mean, that's what a doctor's job is, and it's important, but for me, that's not enough," Mandrake added. "You feel pain, don't you?" Diaz seemed confused. "Well, yeah." Mandrake looked at him very seriously. "Your suffering matters, Diaz. How you feel about yourself matters, for its own reasons, completely. Even and especially if you're going to live forever! I mean, forever is a long time to have to carry suffering with you, isn't it?"

This was a lot for Diaz to take in. No one had ever talked to him like that.

"Do you really think you can help me?" It seemed so unbelievable that anyone could help him, even if they may have wanted to. "That sort of depends on how you mean," Mandrake answered. "How did you get to be the way you are?" Diaz asked him. "I'm a genetic engineer. Well, okay, people like to call me a mad scientist, but they're idiots." Diaz chuckled. He wished he could learn to dismiss other people's negative opinions of him with such seeming ease.

"So do you think you can use your genetic engineering to help me change the way I look somehow?" Mandrake tilted his head at the golem. "What do you want to be different exactly? What part of you don't you like?" Diaz had to take a moment to think about what the question meant. Aesthetic standards had always been presented to him as objective. It had never occurred to him that they could be considered subjective by anyone, not even by himself.

"Well... If I was all lion, that would be really good. Being all snake would be a little better but not as good."

Mandrake groaned inwardly. Why did people always think lions looked better than snakes? He'd always been attracted to snakes and he'd never been attracted to lions. He wasn't dating Soma because he was settling. People who first met Soma were sometimes reminded of the story of the garden of Eden, because he was a snake in a grove who offered people things. To Mandrake, Soma didn't remind him of Satan but of Atlas: he was always stuck in the same location, but he took the responsibility of holding up the weight of the world on his shoulders. At best he'd sometimes wished for a lion's help when evangelical Christians got too pushy at him.

"There are still people who can be accepting of hybrids, if you give them a chance to, you know?" Mandrake tried to encourage Diaz. "Most people?" Mandrake winced. What a complicated question that was. "Well... There are many levels of acceptance and tolerance. It's true that hybrids still face some measure of discrimination even today, but it's still not quite as bad as it used to be in some ways... But they get to exist as part of public life at least! Most of them don't have to live their lives hiding what they look like from most people and can go out and do things," Mandrake explained, striving to stay positive while still being honest.

"I understand," Diaz started answering, "well, I think I sort of do, anyway." He sighed. "To me, it's just like... You know how cats are supposed to be these really female-coded animals, and snakes are basically just this big phallic symbol?" Mandrake scoffed. "There are still male cats and female snakes though." Diaz nodded. "That's true, but still... I guess what I mean is that, when people look at me, I feel like they don't know what they're looking at. So they just sort of freak out. No one says people get along 'like cats and snakes,' you know? People say that people get along 'like clams.' No offense, Mandrake."

Ah yes. Clams again.

"Plus feral lions throw their cubs down cliffs, and feral snakes eat rats alive, don't they?" Mandrake nodded. "Frankly I don't feel like either of those species are really 'me'... I don't want to be anything cruel like that." Mandrake winced inwardly. It was so insidious the way that ideas like this about what people were like always found a way to propagate themselves most easily by being internalized by the kinds of people who were affected the worst by them.

"Can I tell you something about clams, Diaz?" Diaz nodded. "In the wild, otters eat clams, Diaz." The golem tilted his head at him. "What about you?" Mandrake shook his head. "I've never accepted that I had to be cruel because of which species I am. Neither should you. I can't tell you your species are 'right' for you, but you should know there's nothing inherently wrong with them. You may or may not be able to change what happened to make you the way you are, but whether you can or not, the meaning of what you are is up to you, to no one else. That said... It speaks well of you that you'd refuse cruelty like this. Hold onto that," he smiled.

"... I'll try," Diaz finally said. "I admit I still really wish I could change from how I am, but I'm grateful to you for listening to me. Thank you for caring." Mandrake nodded. "You're welcome." Diaz sighed. "Do you really think there's no way I can ever change from this?" Mandrake tilted his head. "I honestly don't know. I mean, obviously, as a genetic engineer, I've helped people change things about themselves that they didn't like, but never in this exact situation," Mandrake explained, "and never people who would regenerate back to how they were before I tried to work on them," he added.

"What you have is kind of unique in a way that makes it tricky to approach. For one thing, if it's magic that made you this way, not science, it might take magic to change you into anything else rather than science too." Diaz tilted his head. "Do you know people who do magic?" Mandrake nodded. "I do. But! Sometimes, magic can't undo what magic did, and it's science that can find a way around it. It sort of depends on the situation." "And for another?" Diaz asked him. "For another, I'm not sure what's even ethical for me to encourage you to do in this situation!" Mandrake admitted.

"As a genetic engineer I've met people who really wanted wings. The dream to fly is a strong one. I try to discourage plastic surgery based on accepting social standards I don't agree with. I don't want to encourage species discrimination. As a therapist I'd rather help a fat client accept themselves than lose weight because I don't think they should feel bad for being fat in the first place, but if they really want to, I also have to support that. Then I have trans clients! I'd never try to tell them not to transition even though there's nothing wrong with the body they were born with in and of itself. And some want to be accepted as valid without transitioning."

Mandrake could tell that Diaz was taking time to think about everything he'd just said. "What a minefield your job must be," Diaz finally said. "You've got that right," Mandrake chuckled knowingly. "I guess when it all comes down to it, I especially don't like the part about being a golem. It makes me feel like I was just created to do work for someone else, but I don't do any work for anyone. I don't even know if I'd want to. I don't like being a statue because statues are supposed to exist to be pretty for other people. I don't think I can ever achieve that, whether or not I should even accept that's what I'm for in the first place either," Diaz reflected.

"A lot of people would kill to be able to regenerate like this, I can tell you that," Mandrake added. "I mean, I know that doesn't help you in any way, but it does have the merit of being ironic," he finished, tongue firmly in cheek. "Ugh, I hate the regeneration thing, though," Diaz shook his head. "It scares the crap out of people. If anything, even if I had to still be a golem, if I could be hurt in a way that people can understand, part of me can't help but think that they'd be a lot nicer to me. They might finally feel sorry for me, instead of resenting me for being what they imagine as 'invincible.'"

"Maybe," Mandrake started thoughtfully, "it's other people who need to get better at understanding that there are kinds of pain that matter that they can't always see with their eyes. People tend to only really believe in what they see," Mandrake lamented. "But you think there's more to life than that?" Diaz asked him. "In some ways, yes," Mandrake answered. "Do you mean, like, God and things like that?" Diaz went on. "Well, I only think it's my job to try to see people's pain if they try to hide it... What they believe in or not is sort of their job to tell me if they want to and not to tell me if they don't, that's how therapy goes, as far as I'm concerned."

"I'm Gnostic," Diaz said. "Oh!" Mandrake seemed surprised. "That's interesting." It would certainly be a challenge for Mandrake to separate his own doubts about his spirituality from the beliefs of one of his clients who believed that Mandrake's God was in fact the Demiurge, whose cruelty explained the suffering in all our lives. Be that as it may, it was still his duty as a therapist to show respect for his client's beliefs for what they were, and not to try to change them based on his own interests. "I know it seems a little bleak," Diaz almost apologized, "but there you have it, make of that what you will."

"No, I sort of get it." Mandrake was complex enough for that to have been a true answer from him, that much was for certain. "We live in a cruel world." Diaz nodded. "Yeah..." "But," Mandrake continued, "there's more to Gnosticism than simple bleakness, isn't there?" Diaz smiled. "Well, yeah!" He was glad that Mandrake could also see this. "Even in this cruel world, there's secret knowledge you can find that can help you reduce some of your suffering, some of the suffering of the people you care about, if only you look for it hard enough," Mandrake went on, "there are real, underlying things to believe in, hidden in our dystopia. There's still hope."

"I think," Diaz thought out loud, "that on some level it just helps make me feel a little less singled out." Mandrake tilted his head at him. "How so?" "Well, think of it this way," Diaz started, "if we were all created by someone cruel who wants us to suffer for his own interests, then... that means that everyone is sort of in the same situation I'm in, in some ways. After all, I was created by someone cruel, who didn't care about how I'd feel about it as long as I played my role. So if everyone else also has been, if that's the very nature of existence that we all fight against day after day, then... it means I'm not alone," Diaz explained meaningfully. "I like that."

"There's nothing wrong with rebelling against your creator if they're unjust," Mandrake assured him. "Who did create you, now that you mention it...?"

***

One day, a while after Mandrake going to see Diaz so that Diaz could confide in him had become a regular thing, when Diaz heard that someone was at his door, his first reaction was actually to be excited about it. He rushed to the door to welcome in Mandrake, who was even supposed to see him that day. After all, Mandrake was the only person who came to see him. Who else could it possibly have been?

It was Boko.

"YOU...!"

Boko had always had a thing with sculptures. They seemed to exist right on the threshold between people and objects, a similar threshold to the one on which Boko had imagined that Klein and himself had existed. There had been a time during which Boko became driven so crazy by the fact that he couldn't be everywhere at once to protect every object from every person who might somehow damage it that he decided that he needed to think outside the box to solve the problem once and for all. He had no magic of his own, but he could always borrow some. Boko had certainly been gifted with being good at borrowing things, if anything.

Wouldn't it have been much easier for objects to be protected if they could protect themselves from the tyranny of the animate all on their own, without needing Boko's help for it at all? It seemed to Boko that it would have been. Therefore, he'd thought, if he could create an object that could move after all, that could kill people who tried to damage it if it chose to do so, better yet, an object that could never be permanently broken in the first place, then, then he would no longer have had to run around all over the place trying to protect them at such a breakneck pace, every moment of his life. He'd no longer have to fear leaving objects behind.

He'd no longer have to fear death. He'd finally know peace for the first time in his life.

He'd raised Diaz to fear the animate, and what they could do to objects, to keep him 'safe.'

"YOU BASTARD, I'LL KILL YOU!"

Diaz slithered across the floor of his lair at top speed, lion head roaring and snake tail rattling behind him as he went. Boko just laughed uproariously. He knew that he'd created Diaz so that he'd be able to defeat regular people, but Boko didn't think of himself as a regular person. To see Diaz coming at him as though the golem had a chance to really hurt him was almost cute to Boko, in an 'aww he thinks he's people' kind of way.

Diaz picked up Boko right over his head and threw him against the wall. Boko repeatedly back-flipped to land sideways on the wall, just as when he'd pushed that wrecking crane. Bouncing against the wall, Boko propelled himself back at Diaz flipping forward as he went. Boko's tail and tongue struck Diaz's head on their way down as Boko landed in front of Diaz, making chunks of marble fly off.

Martial artists could break boards, bricks, ice or cement, but most of them certainly couldn't break marble with their tongues. Diaz gritted his teeth as the chunks of marble returned to his head to make it retake its shape, just as they always did. "Just a little off the top," Boko had smirked. He'd shifted the color of his skin to descending, diagonal stripes of red, white and blue to make himself look like the insignia to a barbershop. What he'd removed would always return, just as hair would always grow back. Diaz would never be able to do anything about it. It made Diaz want to strangle Boko.

So that's exactly what he tried to do. Boko tail bounced over Diaz as Diaz charged. Diaz tried to tail slap Boko, but Boko ducked under his tail. Diaz tried to wrap his tail around Boko's legs, but Boko back-flipped over his tail, hitting Diaz with his tail upward. Diaz grabbed and turned Boko upside-down to bring Boko's head down. Boko dampened the impact into an advancing headspin with crisscrossing high and low tail and tongue strikes. Diaz tried to tail sweep Boko's head but Boko wrapped his tail around Diaz's torso, turning right-side-up to hold Diaz upside-down in front of him and slap chunks of marbles off Diaz's face with his tongue.

Diaz wrapped his snake tail around Boko's neck, making him lose his grip. Diaz moved in the air to force Boko to support Diaz's whole weight in a way Boko couldn't. As Boko fell to the ground with Diaz falling back down to Earth on top of Boko, Diaz wrapped more of his tail around Boko's body, trapping him in a full-body hold the likes of which killed multiple feral snakes' prey when they hunted every day, the likes of which it seemed that even Boko couldn't do anything about when he was trapped in one himself.

In all of his abnormally long life, Boko had never been defeated by anyone.

This time, Diaz had him in such a tight grip that Boko knew with grim certainty that there was no way that he would ever be able to wriggle out of it. When he realized that he was starting to run out of air he started to panic, to be more scared than he'd ever been scared of anything in his life. In his moment of clarity, Boko put his pride completely aside and started tapping on the ground for release, begging Diaz for mercy and putting his life in his creation's hands for once.

Diaz didn't let go.

His features distorted by limitless fury, Diaz squeezed Boko with a squeeze powered by the rage of having had to spend his whole life alone because of him. Was he just trying to scare the chameleon, or was he really going to kill him this time? Boko had never seen him as a subject and had always seen him as an object. Why shouldn't he have paid for what he'd done to him, Diaz asked himself? Should Diaz have let him live because Boko could be the only person who knew how to break Diaz's curse for all he knew? Or would have it been worth it to give up the chance to break his curse if only to stop Boko from hurting someone else?

Boko's life flashed before his eyes. At lightning speed, he started rethinking every single decision he'd ever made in his life, especially the ones that seemed like they'd led him up to being trapped in this situation in which he was now going to die. Boko pictured everything he'd done and everything he'd been going to do gone, annihilated, wiped from history like a bad dream forgotten upon waking up. What should Boko have done differently to avoid ending up in a situation like this? Was there anything he could've done, or was this something that had been going to happen anyway, regardless of what he did? But it was too late for him to ever find out.

Who would take care of his objects when he'd be gone?

Then Diaz saw Mandrake walk in.

'It speaks well of you... that you'd refuse cruelty like this,' Diaz couldn't help remembering. 'Hold onto that...' Diaz gasped, and loosened the coils of his tail around Boko's neck as he did. Boko gulped in the most eager breath he'd ever breathed in his life. Finally wriggling out of Diaz's grip at lightning speed, Boko shifted his body coloration to make himself invisible, and vanished from Diaz's lair for good. Diaz would never see him again.

"Am... Am I a monster, Man... Mandrake...?" Diaz asked his therapist, his whole body shaking uncontrollably as he spoke. "You're not," Mandrake told Diaz, hugging him again, just as he had when the two of them had first met. "You did good," Mandrake added as Diaz's ruby eyes sobbed and sobbed his tears of wax on Mandrake's shoulder without stopping as if Diaz needed to empty his heart of all the tears it could cry before he could stop to breathe again.

"You showed him good."

Chapter 22: Rising Tide

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. Ogun 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 onto it. 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 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 that 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.

Soma 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. Soma 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.

Soma 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 Betta 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 did a flaming flying kick through. Tripping on his vine-web tripwire, she front kick-flipped him and landed safely. His green skin yellowed. Soma shifted to spider-taur to bicycle-kick her. Betta dove between his legs to try back kick him while he climbed a tree upside-down to drop back down in front of her.

Soma's 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. Soma 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 Betta defiantly, transforming it into a small carnivorous plant that also stuck out its tongue at her in turn. Soma could barely stand and barely see straight by that point, but he wouldn't let Betta 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.

Chapter 23: Ripple Effect

'There is evil there that does not sleep.' (Boromir, about Mordor)

"So..." Klein asked Fugue nervously, "what have you been up to?" Klein remembered the blowfish fondly, but there was something 'off' about him somehow that the skunk couldn't quite pin down. "Oh, you know..." Spikes erupted from his skin all over his body, yet Fugue continued to appear completely calm. Klein was not surprised at the former, but he was surprised at the latter. He had never known Fugue with such control over his spikes before. "This and that."

Fugue twirled a staff he was carrying around himself, some of his spikes coming off and sticking to his staff to cover it in spikes just as he was on its way while he faced Klein menacingly. "I always loved the rain, don't you?" he asked the skunk. "It's just like a thousand needles falling on you from above, but good," the blowfish elaborated. "It must make it a lot easier for fish not to have to worry as much about getting dehydrated," Klein observed.

"Yes," Fugue had agreed, "it makes you surface dwellers easier to find, at that." Klein closed his umbrella, tentatively turning it into a makeshift weapon while adopting a defensive Chinese sword-fighting stance. "They say it rains on the just and unjust alike," Fugue added cryptically, "whatever that means." Maybe it was time to experience the rain after all, Klein thought.

"I didn't know you were looking for me." It had the merit of being true. "How about your life, Klein?" Thunder crackled overhead. "Well, Bridges went to jail, Shinai went to war, Ogun bit me in the leg that time, Rakim had the incident of course... Mano's been down and I'm not helping much." Fugue chuckled mirthlessly. "It sounds like life hasn't been so kind to you either," he said. "That should make this easier, in any case." Klein tilted his head.

"What do you mean by 'this'?" The skunk was liking the sound of 'this' less and less.

"I was sent to kill you," Fugue sighed, "but I'm not going to." The blowfish lowered his staff by his side, like something he wasn't going to use after all. "And knowing life hasn't been kind to me makes this easier how?" Klein asked Fugue as the blowfish retracted his spikes and removed the spikes from his staff. "Forget it, it's stupid." Klein lowered his guard, reopening his umbrella over himself. "Well, I'm sure it's not stupid." Fugue shrugged uncomfortably. Silence fell between them as the rain continued to fall. "Thank you for not killing me," Klein finally said, "regardless of why you were going to."

"I thought you'd stay!" Fugue blurted out. "Huh?" Klein looked at him incredulously. "When you stayed over that time," the fish went on, "for a bit, I thought I could talk you into staying for good. I didn't know what your plan was. I didn't know you'd have to leave." Klein's jaw dropped. "You mean, you...?" Fugue nodded, embarrassed. "I had no idea you felt that way about me. I mean, I thought you and I would be more like you and Bridges I guess." The fish looked at the ground. "We were. I just... wondered what it would be like to live with you for a while, for some reason." He blushed. "I told you it was stupid." Klein looked at him seriously.

"I would've said yes!" Fugue hadn't expected that. "If I'd known, I probably would've stayed. I just ran because I didn't want to get caught after my plans against the factory. I didn't want to get you in trouble for helping me either." Fugue frowned. "Why was it more important for you to do that than to stay with me, though?" Klein was dumbstruck. "I just... took it for granted I would, I suppose. It was the whole reason I came. Why didn't you come with me to North America?" Klein asked him. "Because what I was doing there was important_to me, Klein! I saved the lives of fish folk and the poor every day. They _needed me. Why would I have left?"

"Why did you leave?" Klein was going through an unfortunate perspective shift about what had happened to him with Shinai since then. Klein had not realized that, in his own way, he'd put Fugue in just the same situation in which Shinai had put him by going off to war. Klein had a thought for the wife of Buddha who he'd left when at 29, and for all those left behind on anyone's quest for enlightenment. It was too easy to see the quest and miss the people around it.

"Oh, Klein..." Fugue started, "I'm sorry. I'm really not trying to make you feel bad, but I had a pretty hard time when you left. I renounced my religion, you know." Klein gasped. "That's awful! I had no idea it would hit you so bad." Klein shook his head. "You know, Klein... You may not know this, but there is a kind of rumor that, usually, fish will only talk about with other fish. We don't want to offend you or make it harder for some of us to date the rest of you, but... The thing is, some of us believe that we fish make good 'vacation loves' for the rest of you. We are summer flings, but when comes the fall... the seafood buffet's over," Fugue euphemized.

"A nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there," Fugue stuck out his tongue.

"I never wanted to make you feel like that!" Klein shook his head emphatically. "I would never have done anything if I'd known it would do something like that to you." He grabbed Fugue's hand to put his hand on it tenderly, as he had when they'd been living together. "You should know I've met someone else," Fugue told Klein while looking into his eyes, "although he may not be long for this world if no one does anything about it," Fugue added grimly. "That's horrible!" Klein looked crestfallen, even though Fugue's new boyfriend was someone he'd never met. "Is there anything I can do?" Fugue sighed. "Well, that kind of brings us to why I'm here..."

"You never did tell me why you came here," Klein observed. "I was getting to that," Fugue answered. "You see, when I renounced Shinto, it was because something else came along that took its place, just as Ammut came along and took your place." Klein nodded. "What was it?" Fugue would've rather not have had to talk about it, but time was of the essence, and there was no way around it.

"I joined a cult."

Klein scrambled for his umbrella, having dropped it in shock. "A cult?" Fugue nodded. "At first, I would have told you it was just a small, new religion that had a hard time getting taken seriously, like so many before it," Fugue explained, "but it's a cult. I can't pretend it's not anymore." Eli had sometimes said that religions were really successful cults, and that cults were really unsuccessful religions. In truth it could be much more difficult to tell the difference than most people liked to believe. "I understand." How could Klein not? After being taken in by Boko so completely, who could Klein be to look down his nose at Fugue for falling for such a thing?

"Are they why your boyfriend is going to die?" Fugue nodded painfully. "Yeah. They've done something horrible to his body, for 'religious' reasons. If I don't rescue him and cure him, he's going to die," he explained. "What can we do?" Klein asked him. "I'm a doctor, but I can only do so much," Fugue cringed, "and I can fight, but I can't stand against them on my own. Do you know other healers who can help me cure him? Will you... fight by my side, Klein?"

"The best healer I know would have to be Soma," Klein replied. "Mano knows plants, Mandrake does genetics, Ogun and Rakim do tech... I'm no healer, but I'll bring you to them, and yes, I'll fight for you, Fugue. I'll do what I can." Fugue nodded. "Thank you, Klein. I'm grateful for your help." Klein shook his head. "If only Shinai was still around to tell me what he learned about deconditioning people from cults..."

When Fugue and Klein reached Soma's grove, they found it half-burned down and drenched in rainfall. Rakim carried Ogun while landing in a clearing near Soma. Soma's red skin flickered to and from orange as Mandrake watershifted all over Soma's dryad body to heal him. Betta was lying unconscious in a vegetal cocoon by a tree. Mano walked into the clearing, took in the scene, looked at everyone with her three eyes, and said "What the hell is going on here?"

"Oh, Mano!" Fugue exclaimed. "You've been sorely missed." Mano raised an eyebrow at him quizzically. "Have we met before?" He sort of rang a vague bell but Mano wasn't really sure from where. "Not for long, only for a short time, back when we lived in Brazil... You met a lot of fish activists at protests back then, I'm sure." Mano snapped her fingers. "That's right, I do remember you! You told me you were a big fan of Eli, didn't you?" Fugue chuckled. "Well, I'm sure a lot of fish you met there told you that. Her 'Pool of Tears' poem is still famous, and her fandom..." He looked at the ground darkly. "Her fandom is still very active, Mano," Fugue said.

"In what way?" she asked him. "That's where it gets... messy," he warned her. "You see, Mano, fish activism hasn't been the same since Eli died, and you vanished beneath the waves." Mano winced. "I don't mean to be insensitive," Fugue hastily explained, "I know you were grieving. She was important to you. But many of us grieved for Eli, even though we didn't know her as well as you did. She represented something important to us too, in our own way."

Mano nodded. "I understand. She was something, all right." Eli had liked to share credit with others, as a strong believer in the fact that no movement could survive without cooperation and community. Be that as it may, she had still done more to bring the issue of fish rights on the map that anyone else that Mano had ever known. When the cause had learned to rely on Eli for so much, it was only natural that the cause would suffer from her death, just as Mano had.

"When she died, she left a power vacuum, with no one left to fill it. With you out of the way, someone stepped in to try to take her place at the head of the fish rights movement. His name was Atlan. He was very charismatic, and he had his own very literal interpretation of her poetry that he put his own spin on. He talked about it publicly, very convincingly. More and more of us began to believe that he was more and more right about everything. He led us to believe that we had no choice but to listen to him and to do as he said if we wanted the fish rights movement to survive. He borrowed her words persuasively to support his argument."

A chill went down Klein's spine. He was starting to understand.

"At first, our direct action stopped at flooding workplaces that forced fish to work themselves to dehydration, cutting out fish folk trapped in fishnets at sea, retaliating against gangs that targeted fish... At first, I could believe in that. We'd been downtrodden for so long, and none of the 'right' ways of dealing with it had done anything for us in decades. We had to do something, do you understand? Our people are dying!" Mano nodded sadly. "I do."

"With time, there started being more and more 'accidents,'" Fugue continued. "First an air-breather drowned in one of the floods we started," he said.

"I wasn't happy about it, but it was an accident. Atlan said that if all workplaces allowed fish to work in fair conditions, no air-breather would've been harmed. They'd only gotten what was coming to them. It made sense to us at the time. Then, we started blowing up fishing boats that trapped fish folk altogether. At first we blew them up when no one was on board, but when a fisherman died in one of our explosions, Atlan said they'd killed our own first. Turnabout was fair play. We went along. Then, we started attacking gangs that simply didn't have fish in them. Atlan became mistrustful of any fish hybrids following him who needed to breathe air."

"What was he?" Klein asked Fugue. "Atlan's a dolphin." Klein gasped. "But dolphins aren't even fish! And they need to breathe air." Fugue nodded. "Yes, that's true. Atlan's a hypocrite. He applies different standards to himself than he applies to everyone else. Most cult leaders do." "A CULT!" Mano exclaimed. "He made her movement, my beloved atheist's movement, into a bloody religion?" She was as offended by this as by any other sacrilege. "My Eli was a hybrid," Mano added disgustedly, "She was as much of a reptile as she was a hermit crab. And she needed to breathe air!" Mano shook her head angrily. "The nerve of him."

"Atlan called his new religion Fishism," Fugue explained. "The first commandment of Fishism is that fish are people." Mano couldn't help feeling a pang at hearing this, even in such a grim context. It wasn't just the idea of something so essential being enshrined as a religious commandment, it was the implicit acknowledgement that it represented of how badly it still needed to be said, again and again, until it would finally stick.

"Beyond that," Fugue went on, "Atlan believed that Eli had been the Prophet of our new religion. He claimed that she had prophesized that someone would rise up to replace her at the head of the fish rights movement when she would be gone, someone who would carry on her work on her behalf, so that she could still watch over us from beyond the grave. He taught us that it had been surface-dwellers who had killed her. Even though they had not killed her with their hands, it was the depression they'd caused her that made her kill herself, so they may as well have. He said that they did this to stop us, that it was our duty to avenge her death from them."

"I'll be darned," Mandrake said, "maybe God really is a shellfish, after all," he mused.

"Privately, I often wondered what you would have thought of Atlan, Mano," Fugue said. "In some ways, he didn't truly seem to embody the spirit of Eli's activism or poetry as well as I wished he had, but he was all we had. We had to turn to someone, and we didn't have many volunteers to choose from. We latched on to what we could. With time, Atlan's obsession with controlling us grew. Atlan forced those of us who dated non-fish people to break up with them, or excommunicated us for it. We confessed to him, and he used what he learned about how our minds worked to manipulate and blackmail us. Even our genes became subject to his tampering."

Mandrake frowned. He hated when people gave genetic engineering a bad name.

"Now, Atlan has tracked down something old, something terrifying that had been forgotten about for thousands of years. You see, 'Pool of Tears' was his favorite poem by Eli, do you remember that one, Mano?" She nodded. "I knew all her poems," Mano said, "they wove a richer tapestry together than on their own, mind you. I remember she talked to me about that one, one time." A shiver went down Fugue's spine. "Atlan managed to get his hands on ancient, forbidden magic, magic that doesn't belong in our universe at all... the magic of the Old Ones. With it, Atlan believes he can flood the whole world, and 'make Eli's dream come true.'"

Mano gasped. "But that was just a metaphor!" Fugue nodded. "So it was. Many religious stories are. But a lot of people take them literally, too," Fugue added, tongue-in-cheek. "Eli just wished that landlub..." Mano stopped herself. "Eli wished that surface dwellers could be forced to understand what it's like to be a fish in an air-breather's world, that she could 'turn the tables' on them somehow, to force them to experience empathy for our situation, so that they'd become more compassionate toward us because of it," Mano explained. "She never would have wanted to actually drown them all! That would go against everything Eli believed in," Mano finished.

'Oh! When they call us landlubbers, that's not good,' Klein privately understood.

"But why did they attack us?" Mandrake asked Fugue. "You're Mano's friends," Fugue answered. "Atlan wants Mano to join Fishism, and to legitimize his position at its head by endorsing him in Eli's name, probably by controlling her just as he controls the rest of us. It's a common cult tactic to separate people from their friends. With no one left to turn to, Atlan hoped that Mano would turn to Fishism out of desperation, just as so many of us did. When Milgram refused to kill Ogun, Atlan stole my blood and used it to make her into a Voodoo zombi, to force her to do it. When my boyfriend Ammut criticized Atlan for it, Atlan imprisoned and tortured him."

"So Milgram is the eel who attacked Ogun, the one I fought?" Fugue nodded. "She was." Rakim growled. He was still nursing very strong feelings against the person who had attacked and possibly killed his boyfriend Ogun yet, at the same time, Rakim knew that Ogun would have wanted him to help someone who had been hurt by someone who had been using Voodoo for evil, someone whose actions against Ogun hadn't really been her fault.

"I'll go back for her," Rakim volunteered grudgingly. "She fell in the water, so she should be fine." "Wait," Soma told him, "before you go, I need your help with something." "Don't overexert yourself!" Mandrake told Soma. Soma always overworked himself to help others. He already needed Mandrake to tell him to take care of himself the rest of the time, let alone when he'd taken such a beating.

"I won't," Soma assured Mandrake before turning back to Rakim. "Will you help me do something for Mano first?" Rakim nodded as Mano moved near them with a puzzled expression on her face. Soma guided Rakim's hand onto Mano's sternum. "Jolt." Rakim blinked at him. "What?" "Do you trust me?" Mano nodded. "Do you?" Rakim nodded as well. "Jolt. Not too much, but enough."

Klein gasped as current passed from Rakim into Mano's body, shocking her. He almost wanted to jump in to intervene. Even though Soma had proved trustworthy when he had healed Klein's leg after Ogun had accidentally bitten it, Klein was so surprised by what happened that he initially was not certain that Soma really did have Mano's best interests in mind. However, she'd consented to his treatment, seemed to trust him, and she seemed to have survived what he had just asked Rakim to do just fine. She also looked dazed for a moment but, after she brought a hand to her chest, she looked at Soma and Rakim meaningfully in a way that puzzled Klein.

"Thank you," Mano said, simply. Klein relaxed again as Rakim kissed Soma goodbye before flying off to get Milgram.

"Now," Soma continued, "it's your help I'm going to need, Mandrake." Mandrake shook his head despondently, not because he was being asked for help but because he could tell that Soma was still pushing himself, likely more than it was wise for him to be. "Yes, dear," the otter answered his boyfriend dutifully. "Ogun's burns are pretty bad... Do you think you can imbibe this salve into your water form, so I can guide you as you go?" Mandrake nodded, shifting to water and going through the healing ointment that Soma had indicated to him to mix it with his water self, letting Soma direct him to the parts in and out of Ogun's body that needed it the most.

"Okay," Soma started, "it's not perfect and he'll need more repair work later," he harrumphed, recognizing that Ogun would have appreciated his use of the word 'repair,' "so I'll have to get back to him soon, but he should at least be out of immediate danger for now." Mandrake re-wrapped his water form around Soma, hoping to continue to heal Soma's dryad body as well, not only with water but with the burn salve that he was still carrying this time.

"You said Atlan used your blood to control Milgram, didn't you?" Soma asked Fugue. "Yes," the blowfish nodded. "I know it's not pleasant, but may I have a sample of your blood as well?" Fugue winced, rubbing the spot on his arm where Atlan had taken blood from him. "If you must," Fugue replied gingerly. "Good. I need some of it to synthesize an antidote to what Atlan used," Soma explained. "To save Ammut's life, I'd agree to anything," Fugue answered as Soma bit into Fugue's arm with his syringe-like fangs. "And what threatens his life?"

Mano took some herbs, roots, leaves and seeds out of a sash that she was carrying to offer them to Soma. "Now, Mano, Fugue, Mandrake," Soma addressed them as he finished chewing Mano's remedies while Fugue had explained Ammut's condition to him, "I'll need all of you to help me make something that can save Ammut. With your herbs, med kit, genetic engineering and my hedge witchcraft, we can save him. We have the technology."

When they'd finished, Fugue did what he could to heal Soma as well before refilling and reclosing his med kit. "Let's go find Ammut and this 'Atlan,' then," Mano enjoined the others. "But where are they?" Mandrake asked. "Atlan has an underwater lair deep in the ocean," Fugue explained. "How can you get there, though?" Soma asked, wishing he could go. "We'll take my sub," Mano replied. "But you never let anyone aboard your sub! You said it's your sanctuary," Klein exclaimed. "Well," Mano answered, "there's a first time for everything, I suppose."

Mandrake was going to go with them, but he looked back at Soma still flickering between red and orange worryingly. Regretfully, Mandrake stayed behind to continue healing Soma with his water shifting and to be able to help Soma when Rakim would come back with Milgram in tow. "What... What the hell is this?" Betta asked groggily as she started waking up from having been knocked unconscious by Mandrake as raindrops. She struggled trying to break free from the vegetal webbing cocoon that Soma had woven around her to keep her safely immobilized, but it kept re-growing around her the more she tore through it, like the re-growing heads of a hydra.

"Oh this? It's harmless. I sleep in this every night," Soma told her offhandedly. "Now would you mind telling me why the hell you tried to kill my boyfriend?" Mandrake asked her. "Mandrake?" Mandrake tilted his head at Soma. "Let me." Mandrake gestured at Soma to go ahead. "Now would you mind telling me why the hell you tried to kill me?" Soma asked Betta. "Atlan asked me to," Betta answered, "as a test, to prove my loyalty to him. He wanted us to get used to hurting landlubbers, since we were going to be doing a lot more of it. He said that if we started by killing the air-breather who'd hurt us the most, everything would be easier after that."

"What did I ever do to hurt you?" Soma asked her. He'd never even seen her before. "You didn't," Betta replied coldly, "he did," she finished, gesturing toward Mandrake with her head as she did. "Me?" Mandrake pointed at himself. "What did _I_ever do to you?" Betta stared daggers at him. "You mean he didn't tell you?" she asked Soma. "Mandrake, what in the world is she talking about?" The otter shrugged helplessly. "I have no idea." The fish rolled her eyes.

"Oh, that's rich! You know what you did," she told Mandrake. "Why did you attack me, not him?" Soma asked her. "Well, even though I beat him before, now that he can do that thing with the water, there's not much I can do against him, for one thing," Betta answered bitterly, "plus, since Bridges hurt me through the one I loved, I figured I'd hurt him through the one he loved back. I told Atlan how I resented him so. He encouraged me to seek out catharsis here."

It seemed like someone could use a therapy lesson, Mandrake thought, unimpressed.

"... Bridges?" Soma finally asked her. "She thinks I'm Bridges," Mandrake told Soma. "Well, you are, aren't you?" she barked. Soma and Mandrake looked at each other giving each other that look. She stopped, and thought about it for a minute. "Well, all of you otters look alike to me." Mandrake's eyes widened. He pressed his fingertips together, as therapists were fond of doing. "Ooh, let's unpack that, shall we?" Soma gave him a sidelong glance. "In a minute, love."

Mandrake grumbled under his breath as Soma turned to face Betta again.

"So you tried to kill me because you thought Mandrake was Bridges, and you knew some sort of otter was dating me. Now we're getting somewhere," Soma said to her. "What did Bridges do to you, Betta?" Mandrake asked her interestedly, his training as a therapist slowly returning to him in spite of the situation. "He stole my boyfriend, Freud, are you happy?" Betta asked him bitterly. "There's no need to be vulgar," the Jungian answered, tongue-in-cheek.

"Bridges needs to understand that not everyone lives in his own little play world where everything belongs to everyone all the time," Betta said. "What's on your mind?" Soma asked Mandrake. "Huh? Nothing." Mandrake's mind seemed to have briefly wandered. "I was just thinking of something that happened to me before we met," Mandrake told Soma. "Oh?" Soma looked intrigued. Was this not something they'd talked about before, Betta asked herself? "Relationships can be very difficult for a lot of people," Mandrake told her, "there are a lot of reasons why they end up not working out for people a lot of the time."

"It was because I was a fish!"

"Ah, yes," Soma nodded sagely, "we cold-blooded ones are unlucky in love at times." Mandrake looked at him. "I didn't mean you!" Mandrake raised an eyebrow at him. "Look, can we talk about this later?" Mandrake stuck out his tongue at him. "You two really _are_like an old married couple, aren't you," Betta snickered, "maybe I dodged a bullet after all." Soma stared daggers at her. "I've never run out of olive branches to hand people, so I don't know what I'll do if I do run out, but if you keep swatting them away, we're all going to find out, aren't we?" The wind seemed to blow menacingly through the leaves above them as he animated them overhead.

"You don't know what it's like," Betta told Soma, "because you sleep. You may be cold-blooded like me, but you have no idea what it's like not to sleep," she elaborated. "But you can sleep if you want, can't you?" Mandrake didn't quite get it. "What if I don't want to sleep, Einstein?" she snapped at him. "Maybe everyone else doesn't always want what you want, have you ever stopped to think about that?"

Mandrake had clearly touched a nerve, he realized.

"Why is it important that you not need to sleep?" Soma asked her. "It was important to Mark that his partner sleep with him," she looked downcast, "he'd talked about it. I don't quite get it to this day. It was the first time either of us tried being in a closed relationship. But for some reason the idea that someone he'd be having sex with would spend the night with him had some kind of special meaning to him. I tried sleeping once or twice when I was a kid but I really didn't like it. I tried it again once, for him, but I woke up feeling antsy, restless, and dehydrated. For some reason I just can't stand the thought of staying still that long. I get... itchy," she said.

"The stupid thing, see, is that Mark didn't care about my shifting... Every six months, I turn from a girl into a guy, or from a guy into a girl. That's what I was always afraid I couldn't get dates for. But Mark was bi and he didn't care, so I felt really lucky to have him while I did... Eventually, he woke up in Bridges' arms one morning. He just had to be able to spend a night with someone. In the end, something all fish share, that I didn't control, was the deal-breaker."

Mandrake nodded.

"Do you remember when I was thinking back on something earlier?" Mandrake asked Soma. Soma did. "Before I met Soma," Mandrake started telling Betta, "I was dating this iguana guy for a while, see?" She encouraged him to continue. "It was pretty serious. We even moved in together and everything. I remember we used to fight about how hot to keep it all the time. See, I'd always be too warm, because of all this fur, but he was always too cold, because he was cold-blooded. Our thermostat would go back and forth every time either of us would walk in front of it, without either of us ever achieving a decisive victory."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "So then what happened?"

He shrugged. "What do you think? He left me for a gecko girl." "You got left for a girl?" Soma asked him incredulously. "Don't make fun of me, it really hurt!" Mandrake told him. "No, no, I'm... I guess I didn't know," Soma explained. "I guess it's a good thing I'm stuck in this grove after all. How would you and I ever fight over the thermostat here?" Mandrake gave him a look. "Unlucky in love, indeed," the otter remarked. Soma stuck his forked tongue out at him.

"The point is, I felt shitty for a long time after he broke up with me," Mandrake went on. "I really internalized what happened as my fault, as proving something bad about me as a person. I questioned what it would've meant about me if I couldn't be in a relationship with a reptile because of it. He really meant a lot to me, I'd gotten really used to him, to the point that it was hard to get through the day without him. He'd taken part of me with him, and I couldn't get it back. Eventually I started questioning whether or not I could be in a relationship with anyone at all. It was pretty much the biggest romantic crisis of my life."

She grunted knowingly.

"I feel you, man. When Mark left me, it was like he ripped everything out of me that made me want to live," she explained. "The ground gave out from under me, and I collapsed like a stringless puppet. Mark was my whole world, Mandrake... Everywhere I looked, all I could see were things that reminded me of times I'd shared with him. I didn't have any reprieve. I couldn't even hide in sleep the way you people can. Just... everything hurt, all the time. Pain became the only thing I knew. I resented everyone in the world who was happy. What did they have that I didn't have, that made them deserve it, not me? Eventually... I wanted to burn everything down."

It was becoming disturbingly difficult for him not to relate to her, Mandrake thought.

"I wanted to burn Bridges," she said.

"So you did," Soma said, "or at least you tried to." Betta scoffed. "I couldn't even do that right, that tells you everything you need to know about me right there," she stuck her tongue out. "Look, the point I was trying to make," Mandrake started, "was that in spite of what I went through, I ended up together with Soma after all. I didn't give up. If I'd believed I couldn't date reptiles, I'd have missed out on the best opportunity of my life," he said. Soma smiled this time.

"You'll meet someone else someday too, I'm sure of it," Mandrake continued, "There are other... well, you know." She looked at him dubiously. "... fish in the sea?" Betta sneered at him. He seemed duly embarrassed, so she decided to let it slide. "I did meet someone else, actually... but she's not doing too well right now," Betta said. "What happened to her?" Soma asked Betta. The fish looked downcast. "She's Milgram," she said, "Atlan said he'd free her if I killed you."

Mandrake frowned. "In the name of Eli?" Betta tilted her head. "No good?" Mandrake scoffed. "Eli was a hybrid! She was as much of a reptile as she was a fish. She fought for dryad rights in Brazil just as for fish rights. She breathed air. Now this dolphin, who's not even a fish, shows up out of nowhere after her death, walks in as though he owned the place, sets fish against fish, and sends you to kill a reptile dryad because his boyfriend happens to look like someone you hate by blackmailing you. And you're going to take his side over the side of those who are bringing back your girlfriend to free her from his spell even after you and she tried to kill us?"

She looked downcast for a moment.

"I don't see a source of water around here," Betta finally remarked, "what do you do if some of your patients are fish and they're hurt bad enough that you need to keep them overnight for observation?" Mandrake shifted all of his body to water except for his head in front of her, and gave her a meaningful look. "Well I'll be gosh-darned," she said, "I guess I hadn't thought about that."

This was when Rakim returned with Milgram, unconscious.

"She's out, but she's still alive," Rakim told Soma, kissing him on the cheek again before looking back at his beloved chimera worryingly, "what about Ogun?" "He'll live, for now," Soma assured Rakim, "Mandrake helped me with him a bit after you left to get Milgram." Rakim nodded at the otter who shared Soma with him in thanks, and Mandrake nodded at him in return. 'Anytime,' Mandrake implied.

"The shark girl who warned you..." Betta addressed Rakim. "Scylla you mean?" he asked her. "Atlan sent her to kill you, just as he sent Milgram to kill Ogun, Fugue to kill Klein, me to kill Soma, and Wintermute to get Mano's attention," Betta explained. Rakim shuddered. Scylla had made short work of him in the ring more than once. If she'd chosen to, she could have killed him without breaking a sweat. But she'd spared him, and now, he feared for her safety dearly.

"Where is she? Do you know where she is?" Betta fidgeted in her vegetal cocoon. She hated not being able to move so much. "If I know Atlan, and I do, he's going to have her tied up on a pole by the pier. When fish disobey him, Atlan ties them up on this pole just so they're too far above the water to be reached by it, even at high tide... They die of dehydration before hunger can kill them, although thirst is certainly part of the equation," she shuddered.

The more she thought about it, the more Atlan was really kind of fucked up, she mused.

"She'll be guarded, pipsqueak!" she yelled out after Rakim as he flew back away. "Now..." Soma addressed her, "How long has it been since you've had a cigarette?" She gave him a surprised look. "How did you know I smoked?" He hissed. Was this how he laughed? "I can smell the smoke on you a mile away. You weren't just a casual smoker, you were a chain smoker, weren't you?" She looked uncertain. "What's it to you?" Soma didn't relent. "Atlan doesn't let you smoke, does he?" She looked down. "Atlan said that, if we're ruled by pleasure, we'll never be able to give ourselves over completely for the good of the Fishist cause."

Soma nodded knowingly. "What do evil therapists do in those conversion camps you hate, Mandrake?" Soma asked Mandrake. "They completely control and limit access to anything that can make someone feel good," Mandrake answered. "That's another common tactic of all those who try to cement their power over their cult members," Soma explained. "People are easier to manipulate when they're desperate and on edge. Mandrake," Soma asked, "will you go look in my secret stump for me, please?" Mandrake complied, wondering where Soma was going with this until, to his surprise, his hands found cigarettes hidden in Soma's secret stump.

"You smoke?" Mandrake asked Soma incredulously. "No, but I figured I might need them for something someday, and it looks like I was right," Soma replied matter-of-factly, throwing one to Betta as the vine webbing loosened around her just enough to allow her to grab it. She brought it to her lips, paused for a moment, looked at Soma, looked at Mandrake, and groaned.

"Do either of you guys have any fire?"

They shrugged. "We don't smoke," Mandrake told her. She thought about it a bit longer. "How about Rakim, does he have anything on him that can make fire?" They shook their heads. "Rakim's afraid of fire," Soma explained. "Hah, that's great!" She laughed. Then she realized it meant she wasn't going to be able to light her cigarette for even longer, and she groaned even louder than before.

"Well," Mandrake said coolly, "you better hope Ogun does wake up," he added, gesturing at the chimera's dragon mouth as he did. "Mandrake..." Mandrake looked at Soma. "What?" Soma gestured at the ground around them. "Get me some sticks." Mandrake looked at Soma disbelievingly. "You can't be serious." Soma gave Mandrake a look indicating he was completely serious. "She just tried to kill you!"

"Mandrake..." Soma persisted. "Fine," Mandrake sighed, "I'll do it myself." "I can do it." "I said I'll do it!" Mandrake insisted. Soma sighed. "Fine, thanks." Mandrake shook his head as he rubbed two sticks together, using his feet to provide them with a stable base while he used his hands to move them against each other until he finally lit a spark. He walked over to Betta unceremoniously, and finally lit her cigarette for her with the stick he'd just set fire to.

"Ah...!" She took a long draw and, letting it out, seemed to let all the weight of the world off her shoulders as she did. "Shit, I missed these," she said happily. "I can't believe this," Mandrake said, "you are some kind of doctor, Soma," he told his boyfriend sardonically. Soma shrugged. "Hey, sometimes self-care might be a little counter-intuitive, but it still counts as self-care, doesn't it?" Soma grinned. "Anything else I can do for you, herr doktor?" Mandrake asked.

"Yes," Soma answered, "tell Bridges I'm not getting enough cigarettes for this."

Chapter 24: Deep Blue

He finally noticed her from above the pier as he flew overhead. Scylla was tied up to a pole, plunged so deep into the earth under the shallows that went back and forth between high and low tide between the shore and ocean that there was no way that she would be rehydrated by any of the water around her. It was designed to be torture the likes of which Tantalus had endured, smelling the saltwater beneath her that couldn't reach her even as she'd become more and more dehydrated. Furthermore, as a shark, being forced to remain still for long was already bad enough, since sharks need to stay constantly in motion to stay alive as well. She squirmed.

Descending by the pole that she was tied to in slow, careful circles to land near it, it didn't take long for Rakim to notice that Betta hadn't lied. There was someone else there, someone who seemed determined to make it so that the bat would not be able to free her after all. It was the same ninja carp who had appeared on Mano's sub to get her attention before vanishing again.

"You must be Wintermute," Rakim said to her, remembering what Betta had called her.

She looked at his face carefully as he spoke and, rather than talking back, she started signing at him. 'You must be Rakim,' she gestured at him without taking her eyes off him as she did. He nodded knowingly, and signed back at her. 'I am.' She gasped. You had to see a carp gasp. Their faces seemed sort of designed for it, he couldn't help but think. 'Leave now, and I won't kill you where you stand,' she motioned toward him, pushing past her initial surprise.

Scylla was drowsy, but still sort of half-awake, so she noticed that Rakim was there having an exchange with Wintermute. She hadn't known that Rakim knew sign language. 'If you let me free her, I will go,' Rakim signed at her. 'You can even come with us.' Under ordinary circumstances, he might never have gone to the trouble of learning it, especially belonging to a species that privileged sound over sight the way bats did. But when Irshad had started going deaf, he had started learning sign language, hoping to continue to be able to talk to her, no matter what would happen. 'We can protect you,' Rakim added with what he hoped was due emphasis.

She shook her head. 'If I let her go, it'll be me up on that pole,' she signed resignedly.

He sighed. First he had struggled to learn Arabic for Irshad, then he had struggled to learn sign language for her. He'd always be sad that he hadn't gotten the chance to speak it with her. Even trying to do so now was bittersweet for him, because of what it reminded him of. And yet, even having learned it, it was still no use. How many more languages would he have to learn before he would finally be able to communicate what he truly wanted to someone talking to him?

'I understand,' he signed simply.

They both assumed their chosen fighting stance, sustaining each other's gaze while they did. Rakim saw her eyes freeze into a literally icy glare while sai made of ice coalesced from snowflakes swirling around her in her hands. "Oh crap," the bat couldn't help saying out loud as he started swinging an electrified chain that he extended out of his arm like a flail on his side. She read his lips, and looked at him confidently. " Get over here!" he shouted at the carp as she prepared to block the electrified chain that he was sending toward her with her ice sai. Scylla, almost passed out from what she'd been going through, heard him, and chuckled mirthlessly.

She'd always liked his video game references.

***

Mano, Fugue and Klein reached Atlan's underwater lair in Mano's sub, and found a way in. Fugue knew how to use his spikes to pick locks, and made good use of his skill to allow them all to get past locked doors that stood in their way. Soon, they came upon a room in which three separate doors awaited them, forcing them to split up to continue advancing deeper into the Fishist hideout. Klein was forced to choose the only door that didn't lead into a flooded area.

Klein walked into a bare, white, circular room. In its center, two life-sized mannequins laid collapsed in a heap on top of each other, seemingly inextricably entangled. Strings that seemed too long for them dangled weirdly between them and the ceiling over them. When the skunk took one step away from the entrance toward them, the strings that were attached to the mannequins abruptly yanked both of them so that they would have their backs to the wall facing each other on each side of him. They had each had one of their arms ripped out of its socket, left interlocked with the other's arm hanging by strings at the center of the room in front of Klein.

Klein remembered the factory worker who'd lost an arm because of him well. So this was another way in which Atlan used his powers based on the information he gathered about how other people's minds worked, Klein thought. The dolphin would try to learn what had been some of the most formative events in people's lives so that he could use that knowledge as part of psychological warfare, to try to weaken his enemies' defenses against Atlan ahead of time.

As the strings above the mannequins started spinning around the circular room's ceiling, they dragged the mannequins behind them, still with their backs to the wall facing inward toward the skunk. While they span faster and faster and faster, splatters of blood started appearing on the wall around him, staining its pristine, untouched appearance with bright, messy splashes of red all over the place. The blood didn't seem to have been coming out of the mannequins at all but to have been appearing on the walls themselves. It soon got to a point where more of the wall of the room around him was red than white.

It would've been distressing enough even without his past. Somehow the things about it that didn't quite 'work' - the fact that it was mannequins and not bodies, that the blood wasn't coming from where it looked like it would've been supposed to have been coming from - made it feel creepier, not better. It seemed to bring into question whether or not he was even able to process reality the way it was as it is, seeping doubt into his mind about his grip onto it. What was there even for him to hold onto in such an uncertain existence? So he closed his eyes, and thought back on something that Fugue had taught him long ago.

"Rin... pyo... toh... sha... kai... jin... retsu... zai... zen" he interwove his fingers as he said.

When Klein opened his eyes, the mannequins and blood splatters were gone.

Although Fugue may no longer have been Shinto, Klein was certainly glad that Fugue had been when they'd met. Klein got the impression that Atlan didn't look too kindly on his followers entertaining other belief systems. Whatever Fugue's reasons had been, Klein was glad that Fugue had shared with him the tools he'd had to regain control over his own mind, when he'd still been able to.

The floor in the next room was all black and white tiles, looking just like a chessboard. Klein couldn't help but think that, if he'd been able to see himself from an outside perspective, his black and white skunk body would've probably looked pretty cool set against this floor. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, and there were long rectangular tables set against the left and right walls covered in white tablecloths, plates, glasses, pitchers, bowls, cups, pots and utensils.

The most notable part of the room was still the lobster with a monocle and tuxedo in it.

"And, of course, you would come through here," said the lobster to the skunk, "the only path that wasn't flooded." Klein looked him up and down. "How delightfully... predictable of you." Klein had never seen a lobster smirk before. "Of course, everything is predictable if you have enough data," the crustacean added, flicking his long antennae as he did, "that's just common sense." Klein frowned. "You mean, like, Fate?" Descartes chortled. "Yes, exactly like Fate, if that helps you." Klein shook his head. "There's no such thing." Descartes' claws were decidedly untied. "Oh, but there is. That's how I know Eli's prophecy will come true."

Descartes had started out as a Christian because it had initially seemed to square with his deterministic, essentialist view of the universe. He had abandoned it after having become annoyed with the doctrine of free will, whatever that was. "It will lead us to victory just as surely as our dry path led you here, like a conveyor belt." The lobster had become a genetic engineer and an architect, using his abilities to torture Ammut and to build Atlan's lair. He saw himself as making sure to guide everything in the direction in which he believed it was supposed to go. "So there's no free will?" Descartes scoffed at Klein's sophistry. "A retroactive illusion for pawns."

"Don't you mean 'prawns'?"

Klein narrowly cartwheeled away from having his head cut off by a lobster claw. "You want to talk about shellfish, you insipid little punk?" Descartes adopted a stance that the skunk recognized as being from Eskrima. "Let's talk about lobster tanks, to pick a completely random example I've made up off the top of my head," he started, "when you see a lobster in that tank, Klein, what do you do? Do you walk up to it, and tell it there's no such thing as Fate?" He clicked his claws menacingly at his sides. "Of course not. There's only one thing that can happen. Just as what happened to Eli, as what will happen to all of you landlubbers, inevitably."

Klein was glad that Mandrake had not ended up against Descartes. He would have had such a hard time hitting a shellfish. He liked them so. While the skunk usually found Mandrake's attachment to them admirable, Klein was glad, for once, that he, himself, was not burdened with such compunctions. It would have made fighting back against Descartes difficult, and it increasingly seemed to Klein that he wasn't going to be able to talk his way out of this one.

"You're nothing but a pack of cards," Klein said.

As he sank into his low capoeira footwork, Klein suddenly realized that the rows of black and white floor tiles had started moving under him one after the other in turn. Besides the fact that a horizontal movement was always followed by a vertical movement and vice-versa, there seemed to be no other discernible pattern to which one would move next. They'd been set up in a way in which they didn't interfere with the tables on the sides of the room. What they did do was to consistently make Klein nearly walk into most of Descartes' punches while moving the lobster narrowly out of the way of most of the skunk's kicks, as though he knew where they would be.

The crustacean controlled the Cartesian grid beneath them, so the odds would favor him.

"Are you so naïve as to think the path that led you here is still dry, skunk?" Klein shuddered. How had it not occurred to him that they'd been going to flood the path behind him to trap him in a dead end the way they clearly had? Was Atlan's right hand man right about Fate after all? Did Klein only think that he had free will because he didn't know all of the right factors to predict what would happen to him with utmost certainty, proving his existentialism wrong, he asked himself? Naturally, whichever interpretation of reality resulted in Klein being killed by his opponent was going to be considerably less appealing to him, that much was for certain.

Between Descartes' ballroom footwork and Klein's capoeira, both seemed to be dancing.

Klein jumped back onto a table out of the way of a claw swipe then leapt off the table over Descartes to dodge another one, landing behind Descartes. The chandelier over them swung seemingly of its own accord just as the lobster was in the process of accidentally knocking over a glass because he had tried to hit Klein with his claw and failed. Neither of them expected the glass to hover in midair before slowly returning to the table as though it had come to life.

A chill went down Klein's spine.

He may have been up against worse than the lobster after all, the skunk thought to himself. "Bad fish, breaking glasses," a disembodied Cheshire grin admonished Descartes, confirming Klein's most frightening suspicions. "What did a glass ever do to you?" he asked the lobster reproachfully. "Don't you think that's rude, Klein?" Having just swung from the chandelier above Descartes and Klein by his tongue to save the poor object from inadvertent destruction, Boko dissolved his chameleon camouflage to give a toothy grin up at Klein from his predatory crouch...

Chapter 25: Fishers of Men

'How cheerfully he seems to grin...' (Lewis Carroll, How Doth the Little Crocodile)

Ammut had been left on the doorstep of a Brazilian orphanage before he'd been old enough to have known how to talk. He'd been far too young to have even remembered anything about his life before the orphanage. Ammut didn't have papers with him, or a name tag, no indication of who he was or of where he was from anywhere on him. With his heritage as uncertain as it was, it was assessed that 1 out of his 8 great-grandparents had been a lion, and that 3 or 4 of the remaining 7 had been sharks and crocodiles, but it was impossible to determine whether his shark or crocodile heritage predominated.

They named him Ammut because of his appearance. With his mane around his crocodile face, even with his shark fins that didn't quite match it, Ammut still very much looked like the Egyptian Devourer of Souls. Some mammals and reptiles disliked fish, some reptiles and fish disliked mammals, and some mammals and fish disliked reptiles. It wasn't hard to imagine any number of reasons why Ammut may have been abandoned in a social context like that.

Ammut learned that, when they wanted to get rid of someone, the Egyptians had sent them to the crocodiles, the Romans had sent them to the lions, and pirates had sent them to the sharks. Ammut was going to develop a weird relationship with eating, there would be no getting around it. When he was still of kindergarten age and too young to have much of a sense of hygiene quite yet, he would put his little action figures in his mouth.

Some of the fish and mammal children became scared of him. They believed that the fact that he did this meant that Ammut wanted to eat other people, and that he would eat them if given half a chance. But the reptile children found a much crueler reason to make fun of him because they, understanding other reptiles based on their own experience as they did, knew the real reason for which Ammut would do this, and found it a greater source of shame still.

He was playing at being their mother.

When a mother crocodile's children were very small, and she wanted to protect them and carry them with her to and fro wherever she would go, she would put them in her mouth to carry them in it. You could see them poking their heads out between her teeth, staring at the outside world from it with that big proud grin on their faces. Children, reptile or not, were taught strict gender roles early on, and they began to bully and pick on Ammut as not being a real boy.

Hurt by their behavior, Ammut thought of stopping, but the more he'd think about it, the more he'd grit his teeth and refuse to give in. Ammut wasn't going to simply let them win. Even when he'd become old enough to know better than to put action figures in his mouth, although he never switched pronouns or considered transitioning, Ammut still embraced the 'girly' aspects of his personality around others to the fullest, without apology. It cheered him up.

He liked how jarring others would find them sometimes, how surprisingly they contrasted with his fearsome appearance and completed it. It would throw off the people Ammut didn't want around in the first place and it would put the people he did want around at ease. Rejecting his 'Devourer' aspect all the way to its logical conclusion, he became a vegetarian. He loved expressing affection by making food for others, having learned at the orphanage at an early age.

Having grown up at the orphanage had also meant that the nuns who had raised him had also taught him about Christianity, as nuns were wont to do. When he was very small, he only knew about Christianity through what the nuns taught him, so his perspective of it was necessarily limited by what they thought it good for him to know. In such an environment, he developed a naïve, idealistic understanding of Christianity, becoming a passionate believer.

Ammut started to wear a Jesus fish around his neck.

People would make fun of Ammut and ask him if he was sure that he wasn't carrying that fish around as emergency rations, but he'd just laugh it off. He tried to look like he had a thicker skin than he really did, and his uproarious laughter was sometimes contagious, even to the people who would make fun of him. Ammut would try to be self-deprecating to disarm teasing, to push when he wanted to pull. He feared abandonment so, desperate for people to like him.

Christianity, as he understood it, spoke to him. Every time he would submerge himself in water three or four times a day to make sure that his body would remain hydrated, as even hybrids between fish and other species still needed to do, he would think about the meaning of baptism, the meaning of washing away sins with water and breathing in new life once out of it. Early Christians were described to him as revolutionaries and agitators, even as he heard about liberation theologians trying to create God's kingdom on Earth around them to this day. The ideals of complete, infinite love and peace for everyone on Earth appealed to his innocent nature.

But there was the fishing.

According to his own interpretation, when Jesus had told his fishing apostles 'Come with me, and I will make you fishers of men,' it meant that you were supposed to want to be one of the men being fished in the context of the metaphor. Obviously, no one would have wanted to have been 'fished,' to have been killed and eaten by Jesus or his apostles. Ammut did not believe that the apostles would have been drawn by an offer from Jesus for them to be cruel to others.

However, there were many Christian reptiles, mammals, birds, and insects who believed that Jesus' status as a known fisherman had meant that Jesus believed that fish people in general deserved to be killed. What Ammut interpreted metaphorically, others interpreted very literally. These were the same people who believed that it was their Christian duty to discriminate against dryads because Jesus had been a carpenter, with unflattering words comparing dryads to wood.

Discriminated against by other Christians so, in spite of his best efforts, Ammut did some historical research. He was horrified to discover how many cruelties Christians had perpetrated on others in the name of their own interpretation of Jesus' doctrine throughout history, all over the world. Out of all religions, as a historical force, Christianity had even perhaps been the cruelest of all. It made Ammut cry to imagine Jesus saddened by everyone dead in his name.

Eventually, having been raised a Christian grew to make him fear his own capacity for cruelty more than having been a shark, crocodile or lion ever had. It got so bad that he felt compelled to distance himself from Christianity because of it. While Eli and Klein had experienced their apostasy as a liberation, Ammut's was grudging and regretful. He'd always wanted to imagine that everyone would meet in the afterlife and everyone would just be okay.

Disillusioned with Christianity, but still seeking out an outlet for what was left of his idealism, Ammut turned to fish rights activism, hoping to fill just the void that his experience with Christianity had left him with. He met Fugue at a Brazilian fish rights protest that had been organized by Eli. A counter-protestor had attacked Fugue, and Ammut had jumped on the bigot to take him down with a gator roll choke, or a crocodile roll choke, as Ammut liked to call them.

Fugue had been impressed with Ammut's Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Ammut would say that, as an extrovert who loved being around people as he did, it was the perfect style for him. He would describe it jokingly as the art of hugging people close, and never letting them go. Fugue, as an introvert, had also thought of his staff fighting as a perfect expression of his own personality. It let him keep people at a distance and it appeased his OCD to fight without having to touch them. When it all came down to it, Fugue tried to tell himself that a staff was just a really big needle, just as he worked with at the hospital, wielding it merely another matter of utmost precision.

Once, Fugue had started having a panic attack, and Ammut had tried to put his hands on Fugue's body to help him calm down. They'd known each other well enough by then that Ammut knew, even though Fugue disliked being touched by strangers, that they'd reached a level of closeness where Ammut was no longer a stranger, which made it okay. However, Fugue's panic attack had been too strong for him to contain, and his spikes had erupted all over his body, including where Ammut had put his hands on Fugue, piercing a hole through both of them. Ammut had screamed and, surprised, had yanked his hands back before looking at them.

His expression went from stupefaction, to dawning understanding, to... laughter?

This time it had been Fugue's turn to have been stupefied. No one had ever reacted to having been poked by his spikes this way, that much was for certain. Ammut had looked at the Shintoist with that big crocodile grin on his face, and he'd told Fugue "It looks like you've found a way to make me more Christ-like than I ever thought I could be after all!" With the bleeding holes in his hands, Ammut looked like he'd been on the receiving end of divine stigmata himself.

They'd shared their first kiss just after Fugue disinfected and bandaged Ammut's hands.

When Ammut's apartment had collapsed in an earthquake, Fugue had offered to Ammut to move in with him, to save him from having to live on the street. They cared for each other deeply, and Ammut was immensely grateful to Fugue for being there for him in his time of need. Fugue was glad to have been able to do something to repay Ammut for having protected him before.

It started out being difficult for Fugue to adjust to having anyone living with him. Even though Fugue hadn't slept, he'd been used to having had a lot of free time to himself outside of work, which was harrowing, to recover from having had to be around so many people for so long, especially people who had all needed his help so urgently at all times. He'd used his free time to sew and knit his plush animals, practicing his precision handiwork as he'd become accustomed to. He'd play his video games to increase his hand-eye coordination and to turn his mind off from the stresses of his job. He'd painted ofuda, and done elaborate purification rituals.

When Ammut began to live with Fugue, they had to go through a bit of an adjustment period. Ammut's extreme extroversion clashed with Fugue's extreme introversion. Ammut loved spending time with Fugue, but whenever Fugue would take time by himself to do the things that he had become used to doing, Ammut would get hurt. He'd interpret it as meaning that Fugue didn't enjoy spending time with him after all, but only helped him out of pity. Fugue loved spending time with Ammut, but whenever he would want time to himself, he would feel like Ammut had no sense of boundaries, feeling encroached on by what he knew was just affection.

Ammut never tried to diminish Fugue's ordered nature to impose his more chaotic way of existing as objectively better somehow. But where Fugue would always sit up straight, Ammut would lounge about in his underwear picking his teeth. Ammut wasn't messy, but he was more comfortable on the ground than Fugue was. Ammut did his best, but it was sometimes difficult for him to remember the way Fugue preferred to have everything done around the apartment. Fugue would stay polite toward Ammut when he'd make a mistake, but Ammut would feel sad to have disappointed him.

Fugue had always disliked the idea that introverts needed to be 'fixed' by an extrovert, as though there were something inherently wrong with them. The fact that Ammut never played into that trope soon became one of Fugue's favorite things about him. They just did what they could to learn to exist around each other in a way that met both their needs as well as possible, even though sometimes it didn't quite work out as well as they both wished it would.

Ammut would talk to Fugue while he sewed, while he gamed, while he shopped, while he painted, while he bathed, while he worked, while he cleaned, while he'd read, while he'd talk to other people, while he'd go to the bathroom. There were times when Fugue snapped at Ammut then apologized when he'd see how hurt Ammut would get, feeling guilty for having made Ammut feel like his feelings hadn't been important. There were times when Ammut would feel especially lonely, and Fugue would stretch himself even thinner than usual trying to be there for him, until he'd gone so long without being alone that he'd been wiped out.

Be that as it may, Fugue would never have wanted Ammut to have stopped living with him. He'd gotten so used to Ammut's company by then that he couldn't even imagine having had to go through the day without hearing Ammut tell him about his day. The sound of Ammut's voice became the soundtrack to his life, silence from him became almost eerie, like a ghost limb that should have been there but was not. Ammut admired Fugue for helping people the way he did. Fugue felt so embittered and disillusioned by life himself that he found Ammut's idealism inspiring, and he hoped to someday learn to love people as unconditionally as Ammut did.

Before Fugue had met Klein, he might have reacted to Ammut more coldly, with less sensitivity about how asking Ammut for space may have made Ammut feel bad. He would have thought about it as a matter of protecting his way of life, as a matter of emotional survival that he would simply have to prioritize no matter what. But having been left by Klein, having been hurt by Klein's departure the way he had been, Fugue knew the pain of being abandoned by someone you care about all too well. Despite his need for occasional solitude, he related to Ammut's need for company greatly, seeing some of his own suffering reflected in the pain of the man he loved.

Ammut would say he felt as though there were this void in him that he was trying to fill.

Once, when Fugue was feeling particularly stressed out because he'd been spending literally all of his time around other people for far longer than was healthy for his metabolism and he'd been working a double shift at the hospital, Ammut had walked into Fugue's operating room just before Fugue had been about to perform a serious operation. Fugue had yelled at him "You're eating me alive!" and Ammut had stormed out sobbing while Fugue had concentrated on saving his patient's life. Fugue had run out trying to find Ammut as soon as he'd been done, wracked by guilt by how badly he knew that what he'd said would've hit Ammut where it hurt.

"That... that formula you've been, been working on to... to be able to control when your spikes pop out or not?" Ammut had struggled to tell Fugue when Fugue had finally found him, through his tears. Fugue had nodded, failing at holding back his tears himself. "It... It works. You won't... You won't have that problem anymore. Ever. I just... I just thought you should know. I thought... I was just excited for you. You've wanted this for so long! I thought you'd be happy. I thought... you'd want me to tell you," Ammut had sobbed as Fugue had held him in his arms apologetically. "You were right" Fugue told him, petting him softly. "You did good. I'm sorry..."

When Eli had died, and Mano had vanished, Ammut and Fugue had both been hit very hard by it. They had great admiration for her, and she held special meaning for them because she'd been part of why they'd met in the first place. She'd given them hope for a world in which fish rights could become seen as something more than mere pipe dreams. When Atlan had shown up to replace her, joining his Fishism had seemed like the right thing for both of them to do.

At first, Ammut had been excited about flooding anti-fish workplaces, freeing fish people from fishing nets at sea, and fighting back against anti-fish gangs. It had brought back Ammut's memories of what he'd imagined early Christianity to have been like, when Christians had still been just a persecuted minority who believed in a God of love, before power had corrupted them. Ammut imagined that, if Jesus had been alive today, he would have supported the Fishist cause. Whenever ordinary means had failed at protecting the oppressed, people had had to resort to extraordinary means, until enough attention had been drawn to force a more permanent solution.

The first time someone had drowned because of one of their floods, Ammut had cried. When Ammut had carried Fugue in his arms while jumping off a fishing ship that Fugue had just set charges to blow up, they'd believed at first that the ship had been left there without anyone on it at the time. When Ammut had smelled blood in the water, no amount of shark DNA had made him even remotely happy about having smelled it. When Ammut had gotten hurt fighting a gang because no one in it was a fish, it had been Fugue's turn to save Ammut's life again on a hospital bed. When Atlan took Fugue's blood to force Milgram to kill Ogun, it was the last straw.

Ammut became as disillusioned with Fishism as he had with Christianity, and said so.

Before long, Atlan had Ammut captured, imprisoned, judged, condemned, and punished by being genetically modified by Descartes. He had been thrown in The Pit, where Atlan decided he'd be throwing down the bodies of those who betrayed him to 'sleep with the fishes,' as Atlan liked to call it. When Atlan had thrown Ammut down The Pit, he had sarcastically told Ammut "For it is my body, given for you...!" Ammut was disgusted at being given dead people's bodies as food with the expectation that he would eat them, and initially refused to, but soon the effects of Descartes' genetic modifications became apparent: unnaturally over-active stomach acid.

If Ammut did not eat, his stomach would eat itself faster than usual, and he would die.

He resisted as long as he could, twitching and squirming as he'd felt the acid do its work, fighting back the urge to throw up. Finally, terrified at the thought of dying, he'd given in, and had eaten the first corpse that Atlan had thrown down to him after all. As horrible as it was, in a fucked up kind of way, though he cried and screamed and almost threw up after having eaten, even the horror that he'd just experienced still didn't quell the pain of being in The Pit alone.

But Ammut's worst punishment for his betrayal still awaited him: he was going to be force-fed his first live prey.

When Fugue walked into The Pit, and saw the bones that were scattered on the ground around them, he understood what had happened. It fully hit Fugue just how horrible Ammut would have felt after having been put through something like this. Fugue found Ammut panting, unable to stand, clearly struggling to somehow resist the pain that the acid was putting him through but ultimately unable to do anything to reduce the agony it was inflicting on him.

"Kill me," Ammut begged Fugue, "before I really do eat you..." Fugue looked right into his eyes. His face was so emaciated that it almost looked skeletal in the torchlight. "I can't live with what I've done," Ammut added, "it's too late for me, but you can save yourself. Just don't... Don't just let the acid do its work. You're a doctor, Fugue... Have mercy on me," Ammut panted breathlessly, his whole body shaking as though he were going to collapse any second now.

Before Ammut could react, Fugue stung him with one of his modified spikes that he'd been carrying, injecting an unknown substance into Ammut's body. Ammut felt his control over his body give way to mild paralysis, and wondered if Fugue had given him poison that would put an end to his suffering. Perhaps a sedative or anesthetic that would make his last moments less painful than they had to be? Ammut couldn't be sure. He hoped it would make it hurt less.

"It's a base," Fugue finally told him as he picked up Ammut's weakening body to carry him over his shoulder, "I created it with Soma, Mandrake, and Mano. It should neutralize the acid for a while, until we can reverse engineer the genetic modifications that he made on you permanently. They should all also be able to help me do that. They're good at what they do, you'll see," Fugue forced a smile at Ammut as he brought him all the way back aboard Mano's sub to lie him down on a stretcher, tend to his injuries, and monitor his vital signs. "Don't you think you should go back for your friend?" Ammut asked Fugue weakly.

"No," Fugue answered, holding Ammut's hand, "I'm staying right here, with you..."

Chapter 26: Saved

'Who survived, anyone new, anyone else but you?' (Porter Robinson, Sad Machine)

It was on their way back to Rakim's place after beating Death in Castlevania that night that they heard the alarm. "Oh shit!" As their brisk walk turned into a frantic run, they got near enough to see first the smoke, then the reflection of the flames on the other buildings, and finally the flames themselves. "Oh no!" Under normal circumstances, fighting fire was Irshad's stock and trade. She would stand side by side with her teammates, with their equipment, fully alert.

Unfortunately, that night took place after Irshad, in her characteristic generosity, had volunteered for a double shift to offer relief to one of her teammates. Already on an odd sleep schedule from sleeping at night rather than during the day as she usually did, and so exhausted from staying up twice as long as usual, Irshad had slept right through her fire alarm. Normally, a bat's ears would have heard a fire alarm and she would've awakened fast enough to escape.

It had been the siren.

Years of the fire truck's siren had eroded her hearing to next to nothing.

Before she'd woken up and understood what was happening, practically everyone else had already evacuated the building. It took a moment for people to even notice that she wasn't down there. By the time her teammates had showed up, the building around their apartment had already started breaking down because of the fire in ways that made escaping from it without getting burned, without the help of anything or anyone, virtually impossible.

Ogun yelled after Rakim in a panic as he saw the bat take flight next to him, against the firefighters' warnings to stay back. As the sound of the hatchling's whimpers while it risked its life to save Samus echoed in his mind, Rakim flew all the way up to a window of his flaming building to find his mother and bring her out himself. Ogun freaked out and, without thinking about the consequences, ran into the building against warnings not to do so as well, breaking out of the grip of the firefighters who were trying to hold him back.

He tried to find fire escape stairs that he could climb, but it was no use: some of them were already on fire, or too damaged by the passage of the flames to safely climb. People on the street gasped when they saw him come out of a window to climb up the side of a building with all four limbs, looking more like the kind of monster that he usually didn't want to look like than he ever had. Rakim thought he'd found her. Was her leg trapped under something? Was she still alive?

Ogun cursed when he saw that some of the windows were also broken and ablaze, restricting which ones he could use to get in and out of the building. The firefighters, while still begrudging him for plunging in where it was their own job to go, were getting the trampoline and net ready below him, in case Ogun fell from the building. Rakim thought he could get his mother out through a window, but just then the window collapsed from the fire, blocking their way out.

More than ever, his lifelong fear of fire nailed him to the ground, frozen in fear as his hell raged around him even while he heard the chimera yell out his name from a lower circle of it...

***

When he came to, he couldn't tell how, but the first thing Rakim noticed was that he was different somehow. But the first thing he asked was whether she'd made it or not. When Rakim heard that she didn't make it, he just screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and screamed, an ear-piercing, never-ending bat shriek that tore the sky asunder.

He would never accept this.

This would never be okay.

Ogun yelled out in vain after him, trying to get him to stay long enough to be able to talk to him, but Rakim was inconsolable beyond measure. His entire foundation for existence had been ripped out from under him. He would listen to no one. He had nothing left to listen for. As thunder cracked above them, Ogun's calls for Rakim's return reverberated uselessly over the treetops while the bat's shrieks were so loud that they drowned out the sound of thunder itself.

When Ogun could tell that Rakim was gone so far that, even with his bat hearing, Rakim would no longer hear Ogun's calls, the sounds of his calls were replaced by the sobs that wracked all four of his heads at once as he wept for the loss of his beloved Rakim.

***

"You're back!"

Rakim looked up from his seat at the Bolgia. He still didn't drink, but he was having coffee, which it turned out the bar served after all. "Oh, Betta!" It was the red fish he'd fought that time. "How have you been?" He looked at the bat incredulously. "How am I? I thought you were dead!" This half of each year Betta was a 'he,' Rakim had learned, even though he'd been a 'she' when they'd fought. Everyone in his species worked that way at different times of the year.

"I was," the bat smiled bitterly.

Betta looked at him with a half-burned cigarette dangling from his mouth, with that look he gave when he wasn't sure if you were shitting him or not. Finally settling on not, he gave Rakim a knowing look. "I get what you mean, yeah." The bat looked different somehow, but the fish knew better than to ask in what way. It would've been rude. "Have you seen Ogun?" Betta shook his head. "I hear Ogun's been at Soma's for a while. Why, are you looking for him?"

Rakim nodded. "You could say that, yeah," he answered, getting up and getting ready to leave. Betta hid his surprise of the bat's sudden departure under his customary blasé façade as well as he could. "Hey, kid?" Rakim turned to look over his shoulder on his way out of the bar. "Sorry to hear about your mom," Betta said, throwing down his burned cigarette after lighting another one. Rakim raised an eyebrow at him. "Thanks," he replied as he walked out the door.

***

"Oh my God, Rakim, you're back!"

He'd been gone for a month by then, with complete radio silence. Ogun had begun to believe that the boundary that he'd crossed this time had finally pushed the bat away for good, with no possibility of Ogun ever making up for it. When Ogun saw Rakim landing in Soma's grove after all this time, even though Ogun tried to remind himself that it didn't necessarily mean that Rakim had come back to Ogun specifically, just knowing that Rakim was still alive and had chosen to come back to Ogun brought him the greatest sense of relief that he could imagine ever experiencing.

"I thought you'd never come back," he shook his dragon head.

He started running to Rakim to hold him in his arms, but when he saw the bat's dour expression and closed body language, something held him back, no longer sure of whether a hug from him would still be welcome or not. "Well... I am. In a sense," Rakim cautiously responded, still examining his arms and legs as he spoke. "In whatever sense I can be at this point, I suppose," he half-asked himself aloud, unsure of whether it was even a rhetorical question or not.

"It's good to have you back."

Ogun was still too emotional to really smile, even though he wanted to. Rakim sighed. He felt guilty about having left. In his absence, Ogun had fallen into a deep depression, and had started spending all of his time at Soma's, talking to him about how much he missed Rakim to an extent that drove even Soma, with his caretaking personality and his own affection for the bat, to become overwhelmed in his own unsuccessful attempts to address the chimera's infinite grief.

Usually they balanced each other out as friends, both believing in nature and technology alike. In moments when he'd lost his patience with Ogun because of how badly the chimera was being affected by the bat's loss, Soma had even told Ogun that he shouldn't have done what he did. He told Ogun that he'd crossed a line people were meant not to cross, which was something that Soma had always told himself that he would never say about anything. Mandrake wouldn't have been proud of him, the snake couldn't help but think, but he'd just been felt so at the end of his rope by then that he let it out and hadn't been able to take it back, even though he regretted it.

"Is it?" Rakim asked him.

The worst part when Soma had said that was that, when he asked himself the question, Ogun himself couldn't tell for sure whether he'd done the right thing or not. It had hit a nerve.

***

After they'd pronounced Rakim and Irshad dead at the scene, Ogun had freaked out and taken both of their bodies to bring them all the way to Soma's for additional emergency measures. He hoped against hope that the snake may have found a way of prolonging their lives that the paramedics had not. While Soma's luck had been incrementally better with Rakim than with Irshad because there had been slightly more of his body left to work with, and was able to hold Rakim in brief stasis with his abilities after he had lost Irshad despite his best efforts, Soma still couldn't stop Rakim's condition from being ultimately terminal, and only a matter of time.

While Soma hated asking Mandrake for favors in general, considering the circumstances, Soma still asked Ogun to call Mandrake to ask for his help to try to put Rakim into a deeper, longer-lasting state of stasis until a more long-term solution could be found, if such a thing were to ever become possible. Most of his original body was gone, and none of them, with their knowledge of genetic engineering, hedge witchcraft or technology, had any idea of how to bring him back. So because of the extremity of the situation, Ogun asked for Soma's permission to try something he had never tried before. Soma first refused, but Ogun made his case, passionately.

Soma grudgingly agreed.

Unlike Rakim, Ogun had been an atheist for most of his life, and an agnostic at the most the rest of the time. In his early childhood, he'd taken an interest in Voodoo, the unpopular faith of his ancestors that his grandparents had discarded for more conventional beliefs long before he'd been born. He'd been discouraged from pursuing his interest in these beliefs and, told that they were superstitions that played into stereotypes that made his people look bad, he grew up still often thinking with models based on these figures that had been presented to him, even though he didn't really believe in them deep down. He'd always thought that he never would.

When Rakim died, Ogun broke. He became so despondent in the wake of his loss that Ogun was just completely unwilling to consider life without Rakim at all. So while it would not normally have been something that he would have done, he'd become so desperate for any way to solve his problem that would work that he'd become willing to consider solutions that Ogun would never have considered under other circumstances.

Tracing a veve on the ground, lighting candles and incense, he chanted a low, persistent plea to his namesake, the loa Ogun he was named after, a source of inspiration to him in his way of life all along. In its own way, the concept of this loa had motivated him to start working with prosthetics, to become a transhumanist and a technopagan. Historically, people had always based new-for-then beliefs on their immediate surroundings. Why should he have been any different?

So he prayed to the unbroken line since the first cavemen's fire, since Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods, to the primal force of blacksmithing, to that same melding of metal to metal that melded lion to dragon to ram to snake. Ogun prayed to Ogun, who had been sent down to Earth to make the Earth into a place where people could live, whose Earth would always be under construction. He called upon the fire in which the world was being forged every day, that would always refuse that the way things are for us now are as good as they can possibly be, that would always fuel the belief that it can be remade into a better shape for the good of all.

To Ogun, it was just another extension of the instinct to survive itself, at its most basic level. It was using every means at his disposal to go on living. As Ogun danced and pleaded and chanted and prayed, even though he never would've thought it possible before, he'd somehow successfully invoked his divine namesake after all. Summoning the _loa_into his body, giving control over to him, becoming his 'horse,' Ogun's conscious mind almost blacked out altogether from his awareness while all of his tools and electronics started jittering around him as though they'd been coming to a life of their own...

He forgot most of what he did on that night after that.

When he came to the next morning, he woke up next to Rakim, waiting to be activated.

***

"So that's how that went down," the bat said after the chimera had explained what had happened to him. "I'd been wondering about that." An uncomfortable silence hung between them. Much as people talked about it, breaking the laws of Nature, God and Man to bring a loved one back from the dead was something that didn't happen every day. "I should thank you, I guess." Ogun looked downcast. "I should apologize to you, is more like it," his ram head said sadly. "What makes you think that?" His snake head sighed. "There was no way to ask you. I would've asked if I could've. I didn't know any other way. I had to make a decision."

The bat thought about it, and slowly nodded. "I can see how you would've thought that, now that you mention it." Even though Ogun was much taller than Rakim, the chimera had to struggle to raise his eyes to meet the bat's gaze. "Isn't that why you flew off into the night, though?" He had to ask. "At first I was mad that you didn't save her," he admitted. "Oh Rakim, we tried!" his lion head wept, staining its mane with tears. "We really tried!" The bat nodded.

"I realize that. It's... It's just never going to be easy not wishing you'd saved her instead of me." His dragon head nodded, sniffling. "Yeah... I can see how that would be hard to get over," Ogun gulped. "Well... You did what you could with what you had," Rakim offered, even though he couldn't take the pain out of his voice as he said it. "Thanks for telling me how it happened after all, at least." This prompted Ogun to finally ask the next question on his mind.

"Where have you been?"

"Killing drones, for one thing," the bat admitted. "I flew all the way back to my homeland... Do you ever get ads, Ogun?" The chimera blinked. "Uh, yeah." What an odd question that was. "Are they usually well-tailored to what you're looking for?" It was another odd question, but not a hard one. "Never, actually." Rakim nodded. "Now imagine if the same algorithms that are used to send you these ads are used to gather information about you, except instead of sending you ads, they kill your family. Tell me, Ogun..." The chimera gulped again. "... Don't you think that would be a lot more annoying than getting the wrong ads?"

Ogun was shaken. No matter how much they talked, there would always be aspects of Rakim's experience that would go beyond what he'd be able to have complete access to, he couldn't help but think. That was just a fact of life. "To say the least," Ogun nodded grimly. "I shouldn't think of it as 'killing' drones I guess, more like 'destroying.' I'm no longer sure what that means, being the way I am now. But if your people were being exterminated by the thousands by a foreign government, you'd been given super powers, and everyone thought you were dead, so you could get away with it, Ogun... What then, precisely... would you do?"

The chimera sighed. He knew he couldn't ignore what the bat was bringing up to him. "I honestly don't know. I've never been in that situation. Maybe the same thing you did. I don't know. I don't hold it against you, if it's what you need to know." Rakim nodded. "It's a start." Ogun blinked. "You mean there's something else?" This time it was the bat's turn to look downcast. "I took a page from your book, Ogun... I did something else I never thought I'd do."

***

"How did you get this number?"

When he had first reached his homeland, the first thing that Rakim had done had been to spend some time alone in a secluded area outdoors getting to figure out how he worked. His body was different now. He went through the same _jurus_that Irshad had taught him with his new body, the same ones he had seen her do with her cyborg arm that morning. He got used to when this or that joint would resist or yield unexpectedly compared to his previous body.

Once he got startled when a bladed chain shot out of his forearm at the end of an arm movement to go embed itself in the bark of a nearby tree. Rakim figured out that he had some of them stored in each of his limbs, and they seemed for all practical purposes indefinitely extensible. Rakim could even electrify them and his entire body at will if he wanted to. With enough trial and error, he learned how to get them all under his full, voluntary control.

He could withdraw or extrude razor-sharp metal claws now. His vocal range expanded even further to include ranges he could voluntarily direct to slice rocks in half at a distance. His flight speed had been increased to an extent to which he could even break the sound barrier if he chose to do so. His flight to his homeland would have been impossible for any normal bat. He had a built-in fire extinguisher, but no flamethrower, not even a lighter. He was glad about that.

When Rakim had realized that his body was now indistinguishable from a cis guy's in every way, he'd wept for joy, at least at first. He'd never thought that something like this would have been possible for him, not in this life. Then he wept with rage and grief when he thought about how badly he wished that this transformation had not been tainted by just how much he'd had to lose as he'd gone through it.

It had been too high a cost for anything, to be sure, but one way or the other, there was no going back for him. As Rakim considered what to do in the aftermath of his drone-destroying spree, he realized that he needed answers for himself that he thought that no normal person could provide to him. In light of this, after much hesitation, Rakim grudgingly decided to do something that he'd always thought that he'd never do.

"I mean, how did you summon me?"

She didn't always remember to use the right kind of language to address her most recent audience right after being pulled through a dimensional portal. "Are you Mnemos?" the bat asked the rat. "How do you know my name?" Had Soma told him? Yes, even she owed Soma a favor. But then, he would never have betrayed her secret to someone, however he felt about that person, would he? Knowing her name gave someone some power over her, however limited.

"I thought I recognized you at the Bolgia after having read about you in one of Ogun's magic books one time," he answered her. "I'd never seen someone make the walls bleed before." She sighed. She'd hoped that hadn't been going to come back to bite her in the ass, but so much for that. "Oh, that's easy," she said, "you just kind of have to scare them straight. They'll bleed, you'll see. It's just an area of effect thing." He blinked. "What?" She shrugged. "Nevermind."

So Rakim had remembered how to trace her Seal, and he had gathered the ceremonial breadcrumbs. As he had solemnly tossed them into a magic circle like an old man at a duck pond, six pigeons had appeared from the sky to come peck them up off the ground in it before they coalesced in a mess of feathers to become the rat's head, torso and four limbs. The half-goddess, half-demon, all-rat of Memory, Mnemos, looked him up and down, gauging him.

"None of your people have summoned me for quite some time, and not many of you overall, at that." In ancient days, a lot of alchemy had started in the Middle East, inspiring Greco-Roman philosophers to develop their own take on it. Yet over the years, Rakim's people had put serious restrictions on the use of several kinds of magic, including evocation. "Many of you believe none of you ever should," she tilted her head at him inquiringly. "Desperate times," he explained uncomfortably, looking at his feet. "Fair enough," she shrugged off. "You had something to ask me?" He stopped, and thought about his question for a moment.

"How are you?"

This time it was her turn to blink in surprise. "That was your question?" No one who had summoned her had ever asked her how she was before. "Well, no," he answered, "it just seemed that, before asking anything else about me, it'd be more considerate to start by asking how you were doing, you know?" She considered this. Most summoners typically launched into a litany of demands. If he meant it, it was almost... refreshing? Did she get refreshed by things anymore?

"I was just being chased, actually." She may as well have answered truthfully. What was he really going to do if she did? So she took his question at face value. If he meant it, he'd be glad she did. If he didn't, then to hell with him, she grinned privately to herself. "So a little out of breath for now but, for what it's worth, I guess you inadvertently pulled me out of a bit of a jam," she recognized. "It should take them a bit to figure out where I went, before they can catch up with me." He raised an eyebrow at her quizzically. "Do you get chased a lot?" She scoffed. "Rats get chased by cats, don't you know?"

He looked at her disbelievingly. "What kind of cats would chase a rat like you, though?" What a curious fellow. Should she have been more careful around him after all? He seemed so harmless. "Well, there's SpeedRun, a cheetah so fast that, when she stops running, her spots keep going without her, DamageBoost, a puma with BDSM-based powers, and RNG, a chaos panther who's also a black hole." She scanned his face for signs of the names' recognition, somewhat reassured to find none. "And they're all after you, all the time?" She gave him a look. "No, that's just right now." He almost gasped. "There are nine of them in all. Nine lives for the Cat's Eye."

He thought about the implications of what she'd said, not just for the world in general, but for her life in particular. "So you always have to be on the go, don't you?" he asked her. "You never really get the chance to settle down anywhere." She wasn't sure how long she had with him, and knew she shouldn't waste too much time talking to him, but part of her was enjoying this conversation for what it was while it lasted. Why not? "It never feels like long enough, now that you mention it, no. It may seem ironic to you, but... I envy mortals sometimes, people who get to settle places, even though some of you may envy me for all I know."

Rakim nodded. "It's always easy to envy people when you don't know just how hard they really have it, isn't it?" She chuckled. "It is." He tilted his head at her. "What do they want with you?" She sighed, and shook her head. "The Cat's Eye has always wanted to extinguish Memory. When they burned Alexandria, when they burned the witches, when they burned books in bonfires, they were always trying to kill me. It's what they do."

It was so much for him to take in, that there was this whole layer of a world above his world that he had never known about, with its own rules and problems and things that seemed mundane when they were being taken for granted from within by people who had always existed alongside them. "So there are other... embodied concepts, like you, out there?" The rat nodded. "I've met Deconstruction, for one. She's much nicer than most people seem to think, really."

Deconstruction was a rabbit magician who could disassemble her body parts at will.

The bat thought about the possibilities that such things may have opened up. "Have you ever met Death?" A chill seemed to go down Mnemos' spine. "Why, you want to talk to her?" Apparently even the rat could be scared. "I was wondering if I could bargain with Death," Rakim said in a bittersweet, wistful way, fully aware of how farfetched it sounded. "Death doesn't make exceptions." He thought about her wording. "Can I argue for life on _everyone's_behalf, then?"

She looked at him with a pained expression that said 'This is the part of my job I hate.'

"Listen, kid... You seem like a nice kid. I'm gonna give you a piece of advice: stop and think about it for a second. Imagine someone so heartless, so resistant to sentiment, that she was there at every death ever since the beginning of time, that her essence was not only not weakened but actually strengthened by this, and that it had always been so... Well kid, do you think you could make someone so entrenched, so heartless, and so powerful change her mind?"

Rakim winced. "Probably not," he shook his head regretfully.

"Every time someone dies, all of their memories that no one else remembers from them disappear. And that loss damages me... Death and I aren't friends. We're not even on speaking terms. So no, unfortunately, I can't help you talk to her." The bat sighed, and nodded in response. "I understand," he said. "The best I can do is Taxes," she added, tongue firmly in cheek. Oh, Death and Taxes - very funny, Rakim rolled his eyes to himself in his mind.

"Are you a goddess, Mnemos? Is that what your people are?" She seemed to infer something from what he'd asked. "You've been having a little crisis of faith, haven't you?" His expression told her she was right. "Well, are you, though?" he pressed on. She furrowed her brow. "Some of us think we are. Personally, I don't think so, to be honest. To me that just sounds arrogant. I mean, I know we might seem like it from your perspective I guess, but it's not really how I tend to see myself. My powers feel like they have too many limits for that, and I didn't create the world. I don't legislate morality. I just try to continue to exist day after day, like you."

It all depended on what someone's definition of a god was. "So what are you, then?" She didn't want to lie to him, but she still wanted to give him an answer that he could understand. "You've seen people do glitch runs of video games before, haven't you?" He nodded. "Yeah." What did that have to do with this?

"Imagine being a resident of a game world for a moment... You see this character, being controlled by a player you know nothing about, walk backwards, go through portals, unlock powers with controller tricks... They do things that appear nonsensical to the people on their own layer, and it gives them access to options unimaginable to most players. They know how the rules work well enough to break them. It lets them slip between the cracks of their world."

For most of his life, the onus had been put on Rakim to prove he was a 'real man' to everyone around him. The implications of what it would mean for everyone to have been living in a putative virtual world in which no one was really 'real' after all were far from lost on him. "So you're players doing glitch runs of the world itself," Rakim continued her metaphor. "If that helps you, yes." For a moment, Ogun had allowed a player just like her to 'play' him. But how could a mere character remember a player's tricks? "Mnemos... Is there an afterlife?" He was going to have to get around to asking her eventually. "Will I ever see my mother there again?"

She weighed her words carefully. "Your mother is well-liked in the... gaming community," Mnemos answered. "She was a good bat character with good controls. They don't make many of those, you know." The lump in his throat had never felt so big.

"Is my God real? Have you met Him, Mnemos?" He was almost afraid to ask, but how could he not? When would he ever get the chance to ask again? "Your God keeps a low profile," she said, "or at least that's what people say about Him. I'm afraid I don't know for sure." He was perplexed by this. "You really don't know?" She gave him a look confirming that she really meant it. "There are atheists and believers even among us 'gods,' if you can believe that."

He tilted his head at her. "What about you?" She winced. What a delicate question that was. "I have to admit I'm personally kind of an atheist, Rakim... For some reason, I just tend to think that, at the layer of reality that people like me exist at, if there really was one, great, big, overarching God, we would know. Then again, you could just as easily make the argument that the layer above us is just as invisible to us as our layer is usually invisible to people like you..."

So even she didn't have an answer for him. He couldn't really blame her for that. Not everyone he talked to was going to have all the answers.

"I suppose if it becomes a matter of knowing for sure, it's no longer really about faith, is it?" she asked him. "All of my life," he answered, "for all matters having to do with how I should live my life, how I should treat others, how to be kind, I always felt like I could turn to faith for guidance, and trust it not to lead me wrong. It was one of the single few guiding principles that I based my life on. On some level, I still feel that way, about how to deal with the living, I mean."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "And about the rest of it?" He sighed. "Ever since my mother died, I've been questioning whether or not believing in God and in an afterlife would ever be enough to be able to help me accept the pain of her death. But every time I turn to this belief for help about this... It still hurts! It just hurts so much. Nothing I try to tell myself about it can make the pain go away. I just can't accept it, no matter how hard I try."

She didn't want to admit to him how much she related to him about that. "I get that. Maybe we're not supposed to ever accept it, for all I know," Mnemos shook her head. "You really looked up to her a lot, didn't you?" Rakim became angry at himself. "For all the good that did her! She deserved better than to die like this, Mnemos!" She didn't look dismissive. "Everyone deserves better than this," she answered seriously. She looked sad.

"I know, but... she was the one who was the hero, Mnemos. She was the one who saved others, the main character of the story of our lives. I was the one who was a secondary character in her life. She deserved better than to die from something that she saves people from every day, that I couldn't even save her from the one time she needed me to, when my turn came to. I wasn't able to rescue her, just as she rescued others... How can I ever forgive myself for that?"

"You're not a firefighter, Rakim," she said matter-of-factly. "I know you've been trying to live up to her for a long time, but if even the people who worked with her every day, who she trusted with her life, weren't able to save her, it makes sense that you couldn't. Your mother was a warrior. She died at the hands of fire, her most hated adversary. Would she ever have listened to anyone asking her to quit? I don't think so. She lived her own life, and died a warrior's death."

Rakim sighed. He knew she was right, on some level. It would have been foolish for him to have expected his mother to limit her life so that she could make it all about taking care of him. She'd taken risks to rescue others than him because it had been her decision to make.

"You're the goddess of Memory, aren't you?" He was going somewhere with this, Mnemos could tell. "In a manner of speaking, yes." He nodded. "I need to ask you something about my memories since what happened." A look of understanding dawned on her face. "Ah, yes, you'd want to know about that, wouldn't you?" She seemed to know what he meant, he noticed. "Tell me, Mnemos... Why can't I remember my own mother's face?"

She had a grave, somber expression. "I could technically tell you that, but... it doesn't seem fair for me to be the one to tell you." He looked puzzled. "So someone else should be the one to tell me, then? Can you tell me who that is, how to get to them?" "You already know how to get to them," she told him, "it's someone you know very well. I have every reason to believe they'll tell you. If they don't... drop me a line, why don't you." She was reasonably confident that it wouldn't come to that, but it seemed like a considerate offer for her to make, in any case. He was shocked when she told him, although he supposed that perhaps he shouldn't have been.

"Do you have any more advice for me?" She thought about his question for a moment. "Well, kid... It's your life, so ultimately, you should probably do what you'd do, not what I'd do. That said, if there's anything I've learned in billions of years' existence, it's that love can be pretty hard to come by... It can get pretty lonely all by your lonesome among all those billions of stars out there. In all this time, I barely ever found it at all... I wouldn't let go of it lightly if I were you. But I'm me. How would I know, you know?" He took in what she'd said, and slowly nodded. "Can I ask you just one last thing before I go?" She gestured for him to do so. "Shoot."

"In all your years, have you ever seen a moth spin herself into a cocoon of flames?"

Mnemos scratched her head a bit. "Not that I can remember offhand... That doesn't mean I can tell you it never happened, mind you. You'd have to ask a moth, I'd think." Rakim forced a smile. "Thanks. I'd always wondered about that." She shrugged. "No harm in asking, kid."

A woman seemed to walk out from behind an invisible curtain next to where Mnemos was. "They're on our trail, dear," she affectionately reproached the rat. Mnemos grunted knowingly, following her into a hole that the newcomer had just created in the ground next to them.

"Yes, Taxes," Mnemos answered her girlfriend dutifully on her way down.

***

"Mother," he'd asked her, "did you ever wonder what I'd be like if I hadn't been your son? If I hadn't been an immigrant, or a bat, or trans, or gay, or a Muslim? What do you think I'd be like then?" What odd questions kids asked their parents sometimes, she'd thought.

"Then you wouldn't be Rakim," she'd smiled at him.

***

"Did I ever tell you what happened when I tried to draw the Prophet, Ogun?" The chimera was nervous, but could only answer truthfully. "I don't think so, no." A cautious answer, but one that Rakim thought rang true. "He was a figure I admired. Kids like to draw figures they admire, you know? But my mother told me why we choose not to do that. Do you know why we don't do that, Ogun?"

He scratched his lion head. "I think I might, but it seems like I should let you tell me what she said right now," his dragon head answered gingerly as well. "She told me that the Prophet was supposed to be able to be the idea that all of us had of perfection. And since no one's depiction of Him would ever be perfect, because all people are flawed, they could never hope to do Him justice, could they?"

His ram head whimpered. "I knew I could never do you justice either, Rakim," his snake head admitted. "Are you telling me you really wish I hadn't tried?" his lion head asked him. "Well... I'm no Prophet," the bat chuckled grimly. "I was never perfect to begin with. I always felt broken, needing to be repaired in some way. Now I guess I finally have been, after all this time." He craned his dragon head forward. "So what are you telling me, then?" Rakim looked at him as if he'd been trying to see into his soul.

"Why can't I remember what my mother's face looks like, Ogun? Can you tell me that?"

That was the question, wasn't it? He'd always intended on answering it, but he'd always been dreading it all the same. "When we were trying to put you back together, Rakim..." It hit him just how much he felt like Isis having put Osiris back together after he'd been shattered into a thousand pieces. "... We had to make some tough calls. There was no time." The bat looked at him expectantly. "The brain is still a very mysterious organ, Rakim. We had to improvise."

The bat's eyes narrowed. "Is my mind still my mind, Ogun?"

"Yes... and no, depending on how you look at it," was all Ogun could say in response.

"What did you mean about my brain? What happened to it?" His ram head couldn't meet Rakim's gaze as it spoke. "We weren't able to save your flesh brain, Rakim. Well, we were able to save some of it, but... just not enough. We couldn't get what was left to work on its own. So I, so we... I had to make you another one. There was no other way to make you 'work.'" The bat considered the endless implications of this.

"But how?" His snake head looked even more sheepish than his ram head had when its turn came to speak. "I programmed into your new brain everything that I remembered you having ever told me... Every conversation we had, what every place where we'd gone had looked like. I did searches for places you'd been that I'd never seen, to find images of them to give you. I put in every game you'd played, every book you'd read, your fighting style, every song I could track down you'd ever heard, every life event you told me about having been through..."

His lion head had to take over as his snake head ran out of breath, which almost never happened. "I managed to get the data from all of your chats, all of your e-mails, every YouTube video you'd ever watched, your personal logs, your browser history... I used them to recreate all of your memories, bit by bit. School, your home, bullies, your mom, our dates, your meals, your fights, our jokes, our dances, your friends... I talked to Soma, to Scylla, to your gorgon friend, even to Betta, to capture their impressions of you, and put in how you'd acted around them. Everything you had conflicted feelings about, the way you'd always move that rug back..."

"But that's where it goes!" the bat couldn't help but to jump in and insist, just as he always had. "Oh my God," he added, noticing what he'd just said, "you really did bring me back, didn't you?" Rakim shook his head disbelievingly. "So that means... Did you go through all my stuff? Do you now know me better than I know myself?" Ogun looked downcast, but was doing his best, reminding himself that it made sense that Rakim would've had a lot of questions.

"I must've seen a small part of it by accident when I was getting the data out. I always looked away as fast as I could to try to see as little as possible, but I wasn't always able to. Of course, I can't make you trust me if you don't... I don't have any evidence of what happened. You have the power to decide not to believe me, if you choose to. Even now, telling you this, I have no idea what you'll say. I'm crossing my fingers you'll believe me, but I don't know."

Rakim tilted his head at him. "But I thought you programmed my behavior into me?" How could Ogun not have been able to predict his behavior, in a context like that? "I programmed in your memories, opinions, thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs, habits, attitudes, the pros and cons you saw to various issues, the factors that affected you when you'd changed your mind about certain things over the course of your life... I don't have a script of anything you might ever say from now on though. Every factor in you can combine with many other factors in ways that are mathematically unpredictable. You were made to be... emergent. Generative."

This was a lot for the bat to take in, but... It was a start, for what it was.

"So if I wanted to leave again, you couldn't do anything about it?" Ogun looked grim. "Believe me, if it had been up to me, you wouldn't have left the first time. But I couldn't do anything about it then, and I still can't now." Rakim nodded. "You see, Ogun... Most people create machines to do something for them, something that they want done, but that they don't want to have to do themselves. The machine is a... service creature, of sorts, isn't it?" The chimera nodded grudgingly. "Most of the time, it is." What troubled waters he'd ventured into, the more Ogun stopped and thought about it.

"You see, in a sense, it's almost like you're my god now, isn't it? I mean, you did sort of create me now, didn't you?" he asked Ogun. "I don't think of it as that," the chimera answered. "Your experiences, your decisions, everything you accomplished, everyone you've ever met... It's the events of your life that shaped you that created you, the version of you that I tried to rebuild, in the first place. I could never have come up with that on my own from nothing. It wouldn't have meant anything if I had. It's only the person you were that gives meaning to the person you are now. That meaning... I didn't create that. I could never have created that."

The bat seemed to understand what he meant. "I didn't try to 'make' you. I tried to give you a prosthetic brain, to save who you were." Like a video game character starting back from a save point, Rakim couldn't help but think. "Religion is a kind of prosthetic, isn't it?" the bat mused. "We can't live with having lost someone, so we make another version of them in our minds to try to heal some of our pain with it, a version of our loved ones that will never die."

The chimera nodded. "It's true I did always think we came up with religion because death was so fundamentally unacceptable to us that we had to come up with a way to refuse it somehow," his lion head admitted. "But I didn't bring you back for me. I brought you back for you. All I know is, I told my gods it wasn't fair to expect me to go on living in a world without you, and somehow they listened to me. I brought you back because I love you, Rakim. So if you need to go to prove to yourself that I didn't program you to stay, I won't force you to stay... I'll just really miss you a lot," his dragon head's voice broke with emotion as he spoke.

"So the reason I can't remember her face... It's because you never saw it, isn't it?" He shook his ram head no. "She always chose to keep on her veil around me. So I didn't really have a point of reference for what her face looked like." Rakim remembered that she'd showed him her face a few times, it was so eerie, remembering having told the chimera about it, but not remembering what it had actually looked like. He thought about his gorgon friend, the one who he had always met only in the dark, who refused to be seen as either a man or a woman, but who the bat knew through his echolocation, through sharing their voices in the dark with each other.

"My mother didn't want people's opinions of her to be based on how she looked. That was something that was always important to her," Rakim remembered, "she used to talk about it. Ogun..." He tilted his snake head at Rakim. "Yeah?" It wasn't an easy question but Rakim pushed himself to ask it. "Do you think we can bring her back someday, the same way you brought me back?" The chimera winced.

"I want to figure out a way to bring her back." Rakim thought about it more. "I want to be able to bring you back, too. I want to be able to..." Rakim trailed off. "Ogun, I want to be able to bring everyone back someday. I don't want there to be death anymore. I want to teach everyone how to fly." The chimera stopped and thought about what the bat had said. "I'd never done what I did that night before. I don't know if my namesake would agree to help me again... I'm the one who owes him a favor now. This almost never happens for anyone in the first place. So I don't know," Ogun admitted.

"I'd have to reverse-engineer how I did it while blacked out for you, but... there could be a way, for all I know." Rakim nodded. "I know it's unlikely. It just seems like if, somehow, we could do it, it would really be worth it, wouldn't it?" Ogun had to agree to that. "The best things in life are there to be shared, that's what we used to say, isn't it?" his ram head answered. "It took a lot though... I had to do some serious digging for spare parts when I was putting you back together." The bat tilted his head at him. "You did?" His lion head nodded. "Even after having gone on a total junkyard spree, I had to scavenge everything from my place."

Rakim gasped. "You mean... your consoles, radio, speakers, synth, TV, DVD player, computer, phone...?" Ogun gave him a meaningful look. "You're all of them now. They all came apart and had to be put back together, to give you life. Uh... You can basically play music and get channel five now. If you want. I guess." The chimera looked down at his feet awkwardly like a schoolboy. "Is anything left?" Ogun brought out his hand from behind his back.

It was his clockwork butterfly, fluttering off from his finger to go perch itself on a nearby branch.

"Oh, Ogun!" Rakim finally jumped at the chimera, throwing his arms around his boyfriend's torso, nuzzling each of his heads in turn as relieved sobs wracked Ogun's body. His love had finally come home to him after all. "Of course I still love you! I could never stop loving you. My brain is different, but my heart is the same. It's still the same heart that fell in love with you..."

And Ogun's clockwork butterfly flew off its branch to fly up toward the sky, the sunlight shining around it blindingly as though it was going to fly all the way up into the sun itself...

Chapter 27: Into The Abyss

'Let me hammer him today!' (Pink Floyd, The Trial)

Mano's path led her back up out of the water and into a corridor that led her to a rowboat on a canal. Approaching the rowboat to sit down in it and pick up its oars, a chill went down her spine when she saw that Atlan, having predicted that she would go down this path, had hung the carcasses of feral cows upside-down on each side of the canal, as though she were rowing her merry way through an underground butcher shop. It wasn't like he just kept meat in reserve to eat it and this was where he kept it. It had been designed specifically to lower her emotional defenses by damaging what were literally her sacred cows, over a twisted anti-Ganges.

Her three eyes narrowed.

This was typical of the way that Atlan would deliberately misinterpret Eli's words to justify his cruelty toward others. Eli had never stopped Mano from being Hindu, or Fugue from being Shinto, or Ammut from being Christian. Ultimately, her main concern had never been about ultimate reality, but about doing everything she could to help people down here on Earth. Relieved to reach the end of the canal, Mano stopped rowing to step out of the rowboat and back onto dry land, onward into the inky darkness. When she reached the end of a white marble path between columns, Mano found what seemed to be a doorway with two torches on its sides.

It was a double door, also made of marble, but there were no doorknobs or doorknockers for her to use to open it. There was no way for her to slide either of them to the side, or to push either of them inward or outward. Carved into the surface of the marble doors were scales, like the Zodiac symbol for the Libra sign that represented sublimation. On the left scale, which was raised, was carved a heart. On the right scale, which was lowered, was carved a feather.

Guessing the solution to the puzzle that was presented to her, Mano pulled down on the carving of the heart on the left while pushing up the carving of the feather on the right, opening the door in front of her to a sound that Rakim would have recognized from the Zelda games. The puzzle had been designed so as to be disheartening for her, in spite of and even because of the fact that she had found its solution. She could only enter into the next room with a heavy heart.

Mano did a double-take when she stepped onto the circular marble platform set in the square room around it. She was forced to take a few more steps forward than she'd initially been planning to because she realized that, since the center of the room seemed to rest on a very precarious and small balancing point under it, if she stayed too near its edge, the platform would topple in her direction, causing her to slide right off it. She could see steam rising from a pit of boiling water below her, lit with a reddish glow against the room's darkness above it to make it give her the impression of it being a lake of fire.

"Fancy some steamed octopus, Your Worship?"

That was when Mano noticed a jellyfish/anglerfish hybrid wearing a toga standing in front of her on the opposite side of the platform facing her. She was holding a long white staff by her side that Mano first mistook for a spear or a halberd before quickly realizing that its end was shaped like a gavel. She looked like she could have belonged on Olympus or in the Heavens, if not for the hellish glow shining through her transparent body from below.

"My what?" Mano scratched the back of her head with one of her many hands.

"You see, unlike you, I actually do believe in Atlan's plan for fish kind. Unfortunately, he got it into his head that he could get you to help us by having you add your credibility to his word, to recruit you to cement fish loyalty to the Fishist cause. This is a mistake." Maat was wearing a blindfold, the lantern-like protrusion coming out of her forehead the only other source of light in the room than the reddish light illuminating the bubbling boiling water below them. Mano understood that Maat couldn't see anyway, and that she was relying completely on sound and on the position of the see-saw-like platform below them to gauge Mano's location near her.

"What makes you think that?"

It was true that Mano, having known what she'd learned about what Atlan had been prepared to do to get his followers to remain loyal to him, would not have joined Atlan for the world by that point. Be that as it may, she was curious to hear why Maat would have come to this conclusion herself. "It's true that there are those among us who believe that there is something divine about you. Because of your connection to Eli, some of us believe that you are her Prophet while she is our goddess, or even that she was the Prophet, and you the goddess she prophesized for us. But if you're here to stop Atlan, I find it hard to believe that you would truly be."

Mano nodded. "I am." What was the point of lying to her about it?

"If Atlan can twist your arm into helping us, I'll defer to his judgment, of course - whatever gets the job done. But as it stands, I believe you killed Eli." Mano's three eyes widened. "Eli stopped her heart with yoga." Maat raised an eyebrow at her. "And who did she learn it from?" Maat extended her gavel to the side to emphasize her point. "No, you could've saved Eli, just as you could've helped us from the start. But you chose not to, because you envied her for her talent and fans. So you let her get so sad that she wanted to die, and gave her the means to do it, to get her out of the way. Now that the hard work is done, you're back for us."

Mano shook her head. "This is madness!" Maat struck the ground with her gavel-spear. "I'll be the judge and jury of that! I'll try the whole cause and condemn you to death!" At this, Maat disappeared right in front of her somehow. The walls of the room flickered, as though they were screens waiting to project some kind of image to her, but everything that Mano was about to see was going to seem to take place completely on the circular platform itself.

A hybrid between a shark, a crocodile and a lion appeared before her. "You should have talked to her more often," he reproached her before throwing up on the platform. As he vanished, his vomit coalesced into an otter just as Mandrake could coalesce from water to otter, but it was Bridges, not Mandrake. "You should have helped her cross the ocean," he told Mano, bouncing a pebble on the floor from him to her as though the floor had been water. Mano raised her hands to protect her face from being hit by the pebble, but it never came. "Why couldn't you have convinced her to stay?" Fugue asked while throwing a harpoon that pierced Klein running away.

"You shouldn't have been a believer," Klein told Mano as Fugue nailed him to an upside-down cross with his spikes between two giant butterflies. "It was your duty to protect her," a chameleon admonished her while rescuing the poor harpoon, spikes and cross from the wall as Klein fell upside-down into the reddish boiling water below. "Why did you let her throw it all away?" Shinai asked her, standing in a ring of fire, growing a scorpion tail to sting himself.

"You didn't understand her gender," Rakim accused her as he walked searing out of the flames that had engulfed and consumed Shinai the moment before. "You should've known how to repair her," Ogun told her as he threw a bucket of water on Rakim, putting him out but short-circuiting his electronic components as he did. "Have you burned down any new lives today?" Betta asked her as she fire kicked Ogun to ashes.

"You should've helped Eli to forget," a rat with pigeon wings told her while disintegrating into dissolving pigeon feathers in front of her. "She was doomed when you two first met," a lobster in a tuxedo assured her from a giant lobster tank. "I talk people out of this every day!" Mandrake chastised her exasperatedly from his therapist's couch over his notepad before melting away along with his couch and notepad as Boko desperately tried to catch them.

"As you cowered underwater," started Scylla as she dehydrated while tied to a pole above the waves until she dissolved into sand that joined the sand on the beach. "You left us up here without power," Milgram continued, electric current flickering through her as though she'd been a defective lightbulb. "Don't you think we'd hide if we'd found a way?" a white lion/snake-taur hybrid golem she'd never met asked her in turn before chiseling himself to dust.

"You got too caught up in your self-care," Soma levelled at her while struggling to escape from one of his web-vine-hydra cocoons as he burned within it. "So now that we've caught you unaware," Maat reappeared to bring her white spear-gavel down on Mano's head, only to disappear right before it would have hit as Mano had raised her arms to block it. "Don't you think that it's time you joined the fray?" a dolphin asked her in unison with all the others.

***

"Submit to the glory of Christ or face eternal damnation," Eli had read the sign she'd noticed that someone had pinned to a telephone pole while she and Mano had been walking down the street. Eli ripped it down. "I swear, blackmail's the last refuge of people who don't think anyone would ever agree with them if they had a choice," Mano had shaken her head. "Everybody do what I say, or the monkey gets it!" Eli had said, getting Mano in a headlock.

"You wouldn't hurt an innocent monkey, would you?" she'd asked Mano, raising an eyebrow at her as she'd pretended to hold an imaginary gun to Mano's head. "That depends," Mano had laughed, pulling her head out of Eli's headlock with what Eli liked to call her octopus 'squeezability,' "does the monkey prove that Darwin was right?" Eli had laughed. "Garbage belongs in the trash," Eli had finished, throwing the ripped prospectus into a nearby trash can.

Mano would always smile when she'd remember this. They'd loved each other so much...

***

"Get a load of this!"

Maat had turned her head left and right in vain, looking for where the voice was coming from. It clearly wasn't Mano's voice. It wasn't even coming from anywhere near Mano. "I move for a mistrial!" Somehow it seemed to have been coming from everywhere around them at once, but how could this have been possible? "Who goes there?" Maat asked, raising her spear-gavel in a way she hoped to appear menacing while still trying to track the miscreant down.

"I swear, it's like they didn't even_try_."

Maat's expression looked like she did not see the humor in the situation. "I never sounded like this when I used to read poetry to you, did I?" Mano recognized the voice. "Show yourself!" Maat didn't. "Of course you didn't," Mano answered her, "I would've told you that." Maat didn't understand what was happening. "Good. You've gotten to know these people over the years, haven't you, Mano?" Mano nodded. "Based on everything you've come to know and love about them, do you really think that any of these people would tell you any of what these versions of them told you just now in real life?" Mano shook her head. "I don't think so."

An approving tongue click reverberated throughout the room. "That's my girl." Maat struck the ground with her white spear-gavel again. "Order in the court!" Maat shouted. "I always told you that you understood me better than anyone, didn't I?" The voice seemed to have been ignoring Maat completely, as though she didn't even exist. "You did," Mano answered. "So who are you gonna believe, them or me, huh?" Mano nodded. "You, of course." Maat raised and spread her arms in exasperation. "This is highly irregular!" "_You're_irregular," the voice finally told Maat dismissively. Mano laughed.

"Do you remember the walrus and the carpenter, Mano?" Mano nodded. "Yes. The carpenter lied to the fish who believed him, and led them to their deaths." Maat's mind wouldn't have been ready to comprehend what was happening even if it had been explained to her. It contradicted her worldview much too starkly for that. "Exactly. Carpenters, judges, basically, Mano, when all you have is a hammer... everything looks like a nail," Elizabeth asserted.

"You will cease and desist!" Maat barked, swinging her white spear-gavel around randomly by this point, desperately hoping she'd luck out and swing it wherever the originator of the voice could've been. "I will do no such thing," Eli told her 'fan' who had no idea who she was, "and neither will the woman I love," Eli smiled at Mano. "Give 'em hell, darling," Eli winked at Mano.

"YOU'RE IN CONTEMPT!"

Maat threw her white spear-gavel across the room at Mano, hitting her squarely in one of her six arms, causing Mano to scream and a dark purplish blotch to appear on her peachy fish skin where her internal injury had just been caused. Mano winced as she realized that she couldn't even rub the spot where it had hit to assess how much damage it had caused because it hurt too much for her to even go anywhere near it. Mano could no longer move that arm at all.

"The jury finds you guilty, and I sentence you to suffer the full penalty of law!"

Mano had always known that her people were capable of doing certain things that no one else ever could've. Spitting ink was one of them, but there would have been no point in Mano spitting ink in the eyes of an opponent who couldn't even see thus who didn't rely on seeing in the first place. To catch Maat off-guard, Mano was going to have to think outside the box. It looked like it was going to mean having to do something that she knew that she could do, but that she had always hoped that she could go through the rest of her life without ever getting into a situation in which it would be the only thing that she could do. Desperate times, and so on.

"I gave Eli everything I had," Mano told Maat simply.

Screaming as she braced herself for the pain that she knew she was about to experience, Mano ripped her useless arm right out of its socket, as octopi had done to deter their predators since time immemorial. Swinging it behind her for momentum, she threw it toward Maat right over her head. When it first landed on her, Maat didn't understand what had just happened. When Mano's arm started moving and picked her nose, Maat screamed, and passed right out.

"I'd give everything for her again," Mano finished, stepping over Maat's limp form.

***

"Hey, Mano," Eli had told her one day, "you know how you think of Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu, or how some Jews and Muslims still think of Jesus as some kind of prophet, even though they don't think of him as God?" Mano had gestured at her to continue. "I like that people would try to interpret someone else's version of events in a way where it's consistent with their worldview, but still trying to show respect to other people's somehow, you know?"

_ Mano had smiled. "You're right, there's something to be said for that, isn't it?" Eli had nodded. "Sometimes, Mano," Eli had told her, "I like to think that Jesus, Buddha, the whole lot of them, were just poets, atheists, and activists, just like I am," she'd added. "I like to imagine that, in their own way, they were just trying to change the world for the better. But people took them at their word, and made a religion out of it. It's silly that I'd think things like that, isn't it?"_

***

Mano, now sporting only five arms, walked through a corridor made of glass, deep underwater. Nothing else in the underwater complex now stood between Mano and the humbling sight of the wide, open ocean, everywhere around her, beneath her feet and over her head. At first, she could only hear the whale songs, but it didn't take long before she saw the whales that they were coming from, slow, feral, gigantic compared to her, beyond measure.

"Can you hear the whales around us, Mano?"

She could hear him speaking to her long before she'd reached the final room in his lair. "Landlubbers say the whales are singing," he went on, "but they're wrong." He sounded as though he were completely sure of himself, revealing a truth that should've been obvious to her. "The whales are crying, Mano." Whale songs had been one of Mano's favorite things to listen to on her MP3 player when she'd been recovering from Eli's death soon after it'd happened. "Crying for the loss of their loved ones." She'd listened to whale songs whenever she'd been on public transit on the surface. "Soon, the world will drown in their tears, just as it deserves to."

She didn't care to have him turn something that had been such a source of comfort to her into a tool of violence against air-breathers because he'd always hated them anyway. "You don't know why the whales are singing," she spat at him. "You're not a whale." She'd just walked into a large glass cube where, deep underwater, they were not so much whale watchers as whale watchees. "And you're certainly not a fish!" She frowned at him. "Yet you barge in as if you owned the place, turn fish against fish, and you have the nerve to do it in my dead girlfriend's name, as if it weren't bad enough." She wasn't about to let him get away with that.

"Maybe you didn't know her as well as you thought you did," he tried to provoke her. "Maybe if you'd paid closer attention when she'd talked to you, you'd have joined us of your own free will already." She couldn't tell whether Atlan believed his own lies, or if he was consciously using them to manipulate his followers without believing in them himself. "You can still take your place in History. Join us! You can still be remembered as a Fishist heroine for us."

The truth of the matter was that, as a dolphin, unlike fish, and unlike other mammals, Atlan was always both sleeping and awake at the same time. The right and left hemispheres of his brain would alternate between being asleep and awake one at a time, always switching back and forth, so that he was always dreaming, even when he was up and about while he did. Atlan's mind was conditioned to be able to think of something both as a lie and as truth simultaneously.

"You don't understand whales or fish as well as you think you do," Mano told him understatedly. "There's more to their lives than crying over their dead, though that may be. They're also singing for their loved ones who are still alive. Whether someone erases their joy or their suffering, they're still being erased. Dolphins mostly eat fish, as far as I know. But we fish aren't the fools you think. We won't let you reduce us to so little as that without a fight."

He looked at her menacingly. "Then fight you shall."

Not so long ago, even with the Kalaripayattu that her mother had taught her, Mano would have had a hard time holding her own against Atlan. This was because, for a long time after Eli's death, Mano had had to go through life with only two hearts, since one of her hearts had stopped beating along with Eli's in sympathetic pain. It may have seemed redundant from an external perspective, but Mano had three sets of two arms each, and each set of arms required the energy from one heart to operate it. With two hearts, Mano only had enough strength to operate four of her arms, but still had six to operate, which really took the wind out of her.

But Soma had asked for Rakim's help to restart her heart by shocking Mano in his grove.

So Mano now faced Atlan with five arms, but with three hearts, which meant that she had more than enough strength to operate all five of them without reserve. Atlan was fast, and deceptively strong for his diminutive size, but he was finding out that he'd underestimated Mano's skill. He still repeatedly surprised her - on some level, she had to be impressed that he could hold his own against her at all, let alone that fact that he was giving her some serious trouble, considering the fact that she had three arms and two hearts going for her that he did not. But she'd trained with discipline, and with her determination, she stayed one step ahead of him.

"Is this all you've got, tyrant?"

He gritted his teeth, redoubling his efforts to break through her rapidly shifting defensive wall of arms, throwing his whole body into it. The room slowly filled with water around them as they fought, their kicks splashing some of the water at each other while it did, neither of them letting it take them off-guard enough to let down their guard because of it. Eventually, the whole room had become filled with water, all the way above their heads, their battle now underwater.

The question entered Mano's mind as to what she'd have to do with Atlan when she'd win. It wasn't an easy question. For the first time, Mano was coming to realize just how difficult to disentangle some of the ethical dilemmas that had been posed to people dealing with cults and early religions alike all over the world could have been. Should Mano have killed Atlan? But if she killed him, just as he had killed others, would it mean that she would turn Eli's legacy into a religion of violence herself after all, having proven that violence had been the best solution to the problem that Atlan had caused them, inspiring others to do the same in turn?

Yet if she didn't kill him, he who had already killed dozens of people without having had any compunctions about it whatsoever and who was overtly planning to kill half of everyone in the world, wasn't she clinging to her principles too strictly? Wouldn't that have meant sacrificing Atlan's potential victims on the altar of respecting her own beliefs, with her doing so on behalf of many people who did not share her beliefs themselves? Wouldn't have it been arrogant for her to risk all of his potential victims' lives to keep her conscience clear? Or was this just another lie that she'd have been telling herself as an excuse to avenge her girlfriend on a personal level?

Finally, Mano got an idea. She'd never done something like this herself, but there always had to be a first time for everything. She wasn't sure of whether it would work or not, or of what it would do even if it did work, but it would have to be better than nothing. If it didn't work, she would have to try something else, but Atlan was proving surprisingly resilient, his desperation driving him to riskier yet more devastating attacks the more he couldn't accept the eventuality that he could possibly lose to her. She had to try something. "Will you just DIE?" he screamed at her garbled by the water after having just missed her with yet another of his desperation moves.

So Mano stung Atlan with a syringe filled with the most massive dose of the empathy drug that she'd invented which had ever been absorbed by anyone and he collapsed, unconscious.

Chapter 28: Down the Stream

'You can't free a fish from water.' (217th Rule of Acquisition)

"I told you that there'd be another Great Flood," Boko chided Klein, "but you didn't believe me, did you?" Descartes looked Boko up and down. He had no idea who this chameleon could be, or how he had found his way so deep into Atlan's lair unnoticed. Klein felt fear coursing through him as he wondered how far back Boko had been following him. He'd been on Mano's sub. Had Boko been in Soma's grove? Had he been in the alley where Fugue had found him? Or had Boko been following Klein since even before then, without Klein ever having had any idea that he was being watched the whole time? There was no way for Klein to find out.

"Who is this interloper?" Descartes asked Klein, indignant that their fight would have been interrupted the way it had been. "How do you do it, Klein?" Boko was ignoring Descartes completely. "What do you mean?" Klein wasn't sure what Boko was talking about. "Well, Klein... I've been doing some thinking recently," Boko started. "You see, when you first left me, I just thought it'd been my fault for having believed that you could be better than you were. I thought I'd been a fool to worship you like an object, when you couldn't help the fact that you were just a mere person. You could never be made to have the clarity of purpose of an object."

Klein could hear that the path that led them there had filled completely with water now.

"But then, after a while, something happened to me that I hadn't seen coming, something that made me question whether I should've paid closer attention to some of the things you'd said to me after all," Boko continued as water started seeping into the room under the door. "It's not important what happened specifically," Boko hastened to add, less than eager to share his defeat at the hands of Diaz with anyone, "but it recontextualized a lot of what I'd done until then. So, I started wondering if you may have been onto something. I left Noah's Vault behind for a while, and I wandered the world in search of some kind of answer..."

If Boko wanted to keep talking until they drowned, let him, Descartes thought to himself.

"After a while of having searched, and of not having found what I was looking for, I started thinking that, since you'd been the first person to make me question some of my most hardened assumptions about life, that maybe I should try to track you back down, to see if you might have known what the next step on my path should be," Boko explained painstakingly. "So how to you do it?" he'd asked Klein. "How do I do what?" Klein still wasn't sure what he meant.

"How do you let yourself get attached to people when you know they're going to die?"

Klein thought about it. He certainly hadn't expected that kind of question from Boko, of all people. Klein still knew enough to be scared of Boko, of course. Boko was still a serial killer who'd indoctrinated Klein into a destructive belief system without Klein having even realized that was what had been happening for a time. Klein would never be foolish enough to trust Boko again. Be that as it may, it seemed like the truth couldn't hurt him, so he may as well have said it.

"When you find people you really care about, people you feel empathy for, Boko, if that ever happens to you... You're going to understand why you're going to be willing to spend as much time with them as you're going to be able to, even if in the back of your mind you know that they're going to disappear someday. When you meet someone like that... life just becomes unbearable without them. So yeah, you still let it happen, and you don't look back. I don't know if I can explain it to you any better than that. I guess it's the kind of thing that you need to experience yourself to really be able to understand it for some reason. That's my answer."

Boko seemed disappointed at first, as if he'd secretly been hoping for an easier answer, but he stopped and thought about it, turning it over in his mind until his expression slowly changed to resigned acceptance. "I suppose that's the best answer I can probably get from anyone about this," Boko told Klein. "Thank you for having taken the time to give me an honest answer, Klein."

Before Descartes could move, Boko had already wrapped his tail around the lobster's body to slam Descartes' body on the ground to his left and right and left before holding the lobster up in the air in front of him. "How do we get out of here?" "I'll never talk!" Descartes had sputtered. Boko slammed him on the ground again to his right and left and right. "There's a switch in the path behind you that brings the water down. But you'll never make it! It's designed to be so far back from here that it's impossible for any air-breather to reach it from here without drowning in the process," Descartes had revealed to them, "so you'll never make it out alive."

Descartes yelped as Boko threw him behind himself with his tail like an old fruit peel. "So what exactly do we do, Klein?" A cold sweat ran down Klein's back. "I don't know. At this point I have no idea whether Fugue or Mano will make it out of where they are or not. So if neither fish can free us from the flooded path... I guess that's it. We're done for." Boko pondered this, a dubious expression on his face. "Should we have another go of it, for old times' sake?"

Before Klein could answer Boko's suggestion, he saw a stingray come out of the path that had led them there, wet but with the water in the path that she'd just come out of decidedly lowering. "It's you!" Klein exclaimed. It was the stingray who'd taught Klein capoeira and candomblé during his trip to Brazil all that time ago! "How did you find us here?" She shook her head, shaking some of the water off from her journey there.

"I was one of the earliest Fishists. It seemed to make sense after what happened to Eli. At first, our movement reminded me of capoeira's early days. My forefathers had also taken guerilla measures to fight against oppression, just as we were. After a while, I saw that Atlan had more in common with the slave owners that my ancestors had fought to liberate themselves from than with those who had freed themselves from slavery themselves. If there's anything I'd learned to do from them, it was to bide my time while waiting for the right opportunity to escape to present itself. When you and your friends attacked this place, I finally saw my chance, and took it."

So she led them out of Atlan's lair, back to Mano's sub, where they joined Fugue, Ammut, and Mano carrying Atlan's limp body onboard before piloting them all back to shore in her Love Craft.

***

Rakim managed to catch Wintermute in just the same kind of hold that he'd caught Betta in that time. Without thinking, Rakim used his wing to redirect his bat screech right at her head. Without missing a beat, the carp, unharmed by his attack, broke out of his hold, and didn't hear him scream when she broke his arm, either. It hurt so much! He felt so stupid. How had he forgotten that, being deaf, she wouldn't be affected by his sonic attacks at all? Yet there he was.

What neither of them had noticed was that, while Rakim had kept Wintermute distracted, an atlas moth had flown in on the scene, up toward Scylla's pole to start untying the shark's bonds behind her back. When she'd finally finished untying her, Rakim heard a splash, and looked behind Wintermute, noticing that Scylla had fallen into the water at last, where her body could be rehydrated in time so that she wouldn't die from dehydration after all. Noticing that Rakim had noticed something behind her, Wintermute had turned around just in time to see the atlas moth land in front of her, and blow a mysterious powder from her hand into the carp's face.

Wintermute was out like a light snoring ashore as the tide moved back and forth over her.

"Thank you for saving my girlfriend," the atlas moth told Rakim while helping him get up in spite of having just had his arm broken, "I really appreciate it." Rakim didn't know that Scylla had met someone yet, but he was happy for her to learn that she had. She'd wanted to for such a long time. Transitioning seemed to have done the shark so much good. It would've been so stupid for her to have died without having gotten the chance to enjoy it, he thought grimly.

"Thank you for saving me from Sub-Zero over here," Rakim stuck his tongue out. "Don't mention it," she said. "After all," she shrugged, "the atlas moth is the most altruistic of all moths." He couldn't tell whether she was kidding or not. "You and my love both seem to be in need of medical attention, though," she went on, "do you know somewhere we could go to get some of it for each of you?" Rakim nodded. "I'm sure Soma can help us both. Follow me."

***

Soma was having a pretty hard time himself.

Mandrake grumbled to himself about how hard Soma had pushed himself before finally admitting that he'd been pushing himself too hard, after how badly Betta had damaged Soma's health. Now that it was time for Soma to start working on healing Milgram from Atlan's hold on her, before he would finish healing Ogun the rest of the way beyond emergency stabilization, Soma realized that he was out of strength, and couldn't keep going. Worst of all, it was nightfall.

Soma had been as diurnal as Rakim had been nocturnal. As a dryad and as a reptile, Soma got much of his energy from the sun's warmth, and it was difficult for him to stay awake at night. He and Rakim usually dated around dawn or dusk, compromising by meeting each other halfway. However, Soma wouldn't be able to keep working at saving their lives if he fell asleep and, like someone with a concussion, if he fell asleep then, there was a risk he wouldn't wake up.

Mandrake related Soma to the environment in general for more than just because Soma was a dryad. Like the environment, people always seemed to assume that Soma's resources were limitless, when in fact Mandrake knew better than most people that his extraordinary powers still had limits just like everyone else's, they were just different. All their time together, Mandrake had been afraid that, someday, Soma would work himself to death, and it seemed on the horizon.

Like Rakim, Mandrake's people had usually frowned on all forms of evocation since ancient times, but, like Rakim, Mandrake was reaching a point where it was a matter of life and death, so desperate times called for desperate measures. Throwing breadcrumbs into a six-pointed star on the ground in front of him, Mandrake recited the incantation that Soma had taught him to summon Soma's master, who Mandrake had known about, but had never met. Six pigeons coalesced into her from the sky while Rakim landed near them with Scylla and her moth girlfriend.

"Oh, you again!" Mnemos told Rakim. "It's been a while, hasn't it?" Rakim told her. "Huh? Oh, I guess," the rat shrugged. She was always surprised by how mortals seemed to experience time differently than she did, but she adapted to it as well as she could when they did. "My poor boy," she said, caressing the drowsy Soma's face as she did, "you guarded my grove so well," she added. "Thank you, Soma." He smiled at her weakly. "Anything for you," he said.

So she sat on the ground by him and, taking out her flute, began to play for him. Plants and snakes had always responded to music well, even when it was a completely natural process. Music helped plants grow, and snakes were fascinated by flute playing in general. Rakim even noticed that the music that Mnemos was playing for her Soma sounded like snake charming music. If her music could turn books into trees, what could it do for someone like Soma?

But what really caught Rakim's attention was the moth.

Standing in the center of a clearing in Soma's grove as the sun finished setting over the horizon, she began to spin. She was dressed like a dervish, Rakim couldn't help noticing, just as his mother had told him that her Sufi master had been when she'd been growing up back home. She span slowly, at least at first, but faster and faster as time went on, until it seemed as though the friction from her spinning motion was beginning to ignite her body.

Before long, the moth had spun herself into a fiery tornado, coalescing into a large sphere of fire over the grove. The half-moth, half-Ifrit hybrid became a second sun at night for Soma's snake-dryad body to draw the same strength from that he drew from the sun itself during the day. Rakim had not fully believed his mother about those stories she'd told him since he'd been a child, but there he was. She hadn't been kidding when she'd told him that all Ifrits weren't evil.

"Well," Mnemos paused her playing to say, "there's something you don't see every day."

***

When Mano's empathy drug had hit Atlan's metabolism, something unexpected had taken place. No one who'd ever tried her empathy drug had ever been a dolphin or a serial killer, and no one had ever taken such a massive dose of it at once. These were three factors that were necessarily going to affect which effect it would have in ways that she couldn't have predicted until having tried.

Atlan had fallen into such a deep sleep that, even though he wasn't getting any closer or further from dying, he was functionally in a coma for what seemed like it was going to be the rest of his life. When Mandrake used his MRI machine to measure Atlan's brain activity, he told Mano that Atlan was now always dreaming with both hemispheres of his brain, without ever being awake. By putting end to end the scans of which images Atlan's dream brain activity amounted to, it was possible to determine what the dreams he was having were. It turned out that Mano's empathy drug had worked after all.

Finally empathizing with the people he'd killed after a lifetime of never having felt empathy for anyone, because he'd been forced to, Atlan had fallen into a dream state in which he lived, from beginning to end, the lives of the people whose deaths he'd been responsible for. Not just their deaths, and the suffering he'd inflicted on them, but their whole, complete, complex lives, from their troubled youths through their growth process to their adult years. Once he'd finished living one person's entire life over, Atlan would start living another of his victim's lives from the start all over again, always reliving his own specific, never-ending version of samsara.

Perversely, Atlan became all that was left that was preserved of the lives that he'd destroyed, a way in which the people he'd wanted to disappear would exist forever through him.

As for Mano, she continued her lucid dreams of Eli, but she began to sleep much fewer hours a day than she'd been doing since Eli's death had first hit her. When she would be about to wake up, she would perform an invocation ritual with Eli in her dream, just as Ogun the chimera had performed with Ogun the loa. She'd summon Eli's spirit into herself to guide her actions throughout the day. When she would fall back asleep, Mano would perform an evocation ritual in her dream, just as Rakim and Mandrake had performed with Mnemos, drawing Eli's spirit back out of her body to stand in front of her so Mano could still talk to Eli while she dreamt.

With Eli's spirit guiding her actions, Mano rose to the challenge that the rise of Fishism had presented to her. She told them that, while she may or may not have been a divine messiah, she would do everything in her power to help continue leading the battle for fish rights, just as Eli had done before her. Mano knew that it wouldn't have been enough to simply dismantle Atlan's cult to let his followers fend for themselves. At best it would've simply made them prey for the next set of easy solutions to come along for someone else's convenience. She considered everything they had to offer, all the needs they had to meet, the problems they had to address.

She turned Atlan's underwater lair into the first refuge and shelter for homeless fish.

Mano made sure to emphasize the roles of everyone who had helped her achieve her goal. Ammut, Fugue, Milgram, Scylla, Klein's stingray teacher, and even Betta once she'd been released after Soma saved Milgram, would be remembered as Fishist saints. Their ability and willingness to break through Atlan's conditioning became an inspiration to fish everywhere that they could also decondition themselves and others from all other social conditioning that had, for the benefit of the powerful, been designed to restrict their ability to exist. Soma, Mandrake, Rakim and Klein would become reminders that even over-grounders could be helpful to fish.

With Eli as her witness, Mano would make sure that Eli's legacy would become something that she would have been proud of, not ashamed of, just as Eli had wished that someone had done for those who had started every other religion that had ended up being corrupted by power in time. Fishists were encouraged to practice Fishism alongside any religion they wanted, or no religion at all. They were encouraged to exercise critical thinking about all belief systems they encountered, without ever reducing those who practiced them to cardboard cutouts. They were encouraged to treat people on a case-by-case basis, based on their behavior.

The vast majority of Fishists thought of Fishism as a philosophy, but only a small minority of them took some of its aspects literally.

Fishism became open even to believers who weren't fish themselves. While fish rights still were and would always be the main focus of Fishism, Fishists became encouraged to extend the same rights they would want to surface dwellers in turn. For over-grounders, the meaning of Fishism could be extended to include any situation in which you wished that you could force other people to empathize with your pain, just so that they could finally understand what you were going through. Fishists were encouraged to vent the pain that they'd experienced rather than to repress it, like water being let out through a dam so that the dam wouldn't burst.

In time, Fishism became known as a religion of peace.

The first commandment of Fishism is still that fish are people.

***

Having finally broken out of jail after all this time, Bridges just wandered into Diaz's hideout unhindered. Having initially mistaken Bridges for Mandrake, when Bridges asked Diaz if Diaz wanted to go out with him to the Bolgia, Diaz simply accepted. Once Diaz realized that Bridges wasn't Mandrake, though, Diaz was already at the Bolgia, had already met Klein, Mano, Rakim and Ogun. Diaz decided to keep going out with Bridges, who had 'stolen' him, after all.

They are still together.