FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Darkness embraced me as I entered exhibition hall three at the Oakenford Games Convention. Excited, disembodied voices chattered around me while my eyes adjusted to the dim light. I was surrounded by posters and booths that advertised the latest in role-playing games and paraphernalia. Vendors sold foam swords and leather armour for the upcoming LARP event and cos-players paraded the hall, some sword in hand, others hand in hand and pushing baby strollers.

I exhaled slowly. So far, so good.

Nobody seemed to take any notice of me, so I tried to relax and flipped through the latest issue of Dragon Magazine and White Dwarf at the book sellers. One main feature read Uncommon loot for high level players. I turned to the later pages and read a comic strip by Phil Foglio. It made sense and I laughed out loud -louder than you would normally do from a comic strip and the vendor cast me a suspicious glance. I bought the magazine and walked away from the booth, clutching it tight. On the cover page, a muscular barbarian, a red dragon and a Valkyrie with very large breasts beckoned me to open it and take a second look.

_It's still there, _I convinced myself, and then turned the pages to

Uncommon loot for high level players.

Told you!

I began to whistle and headed into the open square. The food court was nearby, tempting me with promises of spicy kebab and mugs of mead from draught. It had been so long since I had last bought my own meal, and I strode across the floor, proud as a king, towards a hand-painted sign on the sales cart that read:

Kebab and Blood, Five Euros.

An icy shiver crystallised down my spine and I stopped midstep.

No, no, no! I prayed and blinked. When I opened my eyes, the sign read

Kebab and Coke, Five Euros.

A mistake -an honest mistake. _These things happen in the dim light and all the excitement. I had read the sign wrong, but I had to make sure. Sweat from my hands had dissolved the print on the magazine cover and the barbarian's face was now an unrecognisable smear. _Please God, I thought. Don't let it have changed on me. Once again, I turned to the same feature article, but this time it read:

Uncommon death for low level traitors.

I threw the magazine into the nearest wastebasket. I had been at the Oakenford Games Convention for less than an hour, and now I realised that coming here was a mistake.

"There he is!" cried a woman.

I wanted to dive into the nearest corner and hide in the darkness. I only hoped the woman was for real, and that she meant someone else, but I could not see anyone pointing or gesturing at me.

"What is he doing here?" said a man.

"He shouldn't be here", replied the woman. She sounded concerned.

"It's too dangerous."

I leaned up against an exhibition armoury and let the coolness of plate metal rest against my forehead. It felt good, for I was sweating profusely and felt panic on the rise.

There was no doubt: I was having an episode.

---

I was diagnosed with schizophrenia seven years ago. I was eighteen and one confused mess of voices and things that weren't there.

I was a pretty normal teenager until I turned seventeen. I've heard voices since I was five or six; sometimes a single word called out from nowhere, but nothing to be alarmed about.

Then, one night I woke up and heard someone talking. It was three in the morning and I thought that my parents had left the television on, when they went to bed. The house lay in darkness, but when I turned the lights on, the bulbs didn't illuminate the living room very much. Everything was still cast in shadows and the light was dim and dreamlike. The TV set was off, but the voices still kept talking. I couldn't make out what they were talking about, although I thought I recognised the words. The language sounded vaguely like English, German and French all mixed together, but I couldn't make out any whole sentences. I figured that my parents had watched a movie in foreign, possibly Dutch before heading off to bed, and the TV set must be on the fritz.

The voices began to make me feel uncomfortable. Even though I did not understand the words, I felt that they were somehow malicious, and judgemental. There was definitely something wrong about them, so I unplugged the TV set from the wall socket and expected the noises to stop. Only, they didn't. They were just as loud as before and I felt that their anger was directed at me. I went back to bed and closed every door behind me to get away from the voices, but even though I hid beneath the duvet, the voices kept talking. I was frightened, but somehow I managed to fall asleep some time later.

The next morning the voices were gone, and I told my parents about the TV and how it had kept me awake. My dad turned the set on and off a few times, but we found nothing wrong with the picture or the sound. Finally I wrote the whole thing off as a strange kind of nightmare and only hoped that it wouldn't return.

A few months later, the nightmare returned and stayed with me for the next seven years. I heard voices that could not be traced to the TV anymore. They were as real as any other voice around me, and I could swear that the people talking were standing right next to me, but when I turned around there was no one there or only someone else engaged in another conversation. At first, the voices made no sense, but gradually I began to understand the words. Most of the time, the voices talked about me, making comments on what I was doing. Then they began to criticize me and my actions.

"Useless!" one voice would say, "he's useless."

"Why is he even alive?" asked another. "If they knew, they would all hate him."

I began to see things that I was told weren't there. I saw large bugs crawling the wall, and living shadows where the sun shouldn't cast any. The letters on magazines and books rearranged themselves into new sentences, most of which involved death. Shortly after, I was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and this introduced me to a new world of interesting pharmaceuticals.

Thorazine, Haldol, Loxapine, Trilafon, Mellaril, Navanem, Stelazine. All names of my new best friends for the next seven years to come. One by one they would stay with me for a while, put a stop to the voices and the sights, until I grew tolerant to them and I moved on to the next name on the list.

---

Here I was, seven years older and panicking on Kisantex. I was still hearing voices on the new medication, but the voices were not as angry or aggressive as they had been before. They didn't command me to do things, or criticize my every action, but seemed to be content with forming a sort of commentary track to everything I did.

_I shouldn't have gone to an RPG con of all places. _

The dim lights, the crowd and the walking dead cosplayers fucked with my mind and everyone around me gradually turned zombie-like. Their faces were gaunt and everyone stared at me with empty eye sockets.

_Shit! The pills are not working anymore. _I was panicking badly and needed to escape the crowd and get some fresh air.

I ran towards the nearest fire exit and flung myself though the door. I was in a concrete basement corridor that branched off every thirty feet or so. Clear green arrows showed the way out and I stumbled ahead, just wanting the hallucinations to stop and leave me alone. I heard a loud noise like a thunderclap that sent echoes through the corridor and kept looping in my mind until the feedback turned into a high-pitched wail. I bolted and almost crashed into a tall figure in a grey suit that stood unmoving in the corridor. He was as real as any person, but his face was horrible and deflated, and his hollow eye sockets leaked bloody tears. I stumbled as I ran past him and caught my shoulder on the end of a pipe that protruded from the wall. I winced and cried out in pain and almost fell flat on my face. There was another loud thunderclap in my mind, and the wall launched an army of grey flying creatures. I rounded a corner and found two figures sitting on the floor. Both figures were human, and one had a zombie face with very large eyes. The other looked like a regular human. I stopped and looked at the odd pair. The human had short red hair and a short cropped red moustache and a goatee. A pair of glasses, framed in silvery wire dangled aimlessly halfway across his face. His eyes stared, but not at me. Instead his gaze seemed fixed at some point in the ceiling. The zombie creature was kneeling down and held on to the human. Its mouth formed words that I could not hear.

"They are all zombies," I screamed and tried to drown out the noise in my head. I put both hands to my ears, but it did little to stop the noise. "Then you'll need this," said the zombie and offered me a short, magic wand.

Hallucination or not, I needed to get away from this place.

"Don't take it!" said the male voice in my head. "It's too dangerous."

"He must take it," said the female. "It's poison."

"Shut up!" I screamed at the voices. "Shut the fuck up, and help me for once."

"Then take it," said both voices, and I accepted the magic wand. The zombie made a strange howling noise and pointed a bony hand towards the end of the hall where I had come from. The tall creature that I previously bumped into had rounded the corner and was sliding through the corridor towards me, holding what looked like a snake in his hand. There was another thunderclap, and the snake hissed and flicked a forked tongue at me. It spat a stream of poison at me that hit my leg, and I tumbled to the floor.

Poisoned! I cried, the snake poisoned me. I got to my feet again and crawled the last few feet towards the exit.

---

I was out in the sun and the light blinded my eyes. I stumbled up a short flight of stairs with a leg that wouldn't quite carry me.

"The snake bit me," I shouted at passing convention goers, then I fell and could not get back up. Come on, the snake was only a hallucination, I tried to convince myself. I have had hallucination dogs bite me before and it hurts just like a real bite, but it normally goes away when I blink.

Two men grabbed me by the arms and helped me to my feet. I recognised them as convention security by their clothes and their badges. Everything was back to normal and people looked human again. The only non-human creatures within sight were the usual cosplayers dressed as elves and kitsunes that you find at any RPG convention. I was relieved that the episode was over, but I decided to visit my psychiatrist first thing Monday, and try to get some other medication, cause this one sure as fuck wasn't working.

"You're not going anywhere, buddy," said the guard. "Not with that bullet in your leg." I looked at my leg, and with the hallucinations dispelled, the wound was clearly not a snakebite - I had been shot.

---

"I really don't know what to tell you." I was sitting across the desk from Lt Amari Quinn at the Oakenford police station. "I have schizophrenia and I was hallucinating bad in there."

"A man was killed in there. Shot," said Lt. Quinn. "He was shot with the same gun that put a bullet in your leg. Hallucinating or not, you are the only witness to the murder."

"Zombies," I cried. "I saw everyone turning into zombies. Guests, guards, the three people in the fire exit corridor. When I have an attack, I can't tell what's real and what's hallucination."

"You mentioned three people?" asked Quinn.

"The tall guy with bleeding eyes who shot at me, the one who screamed and gave me a magic wand, and the normal looking one."

"Could this be the normal looking one?" Lt. Quinn slid a photo towards me. It was a portrait of a friendly looking man with short red hair, red beard and wireframe glasses. It was the same man I had seen in the basement. I nodded.

"His name was Kendall Duran", said Quinn. "Ever heard of him?"

I shrugged.

"He went to the Oakenford convention to promote a new board game he'd designed; something called "Future Battalion."

"I didn't have the time to look at too many games before I panicked."

"So," said Quinn. "We've established the identity of the victim. We still need to figure out who the third person is."

I was afraid to look at the photo again, in case the face came alive. I already heard voices hiding in the sound of the cooling fan just waiting to break free, and my leg hurt from the stitches. I desperately wanted to go home and hide.

"There is one major problem, though" said Quinn. "You may not recognise the murderer.

-but he knows exactly what you look like, and he knows that you're a witness."

- - -

"Tell me, Mr Wolf. Do you hear voices right now?"

I nodded. "They are hiding in the traffic noise."

"Can you describe them to me?"

"Man and woman, both sound young and old at the same time."

The police had designated me a psychiatrist named Burris. Exactly where they had managed to pick up a shrink with such short notice was a mystery to me, but he certainly looked the part. He was in his mid-forties, wore horn-rimmed glasses and a salt-and-pepper beard, and he smoked a pipe. He was the perfect stereotype, and I disliked him from the moment we shook hands.

"What are the voices saying to you?"

"They are telling me, that you are one of them."

"ME?" Dr. Burris looked slightly bemused. He lit his pipe, and a scent of sweet tobacco filled the room. I was tempted to tell him not to smoke, get up, stand right behind him and shout

Smoking kills , motherfucker!

That oughta give him an impression of how real the voices are.

"I never thought my life was interesting enough to make me one of them." He smiled and made a half-hearted attempt at a laugh, but I noticed the flame on his burning match tremble slightly.

"Do you understand why we are having this discussion, Mr Wolf?"

Sometimes, when you catch a shrink off guard, he will slip into the authoritative _ I am the doctor and you are my patient_, mode. This one was no exception.

"I've seen shrinks for the past seven years," I said. "I've grown used to these little talks. You've got my journal; you know I'm unreliable."

Dr. Burris leaned forward. He spoke to me as if he believed I was hard of hearing. "You were witness to a murder -the only witness," he said. "Your eyes have seen the killer, but your brain has superimposed another face on top of the real one. If we can strip away that layer of hallucination together, your input could be vital to the investigation.

I sighed. "I saw zombies. The murderer was a zombie and so was the third person."

Concentrating was difficult. Sometimes the voices are clear and outspoken, other times they hide in some background noise. Today they stayed put, and leapt out with any passing noise.

"Don't answer him", a car drove through a puddle and made a splash.

"He's one of them!" someone closed the sliding door of a van.

Dr. Burris kept talking to me, while I found comfort in looking at a begonia in the window. I'd like to crawl into the plant and hide there while the police solved the case without my help. I was so tired.

---

"The magic wand?" Burris had changed the subject. Had I answered any of his questions? I wasn't sure.

"What about it?"

"Was there anything inside of it?"

"Inside?"

"Did it contain anything?"

The question struck me as odd. Why would a hallucinated magic wand contain anything? "I was being chased and shot at. I did not stop to look at the wand. I'm not even sure that it was real."

He nodded and smiled, but his hand clutched the pipe hard. So hard, that the tip of his index and middle fingers turned slightly white. I only wanted to know who had shot at me, but I got the impression that Burris had another priority: he wanted to find the wand.

---

I decided to return to the convention centre. It was the last day of the_ _Oakenford Games Con, and I hoped that retracing my steps would uncover some of the events that my mind had coated with a layer of hallucination. Before I entered the centre, I took an additional 50mg of kisantex on top of the 50 I'd taken only two hours earlier that morning. I'd rather feel lethargic than go through another episode.

I entered through the same door as before and swore to take it easy. I headed straight for the newsstand and bought another copy of White Dwarf. The barbarian, the red dragon and the Valkyrie on the front page cover did not move or change in size or looks. The big-breasted Valkyrie had a mouth that was halfway open. Her eyes were sultry and beckoned me to tear off her brass bikini and grind up to my ankles while the barbarian watched. The artist had drawn her that way to make the reader get horny and buy the magazine, but I observed the metrics of her tits from a purely technical angle; when I'm on meds, nothing happens down below. Zilch. My dick is reduced to urethrae and my mind clouds over, like when you have a head cold. Still, I was happy and confident that the double dose of meds would keep an episode at bay.

I passed the food court and remembered that I still had some unfinished business with a kebab. I double checked that the hand-painted sign read

Kebab and Coke, five Euros,

like it was supposed to. Two customers waited in line ahead of me, and both ordered the one dish available from the stand, both with a side of fries. When it was my turn, I got the impression that the sales assistant looked at me for a very long time - too long for the casual glance over. He looked out of place too among the convention goers. He was muscular, almost professionally so, and his way of handling the food items was not natural to him. He took my order and began preparing it with his back turned. He was very slow in preparing my food and drink. I handed him a fiver and left with my tray, then walked around the stand to a round cafe table at the far end of the food court. When I took a sip of my coke, there was an unpleasant metallic taste to it.

"Don't drink it!" it was the male voice in my head.

"I thought I had Kisantex'ed you fuckers into oblivion."

"He's poisoned it," added the female.

Screw the coke! I thought and took a bite of my kebab. That too, was tainted with the same metallic taste. Either the sales guy was one shitty cook, or my voices were right: someone was trying to poison me. I pushed the tray away and browsed the convention programme. What exactly I was doing here was anybody's guess. The only clue I had to work from was a single name, Kendall Duran - some games designer who had come to promote a board game. The convention programme had him booked at stand I-26 under the name of_Endurance Games_. It was in the cheap indie section, next to Pelligellus Games at I-28.

The table at I-26 was vacant of course, so I browsed through a number of games on display at the neighbouring Pelligellus. They carried mostly fantasy inspired games, with a few war-games in between.

"Ever played Moonzone?" asked the guy behind the counter. I estimated him to be in his mid-twenties, like me, but he wore a long beard in braids that made him look older.

"I was really looking to get a copy of Future Battalion", I said and looked around, but couldn't find the title on any of the boxes.

"Aww man!" Said the vendor. "That was Kendall's last game. Did you know him?"

"I've bumped into him on occasion", I said in agreement with the truth.

"Did you hear that he got mugged and shot, right outside the convention centre?"

"No, the mugging was new to me."

"Mike Ayers." He reached out to shake my hand. His shake was surprisingly timid for a guy his size, and his palm was soft. "I did the illustrations for Moonzone."

"Carter Wolf." The guy was visibly proud of his Moonzone game, and I figured that buying a copy would put me on his good side.

Mike put my copy of the game in a League of Legends plastic bag. "We knew that something was not right with Kendall, when he tried to sell Future Battalion at one hundred fifty euros a pop."

"Sounds pricey"

"Board games like that retail at forty; fifty at the max. But a hundred and fifty is insane."

I guess that makes two of us, I thought. Kendall Duran was not a novice to the games industry. Over the past ten years he had grown from an unknown games developer with Droid Disaster as his first title -a checkers-like game with a sci-fi theme. A series of experimental titles finally put him on the track that would ultimately prove his strongest. During his last six years in the business he produced a whole series of extremely accurate tactical war games, so accurate in fact, that they were used by the military for training purposes.

"Like this one," said Mike and showed me a heavy box illustrated with a tank on the box-top. "Bombs over Baghdad. You could play either as the Iraqi army or the US. This game had a winning tactic of teaming the 173rd Airborne Brigade with the Kurdish rebels outside Kirkuk, and you know what? It worked in real life. Secured the whole northern Iraq. Man, Kendall sure knew his tactics."

My heart skipped a beat, Mike had games by Kendall Duran in his shop. Maybe he also had a copy of Future Battalion.

Mike only rolled his eyes. "This dude came in and bought every single copy. Military guy, that was fifteen hundred smackers right there."

"He must have thought the game was really good, then."

"It wasn't," said Mike. "It was unbalanced."

"How'd you know? Does it say on the box: Warning, this game is unbalanced as fuck?"

Mike laughed and pointed to an area of the centre packed with tables and chairs. A crowd of seated people were bent over various games, most of which featured a large number of cards and counters.

"That's the demo area," said Mike. "All new games are out there for trying out."

"So, you didn't sell the last remaining copy to the military dude?"

Mike looked a little hurt by my suggestion. "Somebody was still playingit. I'd never sell a promo while it was in use." He pointed at a table in the playing area. There was some kind of tabletop game spread out on the surface, but the two chairs were vacant. "Wanna have a go?"

I nodded and Mike began to set up the pieces. Future Battalion was a combination of hex based strategy game, with a R&D phase on top. You could hire engineers to develop new weapons, with a line of futuristic sonic weapons being the most exciting.

Mike shrugged. "Once you get the sonic weapons, you pretty much win the game," he said. "No game lasts for more than twenty minutes."

"So, it's a race against time?"

"Duran really messed up the balance in this one," said Mike. "All the weapon descriptions are accurate, from the AK-47 to the M1 and_Berettas_. The sonics are of course made up, but boy, are they overpowered."

Mike picked out a handful of cards that showed the specifics of the weapons in the game. The cards stated a bunch of numbers that I didn't understand, but I guessed that they represented calibres and rounds contained in the magazines. I was anxious to see the specs for the sonic weapons, but when Mike put down a few cards, they all showed the same picture: a snake. Sonic rifle - a snake, Sonic grenade - a snake, sonic bazooka... I felt queasy, then the snake on the cards began to move and squirm.

Schizophrenic break on the rise; great! just what I needed.

I looked up from the map. The lighting in the hall dimmed, and Mike began to change in front of me. He was talking about rules and tactics, but the words no longer made sense to me. His looks had changed from that of a grown man to something childlike. I was playing a war-game with an obese child, and I laughed. It was hilarious; his words sounded like baby chatter to my ears, while he held up a handful of cards, all of which bore the same image.

When I looked down again, the map had changed. It was still a hex-map with playing pieces scattered across it, but I couldn't identify what pieces were mine. I knew that I was looking for something that I had lost, but couldn't remember what? Something important. At least the hallucination of Mike was benevolent. He had not changed into anything ominous or horrible, only a large, comical infant.

Then it struck me: he was innocent. My brain had interpreted that he had no part in the murder and projected him onto my mind as a babbling toddler.

"Here's here," said the female voice.

"What is he doing here?" said the male.

"He shouldn't be here", replied the woman. She sounded concerned.

"It's too dangerous."

"Guys, you're playing yesterday's tape!" I shouted at the voices. "I know I'm here. I was here the day before yesterday and yes, I'm here today also."

"Not you," said the male. "The tall man."

"He has come for you."

---

I was wide awake in a blink, and saw the tall man moving around among the stands and the tables. Zig-zagging among the cos-players, he made a path towards our table. He wore a different suit, but I recognised him instantly. My hallucinations came flowing fast now and his face was wrinkled and deflated, like a leaky beach ball.

"Why won't you show me his face?", I asked the voices.

"You see what we see,"said both voices.

"Shit!"

Mike was of no use. He moved the playing pieces to random positions across the map and giggled like a baby, or maybe he had already left and went back to his shop. At this point I couldn't tell anymore. I got up and made for the nearest exit. It led me to a short alley that connected to the main street. Any sane person would have taken to the street and either hid themselves in one of the shops along the way, or just kept running. But I am not a sane person, and my leg was all stitched up, so running was out of the question. In a few moments, the tall guy with the beach ball face would exit the convention centre and start to look for me, so I was pressed for time.

_ Going up_, I thought when I saw a ladder extend from the first floor fire exit._ _He won't expect me to go up. Climbing the ladder was going to kill my wounded leg, but I leapt up the first two stairs. To my surprise, I was still on the ground. I jumped again, and once again I was on the ground. I had no sense of distance or dimension and my legs were leaden. I could neither run nor jump.

"Help!", I cried silently.

"You must become," said the male voice.

"Of course," I agreed. "I must become." For some reason, the words made sense, so I became, and my legs grew strong and my arms long and powerful.

I felt myself changing, my vision grew secondary and I navigated through instinct alone. I climbed the staircase with ease, past the first floor and kept going until I reached the rooftop. Here I squatted down and watched the tall man searching for me outside the centre. He looked around, confused, then he looked up and down the main street. Finally he gave up looking for me and walked towards the parking lot.

I sat on the rooftop for almost an hour, waiting for things to return to normal. The double dose of Kisantex did not put a stop to my schizophrenic breaks, but they were easier to control than usual.

---

The vendors were closing their shops when I went back into the centre. Mike was busy rolling up the Pelligellus_banners and didn't notice my return. I didn't wish to bother him anymore, so I headed straight for the playing area, where the last remaining copy of _Future Battalion was left on the table and still in mid-game. I quickly scooped the pieces into the box and made for the exit. I had listened to the voices. I had become

• And it had saved my life.

- - -

Kamryn scratched the bridge of her nose, and then placed a second engineer token on the R&D section of her map. "Your move!" she said.

If my sister had assigned her researchers to a small project, such as a weapons upgrade, it wouldn't take her many turns to finish the project with two engineers.

"Alright," I said. A landscape of deserts and mountains populated with engineers and infantry sprawled before me and I evaluated my options. I could send a spy-piece across to peek at her secret-project, but I only had a single spy, and he could prove valuable later in the game. Instead I placed a mining token on the island of Ra'gesso. The added source of vitellium would almost double my cash-flow.

We had been studying the rules for Future Battalion since noon. They were not overly complicated, but the description for each weapon was extremely detailed, almost taking up half of the rules compendium itself. We skipped over most of it and went on to play the game.

After a few more turns, Kamryn turned over her project card; her engineers had completed the development of a Sonic Rifle.

"My secret project," she laughed. _"_I'm going hedgehog on you."

"Bring it on, sis."

That round, Kamryn obliterated my entire force at Ra'gesso. The next round, she conquered the mainland, and finally she pummelled into my home base and left it in ruins. My forces were virtually defenceless against her sonic troops and the game was over in less than thirty minutes.

Confused, we looked at each other.

"Did we miss something?"

"The game was really fun until that rifle came into play."

We read the instructions again and turned to the page on sonic weapons.

Non-sonic units have no defence score against sonics.

We set the game up again, and started a new round. This time we both focused our efforts on developing a line of sonic weapons. I won the race by developing the cheaper sonic pistol, and conquered her desert-based oil rigs. She responded by developing the sonic artillery, and soon we had wiped each other off the map. By the time every unit was dead, the game had lasted a full eighteen minutes.

"This game is no fun," said Kamryn. "From now on, everybody's just going to make sonic weapons in every game." She was right; the sonic weapons were overpowered, and made the game so unbalanced that it was almost unplayable. Kendall Duran had messed this one up real bad. Why he would try to promote it in this state was anybody's guess, and an asking price of hundred fifty euros was hopeless.

Kamryn studied the pile of cards representing the weaponry. "I don't think he was trying to sell the game," she said. "He was using the game to promote something else."

"Like sonic weapons? But they're not for real, are they?"

Kamryn shrugged. "The weapon reference in the manual mentions something called FAP -a Focused Accelerator Pulse, fitted in all the sonic weapons."

If Duran wasn't trying to sell the game, then what? On the back page, the developer credit was shared between two people: Kendall Duran and someone named Bill Holman. Duran had been shot and killed by the tall man, but I had a strong feeling that Holman might have been the third person in the basement - the one who passed me a magic wand. I hadn't thought much of it, being busy running for my life, but Dr. Burris had mentioned its importance.

"Did it contain anything?"

_What did you do with the damn thing?_I wondered. I must have held it for less than a minute before the security people helped me to my feet.

I drove back to the convention centre, where the maintenance crew was busy cleaning up after the attendees. Bin-bag upon bin-bag was being filled with game pieces, broken plastic militia and ketchup-stained napkins - the casualties of conventions. I grabbed a waste-bag and followed a crew member to a growing pile of refuse, next to the fire exit. This was the place, where I'd crawled two days prior, hands and knees with a chunk of lead in my leg and a magic wand in my hand. I had no idea what to look for, but it had to be here somewhere.

I could not trust my eyes, but my fingers had held the magic wand, and my mind travelled back to the seconds where Holman had handed it to me. He shouted something and my eyes had seen the object as a short wooden rod, but my tactile memory disagreed: the object was too large for my fingers to wrap around. I remembered touching a cool metal cylinder with a screw top at one end. The top was slightly narrower than the bottom, which was flat and probably meant for standing up. My fingers had scratched a slightly rough surface, as if a coat of paint was peeling off.

I dived into the pile of refuse bags, and worked my way towards the wall. Whatever the item had been, I must have thrown it away in panic and it would not be inside a bag. I scurried through discarded coke cans and food scraps like a rat for the better of an hour, before I found an object that was familiar to the touch. It was an aluminium drinking flask with a grey plastic screw-top; the type you carry along on a camping trip. It was decorated with the laughing face of Mickey Mouse, with the paint coming off in large flakes. Was this the magic wand?

Inside, I found six large photographic negatives of schematic drawings, curled up against the wall of the flask. The print was too small to read, but I was pretty sure that this was what everybody was after.

---

EnDurance Games was registered to an address in Warrington, fifty miles west of Oakenford. I searched the Internet for the address of anyone named Kendall Duran, and found three. One had a dentistry practice in Nerton, another was a real-estate agent from Padstoke, but the third shared address with EnDurance Games. Duran, it seemed, had worked from home. Alone, or with Bill Holman.

I drove to Warrington and arrived at Kendall Duran's late 1940s bungalow. Here I parked my car in an abandoned barn close to the property. Both the front and back garden were overgrown with bishop's weed, nettles and elderberry trees - a clear sign of the owner taking little interest in gardening. I was alone on the property with no neighbours in the immediate vicinity.

Off the path, a $115 grey resin zombie was clawing its way through the topsoil. Genuine, hand-detailed eyes were turned skyward and its mouth forever frozen in a Tor Johnson grimace. I recognised the figure from an in-flight issue of SkyMall mail order. The figure had seemed so large in the catalogue, but in reality it looked like a micro-cephalic midget losing a tug of war with mother earth.

So where did you put the North American cougar statue? I thought. The one that will "crouch in your garden to surprise and delight visitors with his stunning realism?"

I found him thirty feet further up the path, where his phosphorescent green gaze casually greeted any random visitor approaching the locked front door. I felt an almost guilt-ridden obligation to ring the doorbell, then knock on the door when nobody came to answer it. I knew that Duran was dead, but I was still trespassing on his property. Irritated, I stomped the ground. Coming this far only to face a locked door under the resinated scrutiny of a zombie and a cougar was frustration from concentrate, but truthfully, I didn't know what I had expected when I left for Warrington.

So, should I break a window or what? I pondered, and looked around for a suitable rock. Then I recognised it, and laughed out loud. It was the $10 Hide-a-key realistic rock, also from SkyMall. So realistic it looks like any other rock in the garden -provided that they are made from grey plastic. Here was one guy, who spent his in-flight time buying random crap.

I retrieved the key from the resin rock and let myself into the home of an avid games collector. Shelves were stacked with piles of board games, role-playing systems in several volumes, and cartridges from discontinued consoles. Two computer games lay on the kitchen table, still in their original shrink wrap: Action 52_for the NES system and _Plumbers don't wear Ties for the Panasonic 3DO. Both were sought after collectors' items, but the consoles for playing them were nowhere to be found in Duran's house. He struck me as a man who was driven by an obsessive attention to detail while being tugged along by sudden and impulsive whims. Three of his own games, Droid Disaster, Terra Nova and_,_ Bombs over Baghdad were piled on top of a shelving system next to dusty stacks of National Geographic. The design for every game was credited to Kendall Duran. Only for _Future Battalion_he had collaborated with someone else. I needed to find out who this Bill Holman was.

I was overcome by a sudden flash of nausea and my vision dimmed.Another episode, I realised, this time with some disinterest. I had gotten so used to the sudden onset of schizophrenic breaks over the past few days, that they were almost second nature to me now and I decided to roll with it. The noise of tires on gravel reached my ears, and when I looked out of the window a black BMW pulled up to the house. Three men in matching suit and crew-cut got out. They looked around, then one of the men lit a cigarette and stayed with the car while the two others passed through the front door without opening it.

Yep! I thought. I'm hallucinating a-gogo. The visions were not scary or threatening. In fact, they seemed entirely disinterested in me. I've always found it scary as fuck when a hallucination moves right into your face and disappears, so I moved out of their path whenever they got too close.

The two men flitted in and out of the various rooms in the house examining everything, while I watched. Part of the time they were solid to watch, and at other times I could see through them. It was like watching a faded VHS being projected onto reality. One of the men opened a wooden cabinet and took out a red ring binder. He browsed through the papers inside and his mouth moved, as if he was saying something. The other man joined him and nodded, and then they left the way they came, carrying the ring binder.

The veil of nausea lifted and my vision cleared. With the hallucinations gone, I was able to continue my investigation. The wooden cabinet that the visions had searched was real. It stood in his study, next to his PC and was still closed. I was curious to see what was inside.

Maybe I should have been surprised when I discovered the red ring-binder inside, but it felt only natural that it existed in reality. I don't know what I had expected to find in the binder; something marvellous perhaps; definitely something worth killing for, but all the binder contained was a bunch of monthly bank statements going back two years. He had received impressive royalties for his games every six months, in December and July, and his spending pattern was pretty simple. Most of his daily shopping was done at the local supermarket in Warrington. The only thing that stood out was a series of large sums being transferred to an account registered to Van Scoyk Enterprises. The first transfer was for a hundred Euros, but transfers grew more frequent, and the sum increased until he transferred several thousand Euros every month, right up to the last statement posted two weeks before the Con in Oakenford. At this point, his account was almost drained. At his current expenditure, Duran would have gone bankrupt within two or three months.

Was he being blackmailed, I wondered. 4G reception was decent in the area, so I did a GOOGLE search for Van Scoyk Enterprises on my smart-phone. The company showed up as the registrant for almost twenty websites:

_Mi Amigo Cash Casino, Atlantis Winnings, Champion Casino, Surefire Bets_among others -all of them were sites related to betting and casinos. Kendall Duran wasn't just a reclusive gamer - he was a compulsive gambler.

I returned the binder to the cabinet and closed it behind me. Then I heard a noise that I'd already heard once that day - that of car tires on gravel. I peeked out of the window, and saw the car I had hallucinated pulling up once again - only this time it was for real. I had fifteen seconds to act, while the men got out of the vehicle, looked around and lit a cigarette before they were in the house. So I made a quiet escape through the rear door and kept low in the bushes behind the house. From their first visit, I knew that the men would stay inside for approximately seven minutes before leaving by the front door, and I knew that I'd be safe in the backyard.

Once they had driven off, I returned to Kendall's study and checked the cabinet. This time the ring binder was missing, and I realised that what I had experienced was not a hallucination - I had seen a future event.

---

Did it contain anything? The words echoed in my mind. Only two people knew that I meant to return to the con: Lt. Amari Quinn and Dr Burris. Only Burris had shown any interest in the contents of the magic wand, so I decided to pay him a visit in his private practice. It was a non-descript building near the harbour in Oakenford. Property was cheap here and it wasn't the most obvious place to set up a practice. I double checked the business card he'd given me. Burris, Dr. Psych, Maritime Rd 31; fifth floor, then a telephone number. No email and no website. I climbed the staircase, then reality began to slip the moment my feet touched the third step.

Queasy, dreamlike and dark; my episodes always start like that and I rested my forehead against the wall, trying to assemble my thoughts. Then I saw them: first only as moving shadows out of the corner of my eye. Then, one by one they invaded my field of vision. Serious looking men in dark suits coming and going, some carrying electronic equipment and devices with microphones and antennas, and all wore short haircuts and long ties. A steady stream of shadowy government people went about their business paying me no attention.

This one is new I thought, and made a brief stop on the second landing. The strange visions headed to a floor further up and I had never observed my hallucinations to be this controlled. Usually I'll just see something standing lifeless in a corner, or maybe the stray cat scaling my wall. Everything about this was novel, so I decided to follow the busy people up the stairs. The stream of people continued all the way to the fifth floor, here they poured in and out of one particular door, never bothering to open it before they passed through. The sign on the door read "Burris, MD." I couldn't help smiling; was it a coincidence that my visions all pointed to my intended destination?

I didn't even bother to knock before entering. Burris looked slightly surprised, as if my timing was bad. He shook my hand and pointed to a leather chair. I smelled alcohol on his breath. It wasn't the rounded scent of yesterday's drink that he had just burped. The scent was sharp and fresh; he'd been drinking only moments ago. His handshake was firm but slightly sweaty.

I inspected the office from my chair while Burris took out a manila folder from the top drawer in his desk. My journal was at the top; apparently I was his only client. The practice was as clean as his patient file: he kept a bookcase, but no sandboxes, miniature figurines, plushies or picture puzzles

-there was nothing here to inspire the imagination, nothing to play with. The whole office was as generic as a movie set. It was too perfect, too stereotypical and too neutral. I didn't need any voices to tell me that this was a setup.

---

"So," said Dr Burris. "How are you progressing?"

"The wand?"

"Indeed, the wand symbolises magic and transformation; maybe even the cure to your condition."

"I've found it."

"Congratulations, you're getting close," he said. "This calls for a drink, don't you think?"

Burris opened a cabinet that contained several bottles of booze. He took out a bottle of _Farvale Bourbon_and two tumblers. It was two-thirds full, and the label was slightly moist from a recent splash of bourbon.

He's drinking to calm his nerves; I thought and accepted the tumbler with some hesitation. I recognised the smell from Dr. Burris' breath.

"Don't worry," he said when he noticed my hesitation. "It's not poisoned". His laugh was unconvincing.

"Of course not. You need me around until you have the microfilm."

"The microfilm?" Burris took a sip from his drink. Then he opened the canteen. "They're not in there, are they?"

"Does it really matter?" I asked. "You know I'm unreliable. I might just have hallucinated them."

Burris reached into the flask and pried out the strip of film inside with two fingers. He held it to the sunlight pouring in from the window. It was a beautiful day outside, but not as beautiful as the sudden look of frustration on Burris' face. Then he clipped the film onto a light-box, intended for viewing X-rays. From my position I couldn't see the pictures, but I knew that right now he was trying to make sense of a series of photos showing smiling people with cyan coloured faces playing beach ball against an alien landscape of black sand and a magenta sky. He looked at me, dumbfounded.

"What IS this shit?" he cried.

"Holiday snapshots. I bought a handful of negatives at the flea market before I came here."

Burris coughed and his voice turned strained. "When did you find out?"

"I've seen so many psychiatrists over the last seven years that I know to spot a fake." I nodded at my tumbler, still with its contents untouched. "Any real psychiatrist knows that alcohol is a strong trigger for schizophrenic breaks. You would never serve it to a patient."

Burris smiled and sat down. "Alright, Mr Wolf. Where are the real photos?"

"In a secret place. Call it my life policy."

"I expect that you wish to be compensated for your troubles."

"I only want the truth" I said. "Who are you and why did you kill Kendall Duran?"

Burris shrugged. "We're part of National intelligence. We keep the nation safe from outside threats - and for this we need to upgrade our weaponry now and then."

"And Duran had something you wanted?"

For the first time, Burris' laugh was genuine. Short, hateful and bursting with spite.

"Duran had nothing, but Holman had an invention."

"Sonic weaponry?"

"A sonic accelerator to be precise. It focuses the audio wave into a singularity, much like a laser concentrates a light beam. We believe Holman invented the accelerator when he worked for the French."

With every mentioning of Holman's name, Burris eyes grew colder, and now and then the tip of a forked tongue flicked from his mouth. He was relieved to vent his disgust for the inventor.

Holman knew that his invention was worth more than the salary the French intelligence paid him, so he kept his progress hidden, and made himself impossible to work with. Eventually, the French grew tired of him and laid him off. Then he took the blueprints and contacted Duran, who needed money to pay his gambling debts. The two struck a Faustian deal:

they knew that every army in the world would buy Future Battalion for training purposes, so they used the game to promote the blueprints on the black market. The high price-tag kept the casual gamers away, but national intelligence would snatch it up -whether it cost one hundred or a hundred-thousand euros. FBI, MI5, the KGB, Islamic State, North Korea; everybody wants the latest in weapons technology, and Holman was only too happy to deliver.

-"and you won the bid?" I guessed.

"The Russians came close, but we have a better reputation."

"Why the shooting?"

"Duran was always a liability. He panicked during the trade and wanted us to destroy the blueprints - he said the world was not ready for sonics.

"So, you killed him?"

"There is more at stake than the life of a single civilian"

"-or two?"

"Mr. Wolf; civilians disappear every day for the sake of national security."

"So when I went back to the convention centre, you sent the tall man to make me disappear?"

Dr Burris' spat out an unpleasant dry laugh. "Agent Bruckner wasn't there to kill you. Why would we kill the golden goose that laid the microfilms? Bruckner was there to protect you - and he almost lost you to the Russians.

"The kebab cook?"

"Boris Sokurov, Russian KGB. He spiked your drink with sodium pentothal to knock you out."

That would explain the kebab and blood I'd seen on the sign.

"And the book vendor?"

"Léopold Deniaud, French DPSD. They were at the con for Holman. He worked for them in their R&D department when he invented the sonic accelerator. He's a bright inventor, but greedy."

"So he's alive."

"We've taken him to a safe place -in very pleasant company."

"I suppose that pleasant is to be taken as an ironic remark?"

"Not at all, Mr Wolf. In fact, I believe you are familiar with his fellow guest.

Burris took out a sturdy looking mobile phone, and showed me a photo of a middle aged man with a round face and an ungroomed beard. Even though the person was unfamiliar to me, I vaguely recognised him as the one who gave me the blueprints in the fire-escape. He knew that he and Duran had played the very real game they invented, and had lost by their own rules. So, in the final round I was introduced as a joker. The voices in my head had been concerned for me, and rightfully so. It was too dangerous, and I shouldn't have been there.

The person standing next to Holman was all too familiar to me.

"That's my sister Kamryn."

Burris nodded. "We too, know how to take out a life policy."

Burris and I were playing a game of our own now, and we both held good cards. I had feared and hated the voices in my head for the better of seven years, but now I realised that they had only been telling me the future, the way they saw it. Holman was alive, but the issue of White Dwarf at the con had read Unusual death for a low-level traitor, while the cover-page Valkyrie was sandwiched in between a dragon and a barbarian warrior. The killings had just begun, and my sister and I were caught in the middle.

---

During the cold war, agents from the Eastern and Western powers routinely met and exchanged high ranking spies at Glienicke Bridge in Berlin; at least, that's what I've seen on TV. Today the old TV shows had come true, and I was on my way to a meeting point in the industrial part of Oakenford with a pocketful of microfilm -six thin slivers of silver-laminated plastic that had cost a life and a leg, and now my sister and Bill Holman were in danger.

I inched the rental KIA past sleepy concrete warehouses until I passed Würtz Cargo, then drove on three hundred yards, before I parked the car and walked back.

What am I to do? I'm no spy.

I expected reality to slip from me like sand through neurons any moment, and for the voices in my head to burst out and comment on everything. But today they were silent, and for the first time in seven years, I was alone. This was all new to me, I felt exposed and vulnerable, and for once in those cursed seven years I wanted the voices to be there with me, to tell me something... anything.

Burris waited for me behind a wooden counter in the reception of_Wurtz Cargo_. It was covered with dust, and only a seventies rotary dial telephone had remained as the sole piece of office furniture. He greeted me with a smile, like some left-over receptionist.

"Welcome to Hotel Wurtz," he joked. "Do you have any reservations?"

"Funny," I grumbled.

"Old habits never die" he said, gently wiping the dust off the desk with the palm of his hand. "I can duck behind the counter if people show up with more friends than agreed upon."

"Plus, you can hide your own piece behind the desk?"

"You see a lot of things Mr. Wolf - for a civilian."

"You pick some strange places to conduct business, Dr Burris - for a professional."

Burris looked around, and a small smile formed around his mouth. He was completely at ease here, much more so than in the fake psychiatrist office. "This warehouse belongs to the agency. We've used it so many times for matters just like this." There was a tone of nostalgic longing in his voice.

"So how does this work?" I asked. "You're the expert around here."

"Just like any other trade, Mr. Wolf. You hand over the blueprints, and we release your sister."

"That simple, huh?"

Burris stretched out a hand and wiggled his fingers with an impatient come here movement. I felt nauseous and took a mental step back from reality. I wanted to curl up into foetal position and hide myself in some warm place deep within my mind, until all of this was over. I cursed the now silent voices that had been my faithful companions for better or for worse, always telling me what to do. I had rarely understood the images they had shown me, or their words of warning, but over the last days I had realised that they showed me the world, the way they saw it. They showed me true face of people, they told me of future events and warned me of danger - all in their own way.

Useless Parasites, I cursed. If you're really that all-knowing, why don't you take it from here? I closed my eyes and waited for my voices to jump in like a tag-team, but when I looked back up, Burris was still there with his hand outstretched; only increasingly impatient. Then I noticed that the skin on his hand turning grey and scaly, like that of a reptile.

I'm hallucinating again. I realised. Just great.

"That's it?" I asked. "I give you the microfilm and we walk away?"

"Sure", said Burris. "That's how people do businessss." The s'es hissed off a forked tongue like steam escaping a pipe and his lie was transparent. But they had Kamryn locked away somewhere, so I decided to play along.

I took out the car-keys from my jeans. "Here you go, then." I threw them at Burris, who caught them in mid-air, visibly annoyed.

"First holiday snapshots, now a set of car-keys," he sneered. "Your games are beginning to tire me, Mr Wolf."

"Likewise," I said. "The microfilm is locked in a rental car parked outside. You show me Kamryn, I tell you which car."

Burris shrugged, and I followed him through a short corridor. He stopped outside a door and hesitated a few seconds before he touched the handle."Before we go in, I must tell you that we've given your sister a mild sedative," he said. "Don't be alarmed if she's unresponsive."

I recognised Kamryn immediately. She lay unconscious on a seventies style couch, with her hands tied behind her back. I rushed to her and touched her neck to get a pulse. Her temperature was normal, but I got no response from her.

"Mild sedative, my ass. She's out cold."

There was a tall army-looking guy in the room, armed with an AK-101 automatic, which he kept pointing at me. Now that I saw him with my own eyes, I recognised him as the tall man I'd met in the fire escape. I had hallucinated him having the face of a zombie, but even with a clear head, I still recognised his facial features. His brown eyes were emotionless and his cheeks were hollow, almost to the point of being emaciated. So this was agent Bruckner? The one who had tried to save me from being kidnapped by the Russians.

Then I noticed another figure, across the room. It was Bill Holman. He sat slumped in a chair, hands tied to the armrests. He was dead, and trails of coagulated blood ran from his ears and his closed eyes. The rope had cut deep grooves into his wrists during his death throes.

"You killed him!"

"He would have made another set of schematics, only to sell them again, to God knows whom. Holman was brilliant, but greedy."

"So you tortured him with his own invention?"

"Not exactly; the schematics are for a Focused Accelerator Pulse. Without it, our existing sonics technology is much too slow to be of any practical value. It took Holman seven minutes to die without the accelerator. That's useless, and there's a lot of screaming involved."

"Seven minutes and twenty-two seconds," corrected Bruckner and checked his watch. He tapped the dial with two fingers and then held the watch to his ear. Automatic rifle and an automatic watch made good sense: both could be disassembled and repaired while on a mission.

I began to untie Kamryn and massaged her wrists to get the blood flowing. She opened her eyes for a moment and smiled when she saw me. "Hi Carter," she mumbled. "So sleepy", then she went back to sleep. I'd have to carry her back to the car, but I needed to get the car keys.

"It's the red KIA," I told Burris. "I parked it a couple of hundred yards down the road. The microfilm is in the glove compartment."

"Wait here," said Burris and left the building.

The silence was uncomfortable in Burris' absence. Bruckner kept aiming at me with the AK-101, and I was stuck with three people; one unconscious, one dead, and one silent.

"Thanks for trying to save me from the Russian". I tried to break the silence, but didn't want to bring up the fact that he had also put a bullet in my leg a few days earlier.

Bruckner shrugged. "Sometimes I save people, other times I kill them. It's all in a day's work."

Burris returned a few minutes later with the envelope. He tore it open and held the microfilm to the window. "It's beautiful!" he laughed. "So simple, and yet so efficient."

"Right," I said. "The deal's done, so if you hand me the keys, I'll get Kamryn back to the car."

Burris reached into his coat, but when he pulled his hand back out, he wasn't flashing the keys, but a P-32 semi-automatic.

"You must have known all along, that we couldn't let you go," he said.

"I did have my worries," I said. "But I had to save my sister."

Burris pointed the pistol downward and disengaged the thumb safety. "I hate to break this to you Mr. Wolf, but..."

"-she too is a liability to national safety?" I finished the sentence for him.

"Yeah, my apologies. But I want you to know that your efforts have been of great value to your country."

"Whatever happened to witness protection programmes and a new identity somewhere warm?"

"That was back in the good old seventies." Burris slipped into a state of nostalgic reverie. "Back then, civilians were offered compensation: money, a new life or maybe a dacha. Today, everything is about budget and efficiency. Identity programmes cost millions, but a .32 ACP shell is less than one euro."

"Those were the days, my friend." I quoted the only Mary Hopkin song I knew, in order to procrastinate the inevitable:

as long as I could keep Burris daydreaming about his past, he probably wouldn't shoot me. I looked around to find any means of escape, but the small room was windowless, and Bruckner had his 101 firmly aimed at my midriff.

Say something, damn you! I cursed at the silent voices in my head. This is where we die.

The response was immediate and powerful. A jet of mental wind erupted from a rift in a bottomless void and cleared my mind. My mind's eye looked into a vacuous abyss and a new confidence swept over me.

"We would never let you die," said the female voice. "We've always been your guardians."

"Guardian, my ass," I said. "What about all the remarks about them hating my guts, if they only knew?"

"Humans loathe and fear what they don't understand. If they knew that you are other, they will hate you."

"We've looked out for the humans on this side of the abyss for thousands of years," said the male. "Protected them from our own kind - and from themselves."

"And what part do I play in this?"

"We three are one. You are our physical part."

"So, what do I do now?" I asked, but I already knew the answer:

The human world was not ready for destructive technology of this magnitude.

Kendall Duran had realised the dangers of unleashing the knowledge too late and had tried to stop it. But he was only a human, and he was killed by his fellow humans.

I sighed, and nodded at Burris, who snapped out of his comfortable daydream. "I understand," I said. "And I'm not angry with you, but I can't allow you to kill Kamryn or myself."

Then I became.

My hands transformed into clawed monstrosities, my teeth extended into fangs and the entire length of my body sprouted a thick coat of grey fur. I gorged myself on the freely flowing energy from the dark side of the abyss and I grew to twice the size of my human form.

Bruckner and Burris stared at me in speechless horror. I expected them both to bolt and run, but they had been trained too well and they stood their ground.

Bruckner let out a sudden scream and emptied his entire clip into me at point-blank range. I was impossible to miss, and the bullets stung like angry bees as they burrowed into my fur. I grabbed the hand that wielded the rifle and clenched his fingers around it. Then I squeezed. His fingers exploded like sausages, and his mouth contracted into an "O". He began to make a long wailing sound that annoyed my ears, so I picked him up and held him close to my face.

"Oh GOD!" he cried. "Oh GOD!"

"Your God is not here," I bellowed. "Only I am." Then I tossed his sprawling body across the room. He sailed through the air like a wingless bird and crashed against the wall, where his body split down front and emptied itself onto the floor. The scent of human insides reached my nose and I breathed deeply, revelling in the fragrance.

I then turned to Burris, who stood paralysed. His lips quivered softly, and fear had made him incontinent. The acrid scent of urine stung my nose. Humans: they live in constant fear of death, yet it is the one thing they all have in common.

"You only die once," I said. "So feel it and embrace it." The confused look in his eyes made it obvious that he no longer understood my language, and I thought of a thousand worthwhile ways of making him die. Then I heard the sound of screeching tires on asphalt, and I knew that it was time to unbecome.

"I'm sorry", I said. "You deserved more than this," and I gently pulled the head off his body, like a ripe cherry off its stalk. It made a soft snap as it came off and blood poured freely from his neck.

---

Moments later, two police officers burst through the door. I recognised one of them as Lt. Amari Quinn, who had interrogated me at the station. The other one let out a "Holy SHIT! What the fuck happened in here?" He wore a badge reading Sgt O'Leary, and looked to be Quinn's junior by some ten years.

"I became," I explained. "-that's what happened. I was embraced by darkness, and then I became."

Sgt O'Leary looked at Quinn and sighed. "There's no fucking way I can put that in a report!"

Quinn looked at me with a faint smile that I couldn't interpret. "I believe that Mr. Wolf is saying that he passed out when the shooting began. Isn't that right, Mr Wolf?"

"Whatever works for your report, Lieutenant."

Quinn pried the rifle from Bruckner's crushed hand. "The clip's empty. He fired quite a number of rounds before he died."

I checked myself. My clothes had torn when I transformed, but now I was back in human form and butt-naked. I was full of bruises, but otherwise unharmed; my fur had been too tough for the bullets to penetrate.

O'Leary staggered. The odour rising from the still pulsating body of Bruckner had gotten to him, and he made a series of retching noises, struggling not to puke. Quinn nodded at him. "I'll take it from here, sergeant" he said, and O'Leary stormed outside. The sound of unsteady footsteps echoed down the hall, then disappeared.

"I'll put in my report that two rival gangs had a shootout... and we interrogated a couple of witnesses at the scene." He reached into his pocket and threw something at me in a slow arc - it was a box of matches.

"For the microfilm," he said. "Burn the damn thing."

"You knew about the microfilm?"

"Of course," smiled Lt. Quinn. "You're not the only one at work." He closed his notebook with a soft snap, then began walking towards the exit.

"What about ME!" I shouted at his back. "What am I in all of this? Witness, victim... criminal?"

He stopped by the door, then turned and smiled at me with an almost overbearing patience.

"Other, naturally... You're other." And his eyes flashed yellow for just a moment.

---