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The whole country was in shock. The world reeled. How could this have happened?

"Mandrake, are you awake?" The otter awoke to pick up his phone groggily. "I am now, what's going on, Klein?" At this hour it had better have been important. "It's Mano. She made another attempt." Mandrake's jaw dropped. "Shit. Is she okay?" The skunk was trying to stay calm but the otter could tell that he was fighting back being more frantic, only half-successfully. "She's alive, but she needs to see Soma and, well, I was hoping she could see you?" Mandrake nodded, forgetting in his drowsiness that Klein couldn't see him. "Of course, yeah. Uh, do you mean right now?" It was the middle of the night. "Hold on, lemme ask her." The otter heard the skunk turn to ask Mano about it, and she answered him.

"She should probably see Soma first," Klein told him. "Soma can't work at night, though... He needs the sun. Do you think she can make it to morning?" Mandrake heard her say something else. The skunk must've had him on speakerphone, he realized. "I think so, yeah..." The otter's training was slowly taking over through the fog of his exhaustion. "Make sure not to leave her alone until then, okay?" Klein had made sure to get to her place before calling him so that he could stay on the phone with her for his whole trip to her place. He'd only called Mandrake once he'd been able to keep his eyes on her while he did. "I'll..." The skunk stopped and thought about it.

It was a little weird, because she was a lesbian, he was gay, and they were platonic friends, but... "Can I sleep here, Mano?" the otter heard him ask her on the phone. "Just... near you, I mean?" Mandrake could tell just how long she'd take before answering him. He knew her well. "I'll be with her until morning. I'll take her to Soma in the morning." The otter shook his head, still trying to shake himself awake. "Thank you, Klein," he yawned, "I'll make sure to be ready to see her in the afternoon. Can I talk to her right now?" He heard Klein address her again. "Yeah, I called you for her because she was too shaken, but yeah, hold on." He handed her his phone. "Mano, are you okay?" She whimpered.

"Hi, Mandrake... Sorry to wake you up so late." She sounded so sheepish. "Don't be. This is important enough to call, you know?" The octopus always needed to have others talk her into treating her needs as important. "I know you over-grounders need your sleep more than I do, though." He sighed. "I'll be back to sleep in no time, don't worry. You shouldn't have to apologize for turning to people, you know? It's what we're here for." Mano tried to chuckle. "You know me. I was socialized to defer." It was true. Her parents had raised her to have full confidence in her physical and mental abilities, no doubt, yet still, she'd absorbed deference from somewhere, somehow. She wanted to be helpful, without drawing too much attention.

"It must be hard to be self-effacing when you're a Fishist leader, mustn't it?" He wasn't being entirely ironic. "There is an element of truth to that," she conceded, tongue-in-cheek. "We'll have to work on your assertiveness later. For now, defer to Klein, me and Soma... Go easy on yourself and take care of yourself, okay? We want you safe. Don't let us down." He wasn't above appealing to what he'd learned about how she worked to keep her alive. "I won't, Mandrake," she answered meekly. "Did anything happen to you recently that you think could've prompted this?" The octopus scoffed. "Besides the obvious, you mean?" He emitted a low growl. "Besides the obvious, yeah." Neither of them liked what had happened.

"I did get threatened at my job recently, since you asked." At first she'd tried to shrug it off, but it had still made an impression on her. "I've heard about that happening to people..." It was one thing to hear about it happening to people at all, but quite another one to hear that it was happening to someone you knew and cared about. "These people just don't like journalists, what can I say," she chuckled mirthlessly, "too many facts." It was hitting close to home. "You should watch your back, Mandrake." A chill went down his spine. "These people never liked your people either, you know?" He gulped. "I know. They kinda built their reputation on that a while back, didn't they?" She grunted knowingly. "I worry about you too, doc, you know?"

He knew all too well. If it had been up to these people, he'd have to walk down the street with a six-pointed star and a pink triangle tattooed on his body by the end of the month. "Thanks, Mano. Just promise me you'll come see me tomorrow, okay? I have something important to talk to you about but I want to do it in person." She scoffed. "I know that's a trick to make sure I don't kill myself, Mandrake." She could hear he was smiling when he spoke next in his voice. "It might be, but it does have the merit of being true." She sighed. "Promise, doc." He clucked his tongue. "You're crossing your fingers behind your back, aren't you?" Her eyes widened. "... Yeah." How could he tell? "I know your tricks too, Mano," he admonished her.

"Okay... I want you to be able to get some sleep. You need it, especially if you're going to be dealing with me this afternoon. I promise not to die until you've slept and we've talked, okay?" While the skunk could've stopped many people from killing themselves physically in a lot of ways, there was little he could've done to stop her from stopping her heart with her mind, if she'd chosen to. "Okay. I'm taking your word for it. You don't have to sleep if you don't want the nightmares to come back, just... stay with Klein and get some rest, okay? Meditate, maybe?" Her spirituality was different from his, but he did usually try to encourage people to make the most of their existing belief systems to improve their mental health, after all.

"I'll see what I'll do. But yeah! I'll stay with him. He'll like sleeping with a warm body near him for once, I'm sure," she tried to smile and winked at Klein as she spoke. The skunk half-frowned, half-smiled at her, mock-punching her shoulder. He had his own appointment scheduled with Mandrake too, later in the week. His romantic history had been a rocky rollercoaster ride if he'd ever heard of one. With Bridges and Fugue taken, Shinai gone and Boko crazy, Klein hadn't shared his bed with a man in far longer than he cared for. He *was* looking forward to having someone's warmth near him, platonic and friendly though it may have been going to be. He cared for her deeply, in his own way, and treasured her company.

"Good. Good night, my friend." She wasn't just his client. They were friends. "Good night, doc." She hung up, and handed the skunk back his phone before they curled up in bed, nothing like lovers would, but in a way in which many friends would not. The otter sighed, putting his phone back down somewhere before lying back down in his bed to try to get back to sleep. It was times like these he wished he could've discussed his cases with Soma. Despite his lack of psychological training, Mandrake's boyfriend had always had good insight into social dynamics. The otter just didn't feel that it would've been right for him to have compromised his clients' confidentiality that way. He'd heard that a lot of therapists had their own therapist.

What must've it been like to have been able to confide in people that way, he thought to himself idly as he slowly drifted back to sleep...

***

It felt as though the bog had been bubbling there since prehistoric times. There was so much fog that it was difficult for the otter to be able to see all that far around him. It was a challenge for him to find where to step as he advanced so that he wouldn't sink altogether, although all of his steps pushed down through the water's surface at least a little regardless. He side-eyed a set of dark, purplish flowers that grew as he walked near, wary of what their effects might have been. His whiskers twitched - the air was thick with the smell of sulfur around him. He walked under intertwined branches forming a short tunnel above him, and between a series of tall, thin conifers on either side of him before a large body of water stood in his way.

He gulped, noticing that his only way across seemed to be for him to jump on the backs of a series of feral crocodiles, half-submerged in the pool before him. There was no other way around it. Bracing himself, he leapt as quickly as he could from crocodile back to crocodile back as though they were logs or stepping stones, each of them turning fast to snap their jaws over their backs where he'd just been a split-second before. When he landed on the last one, before he could leap off again, it stood up out of the water, annoyed, making Mandrake fall into the water next to him after all. "Hey!" It was Ammut! This was no feral crocodile - he was part crocodile, part shark, part lion, and all Fugue's boyfriend. He'd been one the otter's clients.

Falling into the muck, Mandrake started sinking underwater, deeper and deeper, until he became afraid he might drown. A large, hard surface came up from under him, lifting him up from the deep all the way back up to the surface just in time for the otter to be able to draw in a much-needed breath of air, fetid though it may have been. After bringing him ashore, the 'surface' moved so that he saw that he'd been carried ashore by a turtle on her back. Not just any turtle, either. Although he'd never met her in person himself, he was immediately able to tell who she was because he'd heard so much about her from Mano over the course of the years.

"Eli!"

It was the octopus' half-turtle, half-hermit crab girlfriend, looking not a day older than when she'd died. "You saved me!" He followed her under a large tree, very much like some of the trees that she'd watched grow back in Mano's homeland around the time they'd met, with foliage hanging down from it around them and small yellow flowers growing around its trunk. "Hey, just because I don't trust therapists doesn't mean I'm about to let you drown for being one," she winked at him. "Uh... thanks," he chuckled weakly. Eli had been practically larger than life. It was weirdly humbling enough to meet her, even without her having just saved him, yet there he was. "You're used to saving others, aren't you?"

He tilted his head. "I don't know if you ever get *used* to it, but... It's one of the things that I usually do, I suppose?" She nodded. "Yet this time, you had no choice but to let me save you, did you?" He shook his head. "There was no way around it, no," he agreed. "There are tough times ahead, Mandrake... I'd be lying if I said things are going to be easy, and you've heard enough about me to know I'm not the type to lie about things like that." He nodded. "You're right about that." He scratched the back of his head. "This might sound ironic coming from someone like me, who always encouraged people to help others, but... Make sure to remember to do what you can to save yourself too. Let people help you, if they offer you to."

His eyes widened. "I know a lot of people are relying on you, but... You're no good to us dead. You teach people that it's important for them to remember to do some self-care in times of crisis, don't you?" She'd been right. "So what kind of therapist doesn't take his own advice, right?" He hadn't expected that from her. "Take it from someone who knows... I submerged myself far too much in other people's problems for a long time, you know?" He nodded. "Mano often said it was hard to convince you to take breaks to take care of yourself. She wished it'd been easier." She agreed. "My dear sweetheart was right, of course... If I'd listened to her more, perhaps I'd still be alive today... Learn from my mistake. Survive." He grunted knowingly.

"How are you and Mano, by the way?" She raised an eyebrow. "Oh, you know we've still been seeing each other? I guess I shouldn't be surprised. You're her therapist, after all." He gave her a sheepish look. It's not like he meant to invade her privacy, but how could he help the octopus without listening to her? "Guilty as charged. I mean, you don't have to tell me if you'd rather not. She doesn't tell even me everything. I was just wondering if you could've had any perspective that might have helped me help her. You still care about her, don't you?" She sighed. "Very much, doc." He tilted his head. "Did you see each other before... what happened?"

She gave him a pained look. "I swear I didn't want her to do this, doc. You have to believe me." He tried to raise his hand toward her in an appeasing way. "I'm not here to pass judgment. I'm just trying to figure out why things happened the way they did so I can figure out how to help her get better, you know?" She nodded. "I know... I was... She's been so lonely, Mandrake! I was just trying to help her out, because I care about her." He was starting to get an idea of where she was going. "So I... Well, she and I still... you know." She could tell he wasn't sure. "Damn it, why do you therapists always have to ask about..." He shook his head. "No, I understand. Go on." She gulped. "I was sad she was alone. In your world. In the real world."

He looked at her with so much humanity she doubted he was really a therapist. "So I said hey... Well, you know what you have with Soma, that he has Rakim, who has Ogun. It all seems to work out for you guys, right?" He nodded. "Mostly. It's a bit of a process but no more than most relationships, it's just... different." He finally understood. "Oh, so you... Ohhhh..." She was holding her arm uncomfortably. "I just wanted her to be able to live a little, in her own body for a change. I mean... I'm here anyway. I'm not going anywhere." He looked at her sadly. "But that just made her think more about you being gone, didn't it?" She held back tears. "You have to understand. I wasn't pushing her away. I love her, doc. I wanted her to be happy."

He nodded. "I do understand. It's not your fault." He cautiously offered her a hug. "But it *is* my fault, doc." She hesitated for a moment, then accepted it. What the heck. "I should never have..." He was stunned that she'd hugged him back, but pushed past it to start gently moving his hand down her head and back as they held each other in the swamp. "I know, Eli... I know." She sighed. "She gets into this place where it's like... I have to fight her to stop her from killing herself so she can be with me. And I could never live with myself if I made her do a thing like that. I mean, I know I'm not alive and everything, but I still couldn't live with myself, you know what I mean? This never would have happened if I hadn't ripped her heart out..."

Then he was lying on his back with his hands and feet tied to a stone slab under him. He could hear the sounds of the jungle around him, cawing and roaring, eyes in the dark, dashing back and forth too fast for the eye to follow. He tried to see if he could undo his restraints but he proved unable to do so. The structure on top of which he'd been tied up seemed to have been some sort of small ziggurat. Small blue petals had been scattered on the ground around him. He heard growling coming from the dark underbrush around him and, before he could even speculate as to what it may have been coming from, an iguana came leaping out of the bush to pounce and land soundly on top of the otter, sitting straddling Mandrake's pelvis.

He recognized the iguana despite the warm sun's blinding rays of light overhead.

It was a man that the otter had dated a long time ago, long before Soma had come along. The iguana had caused Mandrake such heartbreak that he'd grown to question his own ability to love at all, which it hadn't been easy for the otter to recover from. The iguana, wearing a crown of laurels, looked down on his former lover with a toothy grin twisting his features and his eyes gone blank. Small spheres of light floated like dandelion spores in the air around them. A crowd of jaguars gathered around the iguana, watching what he was doing intently, raising golden bows and arrows over their heads, cheering. Mandrake didn't have time to question this problematic representation before the iguana plunged his hand into his chest.

"Clear!" The otter was jolted back to attention by Fugue's defibrillator on his chest. He was still lying down on his back, but he was on top of a stretcher by then, and he was no longer tied up. "You need to take a step back," the blowfish advised him, putting his defibrillator away. "If you're too close to something, you can see the details, but you still can't see the full picture, you know?" They were in a laboratory, very much like his own. "I see what you mean, yes." He noticed a caduceus hanging on the wall. "You and I are both men of science, aren't we, Mandrake?" Mandrake nodded. "We are." Bubbling beakers around them would have been enough to remind him of this, if he'd been able to forget.

"Glad you'd remember," the blowfish continued, filling up a syringe as he spoke. "What you need to do, in a situation like this, is to treat it just the same way you'd treat anything else: with the scientific method." The otter yelped as Fugue stung him with the syringe unexpectedly. "You follow?" the blowfish asked unrelentingly. "I do," Mandrake winced as he rubbed his arm where he'd just been stung. "That means we observe systematically, we come up with theories, we test them through trial and error, and take nothing for granted, doesn't it?" Fugue cleaned his syringe methodically before putting it away. "We do." The blowfish put a stethoscope on the otter's chest. "Don't just listen to your heart now." Mandrake groaned.

"Listen to your brain!" the blowfish tapped the otter's head with his finger emphatically to drive his point home. "Pay attention to detail. Keep a cool head. Don't let things get to you. Break down the problems you come across to their smallest possible components. Deconstruct them as much as you can until you can't break them down any further. Solve them one part at a time until you've solved each and every one of them so that, when you put them back together, what you'll be looking at will no longer be a problem... It'll be a solution." Fugue turned off a Bunsen burner to his left before turning on another one to his right. "Here, practice with this," the blowfish added, throwing a Rubik cube at Mandrake that the otter barely caught.

"All problem-solving can be reduced to mathematics." Fugue started writing equations in chalk on a blackboard in front of the stretcher. "It really is that simple, so there's no reason for you to panic, is there?" The otter tried to shrug, but his shoulders seemed to be in pain, so he cringed. "I guess not, no." The blowfish seemed utterly certain of himself. "When you're missing factors of the equation, you look at the parts you do have, and you use them to deduce which ones are missing. When you do have all the factors, all you need to do..." he went on, pouring the contents of a bowl into a flask, "... is add them all up. Just don't make a mistake." Mandrake raised an eyebrow. "What happens if I do?" Fugue gasped. "You don't want that!"

With this, the blowfish poured a beaker into a flask. The lab exploded around them.

"Duck, idiot!" Shinai yanked the otter down into a trench with him as a shell exploded far too near them for comfort. "I swear, you shrinks are no good on the front at all," the weasel grumbled, ripping off a grenade's pin with his teeth before throwing it out of the trench in the enemy's general direction. "Is this where you are down there, Shinai?" Shinai shook his head. "No, doc. This is what *all* of 'down there' is going to be like soon, if no one does anything about it. There's *already* a war going on, Mandrake. The battle lines are drawn and they're coming for us." The weasel grunted in pain, vainly shooting back at a wolf having just shot him in the shoulder who just ducked back around a corner before pulling a vanishing act.

"What are you gonna do when they come for you, doc?" Shinai shot around another corner, stopping a charging boar dead in his tracks this time. "Scribble on your notepad? Ask them about their mom?" Mandrake shuddered. "No good?" A bear came out of hiding far nearer to the otter than he liked. He just hadn't seen him coming somehow. The bear tried to grapple him into a killing hold, but Mandrake used his Aikido to break out of the hold and throw the bear to the ground before using his Krav Maga to pin him down and to block his breathing pathways just long enough to make him pass right out. The weasel's speech reverted to a feral weasel's chitter as an enemy horse soldier showed up to torch them both with a flamethrower.

"Ah, there you go!" Ogun pulled the otter out of the fire to plunge him into a pool of cold water next to it before putting him back down on the ground in front of himself. "Good as new!" The chimera put his large pliers aside and rubbed the sweat off his lion head's brow with the back of his hand. "I hope you're happy with it, anyway," Ogun shrugged, "I did the best I could." They were standing by a forge in a fire cave that seemed as though it may very well have been right inside an active volcano somewhere. "What do you... mean, 'happy with it'?" His dragon head's eyes widened as smoky tendrils escaped from its nostrils. "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you knew." Mandrake looked down at his own body, and gasped.

He was a cyborg.

"I kinda had to improvise after what happened to you back there, I hope you understand," his ram head added sheepishly. "I had to do what I could to save what was left of you. Do you hate me?" his snake head asked apologetically. "No, of course not!" This was a little weird, to be sure. It was going to take some getting used to, that much was for certain. Would he have agreed to this if he'd been asked ahead of time? He wasn't entirely sure, but it was too late for that now. "Thank you, Ogun," the cybernetic otter smiled at the chimera. "You did good." Ogun may not have been one of Mandrake's clients as such, but it didn't mean the chimera's mental health was unimportant to the otter. He didn't want to make him feel bad.

"Good, good," his lion head said, relieved, as he wiped the sweat off his dragon head's brow this time. "It was a lot of work!" Mandrake admired the craftsmanship on his new electronic body. "It, uh, seems to have been, yeah." Ogun went to his cooling pool to splash water onto his ram head. "Of course," he went on with his snake head as he dried his ram head with a towel, "I did have all that practice for when I already had to do this for Rakim a while back. Remember that, doc?" The otter nodded. "Yes, it... had a way of gripping the mind, didn't it." The chimera grabbed a lighter to light and take a nice, long draw from his hookah to relax after a hard day's work. "I'm sorry, do you want some?" Mandrake shook his head. "Your call."

The otter could hear lava bubbling in the cavern around them. "We all break and need to be put back together sometimes, you know?" Mandrake nodded. "You're right about that." If life had taught him anything at all, this had certainly been it. "You and I aren't so different in the end, are we?" The otter chuckled. "I guess we're not." Ogun took another draw with his lion head pensively. "You remember how bad I got back when Rakim's flesh body died?" Mandrake nodded grimly. "I got on your boyfriend's nerves quite a bit by the end of it there, didn't I?" The otter nodded. "It was the first time Soma actually complained to me about something in his life almost like I *was* his therapist. We usually avoid that very deliberately." It was murky ground.

"But you still listened to him that time, didn't you?" It hadn't been easy for the snake/dryad/spider hybrid to host the chimera in his grove during the darkest part of Ogun's depression, especially in the midst of his own grieving over the loss of his beloved bat, yet he'd borne it all the same. "I did, yeah... What can I say?" He'd understood where the chimera had been coming from. "I'm sorry again for putting you through that." The otter shrugged. "It was an extreme situation. Desperate times call for desperate measures, right?" His ram head nodded. "That's what I was getting at, yeah. Yet if I'd held in my emotions then, if I hadn't admitted them to myself and others like I did, Rakim wouldn't be with us today, you know?"

Mandrake nodded. "I think I understand what you're trying to tell me." He thought he heard a rumbling in the distance, but he wasn't sure. "We're *all* in desperate times right now, doc," his snake head hissed, "so try to give yourself a bit of a break, okay?" His lion head tried to smile while he put his hand on the otter's shoulder. "We're all going to feel some extreme things when we're in extreme situations like that, aren't we?" Mandrake nodded. "So what I'm trying to say is, it's okay to feel stuff. Let it out. Better out than in. It might hurt and annoy people for a bit, but, in the end, you never know who it might end up saving down the line after all, do you?" The otter smiled. "Maybe *you* should be a therapist, Ogun." Ogun laughed.

"You flatter me, doc." The rumbling he thought he'd heard earlier intensified. "Here, let me show you something." The fire cave started physically shaking around them as he spoke, but the chimera didn't seem to be paying any attention to it. "Uh, what's that noise? Can't you feel that?" Ogun walked over to his cooling pool, motioning for Mandrake to follow him without answering the otter's question while pebbles started falling from the ceiling around them. "Look in here," the chimera gestured at the pool meaningfully as the pebbles started being followed by rocks and boulders outright. "This is how people see you." Mandrake leaned over the pool to look at it. The heat skyrocketed. "Oh, not *this* again," Ogun rolled his eyes.

He shoved the otter into the pool as the volcano they were in erupted around them.

When Mandrake poked his head back out of the pool after the noise and rumbling had died down, he stepped back out of it onto a wet, wooden pool deck, just like the ones that there had been at water parks that he'd gone to when he'd been a kid. Scylla, a shark he knew through Rakim, stood by the side of a waterslide near him, just as the waterslides down which he'd gone back then had always had someone in charge standing next to them to make sure that people would wait the correct amount of time before going down them so that they wouldn't slam into the person who'd gone down before them. The otter walked toward her to ask her something but, before he could, she'd already shoved him down the slide. "Next!"

Halfway down, the single waterslide turned into seven separate waterslides, and his head, torso, arms, legs and tail all turned to water and separated, going down their own waterslide each, mixing in with the water that already flowed down them. When his seven watery parts reunited into a solid whole in another pool that the slides led them into, he stepped back out of it onto another wet wooden pool deck. A moth dervish welcomed him there wordlessly, handing him a towel that he grabbed to dry himself off with. His cyborg body was gone. He'd been made flesh again. She gestured over the side of the wooden deck with her head.

Looking down over its side, he saw that it had been built on top of a patch of cacti that stretched out around them as far as the eye could see. Before he could ask her anything, she'd already grabbed ahold of him, and she'd extended her large moth wings to her sides to start flying over the cactus patch while she'd carried him. At first he worried that she might drop him, but she had four arms, and her wings were very strong, which his worry decreased as he learned. At some point, he did notice she let go with one of her four arms to wipe sweat off her brow. Was she up too high? Yes, it was starting to seem like she was. She was flying too close to the sun. He yelped, feeling hot wax on his body, and realized it came from her melting wings.

So down they went.

Yet rather than falling into the cactus patch as he'd feared, Mandrake landed into what felt like some sort of large safety net. Taking in his surroundings, he noticed that he had landed in what seemed to be a large golden cobweb, too large for any normal spider to have built any such thing. In fact, its strings looked almost just like the vines that Soma's cobwebs were made from, except for the fact that Soma's were green, not golden. He hadn't noticed the tall mushroom that grew all the way up from the ground next to where he was until just then. He also hadn't noticed that there had been someone sitting cross-legged on top of it, knitting a golden piece of cloth with four arms.

It was Bridges.

Since when did the other otter have four arms? It looked like people were finally going to start being able to tell them apart more easily, Mandrake thought to himself, tongue-in-cheek. Mandrake was going to be the one with two arms. Looking more closely, he saw that there were much thinner, barely perceptible golden strings hanging from Bridges' arms. It was as though Bridges were a puppet who was being manipulated by someone from above, but the threads went so far up over them that they vanished into infinity. Who could possibly have been pulling his strings, if anyone? Mandrake had no idea. Bridges noticed Mandrake, looking up from his work without stopping. His cloth stretched in a spiral around the mushroom below.

"Doc, good to see you here!" Bridges smiled. "How have you been?" He always looked so friendly. "I'm a little stuck right at the moment, I'm afraid," Mandrake admitted, taking in his predicament. "Ah, that's nothing to worry about," Bridges waved off cheerfully. "You know what I think you should do, doc?" Mandrake shook his head. "You just need to listen to everyone. Take everything in, from every source you can. That's what *I* always do! As long as you combine every viewpoint you hear and weave it all together now," he knitted on as he spoke, "you're going to get the most complete picture you can of everything that's going on, and the most complete perspective is always the best one, isn't it?"

A feral pelican landed on the mushroom next to him. "Take me, for example," Bridges went on as the pelican opened its beak. "People are always telling me I take things that don't belong to me, you know?" Mandrake had tried to treat Bridges for his kleptomania. It hadn't worked very well. "But you know what I say to that?" Bridges stopped knitting with one of his four hands to grab a beer bottle out of the pelican's beak with it. "Nuts to that, that's what I say!" His golden cloth was starting to come out weirdly skewed but he didn't seem to be paying attention to it. "Who are they to say what does and doesn't belong to this or that person in the first place?" The pelican closed its beak, and flew off the mushroom top in the wild blue yonder.

"No, me, doc?" Bridges brought the beer bottle to his lips. "I go where I want." Bridges wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "I take what I want." It was starting to sound like there was something wrong with Bridges' voice. "Who's going to stop me?" One of Bridges' pairs of arms was shedding fur at an alarming rate. "You?" Bridges scoffed. "Don't make me laugh." Two of Bridges' arms were losing their skin altogether, revealing green scales under them before falling away altogether. "You couldn't stop anyone from doing anything." As one pair of Bridges' arms kept knitting still, his other two arms began to rip away his skin, all over his body, until all of it had fallen away like a husk to reveal green scales everywhere underneath.

"I'll wear and discard any skin I need," Boko laughed chillingly, "and it's allll mine!"

Mandrake shuddered. "Why ask for permission?" He'd learned to fear the chameleon from everything that Klein had told him about Boko. "Why ask for forgiveness?" The skunk had seen the chameleon kill someone with his very own eyes. "There's nothing to ask for." The golden strings that had pulled Bridges' limbs had fallen away along with the husk that Boko had discarded. "It's all the same." Yellow petals started raining from the sky around them as the chameleon stood up from his sitting posture menacingly. "You think you're better than me?" Boko wagged his finger at the otter, turning his body into a kaleidoscopic rainbow as he leapt down on the web to start tightrope walking toward Mandrake. "I *am* the Rainbow Death!"

The otter struggled and struggled to free himself from the golden web until, finally, he broke free from it, or at least from part of it. His body trailed down from the part of the golden web that still held him like a trapeze artist, and he latched on to the golden cloth that still spiraled around the mushroom's stem on its way down below. He went down around the mushroom while holding it for a short time, going down like a firefighter around a fire station's pole. Before long, though, the structural integrity of the golden cloth became compromised, and it began to unravel in his hands on his way down. Just as he was being forced to let go of the very last golden strand, his feet landed on an ivory platform below him. It was a seesaw.

Noticing that his end of it was the lowermost because of his weight on it, he jumped from his end to the other end of it, lowering his new end while raising his former end as he did. At first it seemed a fairly survivable endeavor. He was suspended over what seemed to be nothing but clouds below, yet the platforms were predictable, and he could take his time from one to the next. Soon, he noticed that he was being followed across the seesaw platforms by someone else further away from him. Not just followed, but chased. Torn between the desire to get away from his pursuer as fast as possible and his desire to see what she looked like, he finally managed to get a good enough look at her to see who she was without slowing down.

She was a toga-clad, blindfolded anglerfish with a spear-handled hammer. Mandrake had never seen her before himself, but he'd heard about her from Mano during her therapy sessions. It was Maat the Fair, who had tried to kill the octopus during Mano's raid against Atlan's lair. With the way she was swinging her spear-hammer as she ran, it didn't seem like she wanted to catch up with the otter so that she could ask him for a therapy session, although she could probably have used one, he couldn't help but think. Once she'd caught up with him enough, getting off the second end of the platform became a matter of urgency, since jumping on the second propelled the fish from the first end onto the second one by its momentum.

Eventually, she jumped onto the opposite end of the seesaw he was on when his side was low, and he was propelled so high up above her that he lost all sight of where she was through the clouds. At the very apex of his bounce, he felt something brush against his hand, and latched onto it. It proved to be one of Rakim's chains, dangling from him in a way so as to be able to give Mandrake a way out of falling back down. The bat flew the otter back down into a dark field of prickly, dry grass. The air around them smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. "Oh, no!" The bat seemed to panic. "Rakim, wait!" Mandrake called out after him as he flew away. "I'm sorry, doc!" The otter winced. Rakim had just saved him, but his departure boded most ill.

Something flickered.

He stepped away from it hurriedly. His heart sank when he realized that what had driven the bat away had been his most deeply ingrained fear of all. The otter supposed he could hardly blame him. Betta the Red had just started to walk in a circle around him slowly, the fish's hand holding her wrist casually behind her back as she addressed the therapist in a scholastic tone, looking up. "How about we cut the crap, shall we?" She startled him. "We've always shared a bit of a knack for cutting through the bullshit to get to the point, haven't we?" Her feet, on fire as she was able to make them without hurting herself, were lighting the dry grass behind her on their way as she walked. "It's one of the things I always liked about you, doc."

He looked at her warily. "Thanks." She chuckled.

"At some point, you're going to have to draw a line in the sand," Betta continued. "You know as well as I do that not all opinions were created equal, don't you?" She was halfway through her circular firewalk around him by then. "Everyone knows that. It's insulting to expect people to pretend we shouldn't." He thought about making a beeline across the last space around him that didn't isolate him from the rest of the world with a fiery curtain, but the fish gave him a look that dissuaded him from trying. "Don't even think about it." She was wearing the shorts and the bandages around her hands and feet that Muay Thai kickboxers were known for. The prickly grass was hurting his feet a bit, but he had no choice but to grin and bear it.

"If someone wants you dead, but you want to live, what's a good compromise between those two opinions?" Betta cackled. "He beats you half-dead, and you call it a day?" She spat on the ground. "That's some bullshit." Her circular firewall around him was finally complete and she stood inside it facing him. "Wouldn't you say?" The fish crossed her arms in front of her chest and gave him a dry glare. "You're right about that," he conceded. "So you're gonna have to make some tough calls, Bauer." She raised a finger at him. "Don't let people get away with that. This whole false equivalence nonsense is how things got so bad everyone's ready to slash and burn the whole thing down to see what grows back in the first place," she frowned at him.

"Hold people accountable. Fight back. You've been my therapist too, haven't you?" He nodded. "What do you do when someone rips away everything you have, doc?" He gulped, remembering that time he'd had to stop Betta from burning Soma's grove down. "You start burning things," he answered breathlessly. "You think it was bad when Atlan sent me to you? That's nothing," she waved aside. "Just because our actions were misdirected doesn't mean the enemy we were up against doesn't exist. *They're* the ones we're up against today, doc, and trust me, they're going to make you dismantling that little cult we had going back then look like a cakewalk. Be ready for them." The fire had eaten its way through the circle around them.

So the circle of ground they were on detached and fell down through the ground.

Mandrake followed the sound of crying to find Diaz in front of Gogh's sunflowers. "Oh, doc!" The lion snake-taur golem slithered toward the otter gratefully. "It's so good to see you here." Mandrake hugged Diaz back. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to cry," he sobbed as the otter patted his back reassuringly. "It's okay, Diaz... We've all been on edge." The golem hybrid tried to swallow his tears to speak. "After I'd spent so long as a shut-in, you've spent so long teaching me it was okay for me to go out in the world, that it could be a safe place to live in after all, and now..." He shook his marble lion head. "I feel like going back into hiding all over again. Bridges loves me, but he doesn't know what to do." Mandrake nodded. "I understand. It's not easy."

The museum's security alarm went off. "Oh no!" Diaz panicked as noise blared and red lights flashed everywhere around them. 'Intruder, intruder!' The otter looked everywhere to take in as much of their surroundings as he could as fast as possible. "What's happening, doc?" Security system lasers appeared around them. "Stay close to me, Diaz!" He'd defend the hybrid to the last if push came to shove, he decided. "Swarm, swarm!" Mandrake saw a lioness in a police uniform breaking down the museum's doors. "Freeze, asshole!" It was one of Klein's exes, from back when the skunk had been trying to convince himself and the rest of the world he was straight which had gone about as well as you'd expect it to. She threw a smoke grenade.

The otter jumped in front of Diaz as she came at him with a Taser and nightstick. 'Zap!'

"Oh, I'm sorry!" A spark of static electricity had just inadvertently leapt from the eel to Mandrake as the two of them had brushed against each other while walking past each other. "My mistake," she apologized. "No harm done," he waved off. "Thanks for letting me off the hook." Being off the hook could be important for a sea dweller. "You're Milgram, aren't you?" They were standing on the ocean floor, so deep underwater that the otter could not even see the surface anywhere if he looked straight up and squinted as hard as he could, yet he could breathe and move about as easily as if he'd been standing anywhere on the surface somehow. "I am," she confirmed. "You remember me, don't you?"

Bubbles of varying sizes were coming up around them, floating up toward an ever-elusive surface somewhere above them. "I do." Seaweed billowed in the currents here and there around them. "Rakim knocked you out and brought you to Soma after Atlan controlled you into attacking Ogun." She looked down. "Not one of my proudest moments." He put a hand on her shoulder. "We get that it wasn't your fault." She looked back up at him. "Really?" He nodded. "Yeah." She scratched the back of her head. "Such kindness is uncommon. If you hadn't done that, Betta probably would never have helped Rakim save Scylla from Wintermute, and Scylla's moth girlfriend couldn't have helped Mnemos save Soma's life either," she added.

"When you extended an olive branch to Betta, when you listened to her about all that she'd been through that had led her to becoming the way she was the way you did, it paved the way to convince the rest of our movement that you could be trusted after all." His eyes widened. "I hadn't really thought of it like that before you put it like this," he admitted. "Never take kindness for granted," the eel reminded him, "yours, or other people's. A lot of people leave it by the wayside, even under ordinary circumstances, but even more do under difficult circumstances, like the ones we all entered just earlier this month. Yet it's in difficult circumstances that kindness becomes the most important. You never know what it could do."

'Zap!'

"Kindness is the most important thing." The words had come from just behind him this time. He turned around and saw a bat wearing a veil standing behind him. "Hi, Irshad." She bowed slightly, ever so polite. "Follow me," she gestured at him. He wrapped his arms around his chest when he realized that they were in some sort of ice cavern. Icy stalagmites and stalactites protruded from the ground and ceiling around them as he walked in the footsteps of Rakim's mother through the snow. He wished he'd brought a coat, even though he didn't know how that could've been possible, if at all. He remembered having complained many times before because people kept it too hot, because of his fur. Now his fur didn't feel like enough.

Even though her outfit had been designed for warmer climates, Irshad's djellaba and veil ironically seemed to have been protecting her from the cold around them much better than Mandrake was. "Is it much further?" His teeth clattered as he shivered while he asked her. She stopped, ever so briefly, and turned to him to perform a gentle but firm shushing gesture toward him, indicating the ice cavern's frozen ceiling above them. If he spoke too loud, he may have caused a cave-in or an avalanche of some sort, she seemed to imply. So he took the bat's advice to heart, and kept his questions to himself until the two of them would be in a situation that would be better suited for him to ask.

They came upon a doorway carved into the wall of the ice cave, and she stood by its side to turn back toward the otter so that she could politely motion for him to go through it first. "Oh, wait," she said, putting her hand on his shoulder as he walked past her to make his way across the door, "there's something I need to show you." Before he could say anything in response to her cryptic remark, she'd already made him turn back to face her again, and he gasped when she removed her veil and head covering right in front of him. Irshad would never have done something like that, was all he had time to think before he discovered that it wasn't the bat after all.

It was Dana, he realized. Their snake hair hissed, he turned to stone, and he shattered.

"I always did tell you that you were too scattered, didn't I?" The other otter chuckled gruffly as he just finished putting Mandrake's stone pieces back together again. "Good thing I'm still here to pull you out of that after all," the older man winked as he turned Mandrake's newly whole body back from stone to flesh as well. "Dad!" Mandrake gasped. They seemed to be floating in the middle of a long, wide tunnel formed by interlocking, spinning rings of flaming eyeballs everywhere around them, each of them bigger than a person's head. It looked as though they were standing on glass, but he could feel nothing under his feet.

No matter where he moved his head, the vanishing point of the fire eye tunnel always seemed to move along with his perspective, as if the whole tunnel were moving along with his own eyes so as to never let him look at its wall directly. It was quite disorienting, truth be told. "It's not the first time I have to help put you back together after you go through an unexpected transformation, is it?" Mandrake looked down. "It sure isn't." The implications of his genetic tampering had never been lost on Mandrake. A long time ago, his people had suffered dearly at the hands of those who'd seen genes as the be all, end all of everything. He wanted to heal people with his genetic engineering, but never at the cost of repeating anything of the sort.

When he was transformed, many believed that Mandrake had got what he deserved.

"You thought I'd condemn you even then, didn't you?" Mandrake nodded. "Yeah... You'd never been afraid of telling me when you'd thought I was wrong about something before, you know?" His father raised an eyebrow. "Neither had you, as I recall," his father replied, tongue-in-cheek. "You're right, I hadn't," Mandrake shook his head. "Yet I didn't, did I?" Mandrake looked up at him. "No, you're right. You were there for me through the hardest period of my life, even though I'd never have seen it coming. Even when others condemned me, you stood up for me. It ended up being one of the things that brought us the closest together, wasn't it?" The older otter nodded. "It was. People will surprise you sometimes, son. Let them."

Mandrake heard sparrows singing in the branches of the trees in the grove around him. "Guess who!" The otter almost panicked when two hands covered his eyes from behind him, only to relax when they were removed and he turned around to see who had surprised him so. "Sweetheart, it's you!" Mandrake hugged his boyfriend, relieved. "I'm happy to see you." The snake-dryad-spider hugged him back. "Me too!" Soma ran his fingers across the otter's head affectionately. "I can't remember the last time I saw you acting playful and mischievous like this," Mandrake chuckled. It *was* a bit out of character. His boyfriend was usually so serious. "I missed you," the snake said simply, face still buried between the otter's neck and shoulder.

"What do you mean?" Mandrake raised an eyebrow at him. "We've still been seeing each other, haven't we?" Soma looked down. "I may not tell you this enough 'down there' for all I know, but... I like being around you, love. I really do." The otter petted him softly. "Me too, sweetie." The snake shook his head. "I know we've been seeing each other, it's just... People have been getting hurt a lot since what happened. When their bodies get hurt, they come see me. When their minds get hurt, they come see you. Between everyone we both need to take care of because of our jobs, it just... It feels like we don't have as much time as we used to for us to be able to spend time with each other as much these days, you know?" Mandrake winced.

"You're right... This past month hasn't been easy on our relationship, has it?" Soma nodded. "It's not your fault. Life gets in the way. It's just..." The otter put his hand on his boyfriend's shoulder and looked him in the eyes. "Let's make sure to make enough time to spend time with each other no matter what, okay?" The snake nodded. "Yeah... I don't know. I'm being silly. It's just... There's been so much loss. I never want either of us to regret not having spent as much time with each other as we could." Mandrake whimpered. "Oh, Soma... You know I love you, right?" They held each other close, showing a vulnerable side of themselves to each other that they could never have revealed to the people they helped.

"I love you too, Mandrake," Soma kissed him unreservedly. Backing away just a few steps, the dryad shapeshifted his legs back into a spider's lower body, his plant-like spidery abdomen full of holes with honeycombed patterns scattered across it. "Speaking of which, there's someone else you haven't talked to in a while who'd like to talk to you," he said, motioning to his spider-plant abdomen behind him. "Huh?" Mandrake tilted his head at him, not sure he understood what the snake meant. "You'll see." A swarm of butterflies seemed to come out of Soma's abdomen's honeycombs that were really very small snakes with leaves for wings, covering the otter's body entirely as they landed all over him from head to toe.

All of a sudden, Mandrake looked around him, and saw he seemed to be standing somewhere inside a green, giant beehive, with honeycombs in the walls towering everywhere around him and what were now full-sized snakes with leafy wings and twigs for legs fluttering from honeycomb to honeycomb, fulfilling some mysterious purpose known to them alone. Ivy crept up the walls, lotus blossoms grew here and there on the ground around him, and the smell of sap wafted around him where he'd have expected to smell honey in a regular beehive. Yet what caught his attention the most wasn't this, but the other otter who he found also standing in these surroundings alongside him.

"Mom...!"

Mandrake had always wished he could have known his mother. For his whole life, it had always been just his father and him. She'd died before he'd had the chance to know her, and he'd always regretted it. So often, with the way his life had become over the passage of time, he felt that he was put into a position in which he had to act as some sort of makeshift mother figure to people, who had often not had the best mothers growing up themselves. It had become part of what he thought of as his traditionally 'feminine,' caretaking approach to personal ethics. He often wished he could have known her, in part so she could have served as his model for how to take care of people like that, but even more because he cared about her.

He just ran to her and hugged her, without thinking, without analyzing, without turning anything over in his head about it. She took him in her arms, and cradled him like a child, seeming as happy to have been reunited with him as he was to have been reunited with her. "It's been a long time, hasn't it?" She smiled at him sweetly. "You've worked long and hard for other people, my son. I'm proud of you." She wiped a tear from his eye. "And life is long and complicated, and tomorrow you'll have a big, long path full of hurdles stretching out ahead of you, and you'll have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, always, no matter what. But for now... Just let me hold you, my son." He held her closely, whimpering. Time seemed to stop.

He almost stumbled. Just like that, again, she was gone. He fought to hold back tears.

"What's up, doc?"

He looked around himself. He was standing in a desert made of red sand, the dark night sky above him illuminated by silvery aurora borealis. On one side of him was a bubbling cauldron, a one-armed, headless female rabbit's body wearing a magician's outfit skipping in a circle around it like a schoolgirl, throwing purple petals up in the air above her like a child at a wedding with her left arm while her disembodied right arm stirred the bubbling cauldron with her magician's wand. On the other side of him, a female rat sat cross-legged in a green pentagram on the ground, affectionately petting the disembodied head of the rabbit who'd just addressed him, which was coming out of her magician's hat that was resting in the rat's lap.

He couldn't believe she'd actually just asked him that.

"So, Mandrake" the rat took over, "did you find what you were looking for?" He thought long and hard about everything that he'd just seen, everyone that he'd just spoken to about everything that had been going on, trying as well as he could to make heads or tails of any of it in a way in which he could have given her a satisfactory answer based on it. "I'm not sure," he had to admit. "Oh well," she shrugged. "Tough titty, doc." He blinked. "I'm sorry, what?" He raised an eyebrow, not sure he'd heard her right. "Tough titty!" And she laughed, and laughed, and the rabbit's head in her lap laughed along with her at the poor otter's stunned disbelief. "Mandrake, awaken...!"

He bolted awake. "Ugh..." He shook his head. "Let's go get some coffee, why don't we."