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'That is not dead which can eternal lie,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had looked at her so seriously. "Oh, my son..." She'd approached him and wrapped her wing around him protectively. He'd always felt safe when she'd done that.

"If I believed that you were, do you really think I wouldn't do everything I could do to stop it? I put out fires for a living, Rakim... I'd never leave you to the flames. You're my son."

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was time for Death.

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

For naught.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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