Two Bards: The Forum!

Emma lay in bed with her covers pulled up over her head and tried desperately to keep from crying.

She didn’t like it when her mother and her Daddy fought; it made her want to curl up and hide, even when she was already supposed to be asleep, like now. But she hadn’t been able to sleep right away and she could hear the shouting coming up through the vents even when she covered her head with her pillow. Her Daddy was angry about Julio? And her mother was screaming back about business trips? But Julio was nice to her, and it wasn’t Daddy’s fault his job sent him away so often!

Emma wanted to go down there and shout at them both to stop it! but she’d been tucked into bed and was supposed to be asleep and she didn’t want to make things worse by not being asleep when she was supposed to be. It wasn’t until she heard glass break downstairs that she just couldn’t take it any more.

She shuffled over to the window and pushed it open, not caring if she set off the alarm like her mother warned her about. The screen was gone a moment later, and Emma climbed out onto the roof. It took a moment to orient herself - everything looked so different at night! - but the moon was big in the sky and showed her the tree beside the house pretty clearly, and Emma managed to get into its branches with a minimum of fuss and muss.

Then she was down to the ground and off like a shot, heading for the one place she knew she wouldn’t get yelled at or scared.

The littlest park on the corner.

She ran as fast as she could in her pajamas, and didn’t stop for the roads like Julio the Gardener told her to do. Fortunately, it was late enough at night that no-one was driving, and Emma made it to the park in record time. She didn’t slow down when she hit the trees, too tired and hurting on the inside to care, and as soon as she got under the foliage the moonlight cut out abruptly. It was very dark under the trees but she kept on moving blindly, stumbling over roots and through bushes, tears running down her face making it even harder to see, until finally she tripped and fell.

Bruised, both knees skinned, in a dark forest, alone, and really really upset, Emma wailed.

Rustling of some nearby bushes brought her whipping around and for one awful second some big monster loomed out of the darkness. It was big and tall and had a weird crown, and for a terrified instant Emma recalled the tales of the monsters who lived in the woods and came out at night to eat children. She caught her breath to scream, and -

“Emma. What is wrong? Why are you out of your den this late?”

The warm, wonderfully familiar voice that spoke between her ears rang out and she saw the six glowing orbs that he had for eyes. It was Growly!

Emma leaped forward and clung to his neck, sobbing in a mixture of relief and upset. “Mom and Daddy were fighting, an’ I was s'posed to be asleep but they were loud an’ then I heard glass an’, an’ then I came here an’ it was dark an’ then I tripped, an’ an’ an’ -” Words failed her, and she buried her face in the wonderfully soft fur of his ruff.

She could feel him shift around her, big heavy walking paws pulling her closer before smaller hand-paws joined them and cradled her gently. She hiccuped, and he began to sing in his enchanting voice.

Sing soft
Above the flashing wave
Sleep soft
In the sandy cave
Dream soft
Seek the pretty colors
Feel soft
Drink the joy of others
Rest you sweetly now
You are safe
Here in this bough

As he sang, her tears slowly ran out of her and by the end she was so tired she could barely keep her eyes open.

“Emma. They will be looking for you,”

His voice was gentle and not angry, and Emma loved him a little more.

“Mom won’t wake up until noon and Daddy always spends the night somewhere else when they fight,” she told him with a pang that had her wriggling closer to his wonderfully soft and furry chest. She could feel his breathing against her cheek, and the weird ba-da-da-dump of his heartbeat thudded softly in time to his breathing.

“Then I think a night in my den would most benefit you.”

Growly didn’t end his words like a question, but Emma nodded anyway and prepared herself to be put down to walk to where he lived. To her surprise, he instead shifted his hand-paws and one of his big walking paws to keep her against his chest. Like Daddy used to do before she got too big, and the thought had her burying her face in his fur.

Growly said nothing and instead began walking in a bumpy three-limbed gait. Rocks and branches that would have tripped her seem to just magically not be where his feet landed, and the rocking motion had her nearly asleep by the time they reach the big tree. Growly paused for a long moment as they got there, his fur silvered in the moonlight that came through the branches, and Emma wanted to ask him what’s wrong but he moved before she could.

Sidling up to his den, she can feel his grip on her shift in the instant before he laid down and scootched up into the safety of the tree’s roots. Emma’d never been under the roots before - her mother didn’t like it if she came home with dirty clothes, no matter how interesting the place she’d gotten dirty had been - but with Growly there it felt warm. Safe. He hummed the lullaby again in between her ears as he moved and settled, and she couldn’t help the smile on her face as she finally drifted off.

Murem regarded Emma with concern. He’d heard her long before he’d seen her, and she hadn’t heard him the first several times he’d called. It was only the bright spike of fear when she’d seen him that had let him contact her, and that would be more concerning if she hadn’t been broadcasting images of native predators into his head strongly in that instant. He sighed and set his internal wake-up to just before the planet’s primary star rose over the horizon; he was already so hopelessly burned that he could never present himself to the Seat of Capisten again, but he’d prefer not to have to deal with worried kit’s guardians or the persistent itching caused by excess solar radiation if he didn’t have to.

Twisting a little, he managed to lay his head over Emma’s lower half and went to sleep.

Something was tickling her nose, and she batted it away. It came back, and she batted it away again. It came back for a third time, and was this time accompanied by words.

“Emma. It’s time to wake up.”

She made a protesting noise and buried her face in the wonderfully warm and soft fur beneath her. It was the best sleep she’d ever gotten, and she didn’t want to wake up yet!

She could feel his chuckle beneath her cheek and his amusement lit a warm glow in her heart as it echoed between her ears.

“Very well, but you will need to get up on my back when I tell you to; I cannot make the journey on three legs.”

Emma responded with a very sleepy yes and held on stubbornly as she felt him start shifting underneath her. Maybe a little dirt fell on her as he moved, but she didn’t care. She did care that the morning air outside the den was much, much cooler than the morning air inside the den, and at her noise of protest she felt Growly chuckle again.

He didn’t say anything though, just started lifting her with his hand-paws up onto this back. She accepted the change in position ungraciously, then stretched out along his back to keep as much of herself in contact with his body heat as she could. He held on to her with his hand-paws, and with a speed that had a breeze blowing through her hair he began heading up out of the park.

His paws faltered when they hit the sidewalk, but Emma had walked this way so many times now she felt like she could probably do it in her sleep and she closed her eyes to think hard about the way back. Growly’s pace resumed, each bound eating up space it would have taken her a few minutes even running at her full speed to cover.

Sooner than she thought possible, they were at her house; she’d left her window open last night in her hurry, and it took Growly a single bound to get up next to it. He was really too big to fit through, though, and Emma had to slide off his back to go inside.

She missed the warmth of his body as soon as she’d gotten off, with an almost physical ache behind her heart, but his words helped.

“If you are ever in distress again, do not hesitate to seek me. I will keep you safe against the whole world if need be. I look forward to our next meeting.”

Emma had crawled through the window into her room as he spoke, and at her nod he turned and bounded away as the first rays of dawn broke over the horizon.

She looked down at her pajamas. Not only were they dirty, but they were covered in green fur; if her mother found them she’d be mad. Emma pulled the pajamas off and stuffed them under her bed before struggling into a new pair and climbing into said bed. She held Growly’s voice tight to her heart and closed her eyes to get a little more sleep before anyone came looking for her.

She loved Growly.

Cysud grunted as he heaved another load of sand into place.

He was a Class III of no particular talent, and so he had only been to Arena once when he was very young - but that still put him up on nearly every other pilot still alive. His species was very long-lived, and it was just after his first travel that he’d been taken to Arena to witness…something. He’d been very young, and had spent most of the time in the sheltering cover of his eggfriend’s forebearer’s wing. But he remembered the standing stones, and the soft sands, and the tiers of viewing stands. He remembered the high place where the arbitrator had stood, and he remembered the stairs beneath his feet.

Which had brought him to the here and now, working with other pilots who had lived. He exhaled a thin tendril of thermionic energy, raising the temperature of the sand until it shone in his eyes and formed glass. Grunting in satisfaction as it held the shape he wanted, he turned to the pilot beside him and gestured for another load to shore up the weak point in the pillar they were raising. The other pilot - Catoblepas - obliged, and Cysud sucked in a deep breath that lowered the ambient temperature by several degrees - much to the audible relief of the other members of his crew and the ones working to either side of him.

As he worked, the memory of his return to Arena swam to the surface of his mind.

It’d taken him possibly too long to admit to himself that his people no longer lived in the canyon the light had dumped him in, fresh out of Arena. His sky-drawings had gone without reaction, and it had taken several days of investigation to find the worn-away remains of the story carved into the stone near the Cave of Many Places.

They told a tale of a cataclysm, of a great shaking of the ground after strange streaks in the sky, and how the water had dried up. His people had moved on, in hopes of finding the land where the water had fled to, but in which direction that was Cysud couldn’t say. Time had worn the runes thin, and even reading that much of the story had been difficult. Where his people had chosen to go had been entirely erased, beyond his ability to even feel the runes with his fingers.

The Cave itself had seemed strangely shrunken from his memories of it, before the sight of his diamond-mesh-patterned chest had reminded him of how much he had grown. He stood tall enough now that he had to duck to make his way through the entrance, though the smooth stone of the alcoves inside seemed as timeless as they’d ever had. He’d run his hand over the stone and felt the thrumming of the place, but he couldn’t bring himself to let it take him. Cysud had changed a great deal since he’d last voluntarily gone out into the Metaverse, and deep in his heart he was afraid of finding out how much his bond had hurt his avatar. If he hadn’t need the ability to cool himself in the blasting heat of the day, he would have relinquished his bond then and there.

But he still needed it, needed it to keep himself safe until he reached his people. With a silent apology to his avatar, he had held on to his bond and started flying into the West. When he reached his people, he would let it go with a willing heart.

Of course, that presupposed he could find them. As days turned into weeks turned into months of flying for the daylight hours and eating whatever he could scavenge at night - if there was one thing he’d learned in Arena, it was that food came in many forms and how to eat even the most unappetizing of meals - his hope grew smaller. Wherever his people had gone, they were very far away - if any of them had survived at all. He’d found no runes since leaving the canyon, nor signs of dwellings, and his hope was fading.

And then, one day, someone had arrived.

It wasn’t one of his people; the heat signature was far too small and mottled to ever make that mistake. Yet there was passing familiarity to it - and besides, it had appeared out of nowhere. That warranted a second look if nothing else did. The conversation that had followed was etched deep in Cysud’s memory.

“You’re needed.”

“Where?”

“Back on Arena. The slate’s been wiped clean, and it’s time for it to start working like it used to again.”

“I’m done with Arena. Why do they need my help anyway?”

“You remember what it used to be like.”

“I went there once while I was barely big enough to leave the nest, and that was only because the Cave had worked for me. It’s been a long time.”

“And yet you remember it.”

A pause.

“Yes, I remember it. I remember what it looked like before the City rose. So what?”

“So they need your help to put it back.”

“You should know how it’s supposed to be. You help them.”

“So you do recognize me.”

“Even to my eyes, you’re alight with the vested power of Metaverse Enforcement. Plus the hat is pretty recognizable.”

“Then you know why I can’t help.”

Another pause.

“Say I did help. Would you do something for me?”

A snort. “Depends on what that something is.”

“Nothing illegal. I want you to promise that I’ll come back to my people here when I finish there.”

A look. “I can’t promise that.”

“Then I’m not going. I’ll stay here and find my people or die trying.”

“Wait. I can’t promise that because I’m not allowed there and you know it. But! I will arrange for your safe passage back when it’s all said and done.”

“Back to this world, back to my people?”

“You have my word that I’ll arrange it. Back to this world, back to your species here.”

A very long pause.

“Deal.”

“Deal.”

A handshake that dissolves into the white-hot everything of travelling between worlds.

Cysud shook his head as he looked around. Besides Catoblepas, his team consisted of two smaller bipeds named Nekulturny and Mids, a very tall hexapod who had said to call him Skitters, and a legless reptilian named Kadiss. They were assigned to work on the pillars that ringed the designated combat area, which Cysud could only be grateful for. He didn’t envy the poor sods whose job it was to extract the ruined pieces of city from beneath the sands of the ring to make it safe to fight in once again.

A whistle came from the East, and all the teams began setting down whatever materials they’d been carrying - whether it was detritus of the city or the makings of the place anew - and heading towards the whistle. Arena wasn’t meant for long-term use, so they were still having to bring in food and water to keep the pilots going - but the shipments were tapering off as more and more of the work was completed. Soon enough Arena would stand as Cysud and a scarce handful of others remembered it, and those who’d volunteered to help rebuild it could depart.

Cysud’s eyes strayed over to the work table, where their leaders stood in conference. Legends, one and all; The Brony, Andi Jaymes, Clarence Jaxun. Cysud had resisted listening to their stories before Collyseum had fallen, and had spoken to them without knowing who they truly were when he’d first been returned to this half-land. Now, after weeks in the company of other survivors, he’d heard their stories.

It was difficult, truly, to think that such young pilots had accomplished so much good. Cysud couldn’t ever remember having been that young, though he supposed he must have been at one point. He rubbed the cross-hatched marks on his chest meditatively. He couldn’t truly say that he had ever done the Metaverse much good himself, but these people had. He knew, too, of the loss they had suffered to come this far; the half-finished memorial at the head of all the construction was merely a testament to the knowledge they all shared.

He wasn’t alone in wishing he could do more them, either, but nobody had yet come up with a good idea how. Many ideas were floated and rejected - out of their hearing, of course - and nothing had been settled yet. Cysud privately thought the best that could be done for them would be to send them home and finish the work in their honor while they rested, but he kept his thoughts to himself as he gathered with the others for food. Mealtimes were communal, now, the air filled with the quiet sound of talking as those with universal translators spoke for and to those that didn’t. Stories were swapped, experiences compared, friends made, and the future imagined between each word and breath.

Cysud finished his meal and leaned back to soak it in, one common theme cropping up again and again in the conversations going on around him.

Hex is hope.

Emma Tomlinson was scared.

All the lights in the house were off and wouldn’t turn back on, the fridge had stopped humming, the TV wouldn’t turn on, and neither her mother nor her Daddy were home. Her mother had said she was just going down the road to get some stuff from the store; when she did that she always took a really long time and came back with pretty-colored bottles she wouldn’t let Emma touch, except this time it was even longer than usual and Emma didn’t like it. Her Daddy was at work and wouldn’t be home for another hour or two, and Emma was scared now.

Mind made up, she ran to her room and grabbed her backpack. She put in a spare set of clothes so her mother wouldn’t complain when she came home dirty, then ran downstairs and grabbed a bottle of water and some cheese sticks from the fridge. She considered bringing something for Growly, but she didn’t really have enough room left in her backpack after she’d put the other stuff in there and it wasn’t her usual day to go visit him so there weren’t any of his snacks in the fridge.

She hoisted the backpack onto her shoulders and slipped out the front door, making sure to lock it up just like her mother taught her. The little number keys beside the door were dark and didn’t beep, but she put the code in anyway, just in case. Turning, she took one step off the porch and was arrested by a dog barking. She blinked and glanced around; one of her neighbors was walking their dog, a small terrier that barked at everything and bit you if you tried to pet it. Emma didn’t like that dog - or that neighbor, though she wouldn’t say so because that was Not A Polite Thing To Do, Young Lady - so she turned and hurried off towards Growly’s house.

As she walked she saw more and more people starting to walk too. Most of the adults looked worried, but the kids seemed to be either happy to be outside or sulky because they had to go outside with very few in between. Emma avoided them all; the kids were boring and the adults would try and keep her from meeting with Growly and with all the strangeness of the day she really wanted the comfort of Growly’s fur.

It was odder still that nobody was driving their cars. Emma still checked both ways before crossing the street, but even though some cars were in the middle they weren’t moving. The ones in the middle looked broken, in fact; glass sprinkled the road around them with bigger chunks still hanging down outside the frames. Emma didn’t stop to look closer, even though the glass sparkled so prettily under the afternoon sun. Her mother had always been very definite that broken glass was A Mess, and Emma didn’t want to get messy before she even got to Growly’s house. Showing up to another person’s house all messy was just bad manners, after all.

On reaching the park, she wobbled for a moment at the outskirts; the park was busier than she’d ever seen it, a number of parents apparently having decided to exercise their kids to make them stop whining. The kids themselves were playing noisily on the playground equipment and running around on the grass while the adults were huddled together and talking with worried faces. Something about the knots of worried adults made Emma’s stomach clench unpleasantly - where were her parents? She didn’t know, and hurried towards the trees so she didn’t have to think about it.

The treeline was quieter, the noise of the other kids playing muted somewhat by the vegetation, and she hurried a little as she walked down the familiar path. The park was different when it was noisy, but compared to what was happening with everything else it wasn’t so bad; Emma almost wished she could join the other children, but they all had parents watching them and her parents weren’t around. Her parents were never around, but now it was scary and she wanted Growly. Growly was very smart and always knew what to say and do, like when she’d asked him about the Bad Man on the television.

Fortunately she didn’t encounter anyone else on her way - though she saw flashes of adults walking other trails - and she had arrived at Growly’s house in pretty short order.

“Growly!”

Emma didn’t quite shout - her mother hated it when she shouted - but she did raise her voice and six opalline eyes blinked a greeting from the shadows. “Emma,” he responded gravely between her ears, and the overwhelming surge of relief nearly brought tears to her eyes. She was safe with Growly; he would know what to!

“Emma, what is wrong? It is not our usual time of meeting.” Emma could feel the concern in his voice wrap around her like a blanket, and felt a little silly for her overreaction to the day’s events. Still, she couldn’t help but feel better as he moved to the edge of the shadows and the outline of his funny mustache became visible against the deeper shadows of the root system.

“I don’t understand, Growly, but the television won’t go on, and the icebox won’t hum, and my phone won’t go on, and mother and Daddy aren’t home, and everybody’s out walking and no cars are driving and it just feels wrong. Like you tried to show me about the colors except it’s just bad and kinda yellow?” Emma let it all out in a rush and immediately felt a weight lift off her chest, a weight lightened further by the fact that Growly didn’t dismiss everything as her imagination. Instead he seemed lost in thought, mustache bristling bushier than she’d ever seen it.

“May I see your phone?” The question came into her mind neutrally, no derision or scorn….but nothing happier either and Emma blinked with a sudden sense of foreboding. “Sure,” she said and pulled her pack off so she could zip open one of the outer pouches. “Mother gave it to me to use in emergencies only and makes me charge it every third night, but I tried to call her and it didn’t work. I charged it up like she showed me, I swear,” she added hurriedly, afraid he’d think she messed up and let it run out of charge.

“I believe you took excellent care of it; you are not a careless kit. I wish to see it for another reason; it may have a story of its own to tell.” Emma beamed at Growly’s words; he knew she could take care of her things! That made her Responsible and a good child. Fishing the phone out of its pocket, she made sure to hold it under the shadow of the overhang above them. Growly took it in one of his funny hand-paws and inspected it closely. First he felt along the case with his hand-paws, then he sniffed it - brushing it through is mustache as he did so - before finally-

“Ew!” She exclaimed as his wide purple tongue ran gently over the device from top to bottom. She could feel his amusement between her eyes, but he didn’t respond; instead, he held the phone up to be inspected visually before huffing a great sigh that set his mustache a-fluttering. His amusement faded, but nothing replaced it in her mind and she blinked. “Growly? What’s wrong?”

Growly set the phone gently on the packed dirt floor and gazed at it for a long moment before looking at her with all six of his eyes. “Emma. You say your caretakers have not returned home?” His tone was neutral and she couldn’t feel anything from it in her head. It was strange, and she didn’t like it, but she did her best to clamp down on her unease. “Yes; mother went to the store hours and hours ago and didn’t come back, and Daddy’s at work.”

“And there is no one else you would seek shelter from?” Again, his tone was neutral and his words particularly colorless. Emma blinked, lost, as she tried to think; the only person she could really think of was Growly. Did he not want to help her? Her eyes filled with tears as her lip began to wobble, the events of the day suddenly looming large and scary again. “N-no! B-but you s-said come to you if things got b-bad an’, an’” overwrought, she could feel tears start running down her face and she closed her eyes to dash them away. With mother and Daddy disappeared, and Growly - Growly - where else was she supposed to go?

Big paws landed on her shoulders unexpectedly and pulled her close to a furry barrel of a chest, smaller hand-paws running warm lines up and down her back. “Oh, I did not mean to frighten you, Emma. By law I am required to ensure all other caretakers have given up their claims to a kit before I may take it as my own. Such are the Laws of Capisten; so they are ordained, so shall they be enforced.” His voice was warm between her ears, the last part echoing weirdly like a bunch of other voices were saying it at the same time in the same way. It had the sound of finality to it, an almost binding force, and more tears squeezed themselves out of her eyes as her head felt unbearably full of it.

“I, Murem Sivaowl Ryggaus ki Capisten, third in line to the Seat of Capisten in absentia, do so claim Emma; until she may choose her own path, let her be Emma Josri Ryggaus ki Capisten, fourteenth in line to the Seat of Capisten in absentia. In accordance with the Laws of Capisten, let my words be binding.” Again, the last sentence had a really weird echo, like many voices were saying at once along with Growly. As he finished speaking, warmth crashed through Emma like a wave; she was safe, and secure in Growly’s paws and in the den he’d made livable, and he’d never willingly let her come to harm and she knew it down to her bones.

When he spoke again it was in a quieter voice, a certain thread of exhaustion running through it. “I had not expected the honor of kits, but I will do my best. I do not think it safe to stay here overlong; there is nothing to be found for food that was not brought in by others, and they will not be bringing anything again for an unknown time. Rest now Emma, and I will take us somewhere safer when the primary star has gone below the horizon. Sleep,” the last word was a command Emma, exhausted by the day so far, was happy to obey and, snuggling closer to Growly - whose warmth she could feel all the time between her ears now, even when he wasn’t speaking - she fell asleep.

Swims Many Shoals did not feel well.

He wasn’t sick, exactly. No disease preyed upon his health, no bad food rotted in his belly - but a shadow loomed over his heart nevertheless at the thought of what he had to do. Of what the duty was of him and all his siblings.

It’s not every day you were obligated to kill your mother, after all.

Of course, it wasn’t just that Hunts Swift Prey was their mother. She had also been the leader of the Greater Spinwise Current Frenzy for many years. Her nuanced understanding of group dynamics and uncanny acumen in dealing with those not a part of the frenzy had made her the best leader in several generations, and the changes she had wrought had let the frenzy grow to the largest it had been in living memory thanks to pioneering food storage techniques and new and improved catching strategies.

Swims Many Shoals and all her progeny had profited greatly from her leadership, and so they had ignored the strangeness at first. Hunts Swift Prey was getting on in years, a little shortness of temper was to be expected. A certain amount of rudeness, both to them and their allies could be traced to the same source. Maybe the moodiness was due to a bad meal. The punishments were a little more aggressive, but nothing too far beyond acceptable limits.

And then she’d devoured her litter.

It wasn’t unheard of, when times were lean and the frenzy was getting too large. But they’d never had more food, the new method of preservation Hunts Swift Prey had negotiated for from the Kesshcarron - a type of bottom-dweller - had allowed them to lay in enough food to last three seasons before hunting again, even if they added another dozen to their number. There had been no reason to devour a litter, and when Swims Many Shoals had pressed her for a reason she had sent him away bleeding from a gash in his shoulder and without a response. Closes Many Wounds had tutted over the depth of the gash, but said nothing about where Swims Many Shoals had acquired it.

For all the knotty problems such an action entailed Hunts Swift Prey was their most respected and beloved leader, and had been for many years, and they trusted her enough to accept the complete lack of explanation she provided. They’d kept a closer watch on her afterwards though, Swims Many Shoals and Closes Many Wounds, which made her even more quarrelsome and a number of their brethren had acquired new scars from a correcting nip that was harder than warranted.

Some days were better than others, but on the whole time wore away their beloved leader. Lights turned to seasons, and Swims Many Shoals - being one of the few fast enough to dodge the quick, often petulant strikes of Hunts Swift Prey as well as being one of her favorite children - had gotten perhaps the best view of her deterioration.

So when she ate a second litter, he couldn’t say he was surprised.

Indeed, the consensus was more resignation than horror. As the leader of the frenzy and the only one allowed to breed, a certain amount of behavior was excusable - but this was not. She had killed the future of the frenzy three times over; first by becoming increasingly hostile to allies, then by attacking members of the frenzy unprovoked, and finally by killing the future generations.

The frenzy couldn’t survive such a betrayal. They had gathered and spoken for a long time before reaching a consensus; they would kill the mad husk that had been Hunts Swift Prey, and then they would disperse. None of them particularly wished to take Hunts Swift Prey’s place, though killing her would allow any of the females license to do so, and the waters around them had soured with bad memories and a taste of madness. So they would leave; those with desirable skills would pair up with those whose skills were less so to ensure all would find new frenzies, and they would leave the waters they had lived in all their lives to find new homes free of the taint of what Hunts Swift Prey had done.

But first they had to kill her, and that was not an easy task.

Swims Many Shoals had been elected to bring her to the ambush. He’d objected, but been overruled on the reasonable grounds that whoever did it was going to be the closest to her when the attack started and therefore in the most danger. As the swiftest, he was the most likely to live. Unstated was the fact that, even in the throes of whatever madness had taken her mind, she had shown a reluctance to attack him that no other member of the frenzy shared.

Which had led him to the here and now, swimming a respectful distance away from his mother as he subtly guided her to her doom. It was necessary, a litter eater could not be allowed to live, yet it still rested uneasily with him. For everything she had done - to him, to the frenzy - she was still his mother. Hunts Swift Prey seemed oblivious to his disquiet, however, where before she would have seen and sussed out the reason why before they had swum half a klick - that, more than anything was a sign to Swims Many Shoals that whatever this thing was, it wasn’t his mother anymore.

When the frenzy struck, she was caught completely unawares.

Reads The Currents was the first to land a hit, coming up from below and behind a dead coral outcropping. Her teeth gashed open Hunts Swift Prey’s side and blood spread in the water like a great storm cloud. Hunts Swift Prey’s retaliation had been immediate - but, as predicted, not towards Swims Many Shoals, and Reads The Currents had already ducked out of range.

Then the rest of the frenzy descended.

It was a short, ugly fight. Hunts Swift Prey was their finest fighter, but she was no match for seven generations of her adult progeny. Three of them perished at her claws; Dances In Air died choking when a powerful strike sliced open her gills, Breaker Of Shells died when a lucky lash broke his neck, and Fights The Tide - her second in command and father of the frenzy - was laid open from neck to waist, sinking as his swim bladders ruptured.

Three of their own dead and drifting in the current when Hunts Swift Prey finally stopped thrashing. The water was thick with blood and offal, the latter mostly from Fights The Tide, but the normal hunger such things normally evoked was curiously absent. Their species was not an introspective one; they had no funeral traditions, the bodies of the fallen were usually eaten and the bones left to drift, but something about the thought of doing that this time was… unsettling.

Wrong.

Swims Many Shoals was the first to move, swimming forward slowly toward the mortal remains of their collective mother and greatest leader. A few of his siblings made aborted movements to get in his way, but ceased when he began to clean the body up as best he could. Closes Many Wounds, one of the few who had abstained from the attack itself, joined him as he brushed the torn skin smooth and closed the glassy eyes.

There wasn’t much that could be done, but the two of them did what they could while the others hung silently in the water and watched. When they had finished, Closes Many Wounds drew back while Swims Many Shoals gently pulled the corpse over to the dead coral outcrop. He couldn’t say why he was drawn to the spot, but dead to the dead seemed somehow fitting. He tucked the mortal remains of Hunts Swift Prey gently into a crevice between two folds of the coral and placed rocks around and on her to keep her from floating away.

When he could do nothing else for the one who had given them so much, he drew back and let his arms fall to his sides. His siblings departed two by two, without fanfare, without words. But the deaths had left the numbers uneven, so in the end Swims Many Shoals was left alone with the grisly monument.

It wasn’t a good place to be; with the Greater Spinwise Current frenzy’s dissolution the territory - and the name - were ripe for the taking. Another frenzy would come to claim it as their own, for it was rich enough to sustain five litters even without the tips and tricks Hunts Swift Prey had bartered for over the years. Any new frenzy who did would, of course, kill any of the previous occupants they found in the territory, as was their right; it did no good, after all, to let drains on valuable resources continue living when they provided nothing in return for what they took.

And it wasn’t as though Swims Many Shoals had no options. He was strong and fast and knew a great deal about the changes Hunts Swift Prey had made during her leadership; another frenzy would welcome him gladly as breeding stock and a contender for subordinate leadership positions. He could swim as far and as fast as he liked and he could have a good life wherever he ended up..

But he didn’t want to leave.

He hadn’t been second in command, but he had been one of the closest to his mother in the frenzy, a confidant and beloved child… before. If only he had seen what was happening, if only he had recognized the moodiness wasn’t some passing thing, if only he had done something sooner.

If only, if only, if only

The guilt ate at his insides like acid as he hung in place, unable to tear his eyes away from the makeshift grave. Finally, he could bear it no longer. Drawn as if by gravity, he swam over to a nearby spot on the dead coral stalk and wound his arms through whatever holes he could find and settled down to wait. He would not give up and abandon her in death as he had in life; starving to death was a slow way to go but, in the end, he’d see his mother again.

————————————————————————————————-

In a dusty wasteland where the plants are bitter and stunted and the sun shines red through the clouds, a hunched figure stalks the days and nights. It might have been a pretty blonde woman in a shapeless shirt and pants, tied at the waist. It might have been a lovely woman, the toast of her neighborhood, with blonde hair and a bright future in the Party. It might have been a gladiator, scraping gossip like lifeblood from a place riddled with despair.

It might have been all of those things, once upon a time, but it isn’t anymore.

Now it is death.

It kills everything it finds - friendly, unfriendly, mutated, unchanged, barely sentient and hyper-intelligent. Everything. No exceptions.

Of course, it has to find them first.

Hiding from it is difficult but not impossible. The trick is to stay, in whatever hiding spot you’ve chosen; if you run, it WILL catch you.

And that’s just what they’re counting on.

They’re a motley bunch, drawn together for a variety of reasons but united in one purpose: Kill the beast. Some were in it for the money - bounties from across the wasteland. Others joined for vengeance, for loss and grief; still others sought the glory, the prestige of putting down a legend. In the end, it didn’t matter why they were here, only that they were here.

They’d drawn sticks to see who was bait, and the poor bastard was sweating it out at the mouth of the canyon they’d set the ambush in. His job was to get the thing’s attention and draw it as far into the canyon as he could - after all, the thing seemed to prefer moving prey. The rest of them waited at the lip of the canyon, armed with whatever they had in the way of guns. They had to wait until all of them had a clear shot, or this’d be the death of them all.

They had one shot.

A yelp, followed by four running steps was all the warning they got before the screaming started, and all the killers tightened their grips on whatever weapon they had. The screaming stopped, replaced by an ugly, wet crunching. It went on for an improbably long time, but the silence when that stopped was profound.

The thing appeared in the mouth of the canyon, but they held their fire. It walked slowly some way into the canyon, and they held their fire. It made its way further into the canyon, and paused in the center.

They fired.

The thing was fast, but not faster than a bullet.

Ten bullets.

A hundred bullets.

When it fell, it didn’t look like anything anymore.

It starts with a shift in the grass, an instability in the cliff itself.

On a cliff overlooking an ocean, there is a pole.

It has a crossbar, to which a few, moldy scraps of fabric still cling, but there’s not much left of whatever was there. A flag, one that meant much to many. Not that you can tell anymore; time and tide wait for no one and inexorable entropy’s eaten away nearly all that it was.

The pole itself is unremarkable; it is some kind of metal, but not one you’d find in this land. Not that its foreign composition has saved it from the salt in the wind. It’s mottled up an down with corrosion, and some pieces have fallen away entirely. One day the ocean will have it all.

It continues with a groan, a rumble, a subsonic vibration that sends local wildlife scattering in fear.

There’s something at the base of the pole, where it is shrouded by a veritable riot of small plants. Most of them are flowering, sweet scents lingering in the air and blossoms obscuring the base of the pole. There’s a definite shape to the greenery, but it’s not until the vine are moved aside that said shape becomes as clear as the bleached-white bones that are revealed in that fashion.

The whole skeleton rests intact, the vines having grown up and around and through the bones which themselves interlock a surprising amount. A grinning skull with sharp teeth and half a dozen empty eyesockets rests on the ground in front of the flag, just in front of a spinal column that traces a line nearly two meters in length from skull to what are very clearly pelvic bones, with another three meters describing a gentle arc of a tail.

The shoulders and ribs - two of which are broken - rest against the base of the pole, and one bony arm is tied to it by small tendrils of vines seeking the sunlight. The claws, anchored to the bone of the last joint in each finger, shine dully in the sunlight, polished smooth by the salt-laden sea air.

It rises to a roar, a howl, a spray of dust rising towards the heavens.

Indeed, the skeleton in its entirety is remarkably smooth. No scavengers have disturbed this corpse, nor the pole to which it clutches, nor the banner that flies from the pole. Perhaps it is because the skeleton does not belong there, perhaps it was out of respect for its passing.

No matter why, no matter how, time and tide wait for no one.

It ends with a cascade of stone and bone and soil and metal, as the cliff slides gently into the embrace of the sea.

The temple was coming together nicely.

As Hristiana strode through the cacophony of the builders, the glimmering helm-crown of Archpriestess flashing on her brow, she couldn’t help the genuine smile of pleasure the progress made had brought to her lips. Though it had taken a disproportionate amount of time for the priesthood to reach a consensus about the location for her temple, once a site had been decided upon the gods themselves had handed down a design for a temple such as the world had never seen, and had given an unprecedented amount of aid to hasten the progress of bringing it about.

The main doors - each to one side of a wide, empty outer stretch of wall whose purpose had only recently become clear - opened into a grand hall lined with eight statues; Bruno Hamilton faced Andi Jaymes, Jenika Clarkson faced Thomas Wells, Wyatt Maxwell faced Rosie Harvin, and Crash Jaxun stood across from Brony Robbins at the head of the hall. Behind each statue was a series of carved alcoves, each one dedicated to a trusted partner of the pilot in front of them. Spreading out from the hall were two lesser wings, each containing the pilot-statues and avatar-alcoves of the rest of the Exemplars Hristiana had returned with.

Even though most of the alcoves were empty - a number of them were even unfinished, rough stone absorbing light where the polished rock would reflect it back to the viewer - and the plinths for the interior statues stood empty, a number of priests, priestesses, priestlis, and praestors - all of them either fresh from the Learning or the lowest of the low from other, better-established temples - were already worshiping at the places marked out for each. There were no prayers developed yet, but a constant mantra fell from every lip as the assembled clergy opened their souls to the gods; Hex is Hope. The refrain burbled through the vast, echoing hall, sounding not unlike the wash of ocean upon the shore. More prayers would be created or be granted to them by the gods as the temple established itself, of that Hristiana had no doubt, and the sound would change.

But for now, she reveled in the tide.

Each of the supplicants prayed now for knowledge; Hristiana had given all that she knew to the gods, all the stories and the pain and the suffering and the battles - and, in the end, the triumph. The gods had declared her worthy of the position Archpriestess, but they had needed to take the knowledge from her so they could impress it upon other souls and she had given it gladly. The gods would judge each of those who prayed to them, giving to those who passed their judgement knowledge of the Exemplar they prayed about and granting them standing in the temple.

Hristiana was, herself, Archpriestess of the whole temple; normally each Exemplar would have two High Attendants who would deal with the day-to-day matters of the Exemplar and those wishing to pray to them, with however many regular priesthood the temple had the wherewithal to support. With the sudden influx of more than two score Exemplars into one temple, each one just as worthy as the last and all with virtues many would aspire to, the structure had not yet made itself clear. That would be Hristiana’s job, to determine what would best suit the needs of her new temple and either implement the necessary changes or acquire the required materials.

Something that, as the youngest Archpriestess in several centuries and the only one to have ever acquired the rank before acquiring the Deep Knowledge, she was currently having difficulties with. Hristiana couldn’t help the frown that tugged at her lips as she looked around at the half-finished building. More than five years since her return, and all the statues that should be on display were still resting less than half-done on pedestals in the district reserved for sculptors and stonemasons.

All except one.

Hristiana’s smile grew smaller, though no less sincere, as she walked through the front doors to the open area in front of the temple. There, shining brilliantly in the late evening sun, was the statue that had taken up residence in front of the blank stretch of wall between the two front doors. Solid gold, as near as the alchemists could tell, and coated in the crystal of the gods so that it shone both day and night, it stood just up under the eaves of the roof and looked down at all who entered with a benevolent expression.

Unlike nearly all the other pilots and avatars, who would have statues representative of who they were rather than what they truly looked like - for Hristiana had never seen any of the pilots, save two - this was a statue of the pilot as she had truly looked; of that, Hristiana had absolutely no doubt, though she had never known the woman in life. At her feet a fountain of extraordinary purity flowed to and from nowhere, free for all to drink from, and on the wall behind her the gods had placed an inscription.

Maddox McPhernon, who gave the whole of herself to save us all.

Hristiana bowed to the statue, relishing the feeling of peace that washed through her at the action, and continued toward the arts district where the rest of the statues were being made. It had been too long since the gods had commanded they be made and there should have been word of progress beyond that they were being worked on. Especially since the gods themselves were taking a lavish hand with this temple, involving themselves far more in this mortal than any other in recent history. Theories abounded as to why they were doing so, but even the blindest fool would have to acknowledge that the gods had a vested interest.

Which doesn’t reflect well on the hidebound fools currently obstructing my efforts, Hristiana thought sourly. Archpriestlis Nasos of the Temple of Themistoklis was the loudest naysayer; lir outrage had been immediate and loud when Hristiana had been granted the helm-crown, and had only been brought down to simmering grumbles when all the wine in lir temple turned to blood overnight - a fact that had li had found the hard way when starting the morning services.

Others had stood with lir, albeit more subtly, and thus long months of arguing and delays had gone by before even the temple’s location could be agreed upon. Hristiana had found the whole song and dance distasteful - they were servants to warrior gods, if the others objected to her or her methods they should meet her on the challenge-sands - but had managed it with as much grace as she could muster and help from a most unexpected source.

Manousos, Archpriest of one of the oldest and most well-respected Temples - one of the few others that housed more than one Exemplar, interestingly - had made a point to meet with Hristiana publicly and congratulate her on the progress she’d made on the temple. He’d seemed sincere enough, but Hristiana couldn’t shake the feeling that something darker lurked beneath the face of such benevolence. She’d thanked him exactly as politely as was required of her, and no more, and privately resolved to keep an eye on him.

Still, his public display had done some good and the very day after that encounter the sculptors towards whom her feet now carried her had shown up to the skeleton of her temple and offered their services. She hadn’t recognized their names when they presented themselves to her, but as it had been years since the life-takers had stolen her away she would honestly have been more surprised if she had recognized them. The examples they had shown her were more than acceptable, and if the gods did not bless them with inspiration she would be very surprised.

And yet, they still had not finished even one statue.

And Hristiana had a sinking suspicion as to why.

Bruno kept his head bowed over his gun as he checked it over yet again.

Submarine operations were usually tense at best; this one brought a new level of stifling fatigue. The stealth submarine that was currently carrying them across the Black Sea ran with an absolute minimum of noise. Engines were muffled with a multitude of extra baffles, wooden utensils handed out instead of he usual cheap tin, and maintenance was kept to whatever they could get done quietly; they were deep in enemy territory here, and discovery would spell disaster for relations between the US and the USSR in addition to their own, grisly deaths.

The silence sat around Bruno, Weber, and the eight other guys that’d been assigned to the mission like a funeral pall. Cards were played in tense silence, conversations done in whispers, notes, or half-remembered sign language liberally sprinkled with military handsignals and general crudeness. The first guy who’d laughed too loudly that morning - PFC Marcus “Lizard” Doughty - had had the skipper of the submarine come down on his head like a ton of bricks; Bruno wouldn’t be surprised if the guy ended up scrubbing the head for the rest of their journey, the skipper’d been that pissed.

Nominally, the Marines in the sub were training for cold weather conditions somewhere in the asscrack of Alaska. Most of the unit actually was; those selected for the current mission had gone with the main group as far as Fort Hill before being split off and sent to the rendezvous point near Istanbul. Bruno wasn’t sure whether he was glad to be here instead of with the rest of the unit or not; teeth-freezing cold was starting to look preferable to spending another three days trapped in this tin can. Lieutenant Henry “Hacksaw” Woodbridge, in overall command of the mission, was a competent soldier with all the charming personality of a Glasgow kiss; Bruno himself wasn’t what you’d call a glowing socialite but at least he’d remembered to pack a deck of cards. Woodbridge spent the long hours alternating between pouring over what schematics Command had been able to provide them of their target and maps of the surrounding area, and having long, muttered conversations with himself that were always loud enough you knew what he was doing but quiet enough that you couldn’t make out what, exactly, he was saying.

A real charmer.

Still, whatever his personal quirks his performance in the field was beyond reproach and Bruno could deal with it. Usually. When not stuck on a tin can for three days with the man.

At least the rest of the assigned personnel were generally less grating. The commander of their tiny craft was a balding Commander William Hayes, a nervous older man who had the pallor of someone who spent too much time beneath the waves instead of above them and the antacid habit of a man who’d spent far too much time behind enemy lines. He knew every inch of his boat and could navigate her through the trickiest of waters, whatever his personal failings, and that was really all Bruno could ask for. The two pilots - Petty Officers Michael Montgomery and Lewis Burbank - were much better company, playing cards with the assembled marines whenever they were off-duty. Quietly, of course. The lone engineer - Lt. Cmdr. John Morrows - kept to himself, as much as anybody could on a tub this size, and never seemed to have much to say. Which, given the mission, was probably for the best.

Now, less than ten minutes away from the target, the tension in the sub was thick enough to cut with a knife. Bruno wasn’t the only one checking his weapon, and all packs of cards had been put away. Woodbridge was lurking near the foot of the ladder with PFCs Ferguson, Hubbard, Lawson, and Graham; clumped up around Bruno himself were Rowland, Estrada, Weber, and the unfortunate Doughty who still smelled faintly of cleaning chemicals. The overall mission, as Bruno understood it, was to go in and take out a listening post the Russians were trying to get operational for monitoring sub traffic on the Black Sea; Woodbridge’s team had the unenviable task of gaining access to the main operations hub and getting as much data about the Russian deployment as they could - including and especially the designs for the upgraded hydrophones Russia had purportedly used - while the secondary team lead by Bruno would conduct physical sabotage of the cables linking the post to the hydrophone network.

Hayes was hovering over Montgomery as the younger man made minute adjustments to the controls, all nonessential lights off in the control room. The listening post was located in an underwater base accessible only by submarine; intelligence suggested that the Russians relied on its secrecy and inaccessibility over more active defenses, but at this range and relying totally on passive monitoring systems it was mostly guesswork and prayer that they didn’t find another sub the very hard way.

Finally the man exhaled sharply and pulled the throttle all the way back to idle. “That’s it.” The words ricocheted around the interior of the craft and everyone tensed for a brief moment. Hayes looked ready for murder for a second, before giving a curt nod to Woodbridge. Woodbridge, in his turn, wasted no time in shimmying up the ladder and cracking the hatch less than an inch. When that produced no audible reaction, he eased it open the rest of the way and climbed out, the rest of his squad following him in short order.

Bruno assembled his own men at the base of the ladder as Lawson’s feet disappeared off the ladder and out of sight; Woodbridge’s group had much further to go, and they’d decided on a twenty-minute delay between each group to decrease chances of the larger combined group being discovered before any objectives could be accomplished. Weber fidgeted as the twenty minutes dragged slowly by, his restless fingers patting down various pockets and pouches as if to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, then starting again from the top when he’d checked the last of the pockets he could reach without bending over. Bruno let it go; as far as tics went, it wasn’t a bad one and Weber hadn’t had the easiest time of it since Tunstall had been given his discharge.

The chronometer on the wall ticked over and Hayes gave them the nod. Bruno went up the ladder first, the rubber soles of his boots making as little noise as he could manage on the metal rungs. Poking his head out of the hatch showed him that Montgomery - in a feat of skill Bruno wouldn’t have believed possible - had managed to snuggle them dangerously close to a hulking behemoth of a Russian sub, shielding them largely from view of the buzzing electrical lights above the wharf section of the base; the other side was a sheer wall, which meant they were practically invisible.

Bruno hauled himself out of the hatch and slipped into the water as quietly as he could; the cold concrete walls amplified every noise and echoed them endlessly, though at this point the only noises were the quiet bootfalls and occasional Russian phrases exchanged by the bored guards of the late shift. Bruno treaded water as the rest of his team slipped out of the hatch and into the water one by one; Montgomery had only brought the hatch itself a few inches above water, to keep the profile of both Marines and sub as small as he could. As soon as Bruno’s team was away he’d sink to the floor for four hours before resurfacing to pick them back up and get the hell outta dodge.

Estrada was the last one out of the hatch, and he closed it with a soft clunk before tightening the wheel to secure it. Sliding off the hull, he joined the rest of them in the water and Bruno took point as the struck out for the least-lit section of wharf they could see. Behind them, the sub they’d come in on dropped below the surface of the water with barely a ripple; they had four hours on the clock to reach the hydrophone cables, disable them, and return, or they’d have to find their own ride out and as much as Bruno knew Graves would have been delighted to steal a Russian submarine, he himself would prefer if everything went according to plan and they took their own sub home.

The pair of boots hanging over the edge of the dock itself and belonging to a very unconscious Russian soldier were a pretty decent indicator that Woodbridge had also landed here and as Bruno poked his head cautiously above the level the trail of dripped water not fully disguised by extant puddles sealed it - though the trail was only obvious from a certain angle. He hauled himself up onto the edge as quietly as he could, keeping a sharp ear out for footfalls even as he reached back down to pull Doughty out of the water. Doughty turned and grabbed Rowland while Bruno snagged Weber and pulled him out. Estrada was the last one up, and Bruno gave Rowland the nod as soon as Estrada was out. Rowland nodded back and darted away quickly, following the wet trail Woodbridge’s team had already left.

Fortunately Woodbridge had cleared out most of the guards between the water and the door to the rest of the base; Bruno’s squad was able to get through the door with relative ease and an absolute minimum of time wasted. Once through, the base was like many others Bruno had been tasked to infiltrate over the years. Whitewashed concrete walls and stark fluorescent lighting made shadows stretch ahead as well as behind and doors set flat with no inset made for nerve-wracking progress as they traversed towards their target. Fortunately, this base being more military than KGB meant that everything was labeled. The schematics provided had been rather sketchy on details, but following signs for Electrical Maintenance seemed like a good bet.

Electrical Maintenance was not a good bet. Electrical Maintenance was a dead end with too many guards for comfort; while they’d managed to prevent the alarm from being raised immediately, someone was going to find the bodies they’d stashed in the janitorial closet sooner rather than later and then they’d really be in trouble. Still, they had managed to find a map of the place and hadn’t fallen too far behind on their timeline; two hours in, two hours to go, and a better idea of their actual target location were gratifying in a way that six bodies distinctly weren’t. Their new target - Deep Sea Through Room - had been marked on the simplified floor plan as being recently redone, and in need of extra power couplings; with any luck, the hydrophone cabling would enter the base there.

It took another half-hour to find the correct hallway; the label on the door they wanted still read “Office 4B” and they wasted a further twenty minutes unlocking doors up and down the hallway before they found it. The room was dark and cold, but the retrofitting for the hydrophone wiring was extremely obvious. The wires themselves were thankfully not terribly large; none were larger around than Doughty’s thumb, and the shears they’d brought along were more than adequate for the task of getting through the tough material. The actual execution of their task took less than a handful of minutes; clipping the wires as close to the wall as they could ensured that the cables would have to be re-seated if they were to be mended at all.

With a little more than an hour left before Montgomery surfaced, Bruno’s team began heading back through the base towards the docking area. Bruno himself was wary; he’d seen too many operations where things went sloppy right before extraction and he’d rather avoid that in a base where the only exit was more than twenty fathoms down. They hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Woodbridge or his squad, either, and that was just a bit concerning; still, no alarms had been triggered which meant that whether they’d succeeded or not, they hadn’t been caught yet.

Their own march back was relatively quiet; one unfortunate two-man patrol nearly caught them in a cross-corridor, but Weber and Rowland managed to silence them before they could yell. Their bodies were dumped in a convenient bathroom; by the time they were discovered, the squad would be long gone. Without further interruptions and a little more than twenty minutes to spare, Bruno’s squad slipped through the door to the submarine area as quietly as they’d entered it. They were the first ones back, and all the patrols Woodbridge had cleared for them had been woken, from the looks of it. The sound of bootheels was hard against the water-slicked stone of the wharf and the Russian exchanges were a good deal less friendly; by the sound of it the two Woodbridge had dealt with had been thought to have fallen asleep on duty and were trying to make up for their mistakes.

Which was the last mistake they ever made.

Bruno’s knife slipped easily between the ribs of the first man as he turned the corner, hand up to catch the surprised shout and coughing as the man drowned in his own blood; Weber took the second with a quick jab to the base of the skull with his own Ka-bar. Both bodies were stashed out of sight behind loosely-stacked cargo containers that also served to conceal the squad. Bruno glanced around, a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth. Less than fifteen minutes to their ride out, and Woodbridge was still nowhere in sight. Bruno himself was disinclined to leave men behind, but Hayes had been exactingly clear about the timing; any longer, and they risked meeting another submarine slated to come into the base not too long after they were scheduled to leave. And by “meeting” he meant “accidentally ramming,” Montgomery had assured them later; the cheerful grin that had accompanied the statement was possibly more concerning than the statement itself, but the man was a good pilot.

With two minutes to go before the sub surfaced - and another body added to the pile at their feet - the door to the base slid open to reveal Lawson and Graham, followed closely by Hubbard and Ferguson, with Woodbridge himself bringing up the rear. Bruno nodded to them silently, waiting for Woodbridge’s acknowledging nod before fading back into the group. Now that the lieutenant was here, Bruno could concentrate on assessing both squads and keeping an eye on the water where the sub had come up before.

In point of fact, it was almost a yard further out than the last rise - Montgomery had likely figured out how close he actually was to the Russian submarine, no doubt - that started to show the tell-tale disturbance nearly three minutes later. None of them needed any urging to slide down off the quay and into the water; Rowland was the first man to make it to the hatch and in his haste pulled it open with a heavy clank. Everyone froze as the sound bounced back from the walls on the far side of the artificial bay, but after a long moment of silence Rowland slipped inside with barely a thunk. Hubbard was next, followed by Woodbridge, then Ferguson, Weber, Doughty, Graham, Lawson, Estrada, and lastly Bruno himself bringing up the rear and pulling the hatch gently closed behind him.

He turned, looked at the room full of men smelling strongly of sweat and seawater, and sighed internally.

It was going to be a long three days.

Reese hummed to himself as he bounced and rattled over miles of empty desert.

He’d lost his pursuers a fair ways back thanks to a handy gorge, and had decided to strike out overland afterwards because it seemed like a good idea at the time. His current disguise was a red ragtop Jeep; he’d been traveling as a Winnebago for a while, but then he’d seen the Jeep driving over a dirt track and decided that since he hadn’t seen any Winnebagos doing that, maybe the Jeep was the less-conspicuous choice. So he’d switched, and put up hologram dummies of his people in the seats so’s no-one would suspect him.

In the driver’s seat he’d put Patric, since the man talked constantly about how he was good at driving and complained that Reese didn’t need his help. In the passenger seat he put the switch-man - whose name he hadn’t managed to catch, in addition to never having been formally introduced. The hologram didn’t look like the last body the guy’d been in, but that was okay. That face didn’t belong to him and it’d felt wrong to put it up; the dummy had a very different face and body shape, but it was the right face and body shape so that was all right. The youngest of the four he’d put in the back seats, letting the hologram stretch out comfortably across the whole back row like the young guy never did; Reese knew it was wrong, but it made him feel nice to think of the boy relaxing comfortably so he kept the illusion as it was. The metal man he stood in the back, bracing him against the top supports to look out over everyone; he seemed like the kind of guy who would enjoy that. It wasn’t quite right, but Reese also edited the metal bits out of the hologram’s face to keep up the look of being a perfectly harmless Jeep.

“We’re coming up on a road soon,” he said, and the holograms nodded in unison. “Doont stop on t’ road, whale get coot,” Reese said in his best approximation of Patric’s accent, the hologram at the wheel’s mouth moving in time with the words. “But our trusty stagecoach will see us through safe and sound!” He said in a higher pitch, the hologram in the back seat mouthing along with the words.

Reese sighed and settled lower on his axles. Driving alone just wasn’t the same; he missed his passengers with peculiarly fierce ache. Sure, he was pretty certain two of them didn’t like him much but they were all he had in this new, confusing world, and without their guidance he was getting a little anxious. Besides, the boy seemed to like him a decent amount and that made up for a lot; the boy was why he’d gone and made a spectacle of himself in front of everyone that was chasing them after all. The other two seemed like they could handle it, but there was something about the kid that made his….soul, for lack of a better term, ache.

So when he’d picked up the chatter about the attack planes, he’d gone all out. He’d dropped his disguise and blasted all the frequencies he could find with reports of a rabid stagecoach heading down the highway and they’d fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. Reese still wasn’t sure how he’d survived the missile blasts, but survive he had and now he was on his way to meet his people in Reno, Nevada.

His people. The thought gave him a warm glow and he put on a little bit extra speed because he could. His wheels weren’t Jeep wheels, after all, and there was nothing on them to puncture. They also seemed to be made of something impervious to being bent, cracked, or otherwise shredded by the off road conditions and while he couldn’t explain it, he was certainly grateful. A straight line in the direction he wanted to go was much, much faster than having to obey speed limits on the roads that meandered here and there and boasted such annoying features as stop lights and speed traps. The faster he went, the faster he could find his people again and they could all ride together.

Reese slowed down as he approached the highway; he had to cross it, but diving straight across tended to make people honk their horns at him and he didn’t like that noise - it reminded him too much of Patric complaining how useless and obvious Reese really was. So he slowed to match highway speed and put his hologram’s blinker on - he wasn’t sure exactly what it was for, but it made people more willing to make space for him to get on. As he did, a flash of light caught his optics a few cars ahead and his axles skipped a rotation. There, splashed across the semi-trailer doors of the truck and standing proudly head and shoulders above every other car on the road, was a bottle of beer.

Mmm, beer.

Almost without conscious thought, Reese kicked his speed up a notch and pulled into the left-hand lane. Easing up beside the truck - there was a big logo splashed on the side of the trailer, along with more beer bottles - he increased speed slowly until he matched pace with the much larger truck. His people had given him booze money, but he couldn’t fit inside the tiny liquor stores he’d seen so far. This was much more convenient. Surely they wouldn’t mind if he just stopped a little while for refreshment?

Reese eased back just a little until his front quarter panel was about even with the spot where the trailer hitched to the truck. It was a big, solid-looking connection, sure, but if he just…Concentrating hard, he folded out one of his hidden robot legs and kicked the connector. Once. Twice. The third kick was met with an awful crunch and a hiss of escaping air, and the big rig leaped forward as the trailer came free of its moorings. The trailer itself began slowing down immediately, the sudden loss of air pressure kicking on the emergency brakes and Reese pulled his leg back into himself even as he nudged the trailer gently off the road. The rough surface slowed it even further, and it came to a juddering halt less than a quarter mile from where it had parted company with the truck.

There was no real good or subtle way to do this, so Reese simply shrugged himself into his bipedal mode and set about getting the doors open. There was a lock, sure, but it was designed to foil organic people trying to get into the trailer, not someone Reese’s size; a pinch of his fingers and the thing tinkled merrily to the ground. Pulling open the doors was the work of a moment, and the sight that met his eyes……was a lot of cardboard boxes. Disappointed, he poked one; why did the trailer have a picture of beer on it if it didn’t carry beer? The box made a crunchy tinkling noise, and fluid began leaking out the bottom. Curious, Reese swiped a digit through the stream and tasted it. Immediately, his spirits lifted.

Beer!

Rather than try and deal with the box of broken glass, he reached for another case and tore the top off; sure enough, nestled inside the case were bottles upon bottles of beer. Reese may or may not have squealed for joy, he couldn’t really say either way. The truck was full of beer! It’d been so long, his tank was all dried up, and he wasted no time in pinching the top off a bottle and draining it. Then another bottle. Then another.

“Hey!”

Reese finished his bottle and looked down, the half-dozen or so bottles he’d managed to consume only beginning to touch the edge of his thirst, and saw a short, angry-looking man wearing some form of hat and a huge scowl. He blinked, grabbed another bottle and drained it, then blinked again. The man appeared to be getting angrier the longer the silence stretched; Reese wasn’t quite sure what he was waiting for, so he reached into the current box he held in one hand and offered the man a bottle.

“Beer?”

“Beer? BEER?? You broke my truck and stole my load, and you’re offering me my OWN BEER?”

The man seemed incensed, though Reese couldn’t quite parse why; the man wasn’t one of his humans, wasn’t relying on Reese for anything, so why was he getting mad about Reese having a few beers? He thought for a second, put the bottle down and then reached inside his chassis and pulled out the bills the boy had left on his seat for him to acquire booze with and offered them to the man.

“Beer money?”

The man reached out and took the bills, rifling them quickly before sighing heavily and tucking them inside his jacket.

“Ah hell. Hitch’s wrecked anyway. Gimme a bottle, I don’t think I’m gettin’ any further today.”

Reese didn’t quite understand the man’s tone, but he definitely understood the request for beer and there was plenty to share in the truck. Reese handed him a fresh bottle and the man did something clever to get the top off while Reese simply pinched the top off his again and guzzled it down. The man took a few sips from his bottle while Reese drank six more before he broke the silence again.

“Why does a robot drink beer, anyway?”

Reese glanced down and shrugged even as he drank another bottle. “Don’t know. I came online like this; it’s not just beer, I love me some booze too, but I couldn’t tell you why.”

The man made a noncommittal noise and silence reigned again. With every dozen bottles he consumed, Reese could gradually feel his joints start relaxing. He hadn’t even realized they’d been tensing up until the beer started lubricating them, and the feeling was wonderful. By the time he’d reached his tank’s full capacity, he was feeling very nice indeed and there were still several cases left on the pallet. The driver of the truck, who by this point was even more drunk than Reese, somehow, had introduced himself as Hank and was sitting on a throne made of empty cases, head lolling and empty bottle held loosely in his left hand.

“Tha- thassh it? Yer fffull?”

Reese staggered to his feet, sloshing audibly, and nodded enthusiastically. “Yesh! Ah, fffeelsh sho good. I’m, I’m gonna - gonna jusht take shhhome for th’ road.”

With some difficulty - and more than one case dropped and smashed due to clumsiness - Reese managed to stack a decent pile of cases a bit away from Hank and the remains of the trailer. Hank himself, stared with glassy-eyed interest. “Hoor - how are y’ gonna, gonna get that inshide you?” he slurred and Reese grinned.

“Watch thish.”

With that he staggered two steps towards his pile of beer cases and put his hands on it even as he triggered his transformation sequence. The cases, held by his robotic hands, were pulled to the interior of his wagon form mostly undamaged; he did lose one or two with nasty crunching sounds, but the rest of them made it fine. As he turned to continue his journey, he saw Hank try to wave after him before falling over an empty bottle and not getting back up; in that moment, Reese wished - just a little - that Hank was one of his people. It was nice to have someone to share a beer with. Maybe the boy would like a beer?

With that heartening thought, Reese sped off into the sunset.

Bruno bowed his head silently as he worked with the knife.

It was hardly the first time he’d had to go fishing for bullets in his own skin. Hell, it wasn’t even the first time he’d had to go fishing after…well. After. Still didn’t make it any more pleasant, of course, but it was better than leaving the damn things in there and having to slice back down to them later when they started moving around and doing damage internally. At this point the pain of digging out bullets was an old friend; at least now the injuries were closing behind the red-hot streaks of the knife, saving him the time it would take to bandage himself up.

The knife didn’t slow in his hands, but the thought nagged at him. With no particular body armor Bruno had taken two full rounds from fully automatic weapons fire. By all rights, he should be dead; he’d done it to other men often enough to know exactly how much damage two full rounds did to the unprotected human body, yet here he was picking bullets out like nothing more than particularly troublesome ticks. It said something about the last few months, about the journey he’d taken to get back of which Joe’s was simply the very last leg, that he’d gotten used to things like this.

Now, in the familiar surroundings of his home metaverse - he couldn’t explain what it was that made it different from all the other metaverses he’d ended up in, only that there was something about the surroundings that said home even though he’d never been to this specific place before - it was glaringly obvious, a brilliant neon sign to how much he’d changed. He’d left this metaverse an old man with a trick knee and come back to it a less-old man who took two fully automatic bursts to the soft and fleshy bits and kept moving. It felt….surreal. He was an old man with too many years under his belt, and he’d just been trying to do right by his granddaughter; now he had the power - and, if Rhodes was to be believed, the responsibility - to do right by the whole world.

The thought was unsettling; not the responsibility, no - he’d saved the world before, from a variety of home-grown threats, though most of those missions would never make the history books. It was the power that didn’t sit right. Bruno was a strong man, stronger than most of the people around him since the age of fourteen, and the years had only brought more strength in the form of finesse and weapons training; anyone could be as strong, learn the weapons systems. But healing so fast you had to re-open the skin with a knife to get the bullets out mere minutes after being shot? Being strong enough to pull open several-ton steel blast doors?

That was something else.

Bruno shook his head as the last of the blood-slicked bullets dropped to the floor, the injuries they’d inflicted closing even as he watched. He could feel eyes on him, and when he glanced up he met the wide-eyed gaze of Mac McPhernon as the boy clutched a wired detonator Patric was busily fiddling with. The boy looked away almost immediately, his eyes flashing down to what Patric was doing as the older man continued a quiet monologue on the niceties of hardwired det cord, and Bruno was reminded for an overwhelming moment of the Jaxun kid. How, even with the sunglasses, the kid never used to look anyone in the face if he could help it.

That had changed, sometime during their time in ARENA. Bruno couldn’t say exactly when, but when they’d begun their journey home - Maddox’s final journey home - Crash Jaxun had been different. He’d stood taller, been more willing to meet peoples’ eyes, given directions with more authority; in short, he’d become the sort of man Bruno was glad to follow, the sort of man that should make any parent proud. Given what the general had done in Jarbridge, however, Bruno had his doubts as to whether Jaxun was the kind of man who would recognize that his boy had become a man in his own right, and a hint of trepidation followed any thoughts of what Crash would do when his father attempted to use him again.

But that was a problem for later.

Bruno rotated his shoulder, feeling the chip in the socket where one particularly difficult bullet had wedged itself fill in and flatten until his should no longer clicked oddly in the middle of the motion. The first few turns had clicked audibly, though, and Mac had flinched with each noise. The kid hadn’t been overly comfortable with Bruno the first time they’d met - the bombastic car chase had seen to that - but he’d been friendly enough on their trip in the stagecoach-submarine-whatever. Apparently watching someone take two bursts of full auto to the torso and then pick it all out afterward had spooked him, though, and he’d moved so that the Patric was between himself and Bruno.

Bruno had let him; people had been skittish with him his entire life, he knew how not to take it personally. Granted, it was usually more for his stature than for his knifework, but the principle remained the same. The kid would have to come to his own terms with what he’d seen, which could take a while. Bruno wasn’t certain if it was the time he’d spent with Crash or if he was just getting sentimental in his old age, but the McPhernon kid had far more to cope with than an old dog with older tricks trying to pass on useful tips and tricks. He’d seen the folder in Patric’s go-bag; the Irishman wasn’t a great believer in hardcopy reading, so the file didn’t belong to him, and the kid flinched just a bit every time his hand brushed it. Bruno had confirmed his suspicions when he’d gone for the suppressed MP5 - the name on the folder was Maddox McPhernon.

Maddox McPhernon. Another name on a long list Bruno carried beside his heart. Too long of a list, no matter how he looked at it, yet he’d never let a name be left off and forgotten. He was a survivor, in a line of work that didn’t make for too many of those and made dying for a cause all too easy, and a lot of the names on his list existed only there. So many of them had been redacted, censored, edited, even straight-up erased from history that only Jaxun might know even half if he started reciting the names, but Bruno refused to let the memories go. Maddox Mcphernon was the latest, and while Bruno had never worked with her directly he’d spoken with her a time or two while they were all under the thumb of T.O.M. She’d been unusually optimistic for someone in her line of work, and their chats had left him feeling more determined than ever to find his granddaughter and do right by her.

Thinking of Andi had Bruno tightening his jaw. Bruno had been chosen to come back to the home front because he had the most contacts in the right places, people who’d be willing to tell him what the world really looked like underneath all the media and sugarcoating spin the government was putting out. He was the best one to know if there was anything the rest of them needed to be back here for; he hadn’t found any argument against that line of reasoning, and so he had gone. Now, with war on the horizon and enemy boots already firmly on the ground, he found himself at once wishing Andi was here where he could keep her safe and glad she wasn’t here so the enemy couldn’t harm her.

As Patric and the kid finished rearranging the wiring on the det cord, Bruno set his mouth in a thin line and stepped up next to John Stone. Whatever happened, he’d make this world safe again for his granddaughter.

Or die trying.

Bruno walked carefully down the narrow passageway, keeping a sharp eye on the torch-lit figures ahead of him.

Andi had been first to duck into the short doorway that marked the entrance to these passages, but by the time Bruno had finished rewiring the plasma pistol to bring the mountainside down on the library entrance and ducked in himself Dr. Clarkson - or, more likely, Queen Shandroth - had taken the lead. Bruno himself had fallen into the rearguard position; while his avatar had some knowledge of these caves, if any of the howling horde behind them managed to slip past the Brotherhood’s defenses he wanted to be absolutely certain he was the first thing they met. Not to mention that while Brother Tyber wasn’t nearly as large as Bruno himself was, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell he’d be able to slide past everyone else in the narrow confines they currently found themselves in.

Bringing up the rear in a confined environment wasn’t exactly one of Bruno’s favorite pastimes, but neither was it one he was unfamiliar with. As they followed the narrow, winding path through the mountain’s interior, he could feel old instincts humming to life in the back of his mind. Faint echoes were categorized and dismissed, smells analyzed and filed away, and eyes ticked constantly up, left, right, down again; while ambush from above was unlikely, he’d had it happen once in Afghanistan when some insurgents had holed up in a cave system with valuable intel and the squad Bruno’d been attached to had been ordered to clear the place out.

He’d gone in with twenty other guys and walked out with six.

The concentration required to keep a lookout was minimal but constant, allowing him to put aside things like the fact that his avatar hadn’t eaten for the better part of a day or the weariness that dragged at the corners of his eyes. Staying alive was a higher priority at the moment than bodily discomfort, but some things were less easy to put aside. Constantly keeping an eye out allowed him to covertly observe Andi in her avatar as she stayed further away from him than he would like.

He’d been relieved, mostly, when she’d stepped unharmed out of Pierce’s ship; the invaders didn’t exactly make him more sanguine with the prospect of her being back, but something in his chest had eased when she was back in arm’s reach. Of course, she’d had to jump into a pod almost immediately to assist Crash and the others but Bruno’d been assured by Thomas that even if her avatar died in the course of the mission Andi would be able to return to her body unscathed physically. Mentally was another story, one Bruno was becoming more concerned about the longer they were on a mission together though her avatar had reportedly survived expelling Zenda’s people from the metaverse filled with dinosaurs they had apparently been using as part of their supply chain.

Bruno was observant, and while he’d only known his granddaughter for a relatively short while before that fateful day in Nevada, she’d been a different young woman. Happier, in a way he didn’t quite have words for; she’d withdrawn into herself during their stay in prison (something he still wanted to have a personal word with Jaxun about) and then in Arena Zenda had kept them too busy to interact much beyond mission parameters. But now…When Bruno looked into the eyes of her avatar and through them to Andi herself, there was something in the back of them that reminded him of Weber. Corporal Frederic Weber, one of Bruno’s longest-lasting squadmates, had never been quite the same after a mission had resulted in half their squad getting captured and tortured by the enemy.

Weber had functioned well enough afterwards, carried out his missions in a satisfactory manner, but Bruno had seen the same kind of soul-deep injury lurking in Weber’s gaze whenever he’d had had a drink too many. In the end, Bruno suspected that was what really had killed the man, never mind what the official report said about bravery under fire. He’d spent almost a decade bleeding from somewhere that didn’t leave a mark, and eventually he’d bled out despite Bruno’s best efforts. The thought of Andi running out into enemy fire to save an injured comrade because she didn’t care whether she lived or died scared Bruno on a level he hadn’t suspected was possible.

So he did the best he could, using both his skills and his avatar’s natural abilities to the fullest extent possible. He endured Andi’s needling with as much grace as he could muster, and did what he could to keep the mission on track. When they’d investigated the burned-out monastery, he’d gone in in place of Andi for fear of how the inhabitants would react to her avatar; when she wanted to teleport up to the mountain fortress, he’d taken advantage of his avatar’s status to volunteer at once. When she objected to the Brothers burning the library they had worked for so many centuries to secure, he’d sacrificed the only weapon he had that was at all effective against the 742 invaders without a second thought.

Bruno could only pray to whatever forces were out there that it would be enough to staunch the bleeding.

An almost subliminal noise brought Bruno sharply back to the present. A high-pitched click, at the very edge of his hearing - he suspected that if he hadn’t had the benefit of advanced healing to repair what age had stolen from him, he wouldn’t have heard it at all - was sounding from somewhere, and getting rapidly louder. If he had to make a comparison, the closest thing he’d heard was one particularly harrowing mission where the submersible they’d been using for ex-filtration had gotten lashed by active sonar. The narrow passage they had been following opened out dramatically, and the clicks echoed off the walls.

“Bats?” Andi’s confused voice nearly made Bruno flinch - if they were being lashed, the last thing they wanted to do was make more noise.

“Centimoths.” The name floated up from Brother Tyber’s memory with alarmed alacrity, attached to gruesome stories the older novices had used to tell initiates about these very tunnels. Enormous bugs with a taste for anything that moved, a deeply venomous bite, and a paralytic toxin in the scales of their wings that could stop a man’s heart if he breathed in too much of it. When the initiates had gathered enough courage to ask the Head of Novitiates about it, the old man had confirmed the stories and added stern warnings to never venture down the tunnels unless instructed to do so by an older monk.

Both Andi and Robbins looked deeply alarmed by the prospect.

“Do we put the torches out?” Andi’s voice wavered with uncertainty, glancing up at the ceiling high above them that was almost certainly covered in the things given the way the flickering light from the aforementioned torches wavered against it.

“No point. They don’t need light, but we sure as hell do.” Robbins’ tactically sound advice was delivered in an almost cynical drawl as he moved a bit further out into the cave, stepping around the bones that littered the cavern floor. Bruno had one second to mourn the loss of the plasma pistol before something huge and distinctly insectoid nearly removed the head of Robbins’ avatar.

Robbins dropped into a combat roll with the same grace he’d displayed in the ring back on Arena, grabbing a discarded shield from the floor as he did so. Queen Shandroth - and it was clearly the warrior-queen, not Dr. Clarkson - reacted quickly yet unhurriedly, fixing her torch on a convenient rock before reaching for her bow and arrows. Bruno pulled out his own bow and arrows, for all the good they’d do, and nocked an arrow on the off-chance he could get a clear shot.

Andi disappeared.

Bruno’s heart leaped into his throat even as his eyes darted around as much of the cavern space as he could see - which truthfully wasn’t much. Even Queen Shandroth’s somewhat-elevated torch only cast so much light, and it wasn’t nearly enough to light the cavern in any significant fashion. Not that additional illumination seemed to be the purpose behind the Queen’s actions; even as he watched, she aimed an arrow carefully through the flames toward the as-yet unlit ceiling and loosed. The arrow caught as it passed through the flames, and as it arced higher it revealed more and more of the ceiling of the cavern - a ceiling alive with dozens, if not scores, of centimoths.

Bruno’s mouth went dry even as he slung his bow. If the overlapping carapaces weren’t thick as tank armor, he’d eat his avatar’s cloak; a bow wasn’t going to do enough damage, not with ammunition he had, and if even one of them started dropping the toxic scales of its wings the mission would end here. He hadn’t seen Andi in the brief illumination offered by the arrow, but the Queen was already firing another. And another. And another. Each one lit of the ceiling a bit more, but otherwise seemed not to inconvenience the centimoths in the slightest. Robbins was kneeling on the ground, sheltering underneath the shield he’d picked up, and while Bruno couldn’t hear the words he was mouthing he’d seen him do it before on Arena during his televised matches.

Still, Bruno had his doubts as to whether one punch - even one strong enough liquefy an unarmored person - would be enough to deal with all the centimoths on the ceiling. There had to be something he could do, something that would take care of every centimoth once and for all. He reached back into himself, shuffling through the various abilities imparted to him by association with previous avatars - you people with the super powers, that’s what Patric had said, and while the comparison grated at something Bruno didn’t care to consider in depth, the Irishman hadn’t exactly been wrong.

A memory reared its ugly head, halting Bruno in his search. The greasy, tainted reminder of a man who’d fought a war long enough to forget what it was he was fighting for. A man whose love of violence was only partially met by his lust for a good tumble, who would fuck a woman senseless and then slit her throat for wearing the wrong uniform. A man whose only reaction to destroying an entire planet and every last living soul on it had been a fierce exultation in the power granted to him by the functions of a capital ship.

A man who, but for a few, crucial decisions in his life, might have been Bruno Hamilton.

Lothar Kaldegga.

Bruno disliked strongly to think about it, but Kaldegga had left more than an impression. Power pulsed through Bruno, cycling in time to the throb of the planet’s molten core far, far below him, and he felt an answering hum in the rocks all around him. The memory of Lothar was seared into Bruno’s brain, much as he desperately wished to forget him; using Kaldegga’s power without the channeling devices that had been locked around the wrists of every magic user in that metaverse would have…consequences. Bruno glanced at the ceiling and grimaced - if he died trying this, the mission could continue, but if everyone died then the mission would fail. It wasn’t much of a choice, really, and Bruno pulled on the power in his soul. The thrumming in his core grew more resonant, and he could see the pebbles around him start to shiver.

He was about to call to the others, warn them, when the loudest noise Bruno had ever heard in his life reverberated through the chamber. It threw the rhythm in his chest off for just a brief moment and the world went the kind of silent around him that spelled temporary deafness rather than an actual lack of noise. He looked up to see the shield Robbins had been sheltering under fall noiselessly to the ground, the Queen dropping the arrow she’d been about to fire, and -

“Andi!” Bruno screamed as his granddaughter danced among the behemoth forms far above them. At least, he felt himself make the noise in his throat but not a sound of it came to his ears. The silence was profound. Still, like the rising plume of magma that signaled the eruption of a volcano, he could no more stop the swell of power in his chest than he could stop the tide. “Everyone take cover!” he shouted as loudly as he could into the silence, though the heedless motion of the others told him they were as deaf as he was.

Bruno gritted his teeth and slammed his hands into the wall.

The effect was instantaneous; the walls and ceiling of the cavern began to shake as the power moved through his chest and down his arms like the slow, unhurried progress of a lava flow. Pieces of the ceiling began to fall, small at first and then much, much bigger. A voice echoed in his memory - Cavendish, an ex-SAS explosives expert he’d worked with briefly several years ago - “Bring the whole bloody ceiling down, it will!” He could feel the power, designed to tear rock apart, begin to work on his arms as well. He might have screamed as fissures began opening in his flesh, tracing whatever the organic equivalent of fault lines were as they crisscrossed his hands, wrists, arms-

When the flow finally ebbed, spent in its entirety, Bruno felt like someone had taken him and wrung his soul out like a rag over the sink. As the last of the power flowed out, Bruno found he could finally remove his hand from the stone - leaving twin dark hand prints on it, little trickles running from the bottom of each towards the cavern floor. He looked down at the ruined mess of his hands and forearms - Damn, that was bone peeking out through the ones in his hands - and watched as the split flesh slowly began knitting back together starting where the seam had run over his elbow and up under the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt. Said sleeves were now more than a little bloody, and Bruno sighed heavily. He didn’t want to think about cleaning the blood out of this shirt; he was weary down to his soul.

Turning, he caught Andi’s horrified gaze as she stared at the raw meat that still made up most of his lower arms. He grimaced at her in what he hoped was a reassuring fashion. “I’ll be all right, my dear. I’ve had worse.” She didn’t respond and he sighed again. Still deaf, probably. Bruno tipped his head up just in time to catch a gleam of light from the ceiling high above them.

A way out.

It took several minutes for everyone to regain their hearing; Robbins’ shield-punching trick had produced a sound not entirely dissimilar to a subwoofer turned up far, far too loudly for a single beat, and Bruno wouldn’t be surprised if all their avatars experienced permanent hearing loss after the mission was over.

Not that Andi let something so trivial as deafness stop her from having a look at just what, exactly, Lothar’s uncontrolled magic had done to her grandfather. As soon as the rocks had stopped falling she’d rushed over to inspect the bleeding fissures that were slowly knitting themselves together along his forearms.

“Oh my god, are you okay?” her tone was frantic and her voice louder than necessary as her hands skimmed over the sealing fissures - mostly on his wrists and hands now, where they had been deepest. Blood still dripped to the floor from his fingertips with a steady tick tick tick, and he made sure to hold them where they wouldn’t drip on either of their clothes; he had no idea where their journey would take them, but walking into unfamiliar and almost certainly hostile territory while reeking of blood was, in Bruno’s book, not the cleverest of ideas.

“Andi, I’m fine. I’m already healing,” he said in his most reassuring tone, but she didn’t even bob her head in acknowledgement. Still deaf, then, he thought, and nudged her avatar’s boot with one of his feet. She looked up in surprise, and he gave her his most reassuring smile. It probably looked better on Brother Tyber’s face than his own, because she relaxed and let his - now mostly healed - hands go. He took the opportunity to flick the blood off and as far away from the group as he could before he turned back to survey the wreckage.

Queen Shandroth looked disapproving, her eyes flicking between Andi and Bruno, but she made no comment as she retrieved what arrows she could. Bruno nodded to her approvingly, ignoring the dirty look he got in return; they needed as much ammunition as they could get, headed into unfamiliar territory as they were, and no telling when they’d be able to get more. Robbins was looking off to the side, eyes fixed on nothing, and Bruno frowned.

“Everything alright?” he asked as he walked closer, and Robbins jerked like someone’d stabbed him.

“Hmm? Oh yes, I’m fine, everything’s fine. Why wouldn’t everything be fine? We should probably head up to that new entrance up there since you seem to have basically buried the rest of the tunnel.” Robbins’ words tumbled one after the other, reminding Bruno of Thomas for some reason, but a quick inspection of the chamber revealed the advice to be sound. Between both Bruno and Robbins’ enhanced strength they could probably have cleared enough of the entrance on the far side of the chamber to continue into the tunnels but doing so would probably bring more of the roof down on their heads and with the hollow ache of too much power used sitting behind his breastbone, Bruno was inclined to take the path of least resistance.

“Indeed. Let us continue Northward, then, so that we may find the Sky Stone and purge the invaders from my lands.” The imperious voice of Queen Shandroth was unmistakable, and Bruno exchanged a brief look with Robbins before they both turned to look at the Queen. Dr. Clarkson was a barely-there shimmer in the Queen, apparently unwilling to take back control just yet. Given where they were headed, Bruno could hardly fault her but the Queen wasn’t the easiest person to deal with.

Still, she wasn’t his first difficult superior officer and hopefully wouldn’t be the last. He dipped his head in a shallow approximation of a bow. “Sounds good, my lady.” Bruno looked around, assessing, and nodded at Andi when he caught her doing the same thing. She’d picked up a number of useful skills from her avatars and as much as he worried for her state of mind, he could respect the professionalism she displayed in the field when it came to covert operations. Her eyes - following the same paths his had - flicked up towards the weak light, down at Queen Shandroth - who’d begun to tap her foot impatiently - and back over to where Bruno and Robbins were standing.

“Tactically, it makes most sense for us to proceed Brony, me, you, and then Grandpa,” she told the Queen, whose face grew stormy almost immediately. Andi held up a hand and only long practice at keeping a poker face allowed Bruno to avoid snorting at the Queen’s expression - somewhere between petulant and flabbergasted. “However, I know you and your inclination to lead from the front, my Queen, and Lord Gan does not usually possess sufficient strength to make the gap up there any larger if necessary. However -”

“No, no, I wouldn’t want to denigrate my royal wife’s strength. She should definitely go first.” Robbins’ interruption was somewhat unexpected, and Bruno slid a confused glance his way. That didn’t sound like Robbins being sarcastic, but it was hard to tell sometimes. The man had a deadpan delivery that would have been the envy of half the NCOs on the last base Bruno’d served in, never mind the commissioned officers. Still, he looked serious enough and the Queen had apparently decided to take him at his word.

“Very well! Onward, then,” and with that Proclamation - Bruno could almost see it written in ornate calligraphy on a vellum scroll, and he didn’t have much of an imagination for that kind of thing - the Queen began hauling herself up the rock pile. With one confused glance at Robbins, Andi scrambled to follow her - and possibly past her; Bruno had to remind himself that his granddaughter also had super strength, though perhaps not as much as she used to. He pulled his eyes away from the slope one more time to give Robbins another questioning look.

“You sure you’re alright?” Robbins’ grasp of small squad tactics - especially ones with the crazy powers avatars and pilots tended to have - was second to none. Bruno himself was far more used to dealing with squads armed with explosives and guns, and it took him precious seconds to work out the maneuvers Robbins seemed to have down to instinct. Andi’s plan had sounded solid to Bruno, why did the other man not choose to abide by it?

“I said I was fine, didn’t I? I thought we all had our hearing back by then, but I guess old people have worse ears. So I’ll say it again; I’m fine. I’ll bring up the rear, catch anyone who falls, and we all get out of here safely. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.” Bruno gave the other man an obligatory frown for the insult but otherwise let it slide. It was the rest of the statement that he wanted clarification on, but Robbins seemed disinclined to speak further. After a few moments, Bruno gave up and shrugged before turning to follow the more enthusiastic members of their team up the rock slide towards freedom.

It took them the better part of an hour to get out of the cavern; the small beam of light had proven to be a fissure in the rock leading to the surface that had been both opened wider and partially blocked when parts of the ceiling came down, and was narrow enough to allow only two people to work on it at a time - which had added another twenty minutes delay to actually reaching the surface when the Queen had refused to surrender her spot despite being the person with the least amount of superstrength in the party. And, of course, she had insisted the men were too delicate for this task and their frail constitutions would surely fail when faced with such weighty rocks; which had meant, naturally, that only Andi was allowed to help her in a move that irritated Bruno and royally pissed off Brother Tyber.

Finally getting out into the rapidly weakening sunshine was a pleasure dampened heavily by the biting chill of the wind that blasted through their bones as soon as they stepped away from the shelter of the cliff face, and by the meninist rant Brother Tyber had engaged in in the back of Bruno’s head. Bruno winced internally and shook his head as some of Tyber’s points echoed his memories of a feminism rally he’d infiltrated earlier in his career for reasons he wasn’t allowed to disclose to the general public; the movement attracted the attention of the Queen, who’d been surveying the surrounding ridges with a jaundiced eye.

“Are you so discomfited by a little wind, then? Men. Your constitutions are so clearly unfit for the more difficult conditions here,” she sneered, and Brother Tyber - who’d been momentarily distracted by whatever he’d gleaned from Bruno’s brief trip down memory lane - bristled inside Bruno’s head, trying to take back enough control to refute the Queen’s arrogance. Bruno pushed the irate monk back down into their shared psyche and nodded to the lowering sun.

“My lady, we should find shelter before nightfall. I’m pretty sure that cave didn’t contain every centimoth in these mountains, and without as much warning as we had in the cave they’re likely to pick us off in the night.”

Bruno’s dry statement had the effect he wanted, and the Queen blanched before turning to bark at Robbins.

“Lord Gan! I require you to find us a suitable location to rest for the night.” Her tone was imperious, and Bruno mentally rolled his eyes. Of the many things Robbins was not, the most important two at the moment were an outdoorsman and even remotely his avatar. Still, the other man didn’t seem to be too miffed by the Queen’s order and merely bobbed his head.

“Yes, my Queen and wife. I’ll find us a place to sleep at once.” He turned to go, but Bruno caught him discreetly by the elbow and stopped him for a moment.

“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Bruno murmured, making sure to keep his voice low as the Queen loudly began expounding on the joys of having a husband well-trained in the good, husbandly arts. Robbins gave him an indecipherable look and half-smiled.

“Sure I know what I’m doing. How hard can it be? Just gotta find someplace out of the wind that doesn’t lead back into the hole we just came out of, maybe a little water, and uhhhhh a little, y'know, somethin’-somethin’ on the way. It’ll take me, what, ten-a seconds?” He said the last part in a voice that Bruno supposed was some sort of reference to something Robbins had seen that Bruno hadn’t, and the man deflated somewhat as Bruno kept up his steady stare. “I know, basically, what I’m doing, and I can fake the rest. Trust me, I can do this.”

Bruno released his grip and watched him go for a moment, turning back to the conversation at hand just in time to completely miss Robbins stumble over a rock he would have normally have avoided.

Their campsite for that night ended up being a large boulder that had rolled down from higher up at some point, and come to rest at the corner of an overhang and the mountain face. It provided a certain amount of shelter from the wind and protection on two sides from any opportunistic nocturnal predators, and managed to somehow have ice nestled in the deepest point between it and the mountain. No fuel, of course, but some diligent chipping was enough to get chunks of the ice into their canteens and as unpleasant as sleeping with what were essentially icepacks would be, it’d get them fresh water in the morning.

Robbins took first watch, and the night passed without incident - as did the next few days. As they progressed further and further out of the mountains, the pockets of ice they’d found tucked into crevasses and the hollows behind rocks dwindled in both size and frequency, and there was nothing edible to be found. Not even lichen grew on the rocks, a fact Bruno found disquieting in a way he couldn’t quite put words to. Brother Tyber was unnerved as well, staying in the back of their shared mindspace as the days of travel wore on all of them.

The morning of the third day started off like the two that had preceded it; quiet, cold but rapidly getting warmer, and completely desolate. They hadn’t found any ice the previous night so Bruno had rigged a condenser as best he could with a rock and some of the utensils from Gan’s pack. It’d been barely a third full by the time they’d risen to start walking for the day, and they were all on short water rations.

Midway through the morning, Robbins collapsed.

Andi was at his side in a moment, running from where she’d been walking companionably beside her grandfather, and Bruno himself wasn’t far behind. Robbins was down hard, convulsing, and both Andi and Bruno spent a chaotic few minutes keeping him rolled onto one side so he wouldn’t choke on his tongue or fall off the cliff. While they held on to him, Bruno at least could feel the heat rising off the man in a most concerning fashion; he had to be running a temperature of at best 103, if Bruno had to guess. When the fit finally subsided, they got Robbins into a sitting position and Andi was the first to speak.

“What the hell, Brony?” she demanded, the bright light of panic still shimmering in her eyes. Bruno seconded her question with a quick hand gesture, unwilling to undermine the authority in her voice but equally unwilling to let this slide.

Robbins just breathed for a few minutes, visibly trying to collect himself before reaching for his cloak and flipping it off his shoulder. Underneath the cape his shirt sleeve was torn, revealing a badly-tied bandage from underneath which nasty yellow fluid crusted on the frayed edges of the sleeve. Bruno reached down and twitched the bandage off quickly, prompting a sound of agony from Robbins and a fresh gush of nasty yellow fluid. Underneath the bandage was a jagged and raised puncture mark, surrounded by green-grey skin shot through with dark veins and stinking to high heaven.

Andi reared away, covering her nose and mouth, and even Bruno had to fight down a moment of nausea. Bruno didn’t have to ask what had happened - Brother Tyber was pressing forward in their shared mind with lists of symptoms and possible antidotes to centimoth poison, along with the grim certainty of death without treatment in the first three hours of exposure. Bruno looked down and caught Robbins’ eye, a certainty and regret tinging the other man’s gaze.

“You knew.” The words fell colorlessly from his lips, without a questioning inflection, but Robbins nodded anyway.

“Yeah. Figured we sure as hell weren’t getting any help from the monks after the Ogri got through with them, and thought maybe we’d find something on this side of the mountains.” He waved a weak hand at the black, craggy rock that surrounded them. “Which, of course, we didn’t. Too late to turn back, might as well keep going until I couldn’t any more.”

His voice was weak, and the few words were drowned out by Andi’s sound of protest. “Mmm! No! No, we can still save you - we can still save him, right?” Her eyes appealed first to Bruno then to Queen Shandroth, the former meeting her gaze with a slow shake of his head and the latter meeting it with a cool, unsympathetic look of her own.

“No!”

Robbins reached out and took Andi’s wrist gently. “Listen, listen - hush! I mean it, listen - I will probably be fine. This isn’t my first time dying, and anyway I’m not really here. When this body dies, I’ll jack back into my own back home and I’ll be fine. Nothing to worry about Andi, geez, I mean it, I’ll be fine.” As he spoke he stroked the inside of Andi’s wrist soothingly, even when tears started spilling from her eyes. Bruno blinked as something in the back of his mind clicked.

“That’s why you’ve stayed all pilot, even when Shandroth sends you to go find food and shelter.” Robbins nodded as Bruno spoke, wincing a little when Andi gathered him up in the armored arms of her avatar.

“Yeah. Gan’s not too happy about dying - man that guy is shrill - but this way I get to keep him from feeling the worst of it. Mostly.” He winced again as Andi clutched him tighter and patted her back awkwardly. “Yes, that’s very nice, just - maybe not so tightly?”

Andi obligingly loosened her arms a little and Queen Shandroth took that as her cue to step in. “Husband, what seems to be the matter?” She asked imperiously, and Robbins rolled his eyes.

“You know those marriages vows are always ‘til death do you part’? Yeah, those’re going to expire in the next day or so. Along with me.” His face was a cross between resignation and annoyance - though whether the latter was due to the fact he was still being clutched in steel-clad arms or that the Queen was a casual misandrist, Bruno couldn’t say. He caught Robbins’ eyes and made a carefully covert stabbing motion before sliding his eyes to the dagger the man had on his hip, and frowned when Robbins shook his head.

Has to be natural, he mouthed and Bruno nodded. If Robbins’ greater experience in the Metaverse led him to believe that letting his avatar die slowly of poison was better than a quick end on a knife, Bruno wouldn’t doubt him.

“Well. This is most inconvenient. If you had told us sooner that you had been bitten, we might have been able to do something about it. Then again, men are not very clever about such things so perhaps the expectation of action was just too high.” The Queen sounded bored and moved off before Andi could punch Dr. Clarkson back to the fore like she’d been planning, if the look on her face was anything to go by when her head came up in the wake of that extremely callous statement.

Robbins just shrugged it off. “I know what I’m holding over Jenika’s head for the next forever. Well, you had better get moving, you’re wasting daylight.” His light tone was belied by the darkness in his eyes when Bruno turned a thoroughly appalled glare on him.

Andi beat him to the punch, however. “No. We’re staying with you until…until you go back.” Her voice stumbled uncertainly over the word everyone was thinking and no-one wanted to say, but it firmed up in the end so much that Bruno was vividly reminded of a day nearly fifty and some change years ago when another young woman - so very similar - had firmly declared that he could get over his awkwardness on the dance floor and dance with her if he only applied himself. He blinked at the sudden surge of nostalgia even as Andi marched off to tell Queen Shandroth that they wouldn’t be moving any further today.

It took some arguing, but in the end the Queen agreed and they moved together into the shelter of a nearby depression in the mountain. The stayed there for long hours as the sun traversed the sky and the seizures hit Robbins more and more often, one particularly fierce convulsion mid-afternoon robbing him of the ability to speak. So too did his fever rise as the sun fell, glazing his eyes and leaving him sweating even in the shade. In the end, as the sun crossed the horizon, so too did the light of MetaPilot Brony Robbins slowly drain out of Gan’s body. As the last few pale beams slipped behind the mountains, the body of Lord Gan Vallethio let out a last, raspy exhalation, and lay still.

Nobody slept well that night.

The only sounds in the room are the low beeps and whirs of the machines, and the slow, steady breathing of the man on the bed.

As Butch pushed his way into the hospital room, some of the beeping machines picked up their pace slightly but otherwise very little changed. The man on the bed, bandages wrapped around nearly every visible inch of skin and hooked into what seemed like miles of wires and tubes, looked over at him with the only eye not obscured by gauze - though even that one was still a little milky.

By all rights, the man in the bed should be dead. Butch had seen him take a hell of a beating a number of times, mostly when Butch himself had been Kid Titan, and he’d always been okay by the end of the week. No matter what had happened, by the end of the week he was always ready to ruffle Butch’s hair and take Butch to the ice cream shop and argue with Bob Baker about the morality of allowing children to fight in the never-ending struggle.

But this had been a fucking atomic bomb.

Butch had stopped it, as much as he could, but they’d still lost a lot of people.

A lot of people.

Too many.

The hazy blue eye of Iconoclast blinked at him from across the room and a questioning huff of breath emerged from under the bandages. Butch smiled awkwardly as he stepped further into the room, letting the door close behind him as he held out a bouquet of flowers The Gardener had assured him would be most appreciated. Butch couldn’t name half the flowers or plants in the thing, and it looked a little awkward, but Blue’s - Iconoclast’s - eye crinkled at the corner with a smile hidden by bandages and a clumsy hand weakly directed him to put the whole thing on the table nearest the bed.

There were other tables around the room with arrangements on them, though not as many as there might have been. While Blue was a good guy, a friend and inspiration to many, those many had answered Butch’s call, had followed him into battle to save the entire planet.

Many hadn’t been as lucky as the two of them.

Butch shook his head, banishing the thought as he grabbed one of the empty vases some enterprising soul had lined up in an out-of-the-way corner of the room. Putting some water in it was the work of a moment, and then he plopped the whole kit and kaboodle on the end table Blue’d pointed him to. The other bouquets were just as variable as the one Butch had brought; Iconoclast was one of the few who bothered to remember the meaning of flowers and The Gardener knew it, and tailored every bouquet sent to the older hero accordingly.

“So, Blue,” Butch started, then stopped.

What could he say? Kronos was dead, and it had taken nearly all they had to kill him. Abbi was the Titan now, fully and completely in a way he himself had never been. Funerals and memorials for those lost had been going on for nearly the whole week, and Butch had only just managed to get away from the ceremonies. Too many people were dead, and reconstruction was only beginning.

What actually came out of his mouth was -

“I’m going to ask Abbi to marry me,” he said in a rush.

The single eye blinked, and then crinkled again. Painkillers didn’t have that much effect on Blue - his metabolism was too fast to let the drugs dull his nerves - so he had learned early on to deal with a fair amount of pain. At least, that’s what he’d always told Butch and he did seem remarkably coherent for someone who looked like a mummy.

Butch wasn’t family - not by blood, anyway - but Blue had signed release forms decades ago to let the doctors tell Butch what was really going on. Granted, at the time it had been because an eleven-year-old boy had been having a mild panic attack over the adult superhero who had stepped between him and an oncoming energy blast, but they remained valid. Blue had never rescinded them, not even after everything Butch had done with the resignation and the book deal.

What the doctors had told him just before he entered the room was that Blue would live, but he would likely be in a great deal of pain for the foreseeable future. The bandages were there to take the place of the skin that was always last to regenerate, covering bare muscles and bones and organs and other things that should not see the light of day, ever.

But he’d live, and he was lucid even if he couldn’t respond very well, and he’d heard and understood every word Butch’d just said.

Blue held out a bandaged hand, and Butch took it with only a little trepidation. For all the doctors said about Blue’s overall condition, there wasn’t any hesitation in the squeeze the older hero gave him, even as Butch was pretty sure he could feel more bone than meat under the bandages. The single eye had crinkled so far as to be nearly closed, and the beeping on the machines had picked up substantially. Blue’s vocal cords hadn’t grown back yet, or Butch suspected he would have been congratulating him verbally.

It was only when Blue paused and huffed interrogatively that Butch remembered how he could get and squeezed the hand he held a little more firmly.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure. She’s Titan now, not sure if anyone told you, and she’s.”

He paused.

“Really good. Maybe the best person I know here.”

Another huff, a weak shake of his held hand.

“You’d like her, Blue, even if she did used to be a supervillain. She’s got empathy powers, but she’s strong enough to be herself and to want to help others, and…”

Butch trailed off as he saw Blue’s eyelids visibly drooping, the hand in his slackening slowly in its grip, the machines slowing in their beeping, and gently set Blue’s hand on his chest. The eye made a valid attempt to stay open, and a put-out huff sounded from under the bandages, but Butch had to shake his head.

“I’ll tell you more when you’re better, Blue. I’ll bring her around when you can speak again and have a real talk. Sound good?”

But Iconoclast had already lost his battle with his current nemesis - sleep - and Butch settled for slipping quietly out of the room, the warm glow of the older hero’s approval sitting in his chest.

Consciousness came slowly.

The first thing that registered was pain; a stitching hitch in his side spelled broken ribs, a coppery taste in his mouth heralded a split lip, and a stabbing pain in his gut that meant nothing good. Donaldson hadn’t been this injured when an IED had taken out his vehicle in Iraq. What the hell had happened on US soil that’d busted him up so badly? His head felt…muddled. Did he have a concussion too? He couldn’t remember - his head didn’t hurt, exactly, but he couldn’t remember.

“Hey Captain.”

That, that was him, wasn’t it? Captain Donaldson, Rangers.

“Wha- what? Huh? What’s going on?”

“Are you with me, Captain?”

Donaldson moved his hands down to lever himself up to face whoever the hell was talking to him and encountered something warm and covered in pockets. He looked down, and tried to wiggle his toes.

Nothing.

“I, I can’t feel my legs. I can’t feel my legs!”

The panic was suffocating. He couldn’t feel his legs. Not his toes, not his hands clamped tightly on his thighs, not even a phantom sensation. Nothing. This was the end of everything - his career, his freedom of movement, his way of life. How the hell was he supposed to do his job and take care of his family with no legs?

“You’re not in good shape, Captain. I’m sorry.”

This guy was sorry? Donaldson couldn’t feel his goddamn legs and this guy was sorry?

“What’s- what’s happening? How did I get here? Who’re you people?”

His voice shook with a mix of anger and the awful fear that churned in his gut. He couldn’t feel his legs.

“Name’s Sergeant Bruno Hamilton, USMC.”

Of all the answers the guy could’ve given him, that one threw Donaldson for a loop. A marine? And old for a sergeant; near mandatory retirement, if he had to guess.

“Wh-what?”

“Can you…feel anyone in your thoughts?”

Donaldson blinked. Feeling people in his thoughts? What kind of new-age hippie bullshit was this guy selling? What kind of new-age hippie bullshit could you get from a Marine sergeant, for God’s sake. This guy wasn’t just close to mandatory retirement, he was close to a psych discharge.

He had to be.

“What kind of question is that??”

“What actions have you taken in the last few days, Captain? Do you remember?”

Donaldson blinked, then wrinkled his forehead. His head didn’t hurt too badly, and his mouth didn’t taste like a dead rat so he probably hadn’t been out drinking in the last 24 hours.

So why did the memories feel so far out of reach?

“I- I don’t remember. I was at Fort Bragg, and then….I, I feel like I’ve been dreaming; I, I stole a helicopter? No, I couldn’t have stolen a helicopter. I would never steal a helicopter.”

“So it works just like your guys’ do.”

Donaldson’s head swiveled around to the other man in the room, who up until this point had seemed content to let Hamilton - if that really was his name - do all the talking. Now that was a face he recognized, from all the nationwide terror alerts that had gone out recently. Patric Leibowitz-O’Kelley, wanted in conjunction with several acts of terrorism on American soil. That was…concerning.

The self-professed Marine didn’t seem fazed, either by his compatriot in general or by the distinctly accented interruption.

“Different avatars react differently.”

What was an avatar?

“Talk to tha pilot.”

Was that him? Donaldson wasn’t certified to fly, but he knew his way around a cockpit thanks to a buddy of his back at the Fort. Hamilton was certainly turning back around to look him.

“Captain, you’ve been….possessed.”

Well, that was unexpected.

“What kind of bullshit are you talking about? Possessed.”

Donaldson scoffed. Possession only happened in movies and TV shows; God knows how many lame-brained privates he’d spooked over the years by busting up their “secret” Ouija board sessions on Halloween. It did his heart good to see them fall over themselves getting to attention, eyes darting wildly like they actually expected Abe Lincoln’s ghost to appear and pop them around the head or something.

“In this century’s people’s terms, they say madness.”

Hamilton ignored the muttered comment from his companion and crouched, bringing him closer to eye level with Donaldson. Donaldson wished acutely in that moment he could sit up, but his legs….

“Well. I wish there was an easier way to tell you this, captain, but you can feel what kind of shape you’re in. The helicopter theft was real.”

No.

“It’s- it’s not possible.”

It couldn’t be possible. He’d remember doing something like that - you just couldn’t steal a helicopter and not remember doing it.

Except he did, didn’t he? A vague feeling of his hands on the controls, the pressure of the headset on his ears, the feeling of the wind in the cockpit as he flew the chopper to the rendezvous. But it was all so distant, like a photograph left in the sunlight for too long. The memories faded as he tried to catch them, running through his mental fingers like sand, going……somewhere.

“You’ve been hunting the men outside for no good reason and for some time now. And…..this is hard to explain. Basically, we’re being invaded by aliens, and they do it by possessing…possessing people.”

That was possibly the most ludicrous explanation Donaldson had ever heard.

“This is completely insane. You are completely insane.”

Definitely out on a psych discharge. Why wasn’t Hamilton confined? He was clearly a danger to society.

“Yeah. You have a better explanation? Because I’d love to hear it.”

The worst part was, Donaldson didn’t. But Hamilton had to be lying. Had to be.

“This is….This is not right. This is not right.”

“This guy’s still in your head right now. He can hear what I’m saying. He’s from another world. And he’s got some kind of invasion going on.”

Donaldson could feel his gorge rising. There was something, something in his mind - a shadow?

“Did you drug me?”

Hamilton shook his head.

“Didn’t need to. I wish we had some stronger painkillers for you right now, though.”

“That’s kind of the opposite of what we need to get what we need outta this fella.”

Leibowitz-O’Kelley’s statement was flat and unfriendly. Donaldson’s eyes followed Hamilton’s gaze as the older man looked over, and the irishman’s stare was as flat and unfriendly as his voice had been. The man was clearly losing patience.

“Well, unless we can figure out how to get his pilot to talk to us…He doesn’t know anything.”

Donaldson’s eyes snapped back to Hamilton for a moment before being drawn back to Leibowitz-O’Kelley. Of the two, the terrorist was clearly more unhinged.

“Right! Yeah, no, I’ve got just the thing.”

So saying, the terrorist produced a large knife and Donaldson fought to keep his face straight. It was…easier, than he’d thought it would be. The fear was further away than he’d thought it was. Like it had somehow moved away when he wasn’t looking.

But that wasn’t a thing, was it?

“Doesn’t work like that, Patric.”

Hamilton’s statement was dry with just a hint of weariness, and Leibowitz-O’Kelley responded with a nasty grin.

“Sure it does.”

The man gestured with the - very big - knife as he spoke. Donaldson felt his heart try to race, but again the feeling was oddly muffled. He should feel more fear, but the feeling was just out of reach.

“Wh-what are you doing with that?”

Leibowitz-O’Kelley flourished the knife, the light reflecting malevolently off the blade.

“Well, the pilot can feel everything that you feel, and uh, you’re as good as dead. But I can keep him alive another half-hour and make him feel the worst pain of his life. Might not talk, but from what I understand he can’t jack out until you’re dead. Right?”

That question was addressed to Hamilton, who nodded slowly, and Donaldson felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.

“That’s my understanding.”

Hamilton seemed reluctant, but that didn’t slow the terrorist down one bit as he took a few deliberate steps in Donaldson’s direction.

“No. No no no no no…”

Even as he spoke, Donaldson could feel his fear somehow draining away towards the darkness in the back of his mind. He tried desperately to hold on to it, inexplicably more afraid of what might happen when he failed, but fail he did and the shadow in the back of his mind rose up and swallowed him whole.

“So. Talk to me, pilot. What do we want to know - where you from? And if you say Kansas…”

Donaldson’s head lolled as for a brief moment two people were in perfect balance inside his head, and no-one was holding the reins. In that instant Donaldson knew everything; who the man in his head was, what his mission was, how he was doing this.

Everything.

And then the moment was broken and Donaldson was pushed to the back of his head as the other took control. He watched in horror as the other - what’d Leibowitz-O’Kelley call him? A pilot? - looked out over the two men in the room with him and curled his lips in a small sneer. The expression felt alien to Donaldson’s face, and he felt like his stomach should be trying to crawl up his throat. He should be horrified, the buzzing static in his head was definitely panic but the Other Guy didn’t let a single thread of it show. In fact, the only real feeling in their shared skull was…a faint amusement?

Donaldson screamed, thrashing out with everything that he was in a single uncoordinated attack. The Other Guy didn’t even bat an eye, rolling Donaldson into an even deeper corner of his own psyche with some sort of mental aikido that felt disturbingly practiced. The first step to controlling an avatar is emotional and physiological control, a memory that definitely wasn’t Donaldson’s whispered. Once you have that, there is very little the host can do to resist you. He slumped, despair crashing over him like a tide. He could feel his mouth moving, hear vaguely the words being said to his ears, but it didn’t matter, none of of it mattered. Not now.

I’ll never see my wife and kids again, he thought with a sudden, awful clarity.

Their faces flashed in front of his eyes. Bonnie, with her vivacious smile and bouncy brown curls holding his youngest son Loyd as Alix, Nikki, and Major clamored to see their new baby brother. God, he loved them. Regret seized him as he thought of everything he’d miss - he’d never teach Loyd how to throw a baseball, never put the fear of God into any boys or girls Alix and Nikki brought home, never see Major get that photography degree he was always chattering about. And Bonnie - God, she’d have four kids to deal with, all alone. If he couldn’t be with her, he could only pray she found someone good to help her out.

Donaldson’s steadfast ignorance of the outside world was brought to an end by a sudden, sharp sting in his arm, and he looked out of eyes that were slowly dimming into the regretful face of Patric Leibowitz-O’Kelley. He tried valiantly one last time to take control, to beg the other men in the room to look after his family. But his tongue refused to move, the Other Guy’s spite ringing clear in their shared head as even last words were denied to him, and

everything

went

dark.

As the bright white light of the metaverse dissolved around him, Bruno blinked at the prison bars in front of his face.

Prison wasn’t the most unexpected place he’d ended up in when first jumping into an avatar, but it was a sub-optimal one. A swift survey of the room revealed that he wasn’t alone in said prison; two other people were bickering in cells nearby, and if he squinted he could just make out the halos of pilots around them.

Since, from what Bruno had seen, people mostly got dropped into avatars that matched their own gender, he felt safe in assuming that the blonde female was probably the avatar of Andi and the guy with the metal arm was probably Crash. They were, after all, the ones who’d gone into the pods at the same time he had and they were supposed to be entering this metaverse together, but both of them were deep enough in their avatars that Bruno couldn’t tell for absolute certain. The banter was certainly all the avatars; Crash had a reasonably solid grip on his brain-to-mouth filter, even if what he did end up saying didn’t always make the most sense, while this guy poured out every thought flitting through his head; the one he assumed to be Andi’s was British - or sounded like it, anyway - and seemed to be needling Crash’s avatar for the hell of it.

While they bickered, Bruno took the opportunity to stretch and get a feel for his avatar’s body. He was definitely shorter than usual, and much more wiry, but the most surprising part with the flexibility offered by every joint as he tested them. Elbows bending beyond 180, shoulders that rotated nearly out of joint to let hands clasp forearms behind his back, and hips that rotated easily enough that he was pretty certain he could do the splits if he cared to. Bruno had never been this bendy in his life; even before Africa he could lift several hundred pounds more than the average person, but even in his prime he would never have dreamed of bending far enough to get his own feet behind his head if he so desired.

He filed that flexibility away under useful information and returned to the conversation at hand.

The blonde woman - Jane Blonde, something in the back of his mind suggested and he very nearly snorted at the thought before putting it aside - was still sniping at the other man - Baron Bad? - so Bruno tuned back out to take a more thorough inventory of the cell he was nominally imprisoned in. A quick glance told him that while he was smaller and thinner than usual, the bars were still set sufficiently close together that squeezing through them wasn’t an option. The only bars not anchored in the floor and ceiling were the ones that comprised the door, which was locked securely. Said lock, on closer inspection, was a big 1960s mechanical affair that he could probably have picked with a paperclip if he’d had any. The lack of amenities put it a step or two below several prisons he’d been the unwilling guest of in the past, but the rotting corpses in several of the cells nearby were nearly par for the course.

As far as outside the cell went, the room was much longer than it was tall or wide as near as Bruno could tell. The cells marched down the sides away from a large steel door and seemed largely unused save for the six currently occupied by bodies. The steel door was the only entrance or exit he could see, though the fact that the place lacked windows and still managed a breeze suggested there were air circulation vents concealed somewhere; likely close to the roof, to make it as difficult as possible to use them for anything while guaranteeing any heavier-than-air elements introduced that way would reach maximum dispersal in minimum time.

“Look at that, Ramsbottom being remarkably attentive. Didn’t notice the roofie in his drink when he tried to seduce Blonde, but. Still.” The rather pointed remark made in his direction by the heavily-accented voice of Bad pulled Bruno from his evaluation and he glanced over at the other man. Taller than his own avatar with greasy black hair and the pallor of someone who spent far too much time inside hunched over cathode-ray tubes, the most immediately arresting feature of the Baron was his metal arm. Given the jerkiness to its movements and the audible grind of servos inside the thing, Bruno wasn’t overly concerned if it came to having to manhandle the Baron along in their escape until Crash chose to exert himself. Additionally, he now had at least part of the name of his own avatar: Ramsbottom.

Apparently that had been all the Baron wanted to say about him because the man immediately went back to commenting on Blonde’s hair, of all irrelevant things. Bruno shrugged mentally and grabbed the bar to which the locking mechanism was attached. The thing about locks is that while they tended to be reasonably well-fortified in their own right, they were really only as secure as what they were attached to. An experimental tug was enough to confirm that Bruno’s own strength, used through his avatar, would be more than sufficient to pull the lock and its bolt enough out of position to allow him to get the door open.

He pulled.

“Oh hey, that’s good thinking, Dick, maybe if you - oh shit, it’s working. That’s cool.” Bruno flexed his hands as he stepped through the ruined remains of the door. The part of the mechanism attached to the door hung uselessly in midair, the hinges of the door itself creaking slightly. It’d taken a bit of doing, but the residual ache in his hands was already fading even as Blonde pushed open her own door and stepped out. From the look of the door behind her, she’d managed to conceal a cutting torch somewhere on her person.

“Well done Dick,” she said, a sparkle in her eyes and a smirk on her lips. Bruno smiled back politely, but refused to acknowledge the unspoken warmth in her gaze. Whatever was going on between his avatar and Blonde, it was neither the time nor place for it and he’d already had the unpleasant experience of one avatar lusting after his granddaughter while he was piloting; he’d prefer to avoid another such experience if could reasonably manage it.

“Dick, if I was have known that you could do that, I would have hired you for something other than shagging good guys. That’s - Wow!”

“I’m a man of many talents,” Bruno responded dryly, deciding to take the Baron’s words at face value. The guy’s accent was thicker than several planks, but beyond that he tended to speak very plainly. What he said was what he meant, even if it sounded like his brain didn’t always stop it to sense-check it first.

“And that strength extends aaaaall the way down.” There was a pleased satisfaction in Blonde’s tone that Bruno didn’t want to think about.

“Wow - Oh! Oh, I see what you did there. That was innuendo for the time that, that you two did, uh, did the dirty deed. Which, I am still not sure what it is, but.” Bad’s rambling continued, accompanied by frankly obscene hand gestures, and Bruno shook his head as he went to go destroy the Baron’s door as efficiently as he’d broken his own. For all that the Baron had been offering to fight them both to the death earlier, Bruno didn’t think it was a good idea to leave him in the cell. For one, the Baron probably had at a least a vague idea about what they were facing and for another Crash was the one who’d insisted they come to this metaverse in the first place; leaving the person who was probably his avatar behind seemed counterproductive.

“Please don’t disillusion him, he still thinks it was beautiful.” Blonde’s voice rang out behind him and Bruno couldn’t resist the urge to shake his head as he yanked the bars apart on Bad’s cell perhaps a tad harder than was really warranted. Sometimes the enhanced strength granted to him by his time in the metaverse still surprised him; he’d accidentally crushed a few (unfortunately full) cans back on Arena by gripping them too hard, and Zenda had castigated him on the waste of food.

Not that canned bread really constituted food, but that was beside the point.

“Is that true Dick?” The Baron’s eyes were gormless in their staring at Jane Blonde, who had taken the opportunity presented by being free to inspect her nails for damage. “You know she used you, right?”

His tone was more bewildered than anything, and Bruno shrugged physically and verbally. “We’re all using each other,” he responded blandly and resolutely ignored the resultant giggles from the direction of Blonde as he pulled the cell door open.

The Baron continued to chatter even as he stepped out through the newly-opened door, and from behind Bruno there came the tiniest huff of annoyance. Turning, he met the reproachful eyes of Jane Blonde, who looked more than a little peeved that someone who claimed to be her greatest nemesis was being let out of the jail cell he’d been locked in. Normally Bruno would agree that bad guys belonged behind bars, but this was something of a special case considering the rest of his team was supposed to be in these two with him.

“Now why’d you have to go and do that, Dickie? That was our chance! We could have left him behind.” The pout reminded him strongly of the last time he’d seen even part of a frankly awful movie starring female spies when he’d had to spend six hours in a bar, staking out a target. The movie was only thing that the owner had played on the scattered tv screens and after that it was bad enough Bruno couldn’t remember half of it.

“We need all the help we can get,” was the simplest explanation, and one that seemed to satisfy her. She straightened, patted down her already immaculate curls, and gave him an imperious look.

“Dick, are you coming?”

He didn’t bother rising to the bait. “Let’s go.”

Proceeding to the only door in the room that didn’t obviously lead to another cell was the work of a moment; the Baron spoke ceaselessly as they went, every thought in his head apparently spilling out of his mouth. The door itself was a solid steel construction, with hinges inward and heavy cross-banding making battering it down an excessively difficult proposition. The Baron spent several minutes inspecting it, nattering about possible traps he’d put into place on such an ordinary-looking door, before finally just trying the handle.

The thing swung open easily, revealing a room made entirely of mirrors. Floor, ceiling, walls, all of it mirrored in such a fashion as would have the tackiest nightclub drooling in envy. It was one of the gaudiest things Bruno’d seen in a while, and he silently blessed the training that had beaten the vertigo response out of him years ago as he looked down into the infinity of reflections stretching endlessly beneath them.

Blonde and Bad were still sniping at each other when he glanced over at them to see if they had an opinion on what the room actually contained, and the rush of affection that shot through his veins at the sight of Blonde was as surprising as it was strong. Bruno’s eyes snapped away as he shoved the feeling down; it was something he himself hadn’t felt in a very long time. That, combined with the reasonably graphic images that popped into his mind, was enough to verify that his avatar was trying to reassert himself.

“…And we have D, for Dick,” Blonde’s voice was almost merry as she slid a wicked glance over at Bruno’s avatar, and Bruno had to close his eyes for a few moments to push the images that statement conjured back down into something manageable as he tuned into the conversation at the worst possible time. A half-dozen responses sprang to his lips and he said none of them, opting instead of exhale slowly as he attempted to bring some kind of order back into his head. Ramsbottom - Dick Ramsbottom, because of course he was - from what he could tell of the man, was as adept as Bruno himself when it came to compartmentalization; had to be, in his line of work. He compartmentalized about everything - except Jane Blonde. Something about her upset the man’s mental boxes, and it was left to Bruno to keep things in check.

The next few minutes were spent trying to figure out a safe way through the mirror room, with Bruno’s suggestion of using the heavy metal arm attached to the Baron to break the mirrors shot down immediately by Bad himself. Who, given his remarks a few moments later, apparently thought Bruno had been hitting on him; Bruno wasn’t interested, but Ramsbottom didn’t seem to find the idea too objectionable. Apparently Ramsbottom enjoyed trying to get the somewhat oblivious Baron into a bed for some “education” when said Baron hadn’t given him a mission in a while, though if the Baron’s comments about Ramsbottom and Blonde were anything to go by he hadn’t been met with much success yet.

As the Baron began to crawl across the mirror-coated floor, Bruno was completely unsurprised when the lasers started firing. Given what he’d seen of the place so far, he’d’ve been more surprised if there hadn’t been lasers, quite frankly; the Baron didn’t seem the type to build a mirrored maze, and since most of the crazy shit in this metaverse seemed to be technology-based the more magical options were remote possibilities. As the Baron made his way across, Bruno noted some very familiar moves as the lasers were expertly dodged and sighed mentally in relief. It appeared that Crash was coming more to the fore of his avatar; a covert glance toward Blonde didn’t net him anything more than another uncomfortable fantasy, but he could hope that Andi was becoming more present as well.

Getting through the mirror room once the Baron had made them a safe path was easy enough, and the next room was only remarkable for Bruno’s avatar managing to slip out a witty one-liner in response to the Baron talking about tying up and gagging Blonde. Bruno had nearly bitten his avatar’s tongue after that’d come out, he’d closed his mouth so fast, and some determined shoving put Bruno solely in the driver’s seat. The images that accompanied the line were firmly put back into the place where Bruno did not have to think about them, though they spent a few seconds seared into the back of his eyelids.

Watching Blonde ride a shark across the room while pursued by a large number of other sharks was nerve-wracking, though her dismount onto the safety of the ledge beside both Bruno and the Baron was flawless. The next room was merely a bunch of so-called ninjas; while Bruno had never fought ninjas before, he had gone hand-to-hand with members of military organizations from around the world and the “ninjas” wielded their weapons in a style more reminiscent of East Missouri than the Far East. He ended up putting four of them down, and then the rest were taken out in one fell swoop by the Baron in a move that smacked of Crash.

It was only when Blonde started making comments about Bad and the ninjas that Ramsbottom managed to worm his way out of the bad of their shared mind and begin exerting himself again. He didn’t have much to say about the pool of acid, for which Bruno could only be grateful. The course was much similar to one they’d used to drill the recruits on back in Basic, except that instead of sandbags and waist-deep mud it was live steel blades and acid; still, it required split-second timing to get across safely and he needed all the concentration he could muster. In spite of all that, he made it across safely and popped open the door on the further wall.

And promptly closed it again; until the other two arrived, he didn’t want to have to try and deal with that many snakes alone.

Blonde crossed easily, avoiding each swinging blade adroitly, and Bruno couldn’t tear his eyes away. Ramsbottom had eyes only for Blonde, and made their shared heart beat in arrhythmia for a few seconds after the petite Blonde had landed safely on the ledge behind them. Bruno managed to keep a grip on the motor functions, at least, and answered succinctly when questioned about the contents of the room beyond. It was only the arrival of Crash and the large blade he’d apparently pulled out of the ceiling that allowed Bruno to pull their eyes away.

Itching with the need for action, and the need to get away from the outright uncomfortable at this point thoughts and feelings Ramsbottom had for Blonde that simply refused to stay in the neat compartments he’d laid out for them, Bruno stepped into the room perhaps a bit more quickly than he should have. Taking point came to him as naturally as breathing after four decades of it, and in the last two rooms his own set of pilot abilities - more familiar to him now, after a number of missions - had made him the best choice to go first. In this room, however, he got maybe halfway across before there was a sudden stinging pain in his ankle and a slow crawl of fire up his leg.

Using the broom handle he’d confiscated from one of the “ninjas,” he swatted the offending reptile away and hurried to the other end of the room before lifting his pants leg examining the bite. The twin puncture wounds were still oozing blood, something he hadn’t seen in a while, but the burning sensation had stopped at his knee. Bruno shook his head and let his pants drop back into place. Apparently, the healing factor he had could deal with the poison or with injuries, but not both at the same time. He’d have to remember that in the future.

“Really? You’ll toss me up?” Bruno looked up at Blonde’s voice, the unexpected sound of it pulling him out of his contemplation of the snake bite. Unfortunately, Ramsbottom reacted just a bit quicker than Bruno could suppress the impulse to.

“I thought that was my job.” Bruno wished that biting his tongue would actually make Ramsbottom stop, but his avatar seemed to only find it amusing.The middle of a mission was neither the time nor the place, but he couldn’t seem to make his avatar understand the gravity of the situation.

“Why do you got to make everything about your name, Dick?” Bruno couldn’t quite tell if it was the Baron or Crash asking, but he answered dryly anyway.

“I wish I knew,” he called back as he adjusted the cuffs on his sleeves. They’d come a bit undone after being soaked in the shark room and it had been bothering his avatar.

Fortunately the rest of the banter was a bit too quiet for Bruno to catch, but the sight of the Baron holding Blonde in his arms to do a short but elegant waltz was enough to ignite an ugly feeling in his avatar’s chest, one he didn’t quite recognize and didn’t like in the slightest. Baron Bad, dancing with his girl - !

And then she was flying in his direction, tossed by the extraordinary strength of one Crash Jaxun and time slowed. In that moment, all Bruno Hamilton could see through his avatar’s eyes was his best girl soaring through the air towards him - Lori, as beautiful as she was elegant. In that same moment, Dick Ramsbottom saw the beautiful, dangerous, competent, and sly Jane Blonde - the woman who’d stolen his heart over the course of one meal - falling into his arms.

In a surge of overwhelming feeling that made their shared heart rise to inexplicable heights, Bruno caught Andi carefully in his arms and Dick planted a passionate kiss on the love of his life.

Bruno didn’t quite realize in time to stop it from happening, and though he struggled mightily he could only mitigate what was being done. The kiss ended swiftly, but the deep shock in the eyes of both Andi and her avatar was enough to have Bruno pushing away from reality violently and leaving Ramsbottom in charge.

As Ramsbottom came to the forefront and the sounds of Crash being violently ill faded into something that was no longer Bruno’s problem to deal with, Bruno put his metaphorical head in his metaphorical hands and struggled to get a hold on himself. When he’d been in the avatar of Lothar Kaldegga, Andi had been in the avatar of Grace Lyonns, and Kaldegga had taken spiteful satisfaction in filling their shared mind space with ever more explicit images of what exactly he’d like to do to Lyonns. While Bruno hadn’t been able to shut him out completely, it had been reasonably easy to keep their thoughts separate. He’d quashed the ones that obviously weren’t his and kept on going doggedly.

This, though, was something different; Dick Ramsbottom might be a man of particular talents more often hired for his face than his combat prowess, but he was no less methodical than Bruno was in his own way and approached every job with that same steady approach that comprised his best. Ramsbottom had gone in to the Blonde job the same fashion he always had, but something about her got through to him in a way that no other mark had managed before or since; sure, she’d roofie’d him and taken him to a secondary location before sharing the night and her mission with him, but Ramsbottom loved her. He loved her for her looks, he loved her for her wits, he loved the way she moved, he loved the way she looked in the morning before she cleaned up, he loved her for the constant double entendres she made of his name.

He loved her.

And that was what had tripped Bruno up. Bruno hadn’t felt that way about anyone since he’d held Lori in his arms and promised her the world. She’d been smart, and fierce, and beautiful, and she’d fit into his arms like she was made to be there. But he’d gone to war, to a front from which men came back heavily damaged if they came back at all, and she hadn’t been able to take the stress of knowing he might never return; her letter, arriving ten months after he’d been deployed - and dated seven months post-deployment - had outlined the reasons methodically and clearly. Whatever else could be said about her, she never gave anyone anything but straight talk and the letter had pulled no punches in that regard either.

Bruno had been drunk for a week straight, or nearly, and it was sheer luck that his unit saw no major action for that entire week. At the end of it, pulled out of his funk by one Sergeant Michael Haverly, he’d gone to the Captain and requested heavier duties. It wasn’t too long after that that Jaxun had pulled him for special duty in his unit and the rest was history. Bruno had thrown himself into the military, drowning his hurt in regulations and orders, in hard-won camaraderie and card games, and the years had slipped away almost without him noticing.

Even when he’d found out his daughter - whom he’d never known - had had a daughter, the sparkling joy that had filled his heart when he had been with Lori had been absent. Instead, he’d felt a steely resolve to do right by her, to be the family he’d wished for when his parents had died; finding her had been a mission that had consumed him for months. And when he finally did find her - save her, from Cole - he’d thought that would be that. A bullet burning in his gut and gritty sand in his eyes, it would have been worth it to see her safe.

But that hadn’t been the end of their story, and they had been far and away from safe.

When his avatar had begun to exert himself earlier, Bruno hadn’t recognized the feeling. Hadn’t recognized the the double-beat of their shared heart for what it was. He’d pushed it aside and dismissed the fantasies with as much vigor as he’d done to Kaldegga, and when his avatar hadn’t pushed back like Kaldegga had he’d eased up. His avatar’d snuck out a dirty comment or two, but so had Kaldegga and both he and Andi had agreed to never speak about it by the simple expedient of never speaking about it.

This, though…

The fact that Bruno had, for a split second, mistaken Andi for Lori disturbed him. From the first moment he’d seen Andi, the physical resemblance had been obvious; but he had put it aside in order to operate without distraction by the feelings it evoked. Feelings he hadn’t realized he’d still had; feelings very similar to the ones Ramsbottom held for Blonde.

Apparently, even after all these years, he still loved Lori.

The thought stung, the pain of the Dear John entwined deeply with it, but not nearly so much as it once had. Her second letter, the one that had set him on his current course, had gone a long way towards mitigating the injury caused by the first, and he hadn’t even realized. Not until he’d been forced to think about it by Ramsbottom.

By Ramsbottom kissing his granddaughter full on the lips.

…

He still didn’t want to think about that.

The feeling of bullets hitting his flesh reached him where he rested at the back of their consciousness, and he jolted forward a little in their shared consciousness until he could see the fight going on around him. There was still an ongoing mission, and the other two still needed his help. From what Bruno could tell, however, Ramsbottom was doing a none-too-shabby job taking down what appeared to be some kind of Russian soldier wielding a submachine gun.

Bruno readied himself as Ramsbottom leaped forward; a mission was no time for introspection or retreat, and guns were very simple. The weight of it in his hands as he took back full control from Ramsbottom let him push all the simmering worries and revelations away to the back of his head where he could deal with them later.

A later that, for once, perhaps wasn’t ‘never.’

He fired.

Bruno sat quietly as the plane made its steady way back to England.

That’s not to say the flight itself was quiet; Baron Bad von Charlottesville was currently pontificating to both his granddaughter Andi and her avatar Jane Blonde, who were taking it in turns to wind him up whenever he looked like he was flagging. That made enough noise to completely fill the otherwise deserted cabin, the lone attendant having decided that discretion was the better part of valor and gone to hide in the front with the pilot and co-pilot after the first hour of this.

Not that Bruno could blame them; the last mission had been…stressful. He covertly rubbed his chest and suppressed the urge to cough at the memory of his avatar’s chest caving in. General Cassius - or, more accurately, the 742 pilot who’d been using General Cassius - had shown no quarter. Bruno had felt his avatar’s ribs crack under the first blow, snap under the second, and puncture vital organs on the third. Three punches, in the span of maybe two breaths, on top of the still-seeping bullet holes from the Russian’s gun. Bruno had always thought his least favorite this about broken ribs was the stabbing pain that came with each breath, the way that each breath came shorter than the last like his lungs were trying to avoid the pieces of rib around them.

And then his avatar’s heart had stopped.

Richard “Dick” Ramsbottom had been dead for seven seconds.

Bruno Hamilton had been alone in his avatar for seven seconds.

Bruno Hamilton had, over the course of a long career, been shot, stabbed, sliced, pierced, punctured, tortured, blown up, shocked, dipped in acid, set on fire, and various other things that had been exquisitely painful in the worst ways.

None of them were as bad or lasted as long as those seven seconds.

Bruno grimaced as he remembered pushing himself to the fore of his falling avatar. There’d been no resistance, not even the token amount he usually felt when he exerted himself; nor had there been any sign of the light of the metaverse, lending credence to what Robbins had told him about how natural deaths being the way for a pilot to jump out of an avatar. Instead, there had been a blank gulf where Ramsbottom had been, a depthless, gaping void between himself and the body he was in. Being alone in a piloted avatar was strange, and not in a good way. The body had been meant for Ramsbottom, and while Bruno could make it work by force of will, it wasn’t meant for him, wasn’t designed for him.

That, and the massive amount of trauma Ramsbottom had received. Bruno had felt the shattered pieces of rib grinding together and digging into the soft parts of the chest as he’d pushed himself away from the floor. He had felt it when one of Ramsbottom’s lungs went, leaking air into the chest cavity. Digging deep into reserves he hadn’t known he possessed had allowed him to get a hold of General Cassius and break the man’s neck while using the body against the closest two enemies; it was in that moment he’d felt Ramsbottom’s heart begin beating again, sluggishly at first and then stronger as Crash’s magic took hold and the burn of snake venom faded.

Of course, healing completely shattered ribs had been unpleasant in itself; as soon as the last threat had been negated - by Baron Bad’s paranoia, of all things - Bruno had collapsed. Ramsbottom was back but nearly catatonic in the back of their shared mindspace, which meant he at least didn’t have to feel the tearing pain of pieces of rib being pulled back into place. The moving pieces of bone had caused nearly as much damage on their way back as they had moving to where they’d gotten to, and Bruno had been unable to suppress the overwhelming urge to cough as blood filled his lungs.

Andi had not been pleased when her grandfather started coughing up blood, and Blonde had seemed equally alarmed about how much blood was coming out of Ramsbottom’s mouth. Bruno hadn’t been able to catch his breath to reassure them, the tears in his lungs leaking air into his chest cavity in a sensation he could feel. He’d had to grab the knife he’d gotten in the armory and pierce the pneumothorax before his lung collapsed completely, and Andi had nearly pulled the knife out of his hands when he stabbed himself with it. It was only when the blood had spurted with the hiss of escaping air that she understood, and while Bruno could barely wheeze the words out he managed to get her pick the Russian’s bullets out for him for the next several minutes while his lung re-inflated completely and his ribs became gradually more homogeneous.

But their avatars had had a schedule - or Blonde did, anyway - and Andi had hauled Bruno to his feet long before his internal repairs were done. Making their way to the plane Blonde had waiting for them in a protected cove not too far away from the Baron’s castle had been an exercise in patience and Ramsbottom’s ribs were still more cracked than whole by the time they’d boarded.

But.

He’d lived.

Bruno rubbed his chest again, feeling the reassuringly steady beat of his heart. If Crash hadn’t managed to negate the poison in his blood and allowed his healing factor to address the more pressing issue of crushed ribs…He cut a glance over to where the other two were sitting. Crash was there with his avatar, Bruno could see that much, but the Baron seemed to be the one doing most of the talking. The current theme seemed to be how superior Bad’s 400k system was to many current retirement plans; Bruno wasn’t entirely certain how he’d gotten onto the topic, but a glance at Blonde’s mischievous face gave him a pretty good idea.

The Baron himself was an…interesting individual. Bruno flexed his left hand as the vague sense-memory of heavy metal and recalcitrant servos ghosted along his nerves. He wasn’t sure how or why it had happened, but finding himself in the body of Baron Bad and facing down a mob of angry henchmen had been an…experience. The shock of it had pushed him to the back of the shared mindspace, and the complex whirling of the mind around him had been enough to leave him off-kilter and dizzy. The Baron’s mind had moved at a million miles a second, complex calculations for orbital mechanics and the possibility of putting together a lunar base had been superseded by more immediate calculations of angle and trajectory for best use of his machine-gun arm. Underneath all the science and math had been a constant stream of objective observations about the world around him that managed to completely miss interpersonal cues while spilling out of his mouth.

Baron Bad was smart, smarter than Bruno himself for all the Baron had the interpersonal skills of a hungry raccoon, and Bruno had to take a moment to wonder how Crash had dealt with the man’s head. There was so much, going in a thousand directions at any given moment. If thoughts could make actual noise, the inside of the Baron’s head was an unending cacophony that Bruno himself would be glad to never have to deal with again. There was no organizing such a mess, no compartmentalizing the thousand and one concurrent lines of thought; Ramsbottom, for all Bruno personally objected to the man’s hitting on his granddaughter in her avatar, was at least something familiar, and returning to the man’s head had been a relief.

Bruno shook said head as he took a deep breath and felt his ribs protest - though less than they had an hour ago. Ramsbottom would live, Blonde had the villain she’d set out to capture, and Baron Bad had perhaps some perspective on things. Him and his team had managed to thwart the 742 invasion before it could gain a foothold and, in the end, that would have to be enough.

Joe’s Diner was pleasantly cool after the oppressive heat of both Arena and the barren wasteland where he’d been sent to fight.

Bruno sipped quietly at a beer - a Heineken, though he hadn’t specified such when he’d asked for one. Hollywood had simply brought it to the table with Crash and Andi’s milkshakes - and a glass of water for the still-unconscious Thomas propped up in the corner of their booth - and bustled off before Bruno could question him on it. How Hollywood knew each person’s food preferences would have to remain a mystery, it seemed. Neither Andi nor Crash had seemed too concerned about it, and both seemed to be enjoying their milkshakes, so he had to be content to let it go for now.

Andi was doing most of the talking, with Crash nodding at various points but not contributing much to the overall conversation; from Bruno’s point of view he seemed almost distracted, mind clearly on something other than the subject at hand. He wasn’t sure if Andi had noticed Crash’s preoccupation and didn’t care to mention it or had simply not noticed; either way, she carried most of the burden of conversation.

Bruno had to wonder what Crash was thinking about. He’d asked - nearly demanded - a debriefing from the younger man, and a fuller outline of the situation; what duties did they have as Prime pilots? What did he mean ancestral meeting place? Where had the boxes really come from during the fight? Why were the Trinity the first? What did he mean when he said that Bruno was a Class 4?

Crash had promised to answer them once they got back to the base so he could answer everyone’s questions at once, and Bruno had to be content with that. It was logical to wait, and make sure everyone got all of the information at the same time, but he was - somewhat ironically, given his previous line of work - tired of secrets. Secrets in general, but ones pertaining to or kept by Jaxuns in very much particular, and he had the slightly nagging feeling that if he let it get pushed off for too long he’d never get his answers.

Hollywood came back with their food, and Bruno was surprised to see him put another bottle down with his plate. He glanced down at the bottle in his hand and found it nearly empty; strangely, he couldn’t feel the warmth that usually came with the first bottle, no ease in his shoulders or the muscles of his back. It was strange enough that he sniffed the second bottle when he opened it to verify that it did, in fact, contain alcohol - with a seven-foot-tall lizard man drinking what looked like sriracha two tables over, he wouldn’t put it past Hollywood to have served him something that tasted like Heineken but was not actually beer - but the whiff of chemical fumes was familiar enough. He shrugged mentally and handed his empty to Hollywood, who whisked it away and headed towards a table that looked to be getting ready to leave.

The food’s arrival seemed to break through whatever the Trinity had done to Thomas - Crash had been obtuse on the subject, though whether that had been on purpose or Bruno simply lacking the necessary context for his statements, Bruno couldn’t be sure - and he roused as his plate was set in front of him. He blinked as he looked around in bewilderment, eyes sharpening quickly. “How the hell did I end up in Joe’s?” He demanded of the table at large, and both Andi and Crash started at once trying to fill him in on recent events.

Bruno decided that discretion was the better part of valor and slipped from the booth as they sorted themselves out of the resulting conversational tangle. He’d only had a bottle - and a half - of beer, but it had been a few hours since they’d left the home metaverse. A glance and a mouthed question at Hollywood netted him a nod towards the hallway that they’d once taken to get to Arena to fight a warlord. There was no sign of that door in the hall now, but Bruno didn’t really expect to see it. Fortunately the door he wanted was labeled neatly and clearly: BATHROOM.

Pushing his way inside, he found a clean, white-tiled room with plain white fixtures and a stainless steel faucet. It didn’t take him long to do his business, but as he was washing his hand a glint of light caught his eye. Peeking out from under his sleeve was the wrist band of the control braces he’d pulled out of the strange, silvery box that had fallen from someplace further away than the sky. The metal glistened in the bright light of the bathroom and Bruno had to resist the urge to roll his sleeves up to see all of them. So that everyone could see all of them.

Not that the bracers were much to look at; these were slimmer than the bulky, ornate bracers his avatar had used and favored, the fit comfortable and close beneath Bruno’s preferred style of shirt and the bands of it lacking in the ornate runes and obfuscating mechanisms his avatar had prized. One wider band fit around Bruno’s arm just below the elbow and connected to a second band that rested around his wrist by thin, flexible rods that did not chafe as his previous experience with such devices had, and a small circle of a metallic concentrator in his palm that hooked to the wrist band by wires and which did not impede his grip on his guns (he’d checked).

Bruno clenched his left hand around the power concentrator and breathed through the urge. Lothar Kaldegga, a previous avatar, was the one who’d given Bruno access to elemental magic in the first place; he had been a bitter oilslick of a man addicted to power and the wielding of it. And every time Bruno accessed his power, a little bit of that mire bled in with it.

Bruno had boiled a man alive because he’d needed to end the fight quickly after using Kaldegga’s earth powers, not three hours ago. He had concentrated heat into his opponent - who had looked and acted so like the General - until the man had cooked from the inside out. He had killed so very many people in a wide variety of ways with a frankly astonishing array of weapons over his long career; this should have been no different.

But this time, something inside him had enjoyed it.

Bruno splashed his face with water as the memory coiled in his head like a viper. It had been a brief flicker as he’d watched his opponent’s eyes pop in their sockets and steam boil away from the other man’s mouth, just briefest thrill at the power unleashed from the palms of his hands mixed with an odd pleasure in the agony and death it caused, but even the memory of it made him want to take an icepick and remove Kaldegga from his head by force.

Bruno had never been the kind of man to enjoy suffering - not his, not anyone else’s. He’d take the hits because he could, better than anyone else, and he’d do what was necessary only for as long as it was, in fact, necessary. He’d told the McPhernon kid once that he’d never broken the Geneva Convention in his work; he refused to become the man that broke it with glee. Kaldegga had been that man; however righteous his purpose had been when he’d started, by the time Bruno had shared his body, that idealism had long since fled in the wake of a physical lust for power and a sickening joy in the exercise of it.

Kaldegga had been an object lesson, one that Bruno would not forget easily; for all that the powers granted to Kaldegga - and, by extension, Bruno - made it easy, he refused to become that man or forget what he’d done.

As much as he wished he could yank Kaldegga out of his soul by the roots.

The thought had a hand going instinctively to his chest as the phantom sensation of broken ribs and punctured organs flared in a brief moment of remembered agony. Worse still was the sensation of the void that accompanied it, the memory of an empty space where an avatar was supposed to be and the straining effort to push a dead body into moving when its life had fled.

Richard Ramsbottom was another avatar Bruno wouldn’t forget in a hurry. The less Bruno had to think about the man’s affections, the better, but the fact remained that Bruno had failed him more comprehensively than he’d failed anyone in years. Bruno still wasn’t quite sure how the whole pilot/avatar thing worked, but Rhodes had been quite clear about the laws regarding killing avatars and he hadn’t specified whether he meant your own or others.

Beyond even that, Ramsbottom had been just as much a member of the team as Andi or Bruno himself, and he had let the man die. However temporary that death had proved, no matter that Bruno had been pushed to the back of their shared psyche at the time, Ramsbottom’s safety was a mission priority and Bruno had gotten him killed.

Bruno didn’t fail often, but when he did he didn’t wince away from it. Ramsbottom had died, and Bruno would accept the consequences of that. Kaldegga’s influence became more apparent - and abhorrent - as Bruno used his powers, and Bruno would have to keep a sharp eye on himself when he accessed those powers in the future. Ramsbottom’s interpersonal activities…Bruno splashed his face with water and dried off with the nearby towel. The less he had to deal with those interpersonal activities, the better.

With a deep breath and a reinforced sense of determination, Bruno headed back out into the noise of the Diner proper and rejoined the other three.

He would not fail again.

Bruno sat in silence as Reese creaked and swayed over a highway in Virginia, heading back towards DC.

Reese was a useful ally, in spite of his completely baffling nature. Whatever force allowed him to move allowed him to move fast, much faster than a number of other more conventional vehicles. That, combined with his ability to chameleon into basically anything, was what had allowed Bruno to get away from the seemingly endless meetings in Congress to see his granddaughter for a few days.

When Bruno had found the stagecoach parked outside his current government-issued housing in the guise of an old station wagon, Reese had claimed that he’d simply been in the neighborhood looking for a drink - then offered Bruno a lift down to Archangel base, since he was “heading that way.” Bruno would have suspected Patric’s interference in getting the transforming stagecoach up into DC like this, but the man had adamantly refused to have anything to do with the submersible stagecoach after the government had revoked his persona non grata status and he’d been allowed to leave Archangel Base without being shot into little pieces.

Still, whatever the reason for Reese’s appearance, the offer had been too tempting and Bruno had grabbed his go bag from his room - and, after a brief moment of consideration, a briefcase full of papers and writing utensils so he’d have something to work on during the trip - and climbed in. Thirty hours overland was no joke, but Reese’s tireless nature and negligent disregard for whether or not he was actually on a road had made the trip shorter than it would have been otherwise. The most annoying part was Reese begging for a drink whenever Bruno requested a pit stop; it was too much trouble getting enough to fill his tank, and the disappointed sighs whenever the booze ran out were a little grating.

Still, they made the trip in record time and not two days later they were surfacing in the hidden base on Archangel Island.

Bruno’s reunion with Andi in person had been brief; he’d arrived just as she was about to go on another mission with Stone and Jaxun, so he’d volunteered to go along with. Finding himself in an avatar completely separated from all the others had been something of a nasty surprise; that, and the lingering weariness of weeks of testifying before Congress had made him a bit clumsy in his approach to his avatar, putting him at the forefront immediately with no hint of Night Watch coming through. His avatar had accepted the decision without a qualm, hiding in the back of their shared mindspace as much as his physical body was hiding in the guise of a hot dog vendor.

That trend continued for a goodish bit of while; the only time Night Watch showed any interest in pushing forward was when Hotwire had jumped them off the bridge. Bruno’s brief panic at the high-speed free-fall had been enough to pull a hint of the stoic ninja to the fore, but he’d relented again easily enough when Bruno had needed to be in full control to deal with the cutters. It wasn’t until Bruno consciously let go and invited Night Watch to the fore that the ninja truly stepped forward.

Night Watch, like Bruno himself, was highly focused and mission oriented. He had his goals in order of priority, and his fallbacks for when things inevitably went to shit. Unlike Bruno, Night Watch was a still river that ran deep; where Bruno would take the most direct action, Night Watch would stop and wait for the precise moment. His skills reflected that, with an emphasis on stealth and speed and dealing with enemies before they even knew he was there. In the helter skelter, tactically nonsensical enemy responses in this world he was a breath of fresh air and Bruno observed him from the back of their shared mind space with appreciation for another professional at work.

And then Andi had taken an RPG to the face.

Bruno’s mind had stalled for a moment, shock and horror paralyzing him as he saw blood spray into the air. Night Watch hadn’t even hesitated, the wielder of the grenade launcher having identified himself as being clearly the biggest threat in the room. Night Watch didn’t bother trying to simply subdue the enemy this time, as he had earlier; this time, the garrote was in his hands and around the soldier’s throat before Bruno had quite grounded himself. The familiar feeling of blood dripping over their shared hands - even though it vanished in the next instant - was enough to galvanize him and he pushed his way to the fore of their shared consciousness.

In complete control of his avatar, Bruno had instinctively reached for the bond to Kaldegga deep inside him. He was surrounded by too many enemies; they were too close to him, and by far too close to her. The windstorm he had conjured was a desperate, unfocused thing but it was sufficient to send all the nearby enemies scattering every which way. Jaxun had taken advantage of the chaos to shoot two of the people about to enter vehicles, and Stone had started to emit a high-pitched, annoying noise before throwing a car into a knot of soldiers. But it wasn’t until Andi stood up from where she’d been thrown by the RPG, blood streaming from her nose and a cut above one eyebrow that Bruno had felt some of the anxiety clenching in his chest ease.

Bruno had been enjoying being out in the metaverse again with Andi; the way she’d grown had left a warm feeling in his chest. Her feats of strength and daring had made him feel younger than he had in decades, and at several points he hadn’t been able to resist the urge to point out a particularly good move. She was his granddaughter, the only family he had left, and he would be damned before he let anyone hurt her and live to tell the tale.

Even now, sitting in a stagecoach rolling down the highway, the thought of someone hurting his granddaughter and getting away with it was enough to make his fists clench reflexively. Bruno took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forcing his fists to relax as he did so. The feeling of protective anger was his, he was pretty sure - Kaldegga hadn’t a protective bone left in his body, as near as Bruno had been able to tell in their brief acquaintanceship - but the ugly need to hurt anyone who hurt her - to revisit on them a thousandfold what they had the temerity to do to Andi -

That kind of white-hot rage, the thirst for vengeance, that need to hurt the enemy soldiers, had had him reaching for the ceiling above their heads and pulling. He’d tapped the deep well of power behind his breastbone and let it resonate with the ceiling, willing the concrete to shatter and rain down on his enemies. The concrete had resisted him, much more so than the stone of the cave had when he’d last tried the trick, and while later events had explained why that was it hadn’t mattered much in the moment. When the well in his chest had run dry, not nearly enough of the soldiers were dead; he’d picked up the launcher that had dropped from the one Night Watch had garroted and fired it into the ceiling above the largest remaining cluster.

Bruno shook his head. He should have just used the rocket launcher right away. That personal, deep-seated need for vengeance - that thirst for the pain of his enemies, that was detrimental to the mission. He’d experienced such a bleed before, on ARENA, and he’d made a personal note to keep an eye on it. The problem was that it had felt…natural. Like it had simply come from a part of himself, in the same, sickening way Ramsbottom’s love of Jane had gotten tangled up in Bruno’s love for Lori. Later, after all the information TOM had laid at their feet - Dreams? Nightmares? Bruno wasn’t sure what to think about that, and there hadn’t been time to talk to Andi or Jaxun before he’d had to leave - it hadn’t been just the fact that next destination was an enemy stronghold where the enemy determined what reality looked like that made him suggest talking to Dr. Clarkson.

A thirst for vengeance was not mission readiness. The kind of heartsick love Ramsbottom had had in spades was not mission readiness. And yet neither feeling would stay in the neat, compartmentalized boxes Bruno had been using for years. Decades. Whenever he looked away for a moment they kept creeping back out and coloring his actions and intentions. If he couldn’t get a grip on himself -

“Do you want a beer?”

Reese’s voice interrupted Bruno’s thoughts unexpectedly, and the older man blinked.

“Didn’t you drink all the beer from the last gas station forty miles ago?”

The question was largely rhetorical as Reese couldn’t drink by himself when he was a vehicle; he needed someone else to pour the bottles down his intake. Bruno had spent a solid half an hour pouring bottle after bottle down the small drain concealed beneath one of the seats until the case of beer he’d bought had run out.

“Yeah, from the last stop - but there’s some I have under the seat next to you I was saving for an emergency.”

Bruno raised an eyebrow - he was never quite sure how much Reese could see in his own interior, but he made the gesture anyway just in case. “And what’s the emergency?”

Reese swayed from side to side even more broadly than usual, which Bruno interpreted as a shrug. “You seem kind of down, is all. Beer makes me feel better, why shouldn’t it help you?”

Bruno shook his head. “I don’t think a drink is going to fix my problems,” he responded dryly, and Reese swayed again.

“Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I’m driving, couldn’t hurt to give it a go.”

Bruno blinked and shrugged, before lifting up the seat beside him. Sure enough, underneath the seat was a case of beer. A familiar green case.

Bruno’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why do you have a case of Heineken under your seat?” he asked, keeping his voice calm and level. He didn’t even want to contemplate a transforming stagecoach with mindreading powers…

“One of the guys on the base told me to get some, said it was your favorite. The one who wears sunglasses all the time and has the weird big feeling to him?”

“Crash Jaxun?” Bruno asked, confused. True, he’d eaten in the diner with the kid after the mission to ARENA which would explain how he knew Bruno preferred Heineken, but - “And what do you mean by weird big feeling?”

“Yeah, him. Didn’t you notice? Him and the red-haired woman have more to them than anyone else. There’s just more there.”

Bruno digested that for a few minutes while Reese continued down the road.

“Reese?”

“Yeah?”

“What do you see when you look at me?”

Reese paused for several long moments, though whether he was thinking about what he was going to say or giving Bruno a once-over inside the cab, Bruno couldn’t tell.

“You look like Nick. Or that other guy who talks a lot - we were never really introduced. There’s not as much to you as Crash Jaxun or Red Hair, but more than most of the others. Only, it’s a little bent? It’s weird. Something’s not quite right.”

Bruno looked at the bottles under the seat one more time before putting the leather cushion down. While the beers in the diner had done nothing to him, he wasn’t sure if that was an effect of the diner or something that had followed him out of the metaverse; either way, it probably was not the best idea to imbibe before a meeting with some senators.

“Thanks, Reese, but I’ll pass.”

Reese swayed again.

“More for me, I guess.”

Both of them fell silent as Reese continued down the road.

“I’m sorry, my friends. I just can’t find them anywhere - and neither can Monday. They saved her - I don’t know how - but…it seems they paid the ultimate price in doing so.”

The words had barely left Zenda’s mouth when Bruno snapped into action.

Turning, he made a swift count of the other pilots clustered around to hear Zenda’s news and made a quick decision. Bruno was not in the habit of leaving teammates behind unless they were confirmed dead; he would do a great deal more for family. And after all, Zenda hadn’t said they were dead - only that he couldn’t find them. Bruno could think of at least two instances off the top of his head where people had hidden from the previous Rhodes by taking advantage of his nature. Zenda might be more wily than the previous Rhodes, but there were places he could not go, and Bruno was prepared to search them all for his granddaughter.

Zenda stepped away through reality, and Bruno turned to Pierce, who’d been loitering at the edge of the circle looking pained - Bruno wasn’t sure if it was at the news of Monday’s rescue, or the fact that the ship had gone missing that was bothering the man, and frankly at this point he didn’t care. “Pierce, can you set up the pods to work? Aim them, monitor them, that kind of thing?”

Pierce glanced over at the pods the kid had made, eyes unreadable, before nodding. Bruno squared his shoulders and turned to the rest of them. “Robbins, Thomas, Dr. Clarkson, you take those pods to the last known metaverse this Nightmare was attached to. Harvin, Stone, you’re with me. We’re going to head to the metaverse most closely adjacent to where they disappeared from.”

After a moment of frozen inaction where everyone carefully didn’t look at anyone else, the other pilots ground into action. Bruno would have liked to get Pierce to come with his team, but it was more important that they had someone with experience monitoring the pods from this end, and he also had the creeping suspicion he couldn’t have gotten the other man to use a pod anyway. He’d been singularly reluctant to travel using anything but the Reliance, and with the ship gone he didn’t seem too keen on finding alternate forms of passage.

As Pierce started fiddling with the side of the first pod - Thomas’ pod - before the man stepped into it, Bruno turned to the last two non-pilots in the room.

Mac McPhernon wasn’t looking at him, but seemed oddly stricken by the news about Crash and the others. Bruno didn’t have a good read on him at the best of times, and the current moment was anything but. It quickly became a moot point as Patric stepped between them and glared up at the much larger man.

“You leave that boy alone. You’re down four of your super powered folk, and his sister is dead after gettin’ mixed up in all this.”

Bruno held up a placating hand. “I wouldn’t ask it of him; it’s you I wanted to talk to. I need you to go to Washington and speak to Congress while I deal with the situation here.”

The Irishman frowned. “Would they listen to me? Really? Dunno if you’ve noticed, mate, but I’m not exactly a legal US Citizen - never mind about all terrorism charges. Or the drugs.”

Even as he spoke his hands slipped into his pocket to pull out a small unmarked bottle - nearly empty, from the way it rattled he shook out some plain white tablets. Bruno wondered briefly exactly how much of a stash the other man maintained, to still have some even after being stuck in a completely isolated underwater base for a week and then decided he didn’t actually want to know. He leaned forward.

“Patric Leibowitz-O'Kelley, you are one of the few men alive who knows a damn thing about metaversal travel that I can trust to deal with this. Getting the others back has to be our top priority; we can’t spare any pilots to speak to Congress, so I’m asking you to do it. For me. For Andi. As one ‘super powered folk’ to another.”

His words seemed have struck some sort of nerve; he knew the man had come back from 742 with the ability to repair anything with a touch, but apparently it hadn’t quite hit home before now what that meant. Patric covered his mouth with his hand as he looked up at the ceiling, then down at the floor, then finally over to McPhernon. The kid didn’t meet his eyes, but was putting things in the go bag - his Archie comics, some explosives Patric had left lying around. The Irishman heaved a sigh before nodding to Bruno.

“Alright. Alright, damn your eyes. We’ll take the damn stagecoach and we’ll go to D.C. and I’ll see what I can do. I can’t promise miracles, mate.” He rocked for a moment, like he had something else to say, but seemed to change his mind. Turning, he stalked away cursing everyone in visual range under his breath.

Bruno let him go, and turned to make sure the others had gotten into their pods safely before finally stepping into his own. As the bright, white light that signaled metaversal travel washed over him, he grimly clung to one thought: Missing wasn’t dead. He’d find her, come hell or high water.

The Metaverse swept him away.

That mission was followed by another, and then another, and then another. Bruno wasn’t sure if it was the Metaverse working with them for once, or if Pierce was that good at making the pods work, but at the end of every mission both teams would step out of their pods and nearly the same time to fall on what passed for food in Archangel base. Fed and hydrated, Bruno would grill them mercilessly on what they’d observed in their respective metaverses. Any clues about Nightmares, any whispers of Monday or of the Masters of the Metaverse - that’s what he wanted, sifting through the chaff of extraneous information like a farmer checking grain for rot.

The first few missions spawned a dozen and more leads, and Bruno chased them like a man possessed. More than a dozen missions for each team in less than a week, and only two of those later ones produced actionable intelligence. Bruno had reluctantly decided to split up in the name of time efficiency, sending the other team off to one metaverse and bringing Stone and Harvin with him to the other. He’d have preferred to get his own eyes on both, as he knew approximately what to look for, but he couldn’t be in two places at once and time was of the essence.

It was enormously frustrating, then, for both leads to dry up almost immediately. Almost a week and a half since Jaxun, Andi, Aquamarine, and Maxwell had gone to rescue Monday, and he had nothing. Bruno had debriefed both teams thoroughly, then dismissed them for some downtime while he contemplated their next move. It was while the others were shuffling towards the area they’d converted into a makeshift mess when a surprising interruption made itself known.

Patric Leibowitz-O'Kelley came storming in through the door leading to the submarine day and made a beeline for where Bruno was sitting at a table covered in handwritten notes. He didn’t even wait for Bruno to acknowledge him before he started talking.

“You’re in deep shite now, mate.”

Bruno frowned. “I realize that the situation with the 742 tech is pressing, but we have four people MIA. If we don’t find them -”

Patric cut him off with a sharp gesture. “It’s more than pressin’, it’s about to go up in flames. Three new terrorist groups popped up with stuff in just the week I was up North, d'you realize? And I had some a’ me old mates reachin’ out to me about how China’s rushin’ to get a pod program going, make their own pilots. Lane’s disappeared from his prison, an’ I’ll give ye three guesses where he’s like to have ended up.” The Irishman waved his hands, making a helpless gesture that encompassed the room, the pods, and the other pilots who were clearly listening in while pretending not to. “World’s goin’ to shit, mate. And them in D.C. don’t give a damn about who’s missin’, they want whoever’s here up there dealin’ with this shite.”

Bruno scowled. “We can’t just -”

Patric actually grabbed him by the shoulder, giving it a fierce shake. “What ye can’t do is stay here. They’re talking about assault teams, watch lists, kill orders - if ye’re not their pilot, ye’re the enemy. They’re already after the Jaxun kid.” He must’ve seen the hopeful light in Bruno’s face and waved his free hand. “His other one, the girl kid. Tessa, I think? They’re hunting her. Drones, special force black ops bullshite - I even heard tell about the damned canine squads.” He released Bruno’s shoulder and took a step back, something like pity in his face. “Ye can’t stay here, mate. Ye’re needed elsewhere. Yer granddaughter’s tough, even for one of us super powered folk. And that Jaxun boy probably knows more about th’ Metaverse than everyone else here. Ain’t nothin’ you can do for 'em from here that they can’t do for ‘emselves.”

Bruno rested his forehead on his clasped hands, feeling the weight of fifty years a soldier on his soul. Patric was…right. As much as Bruno would like to deny it, there were responsibilities here - responsibilities he could no longer safely ignore. And the other man was right again in that if Andi was stuck somewhere she couldn’t get out of, it was highly unlikely Bruno or any of the others would be able to get her out. Bruno was out of leads, out of luck, and out of time.

He swore and slammed his fist into the table, leaving a hefty dent in the surface. Thomas, Harvin, and Robbins looked up from their food, startled, and Patric fell back a step. Bruno sighed as he pushed himself to his feet. “Pack it in, people. All the pods, any advanced tech we’re not taking we’re scrapping. The pods go in Reese until we hit shore, then we’ll find a hauler to take them the rest of the way with us. We needed to be in D.C. yesterday.”

Nobody moved for a frozen second, eyes full of disbelief and - in the case of Harvin - something like betrayal, and Bruno gritted his teeth.

“We have possible pilots in China and terrorists with 742 tech.”

“But what about -” Harvin started, eyes going to the pods, and Bruno shook his head with something like despair bubbling in his gut.

“We have no leads, and no more time. If the others can’t make it back from wherever they are, we can’t help them right now.”

Several more seconds of heavy silence went by before John Stone stood up, walked over to a pod, and picked it up like it weighed nothing. Pierce lurched to his feet from where he’d been sitting and leafing through a gossip magazine, and half-staggered half-ran to the pod to begin frantically undoing power connections before Stone could rip them out of the wall. Thomas and Dr. Clarkson stood up to help, though Rosie and Robbins both seemed frozen in disbelief and remained seated.

Bruno was about to join them when a hand on his shoulder stopped him. Patric had snuck up uncomfortably close behind him, and it was all Bruno could do to suppress the reflexive urge to punch the guy. The other man seemed to notice the effort, and stepped back a little.

“Bruno. Somethin’ else.”

He hesitated and Bruno raised an eyebrow. The Irishman seemed to be debating whether or not to say something, and eventually seemed to make up his mind. He took a deep breath and looked Bruno in the eye.

“So. Ye’re not wholly without allies in D.C., and one of 'em came to speak to me before I came t’ get ye. A Colonel Woodrow, retired?” He spoke quietly, and waited for Bruno’s confused nod before continuing. “So, ye’re not the only one whose had people go missin’ on 'em. Whose had soldiers go missin’ on 'em. And, well - it’s been more'n 24 hours, Bruno. More'n a week. You and I and the old Colonel all know the chances of gettin’ 'em back alive after that amount of time.”

Bruno clenched his jaw and nodded.The odds weren’t good on finding them alive in the first place, not after what they’d gone to do and where they’d gone to do it but -

“Get to the point.” His voice was harsh but low, and the other man regarded him for a long moment from behind his preferred sunglasses before reaching into his jacket and pulling out a small envelope and holding it out discreetly.

“Well. The old man asked me to give this to ye - wasn’t sealed, so I had a look.” Bruno took the envelope with no small amount of trepidation and looked up for further clarification. Patric just shook his head and gestured for him to open it.

Bruno did, and spent a long minute staring at the contents before folding the paper back up and putting it in his inner jacket pocket and nodding mechanically to the Irishman.

Both of them turned to the others and began the surprisingly quick process of stripping the base and loading it into Reese. Aside from the ever-growing pile of novels and self-help books Thomas kept pulling out of somewhere Bruno really didn’t want to think about, none of them had much in the way of personal possessions. Pierce and Stone had methodically gone through the labs and either stripped or destroyed anything useful, and Harvin had gone through afterwards to rig up some traps for anyone who tried to raid the place in their absence, as unlikely as that was.

For all their work, they were underway before 1600 local - this time with Thomas at the helm to assist Reese in navigating the murky blue waters. The trip back to land was accomplished in nearly suffocating silence; Harvin looked about ready to either break down and cry or start hitting something until it broke down. Thomas spoke quietly to Reese whenever he did speak, and even Dr. Clarkson was more subdued than usual; Robbins appeared to be at a near-total loss for words. Bruno simply sat and contemplated what they were doing - what they were leaving behind, what he could have done better to prevent the others from being lost in the first place.

He was beginning to appreciate why Patric hated submarines.

It wasn’t until they’d reached the mainland that Bruno finally spoke again, voice only a little hoarse. “Patric’s arranged transport for us; there’s a truck waiting on pier 34. I need Patric, Stone, Harvin, Thomas, Dr. Clarkson, and Robbins to load the pods on the truck and escort them overland to the D.C. safehouse - Patric has the location, and will get things set up to continue missions from there. I’ll take a plane and get to Washington ASAP to begin debriefing Congress on what happened.”

His tone didn’t leave any room for questions, and while both Patric and Robbins gave him something of a side-eye, the rest of them took it at face value and nodded in agreement. Bruno nodded back sharply and walked over to where Reese had beached himself, tapping on the wooden hull with its bright copper finishings to get the robot’s attention.

“Reese.”

“Yes?”

“After they finish unloading…I need you to go back to Archangel Base.”

The hull shuddered under his hand, and the aborted sounds of transformation clicked from within.

“But there’s no booze down there!”

Bruno stayed firm. “If the others make it back, that’s the most likely place they’ll land. I don’t want any nasty surprises waiting for them - I need someone there, Reese. If I could stay there myself, I would. But I can’t. So I’m asking you - for the sake of our lost friends, for the sake of the only family I have left in the world - to please, go back down there and keep watch. Wait for them, when the rest of us can’t. Please.”

The last word felt unpleasantly close to begging, but for Andi Bruno would swallow any pride he had left in a heartbeat.

It seemed to work, thankfully, and Reese settle more heavily in the sand with what sounded like a gusty sigh. “When you put it like that, it would be pretty crummy of me to refuse. Alright, soon as they’re done I’ll head back and wait.”

Bruno patted the hull once and turned to walk purposefully towards the silver Lexus Patric had arranged to take him to the airport. Whether it was some kind of joke or the Irishman’s subtle way of trying to be helpful, Bruno was too tired to figure out. Climbing in, he confirmed his destination with the driver and they started off.

The drive was quiet, the driver seeming to sense Bruno’s general disinclination to talk - or perhaps just intimidated by his size, he was having difficulty giving a damn about which it really was - and pulling into the airport was relatively painless. He didn’t have any baggage with him, and thankfully the Mexican authorities weren’t as annoying about bringing handguns on a plane as the American TSA was. It was a five-hour flight North, and Bruno spent most of it dwelling on the contents of the envelope burning a hole in his breast pocket.

When he landed, he went to the car rental desk and rented himself another Lexus - no drivers this time. He drove the car himself, the heavy urban landscape eventually giving way to something greener. It was at once too long and not long enough before he was pulling up to the gates of his destination.

Parking his car, Bruno walked up the rows slowly, the wind tugging at his jacket and shirt feeling as though it was trying to hold him back. Each step was slower than the last in minute increments, but he never stopped and eventually he reached his destination.

Three graves stood before him, two somewhat weather-worn but the last fresh and newly cut.

Claire Jaymes 1976-1998, Beloved Daughter.

Lori Jaymes 1951-2018, Loving Mother.

Andi Jaymes 1992-2020, Lost But Never Forgotten.

The Colonel’s letter had been brief but not unkind:

Sergeant Hamilton,

I may have retired years ago, but I still have ears in certain places. I’m sorry for the loss of your granddaughter; the son of mine you saved in Vietnam went MIA less than six months later and never returned.

The hardest part of any loss is accepting it, in acknowledging there’s nothing left that you can do and moving on. My wife and I found that having a physical marker helped in dealing with what happened, so I have arranged for Andi to be memorialized beside her grandmother.

My sincerest condolences,
Colonel Gregory Woodrow (ret)

Bruno stared down at the grave, the crisp letter slowly crumpling in his grip. Andi was lost, not gone, and if Bruno had more time he would find her. He hadn’t gone to ARENA yet, to speak to the pilots there, nor had he visited Joe’s Diner. Hollywood knew a great deal, though he never seemed to actually come out and give a straight answer to much. The point remained that he had other avenues that were unexplored…but not the time to explore them.

And that felt like the worst failure of all.

He knelt before the fresh headstone, the ground before it largely undisturbed with no body to bury. He couldn’t bring himself to reach out and touch the thing; it seemed like a too-final notation on a situation that hadn’t lost all hope yet, like if he touched the words they’d really come true. Like acknowledging her gravestone would mean she truly would never come back.

He huffed a gusty breath and looked to the sky, speaking more to the gravestone beside him than the one in front of him. “I never really thought I’d have kids, you know. Never really thought I’d have a family. Especially not with you, Lori.”

His words were as hollow as the crypts a few columns over. He hadn’t really had a family with her, not like it should have been. He’d fathered a daughter on her and left, never to return. He’d never known Claire, and had nearly missed knowing Andi. But she was his family now, as surely as the sun rose in the morning.

“I didn’t have anyone to leave behind, so I never hesitated. The mission was everything; the worst that would happen if I’d died would be that they’d have to find another man to replace me.”

He cleared his throat quietly, the stillness in graveyard taking on an almost listening quality.

“And then you told me I had a granddaughter. I took it as just another mission, at first; get enough money together to provide for her for the rest of her life. As long as she was taken care of, then my mission would have been successful. I was nearly dead when I finally found her, and all I could think to do was to ensure mission success. Tell her about the money I’d put together for her.”

He remembered hot sands and blood trickling down his chin from where he’d bitten his lip through dealing with the agony of a gut shot. He remembered a white light, and the pain of a dying hero. He remembered Andi, tears in her eyes, taking one of his enormous, gnarled paws in her hands and smiling at him through the tears.

“She didn’t want it, Lori. Took me a while to figure out what she wanted was - ”

Was me, he couldn’t finish, breath catching in his throat. All Andi had wanted was a family and he’d taken - too long - to figure that out.

And now she was gone, and he couldn’t guarantee when or even if she’d return. Couldn’t go out and find her like he’d done two years ago, tracking her all across the globe as TOM - the TOM he’d come to hate - had kept her just ahead of him the whole time.

He turned to address the headstone in front of him directly.

“Andi, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep you safe. I’m so very sorry that you went on that mission without me. If…” he trailed off. If he could have, he’d have gone in her stead. If he could have, he’d have gone with. If he could have, she’d be here and safe with her friends and this old soldier would be MIA, as was a fitting end for him.

But he couldn’t make any of that true. Not by kneeling here in front of a grave for someone he refused to believe was dead. He sighed and stood, brushing the grass off knees that didn’t protest the motion. Bruno remembered when his knee had twinged at every third step, had screamed when the barometer dipped, had refused to bend correctly after more than a few minutes of running. He felt old, his seventy years belied by the black of his hair and the breadth of his shoulders.

He started to turn and leave, then hesitated a moment.

“Grandfathers should never outlive their grandchildren.”

He headed towards the entrance to the graveyard, wind tugging at his coat, and didn’t look back.

Bruno gritted his teeth as warmth pulsed beneath his fingers in time with his heartbeat.

Cole was a professional bastard who liked to play with his prey before he killed it, which was the only reason Bruno was still alive and Cole’s corpse was drying on the sand not too far away with a bullet in its head. The asshole had aimed very deliberately; he hadn’t hit any immediately fatal organs or arteries, but Bruno had been in enough fights to know a mortal wound when he saw one. A shot to the guts, this far from any kind of professional medical help? He’d die of peritonitis is he didn’t bleed out first.

He coughed suddenly, the motion taking him by surprise and sending daggers of pain through the hole in his stomach. A spray of red glistened on the hot, yellow sand in front of him. A shiver ran through him involuntarily, the heat around him suddenly cooler than the raging brushfire of pain in his core; apparently, Cole had nicked a lung with the shot.

He’d probably bleed out first.

Still, he was still alive right now and his goal was in sight; Bruno wasn’t the kind of man to die with a job half-finished. If he died, he died with mission objectives achieved. The fact that his granddaughter hadn’t stirred once throughout the firefight he’d had with the mercs who’d been guarding the perimeter or Cole’s monologue was concerning. If she was injured, he’d have to find some way to help her; her health and safety were mission critical. He’d spent two years and change searching for her, setting up untraceable accounts with enough money for her to live comfortably for the rest of her life. She was his mission.

He just had to get to her.

Bruno set his teeth and took a step forward, pain immediately slicing him up and down the torso. He breathed through it and took another step; the hardest part of walking through an injury was getting started. Once you had enough momentum, you could keep going for miles longer than you thought you could. But he didn’t have to go miles; he didn’t even have to go a hundred yards.

Each step towards the stone slab was agony, and his boots squelched unpleasantly with a mixture of sand and blood. Red footsteps marked where he’d been, swiftly curdling in the heat and mixing with the sand to something gritty and red-brown. He could feel the flow under his hand - he had a bad angle to keep pressure on it, and there wasn’t much he could do if he had a better one. Bruno been in the business for nearly five decades; fifty years of missions on soil both foreign and domestic, fifty years of a gun in hand and explosives in his pack, fifty years of objectives and the knowledge that every day could be his last - the fact that today was the day wasn’t surprising. It was almost a relief that he hadn’t ended up under the boot of some petty thug, gang leader, or minor warlord like some bizarre hunting trophy - of all the objectives he’d put his life on the line for over the years, it seemed fitting that the last one would be taking care of Lori’s granddaughter in a way he hadn’t been able to do for Lori herself.

Sure enough, after the first few stumbling steps the going got easier - though not any more graceful. Bruno was a big man, and had always had a strong kinesthetic sense, but he barely noticed when his knees collided with the edge of the slab. Both hands went instinctively to brace against the obstruction, to prevent himself from falling flat on his face. The release of pressure brought a fresh flow on blood, and red handprints smeared on the surface of the slab as he levered himself up. His legs wouldn’t support him any longer, but his granddaughter - she was beautiful, just exactly like her grandmother, though he couldn’t ever remember Lori looking that small - was just beyond the reach of his hands.

So he turned, got his knees underneath him, and crawled. Blood painted the slab, red handprints lost in the large drips and smears the marked where his knees went. One shuffle, two - he could reach her now, the tacky blood on his hands leaving prints on her shoulder and neck as he felt for a pulse. It took him several long and tense moments, hands shaky from blood loss but - there. Strong and steady under his hands. He could see her breathing, too, deep and regular. She looked for all the world like she was asleep, and Bruno’s arms could no longer support him at the rush of relief at that knowledge.

He collapsed against the sun-heated stone of the slab, and the world went white around him.

Bruno paused for a moment to resettle the heavy weight over both shoulders before continuing on.

Tunstall didn’t miss the pause, and glanced over with a raised eyebrow once Bruno had fallen back in line. “Is he gettin’ too heavy for you?” He asked, with a nod to the unconscious body of Sergeant Amos Graves that Bruno had slung in a fireman’s carry.

Bruno shook his head. “Not as long as I keep him balanced,” was his swift reply, and Tunstall nodded before falling back a few steps to bring up the ‘rear’ of their impromptu column. In truth, Bruno wasn’t sure what he’d’ve done if the answer had been affirmative; Tunstall had salvaged what he could from Graves’ kit and carried that as well as half of Bruno’s kit. In terms of weight, he wasn’t hauling that much less than Bruno - and it was still another ten miles to their extraction point.

They walked in silence for a few minutes, the dim shadow of Weber dipping in and out of the jungle ahead of them. Tunstall had given him a minimum amount extra to carry and had ordered him to scout ahead; with both Bruno and Tunstall carrying more than twice their usual loadout in weight, neither of them were capable of much in the way of stealth. It was Weber’s job to find and intercept threats long enough for one or both of the conscious members of the team to drop what they were carrying to help him. So far, it’d been quiet, and Weber had ranged almost twenty yards ahead of them.

“Probably not a good sign he ain’t woke up yet,” Tunstall muttered as Bruno was forced to stop and readjust once again.

Bruno grimaced slightly, the lines in his face deepening. “No, probably not,” he conceded with a glance at Graves’ slack face, “but isn’t much we can do about it here.”

It was Tunstall’s turn to nod, a shallow dip of his chin acknowledging the point. They’d bandaged up Graves’ head as best they could, packing the cut where it’d been bashed against an unfortunately-placed tree branch so at least he wasn’t bleeding all over the place, but there just wasn’t anything any of them could do about any internal bleeding. Once Weber had verified that none of Graves’ bones felt broken, Bruno had volunteered to carry him out and Tunstall had made the call on their gear. That had been nearly three hours ago, when they’d accidentally encountered a VC ambush on their way to their extraction point.

Neither side had been prepared to see the other, but Bruno’s team had been expecting trouble and had managed to get the first shots off. They’d have gotten away relatively clean if one of the VC hadn’t managed to set off what in hindsight was some sort of makeshift grenade; Graves had been thrown clear and hit his head on a tree midflight, which still put him several up on the VC in question who’d managed to pulp himself with the blast.

“Think he’ll have a better personality when he wakes up?” asked Tunstall with strained humor as they continued walking.

Bruno snorted and shook his head. “Better hope not. Better hope he asks for a medal for his ‘boo-boo.’” Radical personality shifts after getting hit in the head weren’t that uncommon - Bruno knew a couple of guys it’d happened to back in his Marine unit - but they were bad news. It was roulette as to what kind of personality they’d end up with afterwards, and half the time they’d drop dead anyway 'cause it’d scrambled their eggs too hard. Graves was a bastard, but he was their bastard and Bruno would rather have him back to cover his six than some FNG who’d need breaking in.

It was Tunstall’s turn to snort. “Maybe if it’d happened a couple hundred miles further East,” he said, dryly indicating the Cambodian landscape around them. “As it stands, I don’t think it’ll even make a footnote in a report.”

Bruno dipped his head to acknowledge the point, and paused again to adjust the awkward burden of Graves’ body. “Think we’ll see any more trouble?” Bruno asked, nodding in the direction he’d last seen Weber.

Tunstall shook his head. “Frankly, I’m surprised we even saw that group back there. We left the Chinese contingent scattered from here to the Ba Na Hills; if they pull themselves together before monsoon season, I’d be impressed.”

Bruno nodded, and both resumed a watchful quiet for the long trek to extraction.

Blue coughed, and red dotted the concrete slab less than four inches from his nose.

The memories leading up to this point were somewhat hazy - villain named Earthshaker? Resonance powers? Las Vegas? - but the situation as it stood seemed pretty clear. The only light was shining through chinks in the rubble all around him, but it was enough to show him the six inches of rebar sticking out of his upper torso. Of course, on the heels of that realization came the crashing wave of pain that having rebar jammed through your soft and fleshy bits generally entailed. He resisted the urge to cough again as he felt more blood welling up his throat; the motion would only tear him up more as his muscles tried to move around the obstruction.

Blue shifted, and was rewarded with a spray of pebbles and an ominous groan. He stopped moving quickly, and waited for the structure to re-stabilize. How had he ended up under what felt like forty tons of building? He wracked his mind, trying to remember, and hazy images floated to the surface; standing at a map table with half a dozen other superheroes, Bombshell 2.0 striding in, another map on the table - another bank robbery - and some discussion. In the end, they’d decided to send Iconoclast (him) for strategy, Bombshell for civilian assistance, and Titan to deal with the villain.

For some reason, thought of Titan struck a chord. Blue wracked his brain trying to remember. Baker wasn’t the nicest of men, true, and he tended to revel in his power too much, but that was old news. Blue had been trying to get him to see reason for years. No, it was something else to do with Titan. Someone else. Someone…Someone…

“Butch,” Blue gasped quietly.

Butch Baker was Bob Baker’s nephew, and when the kid’s parents had sent him to live with the guy Baker had decided to make the kid his sidekick. Blue had objected strenuously; no matter what powers the kid did or didn’t have, the safety and security of the nation was neither his responsibility nor his duty. Baker had responded by bequeathing a fraction of his powers on the kid, and Blue had very nearly come to blows with the man; it didn’t matter if the kid was now bulletproof, he was too young to be shot at.

Still, no matter what Blue tried, Titan now had Kid Titan as his sidekick and the two went together everywhere - ostensibly so Butch could learn the ropes, but Blue had yet to see Baker teach the boy anything. Titan was always in the thick of it, shrugging off bullets and other physical weapons with an almost contemptuous ease, and he tended to only be called out for the most dangerous of fights anyway. From the way Butch fought, the most he’d learned from Baker was to get up every time you were hit, laugh it off, and run in to be hit again. Blue had seen the kid get hit through two walls, get up with an obvious concussion, then activate his rocket boots to do it all over again.

Blue grimaced as the memories started to come back. Earthshaker had been in the middle of shaking another bank to pieces to loot the rubble when they’d arrived in Las Vegas, and Baker had dropped Blue to bull straight in. Earthshaker had done…something, Blue couldn’t remember, and Baker had gone flying. Some kind of blast? Things got hazy again, and the last thing Blue remembered with crystal-clear certainty was diving between another one of those street-breaking blasts and -

“Butch,” he said again, a little louder this time, and a slew pebbles bounced off his head. He blinked - he hadn’t moved, had he? - and looked up. One wide eye looked back down at him, and the scrabbling mixed with shouts from above.

“Titan! Titan I found him, he’s under here!” The painfully young voice of nine-year-old Butch Baker echoed down the space between concrete slabs, and Blue suppressed a groan as it bounced off his headache. Butch was a good kid, but living with Baker was doing nothing for his discretion or volume control.

Indistinct sounds answered the young sidekick, and he looked up at someone. “This is like half a building! I can’t lift that much, and Blue can’t either. Please, you have to help him.” Butch’s eye reappeared in the gap, looking down anxiously. “Blue! Blue, Titan’s on his way, he’ll get you out. Are you okay?”

Blue coughed wetly, unable to suppress the urge any longer. A spray of red splattered the concrete in front of him, and he could feel more blood dripping down his chin as he bit down on a groan of agony. “Chunk of rebar through my lung,” he called back, voice weaker than he’d like. He didn’t want to spook the kid, but Baker could be awfully negligent when it came to tossing thirty-ton chunks of anything around and while Blue would heal from this - he always healed, some things just took more time than others - the rebar was preventing his body from fixing the lung. The less stress he put on it now, the faster he’d heal up later.

The visible eye widened for a moment, then vanished. “Uncle Bob, you gotta help him now, he’s hurt real bad!” Blue winced at the real fear in the kid’s voice; he’d seen Blue heal before, but it never seemed to comfort him when he had to see it again.

“He’ll be fine, Kid Titan. It takes more than that to put a true-blue hero down!” Blue didn’t miss the not-so-subtle stress Baker put on the kid’s sidekick moniker. Baker could do subtlety like a shambling sewer monster could do a beauty pageant; badly. Apparently there were enough people around that Baker wanted to leave a good impression. God forbid a scared kid call out for his uncle.

The concrete slab in front of Blue shifted, and he blinked against the sudden light. Two faces looked down at him, one with concern written all over the parts not covered by a yellow bandana and the other with an easy smile smeared all over it.

Titan laughed. “Well! It seem the true-blue hero has gotten himself into some true-blue trouble. Let me help you with that, friend,” he said as he reached down and pulled Blue from his hollow in the rubble.

Blue bit down on a hiss as the rebar came with him. “Please get it out,” he said from between clenched teeth, gesturing towards the chunk of rebar that was beginning to drip blood onto the concrete with a steady tick-tick-tick.

Butch looked a little green, but Baker just laughed and grabbed the rebar to pull it out in one swift motion. A fountain of blood followed, and Blue couldn’t help collapsing like someone cut his strings. Butch caught him under one arm and held him as he hacked out the last of the blood in his lungs, already feeling the deep-tissue itch that signaled healing. He reached over as best he could and patted the kid’s head.

He’d be all right.

Bruno poked his head out of the carefully-concealed roof access hatch and scanned the road behind them with a pair of binoculars.

They’d been driving for several hours now, with about half the kids in the camper-trailer hooked into metapods. Staying mobile was a good way to stay under the radar, but Bruno couldn’t shake the old instincts that were poking at him to be alert. Still, the road behind them looked free of anything particularly organized - he was pretty sure no self-respecting organization would use white Ford trucks loaded down with hay bales to try and tail them, and they were the vast majority of the traffic on the roadway - so he ducked down and pulled the hatch shut behind him, landing with a soft thump on the floor of the Winnebago.

He winced as he landed, right knee throbbing in pain. It liked to remind him whenever he took a step taller than a curb that no, it did not like him anymore after he’d twisted it wrong in Afghanistan. Or, for that matter, after he’d been blown out a sixth-story window by the mad bomber currently in the driver’s seat.

“Still nothin’ ta see, mate?”

Patric’s taunting voice came from the front, where the skinny Irishman was holding the enormous steering wheel in one hand with the negligent grace of someone who’d driven this type of vehicle for years. Bruno had had a go at driving it for a bit sometime around four that morning to try and let the other man get some sleep, but it wasn’t nearly as easy as the madman made it look and after almost jacknifing the trailer, Patric had banned him from driving and gulped down some white pills Bruno did not particularly want to know the provenance of.

He shook his head in response to the question. “No, it’s all quiet back there, but I can’t help feeling like there’s another shoe waiting to drop.” The people hunting them - whether they were Program or Founders, Bruno wasn’t quite sure - had had more than half a dozen gunships and a whole fleet of vehicles chasing them through the heavily populated city of New York. The wide open roads of Manitoba didn’t feel particularly safer. Especially with Patric at the wheel, as the Irishman took a swig from a bottle Bruno was almost sure did not contain water.

“I keep tellin’ ye, Opal’s got her ears on and she’ll let me know if anyone’s headed our way.” Patric patted the dashboard and the engine revved. Bruno shook his head; he’d never been a technical man - not for that kind of tech, anyway - and after fifty years he wasn’t about to start now. Whatever Opal - the Winnebago they were traveling in’s alter ego - sensed or reported to Patric, Bruno would trust the truth of his own eyes over some gadget. Still, saying so would just send Patric off on another diatribe.

Instead, he reached into his duffle bag and pulled out the .50 caliber rifle; it’d seen heavy use recently, and wanted maintenance before he had to use it again. Keeping it pointed away from anything important, he pulled the magazine and emptied the chamber before reaching into the duffle again and pulling out a compact toolkit. An assortment of rods, oils, swabs, and screwdrivers greeted him when he opened it, and he selected one before beginning to clean the weapon.

Patric glanced back, alarm written all over his face. “Woah, woah, woah mate! You can’t be doin’ that while we’re drivin’, it’s not safe!”

Bruno looked pointedly in the phone held loosely in Patric’s right hand, which he’d apparently been either texting with or playing some sort of game on until Bruno had distracted him. “Right. Because you’re all about driving safety.”

Patric sputtered indignantly. “I’ll have you know-”

Bruno cut across him. “Relax. This isn’t my first rodeo; I know how to handle a gun.”

Patric snorted. “I’m not questionin’ your gun handlin’ skills, mate, I’m-”

Bruno tuned him out and resumed cleaning. The Irishman continued to rant in the front seat as they fled down the empty miles of highway away from their erstwhile pursuers. A particularly shrill note made Bruno wince and sigh; it was going to be a long day.

But then, when Patric drove, it always was.

Lothar Kaldegga hated magic-suppressant collars.

He’d been forced to wear one constantly when he was young, his elemental magic strong enough from a young age to destroy houses when he got upset. The United League had provided a specially sized collar to his parents after one particularly strong tantrum had left a smoking hole in the side of their house. Lothar had regretted his outburst, begged them not to put the collar on - to no avail. His mother had locked the iron ring around his neck, kissed his cheek, and told him it was only until he was old enough to control his powers.

The collar never left his neck for the next six years.

He’d felt it against his throat every time he talked, swallowed, turned his head, or tried to sleep any other way than on his side. The other children had known what it meant, of course, which made things slightly more bearable, but - six years. Even with the gel-adjustable padding and “ultra-comfortable design,” it’d left a visible mark, a place on his neck where the skin had been worn smooth. His father had taken him to a specialist to have it corrected, determined to pretend like Lothar had never worn a collar - that he’d never been an out-of-control child instead of his parents’ meal ticket to the good life. They’d been executed years ago, of course, not long after Lothar had very publicly escaped the confines of the United League military to start a new chapter in the Resistance. It had been a very public affair, ostensibly because they had raised such a disobedient son - but he’d known better. It was a scare tactic designed to discourage others from following his example, and for almost a decade it worked.

Those six years in the collar left him with a lifetime dislike of things around his neck - which included the stiff, high collars of the United League’s formal military attire. Having as much elemental power as he did had afforded him a certain amount of leeway in the matter of attire, a thing which he took advantage of shamelessly. Unfortunately, Lothar’s power couldn’t shield him from the consequences of all of his actions, and he’d ended up in proper restraining collars a number of times during his involuntary service to the United League. They were not the comfortably padded creation of his youth, and the feeling of the circuits next to his skin cooling as they neutralized the neural signals along his elemental nervous system was something he’d grown to hate almost as much as he hated the United League for everything it had done.

He’d had to use the collars on others, of course, over the years since his escape. Lothar was pragmatic enough to know that they were sometimes a necessary evil, though his use of them tapered off over the years as he took fewer and fewer hostile elementalists captive. It was, after all, much simpler to kill them than to waste the resources it took to keep them captive. Translocationists, on the other hand, were much harder to come by and while he was never sure if the collars affected them in the same way, they still received a priority for capture if possible.

Still, no matter if Lothar was the one being collared, or doing the collaring, he hated the feeling of the things. Even in their inert state they grounded and weakened the magic that was near them in a way distinctly opposite to the elemental bracers he used. They were made from the same base metal - or so he’d been told - but the collars were refined differently and acted in a directly opposite fashion. Lothar wasn’t sure which had come first, the bracers or the collars - and frankly, he didn’t care to know. All he cared was that he never wanted to wear the things again.

Which made the current situation all the more intolerable.

Bruno Hamilton was a man as orderly and pragmatic as Lothar himself, though not nearly so ruthless. The man had a strict moral compass that simply couldn’t apply to the real world, however much the man tried to make it so. Lothar knew better from years of bitter experience in fighting the galaxy-spanning power of the United League; if you gave quarter, they took a mile. Any enemies you left alive behind you would simply come back and kill good friends and skilled fighters later. Sometimes, civilian casualties were unavoidable collateral damage. It was the way things had to be, the way Lothar had fought for years, and the fact that Hamilton refused to acknowledge the fact was infuriating.

Even more infuriating was the way the man had just…stepped in to his body, somehow, and taken possession of Lothar. It didn’t feel like magic - none of the tricks he’d learned over the years for manipulating the basic forces of the universe seemed to help push the man aside and give Lothar control back - but he didn’t have any other words to describe it and Hamilton nearly as in the dark as he was. Their minds were so very alike, and yet.

And yet.

Hamilton had had his own agenda - steal a warship, blow up a planetoid. It had been deceptively simple, and had gone surprisingly well; they’d stolen the warship, and then Hamilton had let Lothar loose to destroy the planetoid below them. Lothar had tried to take advantage and steal the ship to take it and destroy more tactically valuable targets - nobody cared about the monks who lived on the dustball they’d been jumped to - but his attempt had failed and Hamilton had fumbled his way through destroying the monks instead.

And now they were here; Hamilton had just removed their shared hands from the weapons systems, and voluntarily put a collar around their neck.

Lothar howled in rage at the back of their shared skull, helpless to prevent it. His hand remained steady under Hamilton’s control, and their breathing didn’t even hitch as the locking systems popped into place. Hamilton didn’t flinch as their connection to the elemental forces of the galaxy died a sudden death, and he equally calmly allowed the cyborg across from them to cuff their body as well.

Lothar thrashed against the weight that was holding him the the back of their shared mindspace, but Hamilton ignored him. Pictures of what Lothar would do to the man’s granddaughter, thoughts of destroying United League planets with the battleship, desperate thoughts of negation - all to no avail. The handcuffs closed around their shared wrists with a solid thunk, locking mechanisms ticking into place even as the cyborg quickly stripped away Lothar’s elemental gauntlets as well.

And then, between one breath and the next, Lothar Kaldegga was alone in his body once again, standing on the bridge of a warship with three bounty hunters pointing their weapons at him and a blasted collar around his neck. He did the only thing he could do.

“Void take you all the HELL!”

The bounty hunters were not impressed.

Bruno reflected for a moment on the sequence of events that had led him to hanging by his fingertips from the edge of a very tall cliff.

First Pierce had come to him with information - less unusual now than six months ago, but Bruno was still at a loss for how he was getting it. As far as Bruno was aware, Pierce’s contacts were mostly reachable through the Reliance, and with it gone Pierce had been largely left up the proverbial creek. He’d refused to use the pods and been so uninformative at such length the one time Bruno had asked him about jumping to ARENA that Bruno hadn’t bothered to try again; all in all, there were very few avenues left to Pierce through which to garner information and yet he still managed it anyway.

Still, as cagey as he was with his sources, Pierce’s tidbits tended to play out well more often than not. Bruno had listened, ordered Patric to clear his schedule for the next day, and sent quick messages to Stone and Harvin to get prepped for a jump. In an ideal world, he would have had either Thomas or Dr. Clarkson as a fourth, but both had been unavailable within the given time frame and from what Bruno had gathered by reading in between the lines, it wasn’t the kind of metaverse where Mac would be very helpful.

Bruno suppressed a curse as he shifted his grip and grit fell into his eyes from the cliff face. He could pull himself up any time he wanted, he was plenty strong enough for it, but his part in the current plan called for him to wait for Harvin’s signal before he moved. So he waited, hanging off the side of this godforsaken cliff face without climbing gear, for that signal.

The jump in an of itself had been uneventful; they’d jumped in and asserted themselves almost immediately. Bruno had ended up in the surprisingly spry body of Liu Bao, 65-year-old Chinese army veteran who lived in a small village called Xiehe and whose town was being plagued by bandits - most of them ex-military peasants, who had decided that robbing people was more profitable than farming. Harvin and Stone ended up in Liu Mingmei and Liu Hu, respectively - grandson and granddaughter to Liu Bao - and the three of them had landed right in the middle of a quiet dinner for three with a side of mayhem.

The table had been stacked neatly with maps and notes detailing exactly where they thought the bandits were hiding, and the best ways to be rid of them when the odds were nearly twenty to one. Bruno had sped-read through them, then marked their own objective - near to three of the seven possible hideouts their avatars had identified, a cave with what Pierce had assured them was unusual amounts of metaversal disturbance. Pierce’s contact had put it down as a possible location for a Map of the metaverse, but Bruno’s personal opinion was that it was probably just smugglers again.

Bruno winced as the sun reflected off the nearby waterfall and lanced him in the eyes; for all that the current metaverse’s resemblance to Zhangjiajie back in Prime was absolutely breathtaking, especially in this light, the hemmed-in forests and steep, dangerous trails made this an operator’s nightmare. Mountains rose starkly in every direction, limiting approach and escape vectors and making assaults on fixed positions dicey at best. That was why Bruno was hanging here; Harvin should be driving the bandits out of the cave they’d holed up in at any minute, and right into Bruno’s waiting ambush. Stone was waiting a little further on to catch any stragglers. All they were waiting on now was the signal from Harvin.

Scouting the locations marked on Liu Bao’s map had been more time-consuming than difficult, with both Stone and Bruno able to run for miles before Bruno, at least, got winded and Harvin could cling to Stone like a particularly snippy backpack. The first three sites had been complete busts; one had been used as a living space - more than fifty years ago - and the other two were nearly inaccessible without either mechanical assistance or earth powers. The fourth site was further away from their intended target, but they’d hit pay dirt; Stone’s enhanced vision was able to pick out no less than four sentries ranged around a little cavern tucked discreetly behind a waterfall.

Stone had scanned the cave system as far back in as he could, and reported back that the number of bandits was closer to 100 than their avatars’ estimates of around 60. 100 people carrying weapons, anyway; there were at least another 30, possibly more, who appeared to be doing various chores or simply running around inside the cave. Harvin had snuck in closer to visually confirm, and had come back with the somewhat grim news that the unarmed opponents actually appeared to be family members and camp followers. Bruno had had to improvise a plan on the fly to lure them out, a challenge he almost relished after weeks of being stuck in appropriations hearings.

Which had lead them to now, with Bruno hanging off a cliff by his fingertips and the pink light of dawn shining on his back.

A loud whistle cut through the early-morning stillness like a knife, and Bruno flexed his fingers one more time as the rapid pounding of feet echoed along the would-be road.

Time to go.

Bruno barely noticed his surroundings as his feet carried him along the well-worn path to the metapod room in the wake of Zenda’s request.

For three years, he’d made the effort to come here as many times a week as he could manage. In the first year, he’d pushed as much responsibility onto Patric as he could manage, and come here nearly every day. Jump after jump, mission after mission to try and find their missing friends - he’d been to so many strange and fantastic metaverses now, he could barely remember most of them. And yet still, they hadn’t been able to find a single clue to the whereabouts of their absent friends.

As time went by, his desperation had mounted even as they continued to hit dead end after dead end. And with that passage, his responsibilities increased; he had less time to visit the pod room, less time for fact-finding missions out in the metaverse when the situation here needed him - and his team - so urgently. Rogue metapilots using avatar-bled powers to commit crimes, terrorist organizations making demands while using 00742 plasma weaponry - the list went on and on. Bruno Hamilton, ex-Marine Sergeant and freelance operator, had been able to devote nearly his entire time to finding his granddaughter; Bruno Hamilton, Director of the Metaversal Task Force, could barely find ten minutes in the day to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Every government wanted his time, every mission here in Prime was a priority, and every diplomat was too important to fob off on Patric. After the first year, Bruno could barely find six empty hours a week to go into a pod and try yet another dead-end mission. Instead, his days filled themselves with paperwork and meetings, plane flights to foreign countries, and testimonies given before every major power in the world. None of them had wanted to work with him at first, and even after Patric’s “little fixes” it was still an unremitting hell of political doubletalk and schmoozing. He was a soldier, through and through; a few of his avatars had been reasonable at the political arena, but that just meant he didn’t actually strangle any puffed-up two-bit idiots who wanted the prestige of talking to him about problems in their country more than they wanted to actually have him solve those problems or anyone else’s.

Bruno’d spent so long wishing for Andi and the others to return - especially Crash - that he almost hadn’t believed it when Reese had told him. The robot had been tasked with monitoring security systems for every major Metaverse Taskforce outpost (and a few other places that Patric had either added or “acquired” feeds to) being as how he needed neither food nor sleep - though explaining to the appropriations committee why Bruno needed enough beer in a month to float a reasonably-sized barge had been an experience Bruno devoutly wished never to repeat - and when he’d told Bruno that the Reliance had returned, Bruno couldn’t find it in himself to believe the much larger robot. Not until he’d seen their missing members with his own two eyes; holding Andi had been like getting back a piece of his heart he hadn’t known was missing, while seeing Crash had been a relief. Someone he trusted, someone who knew more about this metaverse stuff than he did - someone he could step down in favor of, and get back to what he knew best; boots on the ground.

And then they’d interrogated Strickland.

Bruno tried to avoid torture whenever possible - and when you were 6’ 4" and built like a brick shithouse, ‘whenever possible’ was basically all the time. The Crash he remembered hadn’t been fond of it either, preferring to either eliminate a threat outright or get answers to his questions some other way. But he’d hit Strickland right in the throat - the sickening pop of a crushed trachea was a sound with with Bruno was well familiar - and then used his bond-given powers to force the man to require oxygen to the point of passing out. Dr. Clarkson had been standing by with the emergency tracheotomy kit - a knife and the tube out of a pen Jesus Christ - and hadn’t seemed too fussed about having to perform an emergency tracheotomy on someone who was in their custody, but for Bruno it had raised a flag he found impossible to ignore.

Then Crash had started talking about expanding the unilateral power the Metaverse Task Force enjoyed within its own walls, and all the hairs on the back of Bruno’s neck had stood up.

He’d spent three years - three mortal years - building up the foundations of trust with the government, with other agencies, with the people of the world in order to get the job that needed doing done. And even having as much power here as he did stuck in his craw; Harvin was a good sounding board to make sure he didn’t cross the line, but the fact that sometimes he couldn’t tell where the line was any more had concerned him. I try to never break the Geneva Convention in my work, he’d told Mac once, and the kid had responded with I don’t think the Geneva Convention covers other universes. Maybe the kid had been right, maybe the kid had been wrong, but Bruno had had to skirt the Convention more in his tenure as Director than in the past four decades of his life put together. He’d been looking forward to handing over the reins to someone he’d known to have an unshakable moral compass.

But he wasn’t sure the man who’d come back was even Crash any more.

Going on a mission with him hadn’t been terribly enlightening, either; Agrippa had been a very assertive avatar, and Bruno had difficulty seeing through the exaggerated mannerisms the man used like a smokescreen to Crash underneath. Then, too, while the setting was one Bruno had become unfortunately familiar with over the past three years, it was one he still wasn’t comfortable in. It didn’t matter how long he’d been out of the jungle, he’d always be a soldier at heart and he’d stepped back to let Machiavelli deal with the assorted kings and queens of Renaissance Europe they’d encountered on the mission. Machiavelli was a soldier too, and a damn good one, but he was also a far more political animal than Bruno himself would ever want to be and Bruno was content to let him deal with that side of things.

Then, when they’d returned from 1512 Europe, Crash had declared he was going to go find Krieger and had swanned off with Andi and Wyatt in tow. Bruno had let him go partly because he did want to know what, if any, information Krieger had on the situation at hand, and partly because he wasn’t sure he could stop the younger man. He’d had a moment - just a moment, before he shoved it where it didn’t need thinking about - of almost paralyzing fear at the thought of Andi going on a mission with Crash and this time not making it back, but it was irrational and he knew it. Andi was competent enough to hold her own and smart enough to know when to fall back; he trusted her judgement. She would be fine.

So consumed was he by his thoughts that Bruno barely noticed as his hands followed the familiar routine of opening up the pod, making sure it was clean - sometimes the jump back could be…messy - and getting in before pulling it closed around him. It wasn’t until the bright, white light of the metaverse pulled him from his body that he remembered he was jumping at all, and by that time it was too late to recall his scattered thoughts.

Landing back in Vietnam was expected; the familiar, muggy heat, the whine of insects and equipment, the rumble of machinery and men. About the only difference he noticed right away was the fact he wasn’t sweating; his uniform wasn’t bunched up uncomfortably up at the armpits and crotch absolutely soaked with salty sweat and it took him a moment to remember why. His avatar was foremost; his distraction while jumping had put him on the back foot, but for now that was fine. Corporal Jethro Worth was an anthropomorphic beagle, a fact that was immediately and jarringly obvious when he started panting to try and deal with the muggy jungle heat. It didn’t work as well as it did back in Worth’s home of Alabama, of course, but Bruno had yet to encounter any cooling methods that were available in 1968 that worked to any real degree in the jungle and he would have been surprised to find anything different here.

There were distinct advantages to letting the avatar have the lead. For one, Bruno had been a sergeant longer than he’d been anything else, and while he could certainly work with other sergeants when the situation demanded it getting a dressing-down from the enormous bull of a bull wearing sergeant’s stripes wouldn’t have sat well. Especially since his avatar’s rank was corporal. And for another advantage, being so far in avatar meant he got the a decent view into the avatar’s knowledge and memories - most of it Bruno knew from his own time in Vietnam, of course, but the codes and callsigns were different to make up for the changes in species and the weaponry was a little more dated than his own stint. The M14 was a heavier, more solid weight than his M16 had been, and if he remembered correctly it was a much lower fire rate for more stopping power.

Of course, it also had a kick like a mule and could be hard to control, but for some reason Bruno didn’t think he’d have much of a problem with that any more. Of course, he’d have to step up to make sure Worth had access to his enhanced strength but he’d want to do that anyway if they were in combat. Bruno had more than four decades worth of experience on the corporal, and he had a responsibility to keep the man…dog…safe. It’d been more than three years, yet the phantom sensation of having pebbles where ribs should be and something more akin to fruit pulp than organs spilling out through pressure tears in his skin still woke him sweating from nightmares more often than he’d like; Ramsbottom hadn’t been a bad man, and certainly undeserving of what had happened to him on Bruno’s watch. It hadn’t happened again since, but he’d learned his lesson and remained vigilant.

As if sensing his thoughts, Bruno could feel his avatar stepping aside a little and leaving room for him. Pushing up, they both stood equal in their small, shared body as the rest of the team got themselves sorted out. Worth had already packed their kit up, for all they had another three hours to wait until the PBR was ready for them. Bruno grimaced internally at the orders they’d been given; he’d done work all over Vietnam - and the surrounding countries, not that you’d find those entries on his service record - but the fighting in the Bà Nà Hills had been among the worst as far as ambushes and unexpected engagements went. The hills were lush, green, and full of nasty little places where the enemy could hole up and patrols would never even see them. Fights started quickly and ended faster, and casualties were almost a given. It made sense for an LRRP to be deployed to the area, but that didn’t make keeping Corporal Worth alive any easier.

And, of course, Zenda had given them a secondary objective; find and save Ray Delamano from a POW camp somewhere in this conflict. A quick canvas showed that none of the avatars knew or knew of a Ray Delamano, and Bruno suppressed a sigh as Thomas fiddled determinedly with the clunky radio assigned to the unit. Unless Delamano was a colonel or better - unlikely - the radio probably wouldn’t produce any actionable intelligence; John Stone’s computer hacking ability had likewise drawbacks. If they needed to find the records of Delamano, they’d have to do it the old-fashioned way.

After some prodding, Stone ended up leaning on a records clerk until the man - well, actually he was a sheep and the sideways pupils would likely haunt Bruno for a while - gave them the records they needed. Private Ray Delamano, not terribly distinguished but not a bad soldier, had been captured three days ago…in the Bà Nà Hills. It seemed that once again, the Metaverse had sent them approximately where they needed to be, and as they shifted their gear into the PBR - crewed by what appeared to be several rodents and a goose - Bruno couldn’t help but relish the sensation of familiarity with both the environment and his situation in it. He’d do the diplomacy, the politics if he had to - but he’d much, much rather have his boots on the ground and a clear objective ahead.

This was what he was trained to do.