Chapter 94

Three and a half miles above, Piffle and George were pleased to see Junella and Zinc taking so well to flight. Junella's new wings were glistening black, grooved the same as her skin. They reflected dazzling sparks of starlight. Piffle had expected Zinc's to come out like a devilish bat, but instead he held himself aloft on stainless white angel feathers.

He ran a comb over his new chrome pompadour. It screeched across the metal like nails on a chalkboard.

Junella winced. She glared at the other shiny thing he'd made from imaginite just before they left. "With your sideways-ass elbows, you know you can't swing that damn thing."

He looked at her unconcernedly and popped a gum bubble. "I only gotta swing it once."

-***-

Chapter 93

It was not what he was expecting. He didn't have to fake looking intimidated.

Toby kept both feet on the stoop as he peeked in, just in case he was about to step into a floor of her. That was thankfully not the case, but he had a different worry. Even a single step in moccasin-soled sandals might echo in here like the clapper of a church bell.

It was a foyer grander than any hotel in Paris could aspire to. Potted plants stood like rows of soldiers along the entry path. Murals and mirrors adorned the walls. The floor tiles were so shiny, Toby thought a single fingerprint would stand out like a police beacon. They reflected high, high above, where elaborate chandeliers encrusted a wide arched ceiling. There were statues of animals too. Nonevs. They posed on pedestals with bared fangs and raised claws. There were armchairs and love seats and couches, but not a soul in sight to sit on them.

And everything, everything, everything was emerald and marble tile. Green and white checkerboard. Everything. The pattern extended to every ornament and piece of furniture in the room. And it wasn't just the colors. He could see the criss-crossing seams of grout extending up columns, over armrests, over leaves, on the animal statues, even the multi-jeweled arms of each and every chandelier.

Toby gawked openly. This enormous palace was raising goosebumps. Yet, he had to admit, it was also beautiful.

"Hello, Toby. You took less time getting here than I expected."

His head swiveled around like a roulette wheel. After a quick sweep he spotted the only items in the room that weren't green or white. Dozens of square grey speakers, set around the perimeter at eye-height. The voice had spoken through all of them at once, but the volume was adjusted to give the illusion its origin was midway across the foyer. Ventriloquism by proxy.

"I should've given you more credit. I always underestimated you, actually. Sorry for that."

The voice was calm, pleasant enough, but wholly unfamiliar. Following its source, Toby saw a small figure approaching. He had no idea who it was. She walked with unhurried nonchalance down the center of the room. A girl who appeared no older than him.

Simple denim dress. Red blouse. Candy-brown fur with auburn hair. Her tail swayed behind her like the tides.

'It can't be her,' he thought. 'She has a face.'

A calm face, pleasant enough. Nondescript feline features. A small, chagrined smile.

Even though she was barefoot, her steps did echo in the cavernous room. She stopped about fifty feet away from Toby. A cautious but respectful distance. She crossed her arms behind her back and rocked on her heels, glancing around in a circle. "Like what I've done with the place?"

Toby felt reality melt. 'It is her. Jesus, I don't know how, but...'

Actually, now that she was near enough for him to stare like a gape-mouthed idiot, there were telltale signs. Her hair was a wig, for one. And her fur was not fur, but paint. So were her eyes. They were drawn on quite skillfully, but the pupils never moved, and they crinkled when she turned her head. Finally, Toby spotted the most obvious clue. She'd hid it quite well when she walked, but there was a thin strip of pinkish-beige plastic leading all the way back into the distance where she'd come from.

She grinned disarmingly. "How 'bout my Speech Synthesis Program v3.0, huh? Aldridge tried so hard to take away my voice. But I got it back. I like new technology, Toby. It could do stuff even we couldn't accomplish back in our day."

Her new voice was indeed quite pretty. It'd had him convinced until she revealed it was software. Listening closer, there had been slight robotic pauses. Some of the vowel sounds were repeated.

No. He couldn't let himself be dazzled by details. He was here for a reason. It was time to win an Oscar.

Toby let himself stare dumbly for a moment longer. Then deep black hatred clenched his face into a scowl. Buck teeth bared, he stomped into the room and flashed out his hammer to slam the door shut behind him. It sounded like a grenade going off.

"WHERE ARE THEY!?" he screamed.

Scaphis took a step back, looking honestly confused. "Excuse me?"

Toby balled his fists, squeezing the hammer hard. He took in short, intense breaths through his nose, then bellowed again, "YOU KNOW WHO I MEAN! MY FRIENDS!! JUNELLA! ZINC! PIFFLE! I CAME FOR THEM, SO GIVE THEM BACK!!!"

She blinked. "Well, I'm sorry, but you actually just missed them. Aheh."

Toby narrowed his eyes, glowering at her with shaking fury. "You're LYING!!! I want my FRIENDS!!!" Every word echoed along the length of the foyer like a rolling dust storm. The leaves on the potted plants trembled.

Scaphis held up her hands, palms flat. "I know you don't have a lot of reason to believe anything I say, but I'm honestly not kidding! I did have them, yes. But they escaped about a week ago. Damned if I know how. Literally out from under my feet."

Toby stood seething. He let his chest rise and fall like an oil derrick. His jaw was set so tightly it quivered. He slowly raised his right arm to fingerlessly brandish his hammer at her. "I want them back. We don't have to say anything else to each other. We don't even have to fight. You've covered half the fucking world, fine. I just want three people back. Can you spare that many!?" he spat.

The kitten's tail began to flick in irritation. "Look, Toby, I don't have them. They're probably halfway down the mountain somewhere, looking for you. I assume that's where you've been hiding all this time?"

Slowly, he nodded. His words were hissed through clenched teeth. "I found a cleft in the rock. There's plenty of imaginite around here to turn into food. You remember me telling everyone about my days in the cave? How long it took me to get over my fear and crawl out? Think about how long it's been since you last saw me. That's how many weeks it took me this time. That's how long it took to get over what you did to me. Minus a while spent looking for George. Now I'm here. I spent all day climbing your goddamn mountain, and all I want is my friends back so we can go far, far away and never fucking bother you again."

"I'm sorry that happened to George," she said straightforwardly. "I don't know where he is. You didn't find him?"

"I did," Toby replied. "I found a black sphere of crushed bone that I can't bring back to life. I talk to him, and sometimes I think his colors shifting means he can hear me."

To his surprise, she looked genuinely saddened.

Scaphis dared to take a few steps closer, folding her small brown paws in front of her. "I'm sorry to hear that, Toby. I regret doing that to him. And it hurts knowing there might be something I could do to fix him, but you'd never trust me enough to bring him here."

Toby trembled in rage even harder. His hands shook. A tear forced its way out of his eye. He raised his hammer higher. "I don't want to hear any of your bullshit," he said, voice cracking. "I just want my friends. I want to go home with my friends."

She held up her paws in a warding-off gesture. "For the thousandth time, Toby, I don't have them! But what I do have is an explanation. I can make all this make sense. I agree with you that we don't have to fight. You said that. But I can defend myself if I need to-"

He cut her off, snarling, "Yeah, I'll bet you can! Defend yourself against people who you paralyzed! And tore their fucking faces off!"

She closed her eyes, sighed, and rubbed the bridge of her nose. "The Neculaunis did things to me. You had to have felt it too."

Toby said nothing. But he lowered the hammer, slightly.

She noticed and looked hopeful. She took another step. "Why do you think he had it locked away? It's dangerous. It called to me. That's why I woke up. Just like it called to you, Toby. I saw you shuffling around like a zombie on the escalator. You were even worse in Aldridge's living room. Can you honestly tell me you were in your right mind?"

His cheek twitched. "I know what caused that. Dysphoria did it to me."

"And something else."

He stiffened. 'Did I tell her about Logdorbhok!?' He couldn't quite remember.

"The oblivion door," she said.

Toby unclenched, but tried not to show it.

Scaphis looked down at Toby's hand. "Permanent. I thought so. Why do you think you lost your fingers, Toby? I honestly don't know how you managed to avoid losing more. You looked entranced. Like in a cartoon where the scent of fresh-baked pie grows a hand and pulls someone down the street by their nose. That's exactly what you looked like as you stood there in front of it. It got inside us, Toby. You and me."

He shook his head slightly. "I don't believe you. You were so cruel to them."

"It takes what's already inside you and magnifies it. Isn't that so much more effective, and insidious, than just telling you, 'C'mere'? You felt hopeless, so it turned your inner dial all the way to suicidal. I was full of rage at Aldridge, I admit it. I lied to you the entire time we were together. It took the vengeance in my heart and made me go berserk. How do you think I felt after I chucked it into space and realized what it made me do to everyone?"

Toby flicked her words away. "You admit you lied to me the whole time. That's the first thing you've said that I believe."

Her triangle ears perked up. She smiled hopefully at him believing even that. "I did, Toby. I did. And I have to be honest with you, I'm not ashamed. Think of how you felt when you were climbing up here to confront me. That was how I felt for the entire trip. Days and nights. It made me almost glad for being mute. At least I couldn't give away how terrified I was. You were taking me back to him. The man who made my own body into a jail. You've guessed this is a veneer by now, haven't you? You're sharp."

She curled her tail around, then briskly rubbed the paint off, revealing a patch of smeared beige vinyl. "Still me under here. Can you blame me for wanting to look normal, finally?"

Toby narrowed his eyes. He spoke very low. Wounded. "Why didn't you just ask? We were coming here already. We would have been happy to help you. Why didn't you trust us?"

Her hands sagged to her sides. She looked like she wanted to run over and hug him, but was held back by his hammer. "I wanted to and couldn't. You're a fellow coward, Toby; you know what it's like. I used to be confident, yes. Confident enough to mesmerize whole audiences, live on stage. But getting stabbed in the back by your lover and your self-appointed therapist... Well, let's just say it gives you issues."

Toby said nothing.

"All I wanted was to get back at him," she confessed. "Crush him. Punish him. Make him take the spell off me. Toby, I have been stuck like this for over one hundred years. Can you even fathom that length of time? Longer than most people's lifetimes. Wandering around Phobiopolis, getting chewed on by nightmares, looking for anyone who'd stop screaming at my appearance long enough to help me!?"

A grim, humorless smirk. "What'd you do to deserve it?"

She stiffened and snorted in offense. "Deserve it!? You son of a-" She stopped herself. Took a moment to get herself under control.

Her next words were spoken with closed eyes and a tempered voice. "I can understand why you would say that. I was not the nicest furson in my time. But you seem to like Luxy. He wasn't either. Or Junella. Or George. I walked a tightrope over morality back in my day. But Aldridge didn't punish me for any of that. No, no, no. Because he didn't just bake me into a doll's body, Toby. He took away my voice. Why do you suppose he did that?"

The mouse steeled himself. By now his hammer was hanging at his side and his ears were all the way open.

Scaphis took two small steps and made her expression cold and somber. "You're very smart, Toby. Smarter than most people. Let's see if you can figure it out if I hand you the clues. Think back. You didn't give up hope just because of Dysphoria, did you?"

His tail quavered.

"It was more than the Neculaunis too. Toby, you were under a triple threat. No wonder you were so eager to kill yourself and find peace. You saw it. You were actually face to face with it, weren't you?"

"I... Yes."

"Can you say its name?"

Toby opened his mouth. Grimaced. Swallowed. Clutched his stomach. "...No."

"The Allfilth," she articulated. "The dead god known as Logdorbhok."

In a panic, Toby shushed her. "Don't say that!! What if it calls him!? Like, like, Bloody Mary, or Cthulhu!?"

She smiled in sympathy. "It's perfectly safe. He can't hear a thing while he's asleep. Though if he was awake, it'd be a different story. I've never seen him awake, Toby. I don't want to. And that's why."

He cocked his head, a dreadful expression falling over his face like a shadow. "Why... what?"

She stamped her foot. "Oh put it together, Toby! Come on! We sat right in his livingroom where he admitted he was an angel. Junella even made him show off his wings. Did you seriously buy that line about God casting him here accidentally? I never did."

Toby recoiled. "No... No. Absolutely no. Aldridge was nice to us. He was charming and told us stories."

Scaphis shook her head. "Toby, I did terrible things to you, and now here I am being nice and charming. People can be more than they show you. I thought this world had beaten that lesson into you enough by now."

Toby set his mouth in an insulted pout and raised his hammer again. "What are you saying!? That Aldridge and... L-logddorb-bhok... are connected?"

Scaphis leaned in slightly. Her voice was deadly serious. "Master and servant. Or pet, if you prefer."

Toby grabbed the sides of his head and shook back and forth. "NO!!" His shout went echoing down the walls. "That's not possible!!"

A shrug. "You're friends with a nightmare. What's so impossible about it? This planet is a hell, Toby. Or maybe an experiment. All I know is that God sent us a warden and an enforcer. A warden who's very good at pretending to be a saint, and an enforcer who floats in space, sending us all bad dreams till the end of time."

No words came from Toby's open, trembling throat.

"Hades and Cerberus," Scaphis compared. "It's been there right in front of everyone's face all these years. Obvious as soon as you hear it. Ask yourself: why does Aldridge live right beside the Allfilth?"

Toby had no answer.

"Can you begin to guess now why he might have had a motive to silence me?"

Toby was shaking down to his knees. He pointed his hammer at her. "No! I won't believe that about him! Not after you... I saw outside!! All those people! Sucking them up, engulfed and paralyzed, just like you did to us! If Aldridge is the real villain here, then how the hell do you explain THEM!?"

She nodded slowly, indicating that it was a completely valid question. "I've spread my way all down the mountainside, Toby. That's the power his wand gave to me. I broke through Dysphoria. I can feel it every second, gnawing at my heart. But my consciousness is right here," she tapped her forehead, "so it can't get to my perceptions anymore. Beyond that, there's the maze, and Papilloma, and Lalochezia, and Rhinolith, and a little place called Cachexy. I don't think we ever went there together."

Toby tilted his head.

"I'm there too, Toby." Excitement began creeping into her voice. "I'm heading back along the trail we took.  Marasmus, then Lumbago. It's gonna hurt like hell squeezing myself across that glass ocean, but I'll do it. Because EC's there. You remember, don't you? That it used to be mine? Of course you do. Like you said, you saw the new tower. Dunno why, but I like building really tall things. Luxy took my best one and kicked me out. You were dead on the nose when you guessed that's why I stayed in the car. How would you like to have to look at your home after someone else stole it and put all their stuff in it?"

"I don't know how I'd feel," Toby said weakly.

"But it's all going to change. Once I take Ectopia back, the rest'll fall like dominoes. I'm going to cover everywhere and everyone."

He scowled in disgust. "Why are you admitting this!?"

Scaphis put her hands on her hips. "I ain't just doin' it for kicks," she said, in a fair impression of Piffle. "I have to. I'm the victim of a campaign of lies and silence that began before your parents or grandparents were even born. You, Toby, are standing here listening to me give my side of the story. How many others would do that!? If the boogeywoman of all their bedtimes came rushing down from the mountain, yelping about, 'Aldridge is full of shit! He's got a big dead nightmare pal that's causing all your problems!', would ANYONE believe that? Most of them don't even know Logdorbhok exists! I'd have to convince them of that first!"

Toby shrank back. "But to... swallow them up like that? You can't... There has to be something different you could do and not... that."

She slowly sighed. "I thought about it for a long time. I did." She closed her eyes. "But I already told you. I can't make myself trust anyone. I couldn't ask you for help, and I couldn't ask them. Once I started in on my 'project', it was all or nothing. I'll tell them all at once. Everyone. And until then, they'll sleep."

"The ones outside didn't sound asleep," Toby said bitterly.

A nod of acknowledgment. "Sometimes they wake up. I know it's torture for them. I know. But... What if you knew a secret this big, Toby? What would you do to break it? I don't even care if they hate me after I'm done. If I succeed, they'll know! Everyone will know. And even with all of Aldridge's godly powers, he won't be able to stand against a united Phobiopolis. Isn't that worth it? Even if it's not, won't it be? If we can make him shoo off Logdorbhok so we can finally have a world that acts normal?"

She clenched her fists, nakedly pleading for him to understand. "Imagine it, Toby! Imagine the whole world changing! Imagine Phobiopolis without nightmares. Without Logdorbhok's control, the constructs will be no worse than wild animals. Or they might disappear entirely. I honestly don't know. But we'll be free, Toby. Isn't that worth it? If I'm a monster, isn't this a goal worth becoming a monster for?"

"I don't..."

"Remember when you told me about Ectopia Cordis?" she asked. "Remember all those people furious at you for tipping over the mall? All the stores you destroyed? The owners who chased you after the trial? Didn't they think you were the villain? And how many people died when you did that?" Her paws balled into fists. "But you knew you had to, Toby, because Gyre 2 was falling, and it was the bigger threat. Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do, to prevent a greater evil."

Toby stood very still, hammer dangling at his side.

Scaphis' eyes begged him for an answer.

Slowly, Toby held up a single finger. "IF you're telling the truth..." he began.

She stepped closer, ears perked.

"Then you're right. That's a goal worth anything. If you're right, then I'll help. You were right about me seeing Logdorbhok. I probably understand better than anyone else in the world what he is. He's infinite evil. Concentrated sadism and suffering the likes of which no living soul could ever be capable of. So... yes. If your goal is to free us from him," he shook his head, unable to believe what he was saying, "then gobbling everyone up to tell them is, comparatively, a mercy. I'll help. What can I do?"

Scaphis let out an immense, joyful exhale. Her cheeks practically lit up from her smile. "Flippin' hell, Toby, you don't know how relieved I am to hear that!! To finally have one furson listen to me and not just turn their heads because I'm 'the evil Scaphis Tarrare'. Christ! Do you have any idea how ALONE I've felt up here!? I'm surrounded by people, and all of them hate me. I made my only friends hate me too. I'm America's Number One Party Pooper."

Toby snickered slightly.

Scaphis started walking towards him. "Let's get started. I honestly don't know right now what you can do, but you came up here for your friends. I'd like the chance to apologize to them too." She stopped in front of him, flushed with overwhelmed happiness. She put out her paw for a shake.

Toby's paw moved reflexively.

But then he swiftly grabbed his wrist and held it at his side.

She looked stunned.

Slowly, the mouse shook his head. "I have a problem with trust too, Scaphis. I still remember what you did to all of us. I'm not touching you until you prove you're worth trusting. Am I clear on that? Is that okay?"

She put both her hands up like he was a cop. "Perfectly! Jesus, I'm sorry. That was way too soon. You're completely justified."

Toby nodded, glad to see she hadn't argued. "You let me walk out of here without pulling any shit, and that'll be a good first step. You let me walk out of here, then maybe later I'll bring George. He's kind of heavy, but I'll figure out something. If you can fix him, that'll be a good second step. Is all this still okay?"

"Absolutely. No problem. I wasn't lying when I said you were smart, Toby."

Keeping his eyes on her, he backed up one step towards the door.

"Actually..." She frowned. "I made this place for you, Toby. I saw you coming and I figured I'd whip up a nice place to talk." She looked down at emerald green and marble white beneath her paws. "Did you wanna, um, look at it some more?"

He raised an eyebrow. "You made all this just now? How... When did you know I was here?"

A shrug. "When you were about halfway up. I felt some rocks land on me. Standard procedure, I always move my consciousness there when that happens to make some eyes and look around. I saw you climbing."

He winced. "I'm not quite the ninja I hoped."

"You did pretty good," she reassured. She turned slightly, jerking a thumb over her shoulder. "I can make us some sandwiches or something. This place has imaginite up the wazoo. You probably want to at least sit down?"

He looked at her warily. His thumb clenched slightly around the tonguerubber grip of his hammer.

"I'll leave the door open," she said.

Toby shut his eyes, drew in a deep breath, then let it out in a puff. "Fine. I'm gonna go have tea-time with the monster whose lights I came up here to knock out. My life makes zero sense."

She giggled. "I could stand here and let you bonk me with your hammer if it makes you feel better."

He handwaved it. "I'm not.. I never wanted a fight. I'd rather have sandwiches than violence."

Scaphis' smile lit up her face. She actually began purring. "Same here. Let's go! There's a bar at the back with a full deli!" She waved her arm, turned, and took off running for the far end of the foyer, where the line of potted plants narrowed to a vanishing point.

Toby took off after her, thinking that everything was going pretty well.

Scaphis kept smiling. She could hear her purr and their footsteps echo all throughout the giant room.

She knew it was hard to keep one's focus while running. That was why she was so sure Toby wouldn't look up to see the thread of herself which she'd been slowly lowering from the ceiling, millimeter by millimeter, the entire time they'd been talking. It took a bit of angling, but now she felt it drop down inside the cup of his ear.

The sound of Toby's footsteps stopped.

Hers did as well. Folding her hands contritely, she slowly turned around.

Toby was standing very still with no expression on his face.

"Sorry," she said, shrugging with open palms. "I told you I have trust issues."

She walked slowly back towards him, pawpads reflecting on the polished tile.

She looked him up and down, appraising him as a piece of sculpture. "I don't actually put them to sleep. I don't know how to. Well, except for my tongue trick. You remember that? With the faces-fall-off part? I coulda sworn you got a few drops of syrup before I tossed you, so I'm amazed you remember my name. Or anyone else's. Normally it's for putting thoughts in, or taking them out. The first few drops are a primer. Alone, all they do is..." she made a juggling motion, "scramble everything up. So, for whatever you went through... oopsie!"

Toby didn't reply. Toby didn't even blink.

She leaned in closer. "I'll put you somewhere comfortable. You deserve that, at least. Not just in the pile with everyone else. I want to believe that you believe me, Toby, I really do. I want to believe in your offer to help. But I have to be sure. You see how it is, right?" She pointed over her shoulder. "How 'bout that sandwich? I can run go make it for you and sort of hold it up to your mouth and squeeze it between your teeth?"

Toby's face unfroze into a weary scowl of bottomless scorn. "Cut the crap, Scaphis."

She backed up. She stiffened. Her jaw opened soundlessly and her eyes got very wide.

Toby crossed his arms in front of him.

Scaphis' eyes traced the line of skin that was still dangling from the ceiling, still pooled inside his right ear.

When she spoke, it was very carefully. "That's an awful nice trick, Toby. Mind telling me how you're doing that?"

Toby reached up to his ear and yanked her out like swatting away a cobweb. "You're so smart. Figure it out for yourself."

Scaphis backed up a step. "Allright then. This is new."

Toby nodded.

"I wasn't lying."

"Sure you were."

"I was-"

He held up his hand: halt. He let her get a good look at her reflection in his metal fingers. "You know what I noticed? In that whole long story you rolled out, I didn't hear you apologize even once."

She snorted. "I said I was sorry about a dozen times."

"You never apologized," he countered. "There's a difference."

Her features slowly turned from shocked to surly. She looked him top to bottom, sizing him up. The paint on her eyes began to flake. "Why should I apologize? I already tol-"

He cut her off again. "I remember Luxy telling me, pretty emphatically, to, quote, 'never trust a word out of her goddamned stinky mouth', unquote."

A flat, unamused grin. "What a vocabulary on that one, huh? You trust him, Toby? You really think that's wise?"

The mouse shrugged. "So far, yeah."

"Let me-"

He cut her off a third time. "You wanna know why I never believed a single word of what you just got done telling me?" Just as she was opening her mouth, he answered her first answer. "And no, not because I blindly trust Luxy. Or Aldridge. Or anyone else." He shrugged, then slipped his hands into his pockets. "Scaphis, I don't honestly care if everything you just told me turns out to be a hundred percent true. I don't care. We're still going to do this. You know why?"

She didn't give him the satisfaction of a guess.

He leaned in closer, nailing her to the spot with his eyes. "When Piffle said she loved you, you called her a liar. Right to her face. And for that I'm going to beat the shit out of you."

A startled, strangled gasp of a laugh. "For that? Toby, that's an awfully petty reason. I told you about the Neculaunis."

He began to slowly walk towards her, and was pleased to see her begin backing up at the same pace. "You're right. It is awfully petty. But even if I give you the benefit of the doubt, you said that the door only amplifies what's already inside. Doing that to her had no benefit to you, or your grand revenge. Not unless the benefit was the simple joy of hurting someone helpless."

Scaphis stopped in her tracks. She made her expression a sneer and her posture a wall. "Okay then. Masks off. Show's over. What if I did?"

"I just told you what I'm going to do to you for that."

A small, poisonous smirk. "I mean, you can try."

All emotion slowly left Toby's face. Though it was not like when he'd pretended to be frozen. He was simply done wasting the effort. His next words were as neutral as the grey of the mountain soil. "No, I'm going to. I am going to hit you so hard, and so frequently, that you will give me what I ask for. I want Aldridge, and I want the wand."

She crossed her paws behind her back, rocking on her footpaws. "You're funny."

"This is a legitimate offer. If you give him back, then we can all sit down and talk this out."

He briefly saw the fires of hell in her painted-on eyes. "You think I haven't talked with Aldridge before!? You think I didn't wear the results of that for over a century!?"

Toby displayed as much response as a concrete pillar. "Okay then. For the sake of my own conscience, I had to offer you that. I offered. You rejected. To be honest, I actually do want to fight you until you give in."

She pouted. "And here I thought dear little Toby The Lion was one of the good guys. I thought he wouldn't hit a girl."

"You're not a girl," Toby said simply.

A flat laugh. "Well, yes. This outfit was just to lure you in. See if I could hook you, for my own amusement. What else am I gonna do up here? It gets boring."

"I don't think lying to people is entertainment."

Her features slithered into a mean, burning smile. "You're right. It's more than that. It's what keeps me alive."

Toby looked down at the floor, seeing the two of them reflected in the tile. Seeing the provoking little smirk on her lips. With genuine sadness he said, "Scaphis, you're so stupid I almost pity you."

She put her hands on her hips. "Oboy. Name-calling. How will I ever recover?"

He shook his head. "No. I mean it. I've thought about this for a long time. You are stupid. Deeply, tragically stupid. Like, 'dumber than dogshit' stupid."

A trace of irritation crept into her voice. "Luxy's been giving you vocabulary lessons, I see."

"You're still not listening to me." Toby sounded exhausted. "That thing I said before? About how you could've just asked us for help? That was real. The honest truth. I know pretty much everything else we just said to each other was garbage-"

"No duh, Inspector."

He didn't react. "But that part was real. You could have asked us. Did you not see? How I forgave George for all the nightmare stuff he did back when he was just a normal mindless bonecuddy? Remember how we all forgave Junella for driving us off the wrong ramp and landing us in airplane town? And Piffle for running off and getting transformed into half the zoo!? Did you just miss all that!? You were never Scaphis to us. You were just Doll. Our friend. We honestly never gave a shit past that. You could have told us everything and we would have said, 'Geez, that's awful' and kept driving."

She set her mouth in a hard little line. "No you wouldn't."

"Didja know Junella told me she used to be a literal sociopath when she was a kid?"

A snort. "How surprising."

"I forgave her!!" Toby blared. "Then she forgave me for getting my Dad sent to jail on fake child abuse charges."

Her eyebrows went up. "Wow. Great job, hero."

His fingers clenched empty air. "You're still not listening to me! If you were smart, you would. But you won't. Because you're stupid."

"Stop calling me that. Crybaby."

Toby continued like she hadn't said a thing. "We loved you. Doesn't matter if you understand that or not. People who love you forgive you when you tell the truth and make amends. That's how it works. But you won't understand that. You won't because you're an idiot. You think everyone else is just like you. The only thing in your head is revenge and betrayals, so you think that's all there is in everyone else's too. But you're wrong. You're abnormal. Though you were dead right about one thing: you are alone. Whose fault is that?"

She gave him the ugliest dismissive sneer the world had ever seen. "You smug little toad, I'm older than your entire family tree. You're trying to play therapist now? Like Aldridge? Did you see what I did to him?"

Toby's posture was rock rigid. "If you choose to ignore what I'm saying right now, your life is going to get unimaginably worse."

She tossed her head back and brayed a snobbish laugh. "Oh ha-ha-HA! You're barely out of diapers! You have a weapon you trashpicked! Are you seriously-"

"Will you stop playing around, goddammit!?" Toby ran at her, hands outstretched like bear claws. Her arm moved to block him, but he tore it out of the way and sunk all ten fingers deep into the sides of her face.

She shrieked. Every speaker in the building crackled from the feedback.

Face twisted in a monstrous growl, Toby tore as hard as he could. It actually took far less effort than he'd anticipated. Scaphis' face went skimming across the room like a frisbee before smacking into a checkered column. It peeled off backwards, then splatted on the floor like a wet slab of modeling clay.

Toby stepped back, fingers caked with makeup.

Scaphis reeled, shaken and trembling. Her hands hid her face. Slowly, she looked up.

Where her painted-on features had been, there was only now what had always been before.

"I thought you said 'masks off'," Toby said.

Her chest hunched up and down with deep, angry inhales and exhales.

Then she balled her fists and screamed like a hurricane. 

Toby covered his ears as the speakers all around him blasted unholy decibels at full power.

"That was MINE!!!" she shrieked. "MINE to take off! I was just about to! It was gonna be real dramatic! You RUINED that, you prick!" The flanges of plastic around her square-shaped void rattled in outrage.

Toby's ears were ringing fiercely. "I just wanted to see the real you. A big, dumb hole."

"I'm SICK OF YOU," she roared.

The room disintegrated. Every tile of emerald and marble all popped out of alignment at once. They fell from the ceiling and the chandeliers like rain. The statues toppled. The furniture crumbled. From underneath every surface came a bubbling, churning tidal wave of liquid plastic. It had all been her. Every chair, every column, every leaf on every plant. All coated over with a thin veneer.

"HA. AT LEAST I GOT TO RIP THAT OFF MYSELF."

Toby dragged himself up from the floor, sloughing off a small avalanche of tiles that had pelted him from every direction. He stumbled a few steps, dizzy, until he realized it wasn't his inner ears that were wobbling, it was the floor. He was standing ankle deep in her.

A dozen amorphous arms surged out of the walls to web him in place. Like a synchronized attack by chameleon tongues.

Scaphis' disguise melted. The rest of her paint bled away. The dress and blouse were ripped to shreds as she grew herself to five times her previous height. A fully adult colossus, naked and unashamed of her form. "So much for kid stuff," she said with a giggle. Her voice was slightly altered now, due to about a quarter of the speakers being damaged from the tile explosion.

Toby was pinned in place like a butterfly under glass. Only his head and sandals poked out. It looked like he'd been caught in the world's worst bugglegum popping accident. Still, he struggled.

Scaphis loomed over him. She knelt in the acres of herself that covered the floor. The edges of her face-hole dribbled and squirmed. "Keep smart-assing me now, runt."

Such an easy invitation was tempting. But he remembered, Luxy sez: Never give your enemies what they want. "One last time, Scaphis! I came for my friends! Now where are they!?"

Her head tilted like a dog. "Are you fucking serious?"

Toby shrugged. "Am I?"

She bleated in frustration. "Okay, fine! You're officially not fun anymore! I'm just gonna get this over with. As if you didn't know it was coming." She got down on all fours, a twenty foot plastic mannequin, and thrust her faceless face towards him. From within its darkness, he saw a flicker of green movement. Then out came her black snakelike tongue with its emerald tip.

"I like emerald, Toby. It's my favorite color."

"Really? I couldn't have-GHK!!"

His head snapped back as her tongue surged forward like a lightning bolt. The venomous tip broke through his forehead easily, and she relished the ecstatic release of pissing as much of her memory syrup into his prickish brains as she possibly could. "Yes! YESS! Oh FUCK that feels good!" She giggled madly. "Yer not shittin' yer way outta this one, Toby! Nosirree bob! Not this time! You could crap battery acid and I wouldn't let you go! I'm gonna make toilet paper out of your stupid fucking face!!!"

Toby's stricken gape of agony changed in a heartbeat to an expression of, 'Oh please, you overgrown child.'

Scaphis' arms drooped. Her tongue sagged. Her face-tendrils spasmed.

"You really are stupid," he said patiently.

He watched her face pull in a bit, similar to biting one's lip when one is thinking at a rapid pace. "You... Okay, stop this. Just stop. I'm done with the party games. This is ridiculous. I put a soda bottle's worth of syrup in you. Your brains should be gushing outta your nostrils by now."

A wide, smug grin slowly unpeeled across the mouse's face. "You really think I'm Toby?"

"WHAT!?" She shook him, making his ears flap back and forth. "What the fuck are you talking about!?"

He giggled. "Toby's already been here for hours. I'm the bomb you let walk right through your door, Einstein."

"NO! YOU SHUT YOUR LYING MOUTH! STOP IT!!" Scaphis reared back a tentacle and punched the mouse in the face as hard as she could. He merely laughed. With a dozen pseudopods, she grabbed his arms and legs while another two dozen tore off every shred of his clothes. She knew something was unbelievably wrong when he had no penis, just a ragged cutout hole. And underneath was... "Are you fucking kidding me...!?" She tore him in half down the middle, just like Aldridge. Except meat didn't come out. Clockwork and pumps and tubes and pulleys did. Like she'd just autopsied a wind-up monkey.

Both halves of Toby's face kept giggling, even as LEDs blinked inside and various cogs bled out of his cheeks.

"A bomb," she remembered.

Furiously, she tore into the automaton. Toby kept laughing louder. "SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!!!" Her tentacles ripped through metal, wood, plastic, and silicon. No explosives to be found. Not even anything that remotely resembled one. But there was blood on her flesh. Real blood. She recoiled, unable to believe what he'd actually done. Sweet Holy Jesus, she didn't think even she was capable of a revenge like this.

She grew a hand to hold over her mouth to stop herself from puking. "You skinned yourself alive!? You put your pelt on a robot!?" She dug into the face. Real, living eyeballs splattered in her grasp. A tongue and a larynx went sliding to the floor. "WHAT THE FUCK!?"

***

Deep within the walls of her citadel, a blood-and-soot-covered shambles was crouching in a fireplace. It had no lips to form words with, but it tried its best to anyway.

"Shhurprizzhe."

Toby jammed his hand against his skinned belly. He had been practicing dumbfounding the taser, over and over, all for this moment. He had to be sure he could create it under any circumstance, even with his mind clouded by unspeakable pain. Now he made it appear inside the lining of his stomach. And he was already so skinny, it wasn't hard to reach in after it and squeeze.

The button clicked. Electricity sparked. Toby killed himself.

He took the entire top fifth of Anasarca with him.

-***-

Chapter SEVENTY-EIGHT

We rewind.

Two hours previously, George drops Toby down a rabbit hole. When the mouse opens his eyes, he has the immediate thought that this time will be a little more difficult. He is surrounded by hundreds of strolling visitors in the largest glass-walled exhibition hall he has ever beheld. There are banners, barkers, bicycles, and framed oil paintings tall enough to step into. There are many more dream-people here than in the others he navigated, but their robotic movement patterns set them apart. Toby scales a monumental statue of a man on horseback and observes. After fifteen minutes (minus a break to try a piece of saltwater taffy, which he does not care for) his eyes refocus and he stops searching among the shifting crowd, to behind them. In the shadows he sees a wagging grey tail. A lanky teenage coyote in workman's overalls, keeping out of sight but trying to look at everything. Toby introduces himself. She is brash and bullheaded, and Toby knows less about her than any of his friends. He does not have much success convincing her, until he remembers something Junella said. Hate leaves a scar. He switches tactics. Stops telling her to come back to the husband she loves, and instead reminds her of the rival she hates. The one who locked her inside of herself. Twice now. The young coyote stares across the crowd. Then suddenly crushes her meat pie in her fist and barks at him to get her out of here. 'Right this way,' Toby says.

Going back further, we see a ring of friends following like pallbearers behind a winged bonecuddy who carries a skinless bloodclot to the heights of outer space. Looking at Toby in this condition, the others have a sensation colloquially referred to as 'the creeps'. Their mouse friend's attempts to speak are less articulate than Mister Rippingbean's. He has more success with hand gestures. While the skunk, mutt, and hamsterfly stay hovering above, George descends with Toby as close to Scaphis' citadel as they dare. To the burnished metal spires and the slithering, body-carrying flesh strips. On their initial recon flyover before rescuing the others, Toby had seen smoke coming from the highest chimney. Her flesh would not be inside a functional fireplace, he reasoned. But maybe, if he were very lucky, a fireplace might count as the 'bellybutton' of a building. The doormat, the toilet seat, the footstool. The tower itself is a transformed furson. George lowers Toby down into the smoke and the darkness. While they wait for the festivities to begin, Junella and Zinc teach Piffle how to play crazy pineapple hi-lo, using George's back as a card table. They enjoy their quiet game among the soundless stars, until a gorgeously stupid idea kisses Zinc, and he asks if his partner still has the resizing window.

Going back further, the trio watch Toby's voice come out of two different sources. 'You'll need to be high enough to not get ripped apart by the shockwave, though I'm thinking the vacuum of space will dampen it some.' The mouths of the bloodclot and the robot move in skin-crawling synchronization. 'Three and a half miles up, at least. When it comes, cross your fingers you don't get hit by debris. And go limp. Let it toss you around. Less chance it'll break something.' Zinc nods sickly. 'Sure, sure. Like the difference between falling down the stairs drunk or sober.'

Going back further, we see a skinless automaton run towards the campsite on the bottom of Anasarca. It stops, awaiting orders, in front of its controller. Toby looks at it and makes it salute. Then he makes it bow to his friends. As Piffle has guessed, it is similar in construction to the pigdroid: technology from every time and place. Toby remembered the origin of willwells, that someone simply dreamed up the idea, gathered imaginite, and willed it to be. If that was possible, why not a bipedal anthropomorphic semi-autonomous endoskeleton? Complete with long-range telepathic command, and sockets for living eyes? 'Yes sir' says the imaginite, and voila. Toby is proper zonked from the Fentanyls and barely feels a thing when Junella trades her cutlass for a buck knife. She takes his pelt with care, skill, and as few cuts as possible, then tasks Piffle to play dress-up with the robot. Toby knows this world runs on perception, but it still takes a few tries until Junella can pop one of his eyes out, transfer it to the robot, and have him see out of both bodies at the same time. Once that's accomplished, he asks her to take the other one too. After all, Scaphis might ask questions about an eyepatch. And he won't be able to see anything inside the chimney anyway. When the gruesome work is finished, there stands an indistinguishable robotic Toby that moves and speaks exactly as normal, alongside a furless red abomination. The same furson, alive in two bodies simultaneously. Toby sits cross-legged, reasoning that the less he moves his flesh-and-bone body, the easier it will be to control the wood-and-metal one. He is glad for the searing pain in his skin. It helps him focus.

Going back even further, Toby gathers imaginite in Rhinolith. He and George fill sacks of other people's earnings. When they have a sufficient amount, Toby plops down at a stranger's kitchen table and pours out a mound of twinkling nuggets. He sighs. He has done this so many times already, it's all become a blur. The work is never pleasant, but at least now it is easy. Only a moment's concentration transforms the imaginite into three dense slabs of whitish putty. Toby gets to chewing. There is no real taste, but the texture is worse than stale caramel. He chews and chews. Eventually he gets the idea to try flavoring it. Now it is like eating Silly Putty that has a vague association with strawberries. Toby eats pounds and pounds and pounds of it. More than he realizes. Far more than he actually needs. But, after all, overkill is the crux of his plan.

Going back further still, almost to the beginning, we see a small mouse covered in bedsores, sitting with eyes glued to his bedroom television. It is one of his favorite programs: You'll Never Guess. A fascinating parade of trivia and science from all over the globe. It is almost like being able to travel to other places. One episode contains a section all about the explosive cyclotrimethylene-trinitramine, known more commonly to fans of action movies as C4. The program demonstrates its uncanny stability. The host holds up a slab and bangs it on a table. He fires a handgun at it. Nothing will make it blow. Nothing but an electric shockwave from a special detonator. The part of the episode that is just repulsive enough to stick with Toby all his life involves an interview with a Marine sergeant. 'C4 is a miracle,' he says. 'Durable enough to be safely used even around category-five moron shenanigans. One time I actually had to stop my men from holding contests to see who could eat the biggest chunk of the stuff.'

Eat it. You could eat plastic explosive.

And maybe it would stay there inside of you.

Especially if you were dead and it didn't really exist in a normal sense and neither did you. Maybe you could hold about a thousand pounds of it in your guts without it showing on the outside.

Maybe a regular police taser would work for a detonator.

Maybe she'd never see it coming.

***

A pound of C4 is a hell of a lot. The amount in Toby's stomach at the moment of detonation was equivalent to a nuclear bomb. This meant a debris speed of eight kilometers per second. To attempt to conceive this, imagine you are holding a baseball, then suddenly it is six miles away.

When Toby clicked the taser, a spark set off a chemical reaction. The C4 began to rapidly birth nitrogen and carbon monoxide. For a very short moment, Toby's stomach inflated with fiery gas to five times normal size, until his form was stretched past its limits and lost all structure like a popping balloon. The explosion did not stop there. Oh no indeed. It tore the walls of the fireplace apart. It shredded floors and windows and furniture and gargoyles. It wanted to be as big as possible, yet there was this pesky tower in the way. Though it really wasn't much of an impediment. The explosion had lots and lots of power. It ripped away Scaphis like snot from a sneeze. The ribbons of her flesh that stretched across Phobiopolis spasmed, like grabbing the end of a carpet and giving it a helluva snap. The explosion did not stop there. It encountered the top of a mountain and simply slashed away boulders until it ran out of energy and rested for the day. It left behind a sheared, jagged plateau, streaked with gashes, where the top of the world had been. It was commendably efficient, having accomplished all this work in just a fraction of a fraction of a second.

Toby gave Anasarca a crew cut. And everyone in Phobiopolis felt it happen.

***

Skeeto's eyes went wide as a BOOM from outside shook the video game out of his paws and made all of Kat's pottery rattle.

She was at his door in an instant. "Are you okay!?"

"Yeah, mom." He looked around the room at several action figures that had fallen over. "Was that an earthquake?"

The furless fennec rubbed the back of her neck. "Maybe just thunder?" she hoped.

***

Shopping bags spilled onto sidewalks in Lalochezia. Every head in the market town was pointed in the same direction. Past the sheen of the aurora illusion, they could all see the unbelievably massive dust cloud that had swallowed the top of Anasarca. There had been a flash that caught many people's attention, then an eardrum-wrecking blast that demanded everyone's.

A shockwave coursed through the market, ruining everyone's hairdo and sending paper goods airborne. Madam Tif Tif was one of many to experience a tent collapse. Jaziezal shrieked at the unholy mess of crashed jars all over his floor. Poubelle stared with spatula in hand as her burgers burned. For the first time in his proud career, After spilled coffee on a customer. The burly fellow who'd hit George with a map kiosk bit his tongue. A customer of the butcherable triceratops slipped and jabbed his flensing knife into the unfortunate dinosaur's nostril, resulting in an annoyed sigh and a stern glare. Chorizo was so startled he actually jumped into the arms of the bovine lady he'd been pickpocketing. The refugees from Papilloma regarded the cataclysm in silence, not knowing if this was the end of their troubles, or the beginning of more.

***

Bodies flew like hailstones from the blast atop Anasarca. A thousand victims of Scaphis died in a single merciful instant. While most were flung into space, Phobiopolis exists as a magnet for lost souls. Once their momentum fizzled out, the dead souls slowed and began to gently plummet backwards. Many would become meteors impacting the sea around Scarlatina. Boats would rescue a lucky few, while the rest would endure an unpleasant walk to shore. Others woke up in random locations all around the badlands. Some on top of the maze (luckily, not inside it). Some in Papilloma. Some in Dysania. Some in Lalochezia. Some even landed in their own home towns. But a fair portion fell upon the slope of Anasarca itself, banging against rocks, or landing within reach of Scaphis' seizuring, reflexively-grasping flesh. Those that kept their wits enough to hide from her upon resurrection eventually made it down to the mountain's nadir, where they found a pleasant little campsite, and a big, ugly car.

Of all the fursons who were freed, none, amazingly enough, were taken by Dysphoria. The sleeping will of the world itself made sure of that.

***

Though they were among the closest to the event, no one in Phlegmasia so much as turned to look. They were too busy reading.

***

At a ramshackle abode deep within the nightmare-infested woods of Marasmus, a porcupine was entombed alive in PVC. At the moment of explosion, Scaphis flinched. Her grip loosened. Most other fursons would have smashed ungracefully to the cabin floor, then flailed screaming for two seconds before getting themselves scooped up and recaptured. Not Gilla-Gilla. He had been waiting for this. When the plastic uncoiled and he felt himself drop, he wasted only an eyeblink on surprise. Then he flung himself sideways and rolled like a tornado to the other side of the room. Jumping to his feet, he watched beige tentacles slapping at empty space in search of him. He winced at seeing so many of his carefully-stacked supply boxes knocked over. But he was free.

Backing up to the nearest wall, he filled his hands with the first weapons he touched: a hook-headed brush axe and an Uzi. Hoping he would need neither, he stepped in perfect, patient silence backwards through the window she'd smashed, keeping his eyes on her panicked, thrashing flesh. He made no sound when broken glass cut his soles. The soft ash was a comfort. 'You just had to catch me wif my feet up, relaxin'...'

He heard the scrape of bone. Rotating slowly, just enough to keep one eye remaining on what he'd escaped from, he surveyed this new threat.

A white bonecuddy stood ten feet away. Neither the construct or the porcupine moved.

Keeping his grip on the axe, Gilla-Gilla slowly raised his goggles to make eye contact, then twitched his head in the direction of the unholy horror destroying his kitchen, as if to say, 'Are you seeing this shit?' When Scaphis began to pummel the cabin's walls in a frustrated tantrum, the bonecuddy got spooked and ran off. Not as smart as Georgie, Gilla thought, but not dumb either.

He had only two weapons, no armor, no supplies, no mask, and no money. It would have to be enough. He would not risk going back for more, nor would he risk alerting her with the sound of his ATV's engine. Taking his time, remaining absolutely soundless, he pulled his collar up over his mouth and headed towards the woods. He hoped he could find the bathtub without the shrieker beacon. He hoped the market would offer credit. He knew he'd been in worse spots.

And at least he was still alive.

***

Meanwhile, in the bionic bogs of Borborygmus, "Lantern Eyes" Lulu also saw the flash.

The mad queen of the scrapyard jumped out of her chaise lounge so fast she spilled her bourbon. "Wut in th' HAIL!? Somebody tryna outshine ME!?" The tubby possum swiped the Holy Remote out of her pocket and barked into it, "Go investigate that! Now! NOW!!"

From all around her, a hundred identical voices replied from tinny speakers, "Your wish is my command, my Empress." Uncountable trinket-bearing, warpainted parasomnic constructs turned and began dragging their metal limbs towards the mountain.

"Not ALL of you, ya brainless buncha road toads!!" Lulu screeched, jumping up and down so violently the candles in her eye sockets nearly blew out.

The electrosavages halted as one. Woolly manes of coiled copper wire jiggled in the breeze.

Carefully into the remote she spoke, "Only three or four go. The rest of ya's, get back to scavengin'! Time is money!" Her minions mindlessly obeyed, splitting off a delegation to inquire about Anasarca while the rest returned to their eternal labor of combing the bog. In much the same way Scarlatina collected bodies, Borborygmus regurgitated an endless stream of consumer goods from Earth dreamers' collective consciousness. A possum could get rich selling the stuff. Especially with a brainwashed nightmare workforce to claim it and clean it up.

Lulu snagged the shoulders of the two 'bots who were about to zombie their way off the porch.

"Ohhhhh no ya don't! Did I say my footrub was done yet!?"

"Your wish is my command, my Empress."

***

A trail of wheel ruts and insect footprints snaked on and on for miles in the blue soap desert. A peddler, who had been going from town to town looking for a small mouse he needed to apologize to, looked up at the flash, and gasped.

"He did it... By Mammon's wealth, it could be nothing else."

L'roon began to jump up and down in celebration, which was not easy considering his bulky bottom. When the slower-traveling shockwave caught him off-balance a moment later, he was laughing too hard to care that his cart had popped open like an egg, spilling years of treasure across the dunes.

***

Jamais Dreamsicle was getting her fur powdered and her transparent joints buffed in the Channel 909 makeup room when Cameron burst in forcefully enough to shear the door lock off the wall.

"Get your ass to the edge," he panted. "NOW."

She did not normally react well to being ordered around, but her reporter's instincts sent a shiver down her spine at his tone. Shit had just gotten real. "Later, girls," she told the makeup artists as she vaulted out of her chair after her cameraman.

He did not have to tell her where to go. Floods of Ectopians were all heading in the same direction. Jamais caught up to Cam. He tapped his headset, listened, nodded, then called back over his shoulder, "This is big. Newsroom says Anasarca just erupted."

"What!?"

He mimed an explosion with his hands. "Bwoosh. They said a rando called in a second ago; got a perfect shot of it happening."

The vixen's posture stiffened like a hound en pointe. "Run faster."

They did indeed. Jamais felt her blood turn cold when she saw the massive congregation of onlookers clustered at the edge of Bigwheel Twenty-One, all of them slowly walking in the opposite direction of the spin to keep their eyes glued to the dust cloud in the distance.

A paw waved frantically above two day-glo ears. "Ooh, ooh! Miss Dreamsicle! Over here! I got the whole thing!!"

Cam was already filming when he and Jamais struggled through the crowd towards the black-and-green wolf. Shi held up hir cell phone like the tablets of Sinai. Zhiral introduced hir friends, Ludu and Javi, and said shi'd been filming them having a friendly eye-gouging fight. By sheer luck, hir lens was pointed directly at Anasarca when its top was suddenly engulfed in a light that turned night into day. Shi'd managed to keep her paws steady, continuing to record the subsequent ash cloud and shockwave. Shi said that, on the video, you could actually see the Veil Of Tears ripple. Jamais and Cam wedged in close to watch the footage on hir tiny screen. Cam began uploading it to HQ and said it was the clearest he could have hoped for. Zhiral was tickled pink.

Jamais bit her lip. "Should we send it out unedited? Main show's in half an hour. Is eye-gouging 'safe' for dinnertime viewing?"

Cameron looked at her like she had brain damage. "Jammy, I'll bet my own teeth they break it live. This is major history happening. It wouldn't matter if the clip started off with these three gang-banging."

Zhiral and her friends snerked.

Jamais bit her own tongue. "Right, right. Thank you, Cam. I'm not thinking straight." She began looking around for the nearest support column. As the only things in EC that weren't constantly moving, they were the premium choice for a static backdrop.

They were there and set up within seven minutes. Cam double-checked his equipment. Javi, Ludu and Zhiral were fidgeting nearby, waiting for their live interview. Jamais stood on her mark with the billowing mountain framed just behind her left shoulder. She fussed with her hair and teeth in her compact mirror.

Then a thought struck her.

She turned around. Her expression changed.

She suddenly saw what was happening on Anasarca as more than just breaking news. Luxy had been gone for nearly two weeks. And sure, Deputy Mayor Algo Lagnia was thoroughly competent (and had given her a blessedly easy interview at the reopening of Praxus Pammer a week ago), but he didn't have the raccoon's magnetism. This was the longest Luxy had been away from the city in at least a decade.

"This is why he left."

She couldn't bring herself to believe that Scaphis Tarrare was actually back from the grave. Their mayor was just shutting down a rumor, that was all. But what if he wasn't? What if...

It slowly dawned on her that this truly was history unfolding. A moment that might shape all of Phobiopolis for all of future time. And she knew nothing about it, beyond the chilling sight of the world's most dependable landmark now vomiting ash and smoke.

'This is one of those moments,' she felt in her bones, 'that is going to divide all our lives into before and after today.'

It took Cam five shouts to get her to realize she was live.

***

It would be hours until Coryza's mighty walls were raised for the night. If they'd been shut already, the city might have slept right through the explosion, finding out only when envelope-bearing mice began flooding out of holes. Instead, like the rest of the world, they saw the flash and heard the boom. They climbed stairs and fire escapes to stand in cramped masses on rooftops. There were whispers in the air that the light had been Aldridge's return, or his death. Spiretto Bronze, the lizard who had been saved by Zinc's harpoon, stood with his arms wrapped around his husband and his two adopted boys, eyes frozen to the omen on the horizon. A few buildings away, the wings of Dorster the blacksmith were protectively sheltering his own son.

"What does it mean, Dad?" Alfonzo asked.

The old, scarred bird looked down just long enough to peck affectionately at his boy's headfeathers. "I hate saying 'I don't know', kid, but I don't. And neither does anyone else. There's gonna be rumors for days, mark my words. But until we know anything for sure, don't let yourself get too scared. It's okay not to know yet."

As a fledgling scientist, Alfonzo nodded in complete agreement.

On the street below, a gunsmith made of gleaming brass gears rushed into his shop and started checking inventory. Red Velvet knew from experience that, in times of crisis, citizens always felt a little safer with their hand around a weapon.

***

In the thick of Teratoma, a gleaming red piloted mech was being knocked back and forth by a snarling living carpet of blood-maddened Tunnelroars. Within the cockpit, Maxo Mattik stopped punching them to death so he could lift up his targeting helmet and gawk. The canary-yellow cel-shaded cat shouted over his shoulder, "WHOA!! Mini, did you SEE that!? That was radical!!"

Mini Maul, his constant cybernetic companion, was seated in the backpack turret. She checked her video monitor, rewound a bit, scrutinized, and nodded. She replied in her customary robotic monotone, "Agreed, sir. Might even qualify as 'totally tubular'."

A tunnelroar leapt up and suctioned itself to the windshield like a stick-on Garfield. Maxo raised the Drag-Starr's arm to squish it between thumb and forefinger. Its blood was electric blue. The windshield wipers took care of it so he could keep bugging his eyes out at the mountain. "Wowww! All that smoke! Betcha it's something exciting happening up there. Adventure! Or a barbecue!"

The hot-pink otterbot felt the need, yet again, to reign in her fellow bounty hunter's enthusiasm. "Odds are it's as likely to be something bad and dangerous."

Max squirmed. "Yeah, well, but... Could be adventure too."

"I have insufficient data to be certain either way," she said. "In the meantime, the targets are climbing up our legs. Soon their fur will clog the intakes."

"Ooh, right." Maxo slammed the Spin Dry lever and the mech whirred at the waist like a top. A dozen 'roars got a free trip to the atmosphere. Then Maxo worked the foot pedals to make the Drag-Starr leap twenty feet in the air, swooping back down in a bug-gooshing stomp. A brief bit of breakdancing flung the gunk off the roboboots. Then he fired up the laser sword. "I'm feelin' like pizza for dinner tonight, Mini. Howzat sound?"

"What an unbelievable surprise, sir."

***

Not far away on a densely green hilltop, a scout for the Kasheesties sat upon a six-legged cattacuda.

Through the slit in his rusted clamshell helmet, the lithe warrior spied the flash on Anasarca. He held up his binoculars and silently observed.

The cattacuda whined, twitched, and salivated. Its pelt showed many bare patches.

The scout felt a hunch that the beast was thinking of escape. It applied another dose of voltage via the paincage bolted around its head.

The construct yowled. Then it ceased all movement, bearing its master like an unliving piece of furniture.

The scout put away his binoculars and resumed sentry duty. Whatever had happened, it was far away. And not an intruder. So it was of no concern.

***

Tinder Fingers went right on about his business setting empty houses on fire. Most other constructs paid little notice either. Doctor Dacryphilia's operation was far enough below the surface that only a fraction of his captive workers felt the rumble. Though, of the small number who did, a few shook off the fog of monotony long enough to run away from their toil and attempt escape. The Doctor screamed and cried.

***

In Stoma, the tiny village's defense system turned all their caged eyeballs in the same direction. Weary people raised their heads, but not many spoke of what they were seeing. Billawhi did though.

For the first time in her long afterlife, she had ventured beyond her home in search of her foolish wayward foster child. She made it all the way to the small trading town. The journey was so easy, it made her feel embarrassed for all her decades of staying put. Though she wasn't about to admit it. Nor would she confess her grateful relief at finally showering, and having Stoma's lone physician scrape off most of the mushrooms from her body.

She squinted into the distance. "That's my Piffle up there, I'll bet. Making trouble as usual."

***

At the very beginning of the world, young raccoon Louise had no idea where she was. She had been in the car, on the freeway. The wind was loud. A tanker truck ahead of them tipped sideways. Then there were dreamy, fading images of a hospital. Now she was here in a forest full of frightening sounds. She thought there might be monsters in the forest. Her back was against a tree with unfamiliar bark, and she'd tried to conceal herself in a pile of card-suit-shaped leaves. She wanted her mom and dad. She wanted to go home.

But then a sparkle caught her eye. Far in the distance, there was a mountain. Someone on top of it had heard her distress and shone a bright flashlight for her to see. Now she knew where to go.

Grateful to whoever it was, Louise steeled her courage, picked up a stick to hit monsters with, and headed towards the direction of the light. If she was lucky, and brave, she would reach Stoma within the hour.

Afterwards, she might decide to travel farther.

***

From Rhinolith, the flash was bright enough to be blinding. Luxy had been clipping his toeclaws. He popped up, shielding his eyes and blinking the greenish afterimages away. A smile of unbounded joy tapdanced across his face.

"Gracias, Toby. I was getting tired of waiting."

He turned and giggled at the awestruck expressions of his fellow expeditioners. "Whassamatter, guys? Ain't you never seen a mountain asplode before?"

Rippingbean clutched Woofingbutter's lapels. "Zhuh mouffse puwwed it awff!! Juhhzt az pwohmisshed!!"

The gorilla patted his partner's shoulder fondly. "We shall soon have to fight. Are we ready?"

The fox straightened his posture and smiled. "Iht wuwld be ah embuhwwessmenght ef weh weww nogt."

Tía Lopez understood that the expanding dust cloud was a countdown timer. While everyone else rubbernecked, she doubled her speed, measuring out ingredients by experience alone and tossing them into her pot. They had enough potion already, but there was no harm in having more.

Mrs. Xenoiko was used to the tugs on her garments that signaled her miniature husband was climbing up her body like a ladder. The marmoset perched himself on her shoulder and lovingly kissed between her ears. "This'll be easy, muffin. Barely a bother," he whispered to her.

She reached up her tiger paw to cradle him. It nearly covered his entire back. "I do not think so, my sweet darling. But sometimes it is pleasant to be lied to."

He grinned and gave her a wink. "You might be surprised. I used to fight demons fer a living, if you recall."

She was always grateful for the gifts of laughter he gave her.

Janie Jing stood with wide eyes and a twitching bunny nose. She clutched at her necklace. "When it begins, Ike," she said to the hyena standing next to her, "can I have your word you'll leave me to my business and not waste your silly time antagonizing me?"

He heard the quaver in her voice. They were all so old, and it had been a lifetime since they'd left their tricks on the shelf to gather dust. "Not a chance," he told her. "The madder you get, the better the show you put on."

She blushed.

Glancing down at Rhinolith below, Luxy snaked his way around the people and gear on Red's carpeted back, over to where Waxacada and Driuwej were continuing their shared game. "So, ya rusty coupla beard-buckets. How many'd you get?"

Two eyebrows slowly raised in a simultaneous withering expression of 'Have some faith in us, will you?'

Cracked lips that had not passed forth words in decades slowly parted. "Nearly all," said Driuwej.

Luxy clapped his paws. "That's ducky. Great work, fellas. Try not to fall asleep when the fun starts." He gave them a trolling grin and a wave, then scooted off.

In unison, the two old wizards rolled their eyes. Luxy was at least as old as either of them, but refused to act like it. Ah well. No time to waste on the immature. Wrinkled fingers moved towards the two handheld games' power buttons and switched them to off.

Moving like a glacier, Waxacada smiled impishly. "I would have won."

A barely-perceptible shake of the head from Driuwej. "I could stall you till the end of time."

A nod, conceding that the statement may have had merit. "Do you think we'll die this time?"

A moment of consideration. "I certainly hope so. It will end this cramp in my leg."

Waxacada gave his longtime friend a look that said, 'that's what you get for sitting in one place for several centuries.'

Down below, in the wide, bare space where she had spent days and nights killing weeds, Vienna Tusk clutched her paws to her muzzle to keep from screaming in overwhelmed joy. At the moment of explosion, Scaphis had flinched. Her grip had loosened. The two ancient ones had prepared for this moment. Four days ago, one thousand, two-hundred and thirteen spectral hands had been willed into existence above the heads of every single captured citizen in Rhinolith. Then, when the mountain shuddered and the plastic recoiled, they all swooped down in precise harmony. All throughout the waiting, Vienna and the others had walked through Rhinolith, telling the Bargeld what had happened and letting them know what would be needed from them when the time of their freedom came. Now the marten watched as over a thousand disoriented neighbors and kin came floating through the sky, borne by translucent hands of pure thought. They were set down with the utmost care in the barren field, each one in front of a shiny new weapon from Rippingbean and Woofingbutter's Survival Emporium. The spectral hands patted the rescued Bargeld's heads gently, then dispersed.

Vienna scrambled through the dazed, muttering crowd, knocking people to the ground in her haste. If Chief Ghummin himself had been in her way, he would have gone down. Finally, she spotted her husband and sons. The wizards had been thoughtful enough to group them together. And though the trio was still reeling from their month-long confinement, Vienna tackled them in a rib-crushing hug. She poured out her love as tears poured down her face. Never had any sound been sweeter than Cale and Ronnie crying out in desperate happiness, "Mommy!!"

Luxy noticed this unfolding scene from his perch high above. He'd given the marten a pretty hard time, and murdered her quite a bunch, but his smile now was genuine. He internally debated giving her two seconds of kurushimeru, just to let her know he was there. Nah. It'd be funny, but she'd earned her happy ending.

The raccoon knelt for a moment to give Red a skritch. "Yeah, Fido, I know you've been restless. Just a little while longer, then you'll get to play with your new chewtoy."

The big red rustbeast murbled anxiously.

Luxy felt a brief worry. He couldn't resist looking over the construct's side to make absolutely certain.

Just as ordered, on the side of Red that faced the Bargeld, Mr. Xenoiko had painted in immense white letters:

	NOT HIM
	HE'S WITH US

Luxy nodded, satisfied. He'd had the idea just hours ago, after coming to the unpleasant realization that folks from Rhinolith were jumpy by nature, and seeing a sixty-foot nightmare on rollerskates a few yards away might make them behave irrationally.

It was time for his own preparations. The raccoon shivered in bliss as he let his hands be drawn to the twin chromium-plated guns at his side. His favorite gals. His fingers slipped around their grips like honking the sweet, firm tits of Aphrodite herself. He chittered. He heard the pleasant soft 'click' of the needles emerging. Luxy was a firm believer in rewarding hard work, and he'd paid Red Velvet a fortune for them. The mechanism pierced the ulnar artery of each of his wrists with barely any pain. Like Zinc's wrenches, the guns were bloodpowered. So long as Luxy Bleeder's heart pumped red, he was never out of ammunition.

He gave each pistol an obscene kiss, right on the words tattooed on their barrels: GOOD and TIME. "Time to live up to your name, babies," he cooed to them. Then he raised his arms above his head and pulled both triggers.

This startled everyone.

"Good! Your attention's on me, where it always belongs."

Luxy beheld his army, beaming with pride. He stepped right to the edge of Red's back. "Hi, Bargeld!" he shouted down at them. "I hope you remember what we drilled into your heads for the past few days! Now, I know you're all discombobulated, and probably plenty miffed at being grounded for so long. But hold down your bile for just a squidge. We gotta give Toby time to do his thing and rile her up." He glanced at Woofingbutter. "Your watch?"

The gorilla clanked closer in his new combat exoskeleton. "Yes, Mr. Bleeder. I was not so agog that it slipped my attention. Just after the eruption, I set it for exactly eight minutes." He held up a gorgeous golden pocketwatch, merrily ticking down the seconds.

Luxy gave him a crisp nod. "Good show, old chap. Simply smashing." He called out again to the masses below. "Give yourselves a moment to recover! I need you sharp and deadly! No sleepyheads! Pinch yourself. Do some stretches. Tug your prick. Whatever it takes!"

He pointed to the gorilla beside him. "When this nice man's pretty watch goes 'ding', we are going to enter the fight of our lives. Nothing you will ever do will be as cool as this. Or as important. Take that rage you've felt at being paralyzed, beaten in your own city walls, and unleash it on my signal. Give it your everything. We will too."

A vast armada of pure, coiled wrath, the Bargeld nodded and grunted their willingness.

Luxy picked at his teeth. "There's this thing I like to say to my audience alla time: 'Against the night, we are united.' Now, you guys might not be Ectopians. But we all dream under the same dark sky, so that's good enough for me." He thrust a fist skyward. "AGAINST THE NIGHT, WE ARE WHAT?"

"UNITED!" the Bargeld shouted.

"Naw, c'mon, you gotta punish my eardrums! Again! AGAINST THE NIGHT...?"

"WE ARE UNITED!!"

He raised his arms to conduct them like an orchestra. "One more time my fellow Phobiopolans! Because three is traditional! Whole thing now!"

The voices in solidarity were a swelling tempest. "AGAINST THE NIGHT, WE ARE UNITED!!!"

Just what he wanted to hear. "Fuckin' A. And remember, my friends, I am not asking the impossible of you. Just what you are already the best at. We do not have to be surgeons here today. Your aim doesn't have to be William Tell's. LOOK at her, for chrissakes! She's as big as Ike's mom!!"

The hyena facepalmed.

Luxy stood up to his full height, calling upon all his years of leadership and persuasion. "But still, this will not be easy work. Fire everything you've got! Everything! Every bullet in your guns and every ounce of your sweat. Shoot and stab and bash and scream and let her know your fury!! Let her feel everything you've felt! Let her regret the lives she stole in your city! And Papilloma! And Cachexy! And all the others she will take if we don't put a stop to her today!!"

A bellow from the crowd. They shook their provided weapons in the air. A forest of mayhem.

Luxy made each and every one of them feel like he was speaking to them directly. "I don't have much more time for speeches. Get yourself ready, however you have to. Today we're standing at the ocean and pushing back the tide. Show me why the Bargeld has a reputation as the biggest, baddest bastards in all the world. Show her. Make legends happen today."

Another cheer, as if from the halls of Valhalla itself.

That frisky smile again. "And have fun," he told them. "Obviously. There's no better reason to be alive."

***

At the epicenter of the explosion, underneath the mountain, one of the catatonic patients in the campsite's three beds grunted and rolled over in his sleep.

***

Logdorbhok did nothing. This was very good for everyone.

-***-

Chapter One Hundred

Smoke surrounded him. Toby was flat on his stomach, coughing hard enough to hurt his ribs. He felt like Scaphis had already started stomping him. Holy shit did he hurt. Echoes of pain sometimes lingered after other deaths, but he guessed with this one, even Phobiopolis' screwy physics knew there was no damn way anyone should have survived that.

Feeling like he was climbing the mountain again, Toby's fingers clutched grey pebbles. He forced his throbbing body to lift its battered head and look around. His eyes burned. He couldn't see anything but dust.

Then there was a shape. Dark and lean. Toby felt fear for an instant, but then smiled. 'Of course he'd get here this fast. George is the best.'

An ash-speckled skull leaned down as close as it could to the mouse's ear and whispered. "From her ongoing spasms, I believe Dysphoria is attempting to take advantage of Madam Tarrare's distraction and regain control. We cannot hope to be lucky enough it will win."

Toby nodded, though it was more like letting his head flop limply forward.

Even in such a tense moment, George could not keep the eager giddiness out of his voice. "Is it time?"

Toby spat out a gob of black, sooty saliva. "You betcha," he creaked.

George wriggled in anticipation as his master reached into his vest. Toby felt around to make sure they were still there, then extracted two silver vials of L'roon's potion.

The wings were only ever a secondary effect.

George picked one up in his teeth. Toby clutched the other.

"Bottoms up," the mouse croaked. He and George bit down simultaneously.

***

From out of the gloaming came an unspeakable shape. A tower of moving flesh. Like the neck of some legendary sea serpent, armed with uncountable spines and feelers. She could not finely control these many arms, but she could flail sections of them at a time by muscle-thinking. The way a juggler or a jogger achieves an unconscious groove. Certainly enough to swat away the smoke.

She'd been caught off guard, she could admit to that. She'd lost a lot of her captives. Though less than half, she estimated. As if someone had startled her into dropping a handful of loose change, but she'd swept her hand down to catch most of the coins before they hit the sidewalk. A feat deserving of applause, she felt. Especially after getting Dysphoria to shut up and sit down. That had caused agony and wasted time. 

Scaphis searched, seething. Because if she'd survived, he had too.

"TOBY, YOU LITTLE SHIT!!!" she bellowed.

Her voice echoed in the emptiness that just moments ago had been her home. She flailed at the ash till she could see her surroundings. Grim.

He'd fucked up everything. Nothing was left but a bunch of rocks and a mile-high ring of powdered debris. The mountaintop had become a wide, shallow bowl of cadaverous grey. The explosion had wounded the ground with deep fissures and cracks. Jagged juts rose up like breaching whales. Whether intentional or not, Toby had forged the perfect venue for a vicious, protracted beatdown.

Goddamn him. She was livid about losing her tower, but also keeping things in perspective. This was a speedbump. Nothing more. He had failed to accomplish anything of substance. He had only succeeded in pissing her off.

"GET OUT HERE SO I CAN TEAR YOUR BALLS OFF!!!"

"Hi there."

She twitched towards the voice. Swishing pseudopods parted the clouds to reveal a tiny white rodent, standing alone and unarmed.

He squinted against the breeze, looking towards her and not showing an ounce of fear. He seemed tired, actually. Almost bored.

Scaphis' current form rose forty feet above him, an amorphous living skyscraper. Her plethora of limbs curled in fury. Her facial void gazed down upon him like the nothingness within the Neculaunis. She'd decorated the bulb of her head with the speakers from her castle. They were part of her now, enough to be dumbfounded easily. The sunken squares in her pinkish flesh looked nauseatingly like a crop of ingrown blackheads.

They broadcast her quite clearly. "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW LONG IT'S GONNA TAKE ME TO BUILD ALL THAT STUFF BACK UP!?" She saw his fur blow back from the sheer force of her volume.

He wobbled on his feet a bit, but there was no change in his expression. Toby held up his hands and peered at them. "I can't seem to get my one eye to focus right," he muttered in mild annoyance.

"HOW ABOUT I RIP THEM OUT AND MAKE YOU EAT THEM THROUGH YOUR COLON!?"

He glanced up at her, as if taking note of some minor distraction. "You should surrender," he suggested.

The little pest made no move to escape, or even dodge, when she surged out a bullwhip arm and ensnared him. Snatching him up, she held him inches away from her face and shook him hard. "GHHHRRRRRGH!!!"

His head whipped back and forth but didn't snap. When his vision stopped swirling, he got a good look into her refrigerator-sized void, right down her plastic throat. It looked like a pool drain. He blinked his eyes. "Hey, I think that fixed it. Thanks."

"HA HA! MISTER FUCKING SMARTASS! WHAT NOW!?" She gave him another shake. "GONNA MESS YOUR PANTS AGAIN?"

His ears flopped back and forth. He wished his hands were free so he could rub his neck. "Worked the first time, didn't it?"

She would punish him for his smug, infuriating attitude. Force him to fear her. She clenched her fist tighter, feeling his arms jam up against his ribcage. His feet and tail twitched.

She leaned in closer, so his entire body was in the shadow of her mouth. So she could whisper and be certain he was hearing every word. "You failed. Does that penetrate? The opposite of success. I don't know how you blew everything up, but all you did was take down a building. Big fucking deal. Guess who's still here? Me. And I'm going to show you pain you could never even dream of. You called ME stupid!?" Her tone began to rise, until she could see him flinch with every word. "You're just one squeaking speck against the power of a goddess! I am LEGION! I am the one-man-army! I am power incarnate!! You are ALONE!!!"

He chuckled at that.

Screeching in frustration, she whipped him back and forth like a Polaroid.

His vision spun. He tasted bile. His nose began to bleed.

"YOU FUCKING RETARD!!!" Her scream had enough force to press his skin against his skull. "YOU LOST!!! GET IT THROUGH YOUR HEAD!!! YOU PLAYED A REAL CLEVER PRACTICAL JOKE, BUT IT GOT YOU ABSOLUTELY ONE-HUNDRED-AND-ONE-PERCENT NOTHING!!! I'LL RECAPTURE EVERYONE WHO SLIPPED THROUGH MY FINGERS! I'LL REMAKE MY TOWER! BIGGER AND BETTER! YOU CAME AT ME WITH A BOMB!? THIS IS THE AFTERLIFE, DUMBASS!!! DID YOU REALLY THINK YOU COULD KILL ME!?"

Toby was a battered wad of cotton in the clamp of her fist. Barely able to open his eyes, barely able to loll his head towards her. He spat up blood enough to articulate clearly.

"No," he said, and glanced slightly to his right. "Her."

Scaphis felt a tap on her shoulder.

She turned and caught only a brief glimpse of two floor lamp eyes and a multitude of kitchenware teeth.

Then a gargantuan fist made of two-by-fours plowed into her jaw with the force of a train derailment. Little square speakers scattered everywhere.

"YOU STOLE MY BODY."

Another punch, this time from the left. Scaphis' void deformed to a figure-eight shape.

"YOU STOLE MY HUSBAND."

A meteor shower of iron girders, fence posts, golf clubs, castle stones, floorboards, furniture, doors, and cutlery all descended, striking her in innumerable places. Her howl was distorted by the malfunctions in her few remaining speakers.

"I'M TAKING IT ALL BACK, SCAPHIS! EVERYTHING!! AND THEN I'M GONNA KICK YOUR ROTTEN BUTT TO PLUTO!"

Scaphis was stunned for a moment, then rolled her form back up vertically and cradled her throbbing cheek. "Yippeeee, it's Becky. Hi, Becky. What a pleasure it is to have to deal with you again."

The tower of flesh was facing a living whirlwind. Long ago, Scaphis had trapped Rebecca Polidori's consciousness in the walls of the home she had built with Aldridge. Just recently, she'd remolded the wizard's wife into a new citadel. The house and castle had both been demolished to repurpose their pieces into the new design. Now Becca's soul inhabited all of it. Every timber, every brick, every crossbar, every nail. Toby's bomb had freed her, just as the mouse had freed her mind from its illusion hours before. Scaphis' curse still kept the coyote's soul trapped, but her training with Aldridge now allowed her to manifest as a swirling stormcloud of living shrapnel. Three hundred storeys of raw material, all at her command.

Keeping her lamp-eyes locked on Scaphis, Rebecca spun, generating enough wind to blast the last of the dust clouds away and flatten her nemesis to the ground. Even then, she saw that the witch wouldn't let go of poor Toby. Scaphis' spite was too bottomless to prioritize defense over vengeance.

Like spaghetti strands encased in Jell-O, Scaphis wobbled herself back up again. She regained her full height and dumbfounded a new crop of speakers. Her void faced directly at Rebecca. "Allright then. Allright. Two-on-one. I'm fine with that." She gave Toby another squeeze. The mouse's eyeballs bulged in their sockets like a stress doll.

"You stop that!!"

A bullet left a burning streak across Scaphis' arm.

The void turned, and snorted in derisive laughter.

Holding rifles and shotguns in all four hands, Piffle descended. Her wings were an iridescent blur. Her ruby eyes blazed. Her mouth was set in a taut line of determination. The intimidation factor was dampened a bit by the pastel WWI aviator's garb she'd changed her safari outfit into. Strawberry bomber jacket. Fluffy collar. Fuchsia leather helmet and goggles. Plus a bunny-ear-pink scarf around her neck that flared in the wind like Junella's.

"You're pathetic," Scaphis said. "You can't even take this seriously."

Piffle's antennae trembled with rage. "You can't stop me from being myself," she spat back. "Let Toby go."

"You're a CLOWN!!" Scaphis roared at her. "Your head's emptier than mine! You're a nuisance, an embarrassment, a hindrance!! I called you a liar when you said you loved me because you're not mature enough to embody the concept! You loved a TOY!! A thing whose hair you could brush! You're a regressive, infant-minded vacuum with a-"

Another bullet tore across her temple.

"AGH!! GODDAMMIT!"

"How about you stop talking to my friend like that?" came a cold, simmering drawl.

Airborne behind Scaphis was a black-winged angel, cutlass at her hip. Smoke rose from her six-shooter's barrel. Her record-label eyes looked like two burning sunsets.

The top of Scaphis' void flexed downwards in a scowl. "Of course. Here comes Miss Thinks-She's-Hot-Shit. Miss Temper Tantrum. Miss-"

Without a single twitch of her expression, Junella aimed a bullet dead-center down her foe's plastic throat.

Scaphis began gagging, doubling over and sending half-a-dozen pseudopods down her neck-hole to fish it out. Bullets get pretty hot when they're fired. Plus, they spin. Not a very pleasant thing to choke on.

Glistening vinyl wings held her steady in the sky with an ocean of contempt in her gaze. "Get it right, sugarlips. The name is Junella Fucking Brox." She let her finger-needles play her grooves to sing, purely for the sake of style. Because a good overture deserves an aria.

"Hatred is my liquor. Killing is my sport. And rage... is my religion."

Scaphis feigned distress a moment longer, then suddenly shot two tentacles towards the skunk and crushed her new wings in their grasp, intending to rip them straight off. "MINE TOO."

Junella saw the attack coming and had just enough time to hit the eject button before the pain began. A voluntary transformation could always be reverted at will. The wings melted off her shoulders with a pleasant tingle, leaving Scaphis with handfuls of nothing important. Junella dropped out from between them. And though she had to contend with quite a fall, she kept her muscles loose and landed with cat's grace. Her blade was unsheathed in a flash.

Scaphis snarled and crumpled the wings like construction paper. She steamrolled forward, towering over the skunk. "Whether a wasp or a grub, you're still an insect."

Junella tried not to let her enemy's size intimidate her. The beige plastic bitch was taller than a convorine reared up on its back tires. She felt a heartbeat's worth of worry. But then a pixyish grin crossed her muzzle. "Why don't you pick on someone your own size?"

The void grinned. "That implies anyone in this world can stand eye-to-eye with me."

'Well if that ain't the most perfect setup ever,' he thought.

THOOOOMMM

Churning up a smaller cloud than Toby's, though still quite respectable, Zinc's paws left prints as big as swimming pools in the mountain soil. His partner had indeed kept ahold of the resizing window. Now his wingspan rivaled a B-17 bomber. Piffle was fluttering beside him like a pet hummingbird. Across his right shoulder was slung a mirror-finish aluminum baseball bat big enough to knock Godzilla's teeth out.

Zinc held a casual hate behind tin eyelids. He chewed bubblegum with a sneer. Atop his head was a metal pompadour just as shiny as his bat. It would have made King drop dead from jealousy.

"Hey," he said. He flicked his head to the side to spit out his gum. Then he slowly raised the bat over his shoulder and pointed it at her, calling his shot like Babe Ruth. "Fuck you."

Scaphis sighed at this display of bravado. "And here's our genius meathead to finish out the guest list. Christalmighty..."

They surrounded her. She swirled her mass in a circle, glaring at all of hem. "None of you knows the mistake you've just made. I will commit atrocities on your hearts and souls that will make you flee to Dysphoria for relief. And I will do it purely for the crime against my dignity you've committed. I have work to do, you assholes! Torturing you's not even going to be fun! You're making me do chores when I'm supposed to be putting my tower back up!"

Junella called out, "Zinc, please tell me I don't sound this lame when I'm trying to intimidate our bounties."

He waggled a wrench in a 'kinda-sorta' gesture.

She chuckled. "Ya dick."

Scaphis dragged her hands down the sides of her void in exasperation. These brainless microns still didn't get it.

Then she realized she was holding a mouse. She held Toby up in front of her void, not sure if he was even still alive. A realization occurred. "You knew they were out! All that time you kept badgering me to give them back was just an act! You sneaky little liar!"

Toby looked pummeled halfway to putty. "Correct," he groaned.

She grew a foot just to stamp it. "My rug! My toilet seat! My favorite footstool! You stole them from me!!"

Ignoring his injuries, he raised his head and looked straight into her abyss. He spoke, and it seemed magnified beyond what should have been possible. "You. Stole. Them. First."

She didn't let go, but she jerked away from him a little.

Toby made no move to escape. She did not have him trapped; the reverse was true. "Scaphis, you keep talking and talking. I'm giving you one last chance to listen. I want Aldridge, and I want the wand. And my friends want to kick your ass. Give up. Right now."

Absolutely outraged, she jerked him back into screaming-his-ears-off range. But something stalled the insults that were about to come spewing from her mouth. Toby was still staring at her. It wasn't just the sheer amount of will in his gaze. His eyes were glowing.

The pinks turned red and the whites turned yellow. Like his head was a Jack-O-Lantern with a candle inside.

"...What?"

Toby's eyes began to boil. Runny streams of hissing fluid trickled out from the bottoms of his sockets. Steam began to rise through his eyelids.

She had not paralyzed him yet. Angry as she was, there was nothing so satisfying as juicy verbal banter with someone you hated. But this was straight-up creeping her out. She willed him to be motionless.

It didn't stop his eyes from melting though. Intraocular fluid dripped out from his pupils after the corneas slid off. What remained of the orbs was fire-yellow, and quickly turning to soup. Scaphis saw something behind them. A beam like a car's headlights.

Though Toby's skin was frozen, the bone underneath stretched his face into a smile.

"Greetings, Madame Tarrare," came George's voice from Toby's throat. "I will enjoy harming you immensely."

Before she could react, Toby's jaw snapped open like a panzer hatch.

She received a roaring flamethrower shower at point blank range.

Scaphis screeched in pain and reflexively flung the burning mousething away. She slapped at the flames engulfing her head. Her vinyl bubbled and blackened. She screamed loud enough to make several speakers bulge and burst like popcorn.

Toby sailed backwards, though his gaze remained on Scaphis throughout his arc. Rending his vest, black ribs plunged from his torso. Some curled inward to become a breastplate of armor. Others grew and grew, proportionate to spider legs, pointed hooves at each tip. These four new appendages stopped Toby's fall with a landing that rivaled Junella's for agility.

The mouse folded his arms and let the nightmare walk him forward. George had become his skeleton. Two minds together in one merged body. Scaphis had no power over them now. If she paralyzed one, the other could switch over to control movement. The skin around Toby's eyes had baked to a crisp, revealing empty ashen sockets with a construct's remorseless glow at their center.

"You had every chance to avoid this," they said.

Brown, crackling burns framed the edges of Scaphis' void. Her face-flanges were a vibrating blur. "I WILL KILL ALL OF YOU!!!" she vowed. "I WILL RAPE YOUR SOULS!!!" Her liquid mass flooded towards Toby, arms outstretched to catch and tear.

His gaze did not falter. He flashed his hand into a hammer and put his bracers up to block.

But it was a feint. Scaphis swerved suddenly and made a roaring detour for Zinc, calculating him as the weakest link in the chain.

Not that he minded. As Junella had rightly pointed out, gripping the bat with his wrenches was awkward. But one good whack would dent Scaphis' head inside out. He flicked a brief wink at Piffle as he watched the vinyl charge: 'Check this out, babycakes.'

He raised the aluminum high, willing a werewolf's strength into his blow. When Scaphis shrieked, he swung.

Massive hands flowed into existence and caught it.

"FUCKING TOYS," Scaphis growled.

Zinc planted a foot behind him for leverage to yank his bat back, hoping he'd have time for another try, but her grip was unbreakable. He pulled so hard he could hear the hinges of his wrenches squeal.

The corners of her void turned up in a witch's smile.

Zinc's eyes went wide in disbelief when his bat turned white and began to crumble like a giant sugar cube. Piffle gasped. Scaphis cackled. Zinc's mighty slugger never got a chance to fulfill its destiny, because in seconds it was rendered back into iridescent mineral chunks.

***

We rewind.

Luxy Bleeder is lounging on his king size bed upon Red's back, two days previous. A dreadful thought occurs to him. "Did I forget to tell the kid she can unbind imaginite?"

He rustled through his memories. It was how she'd turned Aldridge's amphitheater into that gross gothy tower. And why he'd been able to make something much nicer out of it, since it still retained a bit of flux from her final tantrum.

The raccoon shrugged. "Welp. Spilled milk. He'll find out anyway."

***

Zinc really liked that bat. But he didn't let his heart break as he watched it dissolve. Teeth bared, he grunted like a bear and clamped down hard on whatever flaps of Scaphis were closest. He reared back and fired himself forward in a mighty headbutt.

She winced at the grinding strength in his wrench-jaws. Though his head didn't bother her much, not even with its new chrome hairdo. With a twitch of her will, she felt his muscles lock.

Zinc had never been a Boy Scout, but he came prepared anyway. The pompadour wasn't just for show. Its hidden mechanism was on a spring, automatic-like. A seam appeared along the center of his chromedome and out popped a spinning buzzsaw.

Scaphis said a bunch of swear words as it dug into her flesh, warping her void, sucking in the fringe and getting it caught around the axle. She tried to shake Zinc off, but he had her in a vice grip that her own paralysis added to. Desperate, she grew a long, thin tentacle to wrap around his throat and squeeze.

Piffle was hovering just a few feet away and holding four shotguns. This situation was exactly her mission to prevent. There had been a worry in her mind at first, at whether she was too tenderhearted to blast away her friends. But she'd been through that once already, during the convorine fight. It was time to get serious. So her only hesitation was in trying to figure out the best place to shoot a fifty-foot-tall furson for a painless mercy kill. Luckily, Scaphis was choking Zinc so hard his carotid artery practically begged to be a target.

BA-BLAMM

Scaphis felt her grip collapse as the mutt stopped being in it. He popped into a new self a few yards away, stumbling on truck-sized feet to keep his balance. Once he had it, he blew a quick kiss to Piffle, then cast a salivating, feral grin at Scaphis. He gnashed his wrenches like lobster claws. "Strike one." 

She entwined dozens of tentacles on either side of her core, forming them into sledgehammers. "I don't play kid's games!" She rushed at him.

Pain stopped her in her tracks. Two bright lights of unimaginable pinpoint agony. Scaphis swirled around.

From her backpack, Junella had extended a pair of long metal wands. Like the aerial on an RC car. The tip at each end glowed with the colors of an iron forge. "Stings, don't it?"

Scaphis didn't waste time with snappy comebacks. She stampeded herself towards the skunk, raising the dense-packed slabs of her hammer-hands.

Junella kept her stance until just the right moment to dodge. Rocks exploded in a corona where Scaphis' attack fell, missing the tip of her tail by inches. Junella ducked under the blow, raised her wands, and carved two sizzling, melting lines into Scaphis' arm.

Shrieks of pain.

Junella kept running. She leapt and somersaulted to avoid Scaphis collapsing on top of her like a snowstorm. The wands were connected to the backpack by cables that carried the power, so she was free to drop one, reach back, fill her hand with gun, and fire off all six shots.

"I'M GONNA SQUEEZE YOUR INTESTINES OUT OF EVERY HOLE YOU HAVE, JUNELLA!"

The skunk sped for cover, not slowing down as she tossed back, "Bitch, I will make you past tense!"

A humongous plastic hand rose out of Scaphis' back to chase and crush the skunk, but it only caught a palmful of fire.

"No," Toby said simply. He placed himself to let Junella skitter away, then blasted another twinned jet of flame from his eye sockets.

Before Scaphis could even regain her composure for a counterattack, a wall of iron slammed down in front of the mouse, embedding itself deep in the rock.

"Gotcha covered, Toby!" Becca said brightly.

The mouse was too focused to smile, but he gave her a nod of appreciation. They'd talked about this in Scaphis' fireplace. Becca was not well-versed in fighting, but she did know a good amount of magic. She was fine with mostly playing defense while the others did damage.

Scaphis' scorched hand balled itself into a fist and threw a punch at Becky's wall. It gave it a good rattle.

Becca curled the girders inward like piercing talons.

"GODFUCKINGDAMMIT!!!" Scaphis raged.

She had no mouth to display it, but Becca smirked.

Toby ran over to Junella, hearing the sounds behind him of Piffle flying over in a strafing run. "Madam Brox, are you uninjured?"

The skunk whirled around in a double-take. "I know you said your magic juice could do that, but it's still freaky-deaky." She gawked at the eyelights in Toby's sockets. "Comfy in there, George?"

"It is oddly confining, being surrounded by flesh," he admitted. The tone changed in an instant from rich bass to a high flutter. "Glad to see you guys got through the explosion okay," Toby said. He deduced they'd survived from the fact they hadn't lost their wings.

"Thanks. Bit of a rumble, yeah." Junella slipped the backpack off her shoulders. "YO! PIFFLE!" she called to the sky.

Zinc was now wildly grabbing and punching chunks of Scaphis while Becca floated around to block paralysis attempts. Figuring those two had things covered for the moment, Piffle shot across the battlefield to hover above the skunk and mouse. "Pilot to ground, over!"

"Catch." Junella flung the backpack upwards.

Piffle swooped and got her arms underneath it. "Oof!" It was pretty bulky. "I can't wear this and fly at the same time!"

"Don't need you to," Junella said. "Pretty sure it's from imaginite. Remember Zinc's bat? I don't want her doing that to this. Now, throw it back down to me and Toby at the same time."

Piffle's antennae shot up. "Wh-wh-what!?"

"Just DO IT, YOU AIRHEAD!!" Junella stormed.

Piffle was so startled she let the backpack tumble out of her grip, falling both to the left and the right. The mouse and skunk each dove to catch one.

Junella grinned widely and slipped hers on. "Perfect! No hard feelin's, Piff! I love ya!" Dumbfounded items were made from pure will: a different material than imaginite. Now there was a 50/50 chance she was wearing one Scaphis couldn't crumble.

Piffle picked up on this and chuckled at the ingenuity. "You are just a big ol' bag of tricks, arencha?"

"Yes I am. Go shoot Scaphis."

Piffle saluted and buzzed back to the fray.

Junella tapped Toby's arm. "Keep the other pack safe. I might need it."

"No problem. I've already got something similar," he said, and ignited his ears. Little flames danced on the tips like birthday candles.

"Neat," said Junella.

They swiftly clasped paws together, then scattered in opposite directions to get back to the task at hand.

Zinc was a one-mutt demolition crew. Tail frizzed up and yowling, he whirled his wrenches like helicopter rotors, mashing Scaphis like clay wherever he hit. He was loving this. The 'goosh' of his wrenches impacting her plastic flesh was sublimely satisfying. Scaphis got some good hits in too, and had been able to paralyze him a couple times. But he had a living suit of armor protecting him. Becca was great at swooshing pieces of herself in to break the connection, then giving their foe a good bash with whatever-it-was.

Scaphis grew four whip-tendrils out of her head, spearing them through the air in an attempt to knock out Zinc's eyes.

Rebecca swung a wall of fiberglass insulation in the way, tangling up the tendrils in scratches.

The void growled. "What a big man you are, Zinc. Having a girl take hits for you."

He simply chuckled. "I am a big man." He stomped his foot on the ground, causing a miniature earthquake.

"You're nothing but a lucky idiot!!" she yelled, swatting away flying rebar like a bee swarm. "You coast through everything with your puppydog grin and your 'everything's fine' attitude! You're a living caricature of a dopey henchman! You're brute strength and no strategy!"

To her annoyance, he shot back the exact grin she'd just insulted. "Fair 'nuff. But that's what Juney's for. And Toby. I don't mind not being the brains." He faked a right jab, then swung in underneath with a left uppercut that nearly turned her void inside-out. "I'm the muscle."

Furious, Scaphis made her arm a corkscrew and surged it towards his unguarded belly.

Becca intercepted with a shield of girders, like a nun whacking a wrist with a ruler. "Thanks for all this iron you put in me, Scrappy. It's swell stuff!"

Scaphis fumed. She had actually managed to forget that goddamn nickname. "Fuck off and die, Becky."

"Nah, nah, you're saying it wrong," Zinc corrected. "It's 'Go take a flying fuck at the moon'. That one's my favorite."

"I'm being assaulted by KIDS!!" Scaphis shouted. "TODDLERS!!!"

Zinc cracked his neck. "You want us to get serious? Okay. How 'bout I drop my balls then?"

THUNK THUNK

"Oh shit." Scaphis had forgotten about the doorknockers.

Spiked metal spheres deployed from his backflesh. Snakes of chain followed after. The windows inset on his shoulder mounts filled with red. Zinc let out a train boiler roar, then plumes of burnt blood gushed out of his shoulders. He plunged his wrenches into the dirt for maximum leverage and engaged the motors. Rebecca's materials leapt out of the way as twin flails went soaring into the sky in a glorious overhand arc.

Scaphis tried to dodge. But that's the problem when you're a world-spanning puddle: it's kind of impossible. The wrecking balls impacted with the density of colliding planets. Her mind went pure white. She could not consciously defend, but instinctively grew and flailed random limbs, trying to knock her attackers away.

To add insult to injury, here came a singing pink streak through the sky. Piffle pulled the triggers of two Kalashnikovs, decorated in matching bows. She peppered the plastic carpet below with smoky black dots.

Scaphis was nearly blinded from pain, but she concentrated enough to send one rigid lance of herself up at the buzzing annoyance. Direct hit. It shot through Piffle's hip and impaled right through her ribcage.

Piffle saw her own blood flying in a pretty arc. 'Wowee, that hurt!'

Thankfully, she also saw a massive glass windowpane coming to meet her. Like a hot knife through butter, her head went soaring.

Scaphis was left with a lump of dead hamsterfly stuck to her lance, while a new body sprouted from the airborne noggin.

Piffle was befuddled for a moment, then caught the wind with her wings and righted herself. "Thanks, Rebecca!" she shouted. She looked down to see she'd created four new guns without even trying. "Say... think you can handle one of these?"

Two clouds of silverware shaped into hands to accept them. "I'll try! I won a pink rhino once at the BB gun range in Luxyland!"

Junella was down below, scampering between cover and keeping to the shadows. She was fine with the others being flashy and cracking jokes. She wanted to be an unseen nuisance. Jabbing with her wands, choosing her strikes carefully and hitting every time. Never in the same spot twice. It was lovely seeing Scaphis' flesh recoil like whale blubber wherever she stuck the burning tip. She even let herself get cocky enough to sign a capital 'J' once, like Zorro.

Here came another blind, hunting tentacle. She dipped and rolled into one of the many crevices in the rock, flattening herself inside just as the slab of flab flew overhead. Her tail popped her out again and she was right back to running. 'Nothin' to it.'

Scaphis bellowed as Zinc struck another double-pound. He didn't give her the chance to fight back this time. Like a slave-driver with whips, he reeled in one 'knocker as he cast the other down. He soon discovered that he needed an entirely different rhythm, as opposed to cleaving mall supports or bisecting biteranodons. Scaphis' flesh was gummy, stretchy, swampy. Per Aldridge's spell, nothing could pierce it. It would be very easy to get his spiked balls stuck. Swinging and dragging them was bad. Much better to let them fall out of the sky, POW, then retract back immediately like a yo-yo.

Scaphis was writhing and churning. Her void was sunk deep into her mass, protecting it. She threw random spikes in every direction. Warm blood stained them a few times, but more often than not they'd wham into some chunk of Becky. This was unspeakably irritating. She felt like she was surrounded by stinging blackflies.

She moved her consciousness several yards away from where Zinc was playing the drums, hoping it would lessen the pain. Thankfully, it did. And even better, when she raised her head to take a peek, there was that goddamn mouse.

"All YOUR fault!" she shrieked.

But Scaphis had neglected her speakers. She'd carried them with her head through the mass of her body, floating on the surface. Easy to track. Toby had not been in front of her by chance.

He stood his ground and watched a gnarled, ropy branch of vinyl come shooting towards him. He did not flinch when it ensnared him. Communication with George was instantaneous. He had only to want something and it was done. A fireball briefly enveloped him, torso to tail. Scaphis squealed and jerked away.

Toby swept his arm out in front of him like Moses parting the waters, unleashing a fan of flying hammers. He saw them deeply dent her skin, then bounce off and vanish in the air. He began to walk towards her, keeping his eyes on her void.

Jabbering in mindless outrage, she vomited all manner of hooked and thorny limbs at him.

Hammers took care of all of them.

"She's still not listening, George."

Toby felt the stallion's idea. He approved.

A swell of heat engulfed his arm. Powerful as an oven, but without causing pain. It was actually a pleasant, welcoming warmth. 'So this is what George feels from his own fire,' he thought. 'It's nice.'

When Scaphis tried to swat him again, she was introduced to the concept of molten hammers.

White hot dream-steel flew with the speed of bullets. And where they struck, they didn't bounce away. Sizzling, they sunk into the plastic, melting deep holes downward. Scaphis howled and tried to flow her flesh away from the infernal metal, but they were baking the plastic, encrusting themselves on. She had to grow new hands to dart in and attempt to pry them off.

Toby continued approaching. His posture was straight. His face was a blank, clear pond. He didn't say a word, just kept on holding his right arm up and ready.

She could see the red glow beneath its skin and a blinding spark inside the palmslit. Despite the burning misery in her skin already, she drew upon pure rage and tensed to crush him.

Toby was instantly engulfed in flame. A living torch. He stood within deadly heat and light, unharmed, daring her to try.

He nodded in approval when she abruptly gathered the bulk of herself and scuttled away from him.

But there was nowhere to go to escape. The mutt was still swinging at her like a berserk gorilla. The skunk kept sneaking around, handing out cigarette burns. Whenever she did manage to snare someone, that pink flying clown would zoom by and put a bullet in their heads so they'd respawn elsewhere. And fucking Becky. Not causing much hurt, but definitely the biggest annoyance. There were kibbles and bits of her everywhere, and she was impossible to paralyze. Anything she grabbed wasn't connected to the rest, so at most she could only stop a molecule at a time.

This was intolerable. They had her running like a rabbit. She needed to stop, collect herself, and show them why her name brought terror even after a century in exile. Their successful strikes needed to end, and she needed to stop thinking of herself as one body. She'd been fighting them one-on-one. She had acres of flesh to attack with. She needed to take her own advice, stop dicking around, and get serious.

Feeling Aldridge's wand pulse deep within her stomach, she willed the pain to the back of her mind. She concentrated on the single mental image of an Olympian's arm holding a throwing hammer. Spinning it around their head. Around and around.

Within the pool of Scaphis, fifty-nine new arms grew. Each held a mace, a long haft with a clawed head at the end, packed tightly with as much of her flesh as she could cram into a sphere. She had learned from Zinc: she could do tricks with density too. And while she couldn't hope to wield all these limbs individually (only a construct's mind could accomplish that), she could make every single one of them swing with the exact same motion.

She let out a guffaw of triumph when she felt the mouse and the skunk go flying. One of the mutt's knees shattered. Who needs to aim when you can hit everything on the field at once?

She drew herself towards Zinc's howl. Turned herself to wet concrete and poured over his body from head to toe. He was a giant, but she was an ocean. She would drown him. She could forgive herself for such an embarrassing start. Most of her fighting so far had been ambushes. She was out of practice in hand-to-hand combat, especially in this vinyl body. But she was getting the hang of it. She buried the mutt alive in a thick, squirming mausoleum.

Piffle pulled four triggers again and again, but all it was doing was putting little burnt ripples in Scaphis' skin. Doubt seized her heart. This was her mission! She was failing it! Zinc was covered completely. Nowhere to put a bullet. Rebecca was banging all over Scaphis' mass to no avail.

Then Piffle got an idea. She couldn't remember if she had any left after the catball on the highway, but if she did, they'd be in her pocket. She darted her paw in and pulled out a shiny black percussive. Crackerjack!

She peeled the little sticky bomb. Timing her throw so it'd feel like another rifle burst, Piffle scored a beautiful hit. Then her eyes and antennae darted around, searching for Toby. She zoomed towards him.

Pointing at the bomb, she breathlessly shouted, "You've still got the detonator!!"

Scaphis' back was pockmarked with black smudges, but amongst them was one shiny bomb. Toby's eye caught it. He remembered the car, the loop, the countdown. Did he still have the detonator?

Piffle saw his eyes darting back and forth, thinking furiously.

And then he smiled. "If I do have it somewhere, I'm sure it'll hear me." Toby spoke loud and clear: "Now, please."

The heap of Scaphis enfolding Zinc looked like Satan's fist had suddenly made it a punchbowl. A massive dent appeared in the plastic and the rest of her body rippled. The blast itself couldn't pierce her, but people underestimate how much of an explosion's power comes from the shockwave. Zinc became jelly in an instant.

Everything had gone dark for him a second ago. It'd felt like he'd fallen down an outhouse hole. Then there'd been a split-second of pressure, followed by the sight of stars again. He gulped in a deep breath and didn't even care when he faceplanted into grey dirt.

Rebecca sent down a pair of marble columns to help him up. "Thanks, Mrs. Aldridge," he said woozily.

"GIMME," said Scaphis.

The bomb had hurt, but she wasn't about to let it stop her. Zinc had his back turned. She flung twenty tentacles at him. Becky was only fast enough to block twelve. The others wrapped themselves tight around Zinc's shoulders and pulled with a demon's strength.

He could not even scream at the senses-breaking pain of her tearing his wrenches straight out of his bones.

She did not waste time dangling them in front of his face to taunt him. She snapped her tentacles back and both metal arms went tumbling end-over-end into space. "HA!!! I TOOK THE ONLY THING THAT MADE YOU WORTH A DAMN!!"

Piffle watched Zinc turn around with a look of sorrow and violation creased into his features. She didn't even need to catch up and coup de grâce him, because his cratered shoulders were gushing blood like a firehose. His face turned pale, his eyes rolled up to the whites, and he collapsed.

She beelined towards him. Landing beside his massive head, she thought at first he wasn't fully deceased. His colossal form wasn't moving, but wouldn't it have disappeared by now? She shook his cheek, making his rug-sized tongue wobble. "Zinc!? Zinc!!"

A constellation of junk formed in the sky, making an arrow.

Piffle looked a few yards away and saw a small figure, kneeling with arms bent. She thanked Becca for the heads-up and flew over.

Zinc was small again. Panting from the aftershocks of two deaths in a row. And when he looked down, he didn't see metal. Just scraggly fur over useless skin and bone.

"Zinc! Where're your wrenches!?" Piffle gasped. "They shoulda come back with the rest of you!"

He weakly raised his head to her. "She took 'em. I saw it. They're out in the asteroids now."

The hamsterfly fell to the ground and put her arms around him tight.

Behind them, Scaphis loomed. Closer and closer. Maybe if she was lucky, their tender moment would keep them distracted enough that she could slam her void down over them and chew them both to death. Her curse didn't let her derive any taste or pleasure from food, but at least she'd be able to hear the crunch.

Junella saw what was about to happen. The maces had whacked her pretty far away, but they hadn't broken bones, and she'd been sprinting back to the battle from the moment she touched down. She criss-crossed her wands, shooting sparks. She'd carve her whole name in cursive for what Scaphis had done to her partner.

Piffle saw the massive shadow engulf her from behind. And even though she would have had just enough time to tackle Zinc out of the way, she didn't need to.

Scaphis suddenly reeled back as if a cannon had gone off in her face. The scream that ripped out of her speakers was enough to rupture eardrums. Not a single one of little grey boxes survived.

Junella skidded to a stop and gaped. What the hell had caused that!?

Toby looked past the asteroid field. He fished a stopwatch from his vest pocket. Perfect timing.

***

Again, we rewind. Though not very far back this time.

Following the road of plastic flesh that extends down Anasarca, it rams through Dysphoria and Phlegmasia, then snakes its way across the badlands towards a fortified city called Rhinolith. Just outside the barrier walls, there is a small army assembled. About a mile away, a boxcar-sized storage tank has been delicately set beside the road of Scaphis. Luxy does not want anyone getting splashed. Methylene chloride works like a charm dissolving PVC, but it also tends to do the same to people.

On the side of the storage tank, there is a pressure-sensitive bomb.

Vienna Tusk has it in her crosshairs.

Luxy's eyes, and everyone else's, are drawn to the ornate pocketwatch held up by Mr. Woofingbutter. The second hand is nearing the most important instant of its life.

The mayor of Ectopia Cordis bends low to give Vienna's shoulder a pat. "About time for you to show me why they call you a sniper."

She does not take her eyes off her scope. "Ever think of holsterin' a cock in that mouth so it'll shut up once in a while?" She readjusts the rifle against her shoulder. "I'm aiming."

Luxy is impressed enough at this comeback to actually obey.

And when the pocketwatch rings the first note of a pleasant chime, Vienna's trigger finger clenches.

The bullet flies. The bomb erupts. The air is filled with caustic rain.

The Bargeld erupt a deafening cheer at the sight of Scaphis' skin bubbling and seizing in obvious agony. The stuff she's been doused with is meant to strip the paint off airplanes. It does not fuck around.

A dozen grateful neighbors dogpile Vienna in congratulations.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" Luxy calls out, springing up to full height. "Would you all please do me the favor of ruining my ex-girlfriend's afternoon?"

And that brings us to now.

***

It was a momentary reprieve for the fighters on the mountain. Then Scaphis became much more dangerous.

She was rolling and thrashing like a rattlesnake in its death throes. She'd stretched her body so many miles, she had only the vaguest idea where the pain was coming from. But she knew it was immense. The kind of pain that someone might kill themselves to get away from. Her writhing slabs and arms and coils and pseudopods smashed ruts in the crater, kicking up dust and launching rocks in every direction. She struggled to force her mind to conquer the pain. The only upside for her was that, in her blind flailing, she managed to get a lot of Becky-bits caught in her mass. Which she would not be giving back. If she couldn't kill Aldridge's fucktoy outright, she could whittle her down scrap by scrap. 

The others fled from the chaotic, bestial conniption Scaphis was throwing. Toby set his hammer alight and held it up as a beacon. He was close to the mountain's edge, where the remaining 4/5ths of Anasarca sloped down to its base.

Piffle scooped Zinc up and ran. The canine was still half-catatonic from loss. She realized how much easier he was to carry without his wrench-weight. Junella waved them over, then pointed to a white fleck at the edge of the battlefield.

Toby directed them all to shelter behind a jagged fencelike section of rock. Piffle's mind was purely devoted to Zinc. Though Junella spared the mouse a thankful nod.

She glanced at the flaming hammer. "Auditioning for the Statue Of Liberty?"

He shook it out, and sat down next to the others.

It was nice to have a time-out. They'd all been running, fighting, and sweating, and the battle had barely begun. Zinc still looked shellshocked, but his breathing was steadily approaching a calmer rhythm. Piffle rubbed his chestfur.

In the distance behind them, they could all tell when Scaphis managed to re-grow her speakers. A flood of profanity ensued, of Biblical proportions.

Piffle 'hmph'ed. "She has the worst mouth I've ever had to listen to."

Junella was slumped against the rock, using her backpack for a pillow. "Naw. Can't be worse'n mine."

To the skunk's surprise, Piffle immediately turned from Zinc and hugged her. "Don't you ever say that again!" the hamsterfly shouted, and kissed Junella's cheek. "You're NOTHING like her!"

Junella was unprepared for the raw sincerity in her friend's voice, and how much it genuinely touched her. She patted Piffle's shoulder. "Thanks," she replied gently. "If we get out of this in one piece, how 'bout I buy you a milkshake with two straws?"

Piffle chuckled and gave the skunk an extra squeeze.

"Better make it three," Zinc unexpectedly croaked.

Toby went along with it. "Four."

"Five," George added.

Junella managed a laugh. She angled her head around to meet her partner's sight. "Not feeling so hot, I'm guessin'?"

He shook his head morosely. "I went through all that trouble trackin' 'em down in EC, and now they're gone again."

She reached out to give him a loving ear-scratch with her needles. "They're not gone, doofus. Yes, they're in orbit, but Piffle can keep an eye out for them. Or George, once he gets out of that mouse suit."

The skeleton-stallion chuckled.

Toby did not. "No," he said firmly. "We don't need to."

Zinc swung his head around, raising an eyebrow at that.

Toby locked eyes with him. "You can dumbfound them back. I know you can. Just think of Junella's gun."

The canine looked both hopeful and skeptical. "Weapons and body parts're two different things."

"Why?" Toby asked simply.

Zinc was stumped by that. Pleasantly so.

"Here, look." Toby held up his hammer. Without a change in his expression, he tossed it off the edge of the mountain. Zinc seemed about to jump up and run after it, but Toby simply gave his hand a flourish and popped it out again.

Zinc stared, beginning to ask himself if this was really possible. His wrenches were enormous. Much bigger than anything he'd mindfucked before. But of course he knew every scratch and stain on them.

Junella shook his shoulder encouragingly. "My gun, my sword, his hammer, and your arms. They're really all the same thing."

Piffle gave Zinc a nuzzle.

The canine stared off into the stars, thinking hard. He nodded, deciding. "I'll give it a shot. Any sug-"

Junella suddenly jerked straight up into the air like Superman.

The others yelped, startled.

Screaming in panic, Junella corkscrewed around above them several times before abruptly dive-bombing the ground. Some invisible force rammed her head against rocks until it was nothing but a demolished mess. While everyone else sat stupefied, the skunk popped alive a few feet away and staggered to her feet.

"Somethin' grabbed me!" she yowled.

Piffle was as befuddled as the rest until she realized where they were sitting. "Oh poop, oh poop!!" She jumped to her feet and urged the others to get up too. "We've gotta run back towards her! FAST!"

The others looked at her like she was loopy. Then they all figured it out at approximately the same moment.

"Aldridge's front yard!" Junella shouted.

"The doubling effect!" Toby remembered. "We ran too far from the center-"

"-and stopped being the only one of ourselves!" the skunk finished.

They followed behind Piffle. One more new wrinkle had been added to the fight. An undefined Goldilocks Zone they'd have to stay within. Too close to Scaphis, they'd be squashed. Too far away, they'd split into mirror duplicates. Scaphis had been groping blindly with feeler-limbs a moment before, and chanced upon the Junella on the opposite side of the mountain. When she gave her a few bonks, it had seemed invisible to the others because Scaphis remained singular. So unless they stayed that way too, she could direct attacks at one side of the battlefield that the other would never see coming.

Zinc was still shook up, but not stupid. He understood the gist of the mirroring. It reminded him that they were in the midst of a battle royale, and his friends could not spare time playing cheer-up-the-pup. Toby'd said he needed to need his wrenches back. Allright.

When Scaphis was dead ahead, he barked, "Junella! 'Look, a penny'!"

A crisp nod and a thumbs-up. She ran on ahead of him towards the nearest flat spot, then planted her feet and bent way over.

"Piff, I'm gonna need more air!" Zinc shouted, hoping she could pick up on the play in time. He increased his speed towards Junella. 'My balance is all screwed up with these meat arms!!' he thought.

Junella heard her partner's thudding footsteps. She braced herself with her hands around her ankles. Zinc vaulted off the grey ground, landing one foot on her tailbase. A second running step put his other paw between her shoulder blades. That was the cue. As Zinc pushed off in a long jump, Junella shot to a standing position, giving him a spring-loaded boost.

Piffle saw what they were doing just in time to grasp her place in it. She swooshed ahead, calculating Zinc's trajectory, and arranged herself perfectly for his paw to land on the back of her head. "Yowch!" Zinc stepping on her antennae did not prevent her from buzzing hard with her wings, launching him up even higher.

Zinc soared like an eagle. Below him was a stormy sea of maddened plastic. Her head... It had to be somewhere in all that mess. Speakers! There they were, like a batch of hair curlers. He aimed himself towards them. Raised his arms above his head and clasped his hands together. He was about to perform a diving double axe handle. If he didn't hit with metal, this was going to end pretty badly for him.

Scaphis was much too concerned with the unfathomable atrocities being committed against her by Luxy's wizards and the Bargeld to notice an incoming canine.

"ATOM BOMB!!" Zinc shouted, as hundreds of pounds of pockmarked, scuffed-up, pissed-off steel landed on her cranium like a falling forklift. The bulb of her head sunk comically inwards. Speakers popped off in sparking mini-explosions.

Then Zinc was tumbling towards a river of molten vinyl as wide as his eyes could see. He was going to be swallowed up again.

He closed his eyes before the plunge, trusting that his friends would get him out of this somehow.

"Magic carpet ride!" Rebecca called out. A shower curtain zipped underneath the falling mutt, ferrying him safely away.

Tentacles lashed out in fury, searching the air for where Zinc had been. Others frantically shoved dented speakers back into flesh. "HOW DARE YOU TRY TO SILENCE MY VOICE!!!" she bellowed.

Carried aloft on a comfy improvised raft, Zinc looked behind him. "I wasn't trying to 'silence your voice', ya screwball. I was tryna hit you in the fucking head."

The shower curtain crossed the battlefield and slid Zinc safely off in front of his friends. Piffle loved feeling his strong steel wrap around her when she hugged him. "I knew you could do it!"

Zinc kissed her nose. He glanced at his wrenches: home again, mounts and all. No doorknockers though, he noticed with a frown.

"They're in your pockets, jackass!" Junella teased. And just as she'd hoped, Piffle reached in and dumbfounded them out.

"Better 'n better!" His tail wagged as she helped slide them back in.

The shower curtain gave a 'you're welcome' bow. "I'm gonna go bother Scrappy some more. You should come too! It's fun!" Around Scaphis' head, a ring of iron beams was having a piñata party.

"Sounds fine to me," Junella said. She gave the handles a squeeze and watched the tips of her wands glow red.

Zinc clamped his wrench-jaws like chomping teeth.

Piffle's wings took her up, and she plucked rifles out of the air to fill her hands.

"I like how your fire feels, George," Toby said.

"Would you like to sample some more, Sire?"

"As much as you can give."

"My pleasure!"

What followed was a free-for-all. After locating their duplicates and re-singularizing themselves, Toby and the others circled Scaphis at a constant run. This was exactly the situation they'd hoped for. Luxy had come through, adding plenty of pain to keep Scaphis addled. She could barely even swear at them as they darted in and out of cover, peppering her sides with bullets and burns.

Junella got a lot of practice with her wands. She indeed signed her name. Shaky, but legible. Piffle criss-crossed overhead, taking pot shots whenever she wasn't swooping in to drop supplies. Zinc called out for his shotgun and left blistered black craters in Scaphis' searching tentacles.

Toby and George were unstoppable. The mouse fired machine gun volleys of hammers, and whenever Scaphis reached out to stop him, she grabbed a hot stove burner instead. It was difficult seeing through the sheet of flame over his eyes, but George helped. Soon they fell into a rhythm where the stallion operated the mouse's legs completely, leaving Toby free to aim more flame bursts.

And Rebecca made all of it possible. She was everywhere. Like Scaphis, her mortal mind could only multitask so much, but she could keep her pieces spinning by muscle memory, slam down walls to block Scaphis' attacks, then leave them up while she focused her attention on another part of the battle. She kept her consciousness at the top of her self-cloud, like the all-seeing eye of a hurricane. Whenever her new friends needed ramps to get over a river of Scaphis, she was there. Whenever they needed armor, she was there. Whenever their polymorphous nemesis managed to snare someone, either Becca or Piffle would kill them to safety. It actually became a friendly competition between them.

Junella was tailing Toby, holding her cutlass in George's flame to heat the blade white-hot. Piffle was firing double semi-automatics while holding her gargantuan golden fork in the other pair of hands, parrying Scaphis' attempts to smack her out of the sky. She was also making airplane noises, because why not? Zinc was experimenting with his doorknockers. Since they were based on the same technology as Toby's wrist-sheath, he tried sucking them in, then launching them back out behind him at high velocity. They were hard to aim and didn't hit with the same force. But from Scaphis' hissing, they made an impression.

It all seemed to be working. Scaphis was shrinking. Sputtering mindlessly in rage now, not even producing words. Her bulk was shriveling, drawing in protectively.

Their circle around her tightened. They sped up their attacks, pouncing on her show of weakness.

Except it wasn't. They had forgotten she could tunnel.

She endured the pain till she could keep it at bay. It weighed her down like an anchor over her heart, but she was working to project herself beyond it. If she hadn't had the wand, this would have already been over. It was beyond even her own indomitable will to keep herself extended past Dysphoria, retain her hundreds of captives, withstand so much abuse, and stay sane enough to plan. But she was Scaphis Fucking Tarrare. Junella Brox could take her wannabe act and cram it up her ass sideways.

Remembering how well it had worked to spear Piffle like a cocktail wiener, Scaphis burrowed into the mountain and come up from underneath. Toby's explosion had even tilled the soil for her, and left plenty of fissures she could network through. She twisted her tentacles into needle-point drills.

None of the pests were expecting the ground to suddenly impersonate a porcupine.

When the drills sprung up, she was lucky enough to lance the skunk and mouse on her first try. The mutt stumbled around for a moment, undoubtedly thinking of ways to save his pals, but she retracted her flesh, then popped out more spikes in new locations. She felt the inside of Zinc's ribcage. Perfect.

It had taken only an instant. Now she had to act doubly quick to prevent any escapes. The hamster-insect was easiest. Another long jab had her pinned like a butterfly. And she entombed her other captives to keep Becky from any more decapitation rescues. Scaphis outright guffawed as the dumb bimbo tried anyway, succeeding only in dealing out bruises to the people she was trying to save.

But Toby was special. The little pissant thought he was safe, making himself a red hot poker. Scaphis hardened her flesh around him, tight as latex. She wasn't trying to smother the flames, since the horse probably pulled them out of his ass with magic somehow. She was trying to pile on so much dense skin that even if he tried to Flame On, her nerves would die quickly, leaving him still trapped in a dozen outer layers.

"HA!!!" she screamed. "DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING, DID YOU!? THOUGHT YOU HAD ME ON THE ROPES, YOU PATHETIC TRASH!? I'M SMARTER, STRONGER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN YOU COULD EVER BE!!!"

Toby found himself in complete darkness. He couldn't tell if she'd used paralysis or if he just couldn't move from the sheer weight encasing him. He and George tried heating up the fire, but she somehow kept her grip. Plus he had a spike of vinyl plunging up through his right kidney and out from his left clavicle.

Even so, he kept his calm. Despite the bravado in Scaphis' mocking shouts, Toby could hear a quaver. She was under strain. Whatever Luxy and the others were doing to her, it was taking its toll.

***

To have a thousand barbarian warriors all attacking a miles-long snake of flesh is a bit of a clusterfuck. The Bargeld roared like lions and plunged into battle without fear. Whatever weapons they had, they utilized with terrifying, vicious creativity. There was so much of Scaphis to hit, they rarely missed. And they carried over a month of simmering hatred to draw upon. Endless days spent jailed, immobile, humbled. Some of them had involuntarily pissed or shat themselves and had to wait in the foulness for weeks upon weeks to be freed. They saw red. They enjoyed every instant of their revenge. Their only regret was that Scaphis couldn't bleed.

Chief Ghummin led the charge himself, brandishing his ceremonial oosik above his head. The war club was not the most effective weapon on the battlefield that day (compared to some of his fighters who had gauss guns and anti-tank missiles), but it gave his people a symbol. To see the gnarled bone held high was a rallying point. A sign of their united purpose.

Rippingbean and Woofingbutter had played Santa Claus very well. The Bargeld had awoken from confinement to find gifts of dizzying variety. Lawn care implements, handguns, wands, tasers, bombs, painlaunchers, bazookas, etcetera. A tower guard with a traditional Bargeld toilet-helmet was delirious with joy to have been blessed with a chainsword. He keened in high laughter to swipe and grind it all across the invader's bulk. That is, until he felt a pang of jealousy at noticing one of his bowling buddies lugging an industrial grade concrete-cutting circular saw.

The fox and gorilla weren't absent from the fray. They had not risen to the top of their field by simply buying and selling. To truly provide the best survival gear, you had to test it. Woofingbutter bestowed upon Scaphis a monsoon of hot murder from his brand new exoskeleton. His previous model was compact and nimble. This sonovabitch was a tank. Slow as a glacier, but bristling with rocket launchers, spiked knuckles, and four, count 'em four, chain-fed helicopter miniguns. The gorilla and fox were a well-balanced combination of bulk and brisk. Rippingbean wove all around his partner, fending off plastic tentacles with two high-tech knives. Brand new models. Their blades vibrated with sufficient intensity to cut through bank vaults (and provide a soothing massage to the user through their tonguerubber grips). In his hands they danced like prima ballerinas. The fox was powered by more than just the devotion of protecting his husband. Scaphis had marred his face all those many years ago. She was the reason he'd struggled so hard to regain normal speech. Even WB could not make out the curses RB shouted at her, but he knew from inflection they were bottomlessly vile.

Elsewhere, Lady Xenoiko kept the constructs in line. The expeditioners had earlier set up a perimeter of blinding-traps, but the sheer number of mortal souls running around out in the open was too tempting a buffet to pass up. Parasomnic beasties of every stripe were converging. And every single one of them would die. Long ago, Mia Xenoiko had made a deal with Scaphis Tarrare to harness unlimited physical power. She had served as the tyrant's bodyguard for a time. Slowly, her raw strength ate her mind until she was as empty as a construct herself. Then her lover had broken her, and freed her. She chose her dual-natured form as a reminder. It was time now to revert to her greatest regret. Though not in shame. She stilled her heart and let the demon consume her fully. Her housecat side was swallowed by the vibrant orange and merciless black stripes of the tiger. Dropping to all fours, she became fully feral, and began a circling patrol of the battlefield. Any nightmares she saw, she dealt with. Cactusyotes were crushed to death beneath her mighty footsteps. Arm-snails and shovelcows were simply plowed aside. Bonecuddies shattered like window panes. And when a hypena stood in her path to challenge her, she sunk in her claws and brutally tore the shrieking beast in half. Blood showered her ink. Her body drank it up like sunshine.

Her husband was secretly thrilled to see her like this. Taming her had been the greatest adventure of his life. A year of patience and pain, rewarded by an undying mutual loyalty that had since spanned decades. Watching his wife shred nightmares like paper, a very naughty part of himself was curious if they might need to go through that same routine again. The thought of facing her full strength made him shiver. Still, playtime was for later. Now he was on the job. The diminutive simian displayed a speed that would have left Rippingbean's head spinning. He raced across any terrain, scrambled up any barrier, and frequently used the Bargeld's heads as stepping-stones to get a better shot. Years before Toby discovered the true power of his dream-steel hammer, Ignatius Xenoiko had found his cane. It was his everything. Literally. Whatever weapon the moment required, it became. He bashed with the handle. He shot bullets and electricity from its tip. He split it to become pistols or nunchaku. And the pearl at the top became a grenade of unlimited uses. Many people were snared by Scaphis and had to be killed to safety. Ignatius rescued dozens, but was never once caught himself.

Red's job was the easiest. The talkative ringtailed smallone had said that the evil plastic might try to catch and paralyze him. So he would have to be very, very fast. Fine by Red. He adored his rollerskates. Nothing could have pleased him more than zooming back and forth all day, making Scaphis his speedbump. To be doubly sure she'd keep her hands off him, he'd been bathing in the chemical from the storage tanks. To him, it tickled like soda bubbles.

Ike Fanshaw and Janie Jing were each perched in the palm of a spectral hand. It was a simple trick for Waxacada and Driuwej to maintain the illusion's persistence with their own minds, while allowing it to be steered by its passenger's. Ike had already done a bit of surfing before his coma and was having no difficulty skidding and sliding on the air around the fracas. Janie mostly kept to one spot and let her creations speak for her. She'd earned her title as the Goddess Of Dumbfounding through more sold-out performances than she could remember. Easiest to produce were her trademark gun-wielding fireballs. A ring of six protected her body, while sixty more strafed Scaphis in aerial acrobatics. But that was kid stuff. Opening act stuff. What Janie had been most famous for in her glory days was the ability to produce any object the audience called out. They weren't very stable (like the snacks from the cornucopia), but they were real enough to leave some serious divots in Scaphis' hide, that was for sure. Refrigerators, lawnmowers, naval mines, gas pumps, dumpsters, redwoods. And she really did perform better the madder she got. One time when Ike flew past and yelled her skirt up, she chucked an entire cement mixer at him. Thankfully it hit Scaphis instead. Ike sailed nimbly beneath it and tossed her a jaunty wave. The Loudest Man In The World went back to making their opponent wish she'd never been born. His chosen skill was simple: he channeled will into volume. Upon a flying hand he sang a song of violence. Like Rither's tuning fork attack, Ike could direct his audio like a laser. His low notes pummeled, his high notes pierced, and his rapping was a buckshot fusillade. It was gratifying to watch Scaphis' flesh deform beneath the precision power of his voice. Sometimes the ground even fissured beneath her. Ike selected his very favorite songs, for the more passion he could sing with, the greater the damage. When he added a crescendo one octave above middle C to the end of Billie Jean, he drilled Scaphis underground like pissing into a snowbank. He moonwalked in celebration.

Scaphis' body oozed like a bloated river down from Anasarca, into Rhinolith, and continued on towards other lands. While everyone else attacked her mountainward half, Waxacada and Driuwej handled the opposite side all by themselves. Not just because they had the power to do so, but because it kept collateral damage to a minimum. With the city's walls behind them, the two ancient sorcerers sat cross-legged in front of one another, palms facing. Sparks danced between their fingers like the arcs of a jacob's ladder. A swirling blue flame surrounded them: the 'exhaust' of their projection of will (it also did a dandy job keeping the ground tendrils from swallowing them up). Their eyes and mouths were closed, but they communicated together just fine. After so many years, other Phobiopolans were finally beginning to harness powers the two of them had known and practiced for centuries. Bigwheel 52 believed a blue sky in existence. The Lalochezians maintaining an aurora around their town. Wondrous things could be accomplished when willpower was shared. And to devote your life wholly to another furson, entwining your essence with theirs until there was no longer any separation... Well now. As the pair sat in silence and breathed mirrored breaths, thousands of spectral hands shaped the clouds. It is a lot of work to mold the air itself to your whims, especially with Phobiopolis' erratic currents, but all things can be accomplished through togetherness. They now had a fine pet tornado. A drill of unfathomable size and agony, constantly spitting out lightning bolts, not to mention windborne shrapnel. The flock of hands escorted it back and forth across Madam Tarrare's bare flesh. The wizards were playing air hockey. Scaphis tried many times to catch and entangle the hands, but they were only projections of the mind. It was futile.

And then there was Luxy. Having donned an eye-searing iridescent leisure suit, for once he let his guns and his grin do all the talking. He was the living equivalent of Chief Ghummin's war club. He didn't dish out the greatest damage, but as he leapfrogged around the battlefield, he let everyone else see him and know that Luxy wouldn't let 'em down. His guns had no safety switches on them, of course. Instead, a dial with several settings: Pester, Maim, Kill, Destroy, Obliterate, and simply, DON'T. He had them set to Destroy for most of the fight. With each shot, the pistols drank several liters of his blood and compressed the scarlet liquid down to a dense, lethal pellet. Each shot was deafening. They walloped Scaphis like a hail of anvils. And they were a handy way to get around, too. With expert timing (which he possessed in spades), Luxy could sail over the river of Scaphis like Peter Pan. He'd soar across the chaos, pummel her with a double blast, and be kicked further along by the shockwave. Like bouncing on a sea of popping balloons. Unfortunately, no one is perfect, even if they're damn close. A mistimed bulletjump sent him careening to the ground with a compound leg fracture. The tendrils began entwining him immediately. Scaphis sent a blind tidal wave to swallow him up. The raccoon's grin never faltered. He hummed a sweet melody as his thumbs flicked his beloved pistols' dials to DON'T. A wall of plastic flab descended towards him. When he pulled the triggers, each gun slurped up half the blood in his body: instant mummification. The force of the double-shot drove his corpse three feet into the ground, and knocked Scaphis skyward like a kick in the nuts from Zeus. A moment later he uprooted himself. He brushed the dirt from his duds, paused to autograph a squeeing Bargeld's helmet, and resumed play.

Last but not least, Tía Letizia Iluminada Eldora Lopez kept behind the others. She was not a fighter by any means. Maybe back in her younger days, but that was mostly with her stinging wit. No, her battles had always been fought primarily with her cauldron. Weaving ingredients into dreams, creating effects and emotions that defied natural law even back on Earth. They called her a curandera. A white witch. During the war, she had sold to any side with currency. She regretted this now, but it had kept her alive and under the radar while the titans clashed themselves to death. Keeping out of the spotlight was fine, she grew to realize. It was pleasant instead to teach. L'roon and Jazeizal had been among her few handpicked students. Ignatius, her favorite customer. She might have even wound up married to that scoundrel if not for the blazing heart of Mia. Still, the wizened old coyote was happy. And now she prepared to unleash unhappiness in its most potent liquid form. A bubbling cold elixir of torment. Fear, misery, doubt, and despair, all collected in a simple water balloon. As the fight raged on around her, she trundled her little catapult to a suitable position. It was top priority to make sure she didn't hit any innocents by mistake. This was a potion she would not wish on anyone but the monstrous Scaphis Tarrare.

***

She had them! All of them! Scaphis was incapable of producing saliva, but if that weren't the case she would have been drooling in anticipation. ALL of them! Becky was still whacking away in futility though. "Cut it out, Becky! You don't belong here. You're nothing but a groupie! A backstage blowjob!"

The reply was an incensed hiss. "I healed his heart after you smeared shit on it, Scaphis. He tried so many times to reach you. Even when I begged him to give up! He never stopped seeing your potential!"

"HE TRIED TO FORCE ME INTO A MOLD! TO RESHAPE ME IN HIS IMAGE OF WHAT I OUGHT TO BE! HE NEVER RESPECTED ME FOR ME! AND LOOK AT ME NOW! LOOK AT THE BODY HE LOCKED ME IN!!!"

"Yeah, " Rebecca spat back, "that's what happens when you push someone past their patience."

"OH IS IT?" Shutting up Becky would be like trying to swat every individual bee in a hive. But she could take her frustrations out in other ways. She had four little Easter eggs just waiting to be cracked open. Who would be the most fun to start with?

The flesh curtain around Piffle parted like a venus fly trap. The hamsterfly struggled as hard as she could when she saw the looming void pointed towards her.

Scaphis held her in place with her will, but grew manacles around the pink larvae's wrists and ankles just in case. Her damaged speakers buzzed as she whispered cruelly to her captive. "Immature. Reckless. Stupid. Smirking. Waste of space."

Speaking was a struggle, but Piffle held her head high and responded. "I'm... none... of... those."

Scaphis extended two praying mantis arms and sharpened the tips to razors. A swipe opened up the little moron's pilot costume, exposing her carapace. She tapped on it. "It's a shame. I really do like emerald green. Your chitin even shines like the gem. Though I'm still going to deprive you of it."

Piffle gathered all her courage and braced herself.

Becky tried all sorts of things to stop her, but Scaphis kept her at bay with a skin-umbrella, as her hands went to work, peeling up the plates of Piffle's exoskeleton. Slowly.

It was muffled, but Toby could hear the screams.

He needed to get out of here. Trapped in black confinement, he stilled his mind and tried to think.

'I have an idea, Sire,' George piped up.

'Those are always welcome.'

'As I see it, we have baked the surrounding flesh to numbness, which may in fact have been her intention. But the same is not true for the spear impaling us.'

Toby's eyebrows went up. 'That's true. Can you direct your fire inwardly?'

'I think so, but it may be unpleasant for you, Sire.'

Toby chuckled. 'It's only pain, George. Just do whatever works and don't worry about it.'

'Then I shall.'

Toby braced himself. He felt his temperature begin to rise. He'd had fevers and the flu plenty of times before. This would be no worse, he told himself.

George's idea might not have worked if not for Tía Lopez' skills in potioncraft. The first few balloons of mindpoison were felt by Scaphis as brief, worrying spasms of doubt. But then more hit, and the effect began to seep in. Scaphis felt fear. And she had no idea why. This was an icicle pressed against her spine. A growing, irrational dread. Where was it coming from!?

Piffle's cheeks were soaked with tears of pain. Her chest had been opened like kitchen cabinets. Exoskeletal plates dripped with blood. And then her tormentor stopped.

The square, fringed face-hole was still pointed towards her, yet it no longer seemed to be seeing her. The knife hands twitched. Piffle dared to hope Scaphis was having a moment of conscience. "I... did... love... you," she gasped.

Scaphis seemed to come out of a trance. "Sh-Shut up! You PRETENDED to! Just like I did! Because I knew it was false! That you never cared about ME! Only how good it felt for YOU to play nursemaid to a poor lost toy!"

Piffle concentrated her will, and slowly shook her head back and forth.

"YOU CAN'T FOOL ME! YOU FAKE-" Her head whipped around. "WHAT IS THAT BURNING!?"

George was boiling all the blood in Toby's body. The mouse did not complain, but George could tell he was enduring a lot of discomfort in silence. As their internal thermometer rose higher and higher, the scalding blood dripped down the length of Scaphis' spear, soaking into her wrinkles. In the instant when she loosened her grip to shake the burning liquid off, George sprang like a beartrap.

Four skeletal limbs shot out from the tiny slit in the cocoon, and with the strength of Zinc's wrenches, George pried the flesh open to give his master fresh air.

"STOP THAT!!!" she screeched.

Toby gasped. His boiling tears left seared streaks down his face. He saw the stars. He saw pinkish-beige vinyl. And when he saw Piffle laid out in Scaphis' hand, flayed alive, he reacted.

There was no conscious thought or plan. Toby raised his arm. His hammer curled into a fist. From the back of his hand grew a torpedo-sized gleaming steel bullet, hollow at both ends. In some deep corner of Toby's lifelong gathering of trivia, his library had recorded that ramjet engines could be constructed without any moving parts. He did not know how they worked, or how they were made. He only knew he needed one now. And that George had plenty of fuel to power it with.

Toby cocked back his arm. When he swung, his blood ignited, flames roared from the exhaust, and he punched three hundred feet across the battlefield.

Scaphis saw stars. The mouse's flying fist smeared her cheek across the opposite side of her head. She lost control of her form for an instant and all her captives dropped.

They splashed down in muddy puddles of plastic. Piffle cried out. Zinc and Junella shared a glance: they were both too far away to carry her to safety, but a bullet could get there faster. A few seconds later, all three of them were scampering in different directions for cover. Zinc and Junella were leaking pretty badly from their impalement, but they'd have time to die eventually.

Toby's rocket punch carried him far past Scaphis, nearly to the edge of the mountain. He willed the engine on his hand to change course and bring him back around. He flew to a spot in front of Scaphis' reeling, moaning head. The ramjet vanished. He was barely aware he'd created it.

He said nothing. Waited for her to notice him.

Scaphis had been more startled than hurt by the hit. Something was going wrong with her mind. Something had infected her. She was sure she could get ahold of it. She just needed a break, that was all. Not that these inconsiderate fillthpigs would allow her one.

When she finally regained her bearings, there was the mouse again. Just standing there. Challenging her.

She seethed and readied another barrage of insults. But then a better idea came.

The combatants stared each other down. Toby had his fists clenched. He knew she was seeing him. His body was a landmine, ready to explode into whatever was necessary to counter her next attack.

"I have Scarlatina," she said.

All of Toby's defenses dropped.

'Good,' she thought. The drooping ears, the slack posture. She had his attention.

Toby saw mind's-eye photographs of Skeeto, Tak, and Kat. The school, the market, the Summer Vacation, the hang-gliding cliff.

"Now Toby, you need to listen to me carefully, allright? This has got to stop. All of this. You've completely shat on my good mood. You've done enough fooling around for one day, and now you are going to listen to me. Back off. Leave. Or else I'll start torturing them. I know it's a special place to you, Toby. You don't want me to put all your little seaside friends though what I was just doing to Piffle, now do you?"

Peeking from behind rocks, the others could see that Toby was completely motionless. They all knew how much the cliffside town meant to him. Was he going into shock? They looked again. No, he wasn't immobilized with anguish. He was doing that mannequin-eyes thing again. That cold staring thing. Thinking at the speed of light.

"You know that I will," Scaphis continued. "I took them like I took Rhinolith. Poured myself right down the cliff like Pepto Bismol. I have them all. I can do anything I want to them. Any unspeakable thing I can imagine. And I can imagine a lot, Toby."

George felt the tension in his master's muscles. Stiff as bowstrings. He could not keep up with the calculations going on in Sire Toby's mind.

Scaphis' voice was persuasive, almost pleasant, but there was a corroded, desperate edge to it. "Be sensible. This can all be over. You were never going to win anyway, you know that. Now, Toby, I have business to get back to. So, we'll make a deal on this. You leave me alone, and I leave them alone. Deal?"

Toby saw the threads of a million possibilities laid out in front of him. He envisioned everyone he loved in Scarlatina, all suffering in her abominable grip. They were such gentle people. They would have absolutely no defense against her. They didn't even have to deal with constructs. They'd accepted him as kin without hesitation. They'd made him one of them. Made him-

He almost, on impulse, reached up to clasp his right arm. Instead he minutely flexed the muscles, just enough to feel the piercings.

He took a step towards her. "Liar."

Her void stretched wide like a portal to Hell. "DON'T TEST ME, TOBY!!! I'LL SKIN THEM ALIVE AND DRAG THEIR PELTS UP HERE TO SHOW YOU!!!"

Toby's voice was clear and calm, without emotion. "You couldn't. Because you don't have them. You saw my ribbon, that's all. I took it off before the fight so you wouldn't, but it must have come back one of the times I died."

"THAT DOESN'T CHANGE ANYTHING, YOU MEALWORM!!"

His eyes flicked left and right like an adding machine. "You've been around a long time, so naturally you've heard of them. And if so, you'd know the significance of the ribbons. You extrapolated when you saw mine. But you can't be there. I spent a month with them while you went on to take Rhinolith, and Gilla's shack, and plenty of other places. But not Scarlatina. I guessed because they weren't worth your time. Maybe you didn't think they had enough will to make good batteries?"

"TICK, TOCK, DUMMY!! THIS OFFER ENDS SOON! I'LL PRY THEIR CUNTS AND COCKS OFF AND CRAM THEM DOWN THEIR THROATS IF YOU DON'T SHUT YOUR MEWLING MOUTH AND DO WHAT I SAY!!"

He continued as if she'd said nothing. "And you haven't had time to get to them while we've been fighting. You would have bragged about it right away if you did. So you're bluffing." He raised his head and focused her in his gaze. "You're that desperate for us to stop."

She grew two massive hands to slam down on either side of the mouse. Leaning over, she bellowed, "ARE YOU REALLY GOING TO RISK THAT YOU'RE SMARTER THAN ME!?"

"Yes," Toby said with quiet confidence.

Her voice was a maelstrom. "I WILL PICK THEM UP AND FLING THEM INTO DYSPHORIA, YOU DUMB BASTARD!! THEN THE ALLFILTH CAN CHEW ON THEM FOR ETERNITY AND IT'LL BE YOUR FUCKING FAULT!!!"

Toby was unimpressed. "Even if you're telling the truth, do you really think I'd trade one city for the world? If we leave, you'll conquer everything. Then there's no reason you wouldn't just take Scarlatina too. It's a stupid deal even if you're not lying." He took another step.

"I JUST DID IT, ASSHOLE. THEY'RE GONE. ALL OF THEM. INTO HELL. YOU DID THAT TO THEM."

"Then I'll go in and fish them out."

Scaphis threw back her head, laughing. "HAAAA!!! YOU WERE MINCEMEAT AFTER YOU WENT IN DYSPHORIA ONCE, YOU CHICKENSHIT! YOU'RE A COWARD TO THE CORE, TOBY! YOU'LL NEVER SEE THEM AGAIN! NEVER!!"

Toby took another step. He regrew his normal, coral eyes just so she could see the sincerity in them. "I would jump into Logdorbhok's mouth with a smile on my face, just so long as I was dragging you in with me."

She was silenced.

"Do you believe me?"

Screaming in frustration, Scaphis swept a hand across the dirt to bash him off the mountain. But it was a clumsy, tantrum move. George sprung up and over it with ease.

Her void recoiled into an expression almost like sobbing. "TOBY, THIS ISN'T FAIR!! I AM JUST TRYING TO GET PAYBACK FOR THINGS THAT WERE DONE TO ME BEFORE YOU WERE EVEN BORN!! YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING YOU'RE DOING HERE! YOU'RE PICKING ON ME BECAUSE YOU'VE GOT THIS STUPID SUPERHERO COMPLEX THAT YOU STOLE OUT OF A COMIC BOOK! LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!!!"

The mouse shook his head. He took another step. "No. You hurt my friends."

Her bulk shuddered in a wheezing, dismissive laugh. "This is about SO much more than your "friends", Toby! This spans back generations! You think I've done anything to hurt you!? You can't imagine what real pain is!!"

He growled low in his throat. "I think maybe I can."

One of her giant hands waved a middle finger in his face. "Oh REALLY!? Some coughs, some sneezing!? Lying on your lazy ass all day in a bed!? While I was stripped of my very identity by an elitist fraud and his whore of a wife!?"

Rebecca winced hard enough to crimp metal and splinter wood. But she kept herself silent. Toby was handling this for now.

Scaphis kept rambling. "Hey Toby, this is you! 'Oh I'm so sad! My mommy cleaned the house too much!!' BOO HOO, PISSBABY!!! Come back to me when you've lived as long as I have, Mister Toby deLeon!! Come back when everyone you've ever loved stabs you in the back and stomps on your face! Come back when you've had everyone turn on you! Come back when you're the victim of lies and rumors and nonstop attacks!!"

Toby felt his blood boiling again, and this time George wasn't doing it. "I thought you said a little while ago you only pretended to feel love."

"HA!! That was after I LEARNED, Toby!! Learned what people like you are REALLY like! Learned about your fake kindness and your masks and your self-serving bullshit!!" Her giant finger poke-poke-poked at him. "I had to learn the hard way what love is and what it isn't! Love is something that only lasts until they're done getting what they wanted out of you! Love is what they call it when they're trying to get close enough to shut you up and lock you away! You've NEVER suffered like I have!! How DARE you stand there with that ugly little pout on your face and challenge ME, you runt!! I'VE SUFFERED MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE ON THIS WHOLE SHITTY PLANET!!! YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE COULDN'T COMPARE TO WHAT I'VE SURVIVED! HOW DARE YOU!!!"

Toby was biting his lip so hard his jaw trembled. His arms tensed. He squeezed his hammer tighter. "You've suffered? YOU'VE suffered!? I used to know what happy felt like before I knew you. I never knew how to hate until I met you."

"You're welcome," she replied. "It's a useful skill."

"IS IT!?" he roared. "What good is it doing you? Or me!? Do you have any idea how much I don't want to be here!? How tense my chest is? How many nights I have headaches? How much of my time I've spent having to think about YOU and how to get my friends back from you? Do you have any idea how much I've had to compromise my principles and break my own morality in fighting you!?"

She pouted. "Awwwwww. The boohoo pissbaby turned into a bully. Cry harder and maybe someone will care."

"Will you shut up!?" he exploded. "You talk about your suffering like it's justification! Well guess what? I was sick. My mother did abuse me. She did manipulate me into getting rid of my father. And after all of that, when I got here I DIDN'T START KILLING PEOPLE!! And blaming them for it! Junella changed. Xenoiko changed. But all you're doing is blaming! 'Poor little me! Aldridge put me in a doll!' WELL MAYBE YOU EARNED IT!! AND MAYBE IF YOU WEREN'T SUCH A SELFISH MONSTER YOU'D CONCENTRATE ON FIXING THAT, MOVING ON, AND TRYING TO BE HAPPY! INSTEAD OF MAKING EVERYONE ELSE SUFFER JUST AS MUCH AS YOU THINK YOU HAVE!!!"

Scaphis threw him into space.

Her bluff was more complicated than he realized. Damn him, he'd seen right through her Scarlatina lie. Though when this was over, she really would feed them all to Logdorbhok just to spite him. And her outburst afterwards was genuine. The rogue thoughts still swirling in her mind were making it hard to think, and the little pest just wouldn't stop yapping. But then she noticed he was getting pissed. And maybe that meant she could break his concentration. Turn that creepy, dead-eyed gaze into a snarl. At the point where he was shouting so hard his eyes closed, she whipped a tentacle around him and flung him heavenward with every ounce of strength in her body.

And she'd compensated for Becky and the fly, too. They would not be rescuing him. She timed her throw perfectly, so that her backswing smashed Piffle out of the air, just as a towering wall of herself splashed up to keep Becky pacified.

By the time she turned to look, Toby had already vanished against the star field. Even if Phobiopolis pulled his soul back some day, the only thing he'd return to was her completed victory.

She had taken out their leader. Experience had taught her, the rest would fall soon.

***

Stars streaked past. Blurring. He was flying faster than a bullet through a completely frictionless environment.

"Sire Toby! Sire Toby!!"

He tried to hold on. He really did.

"...ire Tob...! ...ire ....To!..."

The lateral G-forces piled too much weight on his consciousness. It collapsed from the strain into blackness.

***

"TWO DOWN!! WHO'S NEXT!?"

Junella took off running, shooting blindly behind her back. She passed Zinc and thumped his arm, pointing towards Piffle. They needed to strategize immediately.

The hamsterfly was crouched behind an outcropping, staring up at nothing, hyperventilating.

Junella pulled Zinc in close beside her. She cupped her hands and shouted, "Becky!! Gimme shelter!"

Rebecca gave up trying to punch through Scaphis' defense and swarmed her materials towards the others. In seconds she'd created an igloo of miscellany.

The tiny room was dark until a lamp turned on. "I'd appreciate you not calling me that," it said to Junella.

The skunk blinked. "Sorry. She said it so many times, I just..." She wiped her forehead. She could feel her heart thudding against her chest.

Piffle was close to sobbing. "He was trying to save me, and she..."

Zinc put his wrenches quietly around her.

Junella knelt down in front of her teammate. "Piff? I know what you're feeling. But we don't have time for that."

As if to demonstrate why, they all heard Scaphis start banging on the walls. Becca quickly added more fortifications, including a floor to prevent any tunneling underneath.

Junella rubbed the back of Piffle's paws with her thumbs. "Listen. Toby can take care of himself. You know that; I know that. And he's got George with him. They'll both be fine."

Piffle sniffed. "That's true." She got to her feet. "I guess I just needed to hear that."

The skunk nodded. "And now we need a way out of this rattrap."

"Hey!" Becca huffed.

"No, I mean...!" Junella growled. "I mean I got us all huddled in one place and the enemy's knockin' on the door. We've gotta get back on the move."

Zinc gulped. "Juney, I, uh, got kinda a deadmeat-stupid idea."

She clutched his shoulders. "Those are the best kind! Lay it on me!"

He chuckled at her vote of confidence. "Well, ah, I was thinkin' about earlier. How, just before you left, you shrunk the Fearsleigher down and swallowed it again."

Junella cocked her head. "Excuse me? We left it-"

Piffle's antennae shot up. "Ooooh! No, Junella! I distinctly remember!" She patted the skunk's tummy. "It's right in here, isn't it? You gulped it down in a little pill."

Zinc was jazzed that she'd tuned in to his frequency. "Yeah, yeah! So you can upchuck it right now," he leaned in, "...can't you?"

She knew what they were getting at. She just wasn't sure it could work. "I don't know... I don't even know what you want it for."

Zinc gently clutched her shoulders in his wrenches. "All you need to know is that we need it."

The skunk sighed. "Fuckit. I'll try. Piffle, rub some of your fairy dust on me."

The hamsterfly was more than happy to. She hugged her skunk chum tight and bombarded her with willpower.

Becca's lamplight shone a little brighter. It was the most she could offer with Scaphis banging on her fort with seventeen fists.

Junella closed her eyes and pictured the little pill inside her. The one she'd carried all through Ectopia Cordis. All through Dysphoria. All through the monthlong captivity in her bedroom. She stuck a finger down her throat. Horked. Spat up a perfect black jellybean.

Zinc kissed her on the cheek. "Outtasite, partner!!" Piffle kissed the other cheek.

Junella wiped the spit and ichor off. Now she had a teensy sleigh in her palm. "What'd'ya want out of it?"

"I want the car," Zinc said gravely. "This is gonna tear her the hell up, but I told you she deserved a Viking funeral."

Junella's eyebrow arched.

Zinc reached in and, with utmost tenderness, ripped the brass minigun off the roof. He placed it in Piffle's paws. "I put you in charge of my first true love."

She snickered. "Oh, you!"

Junella mindfucked the resizing window and held it over the Fearsleigher.

Before she could start, Zinc cautioned, "Not all the way! I'll say when."

Meanwhile, Scaphis was cackling and pummeling Becky's makeshift bomb shelter. She'd made them run to ground! They'd wrapped themselves up in a giftwrapped present, just for her! And even if she couldn't tear it open, she was already digging underneath to uproot the whole damn thing and chuck it into space too. Only this time she would take care to aim. Looking around, she could just make out the brown smear of Logdorbhok in the distance.

"LITTLE SHITS, LITTLE SHITS, LET ME IN!" she chortled, "OR I'LL SMASH AND I'LL BASH AND I'LL CAVE YOUR SKULLS IN!"

The igloo suddenly exploded, peppering her with shrapnel.

When she'd blinked it away, Junella and Piffle had already sped off in opposite directions. Zinc was standing his ground in front of her.  He was wielding the Fearsleigher as a melee weapon. And he didn't bother with, 'not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin'. 

"Fuck off."

His hand was crunched through the driver's side door. He dented the dashboard to push the little blue button. The skate-car's skates folded out to the side. KER-CHUNK

In Lumbago, when were falling into the chasm, Junella had engaged an emergency failsafe that turned the blades into rotors. Of course, if you happened to be holding the main body of the car in your arms, it would instead make them act as a power saw.

A typhoon wind emerged from Zinc's grip. Saliva dripped from his screaming jaws. "I'm gonna bruise you up bright as a jukebox, baby!!"

"YOUR TOYS DON'T SCARE ME!!"

BBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRTTTT

Maybe not toys, but how about a brass gatling gun carried by a four-armed fighter jet?

Zinc took advantage of the hailfire Piffle had just filled Scaphis' face with, darting in under her tentacles to swing the robustly-spinning blades up into her armpit meat. The screaming was music to his ears.

She swatted at him, flattening him to the ground, but the Cyrus Tear powering the Fearsleigher pushed back. The skate blades were enchanted, frictionless, and tough as diamond. Her flesh could not be cut, but it could absolutely be warped to excruciation.

She recoiled, blubbering, and withdrew her twisted appendage. Zinc was banged up a bit, but able to roll out of the way.

Scaphis' head twitched back and forth, scanning for the bastard. A bolt of black lightning cut twin streaks of fire across her vision. "DAMMIT!!!"

Junella had her generator revved and the welding wands fully extended. "Get some, tubby."

A spiked limb crashed like a falling tree into the space Junella had been just a moment before.

BRRRRRT BBBBBRRRRTT

Scaphis waved tendrils around, but they only got pockmarked with ammunition too. "STOP THAT!!! IT HURTS!!!"

Behind her flight goggles, Piffle's eyes sparkled with naughtiness. "Aw shoot! You figured out my plan!" She held on tight with all four arms, pedaled like a madman, and swung the gun around for another volley.

Thus began round two of circling Scaphis and keeping her annoyed. Piffle fired, Zinc carved, Junella singed, and Rebecca blocked. They kept it up for a very respectable length of time.

Scaphis could tell her reactions were slowed. The army near Rhinolith had poisoned her brain. Swamped her with curdled, ugly emotions. She fought her way past them as best as she could, but they remained a tight fog ensnaring her senses. And the pain from their attacks was distant, but constant. An unending migraine. Concentrating was goddamn hard. Doubly so with these giggling insects flitting around her with their dumbshit juvenile pranks.

From a bird's eye view, Scaphis was squatting on the mountaintop with two world-spanning arms groping out into the mirrored halves of Phobiopolis. Her reach was so wide, it had taken her until now to figure out exactly where the army was bombarding her. Like having an itch, being unable to scratch, and trying to pinpoint exactly what hair it had originated from. She would've loved to send her consciousness there and give them a proper punishment. As it was, she could only flail blindly and hope to hit back. Her 'grow a lot of arms with maces' technique had done well. Likewise 'send out a bunch of ground spikes'. But the bastards kept coming. She could see nothing about them, and didn't dare risk it. Her core had to remain on Anasarca to keep the balance. Plus, if her mind went wandering off, she'd be giving the pests here an open invitation to dive down her throat and grab the wand.

Finally she got the idea to simply spread herself everywhere. They couldn't keep running if there was nothing to run on but paralyzing plastic, right? She stretched out to cover the mountaintop like cake frosting. But goddamn Becky stymied that plan. She threw down planks and walls and doors to make paths for the others. The insects never even broke stride!

Scaphis shrank back. Wide was not the answer. She had to get smarter. Their whole plan revolved around swarming. Multiple attacks from multiple angles. GAHH! Thinking would be so much fucking easier without those fucking machine gun bullets!! But they were bearable. These pussies were not true sadists. Otherwise they'd know the golden rule: you had to back off sometimes or else your victim would acclimate to the pain.

Junella's wands were proving to be worth every ounce of will she'd paid for them. Leaving streaks in the air like peeling taillights, she swung and looped and painted with them. She even got off a few tailblasts of skunk mist. Too bad Scaphis couldn't taste it.

Too late, she realized her enemy was ignoring the others and focusing solely on her. When a clumsy tentacle whuumphed into her path, she nimbly dodged. But that had been anticipated. A forest of spikes sprang up to surround her, and while she managed to thread herself past them, their target was her backpack. She heard a splintering, crackling, tinkling sound. When she looked back, she was leaving a breadcrumb trail of unbound imaginite behind her.

'Shit!! Of course Toby got the dumbfounded one! Which I guess I won't be seeing again any time soon...'

Scaphis squealed with triumph. "CONFISCATED, BITCH!!!"

Seeing red, Junella filled her hands and fired off twelve pistol shots at lightning speed. "Oh no! I'm so helpless and unarmed!" she snarked. She pitched the spent revolvers sideways and mindfucked two more.

Scaphis had pissed the skunk off good. Better still, now that she was concentrating instead of just reacting, she could tell from the insects' occasional starward glances that part of their minds were devoted to their orbiting comrades. They weren't at their peak. Maybe a bit more demoralization would scatter them.

Piffle was still doing crazy figure eights. Becca was maintaining her tornado routine. Junella was quick as a shadow. Zinc was using the car blades to block her every attempt to squash him. But, she noticed, he was slower than the rest.

And he was panting like a husky in summer. Carrying around an armored car was no easy feat. Even miniaturized, the Fearsleigher weighed a ton. At least the spinning produced a nice breeze to keep him cool. And of course, the blades were peachy for lacerating Scaphis.

She tried again to sideswipe him. Zinc swiveled to meet her attack, fucking up her incoming fleshfinger like a hot dog stuck in a metal fan.

Scaphis held back the pain. It was anticipated. It was necessary.

Zinc didn't see the thinner, faster pseudopod that darted in behind him. But he certainly felt its grip on his spinal column. "GHRRK!!!"

Scaphis zoomed in to unwrap her prize. "No gloating! No intimidation! Straight to the punishment!" A dozen fingers yanked his pants off and six more began pulling the bones out of his legs.

"ZINC!!" Piffle and Junella both hollered.

Zinc shrieked ferally. The pain was transcendent. With the only remaining scrap of his mind that still functioned, he reached a juddering hand towards his own throat.

"NO EASY OUTS THIS TIME!" Scaphis grew two more hands to pluck his wrenches off. She even unscrewed them this time, making sure he wouldn't bleed out again.

Zinc whimpered.

Piffle howled in fury. She zoomed back and forth, pummeling Scaphis with the gatling gun, turning her will into more and more bullets. When the monster wouldn't let her poor Zinky go, she remembered Scaphis' obsession with her voice. She parked herself right behind the bulbous plastic head and proceeded to demolish every last one of her speakers.

The problem with this was, she stopped moving.

A mighty swat sent the hamsterfly tumbling ass over teakettle. She dropped the gun. The world wouldn't stop spinning long enough to let her see where it landed.

Junella had taken refuge behind a jagged chunk of mountain. She had only the thinnest line of sight to her partner. She went through three guns trying to put a killshot in his head. Most ricocheted off his wrenches. A few hit his legs. 'Sorry, sorry, sorry!' She hoped he was in too much overall pain to notice.

Rebecca was trying her best to intercede, but Scaphis was waving whips of herself around like lariats. The random swinging was scoring more strikes than if she'd aimed.

Junella emptied four more chambers of her revolver, then finally sunk a bullet in her favorite mutt's skull.

But it didn't free him. Junella's laugh of triumph spiraled into gape-mouthed horror. Zinc had died, yes, but his body was flopping, spasming, seizing. His legs and wrenches doubled. His face filled with eyes and noses. She finally saw the tentacle that had burrowed under Zinc's skin to hold his brainstem in place. 'Jesus Christ, she remembered from Dysphoria...'

Zinc's body juddered in unfathomable pain until his parts settled back into a singular configuration. He was shaking head to toe, eyes wide and glazed.

Scaphis could practically see his beating heart pummeling his ribs. And his legs were intact! "OH BOY! I GET TO DO THAT ALL OVER AGAIN! THANKS, JUNELLA!!"

'Motherfucker!'

Piffle's wings had caught her by now. Scaphis hadn't flung her as far as Toby, but she was definitely out of bounds. She could see the whole mountaintop below her. Scaphis was in the center, hurting her beloved, with long vinyl vines of herself twisting down Anasarca towards the left and right halves of Phobiopolis.

That gave her an idea. She looked up and scanned the stars. Way over there was a dot of pink. She waved. Piffle waved back. Piffle popped her fork out. Piffle did too.

Zinc wasn't thinking much of anything, but it did occur to him to wonder if it was possible to scream your voicebox inside out. It wasn't bad enough when Scaphis had surgically excised his femurs, fibulas, and tibias. Now he had them back, so now she was doing it all over again. Fuckaroo, did this ever suck eggs. Dimly he could hear Junella yelling and taunting, trying to get Scaphis' attention. But the bitchmonster was having far too much fun disassembling him to notice.

Scaphis' giggles were obscene.

The pain was like thunderbolts from an angry god, but Zinc thought he saw an inbound pink-and-gold comet.

'Goodbye, sweet fork,' Piffle thought, and gave it a farewell kiss.

The twin Piffles streaked like ICBMs towards Scaphis' big ugly head. They held their forks like jousting lances and intercepted simultaneously. The hamsterfly merely intended to give her opponent a double whammy of a headache, but something much more interesting happened. In the instant when the two forks impacted, Phobiopolis tried to merge them into one, as it did when any mirrored objects neared. But Scaphis' flesh could not be pierced. So, physics compromised. The fork became singular inside of her void. Lodged in place.

Scaphis let loose an unholy symphony of bestial screeching.

Piffle had performed a proper Kamikaze landing, so she needed a few moments to get herself alive again. But Junella seized the moment. 'Goddamn her tenacity,' she thought of Scaphis as she ran towards Zinc. Even in the midst of a full-blown hissy-fit, the bitch wasn't letting go of him.

Zinc's eyes rolled towards his partner when she arrived at his side. Whatever he said in greeting, it was drowned out in the sonic assault of Scaphis' screams. Most of his legs were pulled pork by now. His wrenches were tossed aside. Junella scratched like a wildcat at the tentacle holding his spine prisoner.

It was INSIDE of her!!! The fork throbbed in Scaphis' face like a four-alarm toothache. Her face-flanges grew inwards, desperately tugging. But it was stuck like glue. For chrissakes, would she have to bite down and bend the goddamn thing!? And something was nagging at her elsewhere. Was Zinc trying to...? No, SHE was!

A palm the size of a barn door slammed down over Junella. "GOT YOU!!!"

The skunk's outer shell cracked in half a dozen places. Flattened to the dirt, she groaned.

The hand molded itself around her and held her up beside Zinc. Once Scaphis was sure that neither of them could move, she concentrated half her will on keeping Becky from rescuing them, the other half on getting rid of that pissshitdamnfucking FORK!!

Junella tried to wriggle out of Scaphis' grip and couldn't. A trickle of her inner ink dripped down into her eye from the fissure in her forehead. Scaphis was doing that paralysis shit again, but if Piffle could talk back to her, Junella knew damn well she could too. "I wish... you had eyes." she told Scaphis. "Give me a place... to stick... my thumbs in..."

Zinc weakly giggled.

Scaphis held her response until she finally got a good grip on the fork with one of her tentacles and folded it in half (scraping the hell out of the roof of her mouth in the process). She yanked the intruder out and pitched it away. It ricocheted off a rock into orbit. "THERE!!! FINALLY!!!" She turned her attention to Junella. "And what a surprise. This little dolly can talk. I'll bet she says five different phrases when you pull on her string."

Junella narrowed her eyes in hatred. "Eat... shit..."

Zinc hadn't been paralyzed; he was just thoroughly messed-up. "Nah," he croaked. "Don't tell her that, Juney. Cannibalism's a sin."

Junella guffawed. "High... five..."

Zinc glanced at his bare shoulder mounts. "Can't."

Scaphis shook her head. "You two are SOOOOOO funny. Funny-pathetic. Funny-useless. A couple of dildos that can kill a few constructs and think they're special." She squeezed Junella tighter.

The skunk felt her shoulders shatter. Her thighs split open. More of her ichor was dribbling out onto the ground beneath her feet. Gasping, she struggled to hold her will together. "Your... breath... stinks..."

Scaphis angled herself over the skunk, casting her in shadow. "You're a loser, Junella. A hotheaded brat. Toby tells me you used to be a psychopath when you were bitsy. What a shock! You've been whining and bitching and picking fights ever since you came out of a cunt, haven't you?"

Orange record labels flared. Even as the fist around her tightened, Junella kept her mind clear enough to force her words out. "Whatever the hell... you think you are... I know in my heart... I'm WORSE."

The void smirked at her bravado. "Worse than me at staying alive? Certainly." She clutched a little tighter, enjoying the sound of the crunch. "Oops! Was that your fingers?"

Piffle had been watching this horrorshow unfold. Rebecca was held back by the lassos Scaphis swirled, so it was up to one small chubby hamsterfly. Her friends needed her. Which meant she needed a plan. She thought about calling out for Rebecca to look for the gatling gun. Maybe bring it to her. But for one, Scaphis might overhear. For two, the gun hadn't been all that effective. Sure it made Scaphis flinch a lot, but she was clearly developing a tolerance. More of the same wasn't gonna cut it. Piffle needed to think up something new, and big, and fast.

She looked at Junella struggling in unquenchable fury. Zinc splayed out like a dissected frog. Trapped. Frozen.

Wait.

The idea was unthinkable. Suicidal. But it felt right. And Junella had said that stupid ideas were the best of all.

Piffle rolled up her sleeves and walked with quiet determination towards her enemy. She braced herself. This would not be easy. But she'd filled the willwell at Lady Xenoiko's inn. She'd filled the willwell at Rippingbean & Woofingbutter's. Maybe she could imagine Scaphis as just one more great big cash register.

'If she can paralyze people, why can't I?' she thought, and waded in.

***

"...i...o...?"

"...ire...ob...?"

"Sire Toby?"

The mouse opened his eyes to a panorama of stars. Very beautiful. He felt weightless. 'Oh wait, I think I literally am...'

"Sire? Are you finally awake? Good heavens, that took ages!" George whinnied in relief. "I cannot fathom what nightmarish chaos is going on back at Anasarca."

Toby's mind felt very light and airy. "Right, George. We were fighting." He recalled the last few moments and frowned. "I let her get me angry. I was emotional. She took advantage of that. Smart move, actually. My fault."

"Sire, please do not blame yourself!"

"Not blaming, just... accepting responsibility."

His master's voice seemed oddly disconnected. George scanned the galaxy. He had maintained Phobiopolis' position, but they were quite a long ways out from it. Distressingly far. Madam Tarrare's throw had been mighty. And it was damnably cold out here in the vacuum. He could feel the capillaries in Sire Toby's fingers and eyelids turning to ice. "We should return as soon as possible. Though I am not sure how."

Toby looked puzzled. "Can we move?"

"Yes, but there is nothing to move against. We are adrift."

A very soft chuckle. "Use your wings, goofball."

A snort. "We are still intertwined, you and I. We would have to separate first. And we are currently out of potion."

A slightly richer laugh. "C'mon, George! Think creatively. We can do anything we want. Anything. You can grow them back, I know you can."

"I am not so certain," the construct confessed.

"You've still got those four spider-arms sticking out of my back, right?"

"Well, yes."

"Then patch some skin over 'em. Take mine if you need to. Use 'em for sails."

George's eyelights flared. "Sire! I feel intense humiliation for not arriving at that idea myself!!" With grunting strain, he forced strips of fat and sinew to pour from cracks in his calcium. Knitting them together without normal gravity was annoying, but soon he had two presentable flaps of flesh. He tested them out. They swooshed nicely.

Toby chuckled. George didn't know how flight actually worked, so even though there was no air out here, his wings still pushed against it to propel them forward.

The stallion directed them back towards the mountain. It was a microscopic speck among trillions, but luckily he also felt the same ethereal tug that had brought him and his master down to Scarlatina months ago. Easy enough to follow. He knew he had no time to lose. He rearranged Sire Toby as aerodynamically as possible and churned space with his wings like he was beating the devil. "I must hope that our companions have not already succumbed to Madame Tarrare. Again, I express my shame and apology for not regaining my wings on my own."

"Don't worry about it," Toby replied serenely. "Que sera sera. You're a good horse."

George had to wonder if the lack of oxygen was making his master slightly drunk. "In my defense, I believe the idea eluded me because my attention was focused wholly on your own well-being, Sire."

"Awwww," Toby said. He hugged himself, and therefore George. "How long till we get back?"

"At my current speed..." He calculated. "Not soon enough. I will attempt to go faster."

Toby smiled. "You're good at that, George."

***

Junella was a smashed licorice lollipop. She was pretty sure she had more cracks than body left. Her ink was barely holding together her shards.

"C'mon, stinkass. Gimme some more wisecracks," Scaphis cooed. "I don't think you can stand many more of mine." She upped the pressure again.

Junella could barely breathe. Onyx blood poured from her nostrils, her eyes, the corners of her mouth. She tried to hit Scaphis with a witty comeback, but literally all she could do was spit on her.

"Oh ho ho ho!" Scaphis chuckled. "Big Bad Junella Brox! Who's the toy now? Who's in power now? I'm wringing you out like a dishrag! You punk! You walking trashcan! You bigmouth, swaggering, posturing, bragging NOBODY!!"

Rebecca was desperate for an opening. She had all sorts of junk to fight with, but this configuration was unfamiliar and it was taking more energy than she'd counted on to keep it whirling. Plus, Scaphis had her beat for sheer meanness. The more she tried to aim some chunk of herself in there to put a merciful end to her friends, the easier it seemed for Scaphis to shove it aside.

The void laughed. "You're a dirt smudge, Junella. After I kill you, no one will even remember your name."

Gritting her teeth, mind ablaze with agony, the skunk coughed out, "Be... fore..."

Scaphis grew a giant ear. "What's that? Speak up! You're mumbling!" She unclenched the slightest bit, having a feeling this was gonna be good.

Those bleeding record label eyes stared deep. "Before... this day is... done..." She coughed. "I... will... taste... your... blood..."

Scaphis pouted. "Vulgar as always. Maybe I'll just keep you like this. Put you in a jar on my shelf. Mark it, 'shithead preserves'. How's that... sound?"

Something was pushing her.

Not an object, but a force. A feeling. Not like the poison from before (which was thankfully fading). This felt like a weight on her consciousness. She looked around, then back at Junella. "Are you doing that? Stop it."

Junella didn't have the energy to respond, 'I ain't doin' nothing but dying, fuckface.'

Scaphis' void swept back and forth like a periscope. The weight was getting heavier. It was nothing she couldn't deal with, but it was an unknown factor. She wanted it known. Finally, she sensed something behind her. She'd thought at first that maybe a rock had rolled into her flesh.

When she turned, there was Piffle.

The hamsterfly stood ankle-deep in skin. Four fists clenched. Glaring daggers. Bleeding from both nostrils. And shivering head to toe from an effort beyond the bounds of possibility.

Scaphis marveled. "Are you actually...?"

"LEAVE HER ALONE!!!" Piffle exploded. "LEAVE ZINC ALONE!!! LEAVE ALL OF US ALONE!!! GO AWAY FOREVER, YOU STINKING DIRTY JERK!!!"

Scaphis was tickled pink. The little fluffball was actually attempting to counteract the will of Scaphis Fucking Tarrare! All by her precious little self! "Well bless your heart," she said sweetly. "You mean this thing?" She held up Junella's dripping body. "You want me to stop being mean to it?"

Every muscle in Piffle's body trembled. Her lips were stretched back in a snarl. This felt like holding up the Empire State Building. Like trying to juggle it. But she had to. Because her friends needed her. Even if this busted her brain like a spent fuse, she had to. Taking a deep breath, she pushed down harder.

Scaphis rocked back slightly. "Gosh, that almost scared me."

Zinc managed to wheeze, "Go Piffle!"

"Comments from the audience are not appreciated," Scaphis turned around just far enough to extend a needle-thin tendril to plunge through his crotch into his intestines.

He coughed up red and twitched. "What're you waitin' f-for, Ju-Juney? Quit b-bein' lazy and k-k-kill this joker."

Junella would have normally tossed back a faux-confident one-liner. But now she was quiet. Not dead, but playing possum. Doing that Toby-thing of stilling her mind so she could think. Maybe she had a way out of this after all. She'd never done it before. She'd come damn close, but never all the way.

Piffle was grinding her teeth. She envisioned a giant willwell dial on Scaphis' forehead. She had to move that red line further. It was barely inching along now. But nothing in heaven or hell could make her stop pushing.

Scaphis giggled. "I really shouldn't laugh. The fact that you think you have a chance isn't funny, it's sad. Tragic. You're my pets now. And you thought being my footstool or my toilet seat was bad? Heh. That was my version of a friendly prank. I'm going to keep you for a long, loonnnnngg time. You'll be puppets on a string. I'll make you suffer and die over and over until your minds break. I'll make you beg for nonexistence. But it'll never come. I will never stop punishing you for what you've done to me today. And when Toby gets back, he'll join you."

Junella had been concentrating everything on changing her perception of herself. Her outer shell was not her. It was just skin. Loose. Unimportant. Like the record shards in her tail. She could lose it all and it didn't matter. Her blood was all that mattered. Her ink. Her juice. Her essence. "H...how... d-di-did..."

Scaphis turned to Junella. "What's that, girl? What's that? You wanna go outside? Wanna go walkies?"

"...Ald...dridge's..."

Scaphis grew her face-flanges out to bat them like eyelashes.

Junella's eyes blazed. "...d-di-DICK... TASTE?"

Scaphis sneered. "Oh ew. You can shut up now." She gave one more squeeze, Not enough to be fatal. She didn't want a reborn skunk running around.

Yet when she clenched, the last of the skunk's body crumpled like a milk carton. And as if she'd struck oil, a torrent of black liquid shot up and out.

'I didn't squeeze that hard,' Scaphis thought.

The stream of ink arced over her fist and splattered on the ground in a puddled mess.  

Then in an instant, it yanked itself up to standing, mindfucked a revolver, and spent the chambers directly into her tormentor's face.

While Scaphis yowled, Zinc cracked up. "HA-HAAA!!! You're a ZIT, Juney!"

Teeth and eyeballs rolled out of the sludge just long enough to wink at him. Then she took off running as fast as this threadbare form could take her.

Scaphis gagged and spat out bullets. "YOU CAN'T DO THAT! IT'S NOT FAIR!!"

On liquid legs Junella sped along, leaving a drippy trail behind. Her oily heart was visible, jiggling around in her chest. She poured herself behind a rock, then popped around an oozing hand for six more shots. "I ca' duh anyfin' I WAUNT!" she slurred back. "Ah'm Junegga Fuggin' BRAWKS!!!"

Zinc wagged his tail. "Knock 'em out, Junebug!"

"You shut your dumbass mouth," Scaphis spat petulantly, and punched him two feet into the ground.

Black, ugly spots were encroaching on Piffle's vision. Her antennae hung limply across her face. The strain was unbearable. But the part of her still capable of awareness saw that Junella wasn't nearly as fast as normal in her ooey-gooey form. Scaphis would catch her like this.

Piffle tried to rise above her mind and body, to see the battle from an ascended vantage. She had told Toby once that visualization helped when filling a willwell. She let herself take in the whole scene from above, like pictures in a book. She saw Scaphis, saw Junella, saw Zinc, saw Rebecca. She pictured reaching out with great big hands, holding Scaphis down.

Junella ducked and shot and ran and shot and ducked. She could not keep this up for long. It was not only taking all her adrenaline-fueled will to retain cohesion, but she was leaving a dotted line behind her. Every lost drop made her shrink. 'And I lost my scarf too, goddammit.'

Scaphis grew a giant hand. Big enough to crush a pickup truck. She aimed it at Junella, but the slippery little bitch wouldn't stop moving. And then her hand started to shake. That pushing feeling was getting stronger. She felt a phantom grip around her wrist. She was slowing down. "STOP THAT!! YOU CAN'T!!!"

Zinc was a shambles but his brain was still intact. He closed his eyes and put his consciousness down low. He pictured Piffle. Sweet, fun, smiling Piffle. He pictured holding her pretty paw in his wrenches. Pictured giving all his will to her like a blood transfusion.

Scaphis' hand trembled. It ground to a halt.

The edges of Piffle's mouth struggled into a grin.

The flanges around Scaphis' void rattled threateningly. "STOP THAT! STOP IT RIGHT NOW! I'M WARNING YOU! I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL DO WORSE! YOU BETTER LISTEN TO ME, YOU BEDWETTING DITZ!"

Piffle pushed harder. The red line moved faster.

Scaphis turned her void towards the hamsterfly. Her tongue began to emerge. She should've tried this sooner. The black length grew and grew. Starlight glinted off the emerald tip. Only a few had ever recovered from her erasure. Aldridge had. And Driuwej. Doing it to them a second time proved ineffective though. If they could claw their way back once, doing it again was a cakewalk. But Scaphis didn't need permanent catatonia now. She only needed to put a braindead animal to sleep for a moment.

Piffle watched the green-headed snake emerge, remembering perfectly well what it had done to her before. She accepted this fate. If Scaphis sent her back in time again, then, well, she'd get to see her toyshop again. And Mary. And all the kids. That wouldn't be so bad.

The emerald tip parted the fur of Piffle's forehead.

Then it went flying.

After slicing the tongue in half with her cutlass, Junella swung around it in a loop-de-loop and poured herself directly into Scaphis' mouth. She did not waste time on witticisms. Her blade flew like a hornet. Chunks of tongue bounced all around. Chopped salami. The skunk kept her balance despite the constant banshee wails making her ichor ripple. And just to be sure, she reached inside her guts and mindfucked the tube of Instant Window they'd used to repair the Fearsleigher umpteen times. It wasn't meant to cauterize tongue stumps, but it'd do in a pinch.

Scaphis split the heavens with her bellowing. She jammed fingers and flanges into her void to root out the invader, but it is hard to hold onto a liquid that does not want to be held. When she tried to use her paralysis, there was a glass wall between her and the ability.

Piffle smiled.

Junella drooled herself out of Scaphis' gross facehole and hit the ground running. She was limping quite badly. Every step hurt. This form felt like an all-over sunburn. Any other time when she'd gone melty like this, she had at least some shell to hold onto. Now she felt like a naked newborn.

Gurgling, fuming, furious, Scaphis whirled around and flung a garden of chained hooks at her.

One caught her in the back, but she let it schlorp right through.

"NO!!!" Scaphis blared. She wrenched her giant arm free from Piffle's mental grip and clumsily pitched it at the fleeing skunk like a toppling building.

Junella saw its shadow rising in front of her. Without a second to spare, she jammed a hand in her ribs and yanked out the detonator.

Scaphis saw it too late to recognize it.

"Now, please."

BOOM.

***

They were close now.

It is hard to build momentum in space, but once you do there is nothing keeping you from accelerating exponentially. The mouse and construct were traveling faster than the speed of sound. Toby had his arm out in front of him, fingers in a fist. His eyes were closed.

'My hammer is my hand. My hand is as dense as lead. My hand is as dense as the sun. My hand is as dense as the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.'

"George?" he spoke.

"Yes, Sire?"

"When we hit, call the lightning. Call all of it."

"I was already planning to," George replied happily. "If for no other reason than theatrical flourish."

Toby chuckled. "I'm sure it'll look cool. But don't direct it at her."

"...Excuse me?"

"I have a better idea."

***

Scaphis called upon the wand to force the brain-splitting tinnitus away. The explosion was over too fast to feel, but it left behind a deep throbbing ache from the massive deformation of her head. And her mouth was full of shrapnel now. Gross.

When her sight refocused, she saw that the mutt was back to full health. The skunk and fly were in his shadow, protectively. They looked like a melted scoop of double fudge, and a woman aged prematurely to her hundreds.

Zinc's voice was nonchalant, but his bloodshot eyes pulsed with hatred. "Dunno if you've noticed yet, but you've got a little problem with your face there. Ever try nailing a nice painting over it instead? Maybe a horse's ass? A garbage barge? Be an improvement."

From out of her form grew four massive gryphon's talons, which she sunk into the rock to drag her void closer to him. Her speakers were gone. She was back to basics. White words appeared in her hollow:

	YOUR
	SUFFERING
	WILL
	OUTLIVE
	THE
	SUN

In response, he fired up his doorknockers and set them spinning. Double-dutch intersecting parabolas to shield himself and the girls.

She laughed soundlessly.

	MORE
	CIRCUS
	STRONGMAN
	SHIT
	ALL
	YOU'RE
	GOOD
	AT

Rebecca couldn't see the words, but she knew Scaphis well enough to infer their ugliness. She was so damn tired. Maybe this one last idea would work. Gathering her focus, she compressed the remaining bits of herself into a megalithic railroad spike to drive into her nemesis.

Scaphis was a bit surprised. But after all the other crap she'd been through, this was nothing. She turned around and made sure Becky could see just how easily she oozed herself out from around the spike. She took the time to regrow her voice. "Good try, Beckers. You get an A for effort."

A cry of exhausted rage echoed from within the living junkpile. She scattered and whirled around the main bulk of Scaphis' body in a chainlink pattern, fencing her in.

Scaphis went along with it, purely to be contrary. "Ooh, better! Except, there's this little podunk town called Rhinolith that had walls too. And I just, y'know, poured myself over the top."

"GOD, DO YOU EVER STOP TALKING!?" Rebecca shrieked. "YOU'RE LIKE RADIOACTIVE WASTE!!! THE LONGER SOMEONE'S EXPOSED TO YOU, THE MORE IT CHIPS AWAY AT THEIR SOUL UNTIL THEY JUST WANNA DIE!!"

Scaphis shrugged. "Good idea. Do it."

Rebecca's groan was that of a patient suffering a long-term illness.

"Oh for fuck's sake, you weak bitch," Scaphis spat. "You've never been anything but a useless leech. A fifth wheel in every conversation. A hundred years ago when REAL things were happening, you waltzed in like you deserved a seat at the grownups' table. You've NEVER had anything important to say! And look at you now! Mostly junk and empty space! That's PERFECT for you! BECKY POLIDORI, THE BIG FAT ZERO!"

She clenched her corral tighter, knowing it didn't matter. Sheer frustration. Her words were slurred with tired exasperation. "Fine, Scaphis. That's fine. You know what? I'd rather be that than what you are. Zero's better than a negative."

"It's not more powerful," Scaphis replied.

Rebecca clenched again. "Power? You think that matters? I have a life where I'm loved, Scaphis. You never will. Think of all the people you've ever known, and who've ever known you. None of their lives would be worse if you'd never been alive."

"FUCK YOU!!!" Scaphis bleated back, having no clever comeback for that.

"Not one of them."

Toby thought he'd have thank Rebecca later for giving him a bullseye to aim at.

THHHOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

***

George and Toby hit like an extinction-bringing meteor.

The ground turned to powder. The air turned to electricity.

Everyone but Scaphis died, of course, but that was to be expected. Toby had once read a sci-fi book where aliens conquered Earth by dropping big metal rods from space. The projectiles didn't have to be enormous, because the speed they reached created mind-boggling force at the moment of impact. Enough to cause planet-shattering earthquakes. Though he was just a mouse with a hammer. So he merely caused a stadium-sized crater in the already battered remains of Anasarca's summit. Scaphis lost her voice again. Fissures widened. Rocks rained upwards.

George called the lightning. The construct drew upon every ounce of his newborn will to fill the battlefield with thunderbolts. They struck in a wide pattern, turning the pulverized silt of the mountain into a mile-wide encrustation of glass. That had been Toby's idea. To put a stop to her tunneling, or at least turn it into its own punishment. He'd learned from a first-aid program that jamming your arm through a window resulted in a lot of scratches and bleeding.

When the air cleared, the new glaze was not a perfect ice rink sheen over everything. Lightning glass looks more like fractals. Everywhere was coated, but from out of it rose gnarled octopoid arms. Baked translucent trees. Some of the cracks that Toby opened, George had glued shut. And in the center of ground zero, Scaphis was trapped beneath a contorted lake of searing hot glass four inches thick.

Toby stood upon it, watching her. Ignoring the soles of his sandals burning right through to his skin. Scaphis' greatest mistake was in thinking she'd been rid of him. Any rational mind, having seen what he and George had done together, would have known better.

The others could still hear the fading echo of the heavensfall punch. They lurched blearily back to life.

Rebecca was not feeling good. She'd lost half her materials under the glass. She cobbled the remaining scraps together; a few dragged sooty shards, fused on and heavy.

Zinc coughed up a rock and dug another one out of his ear. He blinked and looked around, wondering where the girls had gone. Two wiggling feet caught his attention. He hot-footed it across the scorching glass to where Piffle was trapped upside down in it. He was not so fatigued he couldn't grin. "I see London, I see France." He readied a wrench to smash her spine.

A bullet got there before him. Piffle disappeared and popped back again, rightside up. She looked to see who'd killed her. "Zinc?"

"Nope, it-" He turned. "JUNELLA!!"

They both ran to her. She was draped across one of Rebecca's couches, which was about the only break she'd caught. The skunk remained an inkstain.

"How!?" Zinc yelped.

She was a flattened, watery stripe of tar. Barely able to hold her head up and shrug. "Beatsh me. Mebbe I spen too lawng like dish."

Becca's voice came out of the cushions. "At least we're all still here. After... whatever that was."

"So we are!" came a buoyant voice.

Everyone was glad to see George again. He trotted over and received many hugs, plus a brief, babbling summation of events.

"Lean dauwn, Juh-orgie. Ah need sum struc'ure." Junella began to slither her way weakly up his ribs. "Guezz ah c'n drape muhse'f ovuh like a blankit. Yuh carry meh; I'll fiyuh mah gun."

George looked upon her with grave sympathy. Then his colors flared. "I believe I have just been enlightened with a better solution. Let us check first upon Sire Toby though. He may need us."

The five trudged across the still-smoldering ground. Piffle noticed Zinc was wincingly barefoot, so she gave him her boots and dumbfounded a second pair. He nuzzled at her antennae. Rebecca shaped some flotsam into a makeshift furson-shaped avatar. They stopped at the lip of the crater. Junella peeked past George's neck. At the very bottom, Scaphis looked like a laminated sea monster.

Toby stood in the center, visible as a bare bulb.

Hearing their footfalls, he looked up at them. The mouse displayed no readable expression, but his eyes were wide and unblinking. Seeming to see the breadth of every dust mote across the cosmos.

Rebecca shuddered. Those eyes reminded her of Aldridge's, back when he had reshaped the world.

Toby saw that his friends were shaken, tired, and drained. Their resurrections had banished any physical wounds, but the aftershocks were apparent. Yet they were still holding on. Scaphis had not reclaimed them. Toby nodded, proud to stand with all of them.

He saw Zinc open his mouth. About to shout something breezy and encouraging, no doubt. But then he heard the crackle of shifting glass and immediately sped towards the sound.

Scaphis could have broken through, given enough time. Or squished her way through clefts in the bedrock. But that would have been a lot of work. Much easier to find a gap at the edge of the glass and pour herself out from under it.

Toby's burnt paws streaked towards the bubble of vinyl. Without a word, he engaged his hammer and began to thrash without mercy. His arm blurred to invisible. He dealt out blows as fast as the gatling gun. Letting her know that the smart thing was to stay down.

Zinc gawked. "Change of plans, fellas. Toby's playing lead on this one. We're his backup band."

The others agreed. They slid down the crater wall to join him.

Scaphis felt the rapid-fire hammerstrikes as if a woodpecker was perched on her head after a hangover. Everything ached. She could see a white blur through the glass, enough to know the goddam mouse had gotten back from his spacewalk somehow. And brought another bomb with him, apparently? She didn't know how all this transparent shit had gotten here. Quick-drying glue? It didn't matter. This was merely one more annoyance among many. She pushed past the seam, squeezing herself towards Toby's blows. The pain just added fuel to her fire.

Toby observed everything. The looming bulk of Scaphis oozing her taffylike form to freedom. The glass scorching zebra stripes into her flesh. The sound of boots and hooves running to join him. The flash of his hammer. His heartbeat.

Squelching, stinking, burbling, reddened, toxic hellbent plastic rolled itself over the edge to advance upon her tormentors. They never let up, these shitdrinking maggots. These parasites. Even her own boundless imagination was at a loss for sadism sufficient to what they deserved. She had never, in all her existence encountered such resistance. To say one good thing about her betrayal by Luxy and Aldridge, it had been quick. She'd been on top of the world one moment, then awoken as a doll. She was left at the beginning of the world in the Blackdamp, where it had taken her months to move again. Years to transition from crawling to walking. Over all that time, her will grew stronger and more powerful in its confinement. She had a goal she was dragging herself towards. And if it took infinity and a day, she would get herself back to the mountain to make the angel pay in blood. Luxy would come after: first the power, then the snake. Getting herself stuck in Trapforest Path had been the best bungle of her life. Whatever irritation this mouse was causing her now, he'd been usefully stupid enough to carry her out and onwards.

Like clicking off a lightswitch, Toby suddenly ended his assault. He dashed backwards a few yards, then stopped to watch her with total perception. She grew and grew until she was fully free of the massive lid he'd slammed over the crater.

They regarded one another. Waiting like chess players.

The others caught up and stood a respectful distance behind Toby. They had no idea what he was planning, but they were giving him room to do it in.

Gaze never wavering, Toby stared into Scaphis' void. A doorway in a living mudslide. The most alien form of any nightmare he'd faced. Even Logdorbhok had a body. He still marveled that she'd chosen this on purpose. To isolate herself from all. To play the eternal outcast. The world's biggest victim. The heroic underdog. Toby understood what Luxy had said about not hating her. He couldn't. He understood her too well now for anything but pity.

Holding his hand up, he showed her his palm. Then he let his hammer sink back into its sheath, fingers too. Leaving just a small, pink hand marred by the Neculaunis' greed.

He spoke with the pure, clear tones of a ringing bell. "I can't begin to know the pain you're in, Scaphis. For whatever I've done to hurt you, I genuinely apologize. You've put me through a lot too. Are we willing to call it even? It's not too late for both of us to walk away. You know what I want from you. This can all be over."

Her void inhaled and exhaled in rage, like the kiln of an iron foundry.

	YOUR
	PAIN
	HAS
	NOT
	EVEN
	BEGUN
	TO
	EQUAL
	MINE

Toby closed his eyes and shook his head. "Can't you just stop? Please? I am honestly asking you. You're not hurting anyone more than yourself. Let go of this."

Arms of ropy, bulging muscle emerged from her shapeless mass, clawing towards him.

	THERE'S
	LESS
	HATE
	IN
	HELL
	THAN
	THERE
	IS
	IN
	ME

Toby sighed. "Allright. I'll respect that." He launched himself towards her without an instant's hesitation. His metal fist was a jackhammer, putting blindingly-fast dents in her newgrown arms.

The void sneered in outrage as she grew another limb to crush him with.

He anticipated it, but the revolver bullets were appreciated anyway.

Junella could barely hold the gun. The recoil had almost blown her hand off. "No'uhn kills thuh clien'."

Seething, Scaphis vomited out a tangle of cactus arms towards the insubordinate skunk.

Before they could fly five feet, Toby smashed them off-course with a volley of fired hammers. "No. Your fight is with me now," he said firmly.

"FINE THEN," she screeched. The sound was distorted and watery, coming from the few speakers she'd as yet managed to birth.

Scaphis surged everything she had at him. Toby was eerily silent as they fought. He wasted no time on facial expressions, his face as blank as the glass below them. His arm was a machine to swing his hammer. And he did. Many times. He calculated like a computer, foreseeing her attacks coming: predictable and slow as tar. He blasted steel from his palm in every direction, always hitting his mark. But always mindful of his friends. They had also charged in, firing everything they had left. He loved them so much. Not a single hammer so much as grazed any of them. That was more important.

Zinc fell back on his earlier trick of detaching the doorknockers to use as melee flails. Longer reach, and he only had to hit hard enough to knock Scaphis' attacks away from Toby. She was growing arms fast enough to make the canine's eyes swirl. Barely aiming, just trying to overwhelm her opponents with sheer volume. Piffle shot to the top of the sky like a bottle rocket, spotted a brass gleam, and soon returned with Revenge Of The Gatling Gun. She looped back and forth, pumping out short bursts of cover fire. Becky was bone tired and out of ideas, but she flung her bits of trash at Scaphis with whatever scraps of fury she had left. Junella raised her revolver again, and this time her shot really did burst her paw like a water balloon. "Fugg."

George recalled his idea. In between prancing to and fro and lobbing fireballs, he asked, "Madam Brox, would you like to try something unorthodox?"

"Pleesz," she gurgled.

The stallion lifted his head and called out, "Madam McPerricone!!"

Piffle appeared dutifully overhead. "Need some guns?"

"Actually, Sire Toby entrusted you with four vials of potion, if I recall," he requested pleasantly.

"Sure!" She fished them out. "I got your number! You wanna get back with Toby so you two can do the fire-breathing dragon dance again?"

George smirked. "Not quite. He seems to be fighting remarkably well on his own. Could you please crack two vials open and pour them down? I have no hands, and Madam Brox is missing one herself."

A ludicrous smile came over the skunk's drippy face as she realized what he intended.

Toby swung his hammer like Hephaestus at the forge of Olympus. He was not consciously aware that he was hitting harder than ever before. Much harder than bone and muscle should have been capable of. He simply needed to, and did. The steel in his arm was as cooperative a partner as George had been. Soon it felt as if he existed to swing the hammer, and the hammer existed to swing him. Mutual tools for each other to wield.

The flanges around Scaphis' facehole fluttered like the stingers of wasps. Her pseudopods took on the shape of whatever murderous implement came to mind. "Your peace and love shtick didn't pan out, so it's straight to the violence, huh? Saint Toby! WHERE'S YOUR BIG HEART FULL OF MERCY NOW!?"

He bashed away a needle, blocked a mace, fired at a tree branch and pounded a beak. "I dunno. You ripped it out a while ago. Ask yourself."

Scaphis dimly heard the crack of a transformation potion. The mouse was her biggest priority though. The rest of these assholes were just riffraff. Their attacks were spitwads. But Toby... Oh, he'd come back changed. Damned if she knew how. But he was devoting himself wholly to the fight. And when he hit, it hurt. A different ache than all the others. Like a vibration echoing in her nerves. Bearable like all the rest, naturally, but she couldn't explain it. "I will EVISCERATE you! I will LIQUIFY you! I will make you BEG ME TO DIE!!!"

Toby swung his hammer. "I've spent my whole lifetime in pain already. In my bed, in Phobiopolis, in Dysphoria. You could almost say it was training me for this very moment. What do you honestly expect to do to me I haven't already endured?"

"I CAN TRY, SHITMOUTH!!! AND HAVE FUN DOING IT!! JUST LIKE WITH YOUR BUDDY, ZINC! YOUR PAL! I PULLED THE BONES OUT OF HIS LEGS! YOU SHOULD'VE SEEN IT! HE HOWLED LIKE A STRAY IN AN ALLEY!!"

Toby blocked a sucker-laden vinyl octopus tentacle. "That's terrible. You should be ashamed of yourself."

"I'LL DO WORSE TO YOU!!!"

Another voice chimed in, "No you won't, asshole."

Scaphis shrieked as a line of burning black acid fell across her tendrils. Whatever it was, it was globby and on fire and it dripped and it BURNED and it WASN'T COMING OFF. She flailed her many limbs and finally managed to shapeshift away from the horrible stuff.

"Want more? I got more."

Glass chipped and splintered under four charred hooves. They connected to a quartet of strong, bony limbs, each covered entirely in intricate grooves. A skeletal ribcage lead to visible vertebrae and a cascading tail: fur of silver-white and purest night. At the neck was not George's skull, but the beginning of a torso. Two grooved arms wielded a flaming cutlass and a handful of molten vinyl. And then, beneath a glorious mane of blazing shards, high-beam eyelights shone through record label holes. 

Junella opened her throat and unleashed thunder. "YOU SHALL HAVE NO OTHER GOD OF DEATH BEFORE ME!!!"

She slung her arm, casting another whip of hot sludge towards Scaphis. Vinyl is a class 1A flammable liquid. Meaning it burns like Satan's diarrhea after a chili-eating contest.

"NOW KNEEL, FOOL!!!"

Scaphis did not need this shit. This was turning into a cartoon. Now she had to dodge flaming skunk turds. This was fucking stupid. In her momentary distraction, Toby managed to catch one of her arms and nail it to the ground, crushing his hammer back and forth like stamping out a cigarette. She winced and reeled. She Did Not Need This Shit. She had to think. She had to concentrate.

'Okay, fine. If I have to keep myself here, then maybe I can get some peace by making those idiots at Rhinolith give up.'

If you can't strike your enemy, she knew, strike at whatever they loved.

***

Luxy was still blasting gleefully away, but by now he'd decided that this battle needed a general more than a figurehead. He stood upon Red's noble brow, surveying the skirmish from on high. When necessary, he called out out orders on his RB&WB brand walkie-talkie. Well, maybe not orders. That sounded too stuck-up. Suggestions then. Better. This was supposed to be fun after all.

He was a bit surprised when the bulk of Scaphis suddenly pulled away from the cluster of warriors. For a heartbeat he let himself hope that she was retreating. But no, of course not. Scrappy never took the easy way out. Like the world's biggest slug teaching itself to dance, he watched the titanic slab groped blindly around. Squishing people here and there, but not taking the time to savor their misery like she normally would. No, the vinyl kept on searching until it touched Rhinolith's outer wall. He wondered why the plethora of her already inside wasn't enough for her to find it. Maybe it was like when your foot fell asleep? Whatever the reason, once she'd found her target she started bashing herself against the city like a retarded dolphin attempting to escape a swimming pool.

The fortified barrier of skulls crumbled easily. Scaphis bludgeoned with an animalistic lack of care. Not targeting anything specific, just letting the peasants know that she was coming after what they valued more than their lives. The Bargeld bellowed as one and turned to charge and defend their home. Scaphis swatted massive chunks of wall away with the ease of turning crackers to crumbs. Spires and corbels toppled, liquefying anyone inside.

Luxy gave Scaphis a golf clap. "Actual strategy. Bravo. And only, what, forty minutes into the fight? That's an improvement." He scooped up his walkie-talkie, then put it back. A simpler option surfed past on a spectral hand. "Oh, Ike!"

The hyena swiveled around midair. He'd been zooming off to sing at Scaphis, but Luxy called the shots. "Yeah?"

Luxy pointed to the squadron of flaming handguns that was irritating their foe. "I need Miss Jing for a minnit."

Ike nodded. He cupped his hands to his muzzle. "YO JANIE!!! GETCHA ASS OVER HERE, DOUBLE TIME!!!"

Red shook his head at the painful volume, making Luxy wobble to keep his balance.

The illuminated rabbit flitted over, red-faced with anger. "Ike Fanshaw, you are an ill-mannered pottymouth and a scoundrel!"

He grinned.

She turned up her nose at him and scooted towards the mayor.

"That cement truck was a dilly tho'," he said.

An eyeroll. Then, begrudgingly, a fistbump. At least he appreciated her work.

Red sniffed the ghostly hand as it carried a bunny towards him. He wondered what it was made of.

Luxy hopped off the rustbeast's noggin onto the palm beside Janie. "Hiya. Can you do ribbons?"

Disarmingly to the point as always. She gave the raccoon a puzzled look and made several spools appear between her hands. "Obviously."

"No no, I mean a really BIG one!" Luxy held his arms out wide. Behind them, the booms of Scaphis demolishing Rhinolith sounded like falling timber.

"I suppose," Janie said.

"Great! I've got this idea, see, of taking all five containers of acid we got left, tying them to Red here, and having him do a sweet backflip onto Scaphis."

Red rumbled questioningly. He'd never heard the term before, but he could parse what a 'back flip' would entail.

Ike paled. "That's not leaving any in reserve if we need it!"

The raccoon shrugged. "A calculated risk." He lifted Janie's transparent paw and kissed it. "Can you do it for me, mademoiselle?"

"I... I..." She stumbled for a bit. It was a unique request, something she'd never made before. But then she set her lips in a determined scowl. She was the best in the world at this. If she couldn't, she didn't deserve the title. "I'll do my best, Mister Bleeder. But how are you going to tie it?"

He grinned. "I'll think of something. Probably poke 'Cada and 'Wej to see if they can spare a moment. We'll make it work. Don't worry. After all," he held up a pointer finger, "the letters in 'can't' appear nowhere in 'Luxy Bleeder'."

***

Toby was not consciously emulating Gilla-Gilla, but his new fighting style showed clear similarities. The porcupine had compensated for his small size with broad, looping movements, making use of momentum. Toby harnessed the recoil of his hammer-cannon the same way. When he fired, directing some of the power inward was enough to pull off skillful twirling jumps and blink-fast backhand attacks. He moved like a dancer. Like water.

Junella and George were having the time of their lives. This new form was pure fun for both of them. Junella catapulted noxious, clinging firemud, while her sword arm burned and slashed. She was laughing like a kookaburra the whole time, feeling like Shiva the destroyer. And seeing their bloodthirsty joy restored the others' morale as well. Some of their tiredness eased into a second wind. They began to regain creativity in their clashing. Rebecca discovered that the chunks of glass welded to her miscellania worked just great for impromptu dinosaur claws.

The void was unhappy. Yes, she'd gotten some breathing room when she ditched fighting the Bargeld to go knock over their big stupid cereal bowl. But now they were attacking again. They didn't seem to get the message. So she chewed into their city harder. If nothing else, she could derive some satisfaction from leveling it. And Toby was an enigma. Even striking completely at random wasn't getting results. Though, how about the psychological front?

Toby hit. He dodged. He blocked. He hit. He fired. He fired again. He blocked. He was confused for only a moment when one of Scaphis' vines seemed to deliberately miss and go past him. But then it snapped back like a tape measure and he felt the sting of his piercings being ripped out.

Scaphis waved the ribbon triumphantly in front of him. "Look what I got! Is this the yellow streak of a coward!?"

That was a pathetically cheap tactic. Toby didn't even have to glance down to dumbfound it back onto his arm. "You can't take what's mine."

Grimacing, she tossed the scrap of cloth aside. "I can take EVERYTHING from you!!! Your friends! Your life! The clothes off your back if I want to!"

"No, you can't," Toby reiterated, since she hadn't taken his meaning. "Whatever I know is mine stays mine." He blocked, hit, fired, and dodged.

"Then how 'bout I take your MEMORIES again!? Make you into a babbling toddler! Jam you so full of my special syrup that you'll forget how to not shit yourself!!" Her tongue was gone, but he didn't know that.

Toby launched hammers at six different pseudopods, hitting them all. He vaulted over a jab that shattered the ground below him. "A bullet doesn't need to know its name, only what it's pointed at," he replied.

She snarled in frustration. This zen koan bullshit was getting on her nerves. She stopped all her whirlwind attacks to mudslide an enormous amount of herself all over Toby's hammer arm, burying it to the shoulder. "HA!"

Toby was instantly paralyzed. But his hammer wasn't. He asked, and it launched backwards up his arm into his chest, killing him. When he returned a moment later, he resumed firing immediately.

Scaphis sputtered inarticulate growls. She spotted a familiar bit of home decor from within Becky's whirlpool and made a grab for it.

"Oh shit! Not that!!" Rebecca realized too late that maybe she should have hid the Neculaunis.

Scaphis whipped it at Toby like a club, but the mouse could dodge like a jumping bean. The silver door did not take a single scratch from gouging divots in the glass. Scaphis held the doorway open and tried to drop it over him like a net. But Toby didn't even need his hammer to push it away. The nothingness inside tingled a little where he touched it, but he didn't want to go through, so it was barred from taking him. Scaphis eventually gave up in disgust and pitched it out of sight like a Frisbee.

A very small smirk pulled back the corner of Toby's mouth. "Weren't you telling me about how that thing drove you crazy? That it was the real cause of what you did to us?" He dodged and fired some more. "Seems strange you'd pick it up again."

"OH SHUT UP!!! NO ONE LIKES A WHINY, NERDY SMARTASS!!!" she sneered. "YOU'RE JUST WASTING TIME HERE, TOBY! MAYBE I SHOULD SCREW MY TENDRILS DEEP INSIDE YOU, UP IN YOUR NERVES! MAKE YOU MOVE LIKE A HAND PUPPET! MAYBE I'LL MAKE YOU KILL AND RAPE YOUR FRIENDS! HOW'S THAT SOUND!?"

Toby blocked. He fired. He blocked. He dodged. "Why don't you do it if you can?"

"YOU PIPSQUEAK!! YOU UGLY PINKEYED PIECE OF SHIT!! YOUR BEHAVIOR IS OUT OF CONTROL!!! I'M YOUR SUPERIOR IN EVERY WAY, AND YOU'RE DISRESPECTING ME BY PUTTING ON THIS POINTLESS DICK-WAVING SHOW!! YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO WIN!! YOU'RE CAUSING YOUR FRIENDS NEEDLESS PAIN BY PROLONGING THIS! SO STOP DRAGGING IT OUT! YOU CAN'T WIN AGAINST ME! YOU'RE NOTHING! YOU'RE NOTHING!!!"

Toby didn't have George's fire anymore, but sheer air friction could turn his hammers red hot if he wanted them to be. "I was actually having that same thought a little while ago," he said conversationally.

"SO YOU ADMIT IT!?"

"Sure. Only it wasn't exactly right." Dodge. Hit. Block. Block. Hit. Fire. Fire. Fire. Dodge. Block. "I thought I was nothing. A blank sheet of paper. But that wasn't quite it. Because I don't just copy what I see, I reflect it."

Scaphis tried to collapse a wall of skin on top of him. A sweeping fan of hammers put a stop to that idea.

"It's not just mindless parroting. I'm a mirror. Which is not only more accurate, it's a nicer thought." Block hit block fire dodge block hit dodge block. "I show people what they show to me. I learn, and I return. George's loyalty. Piffle's embrace. Junella's passion and Zinc's calm. Luxy's insight. Everyone in Phobiopolis. They all built me. Even you, Scaphis. I'm only reflecting what you taught me to be."

"YOU'RE RAMBLING!!! THIS IS HIGH SCHOOL JOURNAL BULLSHIT! I'M NOT LISTENING!!"

Block block fire block dodge block hit dodge dodge dodge block fire block. "But I'm more than just glass. I'm diamond. So all you're really doing here, all the pain you feel, is just you punching a reflection and having it bounce back and smack you in the mouth."

"I'LL SMACK YOU IN THE MOUTH YOU PISSDRINKING CHICKENSHIT!!!"

DodgeBlockBlockBlockDodgeBlockDodgeDodgeBlockBlockBlock. "Are you trying to?"

"STOP MOVING SO FAST GODDAMMIT!!!"

"No," said Toby. Blockdodgeblockblockdodgedodgedodgedodgeblockdodgeblockdodgeblockdodgedodge.

"IT'S NOT FAIR!!!" Scaphis thundered. "I'M SUPPOSED TO WIN! YOU'RE MAKING ME SO UPSET, YOU PUS BAG! YOU INFECTED CYST! WHY DON'T YOU LEAVE ME ALONE!? YOU'RE A TERRIBLE FURSON!!! YOU'RE CRUEL AND EVIL AND YOU DO NOTHING BUT CAUSE PAIN AND MISERY!!! YOU'RE AWFUL, YOU'RE AWFUL, YOU'RE AWFUL!!!"

Toby didn't bother responding to that. He was completely unaware that his hammer had long since stopped being just a hammer. The metal flowed like liquid. It had swallowed his bracers to add more to itself. It became whatever the moment required. A shield, a sword, a crowbar, an axe, a scythe, a helmet. Or myriad nameless shapes that allowed it to bend and block two attacks at once, or a dozen. Whatever Toby needed, it fulfilled. The steel and his will were now indistinguishable. Inseparable. He moved the metal without any conscious thought. Toby watched it dance and thought it was beautiful. He was so grateful for it.

Scaphis kept on making noise. More shouts and insults. It wasn't important, so Toby didn't listen. He looked behind him instead. His friends seemed like they were having a good time. Rebecca was still poking Scaphis with plumbing fixtures and whatnot. Piffle pedaled the gatling gun like a champ. Her aviator's goggles were adorable. Zinc had gotten his hands on the car somehow, shrunk it down, and was now brandishing it like a whirling accordion of death. Toby chuckled. And Junella's tail looked great. Even cooler than her scarf. He wondered if she'd keep it. She and George made a good team. He was happy for them.

Blockblockblockblockdodgeblockdodgedodgeblockdodgeblockblockdodgedodgedodge.

He really wasn't hurting her anymore. Just putting his hammer in the way for her to hurt herself. It was kind of sad, actually.

Then something changed in her. All her vulgar rambling stopped. She clutched her head and started yowling like she'd gone insane. Her tentacles whipped around like snapped suspension cables.

Toby wondered for a moment what in the world was wrong with her.

"Oh! The people in Rhinolith must have done something," he guessed.

***

They had indeed. Five metric tons of methylene chloride was now chewing away at her flesh. Plus Red was really making her feel it. Lying on his back after his sweet flip (which a lot of the smallones clapped for, he was happy to hear), he was kicking his legs, squirming around, and grinding the stuff in like an Indian burn.

***

Scaphis screeched like a freight train's brakes. The ITCH!!! Oh god it was BACK! It was SO MUCH WORSE NOW!!! She could feel some kind of horrible liquid splashing her in both mirrored directions. A mile-wide pool of piranhas. It was insufferable! Maddening! They had to stop DOING this to her!

Toby cupped his hands, hoping she could hear him over her yowling. "Whatever's happening, will you please just take the hint!? You can't win, Scaphis! I'm never going to stop fighting you. Not because I want to play hero, but because it needs to be done. I'm not even important. You are. You need to be stopped. It doesn't matter who gets it done, it just has to happen. Like a chore. Like taking out the trash. Even if you manage to stop me somehow, I have all my friends here. All those people below. And the more concentration you lose, the more will come." He had no idea if she could hear him. "Scaphis, you can't fight everyone in the world! If you keep going on like this, that's exactly what you'll be up against!"

Panting, twitching, desperate. Her mind was a hornet's nest. What if they had more of that stuff? What if they just kept pouring it on? It was almost as bad as the fear-inducing potion. What if they had more of THAT too!?

Scaphis considered her options. Then slowly, a laugh began to rumble out of her. A deeply worrying laugh of someone who has just decided upon the unthinkable.

***

Some of the Bargeld, the very old and very young, had used the tub stations to evacuate. But more often, the shower heads were disgorging people into the battle. As word began to spread that the fight was on against the Plastic Storm, Lalochezians, Papilloma refugees, and just plain folks came pouring out of the drains with whatever weapons they could grab. They entered the chaos as fast as the Vermillion could deliver letters. (Scarlatina remained blissfully unaware as usual. But if they had known what was going on just to their north, a few of them certainly would have joined in too.)

One amongst the new influx was Gilla-Gilla. He'd made it through the woods to the derelict tub, then arrived in the market town streaked with construct gore. His bullets were spent and his axe was bent. And the town was in a panic. He was abruptly shoved out of the tub he'd arrived in so a brawny truncheon-wielding elephant could squeeze in. Once he learned the reason, the porcupine snapped into action. Racing to the nearest pawnbroker, he cut off his own ear as credit to borrow a painlauncher. Heading back to the tubs, he saw someone leaving their dirt bike behind as they exited the city. Gilla-Gilla decided that it was only practical to take it with him. 'And if I see the geezer again, I'll hand it back.' That was fair.

Vienna Tusk saw what was coming before anyone else. She'd climbed the outside of the northwest tower to take shots at the blob trying to bring down the walls. After getting very little response, she took a break to rest her shoulder. She angled around to view the two old wizards batting the tornado back and forth. Fuckin' madness, but a stunning sight. Then she spotted movement on the horizon. Looking through her scope, she verified the unbelievable truth.

She descended the wall at near-gravity speed, then ran to the nearest member of Luxy's expedition and passed on the news.

Ignatius Xenoiko hollered into his walkie-talkie, "She's retreating!!"

A tsunami of plastic was fast approaching Rhinolith. Rolling itself up like a windowshade. Slithering along with the muscular strength of a boa constrictor. Steamrolling everything in its path. Trees, hills, constructs. It seemed as tall as the sky itself, and as fast as an onrushing storm.

The Bargeld parted like the red sea. Clamoring and already celebrating, they got the living hell out of the way of the approaching vinyl juggernaut, spreading east and west as fast as their legs could carry them.

Red struggled to get himself turned over. He was like a turtle or a beetle whenever he was on his back. He could always get upright, it just took a week or so. Thankfully, the same spooky hands that had tied the pretty ribbon on him came down again to give him a boost. He bleated in thanks.

Driuwej was facing towards the rolling cataclysm, watching as it bore down upon them. "We should move," he suggested.

Waxacada blinked. He felt the growing tremble in the ground beneath his seat. "Maybe not."

His friend got a hunch as to what he was thinking. "The Finale?"

Waxacada nodded. They had always wanted to try it. But of course, that was the downside: they could only do it once. There was literally no way to know what would become of them afterwards. It was unknown. Exciting. "Oughtta send her a message."

Driuwej smiled too. The pair of them brought their hands together and interlocked their fingers. The flame surrounding them turned to a gorgeous, vibrant azure. Dazzling to behold. Even more impressive to be inside of.

The colossal wall of Scaphis jiggled their beards as it came closer and closer and closer. When the shadow fell upon them, the two sorcerers closed their eyes and unleashed every spark of will in their bodies in one last monumental explosion.

The colors were spectacular.

It had been Scaphis' intention to bulldoze Rhinolith completely. If she couldn't keep the city, no one else would. She'd drive the rubble into the ground and let them use the empty space for a litterbox. But this petty act of destruction was to be denied. Waxacada and Driuwej's swan song punched her up and over the city completely.  And it felt like a well-deserved spanking.

The massive beige lump knocked everyone off their feet when it bounced down on the other side. It sent out blind hooks to ensnare a final few, but missed almost all of them, and the unlucky ones were swiftly recovered by their clanmates.

Red skated out of the way just in time. It was strange to see something as big as himself move so fast.

Then off it went, on towards the mountain from whence it came. Scaphis was finally out of their lives.

A cheer of eardrum-busting proportions went up among the crowd.

Helmets and weapons were thrown in the air. Guns were fired. People hugged and shouted and shed tears of profound relief. The nightmare of all nightmares had retreated. They had beaten it back. They had won. Rippingbean wrapped his arms around Woofingbutter and dipped him in a fiery kiss. Ike and Janie had fallen out of the sky when their spectral hands disappeared, and now they rolled around like kids, tickling each other and laughing. Vienna elbowed her way through the revelers towards her family's shouts. Locating them, she hugged them close like she never wanted to let go. Tía Lopez danced the tarantella with a group of Bargeld children. Red returned to the crowd and was mobbed with grateful petting. Luxy grabbed literally anyone he could get his hands on and kissed them. Then slashed their throats. Hey, it was a reflex.

Ignatius heard stampeding paws behind him. Suddenly he was violently tackled by four hundred pounds of blazing-eyed tiger.

"MATE ME."

His eyebrows shot up. "Honeysuckle, we are in public if you hadn't noticed."

"WHO WOULD DARE STOP US?" Mia blasted.

"Now that is a good counterargument," he replied, and shinnied out of his pants.

Luxy put down the professional wrestler he was smooching and squinted at the retreating dollop of Scaphis. Barely visible among the dust clouds was some pointy nutcase on a dirt bike, chasing after her at top speed and blatting out bursts from a painlauncher.

"Who is that guy? I like the cut of his jib."

***

Meanwhile on Anasarca, the few inside the crater knew the battle was far from won.

Scaphis' laugh was hellish. Unhinged, piercing, gasping. The laugh of someone who's just pushed the doomsday button because the other girls at school wouldn't let her play ball. And she'd completely stopped attacking. Whatever she was doing, it was monumental enough that she'd left herself completely open. Confident that there was nothing they could do to stop her.

Toby held up a hand for his friends to gather round. Piffle landed and leaned against the gatling gun. Both were glowing hot from heavy use. Zinc dropped the Fearsleigher to lovingly knead her shoulders in a massage that made her purr. Rebecca condensed parts of herself to build a coyote again.

Grooved hooves made the ground shake. Toby glanced over, then did a double take at how far he had to crane his neck to meet Junella's eyes. "You're tall."

She simply smirked, knowing damn well she looked both gorgeous and imposing like this.

George's voice came from somewhere around her stomach. "What is our plan of action, Sire Toby?"

The mouse winced at Scaphis' ongoing lunatic laughter. "Until we know what the heck she's doing, I can't make countermoves for it. But she's not poking us at the moment, so let's take advantage of that and relax a sec." He stepped closer. "More importantly, I have to thank you. All of you. You've always meant the world to me, and never more than today."

"Good ol' Toby," Piffle said fondly. She spared an arm to hug him. "Thanks a million yourself."

He saw that the ends of her wings were chipped and battered from how hard she'd been flying. He gave her a nod of gratitude for her bravery. Then turned to the skunk and mutt. "Zinc, Junella. The world's best wrecking crew as always."

They smiled and clanked wrench against cutlass.

"George. I always enjoy getting stuff done with you, whether you're inside me or beside me."

A chuckle. "Thank you, Sire."

Toby walked over to the coyote-shaped amalgamation. He took her paws in his. "And Rebecca, for someone who told me they've never really fought before, you're doing amazing. I want you to know that."

She looked like she had really been needing to hear that. "Yeah, well. Scaphis makes me mad."

Zinc quipped, "Necessity is the mother of aggression."

Becca laughed, and realized her jewelry eyes were actually crying.

Then George noticed that the sky was getting darker. "My friends... something is occurring."

They looked up to the crater's edge and felt their blood turn cold.

A monster of unfathomable size was out there, eating the stars one by one. Replacing them with flat, dead black. It was happening on the opposite side as well. Like some vast angel of oblivion was enfolding the universe.

Scaphis' laugh grew louder and more high-pitched. "I WAS WONDERING WHEN YOU'D FINALLY NOTICE!!!"

All emotion vanished from Toby's face as he became a calculator again. He watched the galaxy erase. But she couldn't be destroying space itself. Nothing could be that big. So she was blotting it out somehow. She was-

It clicked for him. He hadn't expected this.

She could see on his face the moment he understood. She whooped in delight. "SEE, TOBY!? THAT'S THE DIFFERENCE! YOU DUNCE! YOU RETARD! THAT'S THE DIFFERENCE!!!"

His owlish eyes did not turn away from the stars. He believed he could make out the ragged, amorphous edges of the phenomenon. "...Between what?" he absently muttered.

"YOU AND ME, DICKBRAIN!!! WHILE YOU JUST STAND THERE SUCKING YOUR FRIENDS' COCKS, I ACTUALLY ACT! I GET THINGS DONE! I DO WHAT I HAVE TO! YOU JUST WASTE TIME, WHILE I DO WHAT IT TAKES TO WIN!!"

Two gargantuan multifingered hands, each big enough to pancake Logdorbhok, rose up from both sides of Anasarca. Extending her flesh outward over the past two months had required unfathomable will. She had worked at it inch by inch, day by day. Now she was taking it all back. Reeling it in. The loss of captives to draw willpower from was negligible. The wand kept her afloat, and when she re-trampled Phlegmasia, she sucked up all the poor pants-shitters in there for backup. Their brains were baked, but there was enough spark in them for now. This was almost over anyway. She had won.

"DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW LONG IT TOOK ME TO CRAWL ALL THAT WAY!? TO SEARCH OUT ALL THOSE PEOPLE AND TOWNS!? WHAT A WASTE! NOW I HAVE TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN BECAUSE OF YOUR SELFISHNESS, TOBY! WHAT A PIG YOU ARE!! BUT I'LL DO IT! ONCE I'VE GOT YOU UNDER CONTROL, I CAN TAKE MY TIME! I'LL DO IT ALL AGAIN, AND THERE'LL BE NOTHING TO STOP ME THIS TIME, BECAUSE YOU'LL ALL BE TRAPPED LIKE BUGS ON A FLYSTRIP! HA!!!"

There was nowhere for the pests to flee. She would collapse the entirety of her bulk upon them and bury them alive. Drown them in her liquid skin. Feel her fingers sink down their throats. Tear them to pieces from the inside out. Again and again and again and again and...

Toby's mind was an engine of efficiency. Seeing everything. Considering options. Reviewing possibilities and rejecting the bad ones. He pushed as much will into his mental cogs as he had his hammer. More and more stars were disappearing.

George thought reasonably that it was about to become very dark, so he increased his innerlights for the others to see by.

Junella stared up at the diminishing sky. She tried to keep the tremor out of her voice. "Folks, we had best start digging. Our only way out of this is down."

Toby held a hand up to halt the idea, shaking his head forcefully. He was still busy thinking, so his reply was soft and halting. "We can't run away. She'd come after us. We have to stop this here."

Zinc looked away from the hands of doom, down to the pair of ruby eyes he loved most. "Just in case I don't get a chance to do this again..." He pulled her in close and planted one hell of a kiss on her lips.

Piffle cooed and kicked a leg up.

Toby nodded to himself, deciding that if nothing better was coming to him, the plan he had now was what they had to work with. "Becca, we are going to need a ceiling over the crater. Right now, before she gets here."

She looked up at the sheer width she'd have to cover. She had no idea if she had that much material left. "I'm on it." She discorporated her coyote form and surged all the remaining scraps of house, castle and citadel upwards.

"Piffle, she'll need your will. I don't think anyone could do it alone."

The hamsterfly grimly nodded to Toby. She forced herself to let go of Zinc, then kissed two of her fingers and touched them softly to his lips. "I'll... just be a jiffy, okay?"

The canine nodded. "I'll be here." He watched her take off to aid Becca. Then he looked to Toby. "What's my marching orders, Sarge?"

Toby smiled to see the confidence showed in him. "You and Junellageorge both. I'll need cover. I've got an idea."

"OHHHH NOOOOOO!!! TOBY HAS AN IDEA!! ANOTHER OVERCOMPLICATED, POINTLESS SHITSHOW OF AN IDEA!! I'M SHAKING LIKE JELL-O! HAVEN'T YOU BEEN PAYING ATTENTION!? DID I FUCKING STUTTER!? YOU CAN'T DISH OUT ANYTHING I CAN'T TAKE!!!"

He ignored her.

Junella snapped her revolver into her hand. "Don't worry, mouse. There's no pleasure in paradise that'll compare to shutting her trap. George, you think you can make my gun shoot flaming bullets?"

"I can try!"

"Zinc?" Toby asked.

The canine was just standing there, looking down at his chest like he was facing his own funeral. Staring at the place with the faux fur patch.

"No," Toby said, ironclad. "Not unless we have to. Let me try first."

Zinc looked relieved, but unsure if this was just delaying the inevitable. "Okay, chief." He glanced back at the Fearsleigher, which he'd set down to kiss Piffle goodbye. If this was the final act before the curtain, he'd need to be at his zenith. The car plus his doorknockers gave him almost 330° of cover. But this wasn't about protecting his own pelt now. It was about Toby. Deciding, he tipped himself back and sat down hard. Kicking his boots off, he pointing his soles at his partner. "Junella. Skates."

She nodded. She mindfucked the wheeled platforms into her hands, and George, with construct-perfect accuracy, tossed them down onto the holes in Sir Zinc's feet.

The mutt boosted himself up and took a second to reacquaint his balance. Then he double-tapped his wrenches together. "Let's rock and roll."

Toby gave him a last smile before his face blanked again and he returned his gaze to Scaphis. He planted his feet and held his right arm out in front of him.

Becca got the ceiling up just in time. She arranged herself in a lattice, spanning the crater's rim. All starlight was extinguished when Scaphis drew the encroaching halves of her mass together and interlaced the humongous fingers. Becca turned on every lamp in her collection. Piffle was fluttering beside her and dumbfounded a miner's hat to help.

When the slab finally fell, Rebecca screamed aloud from the agony of catching it. Her I-beams bent. Her fabrics tore. Her walls cracked. Her boards splintered. It was the weight of the entire world. A soulbreaking amount to handle. She'd incorporated as much of the glass shards and spirals into herself as she could, but her heart knew it wasn't enough.

Then four gentle arms were enfolding one of her columns. Piffle was hugging her. From that small contact, Becca felt a stunning ripple of willpower enter her fractured body. Like an injection of adrenaline with a chaser of pure hope.

'I can do this,' Rebecca thought. 'Because everyone is counting on me. If I fail, they fail, and I can't let that happen.' "Thanks, Piffle," she said.

The little glow-bug gave her a thumbs up.

Down below, Toby was as static as his friends were active. Junellageorge thundered back and forth, rattling her sword against her flank, spewing a firehose of taunts at Scaphis, daring her to attack. Zinc did figure eights on his skates and tried to get himself as zen as possible. The doorknockers were not meant to be used at high speeds. They were a weapon for planting himself in one spot and unleashing hell on whatever came to him. If he was sloppy, they'd cleave right through him. So he would simply have to be perfect.

A red hot light was beginning to pulse inside Toby's outthrust arm.

Scaphis giggled. "I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE PLANNING, TOBY, BUT I'M NOT AFRAID OF YOU. YOUR EYES ARE OPEN BUT YOU'RE NOT SEEING. I'M INVULNERABLE. I'M YOUR FUCKING GOD. SO YOU JUST GO AHEAD AND TRY WHATEVER YOU'RE TRYING. COME ON! TAKE YOUR BEST SHOT! I WON'T EVEN FIGHT BACK!"

Toby didn't waste mental effort saying so, but of course he didn't believe her.

Scaphis had never cared much for dumbfounding. She could do it just fine, but she preferred to rely on herself instead of tools. (Luxy later copied this quirk as if he'd come up with it himself, the worm.) Since the Bargeld weren't bothering her anymore, it freed up enough will to let her make six civil war battlefield cannons appear in her flesh.

"Bullshittin' bitch!!" Junella screamed, and dove to block when they fired.

Toby didn't even blink as two cannonballs missed. They flew past on either side of him, leaving potholes in the glass where they hit and bounced off. Two others were stopped by George's mighty hooves. The remaining pair were knocked out of the park by Zinc. "Strike two!!" the canine hollered.

Toby remained motionless. He had immaculate faith in his friends. And he needed all his concentration to keep his arm from tearing itself apart prematurely.

Scaphis cackled. "FIRE IN THE HOLE, DIPSHITS!" Six more cannonballs flew.

Up above, Becca was trying to find her happy place. Scaphis was pushing down on her with slow, sadistic force. She couldn't stop dribbles of vinyl from leaking through her cracks to dangle down. Piffle was a godsend. Her tanks had been dry when she'd started this task, but the little hamsterfly was a fresh new battery. Becca breathed in and out, nice and slow. The strain was incredible, but all she had to do was maintain. She imagined herself and her husband sitting on their front lawn together and sipping iced tea. She dreamed of summer sun on her fur. Breezy days at the carnival. She pictured playful kittens and leaping dolphins. She tried not to hear the inexorable, grinding breakdown of her body's creaking components.

Scaphis fired at random, keeping Zinc and Junella busy. It was hilarious to watch them scurry. Back and forth like soccer goalies. This was all just playtime until the roof caved in and annihilated them. She almost hoped Toby would get to do whatever-the-hell it was he was doing down there before she crushed him. It looked interesting. But ultimately as pathetic as everything else he'd tried.

Junella managed to catch a cannonball barehanded. Normally it would have ripped her arms off, but George's bones were strong as bronze. She pitched it back, purely out of spite, knowing it wouldn't connect. "Nothing gets past me!" she snarled. "You hear me!? Nothing!!"

Oh, that was too good to pass up. Scaphis had been holding back to give them false hope. Now she fired a frenzied fusillade from all six cannons at once.

In the multicolored glow of George's light, Junella watched the air fill with black hailstones. 'I should learn to shut my fucking mouth once in a while,' she thought.

She and George raced in front of Toby and braced to block with their entire body.

Two dozen impacts brutally knocked the pair apart.

Zinc watched chunks of their corpses go flying. For a split second, Toby was unprotected. 'My turn,' he thought. He skated in front of the mouse, drove his wrenches into the glass for stability, and played defense.

Cannonballs came. Zinc marked them. As they strolled through the air towards him and his friend, he understood finally that his doorknockers were not mere tools. His own blood pulsed through their veins. They were a second set of arms. 'Just like Piffle's,' he realized, and smiled at the comparison.

Red exhaust geysered from his shoulders as he reached out and punched away one, two, three, four, five, six cannonballs. The chains were no longer inanimate tethers. He could move them just like Scaphis' pseudopods. Because he had to. The spiked spheres at their ends changed density mid-swing to spit sparks and pummel the cannon fire back where it had come from.

Blood and spit ran in rivers down Zinc's teeth. "STRIKE THREE! YOU'RE FUCKED!"

Scaphis only laughed harder as the cannonballs bounced off her.

Junella and George awoke in the same instant. They turned their heads and saw each other lying there, having skidded several yards apart from where they'd died.

"Sorry," Junella said.

George clambered to his feet. "We have fought separately before. This will be no impediment." He raced back to the fray to aid Sir Zinc.

"Yeah," Junella agreed. But it'd been lovely.

As she ran past Toby, the mouse did not look at her. His eyes were still locked on Scaphis. His arm was bulging as if a bomb was going off inside it in slow motion. She didn't have time to wonder about it though, because she had to strain to hear what he'd just mumbled at her. "Say again?"

He enunciated clearer. "Why do you think I gave the potion to Piffle?"

Junella cocked her head. Then her eyes went wide. She pointed her cupped hands towards the ceiling and hollered for the hamsterfly.

Piffle was in a pleasant daze, concentrating all on helping Rebecca. But an antennae twitched at the sound of her name. Junella was asking for more potion. Right, right. That was easy-peasy. She fumbled in her skirt for the four little vials and tossed down two of them.

Scaphis saw all of this. She didn't know exactly what the silver items were, only that they must be important to the pests. Therefore it would make them sad to lose them. She fired another volley.

Junella was not about to give them up. Like water flowing upwards, she jumped, vaulted off George's back, jumped again off a mid-flight cannonball, and caught the vials in her paw. "OPEN UP, GEORGE!" she yelled. She cracked the tubes as she fell and hoped the contents would land where they were meant to.

There came a crack of lightning. Junella's wax and George's calcium leapt up to intertwine.

Zinc cheered for them.

Then Phase Two Georgella turned to face Scaphis. Same centaur chassis, but with a brand new pair of power-packed bone arms extending from her shoulders, each ending in a steel-capped hoof.

Her record labels were orange from real fire now. "Back in the saddle."

Scaphis fired everything she had. Cannonballs, beartraps, landmines, hand grenades.

Georgella charged forward to punch the junk out of the air. Zinc came swooping in to add assistance. There was nothing they couldn't stop together.

Toby watched them dash back and forth in front of him with the speed of angels. He allowed a brief break in concentration, just to appreciate that he had the coolest friends ever.

His arm was as big as a pumpkin now. A bloated, gurgling, undulating mass that looked like an out-of-control tumor. Like a nest of lava snakes. White hot metal dribbled out from the slit in his palm. It took incredible control to keep the whole pulsating mess from blowing up and taking everyone with it. Luckily, that was what Toby had.

He remembered, back in Junella's dream, he'd been on the side of a skyscraper. There had been thick glass he'd needed to punch through, but one hammerstrike wasn't enough. So he came up with the idea of forcing two hammers to coexist in the same space, then releasing them together. That had worked out nicely. So he expanded on the concept. By now he was up to sixty-eight hammers occupying the sheath in his arm. He had been adding them slowly and carefully, like building a house of cards. Each new addition increased the strain on his flesh exponentially. He thought he could get maybe three more in. Maybe two.

Rebecca held strong. Piffle radiated will. Zinc hit home runs. Georgella screamed flames.

Scaphis kept on cackling and launching cannonballs.

Toby kept his eyes on her. Hearing the gleeful cruelty in her voice made this easier. He didn't think she could hear him, but he spoke to her anyway, because it was true. "You tried to erase my story," he said. "I rewrote it."

Then he screamed for his friends to get out of the way.

Georgella and Zinc both dove for the glass at the sound of his shout.

Scaphis saw the grotesque balloon Toby's arm had become. Big as a barrel, and glowing hot. "WHAT ARE YOU-"

Toby fired his hammer.

Or rather, he let his arm destroy itself and hoped that the miniature sun he'd created wouldn't go off course and kill everyone.

The screaming sphere of burning dream-steel did exactly what it was asked, and headed straight at the void.

The impact deafened everyone.

***

Luxy looked up as a new star appeared in the sky. He thought at first it was the distress beacon he'd given Toby earlier. But no; its light had a particular purplish tone. This wasn't the same as the C4 blast either. This was something different.

***

From across the width of the world, Toby felt his heart beating. Felt his lungs moving cupfuls of air in and out.

His hearing was nothing but muffled, faraway thumps, plus the sound of his own breath echoing in his skull. He opened his eyes and saw a congregation of bluegreen angels. Afterimages from the searing bright. He blinked hard, trying to shoo the smears away. Will them away. Darker shapes gradually returned, but there were pinpoint specks that seemed, for now, permanent.

He heard cries that might have been his friends urging him to get back up.

And something else. Laughter. Hers.

'No, please...'

Toby tried to sit up, but something wasn't working. He'd flopped when he should have pushed. Oh. That was why. He only had one arm now. Looking down and squinting, he was able to discern that his right hand was gone entirely, and his upper arm was a cheerleader's pompon of bloodless, dangling tatters. Splintered bone poked through.

Compensating, he rolled to his left and got his legs underneath him. Someone ran to his side to help, but he couldn't tell who. His vision still lurched. His hearing was still a jumble. There was no pain from his debilitated arm. Maybe it just hadn't arrived yet.

Back on his feet, he turned to thank Zinc. He wasn't even sure if he made sound when he spoke. Turning, he saw what had become of Scaphis.

At the edge of the crater, there was a wide, black splatter, as if someone had thrown a chocolate cake at a ceiling fan. Her void was in the center, as always, but the laughter wasn't coming from within it. Instead, like swimmers in mud, her speakers dragged themselves through the desiccated flesh towards her head. Giggling in defiance was her top priority.

As Toby watched, she began to peel herself off the wall. Chunks of char broke with audible shattering. Liquid pink seeped through. Arms struggled to emerge like sentient bubblegum exhuming itself from under a theater seat. The flanges around her face were melted down to a horrible, puckered crust. They cracked. Ash trickled down. The laughing grew louder.

'I failed,' Toby thought. Not a judgment, but a simple observation. He had brainstormed a last-ditch attack, and at most it had made her slower.

The speakers slithered into place like burrowing moles. "YOU SEE? YOU SEE, TOBY!?"

He nodded, because he did.

Her words were slurred with madness and static. "YOU CAN'T BEAT ME. NOTHING YOU DO CAN BEAT ME, TOBY. YOU'RE A LOSER. JUST LIKE ALL YOUR SHITTY DUMB FRIENDS. YOU'RE SCUM. WORTHLESS. BENEATH MY PITY. YOU'RE THE HAIR IN A POOL DRAIN, THAT'S ALL. THE SHIT IN A SEWER. YOU CAN'T TOUCH ME. I'M IMMORTAL. THE MORE YOU TRY, THE MORE I LAUGH AND KEEP ON GOING. HOW'S THAT MAKE YOU FEEL, FAGBOY?"

Toby watched her rip her burnt and blighted mass away from the mountain's rock. The sounds made his skin crawl. She was unspeakably ugly like this. Her will was as monstrous as Logdorbhok's, and now she nearly resembled him. Her unscorched flesh dragged her along like a lava flow, until the last strands came free from the pebbles and glass. It would not take long for her to shake off the marred patches and be good as new.

"I AM THE UNSTOMPABLE COCKROACH. THE INERADICABLE INFECTION. YOU ARE JUST ONE OF MILLIONS WHO'VE RISEN IN OPPOSITION TO ME, AND THEY'VE ALL FAILED. SWEPT DOWN LIKE TIN SOLDIERS, TOBY. THEY'RE ALL GONE! LIKE DUST! MAYBE IF YOU SURRENDER NOW, I'LL END YOUR PUNISHMENT IN A MILLENNIUM INSTEAD OF FOREVER."

Toby's sight had cleared a little, though there were still dancing specks in his corneas. He looked upwards. Scaphis had not stopped shoving against poor Rebecca. Toby could see the ruts where her anchored elements had been dragged down the crater rim, lowering the ceiling inch by inch. He saw the lattice shake with strain. Huge, stringy gobs of Scaphis poured down like honey through a sieve. Piffle was flitting all around, dumbfounding forks like crazy for Becca to use as patches.

He looked side to side and saw Zinc and Georgella, battered but undaunted. He mused that their positions had reversed. On his skates and with his chains, Zinc had become the more agile one. The skunk was now a juggernaut of brute strength. They were still positioned to protect him, even after seeing that his plan had fallen through.

'I need another one.'

Scaphis continued to spout punch-drunk ravings. Insulting Toby, his intelligence, his friends, and his new amputee status. Bragging about her invulnerability and infallibility. Toby pushed her out of his mind like turning a volume knob. He needed to think.

He looked down at the ribbons of skin his arm had become. He didn't know where his hammer was. Maybe it was vaporized. He had to keep fighting Scaphis, yet now he was without a weapon, or even a hand to hold it.

"SHOW ME MORE, YOU WIMP! YOU PUSSY! YOU HIT ME WITH EVERYTHING YOU HAD, DIDN'T YOU? WELL IT STILL WASN'T ENOUGH!! I'M STILL HERE!! I'M ETERNAL!!!"

Toby beheld her fracture-laced void and shaking fists. He willed time to slow. Forced his heartbeat to quiet. Forced his mind into gear-stripping overdrive. And he thought he could actually see the moment grind to a crawl. Zinc coasted by, slow and soundless. Piffle's wings beat. Gouts of Scaphis dangled as she extruded herself through the cracks where Rebecca was keening in torment.

'Allright,' he thought. 'What do I have left?'

It was like before, when George had built a plan to stop Gyre Two. And when Toby had flown on the stallion's back, dreaming a contraption from all the parts in Phobiopolis. Nothing had changed, really. The pool of materials he could draw from was smaller, and time was shorter. He didn't have his hammer. But he still had his friends. It looked like they would all fail together. That was better than winning as a lone survivor, he thought. One small comfort.

"WE COULD KEEP DOING THIS FOR YEARS, DIPSHIT!!! THROW YOUR BEST AND I'LL SMASH IT DOWN!!! UNTIL YOU FINALLY GET IT THROUGH YOUR THICK FUCKING HEAD THAT YOU CAN NEVER WIN!!! I ALREADY GOT YOUR HAND! NOW YOU CAN'T JERK OFF AND FEEL BETTER ABOUT LOSING! POOR, POOR PISSBABY!!"

'What about me?' Toby asked. Without his hammer, what did he still possess? 'Well, I'll always be good at running away and being sick. She can't take that away from me.' A chuckle.

Pebbles skittered from the ruts Becca was gouging in the crater's walls. She howled in mindless, forlorn pain.

Piffle felt like her will was about to become a black hole and implode.

Junella's orange eyes were fixed on Toby, awaiting orders.

"WHAT'LL I TAKE NEXT!? HOW ABOUT YOUR BUDDIES? I MADE YOU WATCH THEIR TORTURE ONCE ALREADY. GET READY FOR THE RERUN! IT'S THE ONLY SHOW IN TOWN! EVERYONE YOU LOVE, SCREAMING INTO INFINITY! THAT'S ALL YOU GET! THAT'S ALL YOU DESERVE!"

'What do I know about Scaphis then? She brags. She's in love with her voice. She's cruel. She holds grudges forever. She doesn't listen. She-'

'I'm not listening,' Toby realized.

What had Scaphis really been saying all this time? Underneath all the layers of dirt and obscenity? She couldn't be beaten. His attacks didn't work. And wasn't that plain to see? Hadn't it been easier at the start of the fight? Wasn't she recovering with increasing ease to everything they threw at her?

'The harder we hit, the more she draws upon her will and resists us.' His eyes widened in epiphany. 'Just like me.'

He felt like the world's biggest fool. 'Punishment just breeds resentment. She tried to punish me and it only made me fight back harder. We're not any different just because she's her and I'm me. Why did I ever think I could beat her with tactics she's already tried, that already failed?'

Demented, gurgling laughter dripped from Scaphis' sparking speakers. Georgella and Zinc were lobbing attacks at her, but she brushed them away with contempt. The barbecued hunks of her flesh were unable to do her freezing trick, but they also couldn't feel pain. She'd turned her damage into armor.

Toby's thoughts raced faster and faster along a path that was blossoming open in front of him. 'Luxy, I'm sorry. I ignored what you said. I've been playing the game wrong all this time. I've been playing on her terms and not mine. I've been trying to match her power. But that's stupid. The goal was never to fight her. Or punish her, or hurt her, or anything like that. This was never about revenge. The goal is to get the wand back.'

Scaphis was dumbfounding again. Zinc bashed cannonballs away with his chains, his wrenches, sometimes even his skates. Georgella struck sparks against the glass with the speed of her hooves, screaming with the effort of playing the most unfair round of tennis the universe had ever witnessed.

"LOOK, TOBY! LOOK AT YOUR DOOMED LITTLE PALS! THEY'RE STILL STRUGGLING! HARMLESS AS A BOX OF BLIND KITTENS! LOOK HOW STUPID THEY ARE! LOOK AT THEM EMBARRASS THEMSELVES!"

Toby knew his goal. Now all he needed was a method. He inventoried himself again. He envisioned turning a box upside down and shaking it to see what could possibly remain inside. All that tumbled out were memories of his miserable sickbed.

He froze. His mind boggled at the sheer scope of how obvious it was.

'I had it all along. I carried it even longer than my hammer. My secret weapon. It's been with me from the very start.'

Vertical rivers of Scaphis surged down from the sky as more of Rebecca's body gave way. It was the melting bedroom in Dysphoria all over again.

'I have only seconds left,' Toby understood.

He turned and ran.

Scaphis' laughter shook the crater. "I KNEW IT!!! I KNEW IT!!! THE COWARD EMERGES AT LAST!! ALL YOUR STOIC POSTURING AND NOBLE SPEECHES ARE FINALLY DEAD! LITTLE TOBY NOBODY IS FLEEING LIKE A RAT! BUT THERE'S NOWHERE TO RUN TO, DUMBASS! I'M EVERYWHERE!!!"

He wasn't running away. His friends would have enough faith in him to know that too. He only needed distance for a running start, and a few last moments to shape the idea into birth.

It was nothing but a glimmer now. But he had his goal. The true win condition he should have been trying for right from the start. As the sinews in his thin legs propelled him across glass, it stung to know that innocent people had suffered today because he'd let himself care more about vengeance than practicality. He could have chopped out ninety percent of his plan if he'd started from this. Or maybe not. Maybe an idea this simple could only work if he'd driven her to this exact mental state. So certain of her victory that she'd be susceptible to misdirection.

"BURY YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND, TOBY! RUN AND FIND A NICE HOLE TO HIDE IN, YOU PATHETIC FUCKING TAPEWORM!!!"

It was all game pieces now. Constants and variables. Tic tac toe. He rearranged everything and everyone inside the crater until the Rubik's colors all lined up and the puzzle box unlocked.

He stopped at the far edge of the crater. Turned back around. "JUNELLA! I NEED YOUR CUTLASS!"

She hesitated at the request, but only for an instant. If Toby needed it, then Toby needed it. Wasn't like she was using it anyway. With her unwieldy hoof-hands she managed to get a grip on the hilt and sling it across to him.

He watched the sliver of metal arc through the air and land with beautiful accuracy at his feet. "Thanks!!"

Locking eyes to void with Scaphis, Toby bent down and picked up the sword. A talismanic weapon. Junella had carried it through countless battles. He grit his teeth and braced for pain. Holding a deep breath, he jammed the hilt into the stump of his arm and screwed it into bone. The pain was fireworks. Sheer will forced the frayed scraps of his flesh to wind around the metal and knot it into place.

He raised it over his head.

George's innerlights glinted off the blade.

Screaming, Toby charged.

Scaphis nearly rolled over laughing. Her bulk jiggled in disbelieving hilarity. "WHAT IS THIS!? WHAT IN THE HOLY PISSING HELL IS THIS!? YOU HIT ME WITH A PUNCH THAT BURNED MY FUCKING FACE OFF, AND NOW YOU THINK A SWORD IS GONNA DO JACK SHIT!?"

Toby screamed louder, spit flecking from his mouth, blood spurting from his arm.

This needed to look a certain way. A last, desperate attack from a mouse that had run out of ideas. But inside his head, Toby was very calm.

This was the final moment. The eleventh hour. If this did not work, the world would end. Because it wouldn't just be his friends who would suffer until the end of time if it fell through. Scaphis had grown stronger from fighting him. Even Luxy might not stand a chance now. She might really take everything if this failed.

Toby envisioned the ghosts of everyone he'd ever met, loved, fought, or killed in this nightmare world. All standing arm in arm on both sides of his path, giving him strength.

Scaphis laughed as loud as a derailing train. Louder than a suicide bomber detonating in a hospital. Louder than a typhoon sweeping hundreds of lives away with merciless fury.

Every step Toby took lasted a lifetime. Like dreams where he was running without moving. He tilted his head up. "Becca! Springboard!!"

The coyote couldn't hear him. The last scraps of her sanity were devoted entirely to holding back the relentless, punishing, unstoppable tide of Scaphis. But Piffle heard. The hamsterfly looked around for anything she could pry loose for Toby to use. But everything was already in use. Everything was stretched to its absolute limits. Not a cushion, a plank, or a thread could be spared. For a moment she panicked. But then, oh, how obvious?

She positioned herself and blasted another golden fork from her bellybutton. It drove into the ground in Toby's path at the perfect angle.

Toby beamed a grateful smile at her. But she still had more to do in his plan. Wordlessly, he directed her gaze towards Zinc, then fluttered with his hand.

Her weary antennae rose. She didn't know why, but she knew what he wanted. Though it meant leaving Rebecca to bear the burden alone. Regretfully, she descended.

Rebecca screamed as the fabric of her very spirit tore.

Toby could not waste even a second on empathy for her. Faster than Piffle could fly, he whipped his attention to Zinc.

The canine had his shirt lifted up. The faux fur patch was already off. His other arm was raised to break the glass.

Toby drilled into him with his eyes. 'NO,' he mouthed. He instead gave his friend other instructions. Just a swift pantomime with his fingers, but it was enough.

Zinc stared back in surprise, nodded, then let Piffle's arms reach under his wrenches and lift him up.

Toby was still charging with the cutlass. Scaphis laughed harder and harder. She was completely ignoring his friends. This was going perfectly.

He was fifty feet away from Piffle's golden springboard. Junella's part was next.

Their eyes met. Coral to orange.

Toby made a gun with his fingers. He indicated position with his gaze. Then he jerked his head back, mimicking an impact.

Junella had no clue what all his instructions added up to, but the steps were clear enough. And she knew it was not wrong to put her trust in him. Within her skin, she felt this feeling echoed by George.

Scaphis saw that Toby was preparing to flick himself at her. Like a booger into the sun. Her facial flanges punched away the char, emerging and elongating, becoming a nest of squirming stinger-tipped rat-tails, all pointed at the onrushing rodent. "YES, TOBY, LET'S END THIS!!! COME TO MOMMY AND LET ME CLEAN YOU!!!"

Tensing his muscles for the jump, Toby glared into the gibbering void from which nothing but horror and pain ever flowed. His eyes captured everything, holding it within the grip of his will.

He pushed off from the glass and felt his feet touch gold. The fork bent. Sprung. Launched him. Toby was airborne.

He roared his lungs raw.

He stretched his cutlass-woven arm for a killing blow.

Scaphis surged her tangle of tendrils towards him, laughing like she'd never stop.

Toby gazed down into the writhing, hellish snakepit and felt no fear. His friends were there for him. With bliss, he felt a burning pain, and then nothing.

Scaphis saw him vanish just inches away from her ravenous mouth.

The cutlass hung suspended by momentum for an instant, then dropped and clattered to the ground.

Junella held the smoking pistol in her trembling hands. Aided by a construct's perfect aim, she had just made the most important bullseye of her life.

Scaphis' tentacles surged in outrage. She blared like a siren, searching in every direction for the mouse. The lying runaway coward! Where was he now!?

Toby was reborn exactly where he wanted to be. He'd done this with George once. He saw his destination, fixed it in his mind, told Phobiopolis 'that's where I'm going, okay?', died, and teleported there. Simple.

Scaphis' horrified scream shattered glass.

Toby was on hands and knees in her void, hunched down over the puckered sphincter of her throat.

She froze him as soon as possible, but it was not quite fast enough for Toby's hyper-alert senses. He jammed his hammer into the hole and the metal obediently reshaped into a ring.

Before Scaphis could reach in with a dozen arms to scrape him out, Piffle swung Zinc right into her maw. He immediately jammed his wrenches in, like propping open a garage door.

Zinc could not move a single muscle. Toby couldn't either. But that was fine. He already knew that involuntary bodily functions were unaffected by her paralysis.

Toby's eyes rolled back in his head. His stomach muscles clenched. He smashed the mental chains holding back all his fear, anxiety, outrage, and trauma. Busted the lid off of Pandora's box.

'All I have to do now is what I've always been good at.'

Toby erupted a lifetime's worth of poison down his enemy's squirming esophagus.

A tidal wave of medicine. An unending deluge of lethal toxicity. Chalky white pills, colorful capsules, amber fluids, greasy creams, glossy drops. Ibuprofen, Cortisone, Vaseline, Robitussin, Alcohol, Acetaminophen, Calamine, Zoloft, Amoxicillin, Benadryl, Vicodin, Vioxx, Xanax, Miralax, Ritalin, Bismuth, Adderall, Ipecac, Toprol, Micturin, Raptiva, Cymbalta, Taxol, Dulcoease, Oxycontin, Meridia, Estroven, Lantus, Darvon, Propulsid, Accutane, Propofol, Fentanyl, Vincristine, Cylert, Ergamisol, Warfarin, Palladone, Methotrexate, Mevocor, Magnesium Citrate. Every type of pharmaceutical venom his mother's fangs had ever pumped into him. It all came out. Out of him and into Scaphis. The tsunami french kiss. Toby heaved with such excruciating force that the edges of his mouth tore open. Blood cascaded alongside the injections and prescriptions. Bile and lymph and scabs and pus. The flood could not be stopped. Used bandaids, syringes, enema water, toothpaste, Q-tips, toilet paper, surgical dressings, stitches, soiled pillowcases, hand soap, mouthwash, shampoo, flea dip, ear candling wax, barf bags. Toby's eardrums burst from Scaphis' screams. Zinc had his eyes closed, just bearing the blows of her pseudopods as they tried desperately to end the violation. Piffle and Georgella fought with guns and fire. They tried their best to keep her from reaching Toby, who did not stop vomiting until his own organs turned inside out.

Bloody tears streaked his face. He'd lost every bit of weight he'd regained from Dysphoria. His chest was a sunken, ghastly pit with visible ribs. Pills clung to his lips. Sickness dripped from his whiskers. There was nothing in his consciousness but ache.

Then an earthquake met him.

What Toby had done to Scaphis returned upon him tenfold.

He and Zinc were blasted out of her mouth with the force of a hurricane.

The bedraggled, shriveled mouse skidded to a stop a hundred yards away in a smear of yellow puke. He watched a charred, spasming fire hydrant fill the crater. And though unfathomable fatigue was swallowing him alive, he did not let his eyes close until he saw one important detail emerge among the spew.

When he did, he felt a shiver of satisfaction. His part in this was finally finished. He could exit now.

Nothingness crashed into his remains and swept him miles away.

***

There was a torrent of repugnant chaos, and then it ended, and things were quiet.

Under the starlight, an unassuming green cat struggled to her feet in the ankle-deep lagoon of acidic chyme she'd created, gasping and gagging.

She was of average height and build, appearing in her early twenties. A calico with spots of chartreuse, kelly, and pine. She was currently naked. Her verdant fur spread all the way up her face, which actually didn't exist. Merely a hole so perfectly rectangular you could have slotted a post office box into it.

Back hunched, she rose on shaky limbs. Her ears and tail twitched. She could see little dribbles and tidbits clinging to her hair. In revulsion she screeched and started clawing the slop from her body. Oh god, the smell, the smell, the smell.

But it wasn't long before she realized she was seeing something so much more important than a horrendous lake of barf. Her hands. Trembling, she stared at her own claws and pawpads. Her tail swayed into view. She had hair again! Hair that wasn't a wig! She reached down. She was female again! No longer a nullified toy!

She whirled around, sending up splashes. There, far behind her, like a tossed-off overcoat, was a mountain of lifeless charred plastic. Emptied out. Defeated. Nothing but a melted snowman.

She was free.

Scaphis clutched her head in her paws as a laugh began to trickle from her void. Rising in volume, it wracked her ribs and lacerated the silence of the crater. Its intensity grew until she was staggering to keep her balance and not fall back in the sludge.

"Toby, where ARE you!? Do you realize what you've done!? You IDIOT! You perfect, perfect idiot!! You superjumbo, extra-strength, military grade, SHITHEAD-OF-THE-CENTURY! Do you realize what you've DONE!?" Her laughter was cracks of thunder. She shook and writhed uncontrollably, unable to believe the immensity of his failure and her fortune.

Along the edges of the crater, a few soaked and bone-tired people were hauling themselves to drier land. Piffle dragged a sputtering Zinc by his wrenches. Junella flicked puke off her sword, then used it as a cane. George emerged like a sea monster a few yards away. The survivors glanced around and found each other. They said nothing. The only sound was Scaphis' maniac crowing.

"I'm OUT!!! I'm free!! You broke the curse, you moron! That's all you accomplished! You died for NOTHING! Except to make ME stronger!! Do you have any idea what I can DO now, Toby!? Now that I'm out of that plastic fucking straitjacket!? I'm FREE!!! I can do ANYTHING! I'm unfettered! Unchained! Unhobbled! You thought I was Queen Of The Shit with all that vinyl on me!? HA! That was me in a wheelchair! On crutches! I'm EVERYTHING I WAS again!!" She raised her arms to the galaxy. "EVERYTHING'S MINE NOW! EVERYTHING'S GONNA BE EASIER! FINALLY!!! I CAN TALK WITH MY OWN VOICE! I CAN FEEL! I CAN EAT! I CAN GO WHEREVER THE FUCK I WANT AND PEOPLE CAN STARE AT ME AND I WON'T FALL DOWN LIKE A STUPID, USELESS, FUCKING, DOLL ANYMORE!!!"

She doubled over cackling. Tears streamed down the sides of her void. She hadn't felt them in over a century. She was so happy her hands were shaking.

She started sloshing around in the vomit, looking for the mouse. He had to be around here somewhere. The little pest was as unkillable as she was. "Toby!? Toby!? Come here, you dumb bastard! I gotta shake your hand! Then break every bone in it, you time-wasting prick!" She saw the others around the edges of the new sallow lake. "Okay, well there's YOU guys. The B list. Don't worry, don't worry. I'll get to you all later. Blood and guts and torture and all that stuff. Don't worry." She felt suddenly lightheaded from giggling so hard. Her chest fluttered. "Fuck, I gotta sit down... Looks like I didn't puke up any chairs though! Too bad! HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!"

	"Scaphis, stop."

The voice turned her blood into fiery ice. Every ounce of her joy was shattered. She scanned around, whiskers tensed, looking for him. She knew that voice. Of course she did. That bastard! Of course she'd ralphed him up too!! "DON'T HIDE, YOU CUMSUCKING CHICKENSHIT!! I KNOW GODDAMN WELL YOU'RE THERE!!!"

A wind began to swirl. There was no air on the mountaintop, but it came nonetheless.

Ripples appeared in the vomit. And then, just like that, it all dissolved into nonexistence. Every drop. It was unclean and needed to go away.

From out of the dust materialized a long blue cloak, impeccable and regal. The figure within was hidden, or insubstantial. As the shape crossed the crater towards the tensed green cat, it grew. It rose to a height of forty feet. Its footsteps were slow and tired.

	"You are always so disappointing."

Scaphis tried to keep her voice fierce, but her body was cowering by reflex. "Yeah? Well TOO BAD! Too damn bad, you control freak fuckwit! You killjoy!" She tried to stop herself from retreating at the same pace he advanced, but couldn't. "I'm out now! Toby The Wonder Dunce broke your unbreakable curse. Whatcha gonna do, old fogey? TRY to put me back! I DARE you! You CAN'T! You're a castrated, blubbering weakling! Because I'VE got the wand! I'VE-"

Her whole body shuddered. She'd dumbfounded it out of her guts into her hand, except it wasn't there. It wasn't. She didn't. It... Oh god no. No. No.

The sleeve of the blue robe rose slowly. The wind began to pick up, adding a low howl that was almost singing. A skeletal hand drew itself upon the air. Flesh and fur filled in. The fingers held several inches of wood with a dazzling blue teardrop at the tip.

He pointed it at her.

Scaphis backed up, tripped, fell on her tail and kept on crab-crawling away from him. Shaking her head at him as if she could dispel the mirage. "No. NonononoNONONONONONONO!!!"

A face grew from smoke within the robe's hood. A stern, weary, pitying gaze. The face of a man tasked with the same chore he has fulfilled so many times it has grown torturous.

Scaphis snatched up handfuls of dirt and threw it at him. "FUCK YOU!!! I already DEALT with you! It's not FAIR!!" She scrabbled around for bigger rocks. "I was out! I had all my plans! You're not putting me back in that doll! You're NOT!!!"

	"Scaphis, do you remember why I chose that form for you?"

"EAT SHIT!!!" she screeched. She flung sprays of harmless pebbles. They hit soundlessly against the robe and slid off. "Because you're a SADIST! Because you're a PERVERT! Because it probably turned you on to do that to a woman! Shut her mouth and make her a toy! You SICK FUCK!!!"

Aldridge closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. When he could bring himself to look upon her again, there was an eternity of sadness in his eyes.

	"It was one of your war crimes. Don't you remember? Two members of your inner party were disloyal, and so you made their daughter watch as you threw them into Dysphoria. And then, as she cried, you plucked her favorite toy from her arms and threw it in too."

He covered his face with his hand.

	"If I had been there and not just heard about it secondhand, I think I might have taken you to the Allfilth myself, pried open his mouth, and forced you inside. Maybe it's my greatest failure that I didn't. That I worried too much about lowering myself, and not about ending the sorrow you spread wherever you walked."

Fists clenched in eternal hatred, she stared back at him with her expressionless abyss. "Do it," she dared. "I know you don't have the balls. No matter how strong you are with that wand in your hand, you'll never be me. That's your greatest weakness. I'll always do what you won't, which is why I always humiliate you." She cocked her head back and spat at his feet.

	"I think that's quite enough."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah! Because it's always about what YOU want! YOUR morality, forced on everyone-"

	Stop.

And she did. A wind blew from his voice, through the wand, and clutched her flesh like a thousand shackles. Scaphis felt every muscle in her body lock up.

She fought with every spark of her will. She thrashed with demon's strength. Froth formed at the corners of her void. It accomplished nothing. "DRINK MY LIQUID SHIT, YOU FASCIST!!"

	I said, stop.

It was not shouted. The words were simply imbued with such unearthly resonance, they compelled by weight alone.

Scaphis shrieked as she felt her invisible bindings tighten, compressing her muscles against her bones.

It was the Word. The almighty voice of God's chosen heralds. As Rebecca swirled together a body from her remaining components to stand beside her husband, she understood exactly what its use meant. It was not only unfathomably taxing to call upon it without the directed will of the Lord himself, but Aldridge had once told her that he didn't dare use it because it was unethical. To force control upon another's body was something that, well, Scaphis would do. He was not her, and would not be her. Except now it seemed he had taken her words to heart. There was no other way to be rid of her.

	"I have tried for so long to be patient and forgiving with you, Scaphis. But it's difficult. Do you know why it's so difficult?"

Her response was not words, but the desperate growls of an animal willing to chew their own leg off to be free of a trap.

At a twitch of his expression, the air began to churn and darken. A flicker showed itself of the unquenchable rage he kept caged away from the fragile mortal souls so it could not harm them.

When Aldridge spoke his next words, he imbued them with the full power of the Word, draining his own life force, uncaring of the consequences.

	"It's because you simply WILL

Scaphis was driven to the ground. Rocks and bone splintered.

	NOT

Spittle frothed from her void.

	LEARN.

Her body was driven down onto her legs with cosmic crushing force, snapping tendons and bursting capillaries. It looked like an invisible cargo crate had been dropped on top of her. She gurgled indiscernible sounds.

Aldridge opened both his hands and let the wand reposition to the center of his mass. It began to turn.

The wind picked up, groaning like a chant. It sketched in the dirt, pulling pebbles and glass towards where the azure drop was spinning. A pure absence of light appeared at the tip. A singularity.

Scaphis felt herself being pulled along the ground towards it. "NO!!! NEVER!!!"

Aldridge was silent. He needed to concentrate. It was time for this to be over.

Rebecca had become a minor skyscraper of mortar and iron. She stepped closer to drape her paws on his shoulder. He did not take his eyes off his task, but she felt his muscles ease at her touch.

With renewed will, Scaphis fought against the Word and actually managed to dig her claws into the ground. "I'M NOT! YOU CAN'T! STOP! STOP! LET ME GO!!"

Rebecca spoke with quiet bitterness. "You should take your own advice."

The void lashed out with unspeakable venom. "NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT ANYTHING YOU'VE EVER SAID, BECKY!!! DID ALDRIDGE TELL YOU ABOUT THE TIME HE TRIED TO FINGER ME AFTER A SHOW? HOW HE FORCED ME TO MY KNEES AND MADE ME BLOW HIM BEHIND THE CURTAINS!? HOW HE GRINNED!?"

She winced in disgust and laid her head on her husband's shoulder. "God, please, just stop. No one is listening to your craziness anymore. Just stop."

"DID I HURT YOUR FEELINGS!?"

A particle of incredible density waited with patient, heartless hunger to draw Scaphis in. Her tail whipped like a windsock. Her ears flapped. Her claws made furrows, but they did not slow her motion.

The others began to come near. Junella leaning on George. Zinc and Piffle leaning on each other. They watched. Despite the wind and dust churning in spirals towards the new black hole, they didn't feel a thing. Their fur didn't even rustle.

Scaphis saw them approaching. "HELP ME!!!" she gasped.

The four converged around her, and in their eyes she saw no more mercy than she deserved.

"PIFFLE! HOW CAN YOU LET THIS HAPPEN!? HE'S GONNA TRAP ME AGAIN! CAGE ME LIKE A CRIMINAL!! YOU HAVE TO FORGIVE ME, RIGHT!?"

Two round rubies showed no trace of emotion. Piffle folded her arms behind her back without a word.

"ZINC! YOU'RE ALL FULL OF CHIVALRY!! I'M A DAMSEL IN FUCKING DISTRESS!!!"

The canine's posture defined scorn. She saw his lips form the word, 'Adios.'

Scaphis was meters away from her fate. She felt her legs being lifted towards the suction. "WE'VE BOTH DONE BAD THINGS, RIGHT, GEORGE!? YOU COULD UNDERSTAND THAT IN ME!"

His expression was a statue of infinite contempt. His colors fused into a single bloody red.

She felt the skin of her feet stretched like taffy. The toe bones dislocated one by one. Her tailtip touched the singularity and its length compressed by half in an instant, mangled by astronomical gravity. She shrieked her throat raw. Her hand reached out.

"JUNELLA!" she gasped. "WE'RE ALIKE! AND THAT WAS A GREAT FIGHT, WASN'T IT? COME ON! DO YOU REALLY WANT IT TO END? WE'LL NEVER GET ANOTHER CHANCE TO SPAR IF YOU LET HIM DO THIS TO ME! YOU COULD FUSE WITH GEORGE AND WE'D PLAY SOME MORE HANDBALL! IT'D BE FUN! PLEASE!!!"

The skunk stepped forward to watch her enemy rise off the ground towards her terminus. Her face was unreadable. She did not blink.

Scaphis felt her feet collapse. Felt her bones turn to shards and her marrow gush out. "PLEASE!!! I'M BEGGING YOU!!!"

Junella tilted her head. Slowly, she reached out a hand.

Tears streaming backwards from her void, Scaphis wrestled against her entrapment to reach out. She watched her fingers bend backwards. Heard them snap.

Junella took another step closer, then clasped Scaphis' broken paw in hers.

"THANK YOU!!! OH FUCK, PLEASE!!! PULL ME OUT!!! PULL ME OUT!!!"

Junella did pull her closer. But it was only to gain better leverage. Her other hand filled itself with cutlass, then swept across between them.

Then Junella let go.

Scaphis watched her own crimson droplets dance in the air before her.

The last thing she saw before the black hole consumed her consciousness was the skunk licking blood off the blade of her sword.

A green-furred skull turned inside-out as it was squeezed into a point of matter no bigger than a pinhead. A struggling arm twitched obscenely, broken fingers flopping, before it too disappeared.

Then silence.

The record label eyes were unblinking as the moon. As cold as polished glass. "Told you I'm worse," Junella whispered.

Before the last of his energy ran out, Aldridge created a cube around his prisoner. Clear Lucite. Then it dropped out of his hands as he collapsed in exhaustion against his steadfast wife.

Rebecca brushed back his hood and ran her makeshift fingers through his hair. She felt him shudder from labored breathing.

Aldridge held her tight. He thought he might weep from exertion, but instead he simply felt hollow.

Rebecca kissed his forehead. "Good to see you again, my hummingbird."

He nodded that the feeling was shared.

"It's over now. It's over. Shh. It's over."

He rose to his full height and looked into her eyes, cupping her cheeks in his palms. His voice was paper-thin and wavering. "Thank you for being beside me," he told her.

"Always. Don't be silly."

The wizard smiled.

The others were also warmed by their love. However, more than anything else, they really just wanted to fall down and not have to move anymore today.

Though first, they had an important task.

Everyone looked around the crater. Piffle dumbfounded binoculars. But it was George's keen eyes who spotted him first.

He'd been difficult to find because his snow white fur was riddled with gravel and glass. Lying on his side, Toby's breath made almost-imperceptible sweeps across the dirt. His friends did not wake him up. No one in history had ever deserved sleep more.

-***-

101

He was drowning. Suffocating. Interred in a living coffin of grinding, sloshing flesh. The stench of burnt plastic. The darkness. The tightening crush on his crumbling skeleton. This was for keeps now. This was forever. He'd failed and she had him. This time everyone would

Toby's eyes opened. He was in a completely unfamiliar bedroom with his heartbeat thundering and the blankets clutched tight in his paw.

He took deep breaths to calm his nerves.

The mouse didn't know where he was, but at least it was nice. A small, yellow bedroom not much bigger than a closet. Big soft mattress beneath him. Royal blue blankets surrounding. There wasn't much else in the room besides an end table. On it was a vase with a yellow rose, a plate of cookies, and a note. Toby could read it from where he was lying:

	Good morning! Take your time, I'm not watching.

It was signed with an R. and a whiskered smiley face. Toby smiled back. His facial muscles ached. Heck, everything did. At least he felt rested.

From elsewhere in the house he could hear a steady, muffled beat and people talking over it. A party.

Toby tried to sit up. His right arm didn't want to cooperate. It existed again, but now it had a new problem. As he pulled the blankets down, he saw that it had mutated into a gargantuan steel fist, clutched around a comparatively-tiny hammer. The metal looked like it had been flying as a liquid, then suddenly snapped to solidity. Reflective silver rivulets streaked through the fur all the way to his elbow. He tried to lift it. "Whoof." Heavy as a bowling ball.

He tried to make it change back. He nudged the hammer with his mind, but it wouldn't retract. His arm had become a statue.

He wasn't too worried though. It'd go back to normal after a while. It was probably just tired. He couldn't really blame it.

Scooting to the edge of the bed, he blushed to realize that he'd been undressed before being tucked in. He still had his undies though. He looked around for his clothes and found them neatly folded on the closest chair. Allright then. However, looking down at himself, he wasn't sure they'd fit now. He was skin and bone again. His legs were toothpicks. His left hand looked as flimsy as a leaf. He reached up to touch his face. Euggh. 'I need to find a mirror.'

Toby grunted as he stood up. His muscles felt very old. What had he been doing? Scaphis. Oh god, Scaphis. The fight had been gone from his mind until just now, but one little peek opened the floodgates. The room seemed suddenly smaller. Shrinking. His heartrate sparked. Where was she now? Where were his friends!?

'Stop. Stop! You're obviously safe, and they are too. You're in Rebecca. The war's over. Your plan worked out and she made herself a house again and everything's okay. That's probably what those sounds are in the other room. People celebrating.'

Toby rubbed his face with his remaining hand for a moment. It was impossible to believe he'd really succeeded. To spend so long planning, and to have that moment actually come and pass... His mind could accept it but his emotions still insisted on high alert. Toby lurched towards the end table and nearly drank the vase water. Instead he stuffed a cookie in his mouth. That was better. Soft and chocolatey. Fresh-baked, or imaginited. Soothing. 'That's right. Calm down. I can actually let myself relax now.'

But still his muscles vibrated with tension. His pupils were hugely dilated. He didn't think relaxation was something he'd be able to reach again for a long, long time.

He barely noticed when all the cookies were gone. He cocked his head at the empty plate. He licked his lips: the evidence was there. "Huh."

He guessed if everyone else was out there, he probably shouldn't stay in here much longer. Though part of him did want to just lie down again and go back to sleep. This was like the pain-echoes after a death, but much stronger. Exhaustion echoes. The dull background throb of having exerted himself far past his limits. Plus, he didn't even know what he looked like anymore. Maybe his friends wouldn't want to see him like this.

'No.' Even if he was now the Anasarca Ugliness Champion, he knew his friends would want to be with him. Just as much as the reverse was true.

Toby padded to the exit and clicked it open. The music jumped up like he'd turned a volume knob instead of a doorknob.

He poked his head out. Dark, but lights were bright around the corner. This was the end of a hallway with many slim doors crammed in beside each other. He stepped out onto the cushy carpet and finally realized he was barefoot. Did he want to go back for his sandals? Nah. He wanted to find a bathroom.

The door across from him was as likely as any other. Toby opened it and his eyebrows went up.

Inside the cramped little closet, sandy spotted fur was grinding against colorfully-lit white plastic.

Ike opened an eye at the change in light. He saw Toby and wriggled a hand from around Janie to give the mouse a thumbs-up. "Heyyy, look who it is! Nice job on Scaphis, man."

Janie's head swiveled. Her colors flared like fire. "You will not say a word about this to anyone," she thunder-whispered.

Toby simply nodded in compliance and shut the door.

"Lookin' for something, kiddo?" came a familiar voice from nowhere.

Toby turned around. "Oh. Hi, Becky." He winced. "Becca! Sorry. Now she's got me doing it."

A snorting giggle. "S'okay. It stings a lot less when it's not her voice."

It felt odd to be addressing the walls. "I was, um, looking for a bathroom?"

"I don't have one, remember? Would you want someone peeing in you?"

Toby made a 'fair point' noise. "I just wanted a mirror, actually."

"Okay, that's easy. Lemme rearrange one over here for you... There." She opened the door to his right.

"Cool." He started to head inside, then stopped and looked back out again. "Thank you for the cookies. And I'm glad to see you're back to 'normal', I guess."

Rebecca chuckled. "No problem. I've been a domicile so long, it was a piece of cake to puzzle myself back to it."

"Good. Also, um, how long was I asleep?"

"About eleven hours."

He blinked in surprise. Though, that felt about right. He had that slept-too-long-and-now-inexplicably-wanted-more-sleep feeling. He nodded to Becca and stepped through the doorway.

A light turned on. This was a storage nook full of labeled boxes, framed pictures, record albums, and old Christmas decorations. Toby was standing in front of a full-length ornamental mirror.

He barely recognized his reflection.

It reminded him of the front yard doubling effect as he walked towards himself. Or rather, as a gaunt, gutless phantom with eyes the color of cranberry juice did. He was definitely skinny again. Hopefully that would change in time, along with the horribly-bruised canyon in his abdomen.

He ran his hand along his hip, up into the rim of the gaping scoop. It was furred inside, just empty. The skin was plum purple, though not too sore. He could reach inside all the way to his backbone. Leaning over further, he could feel inside his ribcage. Hollow as an attic. 'I literally puked my guts out,' he realized. He had a shivery feeling this might be permanent. That he had so completely divested himself of his past that this was the consequence.

He thought back to his days in the sticky bed, quarantined, taking pills while his mother scrubbed the floors. None of it bothered him much anymore.

He looked at his eyes. The tear-streaks from Scarlatina were still there, though faded a bit. His cheekbones were very visible. His neck looked like an old sock with a broom handle inside. And his eyes were significantly past bloodshot. Every part of them was red. The whites were barely-discernible from the irises, and the pupils looked like the pimento in an olive. They were surrounded by heavy purple bags. And was there a flicker of light way at the back of them? Hard to tell if that was just a reflection, or if he'd absorbed a little bit of George somehow.

Toby stepped back. Assessing himself in total, he sighed. His massive steel sculpture of an arm looked like it contained more mass than the rest of him combined. A summer breeze might knock him over. He rubbed around inside his bowl of a torso again. "I guess I can pour cereal in it," he quipped. He didn't laugh.

'I don't know if I was ever handsome, but I'm certainly not soft anymore. I look like a pile of Q-tips. But, I mean... if this is the price of saving the world from Scaphis... Okay. I can live with this. If Piffle can be a fly, I guess I can be a scarecrow.'

He nodded to himself and left the room to seek his friends.

The music guided his way. It was a happy song, maybe a little too uptempo for how he was feeling Toby wove his way along the hallways towards the bright light spilling in from the livingroom. He peeked his head around the archway.

There were a lot more people here than he expected.

Rippingbean and Woofingbutter looked resplendent in tuxedos as they sipped champagne from one another's glasses. Junella was showing off her sword to the Xenoikos. Tía Lopez was spiking the punch with something nice. George looked like he was in the middle of a thrilling retelling. Luxy was beside Aldridge's globe, hunched over and peering at it, deep in thought. Darting around everyone's legs were two giggling diapered infants with wisps of beards. 'Waxacada and Driuwej?' Toby guessed. Chasing after them came a miniaturized rustbeast. Red had been made pet-size to join the party.

There in the corner was Aldridge, looking very much the wallflower. Some of the Bargeld were pressing him with eager questions. From his posture Toby could tell the wizard was responding with considerable modesty. Rebecca was standing beside him, having fashioned a walkable body out of carpet and curtains.

Toby was debating how to make an entrance, when a roaring voice suddenly overpowered the music.

"THERE HE IS!!! THERE'S MY BEST FUCKING FRIEND IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD!!!" Zinc vaulted over a coffee table and literally plowed guests out of the way.

Before Toby could flee, he was captured in a rib-destroying hug. The ecstatic mutt's tail was a whirlwind.

"I'm glad to see you too but you are killing me," Toby wheezed.

Zinc stepped back to let his friend breathe a little. "Sorry! Overexcited!" He kissed the mouse on the cheek. "Whoa, shit! Looks like Bonky got some radioactive mutations goin' on."

"Please stop calling my hammer that," Toby said reflexively.

By now the entire crowd had converged upon him. Like quicksand, Toby was swallowed up in hugs, hearty pats, kind words and smiles. He tried to smile back, but mostly he was feeling overwhelmed. Though, amongst the forest of well-wishing arms and torsos, he caught a glimpse of orange record labels looking back at him fondly.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the man of the hour himself!" Luxy announced. Drink in hand, he oiled himself through the throng and held Toby's right arm up like a winning prizefighter. "Let's give this conquering hero three cheers! No, fuck that! He deserves more! At least seven!!"

As the crowd bellowed raucously, the raccoon lifted Toby up to whisper-height. "Good job out there, rodent. You saved all our asses. And, my goodness, have you been on a diet?"

Toby chuckled weakly. "Brief turbo-bulimia," he replied.

Luxy sniggered. He set the mouse down where a fuzzy cheek immediately nuzzled against his.

Piffle cooed. "You did it, Toby."

"Indeed, Sire. I am very proud of you," George added.

Toby had thought he was too burnt-out to get misty-eyed. He was happily wrong.

Rippingbean and Woofingbutter muscled themselves closer. "My dear boy, your plan executed itself splendidly!" said the gorilla, pumping Toby's hand up and down.

The fox gave him a dazzling, immaculate smile. "If you ever desire it, you have a lucrative career ahead of you modeling equipment for our catalogs," he enunciated flawlessly.

Toby smiled back. "Dunno if that's the life for me, but thank you."

"Oi, Mummy! That's the mouse that made the mountain go POP!" a young voice called out. Two grinning marten kids leapt in for a pounce-hug. "Luxy told us!" "Yeah! Bloody choice mayhem, mate!"

Toby looked up to see Vienna Tusk standing behind them, looking utterly petrified. She turned away from him quickly, her face a complex expression of shame and regret.

He couldn't help a chuckle. Everything they'd done to each other seemed so small and faraway now.

When she glanced again at the mouse's eyes, there was no furious thirst for vengeance there. Impossibly, he just smiled and mouthed the words, 'It's okay.'

Her slab of a hubby reached in to pluck the boys off. "Ronnie! Cale! Let 'im breathe, ya little fleas!" Cordwood Tusk tossed the mouse a 'good work' nod and stepped back. Vienna walked away too, but not before aiming a glance at Toby that said, later, she might want to try her apology again.

He thought he'd like that.

Luxy looked around. "Oh, hey, Tobester, there was someone I picked up like a burr along the way. Says he knows you." He reached into the crowd and pushed forward a familiar goggled face.

Toby could not believe his eyes. He threw his arms around Gilla-Gilla, bearing the quills quite admirably. "Oh, man! I'm so glad you got out! And so sorry we had to leave you there!!"

"Strategy, fam. It's understood. Hadda see y'again tho. Got somethin' forya."

Toby let go, looking curious.

From out of his vest the porcupine withdrew a sheet of paper and unfolded it.

Toby skimmed it, then couldn't help a burst of laughter. It was an itemized list of every single thing he'd taken from Gilla-Gilla's cabin. "I'll pay it all back, I promise!"

A trace of a grin. "See that you do. Jerky's on the house though."

"Speaking of food," Piffle piped up, "Aldridge made cupcakes! They're literally divine! We've gotta go get you some and fill that tummy of yours back up." She patted the empty space in his middle and started leading him across the room to the piled-high refreshments table. Zinc and George followed.

Many more shoulder pats and hearty cheers jostled him as he crossed the room. Ignatius popped up to deliver another bone-powdering handshake. Mia was much more gentle as she stroked his face with her housecat paw. At the table, Piffle pressed a plate of sweets into his hand. "Eat!"

He nibbled a cupcake. 'Holy shit, this really is good.' The frosting tasted like Christmas morning. "So, you don't seem to mind how I look now."

Piffle's expression conveyed, 'Why in the world would you think otherwise?'

George leaned down to nuzzle his master's bony shoulder. "We nearly match, Sire."

Toby chuckled and rubbed the stallion's skull fondly. "I guess we do."

From out of the blue, Toby found himself enveloped in a grandmotherly hug from Tía Lopez. He stiffened and blushed, not really acquainted with such a feeling. Though, soon he relaxed and let the warmth of the gesture soak into his tired bones. It felt very, very nice.

"I told you you would do fine. And see? You have." She gave him a smile, sweet as honey. Then she abruptly popped a jellybean in his mouth. "Here. A treat. You're too skinny." She gave him a wink and a pat on the cheek, then melted away in the crowd.

Toby was left pleasantly befuddled. The bean tasted like apple pie.

Zinc poured himself a glass of rum. "It hasn't been a party without you, pal. We let you sleep, of course. Shit, we all catnapped for a bit. But we saved the whole goddam world! The kitten kaboodle! You can't stop a shindig from happenin' after that!"

Silently, Junella appeared beside her partner, swiped the bottle from him and swigged. She looked at Toby with a smirk at first, but then her expression changed. A weary smile that told him she probably would have preferred someplace quieter too.

Toby nodded, appreciating that.

Piffle was now asking what he thought of the cupcake, and he was about to reply, when something on the coffee table caught his eye. "What's that?"

Aldridge shifted from a vole in the corner to an ibex by the fireplace. "That is our foe."

Toby felt the reassuring hand on his shoulder, but all other sensations faded against the sight of that clear glass cube, just sitting there out in the open.

Perfectly imprisoned in its center was a single drop of blood.

"She... can't get out of there, can she?"

"Not a worry," the wizard said softly. "I built that cube from anti-imaginite. It's a concept I've been playing around with for quite a while. Absolutely impregnable. She could... for a thousand... and not even..."

Aldridge kept talking. Toby didn't hear it.

The color drained out of his vision. He felt his jaw judder.

And even though there were people all around and some part of him knew this was embarrassing, he literally could not stop himself from rushing forward through the crowd, dropping to his knees, and repeatedly punching the cube so hard the table it was sitting on shattered.

The sound of it made people jump away. Then they backed up further at the fury Toby suddenly unleashed. "CAN YOU HEAR ME IN THERE, SCAPHIS!? CAN YOU HEAR ME!?" He brought his steel slab of a hand down against the cube over and over and over. It didn't leave a scratch. Toby kept hitting. He literally could not stop himself. "YOU'D BETTER STAY IN THERE IF YOU KNOW WHAT'S GOOD FOR YOU! BELIEVE ME! BECAUSE I DON'T EVER WANT TO GO THROUGH THAT AGAIN!! YOU HEAR ME!? NONE OF IT! EVER!!! I NEVER WANT TO FEEL HATRED AND WORRY LIKE THAT! I NEVER WANT TO THINK ABOUT YOU HURTING PEOPLE I CARE ABOUT! I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOUR HORRIBLE NOT-A-FACE FOR THE REST OF ETERNITY!! SO IF YOU EVER DO MANAGE TO ESCAPE, RUN AWAY. FOR YOUR OWN SAKE! BECAUSE IF I EVER SEE YOU AGAIN I WILL HUNT YOU ACROSS SPACE AND TIME AND I WON'T CARE WHAT I TURN INTO IN THE PROCESS. THERE IS LITERALLY NOTHING I WOULDN'T DO TO STOP YOU. AND I DON'T WANT THAT. I DON'T WANT TO BECOME THAT. I DON'T WANT TO LOSE EVERYONE I LOVE BY BECOMING THAT." Tears were flooding uncontrollably down his face. "YOU HEAR ME!? STAY IN THERE!!! STAY IN THERE FOREVER!!! DO IT FOR YOUR OWN SELF-PRESERVATION IF YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE, BUT DON'T YOU EVER, EVER, EVER LET ME SEE YOU AGAIN FROM NOW UNTIL THE END OF TIME, YOU MONSTER!!!"

Toby suddenly snatched up the cube and ran out of the room at top speed, knocking people out of his way as if he couldn't even see them.

Aldridge saw exactly where he was heading. He transferred himself there instantly.

The shocked crowd was silent for a moment, then began to softly murmur about the stunning outburst they'd just seen. Some reached out hands to help up the guests Toby had knocked over. Some started nervously picking up shards of glass from the coffee table, until Rebecca stopped them and said she could handle it herself. Most, though, followed Toby.

Cutlass out and flashing, Junella let everyone know that she was getting to him first and not even God would stop her.

She bullied her way through the bodies packing the hallway, towards the stark, bare-boards room where all these weeks of awfulness had began. She couldn't stop a shudder. Memories of that green-tipped tongue. Watching Scaphis tear Aldridge in half. Watching Toby nearly lose himself inside that silver, floating abomination.

When she finally burst through, the first thing she saw was Aldridge leaning against the left wall, arms crossed, observing. She saw how the room bulged outward from the unholy artifact at its center. She saw the Neculaunis with its door flung wide open.

She saw Toby frozen in front of it, shivering and panting, lips stretched in rage, arm cocked back, holding up the cube of Scaphis, about to throw her in.

Junella sheathed her cutlass and walked silently towards him. The mouse looked immobile but simmering. A volcano two seconds from eruption.

Rubberneckers were crowded at the door, trying to push in. Some intended to stop the mouse, others to encourage him. George raised his temperature just enough to be uncomfortable. He nosed his way through and lifted them aside by their collars in his teeth. Sire Toby needed this moment to himself.

Sweat dripped slowly down his forehead. His arm trembled from the weight of the cube, and from holding it for so long at a pitching angle. His left leg was braced behind him and was skidding slowly against the floorboards. The oblivion door's nothingness didn't call out to him now. He had no interest in it besides what it could do to the living disease in his hand.

Toby felt needle-tipped paws wrap softly around his shoulder. Not preventing him, simply joining him.

He dragged his eyes away from the Neculaunis. Junella's face showed quiet concern. She blinked, and showed him two shining sapphires for an instant, before they reverted again to her regular hue.

Toby swallowed. His throat was as tight as a violin bow. He could not speak, so he asked with his eyes, 'Are you going to try to stop me?'

Junella shook her head. She replied back just as silently, 'I'm with you whatever you decide.'

He took in a deep breath. Then he abruptly dropped the cube on the floor with a startling THUNK and poured himself into her embrace. He cried and shuddered on her shoulder.

Aldridge, watching, simply nodded.

Junella enfolded the wreck of a mouse in her arms, cradling his head and resting hers against it, cheek-to-cheek. Her needles caressed his fur, feather-gently.

His whole body twitched with a powerful sob. "A-aren't you g-gonna yell at me for n-not tossing her in? I know you w-would."

"Maybe not," she replied with a catlike smirk. "You can only go in if you want to, right?"

Toby nodded. He was getting her pretty scarf all sloppy with his crying and felt really bad about that. "I th-thought about that. I saw mys-self throw her, and how she'd bounce off, and maybe I'd yell at her some more. What stopped me was, I didn't know how I'd feel if she went th-through."

So quiet no one else could hear, Junella whispered in his ear, "My Toby."

He shuddered. He held her tighter.

She moved her hand up and down his back in a calming circle.

"I'm sorry I ruined the party," he mumbled.

She snorted. "Nothing's ruined. They understand. I don't even have to ask 'em. Maybe the music'll be quieter for a bit, but you can come back when you're ready and I'll pour you a drink and everything'll be fine."

"Just soda, please."

She chuckled. "You wimp."

He laughed too.

***

It was now the day after. Rebecca had cleaned up all confetti and the spilled drinks inside herself. Aldridge had flown their guests home. A magnificent sight, actually. Everyone had linked arms in a chain, then the cast-off angel unfurled his wings in an unbelievable span, counted to three, and lifted them all effortlessly into the air. Toby waved and waved goodbye.

He and his friends remained for another night's sleep. After a simple, pleasant breakfast, they went out to the front yard to talk and enjoy the view. Six lounge chairs rose up from the lawn. George was content to lie on the grass. Piffle, however...

Junella leaned over the back of her chair. "Will you cut out the victory cartwheels and get over here?"

The hamsterfly fell over on her tush and tittered. The pianograss played a lovely chord. "In a minute!"

Before them was the whole of Phobiopolis, all spread out like a buffet. Through the Veil Of Tears they could see mountains, plains, even the faraway light at the top of EC. A beautiful panorama. From such a height, everything was peaceful.

Toby stood for a moment just appreciating the house. Rebecca had not only rebuilt herself exactly as she'd been before, she'd used the bulk of Scaphis' citadel and the old castle to fill in the crater. Now the mountaintop was a smooth plateau of friendly chocolate-brown rock, covered in soft green, with one cozy home as its centerpiece. Toby turned to see Aldridge settling down beside another of her avatars. Rebecca's latest body was composed of faux fur and clothing over a mannequin: as close to her old self as she could accomplish.

"Sorry about blowing up your castle," Toby said as he walked over.

Aldridge snorted. "Ah, well. I never should have built it in the first place. Nothing but a monument to my phase of sullen misanthropy. Rebecca's all I need." He reached out to pat her paw.

Becca added, "And with the mountain shaved down, the view looks different for the first time in forevs."

Toby was glad things had worked out. He sat down beside them and stretched his legs.

Zinc was sipping something effeminate from a cored-out pineapple, because this seemed an appropriate time and place. "Kudos to you during the fight, Becca. You were a slaughter house."

Everyone groaned. The mutt's tail wagged. Piffle came over to bop him on the head with her wing.

"And thanks for mopping up the trash at the end," Junella said to Aldridge. "Tho' it woulda been nice to have a bit more assistance during."

The wizard, now a stoat, sat up to let her see his arched eyebrow. "Oh? Excuse me, but how far did Scaphis manage to reach in two months' time?"

George recalled the particulars. "The furthest southward point she was observed was Sir Gilla-Gilla's abode in Marasmus. But to the east and west she overtook both Cachexy and Polydactyl. If it were not for her looping path indicating disorientation in Dysania, she would have easily engulfed Lalochezia as well within that time."

A crisp nod from Aldridge. He laid back down and closed his eyes. "If I hadn't been inside of her, she'd have done it all in three weeks."

Junella made a 'Well allright then' sound.

"What were you doing in there?" Piffle asked.

"Dying a simply ludicrous amount of times," he responded straightforwardly. "Bathed in acid, suffocated in stomach folds. It was unpleasant. Only meditation kept me sane. In the brief, repeating moments when I'd return to consciousness, I kept on trying to work my way towards the wand. She did an impressive job keeping it separate from me. But having to constantly keep me in check drastically reduced her own capacity."

Toby was reminded of his days spent in L'roon's storage compartment. His mind also boggled at the thought that the Scaphis he'd fought had been severely handicapped. 'Cripes, what would she have been like at her peak!?'

The wizard squoze his wife's paw. "Everything worked out in the end though, don't you think, Sugarbeet?"

"More or less, Poopcookie."

Junella winced down to her soul. Zinc gave Piffle a look of, 'You will not call me that.'

George considered something different. "If I may ask, Sir Aldridge, it seems inefficient on Scaphis' part to have constantly counteracted you. Why did she not dispose of you in Dysphoria, if that was her preferred method of ending those who opposed her?"

Aldridge pointed at him, indicating an excellent question. "For one, that place doesn't bother me anymore." His tone conveyed a long, hard acclimation. "For two, because devouring me was simply more Grand Guignol. Melodramatic. Too emotionally-satisfying to pass up. I may also have subtly manipulated her towards that course of action. If it worked, I'll take credit for it. If not, happy chance."

He paused for a moment, then spoke with solemnity. "I apologize for putting the burden on you all. But I have had so much past experience with her, I foresaw the coming battle from the perspective of if I were an active participant. It did not go well. My tricks were known. New blood was needed. I sacrificed both myself, and you, on a gamble. I hope you can forgive me."

The travelers all looked among themselves, asking if they did. They settled on Toby to answer, since he had easily suffered the most from the wizard's decision.

The small mouse thought it over for a while, then shrugged. "I guess, like Gilla-Gilla told me, strategy is strategy. She put you in the position to make that choice. It was unfair, but it was what you had to do. So that's that."

Aldridge was humbled by Toby's simple, rational outlook. "It was unfair, yes. You should never have endured what you did. Even at my most wrathful, I still thought that Scaphis could change if given a properly reflective punishment. I was wrong about that. You paid the price for my excess of compassion."

Toby fidgeted. "I'm not angry at you."

"Maybe you should be," the wizard replied. He turned his gaze to the stars. "Toby, I have not been angry in a very, very long time. Perhaps that is why I have also not done anything for the same length. Anger is a motivator. My serenity became stagnation. Don't let it happen to you. Keep your fire lit, but look after it. Neither too hot or too dim."

Toby nodded at that.

Aldridge went on, knowing he was about to descend into rambling, but hoping some of it might be useful to the others. "This is not a kind world, as you all well know. The star being keeps us afloat, but we are castaways on a sea of darkest ugliness and chaos. We are at our best when we resist; when we lash ourselves to what makes our lives worthwhile and speak directly to fate, 'No, you cannot have this. It's mine.'"

He turned directly to the mouse. "You have to choose carefully what you want to hold onto, because time will steal all else. Friendships are a good choice. Power and control, not so much."

Junella felt a twinge at that.

Aldridge observed Toby's fused hammerhand and the tension of the mouse's posture, even in his relaxed position. "You are still fighting, aren't you?" he asked gently.

Toby looked at him in surprise, then nodded vigorously, glad that someone else had noticed. (They all had, actually. His faraway looks. His fidgeting legs at breakfast. The multiple times he'd woken up from sleep to pace or get a drink of water.)

"I..." he swallowed, "I can't convince myself it's over. I spent so long planning, it's like I'm locked onto that mindset now. On rails. I dream about her. I replay our conversations. Especially the insults that hurt the most. I keep going into the livingroom to look at that cube on the coffee table, making sure she's still in there." He added, "Sorry about breaking that, Rebecca."

A handwave.

Toby rubbed his forehead. "I hear her voice when it's quiet. I go over and over plans that already happened. I keep nitpicking. 'Why didn't I make a detonator instead of a taser? What if I'd used, like, an Ipecac cannon? Would things have gone better if I'd done X, Y, or Z? Would fewer people have suffered?'"

Aldridge saw his own reflection in the mouse. He reached out to cup Toby's shoulder. "Your mind will continue being cruel to you for quite a while longer, I'll wager. You'll beg it to stop and it won't. But sometimes hearing it from another's voice can be something you can use against it: You did well. Nothing's ever perfect, but it turned out good. It's okay to celebrate that."

"Celebrate!?" Toby yelped. "My friends had their brains sucked out! Everyone in Rhinolith spent a month in hell! Then I singlehandedly destroyed their economy. Lalochezia's on the downward spiral too. I stole from Gilla. I screamed at L'roon-"

Aldridge giggled.

Toby gave him a furious look.

The wizard could not keep the smirk off his face. "You think I haven't made mistakes just as awful? That any of us haven't?"

"You think you're special?" Rebecca teased.

Toby didn't know whether to feel offended or reassured.

With bottomless caring, Aldridge locked his gaze to Toby's and told him, "We're all fuckups. Everyone who ever lived."

"Well... I don't know about..."

Aldridge shook his head: no exceptions. "The story of history is not much more than endlessly wringing progress from cataclysms and atrocities. Slow progress. Why let all that pain have happened for no reason? Build from what the ashes unearth. There is nothing innocent, nothing pure, nothing untouched by the universe's blind, cold cruelty. Oh well. We wrest joy from this decomposing world for the sheer satisfaction of spite."

Toby thought of how angry Logdorbhok must have been at his escape. How big a fit his mom would throw to know he'd been playing outside all this time.

"We laugh because the cosmos does nothing but try to stop us. And when we fail, that is simply the default state of existence. So it should not concern us for very long."

Toby's mind was a bit blown. "That's, like, incredibly nihilistic and incredibly hopeful all at once."

"Good." Aldridge sat back in his seat. "Life is contradictions. Deal with it. And deal with the fact that you and your friends are heroes."

Toby blushed. "I'm a hero for swinging a hammer a lot?" he joked.

Aldridge responded seriously. "No. For persevering." 

George snorted in complete agreement.

"I..." Toby swallowed. "I feel like I can't really accept that word, honestly. After all the things I did to her... How far I let myself go... What kind of furson am I after all that?"

Aldridge replied with a question. "Do you think I am evil for putting her in that cube?"

"No, obviously!"

A brisk nod. "Then turn that logic on yourself."

Toby instinctively tried to argue with that, and couldn't find a way to.

Rebecca added, "What Aldy said about choosing friendships? That's how you come back after staring into the abyss. They're what pulls you back. Scaphis never trusted anyone else. She was too scared to take that risk. So she never knew the rewards."

Toby considered that, then slowly turned to look at his friends.

They all returned gentle smiles.

He was reminded of what he'd said the day before around the campfire, about giving up everything to win, including themselves. He had done that. He had let himself become an engine of purpose, no longer caring what became of him. He'd jumped headlong into the blackness, tumbling without fear, accepting of oblivion... And his friends had caught him. Here they were, all together now on the other side of the plunge.

He envisioned them dragging him out of a cold swimming pool where he'd almost drowned, leading him to safety and wrapping a soft fluffy towel around him.

Aldridge wasn't psychic, but he was skilled at reading cues. "It seems to me you've made yourself responsible for a great many things, Toby deLeon. The weight of the world. That's a hard burden to bear. Maybe it's allright, I think, if Atlas steps down for a break every now and then, and lets someone else hold the sky."

Toby was about to ask, 'Isn't that selfish?' But then he stopped himself.

Hadn't he rescued them too? Hadn't he dove in to save them? George, Zinc, Piffle, Junella. Was there anything selfish in thinking they might be willing to do the same?

Was it just that he didn't want to return to the past, when he'd been a weakling in need of their care? Yes, that struck a chord. But he wasn't weak anymore. He was just... fragile at the moment, that was all. If they carried him for a while, it wouldn't be permanent.

His friends were still smiling at him. Lovingly. Encouragingly. At times when he'd lost his memories, hadn't they always been there to remind him? And now that he felt like an overturned box of jigsaw puzzle pieces, was it really so outlandish to think they might be happy to help him pick them up?

A burden became easier when many hands shared the weight.

It was barely above a whisper, but he had to say it. To all of them. "Thank you."

They nodded that he was welcome.

"That reminds me!" Aldridge suddenly sat bolt upright and looked at the others. "You came to me the first time to ask favors. Seeing as how I put you all through a living hell named Scaphis, you deserve them even more. Ask away."

Toby sputtered. That was rather sudden. He couldn't think of anything to wish for.

Though Zinc pounced on the opportunity. "I want my dream car. She's been in my brains for years now and she wants out. But I don't want you to just give her to me. I want enough rocks to build her myself."

"Done," Aldridge said without hesitation. "There's an underground pocket of imaginite near your home in Phlogiston. No one's discovered it yet. I'll draw you a map and build you an entrance."

"Hot damn!" He clapped his wrenches.

Toby thought of something. "Speaking of imaginite, one thing you can definitely do is help me repay Rhinolith."

The wizard's face said it didn't even need to be asked. "I will pick up that tab in its entirety. Your friend Gilla's list too. It comes down to my responsibility anyway. I loosed a remorseless viper upon the world: these are my amends."

Rebecca added, "And before you ask, yes we'll take care of the comatose three you plucked out of the funhouse dimension. I've got some experience coaxing people back from that."

Toby nodded in relief. He'd been just about to raise that point.

"Though, none of that is for you," Aldridge noted, pointing at the mouse.

Toby stammered. "I- I can't think of anything I want! I mean, my mind did kinda flick towards my old bookshelf. But no. That's just me trying to go backwards again. If I really want to read any of them again I can go look for them in EC. Or imaginite 'em myself."

"May I make a suggestion?" Aldridge asked.

"Go for it."

"We were just speaking of worries and letting them go. I used to be fairly good as a hypnotist. I can make you something my wife and I use. Actually..." He rustled in the pocket of his bathrobe. "I'll just give you mine and make another later."

Into Toby's hand was placed a small octagon gem. Flat on all sides, worn smooth by years. Nearly clear but with a trace of blue. The small weight of it alone was pleasant. "What does it do?"

"It's a calming gem. If you hold it and stare into its center, all your emotions will recede. You will be as still as a pond. A perfect aid for meditation."

Rebecca piped up, "Just don't use it too much. You'll go stale like bread."

Aldridge blushed. "Um, yes. True."

Toby stared into it. He did not feel a trance come over him, nor a blissful wave of serenity. He just felt... neutral. Not the nothingness of the oblivion door. Not the numbness after Dysphoria. Just himself, and that was all. He smiled softly and looked back to Aldridge. "Thank you."

"Um..." Piffle was tapping her many fingertips together. "Are you still playin' Santy Claus for the rest of us?"

"Absolutely, my dear," Aldridge replied.

Her whiskers bounced. "Oh good! I've been thinking about it while you were talkin' with Toby. What I'd really like is if, um, whenever I get transformed into something, if I always had a way back."

Zinc chuckled. "Tryin' to be your cake and eat it too?"

Her cheeks turned pink. "You know me. I really do enjoy it. But I remember what you said about not letting it be a burden on everyone else. This way, it won't be." She turned back to the wizard. "Assuming it's possible?"

"Certainly." He stroked his chinfur. "I believe Luxy has something like that put on him. He likes to be himself. Something about using close friends' perceptions of your appearance to draw upon as a kind of triangulation. With five of you it ought to be easy. I'll ask Waxacada and Driuwej about it this afternoon."

Rebecca snickered. "After their diaper change."

Piffle clapped her paws. "That's the cat's knees and the bees' pajamas! And I'll help out with that, Becca. They're adorable!" The two transformed sorcerers had been among the few guests who'd stayed. Piffle had been tickling their tummies and cooing at them since the party.

Junella raised her hand like in a classroom. "Me next?"

Aldridge nodded to her. "As you wish."

The skunk looked down at the bulbous grooved lump on her rump. "Um, can I have my old tail back? I got a taste of it again when I was playing with George," she shared a grin with him, "and dammit, I miss it." Blushing, she confessed, "Brushing it was relaxing." She knew that was borderline girly-girl behavior. "Keep the shards though. I don't want it to be jus' a handle for bastards to yank on in combat."

Aldridge guffawed. "Pfft! Give me something difficult. That's like asking for me to bake you a tin of muffins." He opened his hand, the wand flew from inside the house, he pointed it at her bottom, and it was done.

Junella jumped at the sudden explosion of fur. She chuckled and ran her paws through all that nice softness. Hidden amongst it were still plenty of jagged, deadly edges. Perfect.

Piffle's eyes sparkled. "Junella, it's beautiful! Please tell me you'll let me brush it too!"

The skunk rolled her eyes. Naturally she'd ask. "Just so long as you have some bandaids handy."

Zinc gave his partner a thumbs-up on her custom chassis. His buzzsaw pompadour had fallen off and vanished sometime during the brawl, but he was still tossing back and forth the idea of a wig.

Junella's sharp eyes noticed a small sparkling missile incoming. She shot out her paws and caught it.

It was another calming gem.

Rebecca craned her neck to give her a smile to go with it. "That's mine. Aldy can make another another. You give me a vibe like you might appreciate it."

Junella looked down at the little pebble of sky. "Yeah... Thank you," she said quietly.

Aldridge sat up taller so he could see all the way to the end of the row of chairs. "What about you, Sir George Charles Atkinson? Everyone else has had a turn."

The stallion blinked. "Me? I had not thought to ask! My needs are simple and easily met. Companionship, conversation, the occasional good scuffle, and high speed. Although..." He hesitated. It might be too much, and too vague. "When I encountered a herd of my own kind outside of Rhinolith some nights ago, it was a painful moment. I saw glints of sentience among them, but a strong rejection of it. I would like, if you are offering to grant a desire, for some way to give my fellow constructs a chance to enjoy the clarity of mind and richness of heart I have been lucky enough to possess."

Toby felt himself tear up a little. Of course George would ask for that. George was the best.

Aldridge was floored. "Well now... I can certainly understand why you'd want that. Though, to be perfectly honest, I'd always thought of ascended constructs as a fluke. The luck of a shooting star."

"They're not," Toby was happy to correct. "I've got some theories about them. It might be way easier than you'd ever guess."

The mouse sounded absolutely confident about that. Aldridge had not been astonished in quite some time. It felt nice. "Allright then. I will give it my best, I promise."

George whinnied in appreciation.

"I hate feelin' greedy..." Junella bashfully poked in, "Especially after you just hadda go and make the most unselfish wish ever." She playfully noogied George.

He chortled and swished his tail.

"But, ah, you mind if I also ask for a ride home?"

"Not at all," Aldridge said. "That was always included in the package deal."

The skunk nodded, relieved. "Just making sure."

Zinc nibbled the rim of his 'glass'. "Though... that does raise an interesting question, Junebug. Whose home?"

"I mean..." She faltered, as she'd only been thinking about her own.

Zinc tapped his wrenchtips. "We've got the Jennie. But Piffle lives back in the Blackdamp. Toby's basically an orphan. And we can't well send George back to a hole in the ground."

Piffle and Toby looked at one another. They hadn't really thought about this.

Junella looked at George. Then an absolutely wicked smile unfurled across her face. "Hey, mouse!"

Toby whirled around. "Huh?"

She pointed a needlefinger at him. "You remember back at the start of this ass-busting adventure, you promised me one tame construct as payment for getting you up the mountain? Well, we're here, ain't we?"

He was a bit startled. Not that she'd remember, but that she could still possibly think of George as payment. "Yes, we are."

She reached behind her and clutched the stallion's dome like a basketball. "Then I'll be taking ownership, effective immediately."

George tried not to show his shock at the brusqueness of her tone. "As you wish, Madam Brox. It is indeed what we agreed upon."

"Right." She nodded in satisfaction.

Folding her arms behind her head, she leaned back and used her new fluff as a pillow. Then, as if an afterthought, she glanced over at Toby and Piffle. "He's gonna need a couple groomsmen though. You two losers wanna come live on a pirate ship?"

Piffle's antennae perked up.

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END OF BOOK FIVE
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