Ever since the...whatever the hell had happened back in the Spire, Lisa had felt...weird. Like, really, really weird.

At first she thought it was her mind imploding after she discovered that her aunt and uncle were deceptive, potentially hostile, kursi. But here she was, half a continent away, and the feeling was still there. Of course, Lisa knew that distance didn't actually mean that her mind was distanced from the events of three hours ago...but it had been three hours! Why did she still feel agitated out of her mind?

'Need to vent this nervous energy,' she noted absently, entirely focused on tracing the Earth's magnetic field lines down to Argentina. She'd arrive in the south, then work her way back up to Texas. This was an extremely relaxed ambassador tour, considering that fact that all of the Americas had collectively surrendered to Basalith.

Still, she needed to officially welcome them into the flock, or whatever. She really couldn't make herself enthusiastic. At the very least she had her kursi abilities, which would make this whole process exponentially easier.

After around two hours of high-speed vaulting through the air like a hammer-wielding Thor, Lisa slammed down onto the ground just outside of Buenos Aires. Actually, slam down wasn't perhaps the most accurate description. Lisa left an enormous crater in the ground, thankfully somewhere off the coast between Argentina and Uruguay. Had she been just a smidgen closer to the shore, she probably would've destroyed some expensive real estate.

'Who am I kidding,' she thought to herself. Real estate in a post-dragonleaf era? Beachfront property in a post-Earth era? Lisa shook her head, letting water drip from her hair onto the ground.

'Huh,' she thought to herself, taking note of how the water seemed to stream right off her body, clothes...even her hair was dry after about a minute of low-altitude flight. 'Though that might just be the wind,' she figured.

She knew that the ambassador thing didn't need to last long. She just needed to show up, look awesome, wow everyone, make them happy, and move on to the next place. She was pretty sure that Argentina's city-seed would be up-and-running in no time, even if it wasn't established yet.

"Lepochim's been slacking," she smiled to herself, the expression oddly pained. Certainly, sending teams of five and coordinating their human and quasi assistance was difficult, but it was the alien's only job! Besides running Basalith, of course, though Lisa barely even counted that. She knew by now that Nevis was the one keeping things together. Thinking of Lepochim and Nevis drew her thoughts back to Basalith, her parents...but no, that wasn't quite it. The strange unease she felt wasn't because of them, or her so-called relatives. 'So the distance is letting me see things a bit clearer.'

Lisa frowned. "Why do I feel like there's something...angry below Basalith?"

---

"She's coming!"

Everyone screamed, the kinds of screams expected of actresses in horror movies. The only reason the crowd could even sustain such high-pitched, grating notes was that the vast majority benefited from some kind of voice-enhancing boon. Why high-pitched screaming was so widespread, Maya had to admit to a bit of blame.

Maybe...a lot of blame.

At the center of the city, instead of a towering spire, sat a ridiculously huge ziggurat. At its precipice was a sun-shaped altar draped in a silky white cloth. All around the ziggurat's sides sprawled a writhing mass of confoundingly large snakes. Well, Maya knew that they were snake quasi-sapients, but they looked more like feathered Quetzalcoatls. It was as though the things had been hand-picked for Dawn Faction's unofficial capital.

Maya had to give it to the Dragon's snobbish, black-and-yellow-eyed administrator...he really meant it when he gave her first pick over the quasi-sapients. Technically, she'd been given second pick after Dean, but the reluctant teen had left such a small dent in the quasi-sapient numbers that Maya hadn't even considered the fact that someone else aside from herself would pick from the quasi-sapient pool first.

Maya currently stood on the altar, her pristinely white robes shifting slightly in the faint wind, as though the sky was gently breathing on her. "Our Lady Dawn approaches!" she boomed, her voice mind-bogglingly loud to be heard over the wailing crowd. As she lifted her arms, the screams increased in volume like a kind of savage war cry.

Maya smiled slightly to herself. The snakes all took their cue, giving her mildly baleful tongue flicks before uncoiling themselves and rising up to their full heights. The feathered snakes technically had diminutive, vestigial-looking wings, but were clearly grounded. Maya almost wondered if the Dragon had made a mistake with the bunch.

The snakes fanned their wings and tail feathers while they slithered into an impressive formation over the ziggurat, their bodies forming waves against its green-gray dragon-leaf wood. Their bright, yellow-red feathers made clear their intended shapes: rays of sunlight streaming out from the top of the ziggurat. Maya placed a hand over the altar, then closed her eyes.

She remained like this until she finally heard the Church smash down somewhere in the trees nearby. 'It's very considerate,' Maya thought to herself. If the Church hadn't first thudded noisily to the ground before each location she visited, none of her receivers would've been ready in time. Word quickly spread on the internet about the Church's campaign through South America; after Argentina, practically anybody in power worth their salt knew to get ready for the Church when she "made contact" with the ground.

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Everyone in the stadium was just as aware as Maya about the implications behind the noise. Maya sighed contentedly, like a proud mother. Now this was worship. Not that the people in Basalith appreciated it. Technically, many of the people in Mexico hadn't been too receptive, either...

But Maya's peacekeepers proved surprisingly adept at changing their minds. She still wasn't sure what boons the brown-robes had, but they certainly knew how to rev up a crowd. If she'd been able to exploit their abilities back in Basalith...

Maya coughed lightly to herself. 'The Church is taking a little while,' she realized, mildly confused but relatively impassive. She'd come eventually, so what was the rush?

In actuality, Lisa had already recovered from her less-than-glorious crash landing and was just hovering in the sky.

"What the everliving fuck," she stated. "Is this real?" Sprawled out before Lisa was a vastly different dragonleaf city than she was used to. For one, someone had clearly chopped down the city's Spire and built the biggest damned pyramid Lisa had ever seen. 'They must've reshaped at least half of the apartment buildings as part of that structure,' she realized. On the pyramid itself were numerous giant, feathered snakes, all of which were at least one-thousand feet long. While Lisa had known that the snake quasies came in all different shapes and sizes, she hadn't expected...feathers.

"If they have wings, are they even snakes?" Lisa felt genuinely stumped. Sighing, she figured it was time to approach the city and do the usual.

As she approached, she sound of frantic wailing and pounding became increasingly hard to ignore. Lisa screwed up her face against the sun as she tried to understand what was going on. "Is everyone...dancing? And...singing?" Singing was an enormously generous description for the cacophony, but the crowd was, in fact, dancing.

Lisa spotted a white-robed woman standing at the top of the pyramid by a white-draped golden altar. She raised her arms like the hands of a clock, moving them around her body in practiced patterns. As she did so, the crowd danced in time with her movements.

And when she clapped, they stomped. Hard.

Lisa was actually quite worried for the infrastructure of the city, not to mention any subterranean quasies. Though she was pretty sure Dean had taken Basalith's main subterranean species, the cute jerboa quasies...so she cast such worries from her already addled mind.

As Lisa had been flying, she'd needed to stay above the clouds to avoid any eyes on her zigzagging form. While flying slowly, she had everything under control. However, with that ridiculous gnawing at the back of her mind, Lisa found using magnetic sense to fly quickly wasn't exactly...safe, or predictable. As she took the time to fly to each stop on her list of cities, she had been trying to figure out why.

She knew it all started with the appearance of her family. She'd already reasoned that, no, she wasn't "distraught" or "hysterical" from her aunt and uncle's revelation. After a few hours, she wasn't even worried about what her parents thought about the whole exchange. Lisa reasoned that even if she'd reacted with fairly violent force, her aunt had attacked them all first.

That's when Lisa felt a little spark catch fire in her head.

But, first things first...

Lisa swooped over the crowd, then descended lightly over the altar. She touched their massive group shell and practically inhaled their worship. She felt like she was getting the hang of keeping her wits about in the face of so much zealous energy, all focused on her being.

'Regis,' she thought grimly. She didn't know what Regis actually meant in terms of abilities, but assumed it had something to do with her ability to absorb the worship around her. As far as she knew, while the other kursi could tap into group shells, none...felt the crowd's fervor like she did.

Of course, Lisa reasoned that she only felt their energy because, as their Church, the people targeted her as their object of worship...but part of her doubted it was so simple.

"Followers of the Way of the Dragon, Disciples of Dawn," Lisa bellowed, her voice projecting out just as powerfully as Maya's, shaking the dragonleaves that fringed most buildings' roofs. "The time for unity has come."

The crowd was absolutely ballistic. Lisa actually tried to calm them down, only to find the effort useless. 'Zealots,' she cursed inwardly. Well, as Bath had been telling her lately...if you can't order chaos, direct it.

"Within the next month, we will open the gate leading to a new world," Lisa shouted exuberantly. "At that time, only the best, the most determined will be provided the opportunity to go." Lisa and Bath certainly had no qualms about letting anyone through the gate. The true limiting factor was the gate's pitiful diameter of just a few feet. Even if only a few million people voluntarily opted to leave Earth for the "uncharted" territory beyond, passing all of them through the gate would be a nightmare.

Anticipating this problem, Nevis and Lepochim had independently suggested to Lisa that COTD should take advantage of this fact to push its constituents harder. For anybody who had no interest in leaving Earth, it certainly wouldn't make them work less hard, and for people who planned to vie for a fast-pass to the new world...

Lisa used her magnetic manipulation to stir her robes and hair, making it appear as though an invisible wind were streaming dramatically around her. 'Maybe I should ask for a cape like Bath's,' she thought not for the first time today.

"Your servants shall endeavor to please you, Lady of the Light, Bastion of Those Below, Hero of the Helpless.."

Lisa smiled peacefully, though her outward appearance completely failed to convey her mounting impatience with the never-ending hurricane of titles. As if reacting to her thoughts, the non-existent wind around Lisa seemed to rip ever more ferociously at her robes. Resisting the urge to roll her eyes, Lisa waited until what could only be the fifteenth multi-word title spilled out.

Then, the white-robed woman below her kneeled reverently and shouted, "Praise to our Sun!" Everyone in the stadium suddenly stopped their screaming. All was utterly and eerily quiet.

"A blessing on this city," Lisa called out, mildly eager to get the hell away from this bizarre city. 'What was its name?' It was on her sheet of paper, the one with all the country capitals and city-seeds...not that she could pull it out right now.

"A blessing on Tollan!"

She suppressed a sigh of relief. Her trusty memory hadn't failed her, after all, even with the distraction of...

Lisa rose up into the air like an eminent goddess, disappearing into the clouds as though she were ascending into heaven. She shook her head. "That was so weird," she muttered. Her gaze suddenly turned sharp. She remembered what she had been thinking about before she approached Tollan.

"Everything started with Aunt Lauretta," Lisa said, voicing her thoughts out loud. "Did I...what was that I felt when I overpowered her?" At that time, Lisa had felt as though something clicked in her mind, though she assumed this was figurative. More of a...change of attitude, than anything else, a change of gears. A willingness on her part to fight back, even in the face of debilitating pain...to protect her real family.

But now she wondered if perhaps the click she felt had been something more. 'It really did feel like a click,' Lisa thought. 'But minds don't just...click...'