Anne wasn't sure what she was expecting when Kayt sprinted out into the distance to meet with some "officials." Russia was a country that took an openly hostile stance towards COTD...the reason why Edgier Than You fussed over chemical weapons protection before they left.

Anne glanced over her shoulder, halting the mindless thwacking of her club against a tree. The sudden cawing of birds filled the sky.

"Well shit," she murmured. "That was fast."

---

'Shit!' Kayt thought to herself as she raced back to the protection of Edgier Than You. The entire fricking Russian army was behind her!

She stole a look back to confirm her initial impression. 'Well, maybe not the entire army...' Actually, now that there was a bit of distance between her and the many Russian tanks and RPG-armed soldiers, she felt much less intimidated. In all honesty, she had to admit that she'd been seriously spooked by the grenades that the hidden Russian troops had thrown at her. When they burst, sending out waves of explosive flames, she and Nimesh had only just been able to jump through the blaze onto unscorched ground.

After about 1000 meters lay between herself and the two forces, Kayt patted Nimesh's neck and hopped down from the wolf's back. Kayt wondered why she was even running...she'd faced off against numerable terrifying challenges in the tournament. Surely, a contingent of normal troops couldn't compare to undying doll monsters, could they? Thinking rationally, Kayt knew that the army's only shot had been to take her out when she wasn't expecting it. If she hadn't been able to escape the flames, they probably would have killed her.

Unfortunately, they'd already blown their chance. And Kayt was angry. More specifically, Kayt was reeling from the near death experience while Nimesh was transmitting savage and bloodthirsty images directly into her fragile mind.

---

Anne cackled--not maniacally, but normally (or so she told herself)--from her position in the boughs of the tall tree she'd been hitting with her club just a minute back. While Anne wasn't a long range manipulator like Susan, her natural vision was still rather good. As a result, at elevation, she could get a sense of what was going on.

'You'd have to be blind,' Anne thought to herself, 'to not see what's happening.' From afar, the ranks of soldiers were falling like literal dominos before the furious whirlwind of Kayt and Nimesh. It was like someone had let a great white shark loose in a pool of sardines.

As the U.S. government personally found out earlier, tanks were completely useless against swift COTD members. Even automated weapon fire proved useless: Kayt quickly burrowed her way into the middle of the soldiers, meaning that any gunfire would be predominantly received as friendly fire.

"That's what they get for messing with us," Anne muttered contentedly to herself. "Hey guys," she shouted. "Think we should assist?"

"No," David replied. "We need to watch the city seed and wait for the rest of Kray City's admins to arrive."

"Administrators?" Anne asked.

"I mean the actual word, not the profession," David snapped, annoyed at the common word's confusing status as both a literal profession and a COTD profession.

Anne rolled her eyes and stuck out her tongue. 'David seemed so reserved in the beginning,' she thought grudgingly to herself. 'But he's actually such a hardass stick in the mud.'

"I'd go with you," Edgewood volunteered. Then he looked at Susan, who was busying herself off in the distance with her target practice. "Hey! Suzy!" he bellowed. "Can you take a look at what's going on over there? I wanna know how much longer the fight's going on."

Susan ignored him. After a moment, David growled and whipped his head around at Edgewood. "Did you never learn how to play with others?"

"What?"

"Actually, screw that. Did you never learn about sexual harassment?"

Edgewood gaped. "Sexual fucking harassment? Why?" Was David secretly a feminazi? Edgewood wasn't even sure what to think anymore.

David narrowed his eyes. "A guy on my team kept calling one of the pretty new hires Princess, and that earned his sorry ass a ticket to nowhere."

"Suzy isn't Princess," Edgewood snarled. 'The actual fuck?' "I'd just as soon call her Suzy as I would you...uh...Davie." Since when was giving people innocuous nicknames anything other than normal harassment? And since when was even calling someone Princess sexual harassment!?

"But you don't call me Davie, do you? In fact, the only people on this team whom you've addressed by nickname are women."

Edgewood couldn't even believe what he was hearing. "That's cuz you're the only other guy, dumbfuck. And anyways, congratulations, your name is now officially Davie."

Just as David looked like he was going to reply, both he and Edgewood jerked their heads left, picking up on the beginnings of a snicker.

"Ahahaha!" Susan giggled, eyes closed. "Davie." Then her expression turned incalculably malevolent as she affixed Edgewood with smoldering amber eyes. "Don't ever call my Suzy again. And, in response to your question, the fight's over." She looked over at Anne, the wild-child straddling a twenty-foot tree's upper boughs. "Exciting, Clubsy?"

"That's hypocritical, you giving people nicknames when I'm not allowed to give you one," Edgewood grumbled under his breath.

Susan gave him an icy grin. "Edgewood...Hedgewood. Bush?" She shrugged. "We'll see. Besides: Anne, you like Clubsy, don't you?"

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Anne gave Susan a contemplative look. "Can you call me Cubby?"

"Why?" Now David was the one to ask, his voice incredulous. 'Cubby? Like a place to deposit shoes?'

"Cuz I love the Cubs!" Anne stated this as though it were a war cry, eyes alight with almost zealous fury.

'Is that why she carries around a club? It's really a bat?' everyone thought to themselves in one way or another.

"...I'm still gonna call you prick," Edgewood said, breaking the silence.

"You don't deserve to be able to give people nicknames," Susan lamented. Without further discussion, she walked off even further away than she currently was, her dark hair swaying behind her. The trees within a few hundred feet of her previous position had already been reduced to pincushions, revealing her actual motives for finding a new position.

"She's coming now, Hedgehog," Anne snorted. Then, as Kayt rapidly drew closer atop Nimesh's back, Anne grimaced. "Damn, that's a lot to clean off." She looked left, towards the coast. She wondered vaguely if Kayt and Nimesh would dye the waters red.

---

Instead of looping back up into Canada and the western United States, Lisa decided to make a pitstop at Basalith.

As she entered the city, a few things became abundantly clear. As Lisa stood before the Ritus gate closed off in the Anima's labyrinth, she felt something--almost a kind of consciousness. The gate looked as though it had an aurora-like blue and green shell swirling around it, though Lisa found that she was utterly unable to influence it.

Lisa sighed. "Aunt Lauretta and Uncle Bern." She thought that she was piecing together the enigma of her faux relatives.

Lisa knew that she and Bath had never actually found out how to become Waymasters of a gate. They just assumed that by being in control of a gate's physical location, they'd naturally be its Waymaster.

Now, Lisa was almost sure this wasn't the case. "Lauretta and Bern are two old, experienced kursi. That means that they're very powerful." Lisa wasn't sure if receiving devotion from COTD members or constantly using her kursi powers was to blame for her rapid growth as a mind manipulator, but she didn't doubt that she'd been able to defeat Lauretta fair and square.

The feat was actually something that left Lisa with a great deal of satisfaction, considering the fact that age was a prime determining factor of a kursi's power.

"But Lauretta knew I would win," Lisa realized, "and knew that if I won..." Lisa trailed off as she peered at the gate. "She must've been the previous Waymaster. But why doesn't anybody in Ritus know them?" Lisa was sure that she would've found some kind of document pertaining to the identity of the gate's Waymaster, but in reality, no such document was to be found.

"And why did she attack me, instead of just explaining things outright? Can Waymastery only be seized through conflict?" Lisa suddenly felt a cold feeling run down her spine. "Juserin..."

Lisa clenched her fist. "I'm still just grasping at straws," she noted. "The best thing to do would just be to ask." But part of her--a large part--didn't want to see Lauretta. She was still a bit creeped out by the fact that Lauretta and Bern had stalked her literally her entire life, as well as her friends. They'd gone so far as to ingrain themselves into her family! Moreover, Lisa was utterly repulsed by Bern's Nihilum ability. The idea that he'd been messing with the heads of everyone she held close pissed her off more than she could describe.

"But I really need to meet with them." Especially Lauretta.

---

"So that's how it is," Bath murmured, his face only inches from Lauretta's own. His hand was on her jaw, gripping her face in a way that suggested he was either her abuser or her lover.

He smiled, his elongated, thick tongue coiling like a serpent within his half-open mouth. "Why didn't you just tell her?"

Lauretta's expression remained neutral. "She needed to believe I was attacking her," the kursi explained. "Or else it wouldn't have worked."

"What if I just killed you, instead?"

"Since I believe Lisa as my rightful heir, she'd become the Waymaster nonetheless. But I didn't want to die," she rasped, a small grin coming over her features. "I just want off this planet."

"A feat you'd never have been able to achieve alone," Bath noted darkly. His yellow eyes pierced deep into Lauretta's; despite the woman's cool facade, Bath could feel her jittering nervously under his grip. "A looking glass to far-off worlds, just out of reach." Without Bath's assistance, Lisa never would have been able to survive on the worlds beyond the gate. On Magnet Planet alone, she would've asphyxiated within a minute of arriving.

Bath naturally understood how Lauretta felt. Due to his own innocent and simple outlook on life and Earth, he'd previously never even considered venturing off the Earth's verdant surface. Now, he couldn't help but feel regret over the many things he could've already done in the past millions of years if he'd known about the gate sooner.

"Why Lisa?" Bath asked, temporarily elongated fingernails digging into Lauretta's jawline.

"The universe is a mysterious place, Bath," Lauretta sighed.

"Not what I asked," Bath interjected.

"You know," Lauretta began, "for a sapient of your age, I'd expect you to more patient."

Bath didn't say anything; Lauretta took this as a cue to continue. "Physics on Earth suggests that the universe is only a few billion years old, however..." she closed her eyes, then reopened them. "It's far older. I don't understand how; I'm not sure if these gates lead to alternate universes and the universe as we know it is a multiverse. I truly don't know."

"How do you know its age?" Bath asked.

"We used a samarium radioactive isotope to date rocks from a planet beyond the gate."

'So, all of these things are fairly recent developments: the prediction of the age of the universe based on modern physics, the utilization of radiometric dating technology.' He wondered why Lauretta was bringing this up.

"Upon realizing that the universe was extremely old, Bern and I knew that if we ever wanted to get out and explore, we needed to foster off-world exploration here on Earth in the hopes that spaceships or vehicles might be developed that would allow us to leave Earth." Lauretta paused. "At the same time, we went out looking for an heir, in the event that I die."

This all seemed fairly logical; however, Bath wasn't sure why Lauretta started this whole response with, "The universe is a mysterious place."

"You see things, over the course of a human life, little coincidences and impossibilities." Lauretta sighed. "Live for thousands of years, and you begin to see patterns. You also realize that there's something...driving these patterns."

Bath listened intently. He hadn't noticed anything in his millions of years besides the natural ebb and flow cycles of nature. He had a sense that this wasn't what Lauretta meant. Though, in his eighteen years as a human, Bath had to admit that fairly incredible coincidences happened all around it, such as befriending Lisa, discovering kursi, going through the gate...

"The more coincidences happen around you, the more you know that...the Prime Mover is keeping an eye on you."

Bath kept a serious face, though at this point he was disappointed. A Prime Mover? This far out in the backwater of space? Why would any kind of all-powerful being keep its eye fixed on Earth?

It wouldn't. If Bath were in charge of the universe, he'd send underlings to take care of the dirty work. Moreover, the very thought that a deity was "keeping an eye on him" struck Bath as exceedingly comical. Keeping an eye on what?

Bath was convinced that there was no such thing. The Encyclopedia never mentioned any kind of universal deity, which was the crux of Lisa's COTD plan in the first place. After all, if religion existed in the universe, they'd have a much harder time proselytizing COTD.

"Coincidence is just the ordering of chaos," Bath smiled, dagger-like teeth glinting in the low light of the interrogation room. "I admit that a series of probabilistically impossible events suggests that something...divine is at work. However," Bath whispered, eyes locking on to Lauretta's pinpoint pupils, "it's unwise to limit your mind to such a narrow conclusion."

Lauretta suddenly found herself alone, and, for the first time in a long while, she felt foolish.