Doug was my next stop on the intel line, and my last hope. I thought I had some goodies by now, something to use at this big gangland summit meeting, but I needed Doug to cement everything, or wrap it up with a pretty bow. Something along those lines.

I headed into Doug’s apartment after a few insistent knocks got me nowhere. “Okay, Doug, what have you got for me… Jesus!”

The place had transformed from ritual chamber into… futuristic ethnically ambiguous brothel? Somehow Doug had gotten access to embroidered pillows from nowhere near Japan, veiled curtains, beaded curtains, and large rugs now hung from various walls, some of them scenes of misty mountains, others intricate geometric patterns.

Finally, lots of nude or mostly nude people were smoking hookahs or long tobacco pipes like my gramps had smoked when I was just a boy. Many were conked out, just snoozing. Most of them were Japanese, most of them were women, but a lot of other ethnicities and species were represented.

Everybody was lounging about in heaps and tangles of people, as though they’d all been hypnotized at a show and the hypnotist was a real weirdo. For his last suggestion, he had made them all take off their clothes and fall asleep. Then he’d just left them there instead of waking up.

I tried to take this all in stride. Doug was a character. A rather popular one, too, by the looks of things.

I shook a woman’s shoulder. “Where’s Doug?”

She seemed to have some difficulty getting her eyes to open. “Doug?” she finally asked. Getting a good look at her face, shock rolled through me. Hina? What the hell was she doing here?

I braced for violence, but Hina just stared dreamily in a me-like direction, smiling. Well then. I changed my voice, making it more gravelly just in case.

“Tubby guy. Lives here. Does magic. Seems harmless. Probably is.”

“Ohhh… you meant Doug.”

I nodded. “Literally the same name I asked for.”

“Oh, hey, you’re grandpa killer,” she smiled. “Glad that didn’t happen man. Like, I was so pissed.” She giggled. I giggled back, a forced haha that sounded quite hollow to my ears. She ate it up though.

+600 temporary reputation with Hina Owari. + 200 reputation with Hina Owari. Your reputation level is presently Friendly (+300). This effect will last until she becomes sober.

“Yeah,” I nodded, dropping the gravelly voice.

“Woah,” she said, sinking back against a wall. “Dude, you’re the best. Yeah, umm, just like check the bedroom. He was heading in there with a bunch of ladies last I saw.”

I turned away from her, grateful that this wasn’t going to be a fight, furious that apparently Doug knew half of Gojira-X and had invited them all into our building. Curious too. How the hell had he got them all past the guards?

That last one was answered when I opened the dark, mahogany, super-expensive looking door to his bedroom. There was a black rectangle of rock, the innards of which glowed purple.

Magical portal. A magical portal that Doug had not informed me of. I’d have to figure that out, and set some ground rules. But first I’d have to deal with whatever the hell this shit was.

Doug was in the large bedroom, with its mammoth water bed and its many lava lamps. But his body was ethereal, wispy like a ghost. And Doug was floating a few inches above all of it, surrounded by a soft glow that shifted colors like an LED light. And still buck naked. The aura around him went brighter and more subdued in slow, rhythmic pulses. It was kind of hypnotic.

I slapped myself across the face and anchored myself to the pain.

Beneath where Doug was floating, even more people lay in a tangle, stupefied. Many of them were again women, a few men, and this time they were covered in silky sheets.

“Doug!”

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He eventually opened his eyes, smiled at me, and floated down to the floor.

His smile broadened. “It’s so good to see you.”

“It’s not so great to see so much of you. Put some clothes on and we can talk in my office. Also, no guests without my permission,” I said.

“While you’re waiting on me, I can make some of these lovely people available for you.”

I frowned. Was Doug some sort of pimp? Was Hina a ho? What the hell was going on around here?

“I’m good, thanks. Kick them out, the ones that don’t live here. And be at my place in five, okay? Underwear mandatory. Oh, and turn off that portal til we have time to talk about what it is.”

He just nodded in response, though he looked a bit disappointed I didn’t join his harem.

The guy was a lot, but if he had intel for me, it would be worth whatever was happening in his new place. If other sorcerers were going to be like Doug, though, I was definitely not going to be putting any of the new people on magic-user detail. Maximum one Doug, that was the new rule.

The Doug I’d just left had been clean shaven. The Doug who appeared at my door had facial hair under five minutes later: a handlebar mustache pointed to the sky Dali style, dyed aqua blue, and a pointed beard extending an extra several inches towards me, also aquamarine. He was now robed in a silken thing that was mostly red, with a huge ornamental Asian dragon all over it. Under one arm was a satchel of supple leather.

His expression soured when I didn’t mention the dye job or the sudden reappearance of a perfectly groomed beard, and that nearly made me grin.

“Doug,” I said. “Mighty Doug? I’m not sure what title you’ve decided to take on. Doug, the Great and Mysterious?”

“Just Doug will do. May I?” he asked, waggling his satchel at me, and I showed him in.

This satchel contained a dish, and a thermos of pure water, which went into the dish. Next, he produced several purple candles and lit them with a plain old Bic lighter, then used a compass to place them at the cardinal directions. Finally he pulled out a book of spells.

I was pretty sure I’d seen this tome before, but not completely. Surely I would’ve remembered the sticky notes he used to quickly get to the page he wanted.

“Who will we be observing?” he asked, with equal parts sleepiness and mild annoyance.

“The Boss. He’s Chuck the dragon’s boss, whoever that is,” I said.

Some muttering later, he dipped two fingers into the dish of water, and swirled it around several times, clockwise, all the while muttering something that didn’t sound much like a spell.

Still, the water clouded like he’d just dropped a whole pot of ink in there.

“You’ll want to keep quiet here,” Doug warned. “I haven’t done this much, and don’t know what might be heading their way from our end. I don’t want to have him stick a gun through and, like, shoot my beautiful face off.” I held my hands up in surrender, then gestured for him to get it over with.

What swam into view was a pair of gleaming black oxfords. In the distance was a smudge of red, but I’d know that punchable dragon face anywhere. It was Chuck. The blurry form became clear after the other one started speaking.

And the owner of the shoes… almost certainly The Boss.

The Boss had a smooth voice, with a slight Asian accent that was almost certainly Japanese. “We have no choice. He’s been invited already.”

Was he talking about me? It sure as hell seemed like it.

Chuck threw his head back and roared. “Aw COME ON!”

“We can’t afford to lose momentum. We’ve got most of the city, and this meeting is just going to confirm that.”

“I don’t want to see that jerk’s face anywhere around here!” Chuck seethed impotently. I got some dark satisfaction seeing sparks shoot out of his metal arm. “That gaijin almost killed me… twice!”

Yep, they were talking about me.

“He’s clearly strong enough to stand on his own, and after only a few days,” the Boss responded. “He spent his time consolidating power, so he’s not a complete moron.”

“I’ll kill him if I see him,” Chuck said.

“Listen to me,” Boss said. “You don’t have to like him, but you do have to keep your claws to yourself. There are plenty of idiots in the organization, and I’d be thrilled if they were snuffed out, but we’re stronger together. The West Side Warblers? No idea how they even still function after their leader got drunk and fell onto that pile of crap.”

Chuck laughed. “Literally almost suffocated to death on human excrement.”

“And that… who the fuck are those guys who let the greased-up pig in the meeting the last time? It doesn’t matter. There are morons who run their parts of the city, and we don’t ask questions. They’re Ringo-Dango, we’re Ringo-Dango, that’s all that matters.”

“Don’t say it–”

“So no going after Stone, got it? You swallow that, for now.”

Chuck turned and punched through a door with his good arm, given that his cyber arm was still messed up from coming after my people.

I couldn’t help it, I snorted laughter. Chuck immediately froze, and though I couldn’t see anything but the Boss’s shoes, I felt him stiffen. Both turned in the direction of the scrying dish, whatever the scrying spell was seeing out of.

I slapped the dish off the table and sent everything flying, then stamped out the candles that got knocked over.

“Idiot!” Doug cried, “That’s not how any of this works!”

I pointed down at the dish then, silently. If I was invited to this great big Ringo-Dango confederacy meeting, with the Brass Crosses, and the West Side Warblers, and Extinction Ball and all the others, I did not want them hearing my voice through the spell’s connection.

Doug bent to retrieve the dish, and the moment he turned it over a hail of gunfire sprayed out of it, into the ceiling. I dove for cover, taking just a smidgeon of damage. He then said some magic words, even as I could hear Chuck shouting, “Don’t shoot the floor! You gotta see who it is! What can you see?”

Doug kept chanting, even when a small gout of flame erupted through the dish: dragonfire from Chuck. The spell stopped whatever magic kept it alive.

When Doug turned toward me, I noted a smoking groove had been shot through his beard. “That was too close,” he muttered.

Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he fainted.