I gibbered as my poor brain stopped re-re-re-orienting over and over from Pinky’s flying. The blessed ground beneath me, a blessed, solid, non-moving surface that it was held me like an old friend.

“Bandit? Oh, don’t be such a baby. My flying isn’t that bad,” said the flyer, which somehow made me want to puke.

“Huf… Aren’t you going to use my magical girl name? You seemed insistent on it,” I asked the madwoman, huffing and puffing to return air to my lungs.

You couldn’t breathe properly when the air around you moved so quickly; it was just too hard to pull it in. The same was true of hypoxia, which was beyond hard to get with pressurized cabins and air purifiers.

I had no idea how Pinky was perfectly fine; perhaps it was because she was Pinky. She wasn’t far and beyond what a normal person would do, basically all the time.

She let out a cute, “Awww man., I missed the chance to use it,” her voice carrying a pout I could not see because I was focused on the floor, which was made of the floor and not a rapidly moving piece of crystal, a hand span wide piloted by a gleeful pink daemon.

I stopped my head there. I didn’t need my voracious appetite to start whispering about how soft she had been or other sappy and or horny shit.

The last thing I needed was to get more worked up.

“… You could always use it now. Play it back over,” I told her, getting my breath back, synching my robe, and standing up.

On reflex, I moved to reload my gun, though it took an extra few seconds to consciously re-adjust to going for the case in my pocket instead of the pocket with my cases.

…

Cartridges, not cases, but that sounded better.

I chuckled to myself as the word stuck in my head.

That was an idea. The word had a kind of resonance that stayed beyond the moment, and I filed it away while I went through the familiar loading of my handy hand cannon.

“Nah. No way. I can’t use it now. I already called you Bandit. If I went and called you Amber or whatever, it would be weird—cringe, even. Also, it's so much more cumbersome,” she said back.

“Let the record show,” I told her, one hand operating the loading handle, “That such a decision is entirely on you, and that I can’t be held accountable for any and all feelings regarding it.”

She gasped, “Oh my gosh. You should have reminded me. Why didn’t you remind me about your new magical girl name.”

It had been a big gasp, dramatic as all hell, but I just said, “Next time, will we cause enough noise to bring the guard? I think not. Bandit is a known name, technically. The last thing I want them to do is figure me out… Somehow. It's best not to risk it.”

“But… But… That means I can’t call you your magical girl name! That means I missed all the possible times I could call you by your cool new name!” she said sadly.

I gave her a look.

“Wait, you were serious?” I asked her before waving it off with a, “No, of course you were.” I sighed. “Pinky, you can literally call me that everywhere in public or private when we aren’t doing activities of questionable legality.”

She perked up at that, eyes going so big they nearly popped out of her head and started sparkling before she blushed. Her hands came up, pointer fingers tapping one another.

“So… What you’re saying is that you’re going to go out in public with me?”

She said it as I had just admitted that I was asking her out on a moonlit dinner date full of romance and not that we could just go outside in proximity to one another.

Hell, we were outside right now!

I placed the case back in my pocket, finished loading it, and looked at her.

“Pinky...” I started, only for her eyes to get even bigger in some kind of puppy face. I squinted at my recent torturer and gave a grunt of pain. “Stop that. Don’t go giving me that look.”

She smiled, hugging her waist in a convincing imitation of an animated schoolgirl gushing, letting out little happy hums of contentment.

I stared at her and just sighed. It was the only thing I could do. Pinky was an unstoppable force, and I was far from an immovable object.

She was starting to wear me down.

I wouldn’t tell her that, and I would fight for every inch, but she was wearing me down.

“Stop looking so content with yourself. We still have stuff to do, and the guard could be coming. Let’s get everything sorted and get the hell out of here. You can do your happy dance when we’re done,” I told her.

She slowed down her happy dance, looking at me, then around at the warehouse, then back to me, then to the pod people, then to me, and then to the only other person in the room.

Crazy Finger, what else could his name be at this point?

He stood on the still levitating sword, his form bent back at a ninety-degree angle. He turned his head to look at us and asked, “Why is it so dark here? Where are we?” In doing so, he brought us back to the moment.

“We’re in a warehouse… Huh, I don’t know your name,” Pinky said, “You can hop off the sword, by the way. The ground won’t hurt you.”

“Oh?” he said, looking to the ground. We—I, agree?” He said, drawing out the agreement for a full second as if the ground was covered in filth before tipping the sword off like he was testing the water.

He tapped at the ground before slinking off the sword and finding his footing, staring down at the ground, holding back a gag as he looked around, holding himself like a naked ape, staring at the world around in a look that could only be horror.

“Where… What… What is this… this place?” He asked, with a hiss.

“Pinky, just told you, it’s a-” I started, only for him to cut me off with a keening noise.

“Where… What wandering star is this? Why is this place so dark? Why is the sky dark?” he asked in a noise I could only place as pain, his eyes looking through damaged holes in the structure as if to glean information but finding nothing.

We looked toward one another and then back at the Lunatic, who was presumably born on Luna.

“We’re on Luna?” Pinky told the man, “Were under a dome? Why would the sky be anything but dark?”

Just as confused as Pinky was, I started to look at the distressed man, looking for any sign of hostility.

He was unstable; that much was obvious, but unstable people had a terrible habit of doing stupid shit while under duress. Drug addicts went on little quests once they ran out of cash to find a fix, quickly going from harvesting copper to selling their bodies. The mentally ill could be more self-destructive and erratic than even that, and if he wasn’t erratic, then I was a blameless saint.

An alien being had strung up this man, his mind bent out of shape by careless or outright hostile intent.

I had helped him because I knew Pinky would want to save him, but I wasn’t a good person. I was good at killing, finding, or bringing people somewhere like I had told the firstborn: Finding things, Retrieving things, and putting holes in things and that was my skillset.

I didn’t like it when people who didn’t deserve to die died. But just like the girl with the machine cultist’s slave box on the back of her neck, I would still kill them. I would if I needed to, and I would kill this man if he decided to snap and make himself a threat we couldn’t deal with.

I wasn’t taking any chances, not after getting shot in the back, not after the magic bullshit parade. My view of the world was missing detail, enough for me to be unable to deal with it in any way other than immediate and terminal violence.

Not when he could pull magic bullshit out of his ass and blow Pinky away. Pinky, kind as she was, continued to try and help the confused man. She was a good person, and I had her back covered.

I watched him, eyes like a hawk, hand not tucking away my loaded gun, fidgeting with the hammer, finger ready but distanced from the trigger.

As she told him about the moon, or as he put it, the ‘wandering star,’ he seemed to have little reaction. He was expecting that answer.

He wasn’t expecting her dome explanation of why the sky was dark.

That told me something fucky was going on.

Was his mind so warped that he did not remember what the sky on the planetary body he expected to be on was like?

Why, or what did he mean by dark? It wasn’t so dark as to be scary.

“Listen, listen. I don’t know what you're going through right now or why you’re all confused... But how about this?” she said, kind and calm, “How about we introduce ourselves? I’ll go first. I’m Magical Girl Sparkling Bubblegum, but that’s a mouthful, so you can call me Pinky, you know because I’m Pink. My orange friend here is Bandit… What's your name, friend?”

He looked at her, his eyes open, giving her a thousand-yard stare as something seemed to flash behind his eyes. Some piece of recognition, not at either of our names or in a sudden epiphany, but just as he seemed to take everything in.

He looked at her and answered, his words coming out in a bumbling murmur.

“W- I… I am Norma- Norman. Norman… Moon… Man. Norman Moonman,” he said, cutting himself off from saying We, like he had been speaking, then again as he said ‘Norma,’ which sounded close enough but sounded even more like ‘Normal.’

While Pinky seemed to accept that, presumably because we had given pseudonyms, something about that struck me off.

It didn’t sound like someone coming up with a pseudonym so much as a true fake name. And he had come up with Norman Moonman, literally a normal man, a moon man.

I could feel something in the back of my head warning me to be vigilant, so I started slowing my heartbeat and letting myself take in more than just him.

“Well, Norman,” Pinky said, “It’s good to meet you. You seem to be confused and afraid, which is rather unfortunate. Can I ask what’s wrong? You seem to be having an episode, but I can’t understand what’s setting you off. Can I help you? Do you need a moment to breathe? We can’t stay here for long, but we can help while we we’re here.”

He opened his mouth, closed it, and then seemed to think and open it again, saying simply, “I… I need a moment to myself.”

That was, as best I could tell, not a lie.

“Ok,” Pinky told him, “Take some time, we need to deal with some stuff quickly.”

He nodded and stepped back, wandering to one of the cocoon walls. Then, he slid down next to two of the bodies.

“Lilly, what was your read on that?” I asked her quietly.

“He is very obviously suffering from strange sickness. He’s probably too far gone and can no longer understand what's happening. Confusion, erratic behaviour, paranoia, miss remembering details, nervous breakdowns over normal phenomena. He’s a Servitor, so it’s a bit different. Still, those are all human behaviours associated with the cognitive degeneration from strange matter exposure, and he should be suffering those, considering that entire place was full to the gills with brighter matter.”

“Thank you, Dr. textbook. Repeat that in small words?” I asked her, just to make sure I understood.

“He got a ‘lethalll dose’ of ‘magic bullshit’ and his brain is beeeyond saving. He probably can’t separate fiction from reality and can’t reconcile who he was before his capture.” She simplified with a few nervous stutters.

“Thanks,” I told her quickly before standing next to Pinky.

She had watched ‘Norman’ walk away, her face thoughtful.

“What do we do about the normals? Not Norman, but the pod people. Can we pull them out and leave them lying around outside?” I asked her.

She turned to me, her eyes coming back from what I could only assume was a serious if quick, internal monologue. She seemed the type to periodically stare off into space.

“Hmm? Oh, yes.” She said, “If you can find a dolly or cart, I can start pulling people out. Then we can stash them in an alley and tell their boss where they are so they can take care of it.”

I gave her a look, then asked, just to check, “by the sound of it, you’ve done this before.”

She nodded with a little “Mmhm” of agreement.

“And, there’ve never been any issues?” I asked her.

“Oh, there are plenty. Some are seemingly fine, some go a little coo-coo, and some become hermits, but relatively speaking, nothing big. Not like Norman over there.” She said with sympathy.

I nodded, not dropping my suspicions on Norman, and while I hesitated for a moment, I found enough conviction to say, “I don’t trust this. Something off here, and it's definitely Norman. Keep an eye on him. In case you missed it, he swept up a red fragment of the anchor's core.”

She frowned, “That’s not good. We need to break that for his own good if nothing else. Though we should do that last after the people are out of the way… Go quickly. Find a cart. We need to work fast to stay ahead of the guards.”

I nodded and headed back into the broken boxes and racks, looking for a cart of some kind that could fit a bunch of people on it. I stepped carefully, kicking bunches of broken crates out of the way to roll a cart back.

While I was looking, I found one stacked with crates labeled LunaTsar Inner-Solar Import Export Co.

Grinning at the good luck. I rolled the cart over to an open area, and pushed against the crates, one foot on the cart, one on the ground, my bare feet gripping the ground while I put my back and legs into it. Keeping my back straight, I slowly pushed the stack, my spine carrying the force forward, which let me, after some huffing and puffing, knock the stack over.

The crates clattered to the ground, several of them cracking open, broken by their weight. I made to move the cart when I stubbed my toe. Cussing, I looked down, hate of all corners flaring through me, and I spotted something important.

It was a familiar shape, one with a very obvious power line, the parts black on black. Rolling from within the crate was a familiar crystal vial filled with a blue hue, fresh and unused, tied in a wire rack.

It was a laser gun.

A familiar one, considering I had been shot at by and fired one myself a day ago.

I stopped and stared at a stash of weapons and the rest of the crates. There were a dozen, and then, upon looking around at other crates, there were dozens.

“Holy shit,” I muttered, my eyes going round as dinner plates.

This wasn’t a warehouse… It was a covert armoury hidden in plain sight.

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Letting go of the cart, I quickly scavenged through the boxes, checking for notices, receipts, checks, a manifest, anything that I could find. I found a set of official-looking papers tucked under one of the boxes.

Quickly, my hands shaking, I folded the bundle and tucked it into the pocket box.

This was a clue, a vital clue.

I had no time to check it for details now, but I could do it later.

Hurriedly, I checked over the open boxes but found little use for me. It was more of the same.

There were black guns and vials of coolant. There were no grenades or pistols like the woman from the bank had used, but there was a crate of black clothes. Checking them over, I slipped on the lighter of the garb, covering my unclothed skin with a set of military shirts, pants, belt, and boots.

Rummaging around, I also found a satchel with all the marks of a covert shielded bag to carry blasting charges, with small pockets made for fuses, scratch paper, pens, and hidden pouches for holding bricks of high explosives. I made my way through the rest of the crate and stuffed extra clothes, robes, and gear to hide among the population, getting a volume of mass-produced, one-size-fits-all-style clothing that I could have tailored to my shape.

It was just clothes, yet it was all I could have hoped for. If I could pillage a uniform and get out of here with it?

I began to jitter.

I could do a hell of a lot with this.

I pulled back on the robe, leaving it loose enough to pull out of. The satchel was hidden under it.

The only thing I could have asked for was pocket money.

I rapidly pulled back from the trove of possibilities, not caring for the laser weapons or coolant cartridges. I couldn’t stay here for long. I had to have taken three or four minutes. Pinky had quoted six, and we had talked for maybe half of one.

The guard could be here at any moment.

I pushed the cart back, forcing my way through the small parcels of debris that I hadn’t quite gotten out of the way and back to the remains of the cocoon. The control over my breath shot and dumped into a river, my body a thing of nerves; I found my way back to Pinky, who was hefting one of the bodies over to a pile.

I pushed up to them, the lumpy ground playing hell on the wheels as I thump, thump, thumped over to the messy wan people.

“Good your back… Where did you?” Pinky started.

“Not now; we're almost out of time,” I told her as I reached down and started loading the people. I lifted them like sacks and dumped them long ways onto the flat bottom cart, keeping all arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times so I didn’t break any of them by moving the damn thing.

The women went on top, the men on the bottom, heaviest first, lightest last, and I stacked them like lumber, placing each in a notch formed by another.

It felt somewhat macabre. Like I was stacking stolen corpses with how out of sorts they were. Pale bodies that would be returned to life and the land of the living soon enough.

I found myself muttering, “This week, Bandit, the mercenary has stolen the bodies of over half a dozen people? What nefarious plans does she have with them, and can the valiant heroines stop her before it's too late?” One of the catchy opening themes from Pinky’s show played lightly in my head, halfheartedly humming the theme.

“Are you humming a theme song and mumbling the recap to yourself?” Pinky asked, “More importantly, were you the villain in the recap?”

I felt my mask spring forward to try and screen me from Pinky’s question, but it was her, so I answered, “I can’t help it; I feel like I’m robbing a stack of corpses from the morgue.”

“It isn’t that bad… You just look like your moving cadavers at the academy, but dressed in black and. Oh, yeah, I see it. Sorry, B. I can’t help you if you dress like an off-duty terrorist.”

“We have two left?” I asked her.

“Yep. Two more, and then we talk with Norman; they’re not connected by the look of it, just seemingly passed out,” Pinky told me.

“Well… Let's not look a gift horse in the mouth.” I murmured, shuffling over to the two remaining forms.

They were, coincidentally, those closest to Norman. Coincidence, of course, not being a coincidence at all.

Pinky would have had to do that on purpose.

Norman the moonman was still turned to the corner, murmuring to himself like a fucking freak.

I kept an eye on him as I made my way to one of the two slumped forms of the perilously treated people in a nook. Quickly, I gave them a peek; though none of the people I had moved had any sign of a tattoo, I had a good feeling.

I leaned in, bringing my head up next to his face, head angled down to the neck and chest to try and glean the symbol, when Lilly, blessed be her name, called out in my head.

“Get back!” she shouted, a quick percussive call out that got my body pulling back before I recognized what I was doing.

My gun came up as I immediately drew and brought Norman back into my sight, ready to fire, ready to kill him… But it wasn’t him that Lilly had warned me of.

It had been the person I had almost touched.

“Pinky! Back up.” I called out, trying to make sure whatever had set Lilly off wouldn’t catch her before asking, “Lilly why are we backing up?”

“That body isn’t a human body. That isn’t a servitor,” she said, her words intentionally made short and to the point so my dumb ass wouldn’t mess up. her words left no room for miscommunication.

“It is not human?” I asked out loud so Pinky could hear.

“No, inside its… Well, it looks much like it would have been in the distorted space of the other place. Inside that body is a writhing mass of something. I don’t know what. The only human thing about it is its skin and a thin dermal layer,” she told me.

I stared at the unmoving, unassuming form and its mirror twin that Pinky was backing up from.

“What is it?” Pinky asked, “I assume you’re Oracle picked up something mine didn’t?”

“It’s a human teddy bear, but stuffed with some kind of wriggling nightmare bullshit.” I told her, “It’s a living trap by the sound of it… Lucky I didn’t touch it.”

My hand reached for my gun, but unsurprisingly, it probably wouldn’t do anything, so instead of flagging the monster, I kept it at the ready for Norman.

The situation was changing; I could feel it in my gut, and I could feel the tension rising in my neck, my skin pulling into goosebumps.

Something was coming to a head here, and I didn’t like not being able to see it.

“Aw man,” Pinky said, far too casually, “I hate this guy’s… Though I suppose they’re not as bad as the tentacle monsters… But they are very gross.”

“The fuck you mean they’re gross? There are two monsters in the room with us. Why are you so cavalier? Shouldn’t we be-”

“Relax… Relax. They don’t move without being commanded or disturbed. Once they’re ready to go, I’ll prepare a vial for each of them, and we can let them swarm an empty warehouse while they melt.”

Pinky sounded confident in her claim, but I wasn’t so confident in the outcome.

My neck continued to stand on end, my body unconsciously readying me for something I could not predict but did anyway.

It was my terrible luck coming back for me.

“Pinky… I don’t know how to tell you this… But I have a bad feeling about this entire thing. I say we goo both of them now, remove you know what, from you know who, and get the hell out of here,” I told her.

She looked at me, still unconcerned. She even gave me a shit-eating grin before asking, “What, you're getting cold feet now? I thought you were a strong and gruff gunslinger. It’s just nerves, it happens.” She said it not in dismissal but in a ‘cheer up’ kind of way that I felt was supposed to be reassuring but was really just even worse.

I could feel it in the back of my head, a warning siren that made me want to start looking for the incoming threat.

But that wasn’t how this worked, I didn’t get to see things coming, I just got to know when it was about to go down.

I didn’t answer fast enough, and Pinky walked over to Norman as I mutely watched in horror, frozen stiff as I waited for the other shoe to drop, a feeling of all-consuming dread brushing its lips on the back of my neck.

“Hey, Norman, we need to head out now,” Pinky asked him.

“Oh?” He responded, “Can I ask you something first? Why are some fingers different from other fingers?”

Pinky, chipper as she ever could be, replied, “Well… I can’t make the claim that I know a fitting answer or not a fitting philosophical answer, but I figure we are all a little different because each of us has something we are supposed to do. We’re all born mostly blank slates and guided there, nudged by coincidence and synchronicity. People can’t all be the same, not even if they’re supposed to do the same things and born the same way, because it's impossible to perfectly recreate the exact happenings of a life; there are simply too many possibilities.”

“What's the thing you need to do?” He asked back.

“Be my truest self,” Pinky said simply.

He looked over at her then, tilting his head before saying, “Thank you. We believe we understand now. Though we have to say, we think you are failing, human; you’re pretending to be something you aren’t.”

I didn’t miss the change of address, reverting to the royal we, but what was more notable about it was the reaction it got out of Pinky. She pulled back as if she had been lightly slapped.

“I’m don’t… I’m not,” Pinky started.

“You are a lie,” Norman said, “So much of you is fake… But that’s none of my business. My hand made me different, and I’ve been trying to figure it out since our hands actions were questions, but I never could... Now… Now I think I understand.”

This was getting out of hand. This had gone past fuckery and advanced fuckery, and looped all the way to super advanced fuckery.

“I can’t believe-” Pinky said, hurt carrying on her words.

“As an avid believer in absolutely nothing, we can understand how deeply pained you are by this, so we will keep this short. Thank you, fake human. You have made our choice clear… No matter how well laid out our hand's plans may have been. They have been crushed… All but one of them. Our hand raised us from gesture to finger but left me able to think on my own… That can not be a coincidence. No. My hand must have laid it as one last plan. Now, WE must see it done. Our hand failed because even a hand needs a greater being to move it; it lacked that power, a power We wield!”

Pinky, confused by the madman, stepped back as he reached into his pocket and pulled out the red shard, its unnatural light shining all the brighter without the interference of the wounded space and its nixed light.

My hand came up, level with the figure, and my other over and across me, hand on trigger, hand on hammer. Careful to not let my barrel flag Pinky, and that it would fire true, I pulled the trigger, holding it down and fanned the hammer.

I fanned it rapidly, the gun barely hitting the piezoelectric igniter before being knocked back far enough to successfully re-ignite it as it slammed back down. My hand moved with remembered precision, the muscle memory unchanged in my new form.

I fanned so rapidly that I cut myself on the hammer, a few specks of blood dripping into the smooth metal of my oldest friend.

I had outdone myself.

Six shots were fired in rapid succession, each firing so quickly as to sound like one elongated shot.

Six projectiles were hurled forth, their forms kicking off their bioplastic shells to reveal fangs of metal. They found their mark, each punching into the man in a 5’’ circle around his heart.

The punched through, blowing out of his back with a wet noise.

The man did not bleed red. He bled black, the back spray flecking out in a gross ichor, each hole leading to similar black holes in his chest.

Even weirder, he did bleed slightly, but only from the skin.

I looked in horror as he simply kept talking, none the worse for Wair, and I felt this entire thing, how everything had been off, click together in my mind.

He had been calling himself a finger the whole time, the use of ‘we’ instead of ‘me’, as if he were more than one man and more like a colony. The fear of being penetrated, as if he were some measure of egg that, once broken, would spill its contents on the floor.

I had seen, back on the throne, a man trapped inside a monster, with a monster growing out of his body, and here, on Luna, I saw something similar: a man filled with monsters.

Tiny shapes move on the back wall and in the holes, writhing like worms or insects. The sight was enough to make my stomach heave, which was only made worse by the light of the shard, which made my skin itch, itching like there were worms under my skin.

I gaged, though I didn’t lose my lunch. I stared in shock, but it was a close thing.

And the man, who was also a monster, continued to speak.

“I was made to be more powerful than my hand, but I am still weak. So, I must carve that weakness away. I must reject it, and so I shall.” He cried madly, a spark of red reflecting off his eyes, giving himself a nightmarish glint reserved for photographs.

He raised the shard into the air, holding it above his head, fingers grasped tightly.

“What are you doing?” she shouted, confused, staring at the man and his shard.

“I reject my humanity, little finger! I reject my weakness!” He cried before opening his mouth and swallowing the glinting red shard.

My gun had done nothing, but I could guess as to what would happen. The tension clicked it all together, like the balls in a cradle click-click-clicking, back and forth.

“Pinky! Shoot him,” I shouted at her, drawing her attention.

She turned back to me, confused and chagrined, managing to give a small smile, “Ha ha, umm, I’m sure we don’t need to do that… Also, I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?” I asked her.

“I’m out,” she replied simply, with an awkward little fake smile on her face. I'm out of almost everything, energy included.”

I looked from her, to the man as an eerie glow started to shine from his speed holes, the heavenly echo muffling as it had with me when I had consumed a core of my own.

It had taken me only a few moments, and we were running out of time.

“Drop the goo on him, we need to kill him. I can feel just how bad this is going to be. Fuck! I don’t know, do something, anything,” I shouted.

“You think we need to go that far?” She asked.

“Yes! I think we’re gonna have to kill this guy, Pinky,” I shouted as the form started to let out a wailing noise.

“Damn,” she replied eloquently, “Well, we’ll need to back up so we don’t get hit,” she said, only for the wail to end.

We turned back toward ab-Norman, who stretched, his body quivering in the way only a good stretch could. Then he looked toward us.

He looked the same, which was good for him, considering he had six bullet holes in his chest. It was also bad because it meant we needed to get the hell out of here and kill him, and it was looking more like we couldn’t do both.

“Ahh,” he said, as if he had just finished a cool drink in the summer, “Much better… Now,” he continued, turning towards us his eyes focused and assured, “now you will hand over those half-turned gestures to us so we may make use of them, humans.”

“And why the fuck would we do that, monster?” I snaped.

“Because then we will be taking you with us, and we can welcome you as powerful fingers… or we can chain and change you. Either way, you will remain fingers, but in one future, you will still exist.”

The idea of this thing spreading made my guts itch.

Pinky sighed before turning to me and saying, “No offence, but I need you to leave and take the randos with you. I’ll deal with this. Also, it would help if you weren’t here for this,” she said, rolling up her sleeves. “I do hate being seen transformed like that, so gross” as if this was totally normal.

“Buh—” I said confusedly, only for Pinky to look at me and press a finger into my lips.

“Go. Go!” she said, her voice dropping into a less girly but more natural and slightly sultry tone that Pinky so often covered up.

It did something to me, mostly because she shouted it, but also because it changed Pinky’s feelings. She felt more in control or perhaps more mature. It was also somewhat distracting. It made Pinky less girly by making her more mature, and my impulse control was in bricks, er, shambles.

It took her literally pushing me toward the cart to make my legs move, but once they did, they moved. I pulled myself away and stumbled towards the cart, nearly tripping over myself.

Ab-Norman watched me, his head tilting in the corner of my eye before looking toward Pinky.

I reached the cart and started pushing, the unconscious body thumping as I pushed it over the sinewy thread of the cocoon and towards the exit, thumping, thumping, thumping over the cocoon before I reached the slime.

There was a flash behind me, and then a noise that sounded more like the shriek of an animate machine than something made of flesh—a noise I could only claim as an explosion that shook the building.

It nearly made me slip as Pinky and Norman began to fight.

I pushed, the wheels choking up and my feet slipping as I hurled down the walkway toward the closest known exit.

Norman shouted, and crates exploded nearby but behind me. The sound of shrieking wood and the pops of metal fasteners flying off into the warehouse reached me before I stopped, turning to check behind me.

Breathing hard, I checked the darkened passage but found no one.

Sighing in relief, I turned back, only to face Norman, who stood on the other side of the cart, looking down at the faces of the sleeping people.

He was deep in thought, and I pulled back, trying to keep them away from him, only for him to whistle, the sharp note echoing, answered a few moments later by the shrill screech of something from the back.

“Good, that will do-” Norman started, only to be cut off as a beam as round as I was tall, hot enough to turn sand to glass and leave sunspots in my eyes swept up from the boxes and around to Norman, who shrieked as it passed near him.

It passed far enough not to wound all of us, but its fury passed by above us, turning metal shelves to cherry red and lighting the crates so it didn’t disintegrate on fire.

Reeling from the charring sensation I felt, I managed to miss the blurring form of something slamming into Norman.

In the corner of my eye, a blurring shape connected with him, slamming him through the shelves, boxes, and wall behind it. Stone and steel cried out under otherworldly force as the two forms left this warehouse before slamming similarly through the next warehouse.

The force rattled the shelves, the cherry red metal bending.

Cursing, I swivelled the cart as the boxes above us began to slide and pushed the cart outside in time to avoid the shelf collapsing behind me close enough to rip the robe from my back, the fabric tearing off.

Slipping outside I quickly let go of the cart, stowing my stuff in my pants pockets and discarding the robe sleeves into the building as smoke began to pick up inside from the charred boxes.

Panting my shoes sticky with goo and not knowing where to go, I started making my way back toward the red lights in the distance.

I got out onto a road before the sound of bending sheet metal drew my eye back toward the building.

A growing dent marred it, the siding being bashed from the inside by something strong enough to deform steel.

Puffing, I rolled forward and into another alley before peeking out and watching.

The two figures left behind punched their way through the siding before hauling themselves out and into the alley. Flopping onto all fours, they began to look around, like hounds, padding around sniffing the ground.

Reflexively I sniffed myself, but smelled nothing, not that it mattered.

Sucking in a breath I looked at the dozen people and realized I wouldn’t be able to run with them.

Checking them over for damage, I spotted none, though their forms could have been hurt non-visibly.

That over I asked Lilly, “What do I do?”

“I don’t know! Get out of here. Pinky can fly, but you’re landlocked, you need to get out of here!” She told me.

“She can’t fly! She’s out of power.” I hissed back

“Then we need a way to get these normal out of here, deny the enemy of resources… You could kill them, but that’s not in the spirit of this.” She told me.

That would be the most expedient way to deny them wet assets. Put a hole in its head. A wet asset couldn’t exactly fall into enemy hands if it was a corpse.

Though I wouldn’t, not with what I could only figure was a bunch of cities. They weren’t involved; they were just here to move boxes.

Thinking, my mind moving a mile a moment, my body twitching, heart beating, I asked her, “Then how do we move them? Can we wake them up somehow?” I asked her, never wishing more than now for some smelling salts.

She hmmed. “Maybe,” she said, “Maybe. It depends on why they’re out cold, but I could gauge it if you can check their pulse.”

I checked to make sure I was in the clear, found the figures having moved into the next warehouse, and started checking pulses.

I counted beats one by one, wishing I could just slap them away. Their pulse, the rhythm of it, was slow and faint beyond belief. It was maybe a few beats a minute, and it was in the low tens at the highest.

Lilly hummed and muttered at the information and again begain to murmur in arcane biological gibberish, and while she did, I waited.

A million years and one minute later, I cussed.

“I wish people were easier, like a bike. Give me an engine battery to jumpstart any day of the week,” I complained.

Lilly stopped muttering to herself.

“Shoot. I should have thought about that,” she said.

Confused, I asked her, “What? Jumpstarting them? Sol Lilly, hocking people up to batteries is torture.”

“What? Oh no, not like that,” she said, embarrassment clear. I mean, jumpstarting their bodies. They’re in a kind of torpor, like a deep, prolonged sleep to preserve them. If we get their bodies going again, they should wake up!”

She was rather emphatic, but it still made no difference to me. Even when she made sense, I couldn’t understand what she meant.

“Clarify,” I asked her, rubbing my temples.

“Use Pinky’s medicine. It kickstarts the body, forcing it to suddenly start using resources. Their bodies should start to wake up, though I have no idea how quickly,” she said emphatically.

I stared off into space and then rapidly, my hands moving with extra effort. I felt my body lit by lightning as I moved like a woman possessed.

Flipping open my case, I started pulling out a syringe, pulling off caps and streaming the unconscious people as best as I could.

After checking the people's pulse and finding it increasing, I started to sit them down so I could get further into the pile, only for me to stim them, pull them out of the pile, and sit them down in turn.

Once I got them all sitting, I got to take a breather.

I also got to reload again and cursed at myself for only keeping one gun on me.

Six shots were too few without a blade to back me up, and I felt it.

Pulling out a cigarette and puffing to calm my fluttering heart and ease my muscles, I asked, “Ok… How many of these stupid points did I get for that?”

“Let's go over it and our next steps,” Lilly confirmed. You know... before you do something stupid and half-assed.”

“Lilly, I would never,” I scoffed, “I always attempt to whole ass everything I do.”