Being “crystalliced” was not exactly what I imagined. And it was impossible not to imagine, when you saw your friends in that unfortunate state. The metal beside the stiff legs on my right side was cold, but I was colder. It was like the post-dormital stiffness experienced through all the limbs upon waking, but taken to its absurd logical extreme. Indeed, this was more all-encompassing than the Compendium’s halting, which had only held me in place, and not frozen my blood. There was no leeway for my tongue to dangle, nor my eyes to move. I stared straight ahead, sideways across a narrow service walkway that had tumbled out onto the wreckage of the Court of Clocks. Rings of ice crystals frosted the truss where my cheek and ear rested against it.

The magic itself had some other effects. I did not suffocate, but was uncomfortably unable to breathe. It felt less like strangulation and more like the awkward waiting for something to happen, as when Lisa would wait with me outside while I sought a moment of privacy attending to my defecatory requirements: the endless walking in circles waiting for inspiration to strike, while her presence loomed impatiently.

My inconvenient circumstances and position gave me a few small advantages. Having been crystalliced—which I think was a mistake, the result of an errant and frantic shot from the scepter—I no longer posed a threat and could be safely ignored by the magician. I also faced toward the center of the rapidly destabilizing room, and could see everything that happened, albeit sideways like a figurine dropped mid-play.

Xue-Fang stood upon the hour hand, the widest and most stable surface which reached from the dented throne out toward the former circular outer access walkway, now crumpled and gnarled like the aluminum Lisa would sometimes wrap leftover lunch in for her son. This was the hour hand of the clock, moving perceptibly at that scale, but scraping against the irregularities of its outer track. It was all that had been left suspended and untouched out of the usable upper floor of the court. Around it, loose scaffoldings projected out of their landing places like loose javelins and ribbons of smoke stained black the steel studs and bolts that hung loose in their joints.

I glimpsed orange sky through a serrated cleft above, which had “unzipped” pulled apart in a perfect crenelation. I found this image hopeful, a promise that the outer world (blasted and barren though it might be here in the Red Hot Caliente Zone) yet existed. Although the facility was closing around us like claws in rigor mortis, freedom was not so far away.

Below was a different nightmare altogether. What I took at first to be an unstable wall was in actuality a tide of loose parts. So much wreckage had fallen into the grinding gears below the Court of Clocks that a new surface had been created there, a froth of snapped pipes, shattered armor plating, dismembered support struts, and a thousand other types of unrecognizable parts integral in some way to the clockwork of the Armory. They lurched and swirled in eddies of junk, smaller gears hopping like the searing droplets of grease from Lisa’s skillet on taco night. I saw entire ladders and walkways swallowed into that tide as surely as quicksand. Beneath that tumultuous layer, the teeth of the gears crushed and pounded, gnawed and choked like an insatiable monster.

The convulsions of the Armory sent a vibration through the the metal beneath me, moving me closer to the edge between the railing and the floor. The voracious hell-maw of gears and catches below belched in anticipation.

A streak of fire caught my eye, Zideo air-dashing across the hour hand platform and tracked closely by a beam from the scepter.

With little cover to speak of, he avoided suffering my fate by staying on the move, dodging and jinking out of the way. He put the breadth of his abilities to use—fiery air dashes to cover distance quickly and change direction suddenly, wall jumps and double jumps to obfuscate his trajectory. But Xue-Fang was nothing if not adaptable, and I knew this could not go on indefinitely.

“I just finished this place,” snarled the long-haired Boss. “How galling!” Beams of frosty white tinged with blue drew icy trails up what had been the walls of the Court. I was helpless to do anything but observe, and noticed that when the beam from the scepter came into contact with an object that was in animate, it froze it for no more than a full second before its crystallizing magic ended. But during that time, it was replaced as I now was by crystal and ice. The trickster’s beam hit a tumbling gear in midair, where it halted in place for the duration, robbed of momentum and force for that second. Then its blue-white sheen retracted, and it clattered into the shifting, crushing depths.

“Looks finished to me, bro,” said Zideo, crouching with his arms out to either side. “Guess that’s what you’d call ironic!” Xue-Fang flushed and fired a scattering of beams at him.

“I,” he said, firing between words, “am not… your bro!” My human zipped and flipped, covering the length of the half-destroyed Court in a breath. Then they stopped, and Xue-Fang straightened his hair and dusted off the light armor that was part of his robed outfit. He lowered the Crystallicer. “Then again,” he said, his voice cooled and his irritation mastered, “we share more kinship than you might imagine.”

“Oh, stop,” said Zideo. “If you give me a ‘we’re not so different, you and I,’ I might literally throw up.”

The trickster’s grin was the purest haughtiness. “But, it’s true. How do you think you got here?”

Commander Zideo stood to his full height, a head shorter than his opponent. “How do you think I got here?”

“The Princess never told you…” began Xue-Fang, taking an exhorting step forward.

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“Oh shit,” said Zideo. “You’re my father?”

Xue-Fang’s head slid backward as though the stupidity of the response physically repelled him. “What? No. Of course not.” He seemed put off balance by the outlandishness of the comment, and in my mind I urged Zideo to strike. I begged with all the powers vested in canine-kind to influence the actions of their humans. (I’m sorry to tell you that, yes, dogs are equipped with a modicum of telepathy. It’s not much, but used in conjunction with the aforementioned puppy dog eyes tactic, it can be very effective. Why do you think you sometimes feed us scraps of human food against your better judgment? That is really all it is good for, though.)

He was impervious to my mental pleading, and Xue-Fang shook off the sentiment. I heard something shuffle behind me, up on the wall where I had left Helmgarth and the crystalliced Nereus, but I was unable to turn my head to see.

“You really don’t know?” said Xue-Fang. “You’re here because of me. I summoned you. Thanks to Victoria’s mad science, I reached through the window between worlds and plucked you like a pie cooling on a sill.”

Everything about the trickster Xue-Fang was a lie. Even a chameleon or octopus can be forgiven for changing their skin, for this is camouflage endowed by nature to capture their next meal or escape becoming one. But he used magic in defiance of nature—all natures, even the nonsensical nature of this disordered universe. I believed him, and then all at once, I did not. And I despised him for his deception.

But his gray-green eyes held no sign of falsehood. If this was a lie, it was one the liar believed.

“Sorry to be the one to break it to you, hmm? But it is true.” He snorted derisively. “It seems the Princess deceived you more effectively than I ever could.” He shook his head, introducing a sine wave into his long, straight hair. “That’s really all it took, isn’t it, Player? A pretty face that needed help. A damsel in distress. How deeply passé. And you went to the ends of the Shard to do her work for her. Why? Did you think you win her somehow?” Now he laughed, a contemptuous rattle.

“It doesn’t make sense,” protested Zideo. “Why would Bosses summon a Player? That’s like a slug looking for salt.”

“Look at all the destruction you’ve accomplished on my account. Look at the wreckage in your wake. Ludopolis was under siege, more or less. Now it is in darkness, waiting only to fall. To fail. Like you.”

My human’s eyes darted in rapid movements. He was thinking too hard. He was standing too straight. He was making the terrible mistake of calculation, stunned by nothing more than words.

Xue-Fang’s movement was fast, like the broad-hatted heroes on Lisa’s big glowing rectangle who quickly snatch up their guns and try to fire them at one another, to unclear ends. The scepter’s beam was true. Just one shot, and it caught my human in the chest.

Magic held my heart frozen. But I felt the stillness deeper still, the stillness of impossibility, of confronting that which may never come to pass. The tendrils of ice crystal rushed outward and claimed his body. An ice statue in the perfect shape of my Player remained.

I wept in my mind. I gasped in my soul. Commander Zideo had been crystalliced.

Sometimes a memory will come unasked for, a meaningless fragment riding the neural paths before it, surfing a brain’s uncharted currents. With Xue-Fang on the left, and Zideo standing frozen on the right, I was assaulted by one of the grim but nonsensical games that he and Krystal would play during her visits. Both seemed to control men on either side of the screen, Krystal’s fighter clad in blue and black to one side, Zideo’s in yellow and black on the right. Krystall would often send out bolts of icy magic, much like those of the crystallicer. If Zideo was unable to dodge, he would be momentarily frozen, much like he was now, and Krystal was free to strike him while he raged next to her on his couch. I feared for him, not only because this loss of control was the thing in life he found most unacceptable, but moreso because of Krystal’s blue-clad person would be free to wreak the most repulsive violence against his brittle body—shattering the black and yellow fighter, removing the icy head with spinal cord still attached, and a half dozen other grisly fates.

Xue-Fang held out his palms to either side, waiting for something. He looked around, made a full circle. “Well?” he asked the universe, perhaps. And to my surprise, the universe answered.

Final Transaction! boomed a bloodthirsty voice from the low heavens, dripping with violence and money.

He raised his hands to soak up adulation from a crowd of onlookers that did not exist, unless you count a couple of Sorrow Troopers clinging futilely to an entire spiral staircase sinking into the churning quicksand of metal debris. He approached the frozen Zideo, and reared back his hand, fingers flat like a blade. He plunged it into my human’s chest.

I could not bring myself to watch, but I was unable to turn away or even blink. The fingers disappeared into Zideo’s sternum, up to the knuckle. My frozen human did not react, nor could he. He stared with confusion molded onto his blank face. Something must have felt strange, because a look came over Xue-Fang. He retracted his arm, and I understood then that his fingers had bent rather than penetrated Zideo’s chest.

Xue-Fang squinted, and poked his chest a couple of times, probing to understand. “That’s-” was all he managed to say before Zideo’s knee shot up and caught him between the legs. I yet maintain that this vulnerability is one of evolution’s greatest disserves to mankind, but that is beside the point. The shapeshifter doubled forward and made a nauseous sound from his very core.

I heard a familiar icy crackling sound. Zideo pushed the Boss back, free of the crystal-ice. “You haven’t been paying attention to the rules,” said Zideo. He balled his fists and assumed the stance of a fighter, which he absolutely was not. “I’m the Player. I can defrost anybody you crystallice, just by touching them.” He set his feet apart, and shook the stiffness out of his shoulders and elbows. “And I’m always touching myself.”

Honorably, he gave his opponent time to recover from the dirty hit. I heard a tack-tack-tacking behind me, rapid human fingers pressing the buttons of what I knew to be the foldable glowing rectangle.

“Fine,” gulped Xue-Fang. “We’ll do it my way.” He stood up as straight as his injury would allow, and closed his eyes. Something flowed through him, out of him. Even through my crystal skin, I felt a new pressure weighing down, a foreign gravity of new rules and new mechanics. I no longer felt the compulsion to run and jump and was no longer certain that would help me in any capacity. The straight line between the two belligerents was all that mattered. They faced one another and nothing else, although Zideo spared a rueful glance for me, helpless on the unstable grating. “Let’s see how you fair against fighting game mechanics, with Finalities.”

“Let’s go then, you cheap-ass Boss,” said Zideo. “One vee one me.”