This was one of those small towns on the interstate which didn't feel like people actually lived there. Or maybe, that the people who did weren't living by the same definition I generally ascribed. I passed by a deserted store window, looking inside at the sun-bleached stock of kitschy, garbage Americana, thinking not at all of what kind of soul-draining exercise it must be to live behind those shelves.

Because gaudy, tawdry, and awful as they were, they were far from the most tasteless thing displayed on these streets. That would go to the signs plastered up all over, so many it looked like another reich in here, if Hitler had a thing for clip-art of cliched resistance movements.

Seriously, every one of them was a red fist thrust skyward on a white background, above the lettering "XMN".

"Ex...em...en?" I muttered. Examine?

Muttered to myself because nobody else was here. Quiet as I'm sure this place usually was, it was even quieter now. XPCA hadn't even had to evacuate, the Exhumans in question had driven the folks out on their own and declared a 'summit of all minds, polymath and erudite'. And we'd heard about it because of the fliers -- the literal fliers that got mailed out all over the 'net announcing such.

Or, that's how the XPCA heard about it anyway. AEGIS obviously got it from them, and she clipped it out of their systems and handed it over to me. Ever since our heart-to-heart a couple days back and my turn in the regenerator, I'd been angling for some work. If she was going to put herself to the grindstone, I would too. And then we'd meet at home and have a nice talk like a really bizarre, messed-up family, just like she wanted.

I shook that thought out of my head. Fliers and signs aside, there was an Exhuman here. Potentially many...and more terrifying, potentially many who were insane enough to respond to unsolicited spam e-vites for an Exhuman-only summit. That was a potentially dangerous kind of crazy, and why I'd wanted to go instead of some shadow ops who might turn the whole thing legitimate by martyring someone.

So yeah. Stretching my legs. Little tiny town. Bum-fuck nowhere. Interstate roaring past just a quarter of a mile 'yonder.

Place even had me saying 'yonder, now.

I walked past another little store, this one selling jerky and other shit to lose between the cushions of your minivan, and arrived at the heart of the tiny, tepid community. It sprawled out before me in all of its open-air glory, festooned with the same red-white-and-awful banners as the rest of the place.

The gas station. Only thing people probably came here for.

It has been transformed, in a way. Not in like, a scary or interesting way by fortifying it or redecorating to match the aesthetics of this would-be summit committee. But just because it was so absolutely mind-bendingly full of crap.

Like, a gas station, right? Except everywhere you'd want to put a car, there was instead a pile of signs, banners, and posters, all identically ugly, and much larger than that hypothetical vehicle. There had to be a million ugly-ass proclamatory materials here, and that was a reserved estimate.

Whoever was here had been fucking busy, that's for sure. They also loved their own idea so goddamn much they were prepared to cover the whole continent in that shit.

And as I stood and watched and saw a figure emerge from indoors, it clicked, and I immediately recognized that yes, the proprietor did, in fact, have his head stuck up his own ass.

Duskwhisper Demonhand was strolling towards me with a grin bigger than this little town. He seemed impossibly pleased to see me, and strolled -- sauntered, really -- with such forced indifference that it actually sort of hurt.

"I knew," he said, having to shout a little because he was walking too slowly and the distance was still awkward, but he'd gone too long without speaking. "I knew the era of recrudescence for Althan rode neigh!"

I said nothing to him as politely as I could, and just tried to enjoy him sweating and picking up the pace a little to come the rest of the way into the street with me.

He extended an arm. I looked at it for a long moment before taking his hand, which I immediately regretted when he shook it with such aplomb, I thought I might need another dip in the regenerator.

"Althan, it's a commodious jollity to re-embrace your continuity," he said.

"Uh. Thanks," I said. "Dork-hand, right?"

He stiffened, and I took the opportunity to regain my arm.

"That is what the Defiant belabled me," he said, cracking his knuckles with a flourish. "But you note that they are incontemporaneous."

I blinked at him. "Incontemporaneous."

"Yes," he dug into his front pocket of his button-down and pulled out a pen-sized device which projected a small holo. "It means--"

"They're not incontemporaneous, they're dead, Dork-hand. The Defiant died, killed by Dragon, and you were the only one who got away."

He cleared his throat significantly, and then, for some ungodly reason, struck a pose.

"Two!" he announced. And then just uh...stood there. Just…

Just stood there. Mid dramatic pose. Hand back on his brow, mid leg-thrust, just...standing.

By the way he kept taking tiny glances at me, I think I was supposed to ask something. But I was honestly less curious about 'two' and more about what the fuck this guy wasn't taking for his mental issues.

He cleared his throat again after a painful moment. "Two things you are now fallacious regarding! One:" he began to read off the tiny holo. "Contemporaneous. Adjective. Existing in the same period of time; to be contemporary with."

"Yeah, but you said incontemporaneous. That's not the same."

He snapped the pocket thesaurus away. "From the latin prefix in-, meaning the negative participle."

"You can't just put 'in-' on the start of any word and say it's a real word."

"Question me, do you?" he puffed up. "Though I be credible, you should find me...incredible."

"...uh. Yeah. Incredible's a word. But, like...in-incredible isn't. Just goes around to being credible again. So you can't always just slap that prefix on and have it work."

"Inconceivable for those of invalid minds, I inplore!"

"IMplore. With an M." He scoffed, but checked the spelling anyway. Kind of doubted I'd get any confirmation when he found I was right. "And I also bet incontemporaneous isn't in there."

"And two:" he announced, bursting with animation again. "You erred grievously in your fallacious assessment of survivability!"

It was a struggle, but I somehow figured out what he was referring to. "Another Defiant lived?"

"Another Defiant was in absentia."

"Just say absent," I told him.

"It's a legal term, you wouldn't understand."

Well, I knew I'd come out here because I wanted to start affecting my own change on the world and not leave it all up to AEGIS and Saga to do, and that my goal had been to talk to these Exhumans and sort things out in a manner which didn't result in significant bloodshed.

But the simple fact was, the world would be better off without this guy. Dork-hand was just as fucking self-absorbed and impossible to deal with as last time.

I shoved the thoughts about killing him to the back of my mind and focused on all the huge, gaping questions that needed answering, and yet we'd been wholly unable to focus on because of his bullshit.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Soo, what's with all the banners?" I asked.

"Ah yes, my prodigal son. I knew your engrossment would reach pinnacle absolution. The fact that you walk with me now communes volumes of your latent dispositions."

My face twitched at the...at least three things wrong with that sentence.

"Sure," I said, tactfully. "So what's up with them?"

As though I hadn't seen them yet, he wheeled backwards and picked up a small rectangular scrap for me, mostly just a white empty rectangle reading "XMN" with the familiar raised red fist on one side. He handed it to me and I realized it was a sticker.

"...uh, thanks. But what's up with them. What the hell is an XMN?"

"It's pronounced, Examine. And it sounds like Exhuman. And it stands for Exhumain Mouvement Nouveau." He winked at me. "The new Exhuman movement."

"Was there an old one? And why are we French?"

"All beautiful works of art are French!" he shouted, posing again. "The Eiffel Tower! The Thinker! Mona Lisa!"

"I think Da Vinci was Italian. Otherwise he'd be Leonardo de Vinci."

He waved his hand dismissively. "I said Mona Lisa was. He painted her in France."

I shook my head at the guy and tried to remember that corpses were notoriously bad at answering questions. But, then again, so was he. Hmm.

"Okay, so, the XMN. What the fuck is it?"

He paused his weird-ass posing calisthenics to stare at me quizzically. "You didn't get my flier?"

"Yes I...I fucking got it," I vented. "I'm here, aren't I?"

"Well," he sniffed. "I believe I made eminently clarion the intendment of the Examine. It is a meeting of intellectual Exhumans, to adjudicate and conclude the ultimate ordination of Exhumanity in the world."

"You're meeting here," I said, looking around. "To decide the fate of the world?"

"I agree, it is not...ideal. I had hoped for a fete soiree gala, but to say those of subordinate intelligence finds my presence needling is an understatement."

I didn't think anything this man had ever said was an understatement.

"Yeah you don't even have…" I looked around. "...chairs. Or like...a room."

"It is a procedural...procedure," he declared, heading back towards his amassed signs. "You may wait inside with Terrence until the body of the assemblage...assembles."

"Terrence," I confirmed. "He's the other Defiant who wasn't there that day. What was he doing instead?"

Dork-hand shrugged with the same flamboyance. "Living his life. He merely missed the meeting because he could not afford to fly out pell-mell helter-skelter owing to a severe deficiency in fundage. I've been getting him back on his feet."

"I'm sure he appreciates that," I intoned.

As he passed the signs, as though by habit, Dork-hand popped another few hundred into existence as though molting them. I'd never actually seen his powers, but it looked like he could just fabricate things by sorta...extruding them, fully formed from his skin. Which was pretty wicked cool.

"So you made all these like that?" I asked, pausing for once to inspect his craftsmanship. The art was comically bad, but the materials it was printed on looked absolutely authentic. I'd have thought for sure he raided an art supply store or something for all that.

"Oh yes, one of the many advantages of being me," he said, somehow being both dismissive and pandering at once.

"Why didn't you make like...I dunno...plutonium bombs or something instead of signs. Not that you should. But if your goal was to get heard…?"

"Too complicated," he said, with the same obviously calculated indifference. "Consider the labors of a mass-fabricator machine, and you will know the extent to which my gift already lofts. None can produce a work so readily as myself."

"Hmm, too complex?" I asked. "You know, a friend of mine used an antique mass-fab to print out a whole swarm of murder robots, once. And no hookups, just a bunch of cross-connected wires, the absolute madwoman."

"Well, I bet they weren't very good robots. Probably just schema she found on the 'net."

"No, she designed them from scratch herself. They were pretty good." I remembered how those robots had been built specifically to contend with my powers, and how fucked I'd have been if I wasn't still learning new tricks with them.

"Whatever," he scoffed. "She may move men, but I move hearts and minds. Where any true war is won. Long live the XMN!"

He was still rah-rah-rahing when he opened the door to the gas station and stepped aside to let me through. Once he followed me in though, I noticed he went quiet.

There was only one other person in the room, Terrence, I had to assume. Terrence fixed me with a steely glare that let me know exactly why Dork-hand had gone silent. Terrence did not seem like the kind of person to waste too much time or suffer too many of Dork-hand's breaths. Terrence seemed more the sort to make Dork-hand suffer for them.

Maybe I was being too judgemental. I reminded myself that this guy was in the Defiant, and therefore, at some point, passed Talon's criteria. But...then again, Talon had wanted Haley thrown out of the group for being just a kid, and he hadn't exactly gone and done that either. I remembered the guy as being impossibly charismatic and flawless...but that was still impossible. I probably just never got to know him well enough to know his faults.

Inpossible, Heh.

...God damn it, Dork-hand.

As for Terrence, he rose, towering a couple inches on me. His skin was ruddy, but mostly black with ink of the many indecipherable tattoos scrawled across it. He wasn't the biggest guy, but he was pretty muscular. Sort of the tall, wiry-strong look, that sorta reminded me of a wrought iron fence.

"Who's this?" he asked, his voice a rich baritone.

"Hi, I'm Athan." I found it my turn to awkwardly hobble the distance and extend a handshake, my exoframe crunching on the hard floor.

"Terrence," he said, not hesitating to shake my hand, with a sharp nod. A reasonable handshake, unlike the last one I'd had. "I know you."

"Yeah? Where from?"

"Wanted posters. You're worth a lot of knish."

I took a step back and crossed my arms. "And there's a reason why. Are you interested in learning it?"

For a long moment he said nothing. I tensed as I waited, as he thoroughly sized me up.

Felt weird having two feet again. One of them didn't work and never would. The doctors explained that after this long, the body could regrow the tissue and even if the nerves grew back with it, the brain had lost the ability to manage that bit quite right ever again. I didn't know what that meant in practice, but feeling it now as my blood went icy explained it better than they ever could have.

I felt it, but it felt alien. Felt more like someone had grafted a foot onto me there and hotwired it into my brain rather than restoring something lost. The phantom sensations still existed, obnoxiously, as my body reminded me that there was still something missing. It just wasn't this.

But hey, at least I was balanced again. That meant I had to do a shitton of recalibration on the exoframe the last couple days.

"Now gentlemen," Dork-hand said, stepping between us once he was certain fighting wasn't going to erupt spontaneously. "Neither of you predilects the sullying of the XMN's inaugural summit."

Terrance smiled, and the transformation it made on his face was remarkable. Maybe it was the addition of a splash of white against the dark facial tattoos. Or maybe it was just seeing something so otherwise grim-looking doing something human.

"Thought you said there'd be some real sluggers here, Dillon. Didn't expect Athan Goddamn Ashton."

Dork-hand looked at him, then at me. "Athan? It's pronounced Althan."

I could only shake my head at the imbecile. Also couldn't help but note that Terrence was still standing there, ready to fight, despite his smile. I was growing uncomfortable with how long we were squaring off against each other here. Didn't seem like a good start to the relationship.

And then, I realized, he'd already said it, hadn't he? Athan Goddamn Ashton. I was famous. I probably was intimidating or something because of my infamy.

I tried giving him a smile and...not sure exactly what else to do, turned to look around instead of stare him down, and to my relief, he relaxed a bit. God that was awkward. I hadn't ever been a celebrity before. Not beyond a high school.

"Good, good," Dork-hand said with a grin. "Well if that's reconciliated, I am--" he paused, looking around the small gas station store for something. Apparently what he needed was a can of potted meat, because that is exactly what he picked up and banged against the shelf with a crappy rattling noise that was absolutely the opposite sound of a gavel. "I am euphoric to annunciate the embarkation of the XMN summit!"

I looked around, wondering if this was really it. Two dudes in a gas station, and me. Terrence didn't bother to look around, I think he knew Dork-hand well enough by now. I probably should have too.

"Actually, before that. Or, in opposition to that," I cleared my throat. "I actually kind of wanted to talk to you about...not having an Exhuman summit. Y'know, in the middle of a political climate where the future of America is being threatened and the XPCA is kinda on the ropes."

Dork-hand frowned at me. "Wait. I thought...y'know, last time, you were banging on about protecting the XPCA as well. I'd just assumed with you being their most-wanted but…" He scratched his head and attempted to exchange a glance with Terrence, who didn't bother looking. Suddenly he was animated again. "Althan, you dense ignoramus, you've made an ass of you...and me!"

I stared at him. "What."

Terrence stepped forward again, smile gone, pose tense again, his wiry muscles twisting under his tats. "I think what Dillon is trying to say is, if you're gonna shut us down, you've gotta do it by force."

"That is not!" Dork-hand argued.

He replied with a smile again. "Fine. That's what I'm saying. Nobody knows what you're saying anyway."

"Look," I said, stepping back as the one-point-five of them advanced on me. "I'm not really with the XPCA. I just want to talk, want to make you guys see why we need them standing."

"Sounds like being with 'em to me," Terrence cracked his knuckles. Lightning crackled around him, going up and down his skin in arcs. Another electrist like me. That was...bad. "Gimmie a weapon, Dillon."

He reached back and like pulling a sword from a sheath, drew a sledgehammer out of Dillon's offered grasp. He checked it once or twice for weight and heft while the two of them ignored my sputtered arguments about peace and cooperation and survival.

"Do I really need to call in the XPCA and turn this into an event?" I asked. "I really, really just wanted to talk instead."

"I guess we don't talk with mouthpieces of our enemies," Dork-hand muttered.

I'd wondered how things could possibly have gotten worse after seeing he was the one making this whole mess. I'd never really actually wanted to find out, though.

Terrence was moving on me before I even got a sword of my own to bear.