Straightening his tie with a jaunty motion, Gentry checked his cuffs and shoes, then opened the door to his suite and strode out into the bright sunlight. Immediately, he winced and wished he'd thought to bring a hat -- the sunlight stung his eyes, as it usually did recently -- but after a moment he adjusted well enough. With a spring in his step and a whistled tune upon his lips, he set off down the block. Breakfast in the daylight hours was a treat which was becoming increasingly rare, and he meant to savor it.

Last night had been extremely draining -- the sixth wiedergänger had been the most difficult yet to raise, and he doubted that his power could support a seventh. But with all six of the creatures anchoring his hold in strategic placements within Chemimax's new executive structure, the critical portions of his plan were falling into place. He still had many months of hard work ahead of him -- the procurement of the special asphalt additives he would need from deeply inefficient locations was proving logistically challenging, as was the complex and nefarious web of bribery needed to get various officials and regulators to look the other way at important junctures. But slowly but surely, things were taking shape, and it was hard for him not to feel satisfaction after his many years of dedicated effort. A man should build great works, after all.

Stopping to pet a small dog, he crossed a busy street and made his way into a small delicatessen. As with many of its contemporaries in the city, it was roughly halfway between restaurant and bodega; a large shelf containing various flavors of crisps greeted him upon entering, and he plucked one daintily in anticipation of trying it -- whatever "hot honey mustard" was, he was determined to enjoy it. Ordering a scrambled egg bagel, he waited for his food to be prepared, paid for his purchase in crisply-folded bills, and took his breakfast outside to make his repast in the warm sunlight. A few pigeons expressed interest in his food, but it was the work of the lightest of entropic touches to warn them away, and the one that disregarded his defenses dropped dead unceremoniously a few feet from his shoes. He pushed its corpse into a storm drain discreetly with his toe.

"Well, isn't this a pleasant coincidence," came a voice from over his shoulder. He turned, smiling, to see Maximus Perforce squinting cheerfully at him through the bright sunlight. "I must say, what are the odds?"

"Fairly unlikely, I'd imagine," lied Gentry, who had in fact engineered this meeting through divinations at great personal effort and expense, "but that seems to be how things work out for the two of us." He stepped forward and shook the other man's hand. "And how is obscene wealth treating you?"

"Well, I wasn't exactly poor before," laughed Maximus, "but there is a bit of a difference between owning a chalet and owning the island it sits on." He glanced around. "I've been hearing that you're a shoo-in for next year's repaving contract. Lucrative, but I was under the impression you were planning something a little more ambitious."

"Well, if you can't predict what I'm up to, that bodes well for my competitors," smiled Gentry. "Still, there are some holdouts making it difficult to get some of the materials I need in sufficient quantity. It's challenging to find kimberlite pipes that overlap with bitumen deposits."

Maximus laughed loudly. "My friend, if I didn't know you were serious, I'd think you were insane. Paving the streets with gold not enough for you?"

"Not by half," replied Gentry breezily. "You've got to have imagination in this business."

----------------------------------------

Orton sat, stunned, in his seat on the small prop plane and stared into space for nearly a half-hour; negotiating discreet passage out of Mexico and into America at three in the morning had been neither easy nor cheap, but he had the twin advantages of being a powerful wizard and of having fifteen thousand dollars in unmarked bills stashed about his person in various wallets, money belts, and old-school wads of cash in his socks. The fact that the plane probably had at least a half-ton of cocaine in its cargo hold did not bother him, but the ramifications of his conversation a half-hour ago did.

In all his previous loops, Orton had been careful to change as little as possible; he'd avoided returning to locations that didn't further his goals, he'd erred on the side of caution with respect to changing things and observing the consequences, and he'd spent almost all of his time either alone or interacting with total strangers that he would never see again. The thought that somehow another person had remembered him through all that -- not an eldritch monstrosity or a psychotic engram, but a real actual human person -- had upended a number of his core assumptions about the sequence of traumas that he (more than a little charitably, he thought) called his life. Putting his head in his hands, he began performing his most reliable breathing techniques, trying to calm his shit.

"Well, well," crowed a nasal voice from the seat next to him, "looks like somebody ain't as smart as they thinks they are, eh?!" Orton jumped; he knew that voice. With a start, he pulled his head up and looked towards its source.

"Now, I ain't no psy-chair-a-trist," said the bloodied apparition of a dead twenty-year-old dishwasher next to him, "but I think you might be crackin' up a lil' bit, Denny."

Orton's jaw fell open. "Vinny." He rubbed his eyes, flabbergasted, before his brain caught up with what he was seeing, and his expression soured. "Great. Just great. An antediluvian murder god chooses to manifest to me, and he picks the corpse of my coworker from a Cajun restaurant as his avatar." He slumped in his seat with a sigh. "Couldn't you have picked, like, Angelina Jolie? Or at least Kathy Ireland?"

"You wishes," snorted the spectre of Vinny. "I can only takes the form of a sacrifice, capisce? An' this guy is about as close to that as you got in your noggin. Besides, I ain't here to make you get no boner, human." He leaned forward, bringing his pinched-together fingers up under Orton's nose. "I'm here to warn you, so's you don't get smoted."

"The correct past tense of 'smite' is 'smitten'," corrected Orton wearily. "and you don't have any power to do either. You might be a god, Tecahapoatl, but you're a dead god, remember?" He crossed his arms, smirking. "You don't really have any power to do anything other than appear as a hallucination, and even then, only to people who believe in you. You're not exactly the Slenderman of the modern era."

The apparition raised its hand, palm down, and wiggled it in a noncommittal fashion. "Maybes, maybes not. But I do know what's all up in your head, wizard boy, an' I can see real clear how much angst you ain't lettin' on about your situation." The spirit leaned closer, leering. "So what says you? How's about we cut a deal?"

"Ugh." Orton groaned, pressing his palms to his eyelids. "What do you even want? A mimosa? You're an image on two clay tablets that occasionally makes people feel creeped out. You barely exist."

"I barely exists now," pointed out Vinny. "But you could change all that, yeah? Drop me off at the Smiths-sonian, with a nice nerd paper about my myth-o-loginy." He snapped his fingers and made a grotesque dancing motion with his arms and fists. "Get me a little exhibit, yeah? A little inroad into the ol' public consciousness? Maybe in another few millennia, I get me another temple, a few sacrifices, and then whoo!" He threw up his hands victoriously. "I make the Mayans look like the Mormons!"

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"Putting aside the part where that's evil and monstrous and also pointless because Gentry's going to destroy the world in about three more years at most," Orton pointed out sourly, "why the fuck would I do that? I'm going to use you in a ritual to find the information I need anyway and then dump you into the Grand Canyon. You don't exactly have much to bargain with, here."

"I got enough." The apparition's hideous, ghoulish face split open in a wide grin. "I don't want no moon-sized crater in my world any more than you do, an' I was around when th' fruits was a hot topic o' current news." He leaned closer, raising his hand to his mouth and whispering conspiratorially. "Only one of 'em came to America, an' I know exactly where it ended up. No long, drawn-out series o' divinations, no traipsin' to every tourist trap in the midwest for no nexi o' semioturgic power, none o' that!" He folded his arms triumphantly. "You writes a little paper, you delivers me to Noo Yawk City, an' bada-bing bada-boom, I tell you where to get th' fruit."

Orton sighed. "Could you be any more of a terrible stereotype?" He rooted around in his bag, pulled out a bottle of vodka, and began to unscrew the cap. "Putting aside the fact that you'd gleefully lie to me as well as waiting to tell me anything until after you'd gotten what you want, any information you do have is at least three thousand years old. Any location you know of is probably a McDonald's now." He took a swig of vodka from the bottle, then turned back towards the apparition. "And best of all, you're banished by essence of wormwood, and this vodka is close enough." He raised his hand to pour the clear liquid onto the hallucination.

"Wait-wait-wait!" Vinny protested. "Alright alright, you can't blame a guy for tryin'! You take me to the place, an' we'll see if it's still there, yeah? And, and, for free, I tell you the answer to th' riddle that's been buggin' ya."

Orton paused. "What riddle? Now you're really just making stuff up."

Vinny's smile returned, broader than ever. "The riddle about how yer sorceress girlfriend breaks all th' rules of magic. Bam! Still wanna throw me in the Grand Canyon?"

Orton gaped, then clenched his fists helplessly. "Son of a bitch!"

----------------------------------------

As the truck rattled to a stop, the panel at the rear opened up, and Enna and Jiann piled out, already sweating. Enna looked around and grimaced. "Another desert trading crossroads. You'd think I'd be used to it by now."

Jiann chuckled. "Sorry th' ancient secrets o' divine power ain't in a Starbucks." He hopped down off the truck's bumper (moving with almost no trace of the dyskinesia that had plagued him when he'd first taken over Cameron's body) and surveyed the area, wincing as he noticed that the small outpost in western Libya only had about five buildings to its name. "At least there ain't too much to distract us. Still, better get crackin' afore we get chased down by more o' Cameron's robot pals." The preceding year had been mostly uneventful, but twice they'd been ambushed by Agents and once by a strange creature in a rubber suit and helmet that Enna was pretty sure had been an actual alien from outer space; luckily, none of them had been protected against magic in any way, and thus had been destroyed rather summarily.

Enna sighed and started the process of the next divination; she exerted her power a fraction to obscure herself from idle attention -- not strictly necessary, but it helped with the embarrassment of waving her hands around in public -- and began working to clear her mind. "See any sticks I can use to draw the runes in the dirt?"

Jiann shrugged. "You can try it with a visualization this time, if'n you want. No guarantee it'll be nearly as effective, though."

Enna waffled for a moment, then decided she had more to gain from making the attempt than from any risk of failure. Glancing around to fix her surroundings in her mind, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

First, she visualized two rings of light on the ground around her feet -- an outer one to isolate the energies she was trying to capture from the outside world, and an inner one to isolate her from those same energies. Next she needed to choose a set of symbols to separate and codify the energies in her divination. She contemplated using the alchemical lexicon, but after a moment decided on the astrological one instead; it was less precise, but had fewer symbols, so she'd be less likely to mess it up while trying to recall the other steps of the spell. She was already trying to hold entirely too many abstract things in her mind, and cutting corners wherever she could was probably a smart move here.

A year ago, she would have struggled to even recall all twelve of the symbols of the basic zodiac, but Jiann's lessons in noephrasty -- the magical disciplines of memory and concentration -- had strengthened her abilities in such areas considerably. It took only a moderate mental effort to call forth her memorization of all fourteen symbols in the full zodiac (the twelve base ones, plus the two sidereal symbols of Cetus and Ophiuchus) and bind them into sections along the circumference of the circle. Now came the actual hard part.

Dredging the specific steps of the divining spell up from her mind-palace of memorized spell steps would have been difficult enough, but doing it while she was visualizing the binding circle taxed her concentration to its limit; her jaw clenched and her breaths became shorter as she strained to keep her focus. Raising her hands out before her, she began to turn slowly as she chanted the Aramaic words of the spell (a language she and Jiann had agreed would have the best possible resonance with the Semitic nature of the fruit while avoiding the cross-pollinatory interference of Hebrew) and searched among the zodiac symbols along the runic circle for any sign of a reaction. At first, nothing seemed to happen, but she controlled her frustration and kept chanting, turning this way and that in her visualized circle while resisting the urge to just imagine the reaction she wanted, rather than waiting for the external force of the magic to affect her imagination on its own.

Finally, after a seeming eternity, she detected a pulsing glow forming around her mental representation of Sagittarius's arrow -- a sort of flickering, yellowish-red halo which indicated a direction in front and slightly to the left of her. Steeling her will and opening her eyes while still imagining the circle illuminating the sands around her (a task which took almost every ounce of her concentration), she began to walk slowly forward, keeping her hands fixed out in front of her and continuing to mumble the incantation as she did so.

Jiann followed along behind her, impressed -- it had taken him nearly a decade to even attempt a meta-ritual, and another half of one before he'd succeeded at the simplest of them. What Enna was doing should have, by all rights, been the exclusive domain of a career wizard, but he wasn't about to tell her that. Her pedigree as a sorceress was bluntly obvious in her aura, however -- her fickle, intuitive nature kept twisting and straining against the rigorous concentration required for the spell in a way a wizard's never would have. He chuckled quietly, enjoying the show.

Eventually, the trail ended at a low tan-colored building made of sun-baked mudbrick; Enna's shoulders slumped as she noticed that it was a shop, with a sign in Arabic she could not read but a display of imported western clothing which required no literacy to identify. She was about to let the spell drop in frustration when Jiann's hand touched her gently on her right shoulder. "Bide a moment." The revenant, one hand on a pistol at his hip, risked a look inside before beckoning her into the shop's cool, dark interior.

As she stepped carefully across the threshold, fighting to maintain control of her spell, her eyes began to adjust to the gloom; she could tell that the shop was empty (of people if not of apparel) but Jiann was already quick-stepping through the piles of garments towards a sunken stairway towards the rear of the building. Bemused, she followed him, idly wondering how much longer she could keep the spell going before her concentration gave out.

As she stepped onto the top stair, however, a jolt of power thrummed through her body, and the imaginary glow around the arrow turned a bright lime green color; abruptly intent, she focused on scanning the area as she descended the steps, no longer struggling to restrain her wayward attention. Below her, Jiann had drawn his second revolver and was standing alertly in the center of the basement they were entering. As the stone door came into view around the corner, her mouth dropped open in shock.

It was huge -- nearly twenty feet tall and twice that wide -- and constructed of an unbroken jet-black obsidian slab carved with ancient and intricate figures, runes, and diagrams. In her mind's eye, the runic circle turned to point towards it whenever she rotated her body. Dropping her spell, she gulped. "I guess we found it."

Jiann nodded grimly. "Now ta find out if we'll wish we hadn'."