Momo was yet again engaging in what some may call a Momo plan.

AKA—anything that would simultaneously give Grimli fatal stress hives, would get a nervous laugh out of Sumire, and would make Valerica very, very proud.

“Are you sure this guy is a painter?” Momo said skeptically, waving around the Soul Splitting dagger. She was sitting on a small wooden stool in a dimly lit alleyway just outside the town’s central market. They had chosen the market as the location for two main reasons: one, it had the highest volume of people willing to do ridiculous jobs for little pay, and two: Momo had been hungry at the time she made the call.

After stuffing her face full of samosas, Momo, Nyk, Kasula, and a burly, bare-chested man with an apron and an easel took to the backstreets. Zephyra was left back at the arena for obvious reasons: having her this close to the public would be a recipe for all-out bedlam; Momo was not keen on setting the circumstances for a JFK-style assassination here in Karahtan.

“I found him and grabbed him off the street in under fifteen minutes,” Nyk said. “Sue me if I wasn’t able to verify his credentials. He has an easel and a paintbrush, what more does he need?”

“The ability to paint, perhaps,” Kasula interjected, frowning. She still hadn’t fully bought into Momo’s plan. Which was fine, of course, because neither had Momo. “He has to deliver a photorealistic still of Momo and the dagger in under an hour. Right now, he’s painting what I can only assume is supposed to be a dog on… a bicycle?”

Momo looked over at his canvas. It had three red circles, one of which had ears and a snout.

She frowned.

“Just trust the process, Kasula,” she said, choosing to ignore the drawing. “Great art takes time.”

“Time we don’t have,” Kasula muttered.

“Seven minute,” the painter grunted. “All I need.”

Kasula looked at him skeptically. “Seven minutes? To go from that,” she gestured her hands wildly at the canvas. “To this?” she pointed at Momo, who straightened in her stool.

“Seven minute,” he reiterated. He then got a thoughtful look on his face. “And orange juice.”

Momo looked towards Nyk expectantly. The dokkaebi slapped her hand over her face.

“To think I used to do useful things,” she groaned. “Like assassinating people.”

—

“What in the Gods do they put in the orange juice here?!” Kasula gaped.

The trio stood behind the easel in absolute, paralyzing shock. In front of them was a masterpiece that would have made Richard Estes weep. A work of true photorealism, so harrowingly accurate that it made Momo feel as if she was looking into a mirror for the first time in her life. Her raggedy white hair, her vampiric porcelain skin, her brown eyes which had gone heterochromatic with a mix of hazel and blue.

And, of course, the shining dagger in her right hand.

Everything was visually accurate except for the backdrop. They had forced the painter to replace the dark and sandy alleyways of Karahtan with the blossoming fields outside Morganium. Momo had gone to great lengths to hide her presence in the Vagrant Dunes – and more importantly, her absence in her own queendom – and she was not about to ruin all that just because of a little Charisma-inspired psychological warfare.

“Was not the orange juice,” the painter clarified, his voice still as monotone as cardboard. He sloshed around the mug of freshly squeezed fruit juice Nyk had fetched for him. “I am Expert Portrait Artist. I do work for you because this one has [Patron of the Arts] skill. You are appreciator of the arts. I appreciate you.”

He had his mug pointed to Momo, who blushed. She had forgotten about that skill. She got it when rising to level 3 in Artist—it caused great artists to flock to her.

“I appreciate you, too,” she said, and gave him a heaping tip of one hundred gold pieces. She’d rather her gold went to the working artists of Karahtan than some capitalist elf queen. “Please buy yourself some clothes with this.”

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“I prefer just apron,” he said, staring at her blankly as he packed up his materials. “Must feel the winds of inspiration under me in order to harness the great fluidity of the brush stroke.”

With that piece of grand poetry, he was off. After a moment, Kasula cleared her throat, and brought their attention back to the artwork again.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think your ridiculous plan might actually work,” she said, gobsmacked. “With this as collateral, Zephyra can get ahead of the tabloids by saying she was using a fake version of the dagger to protest the abuse of wraiths. Then if they accuse her of lying, you can come out with this photo and say you, in a partnership with the Elven Empire, stole the real weapon off the market in an effort to curtail wraith-hunting in the Mists. Gods, it’s so wholesome and peachy I might just throw up—have you thought of being a Public Relations Specialist?”

Momo shrugged modestly. She had barely considered even graduating high school back when she was debating majors, so, no.

“Didn’t you say this would tank your approval ratings?” Nyk said, chewing boredly on one of Momo’s leftover samosas. “Seems like it might do the opposite. Who’s going to hate the queen who’s saving the wildlife? I mean, besides me.”

Momo bit her lip. Admittedly, she had just assumed things would go wrong. That just seemed to be how things went.

“I guess I was just being pessimistic,” she mumbled.

Nyk bit into the samosa again and rolled her eyes. “Finally. Welcome to the club.”

—

With the painting safely deposited in Momo’s backpack, Kasula went back to her sister’s place, taking the dagger with her and leaving Momo and Nyk in the back alleys. Momo didn’t particularly care what happened to the dagger now; she only cared that Zephyra was happy.

(Okay – lie. Momo didn’t really care what state of mind the wealthiest, most charismatic elf this side of Alois was in; she just really wanted to keep that bracelet. She knew in her gut that it’d come in handy soon. And, for the sake of her own continued survival, she also didn’t want an elf death squad showing up at her doorway.)

With that out of the way, Momo returned to the task at hand. She slipped her hand into her coat pocket, gripping the black cube. She could hear the faint screams radiating from within it. They ran up her nerve endings, shot around her veins like live wire. Vivienne’s words kept haunting her, circling her brain like piranhas.

“Sera… she must be waiting for something.”

“I wish she could have been a little more specific,” Momo muttered quietly.

“Are you talking to yourself again?” Nyk said, exhausted. “Or are you doing something else weird and unnecessary?”

Momo rolled her eyes, ignoring the comment.

“Come on,” she said. “Time to do what Valerica hired you for.”

—

As it turned out, Dusk was a lot more helpful than Nyk in hunting down Lione. After giving the cat a sniff of the letter, Momo activated [Hunt the Trail]. The cat pounced into action, tail stiff like an icicle as she weaved through the Karahtan townspeople. They haphazardly sailed through the marketplace, Momo apologizing as she elbowed merchants, tripped over golden vases, and dug her dirty heels into beige carpets.

The farther they delved inwards, the more Momo became aware that the city was simply a grid of archways and columns. The pattern repeated itself over and over, only differentiated by the kinds of people and goods sitting under those looming arches—sometimes florists, with their teethy, chomping desert plants, other times children, using magic to ride along sand dunes or bend sandstone and dirt into small, lively sculptures.

But every long archway ended somewhere, and they all ended at The Wall. The giant barricade that Momo had been led through initially. Everywhere Momo looked, guards were lazily emerging from portholes in the giant structure. The city felt like a relaxed panopticon; the police, while plentiful, spent most of their time idle chit chatting or playing board games with the old merchants in the streets, gambling away a day’s salary and then earning it back the next match.

“Who do all these guys report to anyway?” Momo said, out of breath as she jogged behind the cat. “I just realized I have zero idea who’s in charge here.”

“Why would I know?” Nyk shrugged. “I’m a dokkaebi. Alois is just one of a hundred worlds in my domain. All I know about this place is from the replicant areas that show up in the Nether.”

“Really?” Momo said, eyes wide. “Wait, what’s a replicant area?”

“Sometimes I forget you’re not a natural-borne dokkaebi,” Nyk sighed. “Replicant areas are places in the Nether that look like other places. The Nether isn’t really a place at all, it’s just a collection of energy that has nowhere else to go. So when a lot of souls from the same place end up there, their combined memories tend to create a replicant area.”

Momo remembered the New York City subway station that she and Morgana visited. She remembered the Subway restaurant. Even the Creation of the Universe Museum wasn’t quite a place—it felt much more like a memory. A distant fragment of Momo’s terribly uneventful middle school experience.

Thinking of Earth, a twitch of memory crossed Momo’s mind.

“Those other hundred planets in your domain,” she said quietly. “Is Earth one of them?”

The permanently annoyed frown on Nyk’s face faltered. She gave Momo a short, studying look. Something that almost verged on pity. After a moment, she answered, the irritated lilt in her voice notably absent.

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

A shock of adrenaline coursed through Momo. A hundred questions flitted through her mind like cracks of lightning—how often do you visit? Where on Earth have you been? Do you ever go to California? What about San Francisco? Could I… go there too?–just as Dusk came to a startling halt in front of a dark, somber doorway. A nondescript apartment in a series of hundreds.

On the door, a plaque hung:

L. Baumfreund

“Huh,” Nyk whistled. “Looks like we’re here.”