Horan watched the crowd congeal into small blobs of conversation before splitting apart a few minutes later, the socialization separating the Indians, Aztecs and Greeks into their own camps more and more with each passing moment.

He sighed and swirled his drink, leaning forward on his cushion of thin air and rising another ten feet, now eye level with the fourth level of Aztec bedrooms. He watched another Aztec retreat to their room, clutching a stack of papers to their chest.

When he looked back down, his attention was drawn to fresh movement by the entrance. The door was opening. He dove down to greet the returning expedition(s), then gasped in shock when he saw the state of Mark, Waia, Quet and the purple-eyed Omet. “What happened to you guys?!”

“Quet’s room,” said Mark, clutching his side. “We’ve got some stuff.”

Omet nodded and split apart from the rest of the group, the dried gold staining their head catching a few concerned looks from partygoers. “Let me just meet up with my other-me, and I’ll be right there.”

“Be quick,” said Mark, before leading the rest towards the stairs. Similar to the reactions to Omet, the crowd parted for them with a few shocked gasps and several uncomfortable stares. Quet wrapped her trembling arms around herself, Horan gave out awkward smiles to any Indian who noticed the procession, and Mark and Waia ignored the crowd entirely.

Upstairs, Quet ushered the group inside her darkened bedroom before hastily shutting the door behind her. Horan ran a hand through his hair and paced to the other side of the room. “They’re totally gonna notice that we’re gone…”

“Worry about that later,” said Waia.

“Okay. Right. You’re right.” Horan took a deep breath and turned around. “Well, first of all, what happened?! You said you were just going to be doing some scouting or whatever!”

“We ended up improvising a little,” said Waia.

Mark began counting on his fingers. “I got interrogated, Waia got stabbed, then she was carried off by a flamethrower dragonfly and I got stabbed by a tree-thing, Quet, Omet and I were shot out of the sky…”

“That matrix took three weeks to get right,” huffed Quet.

“…I probably shouldn’t have driven us back here in my condition,” said Mark, clutching his chest. “I’m still in a little bit of shock.”

Waia raised her hand. “I also got shot in the face by a tank, but it’s cool now.”

“Okay…” Horan gulped and sat down on the floor. “And, um… And what did you get out of all this?”

Mark pulled the folder out of his hoodie pocket. “Not much, probably. We’re not sure. The map in here is coded or in a magic language or something, Waia and I can’t read it.”

While Mark pulled the map out of the folder, Waia continued for him. “Not really much of a scouting mission, to be honest. The most productive thing I did was wipe a city’s worth of Servants off the map.”

Mark unfolded the map on the floor. “And we’ll discuss that later.”

Waia snorted. “What are you, my mom?”

“Someone needs to be one for you maniacs. Quet, could you get the lights?”

Quet switched on the bedroom lights before hurrying over to look at the map. Mark pointed out the marked spot for her and Horan. “…Looks a bit too rushed to be a magic language, you learn to write glacially in those very early on, it’s ingrained into your brain.”

Waia groaned. “So, what, is it a cipher? Do we need to head back out and kidnap someone to translate for us?”

Horan squinted at the writings, then looked up at Mark and Waia. “This is copperplate.”

“…Cop a what?”

Horan pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s… not a code. It just says ‘Seraphium’ in copper… Hang on, what?” He grabbed the map and examined it closer. “He hid the Seraphium in Mexico? Right here?”

Quet shrugged. “Maybe. Depends on what you’re talking about.”

Omet opened the door halfway and knocked. “What’d I miss?”

Quet gestured for them to come inside. “Good timing. Ever heard of a Seraphium?”

Omet shut the door behind them, tossed a small stack of papers onto Quet’s desk and sat down in front of the map. “Oh, you mean Deus’ teleporter thing? Yeah, Horan told me about it this morning. How do you know about it?”

Waia slid the map towards Omet. “We stole a map from the Servants that says it’s a twenty-minute drive from your house.”

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“…Neat."

Horan steepled his fingers and stared intently at the map. “It’s not… I mean, he’s got plenty of things and people to hide away, there’s probably stuff like this all over the place… Maybe it’s…”

Omet knelt down and glanced at the door, behind which the sound of the band’s performance could still be heard. “…Hey, uh, Horan, you said that Deus managed to make this Seraphium able to teleport him, right?”

Three pairs of eyebrows shot up in unison.

Horan looked up at Omet, puzzled. “Yeah, that’s the whole reason he…” His eyes drifted back down to the map. He mumbled something under his breath.

Waia scoffed, but before she could say anything more, Mark leaned forward and put his hand on Horan’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about this so hard. That last thing made me sure of it: This is the most obvious trap in the world. I’ve got the full picture now, and I feel a little insulted.”

Waia folded her arms and leaned back, trying to look at the map from a different angle. “…So obvious that we’re supposed to realize that it’s a trap?”

Quet stood up and began to pace, staring at the floor. Omet sighed at the sight. “And now she’s in one of her I-know-you-know loops. We’re gonna be here a while.”

“Let me cook!” Quet began counting on her hands. “We need to consider the possibility, therefore, that such a realization is intended, thus keeping us away from that location. However, this is a conclusion that we’ve easily come to, so perhaps they’re expecting us to come anyway, as a spiteful rejection of their intentions? But what if…” She looked up. “You shouldn’t have let me cook.”

Mark waved Quet down. “No, it’s fine, you’ve got a point. Whatever their plan is – and whoever ‘they’ is supposed to be – it’s not just a cut-and-dry trap, or basic reverse psychology.”

“Then what is it?” asked Omet.

“A last resort,” said Mark, folding the map back up and putting it aside. “Everything about this, from the car, to the two guys right before the car, to Torch in general, it’s all part of a game that we only play if we’re out of options. There’s absolutely no way that the magic get-Deus-to-fix-everything button has just been sitting in Mexico for who knows how many centuries. Best case scenario, it’s some kind of… I dunno, codeword for a meeting spot or something. And I don’t feel good about that being the optimistic outcome.”

Omet shrugged half-heartedly. “Stick to plan A, then?”

“Stick to plan A,” confirmed Mark. “The last people that I trust to hand us an out, easy or no, are the people who gassed an entire city just to kill one of us.” He let out a small chuckle. “Well, that’s a first. I guess your idea is actually the one I’m willing to go with, Horan… Horan?”

Horan took a deep breath and stood up, nodding to himself. “…Yeah. Last resort, yeah. No way it’d just be there. There’s a catch, yeah. I’m saying ‘yeah’ too much.”

Omet took Horan’s hand in their own. “Let’s head back down, take your head off things. The gang’s back together, and we don’t need to worry about any curveballs for the rest of the night.”

Quet sighed and made for the door. “Okay, time to face the inevitable, I guess.”

Omet raised their other hand. “Just a second now. I did say this morning that you wouldn’t have to do party stuff if you didn’t want to.”

Quet gasped. “You did promise!” She wrapped one arm around Omet’s neck in a loose hug. “A hundred blessings upon your bloodline!”

Omet noticed Horan smiling at them. “C’mon, I’m just trying to make this pill go down smoother. Besides, I left a bit of stuff for her to read on the desk, preferably before things start to wind down downstairs.”

Quet glanced at the papers, puzzled “Reading material isn’t exactly something you give to me on a regular basis, but I’ll... look at it?”

“You’ll understand what it’s for soon.” Omet pulled Horan out of the room. “C’mon, I should explain what Mark meant by a car, because there were actually cars, plural.”

Horan sighed at let himself be pulled out of the room. “That… That’d be nice. We need to put you in literally anything other than your current outfit. You can not let your daywear and eveningwear be the name.”

Quet looked at Mark and Waia, the only other people left in her room. “…I take it you’d rather hang out up here than down there? I get it, I’m willing to do a bit of a private lounge spot. Gimme a sec.” She fished a stone out of her pocket and placed it on the floor. She bellowed “New York style!” in a poor Brooklyn accent, and the stone blossomed into a half-and-half pizza on a wide plate.

Quet pulled the cheese-covered stone out of the center of the pizza with a grimace, then placed it on her desk and pulled wet cloth out of one of the hidden drawers in the wall. “I don’t bring out the big guns for just anyone, you know. The matrix for controlled matter generation is confined to a single pebble, so it must be simple to design, right? Wrong. The accent was not an optional accessory, it was the only way I could figure out how to get the vocal activation to work. Dig in whenever you feel like it, and let my pain be my own.”

Mark sat down on Quet’s beanbag chair and listened to the muffled sounds coming from the floor. Waia noted his vacant expression. “Let me guess, you want to talk about earlier.”

“Hang on, that reminds me.” Quet began to open drawers in the wall, seemingly at random. “We should probably do something about that hole in Mark’s ribs fast, huh?”

“I’ve had worse, it’s not too bad if you ignore it,” said Mark. “But I get the feeling that anything that still needs to be said isn’t gonna do much to change things.”

“If it helps,” said Waia, sitting down and pulling out a slice of pizza for herself, “I’m not happy about this. I was hoping to put this whole ‘uncontrollable murder-queen’ stuff behind me, at least for a century or two. But our back is against the wall, and these people need to learn that they don’t cross me and get away with it. When I can put all this behind me, I will, believe me.”

Mark shrugged. “Just try to think about when you should as well. I’m not gonna push you past that; like you said, I’m not your mom.”

Waia nodded. “Thanks. I’d rather we just focus on finishing this instead of sitting in a circle and talking about our feelings.”

Mark sat down and pulled out a pizza slice of his own. “I’ll eat to that.”

The two of them held their slices close to the others, then dug in as per Quet’s instructions. Mark winced after swallowing. “I’m gonna wait until Quet patches me up, actually.”

Quet called out from the stairway leading up to the platform above them. “I wouldn’t bank on it. Why am I looking for first aid supplies in the bedroom of someone who can heal a broken bone in an hour?!”