Mark flipped through the spiral notebook and glanced at the sheet of paper on the floor. “So, wait, where do I find the spheres?”

Quet silently read the papers that Omet had left her, leaning back in her desk’s swivel chair. “They’re mentioned individually in the table of contents, so you can skip to the ones you start with.”

“…And which ones do I start with?”

“It says right at the start of the section.”

“And which clan am I?”

“Wrong ga–” Quet sighed. “I give up. Read by yourself until you remember things.”

From the platform above their heads, Waia leaned over the railing. “Hey Quet, is there literally a single thing in your room that isn’t completely soul-sucking?”

“I was asked about what we can do to pass the time,” said Quet, not looking up from her papers, “and I obliged with my RPG books. Not my fault you have no sense of imagination.”

“Imagination shmimam– nag– Nothing on paper is ever fun! Paper is for money and contracts, and I hate both of those!”

“This is a no-yelling environment,” said Quet. “Please use your inside voice, it stresses me out otherwise.”

Waia groaned and slid away from the railing, lying on the uncarpeted wooden floor.

“If the two of us bore you,” mumbled Mark, “you can just go downstairs and do extrovert things, unless your principles still forbid you from doing party-related things.”

Another groan issued from above him.

“Okay.”

Mark looked at the notebook’s table of contents. Given that Quet had apparently copied out the entire contents of an actual rulebook by hand, the contents ended after listing off the first twenty pages, seemingly out of boredom. “We can’t build another death ray, right? That was more fun than filling in circles.”

Quet shrugged. “If you can clear out enough space, figure out how to alter our schematics in order to build a death ray that works, and un-disintegrate by travel sash, go right ahead. If you’re proposing that we just do something generally magic-related, I would recommend that you start reading up on the basics of thaumatology. I don’t have any resources like that on hand, though.”

Mark rested his head on his knees for a few moments. After a while, he got up and shuffled closer to Quet. “What are you reading, anyway?”

Quet leaned forward to shield the paper from Mark’s view. “Page one specifically instructs me to avoid disclosure of any information to anyone not part of the accepted part of the family. The only part of Operation Netherworld that I’m allowed to show you is the part where it says that.”

“…Did Omet write that?”

“Not word for word, but that’s the rule.” Quet flipped back several stapled-together pages. “This is a possibility, and you don’t need to worry about the scheme unless we all have reason to. I like being a good sister, I’m not spilling.”

Mark shrugged and stepped away, taking a seat on the beanbag chair in the corner. He watched Waia slither limply down the spiral staircase like a leather-clad snake. “That has to be uncomfortable.”

Waia reached the bottom of the stairs and pulled herself towards Mark with her arms. “Not worth standing.”

“And to think,” muttered Mark, “two hours ago, you were this hyperactive murder-queen… Wow, you really did kill a lot of people, huh?”

Quet hunched further over her papers and reached for a pair of headphones hanging from the desk lamp.

“Not my first time,” mumbled Waia, her voice ice cold. “Not something I’m very fond of discussing, so if you could drop this part of the conversation, I’d really appreciate it.”

Mark folded his arms and stared at the carpet.

“Thanks.” Waia pulled herself up and leaned against the wall.

“…Did you think about it while you were doing it?”

Waia winced. “I just–”

“Just… curious.” Mark pulled his arms closer to his chest. “When you were pulling helicopters out of the sky and crushing jeeps, did you, like process it? Did the thought of ‘hey, there are people in there’ register for you?”

Waia’s posture stiffened. “Look, if you’ve decided out of the blue to start judging me for everything, you should–”

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“I’m not judging you,” said Mark, eyes still fixed to the floor. “I’m in no place to do anything like that. When I said I was curious, I wasn’t being coy. I am. Curious, I mean.”

Waia clenched her jaw. “I… No. I didn’t think about that, while it was happening. I wasn’t thinking about much of anything. I saw the tanks and guns and masks, and I knew they belonged to the bad guys, and I knew they wanted me dead, and I did something about it. Not much time or space for contemplation.”

Mark nodded curtly.

“Not like you do it much differently, right?”

Mark glanced in Waia’s direction.

“It’s not like you’ve got any pristine baby hands or anything,” said Waia. “I saw the mess you made back in the Down Below. Or, uh, those people don’t leave much of a… I know you killed people back then, okay? So don’t act all innocent, I know you’re in on it too. You killed that Thel guy.”

“And others,” said Mark. “Before Thel, a bunch of his demon minions, and some Chinese guy who kidnapped Horan. Before that, a couple people working for that Huntmaster guy, before he got the job. Before that, two or three more demons, by the Suez Canal. Before that…” He swallowed. “I… won’t… I won’t let that number go up any more.”

“Big words for someone who owns a shapeshifting Swiss Army gun,” said Waia.

“I should’ve said that a long time ago,” mumbled Mark.

Waia nodded. “Seems like it, seeing as you’re gonna have to break that little promise pretty soon.”

“We don’t know that. We’ve got people downstairs so that we won’t have to.”

Waia scoffed. “Typical. You do realize that getting someone else to do the deed won’t make your hands any less dirty, right?”

“That’s not…” Mark sighed. “I… I know that, yeah.”

“Well, if you know that, why are you so on-board with Horan fulfilling his diplomatic fantasies and roping a fresh Domain into this?”

Mark looked back at the floor.

Waia huffed. “You can’t just keep going like this with nothing but the idea of things working out to back you up. Like it or not, I at least know where I’m going with all this. I keep hearing all this big talk about you being the one who makes all the plans, but you haven’t exactly acted like you have one.”

“…I just don’t want anyone to get hur–”

“People have already been hurt, Mark! That’s the whole reason why I’m here!”

Waia stepped away from the wall and stood in front of Mark, arms folded and eyes smoldering. “Like it or not, the Servants have gotten the ball rolling. They need to pay for what they’ve done to the Chinese, and the Hawaiians, and the people who’ve tried to stop them, and the people who they turned into those things, and…” She held herself back from continuing.

Mark nodded in response to the silence.

“Yeah, you get it, don’t you? White-picket families or no, they’ve poked the bear. I had something, you know. I had people who believed in me, who counted on me, I had a shot at doing something with my life after all these years, I had a chance to feel good about myself! And then they happened, and I need to fix this!”

“You can’t–”

Waia took a step towards Mark. “They won’t leave me in peace, so why should I leave them? They want to throw away my shot before I can really shoot it, so why should I give them a shot of their own? I’m not allowed to be happy for once in my life, so why should they?!”

Quet gripped her headphones. “Weren’t the ones who hurt you in Hawaii?”

Waia turned slowly. “…What?”

Hesitantly, Quet pulled her headphones off, and stared at the wall in front of you. “We’re thousands of kilometers away from there. The Servants here are innocent, aren’t they?”

“…Innocent?” Waia looked between Quet and Mark, neither of whom met her gaze. “I don’t care if the ones here are a bunch of pacifist farmers or what. It doesn’t matter if they’re ‘innocent’, they’re complicit! They all know what they signed up for! What they did to me, it’s like a nine-to-five job for them! You saw what they did for show when they first showed up, Mark! Not a single one of them has tried to do anything about this! If they wanted to be innocent, they wouldn’t have joined in the first place! They know what they’re doing, they can’t back out of the consequences now!”

“And who are you to decide what those consequences are?” asked Mark.

“And who are you to tell me I’m wrong?!” Waia leaned over Mark, dwarfing him in her shadow. “The only reason you’ve been jumping through all these hoops to put other people between you and them is because you don’t want to end up like me. I’m the one who’s had to see firsthand that these people won’t hesitate to burn down your life and leave you to die. You can talk big all you want, both of you, but I’m the only one who really gets what we need to do to fix this. Are we clear?”

Mark sighed. “Just… What even is there to fix?”

Waia’s face contorted into a furious scowl. “Everything, as long as you have what it takes to fix it. It was my… I had people to protect, and I failed, and now I need to make things right. And so help me, I will not rest, or show mercy, or let myself know peace until I’m done. I fail all the time, you’ve seen how often I do that today. But I don’t lose.”

“So we’ve heard,” mumbled Quet. “I really do hope you’re right.”

Waia sniffed. “I am, and I’ve crossed the Pacific Ocean to prove it. So you can all hide up here and hope that the people downstairs have it in their hearts to fix all your problems for you. But I already know what we need to do to fix things. You can come tell me when you’ve decided to agree. I’ll be downstairs, getting something to… Whatever.”

Quet watched Waia stomp over to the other side of the room and shut the door behind her. Once she was sure that Waia was out of earshot, she slumped out of her chair and sat on the floor. “We’re so dead.”

“Don’t say that,” said Mark, sitting in front of her. “We die when we die, anything that tries to predict it is pointless.”

Quet shrugged and unzipped one of the suddenly-present pockets on her skirt. “Fair point, I failed to uphold my ‘no bummers’ rule, you can verify that downstairs. You wanna play sudoku?”

Mark promptly stood up. “Okay, Waia was right, your room is going to bore me to death. I’m just gonna go through your bookshelf and see if there’s anything vaguely interesting there.”

Quet zipped her pockets shut and folded her arms. “You guys suck.”