“Okay…” Omet looked around at the other four, once again gathered in Quet’s room. “This is our official Doing Things Day. We can see how much we’ll end up doing tomorrow once tomorrow is a thing. In terms of all our assigned tasks, I expect us all back home by sundown tonight. Or… Okay, four PM this evening. Let’s not use the sun. So the preparations should be done in the next…” They leaned forward and checked the clock on the wall. “...Ten hours. Same applies to everyone else. I’ll borrow someone’s watch before I leave.”

“It’ll be less if it turns out we don’t have enough time for that,” said Mark, “right?”

“Y…” Omet lifted a finger at Mark. “...Yes. The schedule’s flexible, if you and Waia find anything out. So, ideally we all finish before seven. Let’s call that the final deadline. Preferably before that, definitely not after that. We got all that?”

The rest of the group nodded and/or gave thumbs up.

“Great. You all know the plan, let’s get moving. Quet, you’re with me and Horan.”

“Correct.” Quet followed the two as everyone left her room. She pulled a stone out of her pocket. “I was indeed able to recreate the activation matrix for the portal. Took some jimmying around, as is expected when you’re dealing with someone else’s language, but the replacement should bring the portal back up to full operational capacity. If not, I’m gonna need more hair.”

“Okay, c–” Horan slapped both hands across his face and had to be guided around a corner by Omet. “I didn’t visit Dad! Oh, he’s gonna hate me now! It’s been three months! Closer to four, actually!” He buried his face in the crook of his elbow. “Mmf…”

Omet hesitantly patted him on the back as they pulled him through hallways. “Well, it’s not like you had a choice in the matter. I’m sure Lamius will accept ‘the portal key caught fire and was thrown off a roof’ as an excuse.”

“I could’ve told Quet to prioritize fixing the portal,” muttered Horan.

“Yeah,” agreed Quet, “crunch-time stress made this take me something like two hours. Most of the work was already done, but y’know.”

“Th… Yes, okay, that’s true,” said Omet, as the three reached the portal room. “But there’s no fixing that now, and we’ve got bigger things to worry about now. You can apologize on the way.” They split in two, and the yellow-eyed version stepped towards the middle of the room. “I flipped a coin with myself this morning. Purple’s gonna be staying here.”

The purple Omet saluted. “I’ll do my best, comrade. We’ll all be mourning for you here.”

“You got lucky, don’t rub it in!”

Horan released his face and stood next to the yellow Omet. “Okay, well… Yeah. Let’s do this.”

Quet placed the stone in the circle of minute glyphs on the floor, and a circle of foggy green light erupted out of empty air. “This portal will remain viable for twelve, maybe thirteen hours, so you can come back through from the same place you came out from. Head on through, you one-and-a-half.” She high-fived the Omet next to her. “Safe travels, good luck, whole package. We’ll be here waiting for you, unless we’re all dead by then. Ideally the first option.”

The yellow Omet blew out their cheeks. “Yup, that’s… Let’s stop talking and go.”

“Good plan,” said Quet and Horan simultaneously.

-

Mark polished off the tinfoil-wrapped breakfast burrito that had been stacked up among others on the table on his way out. When he went through the doors, he was surprised to find Waia sitting out front. It was only then that he realized that she hadn’t been present at that morning’s meeting.

“Let me guess, not much sleep?”

Waia turned to look at him. “Nah, I managed, eventually. Just got up early. I assume. Pretty hard to tell nowadays, and this place really doesn’t have a lot of clocks.”

“We mostly just use watches,” said Mark. Once Waia stood up, he shifted the weight of his backpack. “Packed everything we need last night. Mocti’s old birdwatching binoculars which he let me borrow, gas masks, extra day of rations just in case, compass, map, plenty of rope too.”

“...Rope?”

“You’d be surprised how often it comes up,” mumbled Mark, as the two went down the front steps and towards the direction of a highway. “It’s got some kind of use in basically any situation I can think of. Besides, it’s not like I’m gonna end up thinking to myself, ‘man, I sure wish I didn’t have any rope right now’.”

“Can’t wait for you to be proven right,” replied Waia.

A few minutes later, Mark checked his compass. “There’s a highway about twenty minutes this way. We can hotwire a car and take the road west, towards Cuernavaca. I heard a few people mention that the ones taken by Servants went that way, and there’s a pretty decent-sized scavenger hub in that direction. It’s a safe bet.”

Waia shrugged. “If you say so. You’re the one who knows this place.”

“Those people were exaggerating. I’ve been out here four, uh… no, five times. And I’ve never been that far out, I stopped at the city limits last time. Hey, have you ever hotwired a car before?”

“Hundreds.”

“Great, because I’m still pretty shaky on it, actually. I just stole the keys to my last car…” Mark pressed his lips together and stuffed his hands in his pockets.

A while later, he looked up when he noticed the highway’s guardrails. “But there’s actually a trick to checking which cars might still have keys in them. Especially out in the sticks, where the streets aren’t picked clean as much.”

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The two of them vaulted over the metal rail. Mark pointed to a minivan that seemed to have been neatly parked in the middle of the tarmac, between the major lanes. “Ran out of fuel, owner put it aside before abandoning it.”

He shifted his finger towards a congestion of cars where the road bent. “Mass exodus, abandoned in favor of foot travel away from the city. Car owners really like hanging onto their keys, I assume because of force of habit.”

He finally came to a rest on a pickup truck whose left headlight had been smashed into the opposite railing. The skid marks behind it indicated that the vehicle had been swerving severely before crashing against the railing. “Bingo.”

The two jogged over to the pickup truck. Mark continued speaking on the way over. “Driver got Nabbed while at the wheel. Not perfect condition, but those are the best picks for ones with both fuel and keys in the ignition. If you just checked randomly, finding a good car is full-on needle-haystack territory, with all the people who just abandoned their rides on the road.”

Waia arrived first and looked through the driver-side window. “Color me impressed.”

“Called it.” Mark drew his bowie knife and stuck it down the slit the window rolled down from, struggling to unlock the door.

He was, he figured, halfway through the process when he heard the passenger door open. He looked up to find Waia sitting down in the shotgun seat. “Most people don’t lock their doors while driving.”

Mark leaned forward and knocked his head against the truck’s roof. He stayed in that position for a moment before pulling his knife out of the slit and trying the handle. The door opened easily.

Mark sighed as he entered the truck and sat behind a wheel. “Been a while since I felt like that big of an idiot. In conclusion, nothing changed between now and last time I was behind the wheel. I’ve even got a Primus in the passenger seat and everything. Only differences are that I have a huge knife, a magic shapeshifting gun, and I’m in a different hemisphere. Call that a big circle.”

“Cool.” Waia leaned over and checked the dashboard. “Pretty okay fuel, too. Good pick.”

“Unless having functional headlights turns out to be important.”

“Just start driving.”

“Right.” Mark turned the keys in the ignition a few times. Nothing but sputtering from the engine. “Hey, can you actually get out and give this thing a push? Battery.”

“Yeah, sure.” Waia got out and pulled on the cargo bed, extricating the vehicle from the dent in the railing.

While she angled the truck down the road and started pushing, Mark leaned out the window while keeping the key turned. It was hard to hear himself over the sound of the engine struggling to get going. “You know, when I was first trying to take Horan across the middle east, we spent our first few hours fighting with each other while a bunch of demons tried to kill us. This is a lot easier.”

Waia was worried by how much effort she had to put into moving the car. “Okay, what’s your point?”

“If everything is so much less stressful this time around, why do I feel so much worse about this?”

The engine hummed to life and the truck jolted forwards, out of Waia’s grasp. She jogged back up and hopped inside. “Good question. Let’s get moving.”

-

“So,” Omet mumbled to themself as they oversaw the opening stages of the decorations, “this is what really being in charge feels like. Kind of the same.”

Their reverie was interrupted by the sound of duct tape being pulled from its roll. They turned around to see Quet taping off a section of the floor, which contained a table laden with mostly empty dishes.

“I’m just saying this now,” Quet called out to nobody in particular. “Everything within the taped-off zones is what Horan told me to categorize as PTO: Party Time Only. I’m not gonna meticulously prepare and arrange the fanciest snacks in my cookbooks just for the less patient among you to ruin the feng shui or whatever. You know who you are, you can eat it once the Indians have arrived. Any consequences at that point are yours and yours al– Oh, hey, Omet.”

“Hey yourself.” Omet crouched down next to their sister. “Want me to take over the zoning? You gotta be working overtime to put that much food out, right?”

“Eh, you’d be surprised how much some proper thaumaturgic knowhow can help.” Quet closed off the vaguely rectangular shape on the ground and stood up. “Besides, you’ve got more important things to be doing than making sure the catering survives to the actual party.”

Omet sighed as they looked over what little Quet had already laid out. “C’mon, being in charge isn’t just management. You just gotta offer up some advice now and then and people do everything themselves, it’s not like I know anything that you people don’t. Hurat didn’t exactly bother to give us any tips on how he did things, it never really seemed like he was overthinking things. Might’ve just been experience guiding him, though, I dunno.”

Quet slid over to the kitchen. Omet looked down and noticed that her shoes appeared to have wheels built into them. Quet checked on how the five separate dishes on the stove were cooking. “Well, you’ve got a couple months more experience than me, I guess. But yeah, I get what you’re saying, I would’ve been doing the food anyway. I don’t need to worry about anything else, and the professionals in other fields don’t need to worry about this. That’s how I like it, really. Got my own little corner of Quet stuff.”

“I really wouldn’t call any of us a ‘professional’ at anything. You’re probably the exception, Miss College Education.”

Quet blushed and chuckled while she reached for a pair of oven mitts. “Linguistics aren’t exactly pertinent right now, but I get your point. I’ve tried to cover my bases to help everywhere else where I can. I set out a bunch of labeled glyph-rocks on the coffee table over there, for any decoration utility I could think of.”

Omet looked at the coffee table in the lounge area and noticed that the bowl of useless black glass pebbles had been replaced with a bowl of stones with notes taped to them. “...How long did those take you?”

“Most of the night. Would have taken longer if I hadn’t dug into my existing supply. But I learned my lesson from February and did some math beforehand. I managed to get exactly four hours of sleep last night.” Quet used a pair of barbecue tongs to extract a stick of garlic bread from the oven like a blacksmith removing a sword from a forge. “And I’d say it’s paying off beautifully.”

“I– Is there some part of this process that you’re basing off of February?!” Omet leaned over towards Quet. “I feel like that was very different to what we’re dealing with right now!”

“Oh, y’know.” Quet laid the bread on a sheet of tinfoil and began to wrap it up. “A crisis is a crisis. At least I know how much sleep I need to coherently function. But considering how February turned out, I guess I should’ve slept even less!”

She gave a forced-sounding laugh, looked up to see that Omet’s expression was no less concerned, then looked back down at the wrapped garlic bread. “...Ha... Okay, not the most inspiring thing to say, but don’t look at me like that, you’ll bring the mood down for real. I know I’m not in charge, but for the next 24 hours, I will be doing my best to enforce a strict ‘no bummers’ policy in this house.” She pointed to a sign hung from a nail on the wall, which depicted a crossed-out raincloud with a frowny face. “I woke up prepared for everything.”

Omet decided to help with the distribution of Quet’s completed food, placing the garlic bread on a nearby plate and picking the plate up. “Maybe you can just have an early night tonight. I don’t think everything’s gonna fall apart without you once the Indians arrive. I won’t make you deal with the crowd.”

Quet gasped, clasped her hands together and brought them up to her chin. “Promise?!”