Spore Country.

Tasìa thought glumly as she drove.

Almost her entire life had been spent in Spore Country. Ever since the Cull Spore Invasion occurred when she was a wee lass.

A mere week she had been away from the hinterlands of Greater Quadra, living in the Nanospore free zone of Asunción, she felt like a foreigner on the vast expanse of a desolate highway driving back into Spore Country.

There was a pretty sweet-looking early evening vista before them though she could justsoak up its chill ambience. She forced that positive thought to run its course in an attempt to cheer up her alienated mood.

And why should she let a little uneasiness in her disposition get to her?

Everything was going without a hitch; the road she just crossed into would swing them back towards the city. She had only traveled a few miles down it when -

Spoke too soon.

- she gripped the wheel tightly with her thumbs and tapped the leather surface with her polished nails when she saw the surreality ahead of her. The horizon was a blue shimmer that reached with leafed nodes towards the sky just above them.

Something in that far-off ominous distance noticed them.

Tasìa slowed down.

"I don't like it," Annebél whispered.

"That may be the very point that it is making."

"What exactly would that be?" Annebél asked the question even as her head jerked to the side to look out of the passenger window.

The entity curled like a set of talons that clutched something within them that it held above the nearby fields.

Tasìa continued to speak though Annebél was understandably distracted.

"When the Nanospores get you agitated, they also make you more vulnerable to their influence."

Annebél heaved out a nervous laugh as she rushed her words.

"I've been told before that it is a mistake to think of it as a plural set of beings. It all has one purpose, even The Black-Eyed Ones who often seem to be so contrary to everything else."

Tasìa had never seen the brawler appear so vulnerable.

This thing wasn't going away with a mere punch in the throat.

Even as she chuckled to herself, silently the interior monologue admonished her.

Keep that one to yourself, you little jealous cynic.

"Of course, I know that about them, but -" Annebél pointed with a strident thrust, "- that phenomenon up above is miles in length. It is practically a weather event. I can't see it being aimed at little ol' me, or littlest ol' you. It doesn't seem like a rational use of its time and resources."

A protest squawked from behind them that came from Mel. Three notes indicative of an app being loaded caught her ear. To Tasìa's surprise, Val's PA had a translator for NightWing ocular implant at the ready.

She noted that likely meant that his association with Sachmilli was more extensive than she knew.

Annebél held the PA up so Tasìa could see the screen. It gave a nifty summary of what the NightWing communicated with its body language and squawks.

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Mel's journey to Asunción was bereft with more than the ordinary number of oddities occurring along the flight path.

The image of a Quetzalcoatl with plumage that spread between two clouds appeared on the screen that Mel documented with a photo

The creature appeared not so much as a glorious spectrum of bright colors that one would expect of the wingéd serpent of legend but instead the plume exuded an angry demonic red.

Mel continued with his narrative.

There was according to him a gathering force that staggered across the countryside. It had set off the chain reaction that resulted in the IMCQ getting nuked.

Where it had already touched with its corruption, it sat, waiting and brooding, but unseeable. Only the mind's eye perceived it.

Tasìa wasn't certain what he meant by that remark. Manifest fever? Resonance perception? She hazard to guess.

When Mel was finished, Tasìa addressed Annebél with a shake of her head.

"Mel is right. You're thinking in accordance with the human scale of things. Nanospores have what might as well be an infinite store of energy at their disposal.

"When humans are in large social groups, the Nanospores tend to minimize their presence in the vicinities they inhabit, but when whomever they target is isolated, much like we both are now, they try to be overwhelming and all-encompassing when they attack.

"On the morning of the day that we met, they pulled one real doozy of a mindfuck on me - quite the show. You know of the Incubus, the Black-Eyed Ones, and the many Aspects of the Wise One but have you ever met the Faerie Queen?"

Annebél chortled as she gave her a look that said she couldn't believe the words, 'Faerie Queen' came out of Tasìa's pretty little potty mouth.

"No."

Demona's face on the rear-view camera screen suddenly became animated. She interjected, "Please, do go on."

"Yes. The sadness of the entity was overwhelming. There was this decoratively elaborate aisle and stairway that climbed until it reached a podium.

"All of this that I witnessed was set in the midst of a dank forest. There the Nanospores brought into existence a grand architecture made from the strata of dense fungi done up in beautiful desert mesa colors with pink being dominant. On the podium was this casket where a little fairy satyr fawn lay dead

"Its mother was the Faerie Queen. I met her later that night. She felt real, more so in a human way than the other entities. More like, she was one of us. But made twisted by its association with the Nanospores."

Annebél's brow line sharpened along the curvature of her skull. Empresses had executed knaves with less instruction given.

A brave front. Tasìa thought, admiringly.

"Real, Tasìa? You were going a wee bit mad at that time, am I right? So nuts, that you even antagonized me into a fight!

"It took me a solid second to figure it out later that you needed to get to the Hijo Lux to re-up your inoculation. So, how do you know this vision wasn't a hallucinated dream state?"

"Yes. That is all true. But even still, in the sensorium around me, I still possessed interpretive capabilities," Tasìa answered but not with a great amount of pride. She recalled fully well what a deluded state she had been in. She continued on but decided tact was in order. "And as for that fight - you barely beat me."

Annebél nodded to that.

"May I interject," Demona's voice rose above the two other women and Mel's occasional squawks.

"Certainly you may," Annebél responded with a magnanimous tone.

"This Faerie Queen, she is not a hallucination. I witnessed that moment when she caused Tasìa to lose her grip on a building surface. The Faerie Queen is very much a real person.

"She was once an ordinarily Manifested human, but something happened that caused her to cross over from the normative analogous dimension of time and space to the abnormal analogous dimension of time and space of Nanospore activity. That transformation caused the Faerie Queen to come to be."

Tasìa shook her head with astonished curiosity. The levels of transformative existence in the world of Nanospores seemed unending.

"I have never heard of those terms before for Nanospore versus normality," she stated.

Demona acknowledged her like a professor would an apt pupil.

"Technically it's the same dimension, but because of a fundamental rule set in its programming that it abides by in the form of matrix transformations when it moves through space, mathematicians and physicists make a distinction between common probabilistically-inclined analog existence and the calculated phase space that allows them to interface with us."

"Now that is settled," said Annebél. "Do you have any idea about what we should be doing now? Should we be turning back around?"

Demona grimaced before answering. It was the weighted answer of a spymaster who had sent agents on suicide missions before. It gave Tasìa a quanta of solace that Demona did not appear to enjoy that role.

"No. It now regards the two of you as its playthings. If you turn your vehicle around and floor it, the entity will likely quicken its pace to deliver whatever plans it has in store for you. A quickened pace for the Nanospores means a more agitated state in which it will deliver its trickster narrative. So, continue to approach and do so with caution."

Both Tasìa and Annebél stared up at the sky at the change that was occurring.

"It's likely too late to run, now, anyway" Tasìa informed Demona.

The blue, shimmering talons grouped in the sky above the fields on both sides of the Jeep drew back their binded digits and released whatever malevolence they held in their clutches onto the ground below.