“Give him back,” I said, “or at least let me talk to him.”
He shook his helm closed with a resounding and satisfied snap-click that reminded me of a coffin’s locking. Then with a flick, the Angler Knight raised his glacial flamberge, pointing to my heart. Placed an open hand over his own—Sinaya’s in truth.
“He made many things clear before he entered his torpor,” the Angler Knight stated. “First, above all else, was that there is nothing he wishes to say or hear from you, Lady Nadia.”
Nothing? I had everything to say, everything I wanted to hear from him, and for him to hear from me. It wasn’t that I thought my explanations would change the past…I just wanted them to save us if nothing else. From rash decisions like entering an eternal sleep inside a suit of armor; settling for what freedom could be found behind his eyelids. The shock of this sat me back down, my heart threatening to overflow. The Angler Knight, keeping a respectful distance from Sphinx, allowed me my moment and not one more.
“It’s time we leave,” he said, and at my confusion added, “to Lord Marduk’s throne. You’ve been designated as one of the treasures he’d like retrieved before he lays waste to the light of resistance that burns here.”
Eyes red from tears and my curse, I growled, “Marduk can fuck himself.”
“Shall I take this as your commitment to conflict?” he asked, blood still dripping from his spikes. “My only task is to see you brought back alive. The status of all else is not my concern.”
Unlike Sinaya’s last entity, the Angler Knight spoke in a manner bereft of sadism. This isn’t to say there was warmth to his words, of which there wasn’t, but that sadism, while a foul color to one’s tone, is a color all the same. His words, this umbral retainer Sinaya let act in his stead, were cold as the void—an Abyss of a different clade than I’d seen—and flat as a starless sky. Violence from him would be natural, free-flowing until it need not, and whatever form it took wouldn’t cease until he’d completed his task. Why the fuck did Sinaya let this thing run wild?
“I…” trailed off, my gaze drifting up from the Angler Knight to the source of a sudden whistling.
Descending from above—dropping in from some unknown point—was a Lodgemember wreathed in a kaleidoscope of butterflies. Their wings, impeccably sharp, and proboscides, spear-tipped and superheated from ripping through air. The Angler Knight never looked up; he folded his sword beneath his arm and raised a finger.
“Hold your answer,” he stated, an instant before the swarm met his plate.
A waterfall of prismatic-winged violence poured over him, obfuscated him, and swooped low skimming ground to arc back up into the flow descending again to continue the circuit of harm. It flowed faster and faster, blurring butterflies from distinction into an incandescent lemniscate. The Lodgemember who’d sic’d them on the Angler Knight landed, technically buoyed atop a cloud of them not committed to battle. He looked pleased by the attack, enough so that his attention drifted…which is why he died.
The space, the dark, behind the Lodgemember stretched forward and around the Angler Knight’s armored physique as he breached back into three-dimensional space. His finger, out-stretched in the most gentle manner, tapped the back of Lodgemember’s head. He tried to turn around, his butterflies ceased flowing, and it was futile…his head imploded.
There was no cry of pain or meaty squelch. Only a neck’s stump where once upheld a head with thoughts, tastes, and reasons to fight for this city. His body hit the ground, on that downbeat again, and was joined by the tragic rain of discorporating butterflies. Which revealed what they’d struck, an ice sculpture of the Angler Knight; heavily eroded from their assault.
“I substituted the statue for myself,” the Angler Knight explained. “Imbued enough power into it that it held the appropriate resistance he expected my corpus to possess. Then I slipped inside Abyss—it makes for easeful travel—emerging again to employ the technique of which you’re familiar.”
“I didn’t ask,” I said, processing the five seconds it took for the Lodgemember to arrive and die.
The Angler Knight touched the ground—could you believe a suit of armor could be that quiet, float down with feather-grace—and set his attention on me once again. His head tilted in moderate confusion before he shrugged it off. All with the same mannerisms Sinaya used.
He said, “Strange, the young master stated quite clearly how curious you are when it comes to sorcerous matters. I would’ve thought it’d be of interest.”
“You’d ‘intrigue’ me with secrets about how you fight?” I asked.
Sphinx grumbled, “He’d goad you into a fight. Make you think you have a chance at winning.”
His game given up, the slits—of which could barely be made out—of his helm opened to reveal eyes, slanted and stacked on one side, that narrowed in mischievous malice. He bent over, swiped a finger through the pooling blood of the cool corpse, and raised it up in appreciation. The helm’s lower half stretched into an adumbral jaw of metal fangs that parted as four tongues—none of them Sinaya’s—coiled about the finger in a fight to savor the flavor of the slain man’s life.
“Forgive an old knight newly born,” he said, finger popping from his mouth. “I’ve yet to quell the tastes and traits of my ‘younger’ self if you would. Now, shall we fight, Lady Nadia? I have so many new spells and tricks to show you.”
Sphinx asked, “Do we die or move forward?”
Her voice was steady as Dad’s hands when he assembled a shrine. I don't know how she didn’t waver in asking the question; fighting Sinaya at one link of difference took everything I had in both attempts—I cheated in both attempts. This was a fight of two links of difference, an impossibility without a plan or a bandolier of cheats strapped across my body, and I’d been found—cornered—with nothing.
“Would a fight even be rewarding for you?” I asked. “You’re a Viscount.”
The Angler Knight traced his sword’s tip through the air. “Exercise, however brief, is its own reward, and I am still fresh from my graduation. Too untested, and you’d serve as a pleasing benchmark for what power I might exert.”
“Sinaya wouldn’t want this,” I said. “He was never cruel.”
“The latter point I don’t contest,” he agreed, “but on the former, well, the young master spoke to me nothing of his wants. ‘There’s too much Hope in wanting,’ he’d said.”
“Nadia,” Sphinx stated, “his is an unerring blade. Neither pathos nor reason will parry him.”
This wasn’t anything I’d failed to parse from our brief exchange of words, but I had no way to answer Sphinx’s question, to die or move forward. How do you when both choices are an illusion masking the same destination, death? An outcome I’d faced more than once before, but at least had the chaser of success masking the bitter notes of a long goodbye. In that moment I was surrounded by the monuments of my failures, my road terminating at my grandest—Sinaya, and there Sphinx stood beside me all the same, her paws ready to tread over the shards of my ruined life.
If I’d let go at Fort Tomb, named myself, and dredged forth the entity within me, could I win this? If I’d graduated with Sphinx there in my residence suite, or even at the hospital, could I win this? There’d been so many times to grow my power, and I’d held back for fear of losing what I loved—ironic then that there was no one here who loved me, who’d stand by me, save Sphinx…so ready—too ready—to die for me. I couldn’t see her die.
Sensing my desire, Sphinx snapped, “Nadia, don’t you dare—” then silence.
My senses fell away from me. I groped about in the dark of my mind and spirit until I felt the edges of a door—it’d been there for some time—yearning to be opened. Wrapped hands of trembling determination around the knob and pulled. Darkness gave way to light, my eyes opened ready to behold my trial…and there was the Angler Knight still standing before me.
“Fuck,” I hissed.
I was still in the city, witness to its dying breaths, and faced with a choice made all the more difficult—there was no Sphinx at my side anymore. She was there, beyond the door’s threshold, but quiet. Responding to no question or statement that howled through my thoughts. I couldn’t expel her from her place within me. I’d initiated my trial, and summoners face their trial alone.
“Fuck,” I whispered, truly alone for the first time in what felt akin to forever.
In the far distance, one of the breasts of Marduk’s entity glowed bright, surging rings of white flickered down its length, inflating the breast’s head into lobe-y shape. Whatever was stored inside its mouth soon forced the maw open, rolling its upper and lower jaws back like a sock mid-removal. Revealing a bead of such condensed power, such oppression, that I could only watch from my peripheral vision.
Ptoo, was the sound it made—daintier than I’d expected—as the bead was fired. Released? In either sense, it’d disappeared from between the breast’s teeth, and, on the next downbeat of this war, I heard a whoomph. Quick, breathy, like when Mom would blow an eyelash from my eye or when Dad pantomimed cleaning the “game cartridges” he used to collect. Though my examples are domestic, I’d ask you to imagine that sound raised to the volume of a thundering heaven, a bellowing god, the quick-quiet grunt of five hundred lives—enemies, allies, civilians—and histories snuffed in one moment. Paired with the sight of a skyline flattened.
At the time I had no words. Marduk had flattened, churned to shadowed gray, the section of the Lodge district. I think it was the dockyard; it had to be, the shoreline was bitten by the blast. Secretary’s favorite place was gone. All because a monster let it happen, and a different one had grown bored of facing resistance.
“It seems quarrel is not within my itinerary,” the Angler Knight declared.
He dropped his sword into his shadow and hurriedly swooped me into his arms. Just a quick toss—I corkscrewed in the air—before he caught me on his shoulders, slung over like a sack. Then he ran, a pressure wave boosting each step just like Sinaya would do—had done. The city howled in rage and pain, the sound blurring by to pitches my ear could never catch.
As we bolted, I kept my eyes ahead, technically behind us, where I met my face cloned in triplicate with minor changes. Barons Isolating, Unmaking, and Questing followed in the Angler Knight’s wake, close enough to graze his back were they truly present. It was easy to find my words, as well as my fury, when met by my own alien smirk.
“Where’s Sphinx?” I asked.
Revelation Isolating said, “Beyond the gates of your, hopefully, inevitable graduation.”
“Sorry,” Revelation Unmaking said, “but we are rooting for you!”
“Alls below, I don’t care,” I said. “I initiated the trial, so what’s going on? Why am I not…”
“Engaged in some vision?” Revelation Questing offered. I nodded, and she said, “Shame then, that’s not our trial. Ours is rather special, and while you’ve claimed your ticket you’re yet to board, Nadia.”
“So what is it?” I asked, the metaphor slipping past me.
Revelation Isolating purred, “A trip, my dear.”
“Make way knaves!” the Angler Knight commanded, unable to perceive what followed him and the conversation I was engaged in.
I lifted my head, curled my body to look behind me—technically ahead of me—to note the squad of Lurkers hunched behind the lightning-blasted carcass of an alley racer. Past them was a trio of summoners slinging bolts of Cathartic lightning—the ones I presumed blackened the vehicle which served as the Lurker’s cover. The Angler Knight had us set to ram into the cover and conflict. That is, until he grasped my ankles, swung me round in four quick spins, and hammer-threw me over both cover and conflict. The Barons joined me in the air at least.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I screamed. “How do I start?”
Revelation Unmaking stammered, “You need only depart.”
Below me the Angler Knight leaped over the blasted cover, sprinting through the exchanged volley without losing speed. The lightning-slingers, no stronger than soldiers most like, formed matching hand-spells as fulgurous snakes of stormy clouds emerged from their spirits to entwine into a celtic knot, daring to dualcast while ritualizing their lightning spell. I didn’t know whether to cheer them on or curse their attempt; no matter my loathing for the armor which entombed Sinaya, it was Sinaya entombed within—any harm that struck true would strike them.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
They loosed their spell, a tree of lightning whose roots grew from them, the casters, and the snake-knot above. Fulgent branches sizzled across dead buildings and overturned vehicles, reaching greedily for the Angler Knight who’d formed the seal for a hand-spell I’d never seen Sinaya cast. It smoothed away all differentiation between the plates of the armor, leaving him as something more than a silhouette…a window, rather, to the void between stars that great celestial Abyss which held all in its palm. The worries flocking ‘round my indecision flew away as lightning shot through the window, racing off into infinite, everlasting night.
Having already warned them once, the Angler Knight held silent as he burst through their spell and then their trio, his bulk large enough to consume a grown man, and did, leaving only limbs in his wake. Post my aerial nadir, as I descended back into the Angler Knight’s arms, I caught sight and memorized the expression on the man’s face as he tumbled limbless into black—surprise at the present of painful, final wisdom. The Angler Knight reverted to his twisted normal, shutting the window.
“So you return, Lady Nadia,” the Angler Knight stated, “it’d have been frustrating if you flew off.”
“Yeah,” I wheezed, shoving down the terror of touching what was in fact a trapdoor to doom.
Laid back over his shoulder, I raised a new question to the Barons. “When can I depart?”
“Immediately,” Revelation Questing said, “provided you find a way.”
“To where?” I roared, frustrated and fearful.
The trio responded, “Beyond causality’s rim.”
“Spears and sabers,” the Angler Knight groaned, unslinging me into his arms cradle.
The next blast came. Ptoo. Whoomph. This time the residential portion of the district—where Sinaya and I had fought together—was flattened. A wave of evaporated buildings and bodies swept over us, a dust cloud of particulate debris moving so fast it shredded metal into whining strips. Protected by the Angler Knight’s body, I listened to the finger taps of the dead against his armor; curious as to why we lived and they died—it wasn’t like we were a righteous duo.
Though we escaped being shredded to pieces, the pressure wave of the blast banked us off the ribs of a destroyed apartment complex—its spatial enhancements broken, rooms tumbling forth as fractalized innards—into an overturned cable car. We punched through one wall and stopped after hitting the opposite interior wall. Groaning, the Angler Knight’s arms flopped open, and I crawled out from his lap to take advantage of his incapacitation, however brief, to escape.
Out of the car and into the street, it looked like a desert of bone dust, municipal and mortal, had swept the street. Dunes covered vehicles, hands clutching toward heaven poked free like so many flowers—some were so tiny—but I turned from it, the horror and all, to face my Barons. I couldn’t comprehend any of this and decided to ask one last question.
“Aren’t there four of you?”
The trio looked at each other then back to me. Confused why I’d ever ask that question.
“My dear,” Revelation Isolating said, “I think it’s clear…”
Revelation Unmaking picked up, “from choices made and your disposition…”
“...that you’re far from her now,” Revelation Questing finished.
“Huh?” I grunted.
They pointed up. I looked. Above me, the district I found myself in, was the open tit-maw of Marduk’s entity’s breast. A bead of power mature and ready to be launched. “Oh,” I said.
Ptoo. Whoomph. DEA—!
“Intermission,” Amber incanted behind me.
The early displacement of dust, the pre-emptive dissolution of buildings, and the Angler Knight, now risen and half-out of the cable car, froze. Above me, our collective doom refused to settle into stillness, only slowing. Though an instantaneous death once slowed merely proceeded at the pace of a hurtling train just past the eye’s horizon.
Whirling around, I found Amber standing in the street with my bag in hand and hers slung over her shoulder. What seemed like flames danced up and down her raspberry locs, flickering in the indecision of whether now was the time to ignite the whole of her head or not. Nahey tittered, fluttering around her shoulders.
“You left your bag, Temple,” Amber said, and more softly, “as well as me.”
“My bag…” I whispered, stunned by the mundane thing in her hands. “You brought my bag?”
She looked sheepish, and said, “It’s not much of an apology gift, I know, but I am sorry…about not killing Melissa. I didn’t realize I couldn’t because…I didn’t think you’d ever want that. The three of us were so nice together—healthiest relationship I’ve ever been in—and I got selfish. I promised to be your hands and failed you when you needed me to act. So, I wanted to at least grab your stuff and bring it to you—if you were leaving town still—that way you’d have everything you might want to take with you…still.”
I stared at the bag, then her, brushing aside her arm to wrap her in an embrace. It was a messy, ugly hug of frenzied pressure administered haphazardly across her body. Testing that she was real and unharmed, she passed both. Looking up into her eyes—were those shreds of flames flying off with each blink?—I could tell she still, somehow, held me in some affectionate esteem I didn’t, could never, deserve.
“Why?” I asked, tears flowing.
She brushed my hair back. “I love you. One rage-motivated kill order won’t change that.”
“I know you do,” I moaned, slapping my hand against her chest. “I do too, so why the fuck show up here—to die with me?”
“Temple, I didn’t—” Amber stammered.
“Don’t make me watch you die. Don’t watch me—”
“For the second time,” Amber said, catching my wrist, “I’m sorry, but trust me when I say that I didn’t come here for either of us to witness the other’s death.”
I snatched my arm back—she looked like she believed this, but one glance upwards quelled my ability to believe in her; death was still approaching, however slow. Reading my doubt, Amber rolled her eyes and tossed my bag to me. I caught it, and watched her stride past me, jacket fluttering behind her with Nahey at her heel.
Without looking back, she called over her shoulder, “Temple, you can’t only believe everything you see, for reality’s a fiction…”
One finger pointed skyward, her other hand she raised to her face—hidden from view—and ripped away something profound. Blinking, I watched, frame by stuttery frame, a change overcome Amber. In staccato steps, she grew twenty feet. Her hair extended in length commensurate to her height, and the flames which had teased my eyes, too indecisive about their moment, surged to take center stage transmuting what was mundane keratin to perfectly loc’d strands of raspberry fire. Her skin took on a dewy effulgence that created a shadow of light whose luminescence was only superseded by the halo of Sovereignty that sat atop her brow—a line of light tracing a circle broken up by the characters which composed the Coronation name for the Sovereign of Masks.
A Sovereign composed of ten, twenty, fifty—some unReal endless impossible number—of women sporting butterfly masks whose wings told a different expression, story, identity. They crowded around Amber, clung to her legs, her back, draping themselves in a tableau of artful worship. Enhancing the grandeur of their bondmate as if they’d prepared for only this moment.
“...and easily overwritten.”
She snapped the hand, now at her side, and the Intermission ended. Movement occurred. Death arrived with a flash of black—Marduk’s attack stomped on light itself—that tossed me into a void of vision. I saw nothing for five interminable seconds. However, I felt the finger of something more real, impossibly real compared to everything around me, tip my head back. A voice that taught me how false all sound had been until this point, spoke to me.
“It’s okay Temple,” Amber whispered, “you can see. Just open your eyes.”
For all the doubts of godtenders I’d amassed since Dad’s death, it felt so natural to put my faith in one when they deigned to speak to me directly. My eyes opened—I wished I’d kept them closed—to greet Amber’s nothing of a face. Where before there’d been her kissable lips and sharply-planed face, I now only saw darkness. As if someone took the chisel tip of a paintbrush and whipped freely back and forth laying planks of ebon paint over almost every feature she’d possessed. The one that went untouched was her eyes, raspberry with pupils aflame.
Her eyes pinched gleefully, “See, Temple, nothing’s set in stone.”
I looked around us, we were an island—no, more of a plinth—of what remained of the street. Beyond us, in every direction, was level flatness. Even the cable car, where the Angler Knight—Sinaya—had been stumbling from, was gone. One with the dust cloud that traveled back toward the remaining edge of the district and broader city. I fell to my knees.
“Temple, what’s wrong?” Amber asked, her voice echoed by her Sovereign chorus. “You lived.”
“He died,” I answered. “Sinaya’s dead.”
Amber kneeled, gently patted my head with her hand that could crush me.
“Humans die, Temple, it’s the way of things,” she said. “Best not to worry overmuch.”
I shook my head, rising and jabbing my finger in her direction. “No, no,” I roared, “you might be a godtender but you have to remember what being human is like. It’s scrabbling and struggling to get anything in this world. Us reaching for Sorcery is so we could push back at all the bullshit the Old World had become. At the people who said shit like, ‘it’s the way of things,’ when their actions or inactions let the dead pile up.”
Sobbing and screaming, I continued, “And right now, you’re the only godtender present and I’m asking—telling—you to do something. Alls below, if reality is fiction, then rewrite this.”
Amber sighed, ran a hand through her flaming hair, “Temple—”
“Don’t ‘Temple’ me!” I said, stomping to punctuate. “Can you bring them back?”
“Yes,” she responded flatly, “but it’d shift my role in this drama.”
I said, “You’re a godtender, no one can put you in a role.”
“In that, you’re wrong,” she said. “Sovereigns have more of a role to play than anyone—consequence of power. I arrived to play the role of your ferrywoman, to see you from here unharmed. Reviving everyone is within my power, but it’d make me no ferry but the deus who’d set this machine back to rights—doable but would force me away from you.”
“For how long?” I asked.
“How long,” she muttered. “Long enough, Nadia, long enough for Marduk to fire another shot and kill everyone, including you, again. Maybe longer seeing that I’ll have to shake off the Nine —they’re very particular about who gets to be a god. Either way, not worth it.”
I couldn’t accept that. Amber’s points, while esoteric at the time, weren’t unassailable. There had to be a solution, a trick out of this, and I searched the flat ruins of Brightgate for it. I found it behind me, in a building that was coated in a murmur of cherry blossoms and stood in beautiful rebellion to Marduk’s awful horde—the Summoner’s Lodge headquarters.
“What if you push me into harm?” I asked.
Amber’s eyes widened in understanding. Only to narrow at my madness. She couldn’t save me from harm and reverse the destruction that’d occurred here. Doing the former left everyone dead, abhorrent to me, but the latter meant Marduk would just strike again, a waste to Amber. However, raise the dead and send me into the den of the third monster lurking in this city, well, that meant Amber needn’t be ferry or deus.
“You’d play Faust, opposite me?” she asked. “You owe this city nothing, Temple.”
“Don’t know the reference,” I admitted, “but I’m trying to make better choices—Sphinx’s advice—”
“This is hardly a better choice,” she said. “It looks more like a complicated—”
“Suicide,” I interjected, “maybe, but sometimes better choices seem awful on their face. Besides, it was our plan to get me into that room from the beginning. This is us finally doing the damn thing.”
She was on the edge of falling to me; her eyes did that thing where she read me, searching for any hidden feelings that her disagreement could prop up against. I did that thing where I looked at her, smiled, and tried to leverage every iota of my infectious confidence that may have killed so many so far but this time could be used to bring them back. Her eyes shut to a dark face—I thought I’d failed—then opened again.
“I won’t be able to catch you,” she said, “if this plan curdles.”
I shrugged, “Plans curdle, these things happen. Don’t worry overmuch.”
She raised her hands leaving afterimages that shimmered into distinct and Real arms of their own. A thousand and one limbs readied to direct the Sovereign of Masks many bodies. Her hands twirled and closed tight around reality, she had notes to give.
The fluttering pages of time stopped. Photons ceased shifting between particle and wave. I couldn’t breathe nor think, all were actions, and we players, per our director’s command, would commit ourselves to both stillness and silence. She sliced out the script’s pages, laid them flat—I was spread across the six of them, a hundred-and-sixty-eight times, moments fully realized and considered that played all at once—she took a razor to the pages. Sliced out my moments, shifted around words, and discarded others; gone went ptoo and to the shredder fell whoomph. Those figures whose names I’d never known and the few I’d recognized—Melissa Knitcroft, Tsumugi Hoshino, Ina Goetia, Sinaya of the Sunken Valley/The Angler Knight—shifted place to stand beside me in this moment, yet to come when cued.
With marks reset, players called back to stage, she addressed the scenery—that flat construction called, reality—and reset the light down to every errant photon. She rolled through the score, winding back and cutting out measures deemed no longer relevant. Then rebuilt what set had been struck as couldn’t everything that was Real notice the script called for all these buildings. What, no, there was no cue for destruction, don’t you see how it’s absent from time’s pages? We all have to obey the script—it’s paramount.
Every change now made, all agents given new command, the director lowered her hands. Her crew fled to the wings and the seats behind her. She brought together her thousand hands. CLAPPED—the cue. Run it again, she commanded from a viewpoint beyond time and space.
I blinked, and a wind passed through the desolation that surrounded me. Plucked away the ruined vista to reveal a perfectly unmarred version of Brightgate. The streets filled with Lurkers and Lodgemembers alike, villains and victims side-by-side in temporary confusion. Amber turned to me, one hand still raised, primed.
“It was you,” I said, realizing. “Why the fuck did you—”
Her eyes bloomed in panic. She freed her finger and with a powerful flick caught me in the chest. It didn’t hurt, but it sent me flying backward through the rustling curtains I’d seen Amber slip through so many times before. She’d lent me enough propulsion that I wouldn’t stall here with no way out, and so I hurtled through the black underside of the world’s tapestry. Passed by a number of doors, most unmarked and unremarkable. Some were denoted with stars and names blurred down to initials: S. Y., N. K., D. H., N. T., B, and M, were the few I’d caught.
My body, responding to the rotational force Amber had embedded in me, twisted about to face a shifting light—curtains again. I shot through them and out into reality once more. My shoes skidded across the floor. I hit a chair, fell over and into it. Upside down, I took in my destination as it spun into multicolored clarity.
Across from me was a couch, and on said couch sat three secretaries. One held a tub of ice cream, spooning it out at a steady pace. The second held a large sorc-deck which displayed a map of the city with shifting pieces that represented their forces as well as Marduk’s. The third clipped toenails. Sprawled across their lap was that horrible beast who’d killed my father, cursed both my lovers as well as myself, and who might be the only one that could stop Marduk.
“Is this Nemesis Khapoor’s office?” I asked, forcing a smile.
She turned her head to face me, accidentally getting ice cream daubed on her nose, and beamed a mouth full of serrated shark-like teeth in my direction. Eyes already sparking with awful amusement.
“It is,” Nemesis laughed. “Now, what can I do for you?”