Sitting in the diner, Tzal stewed in his own anger and a soup of his impotent frustrations.

This is absolutely ridiculous... He thought, as he sat at a small table, listlessly stirring his cup of coffee into his bowl of chocolate fudge ice cream. The matronly waitress had been surprised when he had asked her for some cinnamon to shake onto his ice cream. He had just looked at the woman with all of the little-boy sadness he could muster, and she had bustled off into the furthest reaches of the little establishment to retrieve a small bottle of cinnamon sticks and some kind of small rasp-like device from the kitchen.

He had to admit to being impressed, thinking they would just give him a bottle of pre ground powder. He had assumed it wouldn’t even be real cinnamon, just that fake cinnamon from Asia…”cassia.” But, the woman had produced actual cinnamon sticks. She had seen the surprise on his face, and just smiled, and patted his arm as she had walked over to take care of another table.

This mixture was one of the few of his truly comforting comfort foods that Tzal knew he could get away with eating in THIS town.

It was vexing. To be in a place of great innate power, but to exercise that power would bring ruin. “The Monkey” lived here.

All of the Older Gods worth their salt knew him. Many even acknowledged the Monkey as being their line’s progenitor. The very thought made Tzal shudder. While his grandfather had told him of their line’s originator, the Sun God of the Great River who had brought all of the colors into The World and single handedly constructed the Four Part Empire, Tzal had great difficulty attributing that being to the one he had always known as the Great Deceiver, The Monkey, and even, at times, The Dancer.

And the Monkey didn’t allow blood rites in HIS town. Any sacrifice that went beyond food and wine that happened in a 50 kilometer radius from where Tzal now sat would be met with extreme punishments.

Horrifyingly brutal, and immediate punishments.

Even by Tzal’s standards.

He had heard that “The Monkey’s City” was not a place to take liberties, ever, from several of the old gods with which he regularly trafficked. Tzal had been skeptical. Old gods, even when they were young, had been prone to exaggerations of the worst kind. Telling a good story having been at the heart of most Godly traditions.

Until one sunny day in Madrid.

Tzal had seen, on a street corner in Old España, one of the Elder Chinese gods, a being known as Longwang. He had, in his prime, been the Dragon God of the Chinese lands, and was known as a god of guardianship, wealth, and, most importantly as far as Tzal cared, the God of Dragons.

Walking along the avenue in an older part of the city, Tzal had come across a lone beggar slumped against the wall of a bakery. He could hear the cracked voice, slurring words through half slackened lips. The man had been tall, once, but was now an agonized sprawl of elbows and knees half huddled beneath a mismatched selection of rags in various states of rot and decay.

The smell alone was enough to turn his stomach. As Tzal came closer, the strong smell of fallen god screamed out to Tzal stronger than anything he could see in the pile of abandoned flesh and cloth. As Tzal moved even closer, he could see the being had been sitting in this spot for a long time. Some of the marks on the cobbled sidewalk around the wretch marked this as his permanent place.

A place where this one would end what days he had left. Here the poor soul slumped, and begged passers by for food and money. Sometimes he offered stories. Sometimes he offered “Good Fortune.” At least once Tzal heard his offer impassive passing people “Purity of Purpose!”

Most of the humans walking past failed to notice the broken elderly god who now sat sessile and cried for their charity. Half of the old dragon’s body had been limp and unmoving, as if he had been a mortal who suffered a stroke. But Tzal could see him for what he was.

He had knelt down to speak with the withered thing, to see if whatever had ravaged him was still around. Still a danger.

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Longwang had told Tzal a story of trying to trade goods in the city of Richmond. Of concluding his business, and celebrating with a meal of a family in a humble home at the edge of the river, just outside the bounds of the city proper.

And of how he had been attacked by the Monkey and his servants. Tzal remembered hearing Longwang’s voice break as he recalled fighting against a power that was so far beyond his own. Longwang had cried.

The God of Dragons had cried. Sobbed.

In his telling, Longwang had alternated, randomly, between calling his attacker both Monkey King, and “Pangu.”

Tzal had to look up the name Pangu. Apparently, the Monkey was also looked at as the progenitor of the Chinese pantheons.

And in this most recent era, he had taken over a city here in the Americas. And while many other old goods faded to nothing, or like Tzal, shrank to almost nothing, the Monkey was as powerful as ever.

Tzal wanted to rage through the streets. He wanted to kill as many humans as he could find who thought he was handsome. He wanted to bathe in their blood, and crack their thigh bones for marrow, sliding his long tongue down and into the deepest reservoirs of that fatty, bloody pudding filled with life.

But what he would do, is look for the dwarf, the giantess, and the odd little man who had killed so many of his employers' minions these last three or four days. I may be suffering from jet-lag… he thought.

It was the mounting layers of frustration. Piled one atop another, they stacked to the sky, or so Tzal felt.

The drive had taken longer than Tzal had anticipated.

Much longer.

Not only had traffic been abysmal, but the roads had been under construction. At one point, roughly 80 kilometers north of the city, he had been forced to abandon the interstate and then his rental vehicle had had to putter along at even slower speeds on smaller roads. He had finally entered the city on Chamberlayne Road.

This well lit little diner in which he sat enjoying a soupy mix of fudgy ice cream, coffee, and cinnamon, and the modest hotel across the street from where he now fumed were the first calming influences on his mood Tzal had encountered this evening.

Putting down his now very clean spoon, he picked up the datpad he carried, and looked at a map of the city.

It had changed vastly since his last visit. He would be willing to grant that his last visit had been just after they had lost a war, some 360 years or so ago.

420 years ago…? He knew he wasn’t the best judge of time.

But, he did recognise the cemetery. Or, rather, he recognised where a small cemetery HAD once been, but was now the central kernel where several much larger cemeteries had organically grown up and around, and finally into that original small one, gathering into one another, creating a decent sized nekropolis.

Tzal stared at the map of the city overall. He knew from the information that Amra's people had collected that the Monkey was firmly established on Cary Street, west of North Boulevard Street. With a quick gesture, he reached out a long index finger, and touched a segment of Cary Street on the projected hologram. The entire length of the street turned a lurid red. With a frustrated sigh, he used both index fingers to bracket in a section of the street between Boulevard and McCloy.

Now only that segemt was glowing the dark red color.

Opening another scene on the holo-projection, Tzal pulled up the dossier he had been sent, which had been regularly updated every day of these last several as he had chased his quarry around the world. He then compared some of the street names he had with the map projection floating before him.

The map projection didn’t have some of the neighborhood names picked out upon it, so he had to use the few street names that accompanied those references. After a frustrating three minutes, he found Franklin Avenue. On his map it was listed as Monument Avenue, and it wasn't until he had opened up a search box that it became clear that one turned into the other, and vice versa, the direction one was heading at the time depending. Confirming for Tzal once again that gringos were always horrible at keeping anything straight, even in their own cities.

But after several minutes more of poking at the illuminated air above his datpad, Tzal’s map of the city showed a rough commonality of Stark’s known holdings in the western bits of Richmonds older, more historic neighborhoods.

Tzal liked this as a means of narrowing down where he might be harboring the fugitives Tzal sought. He felt his odds increasing. And then he saw how close that nekropolis was to all of those points on his map.

Oh…this might work out for me after all. I like my odds much better now… he thought as a smile crawled its languid path slowly across his face. That nekropolis…

This revelation made his smile broaden dangerously.

"A nekropolis." He exhaled the word slowly through painfully stretched lips.

He could work with this.

He made a quick call to Amra’s offices. He needed some of Amra’s men.

Oh, yes… this will work.