Wheel! Of! FISH!

Chapter the Sixty-Seventh, in which the Irregulars Take a Hand

2004-09-13 - 12:48 p.m.

Agent Wilkes lay against the cool, gritty stones of the French Quarter. His synthskin was shredded along his back and hung in flaps from his face, exposing the dull silvery sheen of the titanium bone lacing of his skull. Sparks shot from his eyes and joints as he twitched, his DullesSys onboard cerebral OS frantically trying to reroute power through his shattered endosystem.

The towering brute that had confronted the squad loomed over him, chest heaving with breaths that rattled like kettle drums, the pavement stones settling with peppery cracks under its titanic feet. It glared down at him through mad emerald eyes, and with a brief snarl brought its fist down in a long hammerblow arc towards Wilkes' skull.

The agent's relative personal velocity system fizzed across his staticky vision as the OS tried to bring his hypernormal speed online, but the chassis had suffered too much cataclysmic damage after being flung by the head through a 7.4 inch-thick wall of 80-year-old Georgia clay brick. All that happened was that subjective time slowed down immensely, and Wilkes had time to intimately study the details of the gigantic fist coming towards him at a snail's pace of just over 130 miles an hour ... thick projecting knuckles indicating some sort of primitive bonespur structure, creamy pearled white flesh that gleamed under the yellow sodium streetlights of the French Quarter, and bright jade nails with scraps of flesh glinting with splinters of metal trapped underneath ...

*CRUNCH*

Time came to an abrupt and sticky end for Agent Wilkes within half a breath that had lasted nearly 30 days.

Axle roared with triumph as the senses-shattering action spread around him, pyrotechnic hypertechnics flaring in the sky and blazes of bone-chewing gunfire roaring like flight of dragons over the howls of the wounded, the cacophonous cant of the spellflingers, and the occasional chord from Heph's guitar. Axle's nose twitched in the purple haze of sparking cybernetics, mystic ozone, and gunsmoke as he dashed the fragments of Agent Wilke's skull from his knuckles against the cobbles and turned to wade through a frantic knot of ninjas.

Even a mad, paranoid beast like Wheel's alter ego could sense that this simple battle was beginning to run riot. Oblivion was obviously in the midst of a power play, bringing out a glowing sword that smelled of demons and driving the Northman mageknight Ajax to his knees. Blurs of greyed cyberspeed flickered at the edge of the battle as Oblivion's mercenaries seeped into the battle. The ninja clan in the employ of the Estrodome clearly felt that the principles of the contract had been violated, and were falling back around the remaining cybercotta titans as more ninji came in from the shadows. The arrival of the Interest's black-suited agents had kicked up the violence factor significantly, as had the timely visitation from Curare's Anaconda Guard. Circe and the bionic woman appeared to be backing themselves into a corner of their own near the ruins of Dutrey's while the little pink one and the strange blue beast ran rampant through the skies. The Invisibles were significantly outnumbered, divided among all the foes. Actionhero seemed torn between continuing his ongoing power duel with the witch Circe and protecting her from the riotous onslaught, and Curare was slowly consolidating his forces around himself.

But even more. The beast grunted a curse against the Trilateral Commission as he gathered his titanic legs underneath him and sprung for the nearest unoccupied rooftop, a SunTrust building overlooking the two-block heart of the sprawling riot. It was spreading. Axle snarled as he looked out to the west and saw an enclave of vampires rushing out into the night with hissing laughs, rushing like creeping shadows over policemen and a small mob of drunken tourists. To the east, a hundred-year old cemetery flickered green as the zombies dug up more of their brethren under the guidance of a towering houngan in a stovepipe hat. To the north, a gang war was spilling out of a nightclub as the Yakuza, Triads, and the Russians all decided, apropos of nothing, that tonight was the best night to move against the New Orleans Mob, all converging on Joe Shark's bar. There was fire and thunder behind a pallor of thick salty smoke in the south, and the sound of sirens. The city was going sideways quickly. Axle's lips curled back from his yellowed tusks. For the first time in his strange half-life, he spoke at less than a bellow:

"... gather them together to battle, whose number is as the sand of the sea. They went up the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city. And fire came down from God out of heaven and devoured them."

The sky over New Orleans slashed down a hot black rain as purple lightning lanced into the Gulf from a glaring eye of swirling red clouds.

"Revelations 20:8-9, more or less. Very good choice, Mr. Axel."

There was a dull electromagnetic hum as Axel whirled around, to face the agent who had confronted him earlier, standing with a large cylindrical rifle pointed at him.

"You have ALL been gathered together at the camp of the saints, and now you're all going to be ... purged. That is the way of things, Mr. Axel. The one that stands out gets put down again. That is how you keep order. That is how the machinery runs smoothly."

Axel snarled deep in his throat, shaking the cheap tar-gravel of the roof, and took a lumbering step forwards.

"Do you hear that high-frequency hum, Mr. Axel?"

Axel paused. His eyes grew wide as he looked down the barrel of the weapon ... which was the blazing eye of a pyramid.

"It is the sound of ... inevitability."

He fired.

A shooting star blazed a path through the night sky over New Orleans, leaving a white trail and briefly illuminating the madness below.

Within moments ...

As Wheel became conscious of himself again, he had to reflect that this was easily in the top 5 worst places he'd ever woken up, outdoing even the nameless bordello at the Guatemalan leper colony. At least that place had fresh guava.

He was naked, moving at somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 miles an hour above what looked like the far southern end of New Orleans, and trailing jellied opalescent scraps of what looked like Axel. He'd never undergone a transformation quite like that before. Something unpleasant must have happened.

Still, he should probably reflect on it after he'd taken steps to prevent a brief, unpleasant meeting between himself and the Crescent City. He snapped his fingers twice, twitching his hand with a grunted "Bleh," as he shook off the slick leftovers of Axel.

There was a faint *pop* of displaced air as the grey-striped felinoid cum ace household servant Q'yph appeared.

"Sahib?"

"Q'yph."

"Ah. Yes, of course, boss. Color me all over it."

Flexing his golden dewclaws, the extradimensional imp sketched a series of pentagons in the air around the soaring, naked, slimy Invisible. As each one was completed, Wheel slowed, finally coming to a dead stop, rotating slowly in mid-air in a cocoon of luminescent golden pentagons.

"Much better. Put yourself in for a raise."

Q'yph wrinkled his adorable nose as he slowly brought them down to street level.

"All our banter to the contrary, boss, you don't actually PAY me, per se. I'm bound into your service because you released me from the appointed vessel of containment."

"The blue cough syrup with the high alcohol content and the slightly illegal amounts of methadone."

"Yes, that stuff. Now, if you'd care to undertake the Fugit Ritual and release me from service, THEN I could work for pay ..."

Wheel cocked an eyebrow at Q'yph as he hung in the air, his gleaming jellied hair hanging in thick ropes.

"And you'd stay on the Prima Terra instead of rocketing straight back to the fifth to get sloshed with your imp buddies?"

Q'yph wrinkled his nose again and sighed.

"Okay, fine, fine ... so, what else?"

Wheel drummed his fingers on his bare, slimy hip.

"Oh, right. You'll want your stuff, I suppose."

Q'yph dissipated the pentagonal aura and Wheel dropped lightly to the bricks of the dark alley Q'yph had brought them down in. The imp purred a quick series of impossible syllables, and the air crystallized and fluxed as the aloha shirt was teleported in. It burbled happily as it crawled up over Wheel's shoulders, draping across him like a vast hooded cloak. He wrapped himself in the folds and sighed with contentment, running his fingers over the soft shimmering fabric of the shirt as it snorked up the slime coating him and left him clean and dry.

"Ahhh, much superior. Also, I want you to gather the Irregulars for a meeting in, say, five minutes."

Q'yph snorted.

"Short notice. And you're bringing the Irregulars HERE? You don't think the situation is quite chaotic enough?" The felinoid imp flattened his ears and slitted his bright yellow eyes. "You're not trying to impress Eris again, are you? I swear, you can be SO pussywhi ..."

Wheel held up one finger as the shirt shrunk back to its usual aloha dimensions, leaving Wheel clad in his purple trousers, a Flaming Carrot T-shirt, and the enhanced Converse in yellow and black. He slowly pulled his swirling shades from the shirt pocket universe and clipped them across the bridge of his nose. He then folded his hands behind his back and gazed at Q'yph inscrutably from behind the glittering psychedelic lenses.

Q'yph gulped and let it go.

"Right. The Irregulars."

Wheel grinned slightly. "Post-haste."

Q'yph shook his head and vanished with a twinkling of glass chimes. "You're the boss ..." he murmured as he vanished.

Not too much later ...

Wheel leaned insouciantly back against the greasy chrome and enamel counter of Yancy's Diner, slowly pulling apart a caramel bear claw in the dim light and flickering flames from the street outside. Yancy's never closed. He peered over the rims of his spectacles at the shadowy forms gathered around him.

Perched on a grimy red pleather stool, crouching with his arms dangling and a slightly manic grin on his face was Crackle, one of the many incarnations of the Spirit of Vengeance currently wandering the planet. His face painted in crow's foot streaks of black and white, he rolled his shoulders in the creaking leather longcoat and toyed with a heavy black throwing spike.

Sitting cross-legged in the air in fringed black and salmon buckskins was the man called Blazer, his dark skin etched with flickering patterns of flame. He was a mystic trained in the snowy wilds of North America, a healer by trade but a surprisingly lethal force in his own right. He had written the Cardiac Overclocker cantrip, currently #3 on the Interest's Acquisitions roster.

Pacing quietly in the shadows of the far wall of the room, his fedora pulled low over his brow, Weaver Black wove silver strands of cobweb between his fingertips in increasingly-intricate patterns. A black cigarette dangled unlit between his lips.

Standing tall and with a faint grinding of servos behind Wheel was a man he knew, oh, very well indeed. The towering man's left arm was a vast contraption of counterweights and gleaming chrome, and he had clearly undergone some muscle augmentation and other adaptive surgeries. Wheel glanced up at Overdrive and winked, and the big cyborg grinned back, displaying a mouthful of chromium teeth set into a Scaramanga-4 jaw. The two brothers always enjoyed working together.

"Nice of you all to come in on such short notice," Wheel said around the stem of his bright gold cigarette holder, holding a specially-rolled smoke he picked up by the gross from J.R. "Bob" Dobbs. The Psychedelic Illuminate dropped onto a stool and propped his glimmering gold-soled Converse on the counter. Yancy, unbidden and stolid in his paper hat, handed him a huckleberry shake and faded away again.

"So," he took a long drag of the shake and another of the cigarette, and leaned back in his stool. "What've we got?"

"I'll run the film," chuckled Overdrive. He faced a blank white wall and reached up to his right ear, giving it a half twist. His right eye glowed bright and, with a whir, began projecting footage on the greasy spoon's enamel tiles. Overdrive narrated in his booming, sonorous voice.

"Dis was first drawn t'our attention when some of th' Invisibles started dropping outta circulation."

Grainy black and white footage played of the dual-natured wizard Pairodox being rent apart into fuzzy unreality in the midst of his meditations; a shot of the arcanologist Xanith Epicoene shaking teir head gloomily as te looked over a scrolled piece of paper bearing Oblivion's grey seal; the Professor grinning luridly as he followed a beckoning, flaming succubus between two sandstone pillars into darkness; Eclipse and the Platypus overseeing the robotic autopsying of a mutated beluga whale in the Antarctic lab.

"Musta been more than coincidence. There seemed ta be a real focus on taking out the Invisibles with a particular talent fer patterns. Xanith and Pairodox wit' their reality-spanning magickal studies, the Professor wit' his cosmic knowledge, Eclipse and the Platypus wit' their vast web of zoological ... uh, guys ... all distracted, 'r just out an' out removed from circulation."

Wheel smoked thoughtfully, and Weaver lurked by to light his Carcinoma Angel off the end of Wheel's glowing tip. Blue and purple clouds of smoke rolled through the still air of the diner. Crackle chuckled to himself and Blazer floated closer to the screen, idly waving hexfingers at the cloud of smoke, dissipating it as it drifted towards him.

"And then there was that strange stuff wit' Actionhero, Holte, the Estrodome ... and Oblivion. This, of course, came at about the same time as the Interest's latest attempt on my bro over at the House."

Film captured from security cameras in the industrial district show the Man of Mystery and Quentin fighting their way clear of the warehouse where the Estrodome had attempted to trap them. Footage from the House's mailbox camera shows Wheel breaking the neck of a Mafia tough, firing a cannonball through an armored soldier, and driving a cross through the heart of a blonde death-metal enthusiast.

"So tha's our first point."

Crackle chuckled and tossed a black spike into the wall, where it stood quivering to the upper right of the projected image. Overdrive nodded with a grinding of gears.

"Graduates of the Novum Collegium d'Invisible wit' a talent for eyeballin' the big picture ... were bein' taken outta the picture, as it were."

Wheel grinned smugly and brushed his fingernails on his lapel. "Or at least the attempt was made, in some cases."

There were chuckles in the gloom and burger-scented air as Weaver Black grunted and walked in front of the projection with his fingers steepled in front of him, his shadow thrown across the flickering images. He spoke low and steady in his shadowy voice, redolent of smoke with a hint of chittering.

"Roll it back to the warehouse."

Overdrive nodded and twitched his head to the right. The film rapidly backscrolled and at a gesture from Weaver froze on an image of Oblivion staring down from a loading platform at Actionhero and Holte as they faced the scantily-clad Estros. Weaver pointed a long, pallid finger at the expressionless face of the grey doctor.

"Oblivion first showed up here, but he was kind of behind the scenes. And roll it back to the shot of Xanith we got from the AgamottoCam ... yeah. Oblivion again. And I have reason to believe that the Doctor was also responsible for infecting that whale with the Legacy virus, and for setting off the Pandora trap that caught Pairodox."

Blazer lifted his eyebrows from where he floated nearby.

"But what about that succubus that lured away the demon Professor?"

Weaver gave a small shrug. "Actually, I think he had plans to run off with her anyway. It's that time of millenium. Just a coincidence. BUT, what wasn't ... was the theft of your trans-aetheric tulpaic realizer, Wheel."

Wheel nodded, sketching down notes on a napkin as he puffed slowly on his cigarette and took gurgling sips from the thick magenta milkshake.

"The way I'm seeing it, Oblivion somehow got into the Estro's heads, and has been using them like puppets under the facade of helping them with this farcical quest to acquire sexual favors from Actionhero and the like."

There was a snort from Wheel. "'Hero seems to think that's what it's ALL about."

Crackle cackled. "'Hero thinks too much about his time at Hogwarts."

Again smoky chuckles rang in the gloomy room, as the film Overdrive's eye continued to project switched to footage stolen from the Hogwart's Traveling Portraiture Camera, recounting some of the highlights of the legendary "Lost Weekend."

Weaver took a long drag of smoke, still chuckling. "Oblivion ... exploited the existing chemistry between Circe and Actionhero to maneuver them into a big, showy, and above all distracting conflict. Meanwhile, he snagged a piece of technology from you that he'd been working on unsucessfully for a year or so ..."

"That's because he refuses to shop the Bleed," scoffed Wheel. "Elitist bastard."

"Well, it IS kind of like a pandimensional shopping mall," murmured Blazer.

"Oy, there's nothing wrong with shopping malls if you consider their ironic value, and the ready availability of ..."

"... AS I was saying," Black continued gruffly, "He picked up the realizer, and let the Estros test its veracity on two of the keener minds around. And I think he wanted to get it for use in an elaborate scrying system incorporating several distinct elements of occultech."

"Scrying? For why? He already has the biggest nanoswarm of cameras on the planet."

"I can field that one." Blazer floated over to the projection, which switched to a still of a phantograph in the late 19th-century Punch style, showing a man greatly resembling Doctor Oblivion in an opera cloak and topper being handed some sort of elaborate black medallion by a gorgeous brunette in shopkeeper's garb. Wheel got up from his stool and strode over to the wall, bending over to eyeball the image, which shone brightly in a thousand swirling colors in his psychedelispecs.

"She looks like a Zee. She's got the eyebrows ..."

"And the knockers," grinned Overdrive.

Blazer rolled his eyes as Crackle chuckled. "She IS a Zee," grated the Spirit of Vengeance. "Zan Zedair. Specialized in artifice. That, my friends, is her greatest work."

"What the shazbot is it? Looks a bit like a translocator circuit from an Unreality engine, but the hovery bits remind me of the old planestones from the moon temple near Stonehenge ..."

"Close enough," Blazer said, conjuring an image of the thing in cool flame. "It's a Hexate medallion. Instantaneous transportation, with a number of enslaved spells bound into the very fabric of the thing."

Wheel whistled low and long while Overdrive grunted and unconsciously flexed his left arm with a clanking noise. Crackle hissed and clenched his fists and Weaver Black blew out an irritated puff of smoke.

"'r ya sure, Blaze?" asked the big cyborg.

Blazer swiveled in mid-air to face Overdrive, and spread his hands in a gentle shrug. "The Spirit of Owen doesn't lie."

"Are you kidding?" the spidery gumshoe whispered. "Even Oblivion wouldn't be mad enough to use a Hexate medallion. The Ministry of Magic, the Interest, AND the Grand Coven agreed not to even try to divine the making of those things until ..."

"Until someone made one that didn't kill the user, was the real meat of their contract," Wheel grinned, "and this one apparently doesn't. And I'll bet they'll be fascinated when that news gets out."

"Bet that's one more reason the agents showed up when they did," growled Overdrive. Wheel and Black nodded thoughtfully.

"But the non-lethal side effects are not so great, Wheel-o," Crackle growled, and snapped his fingers at Overdrive, who gave a thumbs-up and shifted to a spirit reel captured from Wheel's recent trip to the aether. Wheel's eyebrows lifted over his spectacles.

"Nooooo ..."

"Oh, yeah." Blazer was grave. "Oblivion has found a way to go anywhere and anywhen he wishes. And thanks to your trans-aetheric gimmick and the other stuff he's gathered up, he can probably scout invisibly and almost instantaneously with his mind, first, before he sends his body along."

The gathered Irregulars growled and subtly readied various hidden weapons, shifting their eyes around.

"But, in so doing, he's causing devastation to the underlying fabric of the higher planes. In short, fellows, Doctor Oblivion is using Secrets Man Was Not Meant to Know, and is causing Bad Things to Happen in the Places Men Fear to Tread."

The capital letters hung heavy in the thick air of the old diner.

Wheel rocked back on his heels, lighting a new cigarette off the glimmering butt-end of Weaver's. He blew a smoke ring that drifted into the shape of a glaring eye. "So, it's reasonably clear that this isn't what he meant to do, then?"

Blazer and Crackle nodded. Overdrive shrugged, and Weaver merely grunted. "I don't trust the bastard any further than I can blow him backwards with a hollowpoint ... but he MIGHT not have known. He might still not know."

"So that's point two," the leather-clad dead man chuckled, tossing a second black spike to stick humming into the wall next to the first. "Doc Oblivion spent a great deal of time and resources getting some of the more observant Invisibles distracted while he made a power grab for one of the most unstable artifacts in existence, and now essentially has free rein in time and space ... at the cost of the sanctity of reality. You saw what happened to Legba ... Gawd knows how he convinced Zan to make the thing ..."

"And that gets us around to point three, and perhaps the most looming one of all." Wheel got up and paced, puffing furiously, gesturing with one hand as Crackle tossed yet another spike, slightly down and to the left of the first. "There's something really bad happening in Otherspace, and it's starting to have effects here." The pop shaman reached into his shirt and pulled out some sort of metal box with a rubberized handlegrip. He adjusted a knob on the side and the box tweedled urgently, two blinking arms sprouting from an antenna at the top. "We've got Gozer-level PKE readings."

Black nodded and paced across Wheel's path, snapping the brim of his fedora. "And a big kick-up in the shadows. Everyone who's anyone is coming out of the woodwork .. even people that Oblivion tried to put out of the way, like Xanith and Eclipse, are sticking their heads up."

Blazer snorted. "It's a schmozz," as Crackle jumped up and slammed another spike home, below and just to the right of the second one.

"An' finally," growled Overdrive, idly rubbing a metal spur off his knee with a sanding finger, "we've got all dis ... just weirdness."

"Hell, it woke ME from the sleep of the dead," grated Crackle.

"So the last point is ... coincidence?" Weaver asked rhetorically, catching the spike Crackle tossed to him and flicking it to land at the apex of the other four. A line of black fire between them drew a neat pentagon, with a pentagram inside. The Irregulars and Wheel considered the icon quietly as Yancy griddled some burgers.

"All of this has come to a head in a ridiculously unlikely fashion, and events have even outpaced the plans of a far-thinker like Oblivion. What've we got ... hey, 'drive, run the notepad program on the screen, huh?"

The cyborg nodded, jiggling the screen, and pushed a few buttons on the keypad on his left wrist. A bright notepad program sprung up on the wall, headlined in bright red. The Irregulars began reeling off list items:

The Novum Collegium Suffers Mass Distraction: Pairodox, Xanith, Actionhero, Quentin Holte, Eclipse, et al. are kept from paying attention to events, including maybe minor changes in spacetime?
Doc Oblivion Gains the Hexate Medallion: The medallion proves to be the first to be nonlethal to the user, but seems to have significant side effects
The Side Effects: Strange structures lace through the aetheric plane, making astral travel extremely difficult, perhaps even lethal, and causing at least one significant metaphysical problem, disrupting the gateway between Life and Death by incapacitating Papa Legba. This in turn is causing a build-up of souls, wandering and lost on this plane, and an increase in supernatural activity. PKE readings currently off the Spengler scale.
Shadow Activity: For reasons unknown, every shadow organization in the world, including l'Universite, has chosen this moment to act. The Yellow Mountain. Oblivion. Aztechnology? Man of Mystery, Inc.? The organized crime families. The Interest. Why were the Interest so quick to show up in New Orleans?
Coincidence and Strange Happenings: Doctor Curare shows up at his New Orleans offices and in a very timely manner at one of his bars. Padraig is in town, and manages to get captured for reasons unknown. Hephaestus Gryphon returns from the Valley for the first time in years. Mana spike. Planetary conjunctions. Wheel, for no discernible reason, decides to head to New Orleans and bring his probability-altering chaos magic with him. Zan Zedair ignores the precepts of the House of Zee to make a forbidden artifact. Oblivion (apparently) fails to research the side effects of same artifact. Aztechnology willingly works with Man of Mystery, Inc. The Estrodome doesn't appear to actually be fully aware of the consequences of their actions. Actionhero is dazzled by lust. Arrival of agents of the Interest. Verses from Revelations.

"There's definitely something funkadelic going on," Wheel spoke with finality through a mouthful of cheeseburger.

"But what're we gonna do about it?" Overdrive clanked as he finally shut down his projector eye, printing out a hardcopy of the list from his left elbow as microfans whirred on, cooling his bulbs while he downed a Turbo Dog beer.

"We've got to do something to heal the damage to the fabric of reality done by Oblivion's trinket," said Blazer between mouthfuls of a heart-healthy salad nicoise.

"And we've got to figure out who is benefitting most from this ungodly string of coincidences, strange happenings, and outright madness, and then perpetrate dire havoc on their persons," Crackle grinned, sitting cross-legged atop an old jukebox and polishing the silver buckles on his tall boots.

"Well, that should be fairly simple. It's a short list of people who have the motive, power, and culpability to be puppeteering this." Weaver ticked off choices on his long, slender, triple-jointed fingers, "Oblivion could be totally aware of the consequences of his use of the Hexate medallion, and be using it towards nefarious ends. Lofwyr could be making a play to remove everyone who is even remotely aware of his existence from the picture through some supernatural cataclysm. Could be the Lizard King, the Interest's Pentagon Pentex, the Shadow under the Throne ... that's all I can think of, and most of those are really unlikely. I haven't seen any Templari Eternals, Dragon's Eyes or reptile people around yet."

"Thank Gawd," murmured Wheel, shivering unconsciously. "So, then. The simplest thing I can think of is to get that medallion off of Oblivion. That should stir the pot."

There was a general consensus along with a racking of chambers, whisking of blades from sheaths, eldritch crackling of spellfire, and whir of servos.

Q'yph *pop*ped in from wherever he'd been lurking.

"The SIMPLEST thing you can think of is to wade into a massive, riotous battle underway at the nexus of six ley lines and three dragon lines, where ninjas and men in black and cybermercs and mad mages are all tossing seventeen kinds of death at each other ... so you can attempt to snatch a medallion from the neck of a man who can move freely through time and space, who is currently wielding a sword that belonged to SATAN?"

Wheel paused for a moment in winding his Neowells watch, and then nodded slowly.

"Yep, I think so. Anyone else got a better idea?"

"Nope."
"Sounds good to me."
"A good time all 'round."
"Good call, dude."

Wheel gave a cheesy grin and thumbs-up, his spectacles flickering in a merry swirl. "Looks like it's a go, Q'yph."

The imp groaned and rolled over backwards in mid-air. "Well, I'M not going, you can bet your last dollar on THAT, boss. Your LAST DOLLAR. No way. Uh-uh. Not this imp. No freakin' way."

"You're right."

"And nothing you say can convince me otherwise. Not interested. Not ... what?"

"You're not going with us." Wheel pulled out his cobalt-blue hand cannon and popped the bullpup clip, thumbing in Thorshots and Whedon shells.

"I'm not?"

Wheel shook his head, slipping the gun back into his pocket universe. "You're going to go keep an eye on the Crossroads for me, and report back if anything crazy gets rolling."

"The Crossroads?" Q'yph gulped. "Where all those black hexfibres are? The ones that seem to have killed the Opener of the Way? Where all those shadows are flitting around the *mrrow* Gallows Tree?"

Wheel nodded with a cheery smile. "That's the one."

"Don't forget the angry spectre of death hanging around," grinned Weaver Black around his cigarette as he opened a shoebox and pushed the switch on a small CS-model hoverdrone, which floated by his left shoulder.

Q'yph gulped as Wheel half-smiled and raised his left fist, uncurling it slowly and blowing a kiss towards Q'yph. The kiss became a flurry of flaring neon butterflies that swirled around the imp, obscuring him in a haze of mad color.

"Beat it, Fluffy."

There was a faint feline giggle as the tickling wings of the chaos butterflies brushed fur, and Q'yph and the butterflies were gone in a *pop*.

"Well, then, gentlemen ..." Blazer cracked his knuckles, which flickered with pink and black fire.

"Funtime." Crackle grinned as he pulled a pair of long black daggers from his belt.

"I heard that." Overdrive chuckled, folding his cybernetic waldo hand back in favor of a wide-bore fusion cannon that sparkled blue and wild in the dim diner.

"Just remember our objectives, and don't get sucked in by the scope of this thing." cautioned Weaver Black, working the lever of an M1 Garand.

"Riiiiiiiight." The half-mad Invisible grinned as he opened his shirt and his lightsaber somersaulted into his hand. It snapped on with an ominous hummmm and underlit Wheel's wide smile, his spectacles shifting endlessly. "Let's get dangerous."

He kicked open the door and charged out into the street, beheading a flaming zombie shambling out of a burning model train shop across the road. The Irregulars rip-roared after him, but Weaver lagged behind, leaving a few alien-looking coins of gold imprinted with large spiders on the counter for Yancy. The old dinerman took the money and shook his head.

"Always with the cartoon jokes, that guy."

Weaver smiled in shadow.

"It's just his schtick."

And then the Anasazi shaman was gone with the rest.

A few panels later ...

Yancy shut off the lights and shuffled over behind the grill in his sandals, taking off his paper hat and holding it one arthritic hand as he fell to his knees before a small altar, carved of ancient red-spored hardwood, topped with a small black idol of some shambling, tentacle-faced thing.

"Your time comes ever closer, milord. Soon ... soon."

His hands shaking and his nose dripping black blood, he slowly got up, and went to the freezer to count the onion rings.