THE GIFTS WE TAKE
by Tenda

A story in three parts! I'd rather intended this be a play of sorts, but I'm a doctor-- not a writer-- so this is as it is.

Dedicated to Robert, wherever you are today. It's a better place, but I'm working on bringing a little of it here.

PART ONE

Ness ushers a reluctant Jeff into the blackout at the Fourside Department Store, and with gun and bat drawn the two enter and disappear and are lost, December 23rd, as a platoon of the Fresh Breeze marches by. They are imperial-- cold and tall though half are short-- and carry standard-issue semi-automatics, standard-issue to put down an Inflicted. There are reports that those beasts are amassing in the marshes, that they are gathering in the slums, that they are numbering five-hundred in the alleys and five-hundred is five one-hundreds too many: so, the Fresh Breeze marches.

An Inflicted is an unusual thing. It is half-beast, half-man, and the nature of corruption is that it is always a blend. An Inflicted shot with a .225 caliber bullet may survive as half of a man, or it may survive as half of a beast; if it is half of a beast, it must be rendered in no part a beast. There are dead bodies in the alleys because there are some that do not lose the blue tinge of the skin when shot, and there are dying bodies in the hospitals because there are those that lose the hue but can't shake the bullets quite as easily. Fresh Breeze grand marshal, Loretta Todd, has to date offered no comment on the recent militaristic motions of the movement. The Fresh Breeze still publishes non-violent billboards and flyers to the Fourside suburbs.

The platoon passes the Fourside Department Store and marches up 9th Street, past the enigmatic tourist attraction of Magnet Hill and into what the newscasters would call an 'encampment' of Inflicted. Garbage diving for food, they are caught unawares, and when the full fire of the platoon is turned onto them they are mush and no more in moments. The screams outlast the flesh, and Paula staring down an otherworldly creature of another sort six-stories up is stunned but only by the humanity and only because she does not know it is the scream of an Inflicted-- when Ness drives his baseball bat through the skull of a blue man, and he screams, Paula does not wince.

"You speak our language," she offers the Mook, "and you say you've never been here before?" The green titan's eyestalk shivers and shakes as it produces a guttural laugh from nowhere.

"We've been here after," Paula hears in her mind's eye, a smooth and familiar voice and it doesn't sound unlike her father, Paula thinks and knows that this is the intent, but seeing the Mook in front of her it's not hard to know it's just a trick. "We've been here after, but we had to move backwards to move forwards."

Paula is reminded of pretentious essays and poetry from her peers and dismisses it as nonsense. "What's the future like?" she asks and she prods, she is by and large buying time and she knows it, and she suspects the Mook knows it, but it seems an intelligent and talkative being and perfectly happy to comply.

"It's a better place, without dissent or disagreement. The postulation that function follows form advanced from the textbooks to the government, and from there it was easy. Green Mook and orange Mook are combat designated, while a blue Mook's responsibility is to serve the nation elseways--"

"Isn't it that form follows function?" Paula interjects and the Mook begins to speak back to her, it is beginning a sentence that is ended mid-way because mid-way through the sentence Ness and Jeff break down the door of the managerial office and a single psionic blast is enough to knock the Mook clear through the back pane window and down six stories to the street below. It lands among a crowd of resting Breezers, and it is no less and no more than providence. Rifles hoisted onto their shoulders, the Fresh Breeze marches on as altogether oblivious holiday shoppers march backways to the department store for last-minute requisitions.

Natalie Levy has a list which says "purchase two teddy bears" though the list really is just two pictures of her smiling nieces she carries in her wallet. She has a regular gait because she is moving with a crowd, and seen from above the entirety of Fourside can be plotted in this way as if one was tracking a regular and seasonal current-- there are shoppers moving south-southwest on 9th Street, platoons of Breezers on 4th and northside 9th, troops of Inflicted that are casing back alleys for friends unknown. They recruit as they travel slums, and back roads, and on this particular day this congregation is congregating at the department store. This is a regular portion of the evening news-- this bird’s eye view depiction of zephyrs and undercurrents-- this is the migration and weather report of the Giygan War, the calendar by which a street determines the days it is a battlefield instead. The Inflicted converge on the department store and the Breezers lag behind because this is information gleaned in retrospect, and the hunter is by definition behind its prey.

A protest forms in the food court as citizens of the great metropolis of Fourside pull away hoods and ski masks to reveal blue-tinged faces. A man who was once a police officer but is now Inflicted recites crime statistics, makes only a single gesture though he speaks on a hundred topics-- a rising, with an ungloved and cerulean hand. A woman who was once a holiday shopper throws purchased presents from a bag, recites the survival chances and unchances of patients at the Fourside Memorial Hospital, joins a chorus of unassuming local citizens who once had tans or maybe pale skin but are now blue through and through. Your children will die, your parents will die, the day will end and one day your life will end and they speak, they are speaking and patrons of the food court with tears in their eyes well up true and blue and join the Inflicted in what the Inflicted call 'a recruiting drive' just as the Breezers storm the building.

Immense military force is not serendipitous or sudden, and it is not free; an army with standard-issue rifles costs a fortune more than an army that amounts to no more than standard-issue flesh. The Fresh Breeze is a government-funded organization, a mischance and misnomer and mishappening where a PTA-originated organization received a budget entirely too large for billboards and flyers and outgrew its own aspirations.

"How do you stop violence with non-violence?" queried Fresh Breeze grand marshal Loretta Todd while she was still an elementary school teacher. "How do you keep your children safe when those opposed to them are opposed, but also shooting on sight?" Immense military force is not sudden but a long-time coming, and even before the standard-issue rifles are bought an army pays a cost that is not counting or counted or summed until after the rifles are lowered for the last time.

Those left in the food court crowd who are pushed to the walls as the Breezers enter,and immediately open fire, cheer whole-heartedly as the Inflicted churn and are putrefied, purified by iron. Even as they, kneeling and bleeding and crying and dying, die, the crowd smiles.

This is not hard, I think. I think it is easier to smile than to do anything else, than to think, while anyone at all is being shot-- so long as it is not you.

It is almost midnight by the time the crowd is allowed to disperse, and Natalie Levy's throat is sore from the act of refusal to cheer, and the rest of her is sore and cold just the same as she shivers and notes her skin turning a little bit blue. A man of the crowd approaches, heavy on his cane, and thanks her for notcheering along with him and a passing touch by him on his way out is enough to bring the warmth back to Natalie Levy's skin. She is dumbfounded.

The benefactor and his cane walk onto the streets, empty-handed. It is Christmas Eve now, a cold and bitter December 24th; it's past midnight but the lights of Fourside are festive and total, so it's never dark any longer. A short trip, which is painful even for its duration because Sebastian is not of good health and walks with a cane, brings him to Jackie's Cafe, where a quick flash of his ID-- "Sebastian Fletch, M.D., Psychiatrist"-- lets him into the back room where he is to interrogate yet another victim of a strange hallucinogenic phenomenon unique to the cafe. Sebastian sits with the man on the floor and in the corner of his vision sees three kids rush into the back of the warehouse and disappear among the boxes, but thinks nothing of it. The night wears on and Sebastian Fletch is a pragmaticist, he is a man who believes the worker's duty is to work, but as the sun rises on Christmas Eve and the new day begins in earnest and not just on digital watches, Sebastian leaves the man to lie mumbling and half-unconscious in the back room.

Three kids, exhausted and weary and in a rush because in their strange travels through the warehouse a number of high-contrast people informed them it was Unchristmas Not-Eve, pass the half-unconscious man and a broken statue and wonder if the two had been there when they walked in, but it's just a fleeting thought of unobservation. The Fourside Department Store is down the street and empty, and the streets between and around and past are empty too, and three kids are free to do their last-minute shopping unimpeded. Three kids make phone calls home to parents who wish them the best on the forthcoming day of good will and kindness towards one's fellow man, and make note of gifts en route to Fourside P.O. boxes, and leave the department store in short order because it's officially a holiday now, and the holidays are a time for rest.

At the crosswalk a blinking orange hand tells three kids not to cross, and Ness wonders why this is still relevant when the streets are roadblocked off-- an homage to Onett, Ness feels, and the preparation for a parade, Paula feels. Jeff isn't daydreaming, but he's paying attention instead, and Jeff is the only one who really sees the absurdity and out-of-place nature of the squadron of Breezers who sprint-- not march-- down the street, towards Central Park, with rifles raised-- not lowered. All of a sudden, Jeff tunes out of an everyday frequency and into a real-world frequency and sure enough, he can 
hear it on the wind, he can hear it over the trees, there is screaming and shouting and gunfire and the grey clouds are smoke, were always smoke. At the crosswalk, a blinking green smile informs three kids it's safe to cross but one has broken off to pursue a passing breeze and two others follow by virtue of necessity.

Central Park is a warzone, and some sense of self-preservation keeps the three away and with weapons lowered, though at the ready. The air is inconceivably muddled, and the din is absolute, and try as they might though everyone in Central Park is speaking one language, not a word can be made out. There are Inflicted-- teeming masses of long blue faces and limbs-- that sing and chant at the center, though their words are lost to screams and sobs as they are gunned down in what would be a real-life reenactment of nuclear decay if their ranks were not replenished with every halving. Loretta Todd is mounted ceremoniously above the forward ranks of Fresh Breezers, bullet-riddled and blue-hued, and there is a man wearing the ceremonial garments of grand marshal now but his words are overcome by roaring staccato murder. Sebastian Fletch is preaching from atop a literal soapbox, though no one is really listening and the act of unattentiveness is enough to drown out his speech. Those who would still be called unaligned Fourside citizens are being rallied by one Natalie Levy who, when the taking of a Breezer hostage fails, leads an unarmed assault against the Fresh Breezers in what newscasters would call 'a protest of what was erroneously deemed inhumane treatment of what are erroneously considered “human beings” among the Inflicted.'

Ness, Paula, and Jeff have dropped their weapons, and shudder just to think they ever held anything that could be called a weapon at all. The sun appears momentarily from behind the bonfire-fueled clouds, and the city of Fourside is a warzone and does not notice, and the Chosen Three of Four are privy to a special sort of perception where each and every of the momentous three can spot the ashes that blow on a wintry wind from face to unmoving face.

Ambulances and fire trucks arrive, police officers come and violence begets violence, and the last act of the Fourside Police Department before their dispersal would be the bloody dismantling of the 1996 Christmas Eve Riots.

Martial law was declared, but irrelevant, and Eagleland National aid was requested, but unheeded, and for nearly a week bodies piled up on doorsteps because the powers-that-be needed time to reorganize, needed time to rally and become military because immense military action is neither serendipitous nor sudden, and a citizen that leaves their home is more likely a potential enemy than a friend when the number of factions present exceeds two.

Natalie Levy's Fourside Citizens' Brigade pledged its protection of the Inflicted that the Fresh Breeze vowed to obliterate, and flyers went out for the both of them but as New Year's drew closer, the only army that had swelled considerably were the Inflicted and none could put a finger on this but for one Sebastian Fletch who for days pondered the immortal words of the late grand marshal Loretta Todd, "How do you stop violence with non-violence?" and was wiser for the wear but lacking an army of his own to speak his piece.

Paula Polestar huddled in the basement of the Fourside Sunrise Hotel with Ness and Jeff says only one thing on Christmas day, and they're not even her own words-- Paula Polestar says only what the Mook had said before its death, and what it said was that the only difference between this world and its own was we did not yet realize function follows form, but all things can change in time.

Jeff remarks that all Inflicted are blue-skinned but born otherwise, be it black-skin white-skin or else-skin, and that they never attacked innocents until after the change in complexion.

Ness flatly asks that Jeff not support the points made by otherworldly invaders, and before Jeff can retort Paula asks the both of them to not speak of it anymore. She prays before bed as  usual, and she prays that the violence can end soon-- also as usual-- but this Christmas is the first night she makes this prayer without an addendum that the violence end peacefully, because Paula can never, ever, be the person she was before.

PART TWO

"A new year begins tomorrow, brothers and sisters! A new year just for us, a new year that rises with us and not against us!" Seth Freemont bellows in his unliving unspeaking baritone to the crowd of blue-skinned but cheering followers. "Blessed are we the children of He, and blessed are those among us who bring more into the fold! Listen well, then, and hear the plans Giygas provides for the day!"

Cheering, ad infinitum.

"More than ever are people aware of us and our works, our cause and our road forward. We grow wiser for it too!, we grow smarter the more we travel the wide breadth of this road. The Fresh Breeze--"

Booing, hushed by Seth's inexplicably chromatic laughter.

"The Fresh Breeze has announced a desire for a cease-fire to commemorate the new year, and we will comply. Heed this, brothers and sisters and spread it, heed it and take it with you! Take it to all of us, and all whom you bring into the fold. Let them not be blinded by hate, but still mindful of tactics! "Blind travel is backwards half the time," the words of Carpainter Dupont! Don't forget those who came before us. Should we forget the lessons of our quashed uprisings of the past?" Seth pauses, and though the crowd is eating up his every word he knows they are restless, and they are not accustomed to being blue.

"Do not hurt anyone, then, be they friend or foe or elsewise. Do not raise a single finger in anger! We march, instead, at sunset to the graveyards of this city, and we are going to dig up the past so best to remind the world of its mortality. We number ten-thousand at least, still strong and still numerous, and all are to pair off and bring with them a corpse to Market Square prior to the ball-dropping at midnight. We will rally them to our side by reminding them at the close of this year that it is just one year nearer this, their own death, their own rotting, their own consumption! Consumption!, they are nearer consumption, and they will come nearer the Giygan ideal for it. Further instruction will be given by Giygas Himself at the square, so be not late, brothers and sisters!"

The crowd cheers again, and a reticent Ness with early-onset facial hair at the edge of it nervously asks a familiar-but-blue face if she's seen Paula, where's Paula gotten off to in times like this, and the familiar face (Erika? Ness thinks, but isn't sure) says she's pretty sure Paula's gone off to the graveyard with a grave look on her face. Ness turns to walk away, and Jeff elbows him and thanks maybe-Erika for him, and Ness elbows Jeff back as they stick hands in their pockets and make their way to a destination they don't know the location of but can find easily-enough by heading opposite the direction of the corpses carried hand-in-hand towards Market Square.

Ness and Jeff pause and look all around them whenever a twig snaps or a leaf grinds underfoot because a cease-fire doesn't make the sounds any less ambiguous or artillery-unlike.

The graveyard is in a peculiar state of flux as blue bodies Ness stubbornly insist belong in graves cart pink and brown bodies and bones downtown to take place in a 'protest' they never had the capacity of imagination to foresee. Paula is away from the commotion, on a knoll that overlooks a river that runs blue but births brown rivulets. "Pollution," Jeff scoffs.

Paula sighs.

She begins, "I've a gift of foresight," and Ness and Jeff nod quickly and many times. "In one month's time, Giygas will be happy and our bodies will be cold. They do not draw breath, or move, and I don't foresee death exactly--"

"But we're dead," Jeff blunts. Ness is the leader by prophecy's definition, is aware of this position of authority-- its obligations-- and shakes his head fervently and many times.

"I don't believe it, we've no reason to believe you're always right, and what about that prophecy? We shatter the nightmare rock. We acted fast, we acted courageously, and we're going to keep it up--" Ness pauses here, because he becomes aware of the fact he is loud and frantic-- "I put the prophecy that brought us here before yours."

"It's your choice," offers Paula, "but I haven’t been wrong yet."

"There's a first time for--"

"That's not really a fact, Ness," Jeff parries. The three stand on a knoll overlooking a blue river that tapers into green tributaries.

The grass crunches but also sputters in its dampness as the brass tip of Sebastian's cane turns the Chosen Three of Four to face him. He adjusts his glasses, and looks up only momentarily, and asks in poor and nervous diction if the girl with them is Paula Polestar and if so, may he speak with her. They nod, and he smiles and looks up to show them, and Paula forces a smile back as the two walk some feet away to converse.

"My son was killed in the Happy-Happyist coup at Peaceful Rest Valley, and I was oblivious for the whole of it. He refused to clear out for Dupont when they moved into the schoolhouse, and though I was in the same building I didn't know until after the fact."

Sebastian Fletch stands on a knoll overlooking a blue river that, past brown and green, meets the blue-blue ocean. He takes a deep breath before continuing, and jabs the ground with his cane twice, a number Paula figures is intentional but cannot figure why.

"I was conducting interviews upstairs. I was very interested in the movement, and they seemed at the time more a novelty than anything really, really real, you know? I was lucky, I had a background, I could read the subtexts in the texts they gave me-- I figured. I figured there were subtexts to find, at least, and that I could get the families back together and the homes healed, and, well, I thought my education had a point.

"There were no subtexts though, there was no subtlety. Carpainter Dupont was the head of an unknowing blue-blue army, and that's all we have here again. It's an army, and it's an army who the Fresh Breeze and every other military outfit is fighting on their home territory. I know it's not right, you know? I've thought about this a long time. It's the wrong way to go about things, I know it is, to answer violence with violence just because... just because it's easy," and Sebastian Fletch is crying, quietly and dignified, and the weight of the world that Fourside has brushed off has found itself in entirety on Sebastian's shoulders.

"I want to protest it, I'm the doctor I am because I'm an activist and I wanted to activize better. Where do you protest this? Where do you go that they can't get to you, kill you for it? All that my son protested was losing his school, and that was the worth of his life to that army. It's the same army now, and I doubt they even listened when he had an actual good point to make. I've got a stab in the dark. 'How do you stop violence with non-violence?' It's strange, because out of context it seems like something that births a pacifist movement, not a military!"

Paula stares off into space, but this is encouraging to Sebastian because in the world of present-day Eagleland the rumors that once surrounded Paula became facts by necessity. Sebastian continues through the tears and the cracking of his voice, the sniffling, the degradation of his age by decades and more until he is a sobbing child again with a blunted dagger in the night, laughing on occasion, because his position is absurd to the adult he professes to be.

"What do you do, where do you go? I want to picket!, that's what protesters do, we picket," the punctuation is all wrong because punctuation by sob is unique but the English language does not make provision for it in the written word, "but where do you protest a world at war? If you stop one half, it's trampled by the other and what have you saved? I'm a doctor, and I'm educated, and that makes this all the harder because I know could I shape the very stars into the message I need to speak... so long as we're all earthbound, half the world would miss it at any given moment," and the sobs here take over, and Paula does not break her gaze into an uncertain future but she frowns a little, she smiles with the other half of her face, she mixes the two and in no uncertain tone offers Sebastian the only advice she can find.

"Just keep at it. The new year is good for you."

The doctor adjusts his glasses, regains his composure over several uneasy but private minutes, and leaning heavily on his cane is Dr. Fletch and not Sebastian any longer as he lurches into the twilight. Ness stands on a knoll facing a knoll where Paula stands and Jeff is on neither knoll, he bade farewell to Ness because though the three agreed months ago they would see the New Year's Ball Drop in person, Jeff wants to see it from a technical perspective-- from the back, that is to say. Ness and Paula stand on opposing knolls for a minute before Ness suggests that they need to go to the ball drop more than ever, most likely, and Paula nods once and solemnly and while looking past Ness and into something Ness defiantly insists is uncertain.

Ness takes one last look at the winding river and as the setting sun casts a metallic sheen over it, Paula's prophecy of cold and unmoving bodies comes together with a vision-- a craggy and otherworldly silver path before him to remind him-- and Ness remembers, foresight comes easier to one but is a stranger to neither. Ness's skin is cold and slick, metal-similar in the December damp, and he shudders.

PART THREE

Market Square attendance was slighted in past years by swelling contentment and the idea that new year's resolutions and new year's well-wishing were well and bunk, and in the midst of the Giygan War those who came the long miles to wish well are well and far away because the last vestiges of the Eagleland National quarantined the city for the holiday. The quarantine is temporary, they say, it is until we find a solution, they say, but this begs the question of what the problem is and just how can one even solve it.

At the south barricade, where the stench of rot is strongest because the wind is southerly, a frustrated Natalie Levy who literally holds back frustrated soldiers of the Fourside Citizens' Brigade rhetorically and smugly asks Ness how anyone can expect to stop violence with non-violence. Those who can sneak past Natalie and her advisors do not rush to attack those Inflicted in the heart of the square, but to join them as Seth Freemont, in a glorious and all-hating all-loving trance addresses his beloved brothers and sisters.

"Brothers and sisters!" he begins per usual, "Giygas is come tonight, He is here among us and with us and He speaks through my vessel! Rejoice and listen!"

Cheering, ad infinitum.

There is a crackling, and speakers come alive at the corners of each factions' barricade and encampments, hidden well-enough that the soldiers tasked to quickly destroy any means of propaganda the enemy brings are unable to comply with such simple instruction.

"People of Fourside!--" Seth Freemont begins and is abruptly cut short because one quick-thinking and quick-fried soldier thought to cut the high-tension line above him instead of searching for the speakers below. The streetlights go out, and the Christmas lights still hanging too, and by light of bonfire and burning effigy-- every military brought an effigy, at least one-- the masses look to one another and by light of effigy and bonfire things are admittedly cast more hatefully than they are by Christmas bulb, or sunshine. Snarls rise and fall in perfect cadence from the Inflicted, and rifles are heard loading on all sides of the square as a wonderful crossfire sure to slaughter all and everyone readies itself, oblivious-- willfully or elsewise-- to its inevitably self-terminating way.

"People of Fourside!" a different voice that is familiar only to two children in the square booms out, "I present to you Mister Geldegarde Monotoli!" Cheers rise up now from everyone that was quiet before, every faction but the Inflicted united, and even among them many cheer when the Monotoli Skytower lights up in its own festive glory, the glimmering and glowing ball at its top ready to descend. Jeff Andonuts steps out of the spotlight so that Mr. Monotoli can step into it, the once-popular always-mysterious icon of so-very-much in Fourside who had some weeks ago become different-- indifferent-- but now obviously a hero again.

"I don't have a lot to say," Geldegarde speaks, speaking down and speaking common-tongue in the hope that he as an illegitimate pop-culture icon may find legitimacy, "but I think it's appropriate because it's a New Year's resolution, and I think we should all be making some special ones tonight."

There are cheers, and they subside, and before Monotoli speaks again a voice cries out, "Cut the power!" Another, "Cut their heat!" A hundred voices rise up together, an indication of rehearsal, "Starve out the blues!" Monotoli clears his throat, which reverberates mightily-- the trembling bass trembling the audience-- and he continues.

"I resolve, and you may regret to hear this, that Fourside will take no such action against any of its citizens. I may speak personally here and say that the Inflicted you fight-- or protect-- are redeemable! I myself was once counted among them, and today I am very privileged to have with me a man who believes he knows best how to fight this plague-- Doctor Sebastian Fletch, of the Jennings School of Psychiatry! Let us ring in the New Year how we should've rang in Christmas, with an open-minded good-nature!"

Sebastian enters from stage left, and the spotlights are slow to capture him. He begins speaking, but his microphone is not properly connected, and though Jeff attempts to signal to him that this is so, Sebastian is consumed in his speech that no one is hearing. Jeff approaches him, but in his wild and zealous state Sebastian pushes him aside, and turns back to the armed and dangerous crowds below and continues an all-important silent speech. Sebastian gestures like a mad-man, and when Jeff a second time approaches and is pushed away, and the good doctor takes his cane and begins pointing at the audience-- it is assumed it is mistaken for a rifle, I think we concluded?-- and rifle shots ring out in kind.

The ball, digitally-rigged and fool-proofed, begins dropping of its own accord as the last sixty seconds are to be joyously counted out. Bullets riddle the first eight, and Sebastian's clutching the one wound he sustains dominates the next twelve. He falls-- a long and sustained one-- and this consumes another handful, which is a very long time to fall, and lands beside Seth Freemont in the midst of the ever-growing Inflicted.

He is alive, or at the very least moving, and conscious enough to be in a visible and pronounced agony. Sebastian is a malnourished and unarmed man, and there are some among the Inflicted who see this man and instantly lose their off-human complexion, and this is affronting to those around them who still carry it; they fight, amongst themselves, and this is the catalyst.

The ball has another dozen stories to drop, maybe another ten seconds, when the Inflicted begin tearing one another apart. The new year begins at some point in the chaos that follows, but there is not a single person in Eagleland who can say they rang in the new year by watching the ball drop in Market Square because ten seconds prior, something more important happened.

The barricades overflow, but only momentarily, as human beings instinctively rush forward and stop some paces in when they remember they are also soldiers, of factions, and that they are at war. A single person crosses the death-marked pock-marked and burning square in the chaos, and she may as well have been nameless but the author is privy to her name and it is Lisa Small-- more likely known to everyone present as 'the hostage of the Fresh Breeze held by Natalie Levy that undoubtedly in some part sparked the Christmas Eve riots of 1996.'

Lisa Small is of her name, and is a speck moving across the square as Natalie Levy pursues and eventually overtakes her, coiling an arm around the standard-issue-of-someone rifle Lisa has picked up and likely thinking this is averting what is to come, but Lisa drops it and Lisa continues to the mob scene that is Seth Freemont's all-hating all-killing pack where she grabs the nearest unconscious person and drags him the best she can from the violence.

Jeff kicks the nearest spotlight and it effortlessly and serendipitously highlights the bare-fisted slaughter below, and he runs to Monotoli's microphone and pleads, in his poor, poor nasal voice, "For God's sake, drop your gun and help someone!"

Natalie Levy and the grand marshal of the Fresh Breeze and the Eagleland National's presiding officer all echo the sentiment, in different words but it is the same message and for that fact the same volume of din present at Central Park a week prior is here intelligible and clear. Ness leaves Paula behind and joins the mad-but-coordinated rush, is in seconds within the maelstrom and limbs and bodies fly and fall and tumble every-which-way but Ness finds his way to the heart of it, though he has tooth and nail in him for the wear, and drags Sebastian's crippled and evermore-crippled body to the edge of the mess, where Ness himself falls flat and he thinks consciously, "I hope someone will rescue me," and from no uncertain future his prophet-part replies, "you will both be fine."

Paula is at the foot of Ness's bed in the morning at Fourside Memorial Hospital, which is packed so full that patients are being serviced on the street for an entire city-block around. Sebastian is in the bed nearest, a blanket tight on him and covering nearly-all but Ness looking at what is invisible can tell just the same there are no legs beneath it; Dr. Fletch is, however, smiling, and a pad and paper are clutched close to his heart as he-- Ness knows, and does not think-- dreams.

He turns to the window, and downtown is quarantined; a quarantine not by men with guns this time, or roadblocks, but a brick wall twelve feet tall and immaculate all the way around. Blue bodies walk into view between the buildings occasionally, and Ness is sure that this is the only solution they have at present.

"This is how violence is stopped by non-violence, then?" Ness offers as his first words, which is something out of a movie or elsewise because no one is naturally so calm and collected when they wake in a hospital; Ness had the benefit of practice when it came to this, the author surmises.

"It's a stopgap, and more importantly, happy new year," Paula smiles warmly at Ness and tickles a peeping foot for good measure. He laughs and she laughs, and this is more appropriate and natural discourse, and Paula continues, "It seems inhumane, but it seemed the best idea at the time. We don't know how to reach them with regularity. Sebastian might have been onto something, but if his best idea is nearly getting himself killed, it can't be done with regularity."

He laughs, and she laughs, and the two look at Sebastian for a moment and he is still smiling. Ness bites his lip and points to the wall, brow furrowed, and Paula explains in her usual sage cadence, "Once the rushers had gotten the injured out, and we who sat back got out the injured rushers," here Paula gently raps Ness on his leg, which is sorest at that very point and he knows she knows that, "we still numbered the greater part of Fourside and they still were fighting amongst themselves, which we'd later find was because that Freemont man was among the ones who turned plain-skin again, so we had time. A million hands can build a brick wall surprisingly fast," she smiles and looks out the window to the wall, which is to her and now to Ness so much more than a wall.

"Now that they're in captivity, and their function is like something out of a zoo, what do you think about what that Mook said? Are you still in the interstellar destroyer's camp?"

"I don't think it's a valid example anymore, I don't think they're different in form so that just makes it anomaly," and when Paula says it, Ness nods in agreement, and a figure at the door is slowly nodding too. “I don’t think it’s fair to say they’re different at all because the skin is different. Different principles for Mooks, I guess?”

"Hey, look, lovers," Jeff sarcastically-- and nasally-- makes his entrance heard, "it's still a bit heated here, and I sort of get the feeling we dawdled long enough anyway, you know?"

"I'm in the hospital, alright, and you are wearing your glasses, so you should be able to see that," Ness holds back the laughter here while the other two let it go, and this is again indication of a rehearsed and composed leader. "It does seem sort of silly though that we are leaving here-- alone, three,” he holds up three fingers here to illustrate the number, “when Fourside just proved a million people can build a brick wall in, what, hours? We saw they can fight a war, too," and his tone is dark now instead of chipper, "so why are we going at this alone?"

Paula stares off into the future, that which Ness defiantly insists is uncertain, and offers all that she can, "We're never alone, for one, and people are occupied with their problems for now--"

"Yeah, and we're wasting time helping them--"

"For now!, but they'll fight with us when we need it most," Paula sums up, all smiling now.

"Is this something we can count on, Miss Never-Wrong, Miss Also-Says-We're-Going-To-Die?"

Paula bites her tongue, and Jeff at the door gets the last word before Ness, strong and tough though he appears, collapses again: "Given what I know-- and I know a lot you 'prophets' don't, remember-- I think the best we can do is pray."