Insert pathetic excuse here! Insert empty promises of sooner updates here! Insert self-centered bitching about my horrible, emotionally trying middle-class life, my relationship status, this week's sexual preference, my fragile mental health, and the rain on the plain in Spain here! Insert witty self-deprecating commentary about pathetic excuses, empty promises, and self-centered bitching here! Insert even wittier commentary about self-deprecating commentary about...

Have a recap, since if you're still reading this bloated monstrosity you're bloody fantastic and deserve not only a recap but a big shiny medal with "FUSIONMIX IS AN ASSHAT" written on it in luminescent mauve font. You also get the biggest chapter yet (this seems to have become a trend).

I did make a few changes to the end of chapter 9 that are somewhat important. The end of this chapter has also been altered for believability per Cedric Bale's prescient observations. Thanks, man. That's why I shouldn't write at 3 in the morning. :)

PREVIOUSLY ON "A SECOND CHANCE FOR REDEMPTION"...

After escaping from the Arena and being shuttled among various dingy, unkempt hotels by a rattletrap troupe of indigo Soldier robots (whose names and Force numbers you can review in the authors' note at the beginning of the last chapter), our 17-year-old heroine-slash-narrator Tera Ankiel and the rest of her tired family and friends have finally succeeded in a backbreaking climb of a cliff in the dark to reach a plateau from which a helicopter sent by unknown benefactors in charge of the robots can rescue them. During the climb, Tera encountered a broken, disturbingly humanoid robot when she almost fell off the cliff face thanks to the hand injuries she sustained trying not to be killed by monsters in the Arena basement. Thankfully, the Gladiator Shawn managed to be just in the right place at the right time to prevent her seriously injuring anything but the last vestiges of her pride.

Now that everyone is safe onboard the helicopter following a last-minute struggle with decomposing, reanimated 'mimiga' creatures, they all have a great number of questions. Unfortunately, the Soldiers are not too keen on answering, and everyone is too tired to digest information anyway after three days of minimal nutrition, no showers, and very small quantities of sleep. The pilot, who avoided formally introducing himself, told everybody that much talking can be done upon arriving at wherever they are going and meeting somebody whom said pilot refers to as 'Sue'.

There was another name-related plot bomb as well, but don't bother hunting for it. All will be made clear...and what won't be will be dug up so that at least you remember what it was.

A Second Chance for Redemption

by Fusionmix

Chapter 10: Children of the Old War

†††

I'm not your boy

I'm not yours

I don't think I've ever been

Tera had hoped she would fall asleep sometime during the ride; alas, she did not. By this point, sound had become a monotonous slurry of thumping grey sensation dripping stickily down her ear canals into the morose recesses of her brain. She also really had to pee. Maybe that was keeping her up, but on the other hand, she had never ridden in a helicopter before, so staying awake would likely yield fun and adventures.

Actually, considering the sort of 'adventures' she'd been having lately, staying awake was not making a very good case for itself. She'd much prefer a gratuitously long hot shower and a bed that didn't smell like marijuana to more zombified albino Wookiees and broken robots and almost dying. But if she went to sleep now, there was the chance she would dream about waterfalls, ocean tides, and trickling bodies of water in motion until she pissed herself for the first time since she was...seven? Eight?

Why yes, she glumly thought, dully thumping her face against one fist a few times. It made a papery sound, and the twinge along the skin of her jaw hinted at what was probably a germinating crop of zits to end all zits. Yes, she repeated to herself, when I ride cool old Japanese helicopters, I always make sure to contemplate the local acne situation and remember the last time I peed in my pants. She nearly giggled. Instead, she made a scratchy sound at the back of her throat, which became a muffled, single cough.

"Plaaaague," mumbled Kax in a sleepy nasal baritone that was more a rumble than an actual word. The great Callix Ankiel, unable to fully form a jibe for lack of mental energy?

Tera caught herself picking on one of the opaque yellowy-white plastic covers obscuring the round little window behind her, recognized the hypocrisy in thinking of her brother that way, and flopped forward to place her face onto her knees, nose between them. The stretch hurt her back; she sat up again and looked around.

Shawn still held his 'Thinker' pose. She wasn't sure if he was asleep or merely brooding in that way that is mysterious and sexy when men in movies do it, and incredibly creepy and not- sexy when actual ones do. Alisa had flopped over on Anzl's shoulder and fallen asleep, stringy brown locks sprawled across her makeshift pillow's narrow chest. Yeah, 'not dating'. Of course not. Tera looked away.

She let her drifting eyes pass over the Soldiers and the cryobox with Chris in it and the mangled pale-skinned robot boy. Still in his seat, Kruger the pilot...at least, she figured that was his name from what Shawn had called him, though from their interaction on the plateau it may well have been Krieger. Anyway, Germanic Name Guy looked to be nodding off. Was that a good thing in a moving airborne vehicle? Oh, there he went turning a page, he was reading a paperback. A real paperback. Tera found herself intrigued. How old was he? The guy was tall but skinny, and moved and talked in a jerky, over-exaggerated, hard-to-describe odd way, some intangibly noticeable characteristic of which almost made her wonder if he was gay.

But then he had talked to that woman earlier. The Peyton he mentioned could be his son, but could also very well be a boyfriend.

Correction: The local acne situation, my bladder, and the sexual preference of the guy saving our lives right now. Way to be grateful! Forgetting about her previous attempt, Tera flopped her face onto her knees once more, again recoiling at the burn in her spine. Blah, she was out of shape. Sitting up, she prodded her soft belly and scowled. Not as though she was super fat or anything, just kind of not-skinny. Or something.

Correction #2: Zits, pee, ambiguously gay pilot, my current state of physical fitness or utter lack thereof...

The Matsushita-38H lurched, and everyone lurched with it; with exception of the artificial occupants of the bay they all jerked upright into an array of spastic limbs in possession of disoriented humans who have forgotten where they fell asleep. "Crap," barked Anzl, voice off-key as he thrust his head above the surface of whatever dream-state he had fallen into and took a gasping breath of wakefulness. "Did someone find us?"

The bass keening of the rotors dropped in pitch alarmingly. A few others added to Anzl's commentary.

"Oops," came the pilot's voice. "Uh, sorry, I didn't want to wake you guys up; you all looked so tired. We're just starting to land. Guess I should have mentioned that. If I had a fasten-seatbelts light I'd turn it on, but I don't. I haven't crashed yet, so we all should be just fine."

Alisa hissed, "How comforting."

Kax tutted in a mock severe manner directed at the pilot's lack of professionalism and said something that would probably have been witty had not the radio suddenly spat out the same woman's voice from earlier, this time much too loud and with what sounded like a dog barking in the background. "Matsushita, you are cleared to land."

"Why are you playing air-traffic controller?" The pilot griped. "I know how to land. I'm better at it than you."

"Good for you. This time you have multiple passengers and four of the robots and whatever broken one you found and a corpse in a box. You're carrying a lot more weight."

"Eh," the pilot waved a hand flippantly. "If this thing can carry a whole team of scientists and their science people gear crammed wall-to-wall, it can carry us."

Tera missed most of that, as currently the phrase 'corpse in a box' had taken up residence between her ears. How could Chris be dead? But nobody had bothered to check the cryobox until now – maybe whatever infection from the mimigas had gotten to him already? She shivered. That made two. Chris had been nice. She'd tried to kill him with a cinderblock when they'd first met, sure, but he'd been nice once they got that confusion cleared up. He'd fought down in that basement, and tripped over her fat ass, and now whatever poisonous slime on that monster's claws that mangled his arm had...how had it killed him so fast? That's why he was in the cryobox, to stop the infection. But Komodo lizards could kill in minutes with their saliva. Dead, frenzied things that bled red light probably could do worse.

The thoughts of Chris were limited to just that: thoughts. Feeling anything about them took too much energy she didn't have.

She wished the windows were transparent so she could see out. The only light from outside was the ebbing, lancing beam from what was probably the helipad flashing intermittently through the cockpit glass.

Tera could feel the helicopter circling, canted slightly to the left, but the movement no longer held much mystery. She wanted out; to just go die in some corner somewhere that nice, not-evil Gladiators didn't. Her melodramatic thoughts were interrupted as the rotors jerked the Matsushita again. A sensation of vertigo slugged its gooey fist into the blonde's stomach amidst an increasing whine. "Here we go," said the pilot with a note of generic confidence. With the blades snarling into breathy, battering crescendo, the chopper leveled out.

An innocuous bump; the rotors continued to scream, but the helicopter remained stolidly where it had come to rest. The pilot's hands flitted across the controls, shoved the joystick away, and popped the doors. An influx of gusty updraft from the quickly decelerating rotors swept dust, crinkled leaves, and chilly reality into the bay. Outside it smelled of earth and grit. "Safe," the woman on the radio cried, as though calling in a victorious baseball player. "That was great. I also remembered to move the trash cans this time, so they didn't spill crap all over the place. Come on in and then we can stop telling BS to all these people and get them settled. There's tea and decaf."

Everyone struggled out of the restraints and tottered towards the open ramp, led by an imperious Nine-00 bearing Chris' innocuous white coffin, while Tera's dad Eric leaned into the cockpit to proffer a handshake to their savior. "Thank you so much," he said firmly.

"You're welcome," came the return, equally strong. Eric's daughter reconsidered her estimates of the young man before the lure of free air became too great. Following her father outside, she helped herself to a deep breath and a look around her surroundings. The helipad was a simple concrete affair circumscribed by floodlights which, upon her looking at them, vengefully made a splotchy mess of her already limited night vision. She still managed to make out sharp-edged vertical lumps recognizable as buildings, whose uniformity reminded her of motels or apartments. Collecting herself, she hurried after the robot leader Nine. The big Soldier robot in question made a beeline for a large single-story complex with lighted windows and, thank God, what would probably be very clean bathrooms with showers in them.

As the motley crew alternately huddled sleepily or stood rigidly 'at ease' on the long porch before the door, the pilot slid up in front and knocked. "Might take a minute." He signed, yanked off his flight headgear, and swiped a bulky sleeve over his face from chin to forehead. Tera made out a sticky halo of sweaty, tamped-down hair and a beaky profile before the pilot was silhouetted violently in the suddenly-opened square of inviting yellow light.

In the door stood a woman in her mid-twenties, wearing a comfortable blouse, a skirt that somehow reminded Tera of hippies, and the longest snake the girl had ever seen looped around her neck like the world's most unattractive and un-feathery feather boa. Anzl and Tera's mother Laura, who did not approve of snakes, stepped back hastily, and for a few seconds a minor state of confusion reigned as people bumped into each other and trod on feet. Tera did not particularly like reptiles in general, but avoided adding to the situation.

"Dude," said the pilot after a few seconds of situation-appropriate staring. "Why are you wearing the snake?"

The woman sighed, and Tera instantly recognized her as the 'flight controller' from earlier. "I am carrying Kiki because the dog is disturbing her."

"Is that what was on the com? Where did we get a dog from? We don't have a dog?"

Something small, fuzzy, and white bolted out the door between the young woman's knees, barked twice in between dodging Germanic Name Guy's boots, and proceeded to jump all over Shawn. "He showed up just after you left," the snake lady explained, shifting one of Kiki's dull-gleaming coils to allow for the crossing of arms. "Sue said to feed him, so I gave him some of the cat food, and he ate it. He's house-trained, also."

Shawn had already scooped up the little dog and was scratching him roughly behind the ears, grinning widely. The pilot watched pensively. "Is that Mickie?"

"Mick," corrected Shawn. Said canine snuffled and, done with being adored, demanded down with a series of petulant sneezes.

Alisa asked the question Tera couldn't quite find words for: "Ok, we almost ran that dog over twice, and then it was in the car with us when we escaped, then it got lost and appeared back in the car, then it vanished and is here after it walked like two hundred miles across Arizona. What."

Shawn continued to watch his dog as Mick trotted around the dark patio, venturing into the pools of shadow only to sniff something, and then darting back as though affixed to the group by a loose rubber band. "Mick is a special doggie." He looked up.

"There is way too much 'specialness' right now," Kax grumbled.

The snake-lady laughed. "Not disagreeing with you. We can explain everything later. I'm Cassandra Adrian and this is Kiyohime, your friendly neighborhood reticulated python. She won't bite you. I'll go put her back in the tank; she doesn't care for the dog. Mick, was it? Come in!"

Cassandra removed herself from the doorway to allow the group entrance. Tera, jammed in the sleepy mini-stampede, was the last human to enter. She was greeted by a comfortably large room eerily reminiscent of a hotel lobby...well, that confirmed her observations on the helipad. With their more articulate host vanishing up a flight of steps, lengthy reptile in tow, Tera looked to the pilot for some explanation of what to do or where to go, and paused when she caught him turning the same bewildered stare towards retreating Cassandra.

The woman stopped as if reconsidering something. "Actually, here." Turning neatly, she trotted down the stairs, deftly unwound the stiff reptile from her shoulders and handed it to the young man in question, who barked out a muted exclamation of surprise. "You put the snake away."

"Sure," he half chirped, half grunted in that odd ascending-tone way of his. It was unfair to think so, but Tera found it an unpleasant voice to listen to, crooked and wobbly like Kax sounded when he became excited and the late onset of puberty betrayed him. The pilot's face was built oddly as well, now that he was facing towards her she could make out the contrast, of sharp chin and eyes deeply sunk in an angular, fine-boned skull, to the snub, childishly turned-up nose and soft upper lip protruding in a permanent half-smirk. The best word to spring to mind was 'severe', except that it carried connotations of dangerous attractiveness, a commodity of which he had absolutely none. His visage, akin to his voice, was—unfairly, Tera thought she should add, though that didn't stop it from being so—unlikeable. The word 'severe' could not suffice when 'pinched' volunteered itself for the role. Those jutting cheekbones could wound.

Nameless Pilot's eyes flicked from the snake languidly swathing itself around his middle and shoulders to her, and he scowled, mouth contorting effeminately. Tera experienced a sudden urge to kick him in his bitchy woman-face, except that she'd feel guilty afterwards and probably couldn't get her foot that high off the ground anyway. It's the lack of sleep talking, she reassured herself. Seldom otherwise was she afflicted with sudden bouts of longing to inflict violence. Except when Kax was involved—or, in retrospect, when scary British Gladiators tried to force open doors of one-way elevators.

Scary dead British Gladiators.

The group continued to stand about awkwardly as Cassandra walked briskly down the entry passage and around a corner, seemingly oblivious. The gentle thumping of her bare feet on the tiles stopped abruptly as she hit carpeting somewhere, and then there was no sound beyond weary breathing.

Eric Ankiel broke the uncomfortable silence with all the grace of a plate being dropped onto a tile floor, scattering its bits all over for people to step on. "You never told us your name."

The pilot froze in place. Kiyohime the snake did the opposite and nosed herself downward, wrapping languid coils around his left thigh. "Um!" He said loudly, then turned and fled upstairs with some difficulty and much clumping.

"Bye, Um!" Kax quietly called after him. Eric shrugged half-heartedly.

"What I don't get," Alisa opined unenthusiastically, "Is why they invited us in just to decorate the tile..."

Anzl put in, "Linoleum."

She did not even bother to look at him, instead choosing to lean back with a thump against the nearest vertical surface, which fortuitously happened to be a wall. "...the linoleum with our filthy, stinking selves. I have never stunk this bad in my life."

Nobody quipped. Silence leaked out of the walls, flopped across the pitted budget linoleum, and foreclosed with little ceremony on the conversation.

Tera took several deep breaths over the course of the next few moments. Each of them had been drawn with the intention of being used to express the idea that maybe they were supposed to follow Cassandra before she gave up partway through the thinking process. She was about to start again when the young woman in question reappeared, placid as ever, tribal patterned skirt sashaying a dry-rustling melody around the precise movement of her feet. "Ok, there are hot beverages for everyone, we should have sleeping arrangements figured out for the time being, and I apologize for the last three days."

Tera inhaled again. "Uh, excuse me, could we maybe, I mean, could I, I don't know if anyone else wants to but I think I could maybe want to is it okay if I take a shower?"

Somewhere in North America, an English teacher broke down sobbing in the middle of reading Heath Has Three Genetic Donors out loud to a second-grade class for reasons he would never be able to explain, since 'Heath likes the number three.' is a perfectly functional sentence.

Cassandra studied the weary girl for a moment. Inscrutably quirking one eyebrow, she pressed her lips together, regarded Tera critically, and announced, "You're only a little taller than me, aren't you?"

"Buh?" Tera said. It sounded particularly intelligent.

"Change of clothes. You'll need one."

Illuminated by decent indoor lighting for the first time in hours, Tera glanced down at herself. Oh. Though the raw scrapes on her hands had scabbed over again, they had left their marks all up and down her jeans and top. As she raised her arms to about head level and stared uncomprehendingly at her own streaked elbows, the dried blood on her skin itched and pulled. Movie blood always managed to stay so morbid and bright, glistening until the end credits or caking over thick and red—this mess had simply run and dried, as though she had pooled brown wood stain in her palms and allowed it to spill over them down her arms.

She rubbed her less-battered right thumb jerkily over the dried mess on her other arm, and as the skin dimpled, a fine mist of bloody dust sprinkled (like paprika! she thought, only nasty!) towards the tile with a papery sound. That broke the spell. She ventured, in a small voice, "Ew?" Slightly more coherent.

With a grin, Kax rearranged his slouching self. "The slasher movie look really suits you."

His sister instinctively glanced at the old, much-faded brown smears on her jeans from the ladder-sliding-against-the-house incident all those years ago. They had been joined by a host of drips and muddied dirt bits, victim to both her injuries and the climb. Vaguely, she managed, "Changing clothes would probably be good. Also, do you have a bathroom?"

Cassandra smiled in that amused, patronizing way people do for children. "Yes, we have a number of bathrooms and showers, so there will be no deficit today, just some taking of turns."

Clumping footsteps from above heralded the return of the pilot, who leaned his arms on the banister and looked down at the bunched up little group. "The one up here definitely works, but I dunno if all the rooms do yet. I forgot to ask you which blocks we'd be putting them in." He studiously avoided eye contact with anyone.

"Ten and eleven," answered Cassandra. "We can figure the details out later. For now there are showers and warm drinks."

Tera, who was not interested in the talking or the warm drinks, did quite enjoy taking a shower. It was about twenty minutes long and involved three kinds of shampoo and two types of conditioner and a lot of very hot water. It was fantastic. She dutifully ignored the muddy blood-brown tinge of the water spiraling around her toes, down the drain.

Halfway through, somebody opened the bathroom door and came in. Tera started and froze when the intruder's graceless tread prompted a jagged squeal from the floor, but whoever it was left only seconds later, shutting the door behind them. As soon as she was finished, Tera tentatively stuck her head out from behind the curtain and peered around the room. The visitor had been the bearer of clothing, two sets of it. One consisted of an oversized t-shirt and baggy athletic shorts, the other of actual people-clothes she did not care about right now. Curiously, she inspected the tag of the t-shirt and found 'Markus Adrian' written on it in faded black Sharpie. Well then, Pilot Guy had a first name and tentative identity; probably Cassandra Adrian's brother. Or maybe partner, but their interactions didn't seem to suggest that at all. Still, it didn't explain what Shawn had called him back at the plateau. Maybe Markus was an ex-Gladiator as well. He wasn't as cut as Shawn or as bulky as Derek and Chris, but...ohgodChris.

Tera threw on the people-clothes in the space of a half-minute (she didn't really want to be wearing the surly pilot's clothing) and tried to run a comb through her hair, a comb which promptly jammed itself in the snarled masses of tangles she hadn't bothered to un-mat before showering. Cleanliness had energized her; she tossed the comb aside and yanked the door open, but then thought better of it and quickly picked the comb up from the floor to place it on the counter by the sink where she'd found it.

She hadn't bothered to take in the layout of the little building that one of the robots—she hadn't been able to tell which in the dark—had gestured her family towards. Thankfully it was small, with a tiny tiled entryway adjacent to the kitchen, which opened out across the bar into a modestly-sized living room with two doors that led to bedrooms. At least, the one she'd just left led to her bedroom. No time for architecture.

"Hey, Tera," said Kax, rising from the couch where he'd been doing a remarkable chameleon impression. "Are you done with the shower?"

She blinked owlishly at him, suddenly hearing another shower running in the background. Ok, so the other door did lead to another bedroom+bathroom combo. "I'm done. Who's in the other one?"

"Your father," interjected Laura, armed with a Pocketpad and obscured next to her son on the couch. "Alisa, Anzl, and Shawn are staying next-door."

Tera found this disappointing, and quickly chastised herself. No. Futile crushes on Gladiators bad. Collecting herself, she answered, "Uh, ok, thanks. Where's Cassandra?"

"Also next-door. Were you wanting to ask her something? She said it could wait until tomorrow. Are you all right?" Laura Ankiel broke out the minefield-stare, and locked eyes with her daughter. She was not the one who looked away.

"Oh, yeah, I'm fine," Tera reassured her, a little too loudly. "Just want to, you know, figure out what's going on and everything."

Kax's muffled voice drifted out of the back room. "That's what we're doing tomorrow. And hey, which of these toothbrushes is yours?"

There were toothbrushes? "Um," said Tera edifyingly, "Whichever. I haven't used one yet. Just pick."

"I call blue!" Kax called back triumphantly. "Huzzah for the perpetuation of groundless, socially-constructed gender bylaws!"

Bare feet chilled by the tile in front of the door, Tera sighed. "Just as long as the other one isn't some gross shade of barf," she muttered, and headed out onto the yellow-lit landing. Room 10 stood across from her with its door slightly open.

Pilot Guy—Markus? Kruger? Kriegerin?—nearly knocked her over as he abruptly stepped out. "Oh crap," he said, grabbing her arm to steady her and then releasing as if scalded. "Sorry." He deliberately avoided eye contact. Tera found it reassuring in a base, passive-aggressive fashion.

She considered staring deeply into his eyes to psyche him out, but found herself staring fixedly at Room 10's welcome mat instead. A pill bug trundled slowly out from under it, casting a great humping shadow in the light of the old tallow-gold lamp fixture. "Who's inside?" She finally managed, while he began trying to delicately edge away.

"Huh?" His child-like expression of surprise startled her with just how open and not-pinched it made his face look, but it faded quickly when he realized that yes, she was in fact talking to him. "Oh, just the other people. You can go in. They're just talking, I think." Slipping deftly around her without bumping the wall, he made for the stairs. Tera considered asking for his name, but he was halfway gone by the time he finished his answer, so she didn't.

Inside, she found the building to be an exact mirror opposite of Room 11, where she and her family were situated. The only difference she could distinguish was the stringent smell of ammonia. She took two steps into the room, and sneezed by way of greeting.

Shawn, seated on the couch, glanced up. "Oh, hello, Tera," he said loudly and off-handedly, like they'd been neighbors for years and she'd dropped by to borrow detergent or something. Ammonia-scented detergent.

"...tremors. She's certain that something is keeping him from..." said somebody else, drifting in from one of the back rooms. It was Cassandra, loaded down with an armful of sheets. She stopped speaking immediately upon sighting the blonde girl in the doorway. "Oh. Do you need something, sweetie? And if you could shut the door, please, or you'll let bugs in."

"Uh, hi. Ok," Tera began, eyes darting from Cassandra to Shawn and back again before settling on inspecting one of the four circular ceiling lights. "I just wanted to ask about Chris. The guy in the box?" After a few false starts she stepped quickly in the room and pressed the door closed behind her.

Setting down the sheets next to Shawn on the couch with a soft thump, Cassandra alighted on the arm of an easy chair and cocked her head expectantly, as if she wasn't sure what Tera was getting at. The girl tried again. "When we were in the helicopter, you were talking on the intercom...the radio thing...and said he was a corpse? Is he dead?"

Shawn barked out a short little laugh, and Cassandra's face softened immediately. "I'm sorry about saying that. Shawn had the same question, and the answer is no. I was being needlessly misleading in my attempt at wit; Chris is alive."

Unable to stop the stupid grin that spread out on her face, Tera did a little hop of victory and boxed a fist into the air. She hadn't totally gotten somebody killed through her stupid clumsiness! "Will he be okay? His arm got hit by, um, something, and..."

Cassandra held up one hand to forestall any attempts at cover-up. "I know about the mimigas, Tera. Chris is going to be fine, but he'll have to lose that hand. The bacteria count of a mimiga is completely off the charts, beyond lethal."

Tera winced. Which hand had been hit? Would it affect his daily life? Would he forever blame her for being the stupid fatty who got in his way and made him trip? He'd be totally right in doing so. It wasn't like she didn't have anything better to do; she could easily have just hidden in that Arena tunnel instead of bunching herself up right where people trying to fight off the monsters would trip over her. "Will he get a fake hand? He's a Gladiator, right, so they tend to, um, have those?" Every one of her sentences, question or not, seemed to end as one. If this went on, she'd soon appropriate the world's supply of question marks.

Her answer came from Shawn. "Cassandra tells me they don't have the technology here to develop a prosthetic like the ones a lot of us used. A hospital could do it, but..." He quirked one side of his mouth upward in a lazy half-smile, finishing the sentence without words.

"A bunch of Gladiator-phobes, huh?" Tera quipped stiltedly.

He chuckled, the skin at the corner of his eyes crinkling up a little. Man, that ceiling light sure was interesting! There was even a June bug in it! An alive June bug! "Something like that. More like incarcerated-prisoner-phobes, actually. No healthcare for us." Without warning, his face became serious. Tera found it safe to look at him again. "You're lucky you met us and not some of the others."

"Yeah. Dad was talking about that."

Shawn cocked a narrow black eyebrow. "What, he give you a lecture?"

"On the terrible dangers of strangers, yes." A stupid grin wormed its way onto her features.

The Gladiator smiled in return, and bounced one palm off his knee for emphasis. "Of course. We're a perilous lot." He continued to move his hand, watching its motion as though it were some strange phenomenon out of his control. "I'm guessing you want to know what's going on."

That, Tera reflected, would be pretty much amazing. "Uh, sure. 'What's going on' as in plans for the future, or 'what's going on' as in, you died?"

With a short, huffed grunt accompanied by a squeak from the sofa, Shawn pushed himself to his feet. He hadn't showered yet. Tera held her breath for a second until the ammonia-stink took over again. Cassandra watched him rise and interjected, "I'm guessing the latter, right?"

He smiled again, this time a little ruefully. "Yeah. Want to give the backstory?"

"If you'd like me to add all the embellishments that Gillian did. I mean..." She paused hard, and flicked her eyes to Tera as though she had accidentally given something away. Tera caught a flicker of hesitation in her brown eyes. "Which backstory?"

"It's fine," Shawn said quickly. "Forget the backstory. I'll just do me." Cassandra nodded her approval and stood up; Shawn turned to face Tera in a loose military 'at ease' position and took a deep breath,. A series of muffled metallic rings outside heralded somebody's rapid advance up the stairs, and he let it out in a relieved gust.

Outside, the voice of Maybe-Markus the Pilot Guy fired off in a note of unreserved frustration. "No! I said no! Damn it, you're not even listening to me!" The door crashed open.

"Bitch!" bellowed a little boy, charging into the room and nearly taking a tumble as his feet slipped on tiles damp from cleaning solution. He turned to grip the door with both hands and swing it viciously shut; it slammed brutally into the pilot's half-raised protective hand and the wiry man jerked his upper body backwards, clutching bruised knuckles. Wow, Tera thought. 'Tis the season for injured fingers. Fa la la la la, la la la...ok, stop.

Markus quickly regained his stance, keeping a foot in the door to thwart efforts at shutting it. He spit hoarsely in pain as the boy simultaneously stomped on his toes and then slammed them in the door. Tera watched the tableau with growing horrified fascination as the man took hold of the knob to stop the door swinging everywhere; his arm shook slightly with the boy's efforts at wrenching control away. Robbed of his fun, the boy screamed instead in a voice too high and too keening to be normal, until Markus roughly shoulder-slammed the door and wrapped narrow, clawing hands around small flailing arms. "Stop it, you little turd!" Markus shouted again, and to Tera's immense discomfort, the boy burst into tears.

"Get off me! Get off get off get off..." He repeated it like an accelerating mantra of madness, and even his cricket voice rang cacophonously in the tiny room. Markus' turned his face upward, eyes wide and pleading. Tera wondered if the wildly thrashing child had some kind of mental disability, but her train of thought was interrupted when Cassandra finally intervened.

Tera had not been aware of just how much raw presence Cassandra commanded. She could not have been anything more than five-foot-five-inches, as she was a little shorted than the blonde girl, but she carried herself in a way that spoke absolute volumes. Not that she was particularly beautiful, either. The baggy shirt and hippy skirt disguised her figure, but she was not slender, and the first word that sprang to mind to describe her frame would be 'sturdy'. Tera guiltily felt a little bit better about her own poorly-conditioned self.

"Peyton," said Cassandra, firmly, and with a great deal of even volume, "Be quiet and stop screaming."

"Peyton," echoed Markus, voice shaky with the effort of what sounded like calming himself down. "Be good, okay?"

The boy, Peyton, stopped convulsing in Markus' grip. He went completely limp and drooled a sticky blob of spit onto the clean floor, giggling as he did. Markus dropped him with an exasperated shove, and he flopped into a small heap before realizing he was free and turning his small, round face sideways on the spit-slick tiles, exposing a full-lipped grin. That pouting mouth and pinched brow radiated malice unimaginably vulgar. "Eat a dick," he crowed to Markus. "I'm not listening to you."

Tera jumped in shock as Markus half-flung a staggering Peyton the few feet to Cassandra, where he curled into his best impression of a snail, cradling his pudgy arm to hide the white marks against pink skin that betrayed the strength of Markus' grip. Nobody spoke. Tera watched the marks fade as healthy color rushed their borders. There might be bruises tomorrow.

"Stop." That was the Cassandra-Voice of Death again. Tera found it chilling. She was five years old again and throwing rice on the floor as a sort of physics experiment. She was six and digging holes in her Mom's garden (who cared about those awful thorny rose-bushes anyway?) to bury dead moths she'd found on the windowsills. She was ten and giving her little brother a mullet with a pair of very dull safety shears. She was...most definitely focusing on the situation at hand.

The little boy slowly began to scramble into a standing position. Cassandra crouched before him. For a second, it looked like she would pick him up, but she just watched as he stood, and then did so as well. Her eyes, unreadable, turned on Markus. His face was stuck in a sort of expression that couldn't make up its mind on whether it was a gleeful smirk of vengeance or a badly-cracked death mask.

Tera, wishing she had been a good and sensible child and just gone to bed, slowly drifted into a peripheral position where the impending domestic apocalypse's blast radius would hopefully leave her unscathed. Markus trembled, and then he slumped against the wall beside the open door, forehead ground into the politically-correct cream-colored wallpaper, arms raised in a protective cage around his face. "Oh god, I'm sorry, I'll stop. I'll..." Markus turned quickly, one hand brushing stringy, sweat-clumped strands of hair out of his face and staring, face contorted fearfully, at Peyton. "Peyton? Hey, I'm sorry." Gone was the angry man who had wrestled a little boy. "Are you okay? Hey, kiddo?"

But Peyton was already affixed to Cassandra's legs, wrapping his arms around them like they were the trunk of a tree with his face buried in a handful of bunched-up skirt. He didn't even bother looking at the hoarse-voiced person kneeling a few feet away. "I don't want to go to bed right now. There's too much people here and the robots are fixing each other and I can't close my window so it's too loud." Cassandra sighed. Markus awkwardly clambered to his feet and dutifully did not make eye contact with the boy.

"Hey, Kruger?" Shawn said softly. "Tera had some questions about me. I was going to ask if it was all right with you to talk about it, since some of it involves you. Or would you rather wait until tomorrow?"

Markus roughly palmed at his eyes and the blunt, disdainfully pinched expression from earlier descended. He turned it on the girl in the corner, but continued to address Shawn like she wasn't there. "Talk about what? What did she ask you?"

"Uh," squeaked Tera, feeling the need to contribute. "Hi? I just asked about...well, I didn't ask, it was more that I wanted to know about the, uh, him not being dead."

"Then you don't need me. Leave my bits out, and Fuyahiko can talk all he wants. Cheers." And he left, stomping out the door like a disgruntled preteen.

Shawn stood and barked out suddenly, "Wait!"

Markus turned, door mostly shut behind him. "What."

"Storme is dead."

There was a short gap in conversation, which sounded like chewing, as thought a person has filled their mind with a thought and can't quite get their brain's badly-adhered dentures around its slippery coating. Markus said at length, "Did you do it?"

"No, they did. Merciful euthanasia." Shawn looked at the ground as he said it.

Markus beamed forcefully, "Too bad." Then the door shut, and he was gone.

Peyton chuckled, slowly, like he was hiccupping.

"I," said Cassandra as the dust settled, "am incredibly sorry you had to see that." Peyton laughed loudly again, a nasal loop of sound that played over, and over, and over again like something was the funniest thing in the world. "Peyton, stop. We need to get you to bed. You can sleep in the purple room today, okay? Shawn, I left the sheets there; three stacks. See you tomorrow then?"

He nodded gravely as she half-dragged a drooling Peyton out by the hand. He turned to Tera as soon as the door shut, and they both stared blankly at each other for a few seconds before collectively exhaling. Sitting down on the far end of the couch, Shawn massaged his temples with two fingers of each hand. "Oh, man. I was hoping it would be better by now."

Encouraged by the fact that he was looking away, and by how large and open and innocuously inviting the couch appeared, Tera gingerly seated herself on the middle cushion. Her terrible, traitorous mind summoned a memory of her falling asleep on his shoulder in the car during the first leg of their flight from the Arena. Don't blush. Don't blush.

She blushed.

Well, poo.

But he didn't raise his head, so it was fine. "Kruger...he was a Gladiator," Shawn began. "He shouldn't have been there."

Tera recalled what she had learned from Chris about how poorly the men were treated. "Was he falsely accused? What was his crime?" Some part of her brain that was still functional and not sleep-deprivation-dulled reminded her that the other Gladiator had wanted his part of the story left out, but the other parts were locked in a loop of Oh boy! Gossip! and she didn't have any mental RAM left to feel guilty about it.

Shawn didn't fall for it. "Kruger will have to tell you that. It was either jail time or Gladiator time. We met last year after he'd been in the pits for five, maybe six. The Arenas used to have a special league for people like him, and sometimes they'd be matched against us for sake of novelty or whatever."

"Five or six years? How long were you a Gladiator? If, um, it's okay to ask." He definitely looked younger than the wiry Markus Kruger.

Shawn finally looked over and smiled a bit. "For a while. It got boring, and Kruger and I started talking about life on the outside and I decided to help him get out. He was starting to go mental, too." The smile fell away. Shawn's eyes were almost black in the dim overhead light. "We all were. So I decided to see what I could do."

He shifted, leaned towards her so he could explain himself with hand motions. "See, when a Gladiator gets wrecked or killed, they get dragged down the emergency elevator and rushed through the containment level to the labs. The elevator is set to make one trip."

Oh. OH. "So." Tera laughed shortly, "That's why there was a one-way elevator."

Shawn nodded eagerly. "That's why. You remember the big doors at the end of the tunnel? The Controllers drag the corpse back there to see what they can cobble together out of it. The thing was," and here he cracked his knuckles gleefully. Angsty revelation on the mountain be damned; that enthusiasm, all directed in conversation to her, still did handsprings in Tera's stomach. "The thing was, the corpse they dragged back there that night wasn't dead."

The little handsprings tripped and landed on their faces. This was it. "That was you," Tera said slowly. "That was you, right?"

He twitched, like he was about to leap to his feet and pump his fist in the air once, but settled for a jerky nod and a grinned, "Yeah."

"So, you faked your death? Or, uh, you weren't dead? I just said that, didn't I?" Great! All that year of tormenting herself over seeing a spur-of-the-moment crush dead for naught! Or something. Blah.

"Naw, I died. Been kind of a chronic illness of mind. I mean, I always get better, but it can be pretty disturbing to bystanders. Sorry you had to see that, anyway. I hadn't quite meant to have my ass handed to me so thoroughly."

Tera nodded dumbly.

He mimed pushing some kind of trolley. "The techs rush me down the elevator, toss me into that little room, and a few hours later I wake up and start kicking ass. I'd been in touch with Kruger's contact for a while—I didn't have a name then, but it was Cassandra—and some of the Soldiers pulled a less dramatic version of that rescue they did for us. Kruger got out, and that was fine. There were some other guys I wanted to get out too, so I stuck around."

"You stayed? It was terrible down there!"

"Eh, I don't care. They were all pretty leery of me, so it wasn't that bad. This attempt at getting me and the others out didn't work out so well. Hadn't expected the undead Mimiga invasion."

She recalled the final moments of Shawn's fight against Gilgamesh, and suddenly said, "Were you trying to die again, when you fought Gilgamesh? Why did you use a plasma grenade?"

His expression was almost feral. Lips pulled back to expose slightly-crooked (but not bad looking, Tera quickly admonished herself, just Shawn-ish) teeth, the young man shut his eyes and chuckled huskily. He hooked his thumbs in his pockets. "Plasma grenade. Plasma...they love their explanations, don't they? Here, come on."

He suddenly took her by the hand—by the hand!—and cocked his head at her with an almost childish expression when she froze. With great effort she squashed down the rising mess of confused emotions and stood to follow him. His face held only excitement, nothing else. They left Room 10 and he let go once he reached the top of the stairs, courteously moving aside to let her trot down ahead of him. Tera liked the way it felt to have him literally shadowing her, lean black shade-smudge cast far ahead of her by the acrid glow of the lamp at the top of the stairs.

The bike lot spread out for infinity in the dark, punctuated by the occasional vertical slash of a darkened lamp. Somewhere on the road a car went by, and the reflective paint on the asphalt caught whatever meager glow its lights threw out, flinging streaks of mercury white across the ground. Out here the sky was actually dark and only the edges of the horizon had gone murky grey-yellow from light pollution, so if Tera looked straight up she could stare up a blank kaleidoscope until she began to make out faint pinpricks that might have been satellites. "Whoa."

Watching satellites could be pretty romantic. Maybe he wasn't just enthusiastic about whatever he'd wanted to show her. Maybe he...ok, she seriously had to stop. She had had a crush on a phantom of a nameless Gladiator, not on Shawn himself. Lingering on that would not help her. Shawn was his own man, not an amorphous ghost so easily manipulated into something she should pretend she...

"There's part of Lyra," Shawn said suddenly, interrupting her train of thought as he pointed at something she couldn't see. "Vega, I think. Get a good look; it'll be too bright to see in a moment. With an unobtrusive little step away from him, she wrapped her arms around herself and squinted up. She'd never seen an actual star before; usually nights in hyper-developed central Texas were too bright, but out here in ski-country Arizona...

Then everything went bright, and when she whipped around, mouth open to form the beginning of a startled question, she found that Shawn's hands were on fire.

She slammed her palms over her eyes too late, and shimmering gold-rimmed turquoise blobs burst beyond her eyes. "Ow," she said, for lack of anything more appropriate. What the hell.

Not a plasma grenade, said a string of quickly-connected dots in her mind. Not a plasma grenade.

"You turned around too early. I was going to warn you first." Shawn admonished her, matter-of-factly, like he'd been wrapping Christmas gifts and she'd walked into the room before he was done. "Here, I've got it dimmer now."

She cracked one eye open-it still was a little flashy-to fill her vision with the Gladiator in a broad stance, blue globules of viscous fire rippling around his forearms.

It was the most badass thing Tera had ever seen. It was, in some way, also the most terrifying. She'd never understood superhero movies, how the hero's girlfriend would be terrified by his identity, until now. She'd always expected that, if she were to someday find a boy who'd consent to kind of hanging out with her in a date-like manner, and were he to reveal himself as being the bearer of mystical powers, she would find it the most badass and/or sexiest thing ever and be the proudest girl in the world.

Except that Shawn was not her boy. There was nothing to be proud of, especially not the sudden sinking feeling that confirmed the fact that yes, she was an incredibly normal and slightly overweight. Yes, he, previously a mostly normal (That's sort of in the same category as 'incredibly normal', right? Right?) monster-fighting hottie, was now an incredibly not-normal monster-fighting hottie who, on top of his hotness, apparently had superpowers.

And yes, he was totally out of her league.

Tera found it a little hard to breathe, but that might just have been the sulfurous heat rolling over her.

The fire slurped back into Shawn's skin, tinting his veins an angry blue until he made a harsh gesture at the ground nearby and it was engulfed in vicious molten energy. Dimmer, my ass! She thought angrily as she was blinded, again. At least clapping hands over her eyes let her focus on not tearing up.

A funny hum, like an old television left on with no reception, buzzed at lowest register and prickled familiar in Tera's mind. She took as deep a breath as she could, pulled her hands down her face, and saw that Shawn was suddenly behind her. Two more hums and he was gone, and then about fifteen feet upside down above her. Tera simply watched, lost for words, as he drifted leisurely past while grinning like that disturbing fairy-tale cat whose name she could never remember.

This wasn't how superhero stories went. The hero was supposed to keep his powers hidden, let nobody in on his secret, maintain a secret identity. Or maybe he was trusting her to keep the secret for him. Breathing got a little easier. Hesitantly, she called, "You can fly too?"

"Sure!" he shouted, undignified as his very dirty shirt fell down around his chin and he pulled it back down...up?...with one hand. The motion didn't make him spin at all in reaction. Somewhere, a physics professor began weeping in the middle of teaching a 9th-grade class about Newton's Third Law. "Well," Shawn ammended, "more like levitate. But how do you think I kept you from killing yourself when you grabbed that loose bush and fell?"

Oh. Huh. Very Spider-Man of him. Did that make her Mary Jane? Oh god this was so confusing.

"Well, thanks! Like, a lot!" She thanked him. It was stilted. He didn't seem to mind.

"I'm effing Superman!" roared Shawn, zipping over her head and set a lamp-post on fire.

Was that property damage? Whatever it was, it was awesome. Tera cracked a smile in spite of herself, and yelled out, "Superman isn't a raging pyro!"

"Want a lift?" He stopped for a moment and hung, suspended. He didn't bob in midair like TV shows always made out people to levitate. He just was stopped, like gravity or force or natural laws had no hold on him at all. But a lift, to fly with him? Or even just float? No. A panic rose in Tera's chest. She couldn't deny any longer that she was attracted to him, but she had no experience with the actually mechanics of dating. Or flirting, for that matter. Was this flirting, or was he just excited to show off what he could do? Wait, wasn't that was guys did to impress girls, show off? But what did flying constitute? Half of what base (and, for that matter, was it even in the ballpark)? What if she got all awkward and no. No flying.

Well, not yet at least.

"Uh, people are probably going to hear us." Oh no, that sounded like an innuendo! Backpedal! Backpedal! "Out here. Yelling! Like idiots! Well, mostly me yelling like an idiot..." She trailed off as he stared at her quizzically. "Never, uh, mind."

"It's a good point!" Shawn shouted back. "But I can be invisible too."

And then, with all the horrible finality of a fun time ruined, Kruger's raspy squawk cut in. "That won't stop the noise or the mess you're making. The boss wants to talk now." He stood by the melting lamp post, arms crossed like his elbows could split the air molecules in front of him. "And bring her, since you feel like being such an exhibitionist and showing off." The eerie flickers of firelight made his beaky face even sharper and more unnatural in the unsteady gloom.

Shawn dropped lightly to the ground in front of the smaller man and interrupted, "Look, it's not like anyone else would have seen. I'm just letting off some steam. It didn't go so well back in the Arena. The whole plan went sideways."

"Yeah, Cass already told me about it all. We were gonna wait until tomorrow, but after that," Kruger crooked his head pointedly towards one of the slowly extinguishing patches of flaming asphalt, "we're talking now." His deep-set eyes vanished into black-shadowed crevasses in the dark when he turned, obviously wanting them to follow.

Shawn's firm grip on his shoulder stopped him. "Look, what's wrong with you? I'd have thought you'd mellowed out a little in the last, what, eleven months, thirteen?"

Kruger cast a sideways glance at Tera and made a half-hearted attempt at moving away. He grunted, "This isn't the time. Let's go." Shawn pulled his arm back with a 'hrmm' noise that said the topic was not closed.

So they went.

After trudging in sweltering silence across the lot, the three were met in the main building by Cassandra, who wordlessly ushered them down the same entryway the whole group of refugees had crowded earlier. She led them into a sparsely-furnished room that looked to be a hotel parlor with most of its furniture and decorations removed, or maybe halfway through the process of remodeling, since Tera nearly tripped on a trio of covered paint cans on her way in. It certainly smelled like paint, coupled with what might have been new carpet-foam. Next to a dusty dark-wood side table (paired with a green armchair whose pallor contrasted with it unfavorably) was a wheelchair.

In the wheelchair sat a very small person, swathed almost entirely in clothing and grossly misshapen. Tera, trained since infancy in the grand social art of not staring at people, inspected the armchair while ruthlessly investigating the figure with her peripheral vision.

It hardly exceeded three feet in height, but what made her stomach unsettled was that its legs bent the wrong way. Nothing in the motions of its hands...its paws...said it was human. It glowered at Shawn and spoke. "You're the one, then," it growled, reedy and female, critical and harsh. "The resemblance to Date is uncanny. Given that firework show earlier, I would have thought you'd take more after your mom." It cocked its head a little and inspected him more closely. "Well, maybe you did. You've got an actual chin."

Shawn rearranged his stance into a mirror of Kruger's assertive one, and cut off the creature before she could continue. "Well, hello to you too. I go by Shawn. Can I ask who you are?"

When it removed its veil, the creature's face bristled with dusty cream-toned fur—almost the color of Mick's coat, Tera noticed—set around piercing liquid animal eyes. "Sure you can. I'm Sue Sakamoto," she snapped. "But the real important question right now, Shinji Fuyuhiko, is of whether or not I kill you."

Word Count: 9195. Hell yeah. Too bad the reason it's so long is because it's so damn slow. I had to set up a whole pile of new plot threads in this chapter, and while I could have split it in two, that would have meant I'd update on time, and we can't have Mix doing that, can we now?

This chapter is for I'll eat yourself, who wouldn't stop bugging me about it. Sorry I missed your birthday, man. The update may be two months late, but at least it's here, right? Too bad I didn't get it out yesterday; could have coincided with Duke Nukem Forever's UK launch.

Review or whatever. I'm going to finish this thing, no matter how long it takes. Also, THE FIRST CHAPTER HAS BEEN REWRITTEN. Rewrites of the next couple of chapters (probably up through 4; after that I don't cringe when I read it) should go up in matter of weeks. Per I'll eat yourself's request the originals are being preserved at my Fictionpress, where I am also known as Fusionmix. Just plug 'Fictionpress Fusionmix' into Google and I should pop up.

Next chapter starts the real fun. Exposition over. Thank you for your patience so far.