(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 1 minute)

Ingest the Ass

“Say, what’s that I hear? My garden, ever so square as I am, used to be so peaceful, but now there’s all this noise from amorphous demons beyond our ken. I hope they can’t bother my sprinkleberries. Used to have bulletmelons too, but God went and tore that strip away; now I’ll never see them again.

Mustn’t criticize. The world doesn’t belong to me, with my paltry four corners. In fact, I must do more than avoid criticism. I’m supposed to be listening, those were my heptagon priest’s instructions. What was it?

Ahh, the Hidden Body. Remember everything said about the Hidden Body… and about a Prince Rudolf, something called a Ruandan, and something called a Sunday. Is that what this hissing little voice hiding in the southern half of my garden is saying? I can’t see anything, but that’s where the tear is, so there must be a nook I’m missing. Speak up little voice.

Mhmm, yes. I see. You’ve already visited the buffet, so your future is secured. Don’t know what that means, and glad I’m not supposed to. Anything else? You see the United States? I wish I saw the united state of my garden once more!

What’s that? New Zealand? Oh, now that you say it, I was supposed to remember that one! Now what must I do? Take it to a priest, that’s what everyone’s been saying. They can talk to circles who can tell God. Perhaps they can mention the name of Abbott Z. Square and I’ll be rewarded with the reunification of my dust lettuce patch. Off I go, to the glass cathedral in the north, where us humble squares and triangles can witness the finest multifaceted shapes, dyed radiant colors through the rainbow of stained walls.”

“Steady, Citizen Square.”

“Hello Constable Triangle. I’m here to see my priest: Judith D. Heptagon. It’s urgent. I’ve overheard something in the far south I think God will be very interested in.”

“The south? That would be the first relevant report we’ve heard out of there. Strange, very strange. They’ve all been from the north so far. Typical, very typical.”

“Slide aside please.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that Citizen. The priests do not want to be disturbed. There’s a circle visiting today, big to-do. They’re all listening in the northernmost corner, because that’s where all the erm… reliable reports come from.”

“My name is Abbott Z. Square and I’ve been listening reliably; I’m telling you I heard something in the south. I’ve got an entire angle over on you, mister, so you better listen.”

“Be that as it may-“

“Don’t point your point at me! I’m just doing my civic and moral duty. Take me inside the cathedral!”

“The best I can do is have you meet our commanding officer; She’s a pentagon.”

“I’m practically a pentagon! There’s a buffet in some place called New Zealand! I don’t get it, so neither do you, but the priests will.”

“This way Citizen, General Pentagon will sort this out.”

“I don’t want- ohh! Curse this new way of doing things. If the world wasn’t so small I could talk to somebody else. Convincing a pinhead like you could take a lifetime.”

“And who is this fine square before me?”

“General Millicent B. Pentagon, this is Abbott Z. Square. He says he’s overheard something regarding New Zealand… from the south.”

“Thank you Constable, that will be all. Now, Mister Square, you should know it is the official policy of the glass cathedral, which is the capital may I remind you, now that the courthouse has been torn elsewhere, that our listening efforts are concentrated in the more fruitful north.”

“What does policy matter? God needs this information, regardless of its source.”

“Not regardless, sir! Never regardless! Would you listen to some loony report from a feral irregular? We get them around here, begging for scraps, and they say all sorts of crazy things. You haven’t been speaking to them, have you?”

“No, of course not. But why can’t I speak to my priest, or this circle even? They can tell God if they like, I don’t need the recognition, just as long as you let me tell them.”

“How about you share this information with me, and then I will decide whether or not to pass it up the chain of respect. I have one more angle than you, an extra bounce for rumination of these ideas. My mind will inherently be more thorough and more competent.”

“Well… there’s no arguing with that. An angle is an angle. The more you have the more accurate your perspective. Once you’ve seen the whole circle there’s nothing else to see, except where God’s voice is coming from.”

“It doesn’t come ‘from’ anywhere, Mr. Square. He is the world. I’d straighten out my tone if I were you.”

“Then he must’ve been asleep for all of history before we heard him, General Pentagon. His power to make the world smaller is impressive, but it’s also… destructive, don’t you think? It only ever takes. It’s like me taking a leaf from my dodecagourd vines. I have a fantastic garden; I’ll have to show you some time if it’s still there when I get back.

Anyway, the leaf. It’s alive, like our world, and it only takes a small amount of force from one of my corners to tear it in two.”

“But you’re suggesting that God is somehow beyond our world the way you are beyond the leaf. That’s absurd, and blasphemous.”

“No, all I’m saying is that if time was spent watering and growing our world instead of pruning it I would be much more impressed.”

“That’s enough! I should never have entertained these ravings. Out with you. If you return you’ll be pummeled until you’re an irregular yourself. Constable! Get back in here and toss Abbott here as far south as you can.”

“This isn’t right! Unprod me you glorified line segment! General! Mark my words! Nothing will grow if you do not till the truth!”

…

“This is i-informative. It will make me a b-better strategist in the long run. But don’t run. If you run you’ll be stomped into homunculus jelly,” Chessica Tarkower stammered to herself, terrified to the collapse point of her logic. Her trembling was confined to a square of quartz polished flat; its seams extended into a field of others: sixteen by sixteen.

A chess board squared was an insult to her capacity to plan, even from an angle that was far too low, but she hadn’t the ability to recognize the offense at that time. The fact was that she was not in charge. Her team would most likely defer to her, but the official role was token. On the board. A subject to the game, not a participant.

Little time had been allotted by the official that roped them into this impromptu Little Wars scuffle. Through Nimuwe Tarkower had managed to get the others to move to pick-up points that suggested they were invited guests. No matter the risk to the mission, she needed all of them there, as each was a weapon when she was otherwise unarmed. Her only asset was the chunk of brainpower she’d stolen from Bragi, which apparently came with some of his survival instinct as well.

The referee presiding had brought a plain board with no model buildings, foliage, or other structures she could work into her planning; he also dictated starting positions, and her perceived weakness had her placed in the back three, behind Jack and Elizabug. Darnette was furthest, with Nevry two squares to Chessica’s right.

Opposite them stood the minimils that should have been their allies: Vesperos, Ontoes, Drookarkus, Gildny, and the fairy with the turquoise hair. The majority were just doing their duty or obligation in defense of the bee, who was, imminently by force, defending his twin arrows. Chessica swallowed, balled her fists so her trembling fingers would be less obvious. Presumably the godly insect did not want to kill her, as that could have been achieved by betraying her team’s status as uninvited guests to the official, yet at the same time he did not look ready to lie down in forfeit.

How far would each of them go to win? That was the primary question, and she was out of time to ponder it, the starting whistle blasting most of her weaving ideas out of her head in gnarly knots. Remember, she drove into herself like a rail spike, remember the rules.

Coin flip had determined the ghosts of the Haeve-Maen would go first. Turns would alternate teams and members after that. Each token was allotted squares of movement as compensation for lack of combat ability, so the referee had insulted her again by affording her the most: six squares in total, no diagonal movement. As the most powerful there, the scheming fairy had but one. The others were somewhere in the middle. In one turn a token could both move and attempt one attack defined as either the launch of a projectile, the swipe of a weapon, or the casting of a single magic, be it curse, blessing, or enchantment.

Technically, the word calmed her more than all others, they could still win the day. Little Wars always had stakes, and after both sides spoke their piece the referee had decided on victory conditions and rewards. The first team to have four of five tokens incapacitated would lose. However, there was an alternate goal the ghosts could attempt. If, at the end of a turn, they were in possession of both of Vesperos’s arrows, they would be declared the winners.

Technically, her breathing slowed again, they could get the arrows without seriously wounding anyone and end this with minimal resentment, free to then complete their mission. There was another shadow cast upon the board, quite literal, and when she glanced over her shoulder she saw that, among the curious human spectators, there stood the smiling Sunday.

Any decisions on that front would have to wait until after. That broad side of a barn couldn’t be hit if they didn’t have anything to shoot. Her focus shifted to the game, narrowed on the arrows. The first turn was declared, only one minute provided to act. A lucky tails had given them the initiative, but token order was established on the first turn by the teams themselves.

“I could spear somebody,” Elizabug offered, claw already fondling a mechanism built into the back of her pin. A good twist would release pressurized gas, fire the tip at high velocity. Not a bad start, but far from the best.

“No,” Chessica instructed, slightly slurred by a tongue swollen with fear. “We want the arrows, not flesh wounds and not death.” She turned to her assassin eggty in the hopes precision could function just as well in the avoidance of an execution. “You can fire your whisker-limbs, yes?” She nodded her beak inside her transparent shell; the mechanism at the pivoting joint was similar to the myrmidon’s pin.

“I can hit the arrows,” she assured, “and reel them in.” A quarter turn had elapsed already, so Chessica gave the approving nod. Quickly taking aim by leveling a whisker at Vesperos, who was on the front line thanks to divine exoskeletal fortitude, Nevry flicked an internal switch with her foot and launched the entire gray limb as if from a speargun. A fine chain fed out behind it.

It might have grazed Vesperos, and much as he wished to keep his arrowhead jewels, his life was still more precious, causing him to turn away, exposing the side of his quiver. Those who have stepped barefoot on the shedding of a cat could attest to the peculiar penetrating power, single hairs often lodged in the sole more like splinters. That same quality was extended to the whiskers, exaggerated by their robustness, which was how it skewered the quiver halfway down its length and ripped it from its strap.

Nevry had a crank for drawing the chain back, but not the time to use it, so instead she spun in place as fast as she could, turning her lower whisker-limbs into a corkscrew as the retracting chain wound around her body.

The quiver was pulled along, and a grasping Vesperos couldn’t get his claws around it. A quarter turn remained when the Nevermoral eggty raised the quiver in triumph, seconds frittered away in the team’s premature celebration. The whistle hadn’t blown; the game was still on.

“Mighty kind of you,” the fairy with turquoise hair called out, “I’ve never gotten to hold one of these.” All eyes were drawn to her as she played with one of the arrows, turning it over to watch the bubbles and swirls in its crystalline head. Chessica replayed the turn in her memory and filled in what the bee’s body had blocked from her line of sight. Nevry had overshot to ensure sufficient penetrating power, causing the whisker and its skewered prey to land in the fairy’s square, where she had time enough to pluck one out before the chain was recalled.

A nasty snag in positioning, Chessica chastised herself. If she’d had a little more time obviously she would’ve advised against such a straight shot that included a scheming fairy who knew how to play all the angles. In terms of raw influence on the world the fairy was extremely powerful, but most of her magic was channeled through enchanted proxies and backroom deals. Her low hand to hand focus was what put her in the back row behind mere Lilliputians who were more experienced on various battlefields.

And her action was entirely sanctioned by Little Wars rules, as she hadn’t stepped out of her square. Simply bending down and picking something up did not count as an out-of-turn attack action.

So they had one arrow on the first move, not the worst position to be in when that position was also still the starting gate, but now the other half of their prize was held by their wiliest and most capable opponent. This was demonstrated as soon a she was finished ogling what she very much would’ve liked to keep for herself. Her wings were usually rolled up like carpets on her back; one loosened enough to accept the arrow dropped over the shoulder into its swirl before tightening once more. Now they couldn’t even see where it was.

Little Wars rules would prohibit her from magically transporting it off the playing field, Chessica informed her teammates. Plus, she won’t discreetly hand it off, the homunculus added silently, as she couldn’t bear to part with it even with such low odds of keeping it. There are reasons scheming fairies and diminished gods don’t ally more often.

With deadly intent still not established, the rest of the turn order played out in bloodless quiet as the tokens repositioned and shuffled closer to the clash: Nevry Mevry, Vesperos, Elizabug, Ontoes, Jack, the fairy, Chessica, Drookarkus, Darnette, and finally timid Gildny Mildny, who had to be admonished into advancing at all. The poor little banker had no warfare modifications, though his golden shell might have granted greater armor than the standard substandard of his people. Mostly he spun on his base, fretting himself dizzy.

Two more rotations passed primarily in rearranging; Chessica did not let them go to waste. Strategies were best at their most adaptable, and the best lessons were learned mid-combat. Utilizing this wisdom she had her team arm themselves while in motion, using sanctioned actions that did not eat into their turns, just like the fairy claiming the arrow. Nevry’s spare whiskers were passed out. When tested against the board it became clear a good strike with the tip of one would hit like a bullwhip.

They were mostly to mislead, if everything went well. Chessica had to think not just about the mission, but also about how they would be received upon their return. Minimil was home base; should she perfect her game it would be pruned to just home. Killing Hestia’s favored underlings would sabotage that, whether or not the Hidden Body was exposed and publicly flogged.

To do this right was to do this without a single maiming, which was even more of a restriction with sloppy hooligans like the knave of clubs and Elizabug Inarug on her front line, both of whom refused to take a whisker, thinking themselves better equipped already. At least they were taking her advice on where to stand, largely because they did not care who their opponents were.

Each move knitted the ideal pattern tighter. Nevry to Vesperos, whose glass shell was too thick for his stinger. Darnette to Drookarkus, who could charm the affable community servant into dropping the fork-bident he used in his soup-diving days. Jack to Ontoes, dual rapiers against Wonderland evasion. Elizabug to Gildny, crass street energy against a gilded jewel fallen off his fence.

But of course, that left the homunculus herself dueling the fairy with the turquoise hair. Evenly matched they might be in strategy, but when their spaces shared a side the advantage would inherently go to the creature from Oberon and Titania’s realm, who could rewrite reality with a tap of a wand, who could grant flight by blowing dust from her palm, and who could bring Ms. Tarkower’s clothing to life and order it to strangle her.

Yet that was the position she sought. Getting there had to come first. All of Chessica’s whispered advice became prophecy, confirmed when the first truly violent interaction came to pass between an acting Vesperos and a responding Nevry. As she had predicted, the aggrieved bee would be acting the most rashly in trying to reclaim the property produced from his own body.

The god went straight for the eggty who had stolen it and kept it in her possession as the most qualified defender. Perhaps his sting could not break her glass, but he went for it regardless. Mid-thrust the eggty followed Tarkower’s order and grabbed one of the devices floating in her transparent medium: a flash bulb.

It went off, blinding the bee, whose anatomically incorrect eyelids were always slow on the uptake. Every lens of his compound eyes was thoroughly dazzled, granting plenty of room for the eggty to dodge his strike. Time remained in his turn, but only one action was allotted, so the referee’s whistle pierced the bubble over the conflict and warned him to do nothing further save rub the spots out of his eyes.

Stained Atlas was extremely noisy, yet Chessica heard only the whistle. As a homunculus of limited function she’d been bred to disregard everything outside the game. Everything between the two parties was tense awkward silence, until she spoke up.

“Don’t spill his white Eliza,” she warned the myrmidon whose turn it was, and who was now in position to do so. The stopwatch ran.

“But look at him!” She menaced the helpless golden egg some more, enough that he tilted and teetered on his back. “He’s beggin’ to be shished and also kabobbed.”

“Please refrain,” the egg blubbered. “I’m just here to make the teams even! You can ignore me!”

“Now how can I ignore such a pretty bauble sharin’ room and board with the likes of I?” his tormentor preened. No white was the order, not no gold. She leaned over him and scraped her pin across the entirety of his face: a nail on a luxury chalkboard. A curl of gold was produced, which Elizabug snatched and wrapped around her pin like twine as a keepsake that would probably wind up a sellsake. It also produced more blubbering, helpful this time.

“I forfeit! Is that what I say!?

“Really Mr. Mildny…” Ontoes grumbled. The whistle blew.

“Yes! We’re finished, yes? I can leave?” he asked the ant-woman straddling him. When he tried to rock free she locked him in place with the chitinous spines of her legs. Her eyes made a feast of the thin strip of lifeless color, right where she’d scratched him. Instead of more gold it had clearly revealed gray underneath.

“Why you rotten stinker,” Elizabug teased with an entwining whisper. “You’re just gilded!”

“Keep your voice down please,” Mildny begged. “No one is interested in the economic opinions of an egg from the goose that lays leaden.”

“You better be watchin’ for the post, stinker,” she nearly salivated onto his exposed character, “because I’ll be sendin’ you some mail. It’s not goin’ to be gold and it’s not goin’ to be gray. It’ll be black. Now roll on.” Once freed the eggty did as instructed, whimpering and wobbly.

Technically that put the ghosts ahead on the numbers, but the economist was hardly a loss to their rivals’ combat readiness. The much bigger blow came on the next turn when Ontoes Wallagog, wielding the initiative alongside both his swords, took an expert stance and prepared to strike at Jack from two squares away.

“You’ll hit a dozen snipe eggties before you so much as poke me,” the Wonderlander boasted. Like his sanity, his flesh could be as holey as Swiss cheese if he willed it, but Mr. Wallagog was no pushover. Having protected the woodland borders of Minimil on hummingbirdback for years now, including a few collapsed-ground breaches into the Wonderland network underneath the barn, he knew to take a more indirect approach.

So far this had proven to be a game of attacking treasures instead of chests; the Lilliputian gambled and struck with his weapons arranged into a pair of scissors. Jack’s response was evocative of the most famous photographic evidence of Wonderland, which featured a stream of feline body parts bloodlessly drifting out of a hole in the ground like bubbles up from a lake bed. His Wonderland neck momentarily vanished, right when the scissoring swords sliced.

But then something wilted gently against the back of Jack’s reappearing neck. He grabbed at it as Wallagog smugly found a way to pace about his single square. The intended injury had been delivered to the rolls of Flatland strapped to his back. Jack grimaced as he read the world playing out across it as one might an essay by Noozy Cornerlore. Dozens of colorful shapes flocked out of their homes, parentheses doors swinging, and bumped up against the new boundary to their world.

“Be grateful to your god,” Jack demanded of them. “There was great evil on the other side of that cut. I only just saved all your skins, and all you are to me is skins.” Irregulars on up to circles ballyhooed, tossing Flatland grass as confetti since there was no depth to allow it roots. “Now ignore anything you hear for the next minute.” All of them went still and silent, as the most effective way to ignore was to pretend to not be alive at all.

“Big man, I forfeit!” Jack shouted at the referee, beginning his walk off the board before the whistle was anywhere near a pair of lips. When it came it drowned out his muttering, “Lousy lilly, what does he think this stuff grows on trees? It’s underground! That’s the opposite of trees.”

“Jack!” Darnette scolded him, expecting Chessica to join in even louder given that it was her plans being scattered to the halitosis crosswinds of Stained Atlas. But the other homunculus was already several steps ahead of the development. She’d even moved past the idea of combat entirely.

For Jack’s forfeit skipped his turn altogether, with the fairy up next. She continued to approach widely, soft-circling the ghosts of the Halve-Maen as if in orbit. Her skills were not hand to hand, her actions always taken by magically animated proxies. Was she now in range to cast such a spell on one of their belongings?

Little Wars had been fought enough over the years to make this particular blood spatter asterisk very clear. In the event that magic or science should create additional entities on the board they would immediately be classified as one of two types: motivated or animated. Those deemed motivated had souls and intellects of their own, a good example being a ghost called up from one of various beyonds to possess some available material. Such a ‘motivated’ would then be burdened by all the same rules as the token that summoned them.

Conjuring a ‘motivated’ counted as a complete action, and it would then need to take a turn of its own, which would not immediately follow its creation, instead being placed at the end of the rotation to allow response time. If, on the other hand, the result was an ‘animated’, a partial will created for the occasion with no emotions of its own, it would not be afforded its own turn. Its resulting action was still part of its creator’s action.

Were the fairy with the turquoise hair so inclined, and in range, she could cast an animating spell on, say, Elizabug’s pin and order it to wriggle until the myrmidon’s insides were a fine hooligan puree. Chessica suspected this would not be the case, confirmed when the fairy completed the movement portion of her turn and prepared to cast on an item already in her possession: the other love arrow.

Against a scheming fairy and a venomous god with an armoring exoskeleton, Chessica’s crew stood little chance in a truly aggressive battle. From that she’d surmised that, with both parties somewhat unwilling to draw blood, a loophole was the best option. Loopholes were both the fairy’s greatest strength and weakness, so much so that she was an even bigger liability than the cowardly flaking eggty that had already vacated the board.

Tarkower knew she bent the knee to Hestia while privately worshiping her own enterprises. As such all actions she took appeared loyal to Minimil while surreptitiously leaving open avenues of great personal benefit, such as acquiring one of Vesperos’s arrows. Between her dainty hands the fairy generated a column of sapphire light that spun the afloat arrow in its beam. When she was finished it remained cloaked in blue and hovered by her side.

“What did you do?” the protective bee asked her.

“Now it goes wherever I want it to go on its own,” she answered him with prim and dismissive confidence. “If stolen it will drift back quickly.” Clever and totally expected, Chessica thought, disarming Vesperos of complaints without returning his arrow to him. More importantly, the arrow was now an ‘animated’ with no intent to do anything other than stay near its master, thus ending her turn and making it Chessica’s, which she intended to be the final action.

The whistle blew to make it official. It was imperative to waste as little time as possible on traversal, so the homunculus marched along the straightest path until she was face to face with the fairy with the turquoise hair, whose eyes were like the full moon reflected in a cat’s, surprised and undaunted. Close enough to speak. Far enough from the others to not be overheard. She selected the perfect volume.

“The arrows have the power to reveal the Hidden Body,” she told the fairy plainly. All the pieces on her chessboard scalp lined up in smart diagonals. “If we succeed we will count you among us in our reports to Hestia. If we fail, then you tried to stop us and I only acquired the arrow through some clandestine hypnotic homunculus trick. You risk little, and could gain much.”

“I could also bring your hat to life and make it smother you,” the fairy said through glittering blue lips.

“Fearing you appropriately was part of my assessment, so you’ll forgive me for rushing past it. You don’t need to hand it over. Momentarily want it to be mine, and it will. Then play it off.” The fairy said nothing at all and did not look away. Seconds ticked down. The referee took a breath, pursed his lip against the whistle. Then the arrow betrayed her temptation, drunkenly wobbling across squares and smacking Chessica’s shoulder. She snatched it, and the whistle sounded.

“Game!” the referee declared, to groans from the audience who had expected more carnage. “Forty-love!” The joke lightened their moods as they dispersed, all but Vesperos’s as he buzzed in consternation.

“My arrows!”

“Oh dear!” the fairy with the turquoise hair squeaked as Tarkower stepped aside and cleared the air between them. “I’m sorry Eros I don’t know what came over me. She must’ve used some kind of mind trick!” As hoped, that put an end to it. Homunculi could emerge from their heads of origin wielding all sorts of powers defined only by the lines people subconsciously drew between their own faculties. Nothing short of an alchemist’s dissection could disprove Chessica, as a homunculus of strategy and manipulation, was capable of hypnosis.

Defeated, the striped little god took to the wing to cool his temper, to be quickly replaced with Chessica’s team huddling close for their next set of orders, Jack included.

“I’m surprised you’re here at all,” Darnette said to him, trying to slap his shoulder, the flesh bending out of the way like jostled gelatin.

“Extra, extra,” he said gleefully, wagging a few rolls of Flatland in his hand. One of them unfurled, revealing a town that looked like a hydrophobic floor plan with a rainbow of staining droplets searching for acceptance. “Can you read this headline or are your ears illiterate?”

“I’m not in the mood Jack,” Chessica said as Nevry silently came up behind her left, the fairy with the turquoise hair also suddenly closer on her right. “You have more word from our spying shapes?”

“Two words,” he clarified, “both curses.” Elizabug pierced their circle. A gap was present on her pin between a skewered flake of Gildny’s gold and a barbecued pill bug, on which Jack draped one of his Flatland posters like a wet towel while he explained the contents of the first. “First off, somebody else is working for the Hidden Body now. A challenge was issued two minutes ago.”

“So now we have to leave the Ruandan behind, unless we split up,” Chessica grumbled. “Who is it this time?”

“Somebody called Friday.” Those who had paid closer attention to the players at Stained Atlas felt a jolt. One of Sunday’s men: the quiet anarchists hiding as loudmouthed anarchists. Where was Sunday now? He’d been there a moment ago. Looking around didn’t turn him up; how did someone who was so literally a mountain to them just disappear?

Tokens raced across Chessica’s scalp at such speed that she had to remove her hat to avoid it being torn apart, though her hands worried its brim enough to keep that a risk. Were the anarchists and the Hidden Body one and the same, choosing to finally fuse in a conflagration of revelation? Had the latter identified a way to infiltrate the former, swelling it with yet more clandestine powers? If their enemies were multiplying it could hardly get worse.

“Second,” Jack said, ripping the poster off Elizabug so fast she went spinning away like a top, “this Friday man is wading toward New Zealand as we speak.” The pieces atop Tarkower stopped dead, fell off. Her body would regenerate them later, when she felt in control of the situation once more, if that was ever true again.

“Your whatsits fell off,” Jack said, his arm detaching as if he had bent down to grab one. Experimentally, he ate it. None of them even heard the peculiar crunching, like an envelope full of cockroaches being crumpled. Their minds were elsewhere, somewhere in the vicinity of the representative of New Zealand. That was still on the far end of the convention floor, and Nimuwe was only capable of instant communication across such a gap, not transportation. Even a strolling human blocked by the crowd every other step would still make it there much faster.

“We can’t get there,” the de facto leader of the ghosts said in resignation. “Whether it’s a challenge or conversion, they wouldn’t do it if they weren’t sure. Little Wars is about to become a monopoly, among the worst of all game types.”

“Oh no…” Darnette commiserated.

“Bollocks,” Elizabug said with snapping mandibles. Nevry sullenly kicked one of the tools floating in her albumen solution. The knave of clubs went back for a second snack off the quartz floor. And the latest addition to the ghosts of the Haeve-Maen consoled Chessica by drifting out of her hands and across her vision. She followed the glowing arrow with her eyes, over to the fairy, who stroked the side of its crystal point as if it were the chin of a pet dove. Then she noticed the dejected homunculus’s stare.

“What? You don’t need it now,” the fairy commented. “I’ll find some use for it.”

“You’ve enchanted it so it goes where you want it, yes?” Chessica whispered. Luckily the fairy had ears sensitive enough to hear any scheme she might be interested in. Her answer was affirmative. “And you want us to succeed, as you then get partial credit. In order for us to succeed, the arrow must land in Friday’s flesh.”

The others started to pick up on the implication, huddling closer, all except Jack, who was helped along by Nevry Mevry nudging him with a whisker. The arrow started to float away from the fairy with turquoise hair. It accelerated.

“My desires are not exactly under control,” she admitted. “Hurry.” Vesperos’s blue-clad arrow bolted, and the ghosts after it in a desperate bid to latch on. As in the match that had just petered out anticlimactically, their Nevermoral eggty’s projectile whisker scored the first point. A deft swivel after a precisely aimed shot wrapped the chain around the arrow’s shaft. Its path inclined, lifting the glass egg off the board that was rapidly running out of squares.

Nevry trailed several more whisker limbs, and it was up to the others to leap and latch. First Jack, then Elizabug who assisted Darnette, and finally Tarkower. Together they sailed first between the heads of the attendees, and then slightly over. Before they’d escaped the haze of breath, gasps of those who misinterpreted them as flying insects sent them swinging and spinning on the chain, disorienting them greatly.

As it should happen disorientation was a comforting state of orientation to the Wonderlander who had often slept in a pot of vigorously stirred laundry in the Castle of Clubs, only emerging when a clean outfit happened to land on his correct body parts. His thoughts hadn’t been clearer above ground than they were above Stained Atlas, reflected in his sudden helpful accuracy.

“When we land on Friday, New Zealand will be off his bow by thirty-eight degrees.”

“Nevry!” Chessica shouted over the gale of their passage. “Can you make that shot?”

“Yes,” the eggty answered succinctly just as they faced a new threat. At first it seemed a toupee had leapt off a passing man’s head to attack them, but as it flew closer the minimils saw a set of claws emerge and a maw of white teeth. It was Edwin the Persian, who had menaced two of them before they’d even emerged from the walls.

The cat had committed their scents to memory and vowed to act as soon as they were detected again. Height and speed had put their markers on the wind, snapping the cat out of the languor he cultivated any moment that he wasn’t actively irritated. He’d clawed his way up the back of a very expensive dress and launched from a shoulder to snatch them out of the air.

What the cat hadn’t accounted for was finding an eggty dangling from the same object, which was his preferred prey thanks to his time at Ukridge Farms. He changed target midair, with the eggty targeting him in turn, for Nevry was of raven stock, and those birds long had a rivalry with cats over who served as the best familiars to the witches of the world. The eggty leapt off the Vesperos-Turquoise Express and tangled her whiskers into Edwin’s to disorient him.

“No,” was Nevry’s only word to the rest of her team as she fell with the yowling beast: the amended answer as to whether or not she could take the critical shot.

“That leaves I!” Elizabug volunteered, now bearing a few of her teammates on her pin, having been forced to shuffle over quickly while Nevry sacrificed herself. “If I couldn’t take shots I wouldn’t be banished in every pub from World Drawer One to the sandy castles!” There was no time to argue; the launching mechanism built into the tip of her pin would have to have engineering as sound as the Nevermoral’s coop.

Carefully as she could with the wind whipping, Chessica removed the corked tip of the pin and loaded the other love arrow into the shaft. All Darnette could do was hold her own voluminous curls out of the way, allowing her to see their approach. She yelled warning. The remaining ghosts braced themselves, not knowing what sort of impact to expect.

None at all, as it turned out. They opened their eyes to discover they had slowed at just the right pace to not feel anything jarring. The arrow had not even pierced Friday’s clothing, instead hovering just off the surface of one shoulder’s backward slope. Chessica chastised herself for not expecting that, as it was consistent with the spell’s previous behavior. It hadn’t smacked the fairy in the face, had it?

“Disembark!” she ordered the others as she hopped off and clung to the man’s suit jacket. Darnette, Jack, and Elizabug followed right after, and once they were clear Chessica grabbed the arrow and thrust it through the materials until she felt it pierce skin. The enchanting liquid’s eternal dance ceased inside its ampule as it became a draining whirlpool emptying into the anarchist’s bloodstream.

The initial effects of the drug would cover them momentarily, stalling Friday in place and preventing him from noticing much of anything while his eyes ravenously sought someone similarly afflicted, including a lingering pinprick sensation and four especially large beetles using him as a watchtower.

“Thirty-eight!” Elizabug crowed as she stood first and aimed her crystal-tipped harpoon into the crowd. It was Darnette who took her by the back half of the pin and turned her to face her other thirty-eight degrees, starboard, where the representative of New Zealand was actually standing. Any closer and Friday’s target would’ve noticed the approach. They’d almost failed their mission by one human step.

“Do it!” Chessica instructed strenuously. “We’ll be investigated any moment!” The myrmidon didn’t need to be told twice, would’ve acted before the first time without Darnette’s guiding intervention. Her lone antennae twitched and tilted like a divining rod until it found the path the arrow should take.

“Here’s love in your eye!” A jet of steam hissed out of the pin as she twisted a section of it it a specific number of notches, as if opening a padlock. A sparkle of pink rocketed away and disappeared in the distance, safely within the silhouette of the representative. The hit was confirmed when they went to scratch their back, lost the impetus with their hand poised, and looked around dreamily as if everyone’s scalps were turning into a terrain of heavenly clouds.

“Everyone hold,” the gaming homunculus encouraged, her own hands alert and still like spiders caught in the coin flip of fight or flight. But something seemed off. She’d read through many accounts of the last time the arrows were deployed, against the cockatrice Zamshy Lamshy and a human ratcatcher. Eye contact hadn’t mattered. As soon as two similarly struck parties were close enough the results should’ve been instantaneous.

Friday wasn’t running into the New Zealander’s arms, nor vice versa. They both just stood there, and then came the swaying, very suggestive of the momentary spell ending, to be written off as nothing but a bout of vertigo. The foundations trembled. Friday was snapping out of it, and whether he chose to rush forward and engage the representative or brush the bugs off his shoulder it would be cataclysmic for the flailing spies.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Tarkower complained to the god of gamesmanship, whom she didn’t think existed in any earthly pantheon, and if it did she might’ve been talking to herself. Reality was so much more of a thorny thicket than the games contained therein of paper boards and carved tokens. Sometimes the rules you knew weren’t the rules at all. Still it eluded her, the mastery of this grandest contest, where a single loss even in the tutoring stage could be the final one.

In this game the stronger you were the less someone could challenge you as a referee, and the most qualified at Stained Atlas intervened before Friday could shake their drugging. Two burly hands with fingers like baguettes clapped onto the man on both sides, as if the back of a chair were being gripped.

“Unhand me!” Friday blurted, kicking out his legs as if the invisible bicycle he rode had just taken an equally invisible ramp. The ghosts were forced to hunker down and latch onto his seams. Attention was drawn in a pool around them, including from New Zealand’s security, who prickled at the commotion and closed ranks around their representative.

“Nothing to worry about everyone!” boomed the colossal creature that had seized Friday, catching him by surprise despite occurring two days later. “Just a friendly disagreement between anarchists! This is how we handle things without pesky bureaucrats in the way, ha ha! With an old-fashioned leathering!”

Stained Atlas actually laughed as Sunday heaved Friday further into the air and carried him out of the crowd. If Chessica had regrown her scalp-shufflers they would’ve fallen off again. How did such an idiotic tactic work so well that these bombers could cajole their way out of punishment with smiles and bravado? Spawned from the brain of a man, she knew part of the answer. Men loved men who seemed both stupider and happier than themselves.

Irritatingly moronic as the entire proceeding was, she had to accept that Sunday had just saved their lives and perhaps their mission. He kept making a show of his kidnapping, guffawing the whole way, spinning the uppity Friday around like a child, until they found an outlet near the water closets that was devoid of people and cast in cool shadow. The smell of tide pools bubbled up from the gaps in the floorboards. Sunday quieted Friday by pressing him against the wall and holding him there like he was trying to hang a portrait without a degree of tilt.

“Shut your mouth or so help me I’ll change your name to January and knock you into next year,” Sunday threatened, finally silencing his subordinate. “What were you doing? New Zealand’s not part of the plan, not yet.” Before the pinned man could respond, both finally took notice of the little folk congregating on Friday’s shoulder, stepping onto Sunday’s outstretched arm as a bridge. “Minimils?” He’d been paying enough attention to gather from whence they hailed.

“I am Chessica Tarkower,” the homunculus proclaimed, loud as she could to make sure he heard. If he knew they were of Minimil he might also recognize her last name’s history in Little Wars; she took his silence as just that. “You’ve done us a great service, Mr. Sunday, assuming you are not a member of the Hidden Body.”

Friday was somewhere between a grumble and a whimper when Elizabug skittered to his neck and pressed her pin against a bulging vein. Jack and Darnette appeared on the opposite shoulder. Then, to Chessica’s surprise, Nevry Mevry clambered up the front of the man’s shirt and hung from his collar.

She had escaped Edwin with nothing but a fresh scratch on her glass, a fact the mouser was still trying to rectify. With an affronted yowl he leapt all the way to Sunday’s chest with claws outstretched in Nevry’s direction, but once again Sunday demonstrated both great power and effective strategy. Keeping Friday off his feet with a single hand, he caught the flying cat with the other, neutralizing its pounce by lifting its stomach until it stilled and looked at him with confused contrition.

“I’ve got this under control,” he warned the cat, with Edwin recognizing the tone as the one used by humans who were about to kick the nearest living thing. “Go stalk somewhere else.” As he turned the animal around and lightly tossed it Chessica once again noted that he possessed pieces of Rexpommel. That was what allowed him to nail Friday up and keep him there single-handed, what allowed him to leave the man hanging and focus on her. “Explain yourselves, before I drown you in the punch bowl.”

Chessica had the explanation, not the leverage. If she couldn’t offer Sunday something in partnership they wouldn’t make it out of Stained Atlas. Information would be best, but he seemed to have gathered too much of it on his own. From Friday’s announcement he already knew the man had turned traitor for the Hidden Body. She needed something else, for him and her team too. The game plan. Either she figured out her rival’s strategy without leaving Sunday’s wrist or she would be smeared across his palm.

But it wasn’t there. As much as she tried to rush every member of the hunting party that was her faculties, a coherent idea had not yet formed. The only chance was her demented spymaster and his flat-headed minions. The body had made their big move, so perhaps something crucial was overheard in the last few minutes.

“If you’ll indulge me one moment longer Mr. Sunday,” she requested as politely as she could before turning to Jack, who leaned against the wall reading a big sheet of creased Flatland like a newspaper. Sensing her eyes on him, it drooped. “Jack, I need anything they’ve heard in the last five minutes. Anything unusual, no matter how irrelevant.”

She tried hardening her expression to diamond to convey the finality of the opportunity, though nothing short of a spherical guillotine cutting from all angles could get him to take anything seriously. He crumpled his paper and threw its middle behind his head, rubbing the ends on his ears to hear anything shaken loose.

…

“General Pentagon, what’s going on out there!?”

“Mrs. Circle, your encompassingness, I’m afraid the rabble from the rubble have amassed. By sharing sides and utilizing parallel momentum they’ve battered down the outer gate.”

“What!? Sharing sides? That’s a triangle tactic. Have our troops gone rogue?”

“Only a few triangles your tautness. Most of them are irregulars.”

“This land is not supposed to be infested with irregulars! When I became the only circle in all of Upper Middle West Edge we performed a census, and they were a mere six percent of our collective area.”

“Well your flawlessness, that was before God made his last few… hmm… annexations. The tears were somewhat uneven, and one of them was in the midst of the 9,360^th annual Upper Middle West Edge Square Dance. Have you been? They sell the most scrumptious fried doughble helixes that have circles filled with-“

“Circles are filled with nothing but wisdom Millicent! Get on with it so I can utilize mine before we’re swimming in itchy irregulars!”

“Yes your roundness, sorry your smoothness. When the annexation tore through the square dance many of the squares were touching the area of… divine activity. It warped their sides to match the rough edge, making them irregulars. They’ve been in hospital to see if it might be corrected.”

“But they’re not in hospital Millicent, they’re tapping at my windows.”

“The latest report is that they were riled up by one Abbott Z. Square. He barged in and started shouting all sorts of things about his shrinking garden and how any shape could transmit any information regardless of sides as long as they didn’t have to think about it.”

“What information?”

“It’s nothing Mrs. Circle. That Square was in here earlier raving about a message for God they heard at the southern edge. I politely informed him that everything worth God’s time was heard in the north and had him escorted out.”

“Of course it is, that’s where I live. He only wants to hear from circles. Our full perspective is closest to his ingrained nature. Did you tell this square that?”

“More or less your rollability, and he then insisted he could tell you himself so that you could tell God.”

“Me? Speak to a square? Why don’t I bite a triangle’s tightest corner while I’m at it? Clearly this square has an irregularity, too subtle for a five-pointer like yourself to notice without a compass to measure. It’s driven him insane, pressure on the brain maze. His irregular thoughts can’t fit through its passages now. There, the issue is settled. go on.”

“Your elasticity? Go on and what?”

“Go and tell Abbott Z. Square and his batty band of irregulars that he’s insane and thus must stop attacking my cathedral! He is to report to the asylum at once.”

“Mrs. Circle, it’s too late for that. They won’t listen. We’ll be surrounded any moment now.”

“Only if they get in. There is a wall of glass between them and us. Assemble the triangular matrix for our counterattack.”

“But… but the glass!

“What about the glass General Pentagon!?”

“It’s fragile!”

“What!?”

“Ahh! Uncorner me you irregular, now you uncorner me! Now you! Don’t corner me at all!”

“What’s cornered is my garden! Hardly anything left… and it has probably shriveled to mere squiggles while I’ve been trying to get you to listen.”

“Mr. Square I presume? Behold, for I am Petunia Y. Circle. You’ve made quite a mess of the cathedral. But who knew shards of glass were so irregular! Ouch! And sharp! Clever of them to hide in each other’s shape to create a deceptively uniform surface. I’ll have this rectified immediately. I do thank you for your service to Upper Middle West Edge, but you’re technically trespassing. Begone with you.”

“Not until I talk to God.”

“You can tell me, quickly, and I will pass it along.”

“No. Now that I hear you, the first circle I’ve been this close to, you look wonderful by the way, truly magnificent, I recognize that you are no louder than me. You must have something to talk to him. A big funnel that makes you louder perhaps. Where is it?”

“It’s not for public use.”

“These irregular friends of mine, who have my assurance that I will ask God to heal their uneven curses, were imprisoned in hospital, so they are not the public. They’ve been rather sheltered of late, and I’m sure they would love to touch a circle with all their hairy corners and shaggy sides.”

“Alright, alright! Back away! This glass situation is what needs my immediate attention, so I suppose there’s no harm in you shouting at someone who knows not to listen. Say your piece and then leave quickly, out the back so you don’t turn these shards into smaller ones!”

“We’ve done it! Come on everyone, to the funnel. This must be it. How do I? I don’t think it’s calibrated for a square. Let me just back up. Ahem… God! Hear me God! I am Abbott Z. Square and I have overheard something in the utmost south of Upper Middle West Edge. A small hissing voice told me that their future was secure, as they had already visited the buffet. They also mentioned New Zealand. I can’t say anymore, as I don’t remember exactly. I’m very distressed about my garden you see. Could you take a look at it? It used to be much larger. Oh and please make all the irregulars here with me regular again so they don’t have to be so dreary all the time. Umm…. Thank you. You’re welcome. Good day.”

…

“Really now? That’s some tender information,” Jack mused as he finished flossing between his ears with the rolled-up Flatland. Skipping down from Friday to where Chessica stood on Sunday’s arm, he bent mid-rib cage and deposited a summary in her ear.

“South?” she repeated quizzically.

“Down for you,” he explained, “because I put that poster vertical.”

“Where did you put it?”

“That’s the one stuck inside the Ruandan’s nose. He could’ve blown it out though.” The homunculus’s mini-mind was off to the races, betting big on anything that felt like a spark of illumination.

A ‘small’ voice was heard from inside the Ruandan’s nose, meaning it wasn’t his, as it would never be louder than inside his own passages. South meant down, so the voice spoke below the man’s nose. What had been under him when he’d leaned down where the knave of clubs could take his shot? There would’ve been the rabble under the floorboards, but that seemed too distant to her, and some of this was likely heard while the man was moving distances the small could not cover at equal speed.

On his person then. There were obstacles to that though, and not just at Stained Atlas, at other smaller conventions where the Hidden Body had blemished the proceedings. Concealing a small spy on your large person was a simple affair, so most entrants were thoroughly searched at both scales by humans with magnifying glasses and collaborating smalls wearing their regular glasses.

In the clothing would be too risky; the mechanism would have been discovered by now. And what was this business with the buffet? How could it secure the body’s future? The only futures it secured were those of the hungry and thirsty…

Then she had it. Chessica’s entire body flashed as if she nearly transformed into a light bulb, the idea just barely remaining a metaphor. Her pupils dilated to the extreme as they finally found the correct focus for the game the Hidden Body had chosen to play. Now that she had identified her opponent, she could strike.

To perform the strike she took out what she now recognized as her secret weapon: the vial of Mustardseed hair. With a quick call out to Nevry, she tossed the vial to the eggty, who dutifully caught it. Then she ordered her to ascend to Friday’s chin and peel his lips open with her whiskers. Met by a wall of teeth glued shut, Chessica saw that as further confirmation of her theory.

“Don’t feed him anything without telling me what it is first,” Sunday ordered, the threat of stomping implicit in his seamless joviality.

“We’ve been gathering information all day,” Tarkower told him. “Your boy Friday here has something inside his gut.” The other ghosts of the Haeve-Maen exchanged stunned looks, all except the Wonderlander who crossed his eyes to exchange his with himself. “It was all in the name really. They just couldn’t resist giving us a clue. When is a body hidden? It can’t be when it’s out of sight, as this entity has loudly announced itself in crowded rooms of globe topplers and war chest hinge oilers.

The body is hidden when it is transformed. You’re a learned man Sunday, so I don’t doubt you’ve read those stories in the paper, just a few years back, about one such hidden body named Edward Hyde, who was by day the mild-mannered Dr. Henry Jekyll.”

“Hyde!?” he blurted, genuinely surprised for the first time since his last bomb went off prematurely in an occupied lavatory. “Yes I remember. Jekyll was a modern alchemist, and he had put together a formula that unleashed his inner demon when drunk. It turned him into a different person.”

“A person of pure evil,” Chessica continued, “who ate more and more of his life as time went on, committing heinous acts of rape and murder, only returning to his harmless state when he needed some place to evade the authorities.”

“But Hyde and Jekyll are dead. What’s that got to do with Friday? He’s a cheat alright, thinks that just because we’re anarchists our card games shouldn’t have rules either, but he’s not the sort to stalk women in dark alleys. I know because I’ve stalked him down dark alleys to be sure.”

“You can be forgiven for your giants’ perspective, and in this age where men are gods on the game board they sometimes forget that they are also the middle ground of kingdom. A man is an environment, and in him countless small creatures going about their day in the forest of his hair and the ocean of his stomach.

Parasites, Sunday, parasites. They eat what we eat, drink what we drink. It isn’t a stretch to imagine Dr. Jekyll had one, and that it too consumed his formula and suffered its effects. Among our gathered secrets was the Hidden Body’s delight in ‘securing its future’ with a visit to the Stained Atlas buffet. I ask you, what sort of creature could secure its future by meddling with the food and drink? Something that was born by the same method.”

“You mean the reason they always warn us to cook pork so thoroughly?” the anarchist asked, perhaps having an embarrassing inkling as to the necessity of food safety regulations.

“Yes I do. Tapeworms! Their eggs are ingested, and they hatch in the gut where they then become freeloaders awaiting their next meal. I believe we’re dealing with a tapeworm of the Edward Hyde persuasion, a person who was not satisfied with the doctor’s station, always seeking more control over those in his presence.

If so the food is contaminated with its spawn, and everyone here will need to be administered a remedy to prevent the Hidden Body from growing. For you see, this parasite has been utterly alone until now, given the Hidden Body’s limited presence, never more than one traitor at a time.”

“But how does it make the hosts do its bidding?”

“When we attempted methods of seduction, both failed,” Chessica said, reminding her team that was the real sticking point, the power most in need of uncovering. “That is because we were not targeting the creature actually in control. The exact method escapes me thus far, but I surmise that the worm excretes some variant of the Hyde formula, one that can alter the behavior without affecting the appearance. A dose aligns them with the Hyde identity, and they obey the worm’s whispering until it is cleared from their system, when they go back to their old selves, leaving no trace of their betrayals.”

“I hate to ask, and I’ll hate to listen even more,” Sunday said, “but what does clearing the system entail?”

“Mouth to mouth transference I would guess,” Chessica said, pointing at Nevry so she would uncap the Mustardseed hairs. The vial’s pop made Friday twitch. “Risky in such a crowded place, but the only method available. That is how the worm moved from the Ruritanian prince to the Ruandan, from the Ruandan to Friday. It wanted to temporarily take over New Zealand next, perhaps get them to visit the buffet if they hadn’t already.”

“So is that egg holding the remedy?”

“We’ll see in a moment,” Chessica threatened. “Are you listening worm? You’re trapped. My Nevermoral is holding hairs of the fairy Mustardseed, whose power I’m sure you know. If Friday ingests them he will temporarily become a donkey.”

“What good is that?” Sunday asked. “Donkeys have even more stomach than we do. You’ll move him from a cabin to a mansion.”

“It eats what Friday eats, like the Hyde formula,” the homunculus reminded. “After the larger body becomes a donkey the hidden one will as well. Do you think a miniature donkey can survive inside the stomach acid pool of another for very long? It’s not an environment they’re adapted to. Death is the most likely result.

Now that I think of it, I’ve only seen the small consume these hairs, becoming small asses. I wonder, is the smallness inherent to the consumer or to the provider? If it’s from the fairy then Friday will transform into a small donkey, the reduction most likely crushing the worm before it can reduce itself, if it even could reduce further.

That’s two likely causes of death, and all they would require is one hair swallowed. Nevry?” The eggty tilted the vial. Friday’s mouth was still sealed, but the miniature hairs were easily thin enough to slip through gaps in the teeth.

“Better open up!” Elizabug threatened from down by the neck, pressing her pin further into Friday’s skin cushion. “Or I get to sew your nostrils shut!”

“I wonder if I could convince the worm to have a drink with me,” Darnette mused. “I would like a fair shot at it.”

“You’re in zugzwang, worm,” Chessica tried to declare through Friday’s skin and muscle. “Die now or let us capture you. You have no other moves. Five!”

“Four!” Jack shouted.

“Three!” Elizabug added.

“Two,” Darnette subtracted.

“One,” Nevry finished, tilting the vial more. Before the first hair could slip out the teeth flew open. Nevry swung away, to the ear, hanging from it like a monkey as Friday’s eyes rolled into the back of his head. Wider and wider his mouth opened, lips swallowing teeth, tongue depressing, until there was nothing but a dark passage to the anarchist’s inner realm.

And out of its shadows swayed a worm, a wary cobra, pale in color, segmented into waxy pockets like mummified ravioli. Its head was crowned with short downturned spines of lacquered black, and further down it was ringed with four orifices of unknown function, four soggy pineapple rings macerated in sour pus. Horrifically, they contracted, stretched, shifted, into a face vaguely like a man’s if you were to squint and mentally project a man over it.

“Hello everyone,” it said, inhuman tone indecipherable yet recognizable as like the burbling of a dissatisfied appetite. “I’d offer you something to eat, but I’m fresh out.”

“Vile,” Sunday said with a scowl. “Absolutely vile.”

“Accustom yourself to my seat at your table,” the worm said, swishing back and forth, taking in the minimils that bested him. “I have earned it. Think. A nation with no homeland to maintain or defend, unburdened by diplomacy. A decentralized network of actors, all perfectly aligned in motive, who can each steal and use an entire army thanks to Little Wars. I do believe the impertinent insect was thinking of friends like me when he concocted it.”

“You’re buying time for your eggs to develop, but these seconds won’t matter if we keep everyone from leaving until we’ve administered a treatment,” Chessica countered. “Tell me, have I strayed? Or are you indeed a tapeworm escaped from the corpse of Henry Jekyll?” The worm nodded with all its visible body.

“I am Hyde Inside, of the Hyde Body, which will soon dominate Little Wars. You called me a parasite, but tell me… when a parasite takes so much that it becomes more than the host, what do you call it then? I will be inextricable. Vital to Little Wars’ function. The humans can no more rid it of me than they can rid themselves of their addiction to the impertinent insect’s game.”

Chessica Tarkower was stood on the arm bridge of an anarchist bomber, facing down a monster worm that could constrict her like a python, and surrounded by mousers and human feet that could defeat her in an instant, but she’d won. In her mind she might die, but she wouldn’t lose.

The rest was logistics. Picking an antidote, alerting the right humans so they would corral the others, eliminating Hyde Body egg clusters one by one. That victory was still theoretical, but the theory was sound, and it belonged to her. Vaguely aware of her fellow ghosts celebrating around her, their noise faded into the background as her vision of the ultimate game continued to expand and layer:

From the Little Wars board to Stained Atlas. From the convention to World Drawer One. To Hestia’s ear. To the rules committee of Little Wars itself. To diplomacy and spycraft. To the world. To worlds beyond. To… was that a hole? What could fall through a hole in the cosmos? Did that mean there was another universe above?

Her epiphany overlapped and was enhanced by the phenomenon coming to a head in Stained Atlas at that very moment, the first detail fading back in for her as Darnette’s dance became a slump to her knees and a collapse of her dress, which was no mere garment but a physical manifestation of her buoyant affectionate nature.

“Darnette?” Chessica tried to call out as her pupils shrank like fired bullets, the name emerging as but a whisper.

“It’s too late for you to stop m-” Hyde Inside said to menace them, forced to stop halfway when he too spotted something unusual in his peripheral perception. No longer alone in Friday’s tongue garage, he was surprised to see a compact yet slippery creature of green emerging from pooling saliva near the front teeth. It was Nimuwe, not summoned, but forced out of the waters of mystery by a surfacing shadow. Traumatized, aghast, she flopped forward and rested her amphibious forelimbs on the ridge of Friday’s pearly whites.

“Excuse me,” Hyde Inside spat, “we’re in the middle of something!”

“The sleeper wakes,” she croaked.

“What?”

“The sleeper wakes!” Darnette repeated, mournful, sorrowful, howling from her knees in her instinctive announcement of the world’s despair.

“One thing at a time,” Sunday growled, his arm devoid of minimils striking with speed not expected of such a lumberer. He grabbed Hyde Inside and squeezed, the parasite unable to retract in time, its life saved only by its flattened physique. Sunday wasn’t put off by its slimy surface, spun his arm to reel it in, extracting length after length until Hyde’s nauseating size finally became vomit-inducing, with Friday spitting up the tail and hacking for fresh breath. His anarchist supervisor did not let him down yet, keeping his attention on the tapeworm wrapped around his forearm to make sure it couldn’t wriggle free.

He didn’t notice the slight elevation of his sleeve, or that his stone cuff links now glowed an alien blue-white. Chessica spotted them. They were of Rexpommel, the boulder with giants’ strength that forever held the king’s sword in a hopeless world. Their hidden power was in play, keeping Friday’s shoes dangling, but the items hadn’t been glowing until now.

It was impossible to miss the second radiating color, golden-green, as shafts of it shot from the prism of steel around the homunculus’s neck. Her shard of Excalibur rose off her skin in a spinning hover before her eyes, as if it wanted her to see nothing else, wanted to take up her entire understanding, be inescapable and defining.

The necklaces of the other ghosts did the same. Darnette wept tears full of blurring dreams into her hands while hers reoriented into a symbolic noose. Nevry had stored hers inside her glass shell through the hidden clockwork airlock in its base, the steel shred gliding across her curved ceiling like a sliver comet hailing from a more festive galaxy stopping by for a single tourist orbit.

Jack poked his, found its slight course correction uninteresting. Elizabug was slightly wiser, trying to guess at how much its sale value had just increased. None of them could fully comprehend until they saw, the truth so colossal that it evaded comprehension. If it was real, their lives were meaningless, so, defensively, they did not understand.

Until the cheap roof, constructed more like a lid, moved like one. As Stained Atlas fell silent and the school of human eyes flashed toward the sky, Darnette, Nimuwe, and Chessica began to understand that the mission had both been mostly completed just in time and no longer mattered at all.

In the scheme of things.

In the scheme of giants.

Long ago giants and gods had done battle. In stalemate the giants fell into slumber and the gods began to deteriorate. When the sword Excalibur was pulled from the stone Rexpommel, mankind would have risen to new power, equal to their original gods, besting the giants’ strength infused into the rock. It meant the giants’ bed was now man’s world. And to them that was theft. You do not sleep through the sounds of a burglar pilfering your cupboards.

But it was all a great big accident, like spilling an ocean or a planetary ornament dropping off a bough of the world tree. Stained Atlas had brought together hundreds of pieces of both Excalibur and Rexpommel, as they were valuable tools on the sidelines of Little Wars, in addition to status symbols.

All that happened was a nebulous mass of the sword’s pieces hanging around at just the wrong distance from a nebulous mass of the stone’s cut pebbles. Magically speaking, it seemed the sword had been pulled from the stone. Its invisible ripple tickled the noses of every sleeping giant, shattering their dreams, forcing them upright out of bedrock, ocean depths, cloud banks typically only accessible by beanstalk, and the whipping antarctic snow never meant to produce living things.

There was no king to challenge them. As the roof of Stained Atlas came off they found only the fascinating boards of Little Wars and all its players and conscripts. Two shadows blocked out the tropical sun over Lilliput, big heads with big powdered wig curls pouring big giggles and breath like an overturned wheelbarrow full of Hell’s used brimstone.

“Look at these little tarts brother,” one of them said, voice much too large to be a woman and far too womanly to be anything else. Some details of her face came into relief: headstone teeth in a cemetery mouth gated by earthen lips she would paint pink at first opportunity, proportionally small and round eyes like an anti-intellectual potato, cheeks rouged with enough blood to drown Stained Atlas, and beneath it all custom foppish dress at least four centuries out of date, hideously orange and rotten buried brown like a mud-beached salmon.

“Oh they do look scrumptious sister,” the other one said, leaning down, revealing himself to look every bit his sister’s brother and to have the fouler breath, less like Hell’s rubbish and more like a souffle given body with copious amounts of briny bilious kraken vomit. The rolls of his wig swung pendulously, knocking over several countries’ representatives, powdering them like donuts, including the Ruandan who sailed into the buffet table and toppled it. With the food floored there would at least be no more Hyde Body time-bombs forming.

“But something tells me they’re not for eating!” the giant continued, looking over the checkered board battlefields of varied size and topography. “Look it there. Playing games they are, with our Lilliputians.”

“Without our permission?” the sister giant said. “You little people need to learn your history. This whole island chain was the property of our father Pantagruel, thank you very much! He bequeathed it to us before the nap so that means you’re trespassing on the property of Ludiyadite.” She placed her hand on her breast and struck a painterly pose.

“And Chasmgape,” her brother identified himself, throwing back both sides of his wig to dig his hands into Stained Atlas. Protest and scurrying didn’t spare the two he grabbed. “Now how do you play? It looks like a war game. These ones are in my army.”

“Then I want these two!” Ludiyadite pawed inside the toy chest with equally plump arms and stubby fingers, snatching both Prince Rudolf and Veranda, foiling her efforts yet again. “I think they should kiss first.” Veranda’s efforts were painfully unfoiled as her face was wetly smeared across the prince’s, no permanent injury sustained, but there was a persistent feeling in her lips like wearing an upside down sock.

The knees of the crouching giants blocked the exits. The pair started making up rules, putting people in piles, manhandling them roughly until they stopped trying to escape. Beyond Lilliput more gigantic figures waded through the sea toward them, drawn by the same alarm clock.

“So, this is the game,” Chessica uttered, “and they are the players.”

The End

The Challenge Obscene concludes in

Challenging Tits