This might come a surprise to some of yourselves, or rather the socialization within yourselves, but I never knew I had grandparents. Grandparent, singular, actually. Grandmother, singular, feminine, factual. This is a disruption of the usual chain of command for a familial unit. You have your grandmother do your bidding for you the moment you know your grandmother - you stay over at her house should your parents be working or strangely diplomatic about the outcomes of blood feuds, you are generously fed above board of whatever it is that is eaten in your nuclear family unit. I did not know my grandmother before I had her do my bidding. The name 'Arctus Augustenburg' was not spoken by her own daughter, Mother, capital M. Recirculated air pointed toward speech was not used on the bear (arctus, ursa, Terra Arcta - the city state of New York City after AD 2017) that breathes its own marinated air during spottily lived hibernation. Much like the bear still hunts or stretches in narcosis, activities requiring equal drive, Arctus slept through most of her own lifespan, choosing to be rudely awoken to face new bastard milieus, none an obvious dirtying of the palette by the green paint going from marble-block solidity to liquid and, suicidal, self-salivating into the red paint. Sometimes I think there are entire caves of paint that bleed the stuff when they are instrumentalized and instrumentally beaten. Little transmutational nooks that housed unaware cavemen in the Mesa, where sand chose to forego becoming glass, apparently a medium for reality itself but always imperfect and thus dishonest, and instead became paint, where the dishonesty of the mirrored visage mattered no longer because the brave chemical reinvention of The Substance Formerly Known As Glass aroused composite debates of its own of whether the asscrack of a sheep is only the asscrack of a sheep if it is a van Meegeren and thus an exemplary Vermeer. All invention is in the service of replicating naivete. I only became aware of my own grandmother because Organum evoked a titan whose legs were broken and whose head was obscured by hills despite my insistence that I knew every titan and I was every politician and I exceed every politician who is also related to me by blood or through adultery or through longing gazes exchanged during grand balls or cocaine binges. Somehow Darling knew more about the people I was supposed to know to be important, and thus learned from the mistakes of before I knew what their mistakes were. She truly loves me because she knew me before I knew that which is worse than me. Glass does not attain the rigid order of crystals typical of liquids, and acrylic latex paint is 41% water. It is as much of an impossibility for Res Jino to be more historiographically adept than myself as it is for glass to starve itself and participate in Project Stargate in the search of aquastructure, and it is even more of an impossibility for myself to seriously doubt the intellect of the woman I spent the rest of my life with until everyone thought at once that the world should implode. There is a secret library beneath the Library of Congress which has a military checkpoint wherein you surrender any cameras and are cavity-searched regardless of if you make good on your lack of direct viewing, forget remote viewing, capabilities and get issued a temporary passport for the Aleatoric Empire (Northern European Territories). There has been a third sister in my family since the second year of my life and she shares a birthday with Mother. Before the checkpoint is an alcove eight meters tall and after the checkpoint is an elevator. Every building in America is under thirty years old but this library is not, because it is not in America but it is instead an exclave in hostile territory. Where Arctus met the two women with the e-umlaut in their names is called the Roosevelt Hotel, opened in 1924, which stands between Madison and Vanderbilt and for a time housed entire hives of WASP metropolitan drunk on unraked muck and clarinets. It is still standing but only because a bear who is also simultaneously the princess kissed several women in front of their husbands and since the bear-princess did not need the kiss of the Edwardian American Kingdom the hotel stood over eighty years. Bang, bang, kaplonk, sturm und drung.

"I've tried to be interested in worldly matters for ages, trust me on this, but my worldliness lies beyond a crossable limen, and I feel like I've only just now come even close to meeting it, even though I've put many years into trying to render myself in touch, the military drone rapidly approaching my conceptual networks and ready to shoot them down without a moment's notice for defiance of the 'actual' order of things. Really, taking the world with a staunch foundation of literality seems to be the norm, but the figurative character of existence seems to apply to humans more than anyone else," I began.

Ari: "I don't concern myself with any of your species' mortal matters unless you're involved, and even with this exception taken into account, I have to accompany many of the things you say with not just a grain of salt, but a deluge of ocean water. We understand each other, but for a long while, I'm going to need to hear elaborations and contrapuntal continuations of the progressions of your ideas to such an extent that I can construe sufficient mental models for - initially, but not permanently - your misguidedness and - continuously - your genuinely intelligent underlying psyche."

"Haven't you established that you trust my judgment already? You sound intensely anthropological with the bent you're taking on in this fragment of the discourse, you know."

"It's an expression of wishing to lead up an augmen in the magnificent connection which has already begun to exist over the course of many discursive shards, Darling."

"Put trust in the process?"

"More than just trust: I'm asking to hear everything in your mental possession at the moment."

"I can talk about the misguidedness and its nature, or at least surmise. Would you allow this?"

"I would encourage it."

"Very well, then. So, this in mind, consider: what you've told me regarding the nature of antimatter and the history of ideas surrounding it and your own mother apparently contradicts the progression of human scientific ideas, and in the process of contradiction it contraindicates reconciling the narratives, showing that the first cosmological history, that developed by the various immortals who have experienced the thrills of development on astronomical scales in time, is referred to allegorically by that developed by humans, indeed reduced in accuracy and nuance to the formulaically-composed oral epics which dominated human rhetorical tradition in the days before its formalization in writing. Those who must have visited places in the cosmos now redshifted so far with respect to our Polyearthly perceptual center of the known universe with its expansion - perhaps itself partly allegorical, partly truthful - that they are no longer readily accessible except by means esoteric enough to warrant the competitive title of 'prodigy' for anyone born with the ability to practice them…those people must know things worth building upon with the utmost zeal. I want to intersect with the paths of existences so archaic that their perception is completely alien to us." I said it with a childish sense of hope, clinging onto the idea of translation between understandings being underlyingly simple rather than an arduous process of questioning about, probing into, and excavating beneath every element of one's worldview, as I was having to do in those days, even if I wouldn't admit it, to her or to myself.

"Darling, you must realize that you would most certainly find yourself in an intensely unexcited stupor listening to such an ancient being describe their trials and tribulations in, to recurse on myself, the boredom of existing for so long, and likewise lament on the absence of supposedly exciting eras well past us. There are exceptions, you must note, but it takes an outstanding storyteller to render the experience of hearing immortal oral history any less emotionally laborious than asking a Gotland War veteran from Bureau's side about the oversize, discolored scar-relic of a once-deep gash on his arm. Don't try it until you know the risks."

"Oh, I see." The relationship of immortal reality to human reality as an overlay has never been clear-cut anyway.

I continued, "That said, everything I've heard about the Gotland War drives me up the wall. The Great Wall of China. No, too obvious. Hadrian's wall shortly after its construction, and the Antonine Wall too, for that matter. Caesar, Claudius, Agricola, and so on would have nothing on me with the sheer amount of frustration the confusion surrounding the existence of the Gotland War brings me." For the un- or under-initiated, I was, of course, referring to the brief - yet still standout relative to the remainder of the 20th century - 1962 conflict between Bureau Hotel-backed forces, predominantly Americans, which might ring a bell in name-recognition terms for laymen, although the details would most certainly have been obfuscated in every possible regard, and I was about to mention why [I believed] this was the case to Ari, who was in the know and would understand my statements readily. "Bureau's forces made such ridiculous claims to conceal their totalizing suppression of information from reporters who were on the scene. All essentially employed solely to accumulate blood dripping from their brows as they too ended up on the receiving end, scalped indiscriminately by supposed comrades and known opponents alike for the sake of brutality, sending a message, they were subject to bogus claims that they had abruptly developed schizophrenic tendencies for a few reasons, the first being that an apparent mass psychosis occurred among several news organizations' combat reporting staff - and later in soldiers narrating oral histories - that multiple months of events had occurred within the span of a few days encompassed by the war, all of which bore relatively few inconsistencies, all of which claimed the sun only rose and set a few times. Telegraphs and other transmissions, they said, were either received at rates so freakishly rapid as to become indecipherable aside from uncorrelatable strings of characters from which nothing could be reconstructed with any ease or were transmitted so slowly that the messages contained therein, often just an inscrutable word - at most a trisyllable in phonetic-slash-orthographic extent - taken fully out of context, took approximately a month themselves to transmit. To me, this reads as a pretense: the reporters could be easily imprisoned, their careers concluded, and their actual stories of the atrocities rumored to have been committed by American soldiers during the war suppressed with the perpetration of such a lie by quote-unquote President Kennedy and my bastard grandfather - wasn't he a 'conclusive' in your parlance? your book? whatever? - because if anything reads like a collective psychotic break intense enough to inspire the minds of conspiracy theorists and private investigators alike for decades amidst a constant backdrop of false-flag revolutions designed to simulate resistance to Bureau's still-persistent hegemony, it's gotta be that. Time dilation is too convenient of an excuse when your enemy not only used magic against you, but used it to hand your ass to you." Thus I went on a tirade - a collected tirade in which I carefully controlled my enunciation to the fullest extent possible without cessation for even a moment except to breathe as necessary (in a natural pattern), but still something of a diatribe. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, theorizes and conspires like a duck.

"Oh, that was my mom. Say thanks to Bathys Augustenburg for me." Having said this, Ari held up a clamshell feature phone camera in my general direction, which couldn't have captured video any less blocky than 480p even generously, and pretended to record a brief video of me as I gave an awkward smile with as little of my will as possible, for posterity, of course.

"Seriously?" I was surprised she listened to me all the way through if that was (ostensibly) all she had to say, but I shrugged it off until realizing she did, in fact, have something more to say.

"You believe my mother doesn't have power over the localized passage of time? What you don't realize is that the mystical manifestation of time dilation can occur as the result of the extremes of magic being met, the construction of time, in its great struggle to accommodate the sheer density of events, compressing a local area's existence significantly relative to its surroundings, creating the external impression that an impossible chronology had manifested in the general era, but it also dissociates the flow of time from its ordinary adherence to a perceptual rate and allows the descent" - I'd never heard someone say 'descends' with respect to time before this moment - "of time to drift down with the carelessness of autumn leaves from trees" - also, I noted, somewhat out of the ordinary in reference to temporal progressions - "and fall into the rippling pool of shifting pasts and their all-is-fire interpretation" - abstractions galore at this point - "which then creates the 'time dilation' effect described here. As for the inconsistencies in the efficacious delivery of transmissions across lines of facsimile sight, you must keep in mind that the logic of magic is necessarily impossible to comprehend; sometimes the unexpected may occur, in this case stretching out the times was a possibility left unaccounted for by the Ouroboros-governed fabric of reality. Do you have any other questions, or do you wish to proceed to something you do know more than an iota of certain information about?" I don't think I had it in me to apologize; there was an allure in the passive aggression which awakened feelings of love within me I had convinced myself were impossible in the course of avoiding others' feelings towards me. I hated when anyone but Ari fell in love with me, more than many other things.

"I'm still ready to believe anything, but I'd like to see a bit more directly how this could be the case, if you don't mind." In reaction to this, Ari simply snickered, getting up from her seat and gesturing for me to follow down a corridor - stepping without even the slightest hint of caution and betraying that the lightness of my typical gait was an act, that I walked like anyone else, footsteps clanging and reflecting off the walls, and wasn't lithe at all - into a room we had not yet entered. The journey there lasted at most a couple minutes; we didn't speak very much aside from my "This way?" or "That way?" inquiries and corresponding answers, for the anticipation was too great to go unignored.

In reflecting on the cold atmosphere and the dim fluorescence of the space, I am reminded of the final walk we took many years later, and indeed very recently, to the top of the burning Central Siberian Conference Building's headquarters, the epicenter of that isolated compound in the northern tendril of Irkutsk Oblast in which everything indeed compounded until it was unbearable, the place from which we radiated the end of the world. Whereas the Mayoral Office of Quebec City had been in pristine condition by all accounts, the Conference Building was burning that day, tongues of flame kissing one another to engulf their surroundings, January 6, 2022. By this time, I knew all I needed to know to bring about a conclusion to the Conclusive-dominated world in which we lived, but I would still ask Ari whether it was a good idea to continue, and if we were to continue, which way, to harken back to the times in which she first cherished me and had to guide me through every which combination of events, the psychogeographic situations we went through together. In Quebec I was no one, just another teenage drug dealer with a few extraordinary grudges and, purely coincidentally, a progeny of cosmic importance, a long and storied family history which hadn't come to use, but in Siberia, I was nothing short of a divinity, whether I liked it or not. When the time came for the flames to engulf us in Siberia, we pretended to face death to rouse the people to rise up against their local branches as a temporary sense of chaos devoured our familiar Earth, while when we reached the room back in Quebec, all we saw inside were a few microfilm readers and a corresponding archive, all carefully fireproofed in case of sudden disaster. Today, I will focus on what we saw on the microfilm many years ago rather than our most recent of major happenings. We may have liberated the world to some extent or another, but God knows it doesn't matter now. What's important is what brought us there.

Ari started up. "Darling, we'll be examining the contents of this room very carefully for the sake of your understanding in particular. I have nothing new to learn here; I only bring myself here with you on account of my wish to review the happenings of history. Do you want to know the impact of the Gotland War beyond just its temporary impacts on the space-time continuum, or do you wish to remain fixated on what a real magic-worlder would dismiss as the immortal equivalent of what your species calls 'human interest stories?'"

"Go on, then."

The JFK story: waving to crowd, bam, man overboard. Less words: lived, died. One word: symbolic, the position, the man as defined by position, the death. The Ari Augustenburg story: was not prepared, appeared to be prepared. I can see the contents of strips of film with eyes closed, even with several walls of bounding. That's not a lie, but I wouldn't have turned the corner if it was not my preconception that Organum waited in the wings and we could perform, for a knowing audience of one out of a half unaware two, her dutifully recanting my nonscience without ever so much hinting at it and instead the performance within the performance suggesting that I had arranged for her to speak on a topic on points I delineated. I would have not told Darling about the fact that frozen yoghurt was invented minutes before the assassination of Kennedy, but was remade in nationalism's image to be something made to cheer up a dear friend of Kennedy's, who was not terribly familiar with the man, and thus became a non-tangible culinary memorial, a USESCO special, because that was not the chosen topic, and that was not a topic I was knowledgeable on, and I see it in Claribel's eyes at that moment that she wishes more than anything else to talk about the frozen yoghurt thing, or at least 'the thing that I am unprepared for but lay displaced near the reader', mousetrap for the mice that are employed to build rat mazes, which I do apologize to Organum for within an hour because it is clear the yoghurt thing is one of her deepest impassions, and I find out I have a grandmother that was never spoken of, and who invented frozen yoghurt. I find myself taking more of an interest in the yoghurt aspect than I find myself interested in the fact that Mother kept the life-altering fact that I am the third in a chain of generation loss to herself. My life was altered and all I cared about was yoghurt. I stopped a clock in God's fields of timepieces and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

We walk into a library of microfilm and striding past Organum, who has that twitch in her eye that indicates that the shit of myself has been declared final by herself, we see a peasant farmer stuffing the mouth of a helmeted troop, restrained with the disemboweled spiky stems of rose, with hay. We see Americans blind from the invention of ocular darts. Missed dart pricks wound, fallen far from the eye, skin under ripped camo scabs. We see peasant farmers skinning ginger root, but thinking better of it. We see pitchforks driven directly into the heart of those tied to the stickpost of a scarecrow. We see Americans submerged in two overlapping biological burgundy pools, one blackening and scratchable with nails, the last and forever itch, and glass shards of unknowable origin. We see long tightrope trails of rakes on the beach that Americans keep stepping on, slightly in frame is a firing squad of shotguns. The firing squad is comprised of those that could have been massacred by the invading forces, themselves so mortal and ready to return to sea for the motherland and grow so small with national pride, Arachne of the patriots, as to become just another insect in amber. Who is filming? Ocellus populi. Who led the Americans to die here or join the circus where they finally look so daunty and graceful and every mudboot becomes a ballerina slipper full of glass? Goni Jino. An order of non-action was issued because the sky was blue and not turquoise, and because every creature only had two arms and nobody was born of moth and centipede. Goni Jino, bloated, face full of something, I suspect and see maggots (here my androagnosia fails me), is yelling at any man in range to put their guns down. Clearly they were intercepted, he declaims. He prostrates the motion that they must retreat immediately, but also at any moment all of their gunboats may catch on fire, or the sun will reveal another sun behind it, and the world is temporarily in greyscale. This comes too late as many Americans have moved into the hinterlands, and these are the men spared of sodomy by the drawing of second to last breath. The bosswoman is absent. The bossbeast is gone. Where? Here, in this very house, completely unprepared for any invasion, in this very room, viewing the contents of the shelf right over, both of them in non-absorbant swimsuits. They are gushing over each other when diplomatic cable clacks and the phone signals Catholic noon. Both of them sigh and lock eyes as if to relay 'do we have to be there?'. A turquoise plague and the sum of all life land on a Sicilian beach. She, plural, collective feminine, thinking and moving as one, the symbolic Leader, finds out that the new national heroes are pizzeria owners with rotary blades and established Arab watermelon sellers breaking their product on anything high impact to bluff gunpower until an actual firing squad is found. The plague and the zero sum for evolution both think 'ah, so multiculturalism really was good all along' as if they did not encourage immigration for centuries. 'Maybe the Americans will get the hype now', they think.

Goni Jino has shut himself on a cabin on the smallest gunship. A turquoise slithering hisses "Could you point me to that head honcho of yours? This business of mine doesn't wait for that loyalty of yours." The captain's cabin with the bolted gilded door, unmissable, unwarful and uncamouflaged. "Thanks kindly." The incubus of Medievalism curtsies. The expected sequence occurs. Kablammo. Head on a stick, head on a sword, kebab on a skewer. 'Americans are so polite that there's no way that made a hungry ghost', she thinks. 'Nirvana must come for cheap when you must perform the most farcical of the worldly. The next Buddha was born because of pickles.'

Footsteps draw nearer, Dullahanic panic. Should the headless rider see you, moonwalk the plank. There is a woman with a bright light for a face ignoring every door but applying phantom pressure to it to periodically have the hands of no one knock. The metal of steel wakes up one day with acute appendicits and decides to bang raucuolously on its sides. There is a replica sun whose light takes zero seconds instead of four-hundred eighty to decimate the cornea. There is a light that is not acute because it does not glint nor reflect. Then it is eternal. There is a light that is not lux aeterna because to that light the sun doesn't pray, and that name the light doesn't call. There is a man behind a golden door whose cells are about to be made unable to die and whose skin will become a plantation of tumors. Goni Jino has his hands over his head exhuming Grover Cleveland pathos from his hanging pockets and finds he is all out of Woodrow Wilsons. Goni Jino's entire composition attains an impossible density where replication occurs at an incredible rate, and he rinses bile externally with a gaping jaw. There is a man whose internal car lobbying begins with a disembodied grin on a visageless face he tries to look away from. What beams, smile or skin cancer? He is lifted by the throat and it is not slashed. This is a man who came to invade an island and found his men put in mass graves by construction cranes building them tombs of dune. The captain has fled and he is alone with an absolute objection to transient existence. He appears very sympathetic in his own head, he has come face to face with an unknowable horror that he never stood a chance against, and could chalk it up to a near death experience that left him a changed man, and maybe his daughter will then change into a man because of that one time daddy's eyes remembered to open for the first time since he was born.

'Rebirth' isn't wrong. There are two types of radiation cancer: that which occurs in the presence of oxygen, and that which occurs in the absence of oxygen. He hears these words: "Fucking disgusting." Near whisper. Somehow it serrates. There are megaphonic booms in his ears. His body is Trinity, non-definitive. The door to the cabin is sealed shut, and grouchy grandfather nukes blow up in the stratosphere. Another voice. Where? No sound exists. "I've told you this, patriarch. I have defined that this is no way for someone upstanding and important like you to die. I have known that you want to live and that your task is the right task. I've agreed with you. I've thought the thoughts that you think you want to think. I've agreed you can't die to that unnatural disgusting turquoise bitch. I've agreed that a man can't be made to die by a woman. I've put it in place that the power structure that made you a man and made you living has been ready for your behind on the throne." If this is a parody of Monei's voice, Monei is a parody of an accidental suicide, so what is your point? The perfect tense is an accreditation of drive and purpose, of which none exists in neither The Evil nor our goner. It is why every sentence of The Evil's originates from a declaration of the speaker, first person singular. The god that failed to kill itself uses sand on the beach to make mummified Marian light, and Saturn Thebes passes fifty volleyballs at once to starstruck little girls as Bathys marches back off the deck. The Evil feebly replicates the stoplight for all growth, Marian white, in sharp recentralization of conservational attention.

We see Goni Jino shit out his guts in a room that suddenly is no longer airless because he is on a rug in his own shitstack ruin of a house. He talked back to The Evil saying he was too tired to live any longer, and his eyebrows curved in waves, and his mouth was lined with sawdust. He was too old to be anything, he was saying, to broker a permanent contract, to elucidate glee in another presence that is too tired of trying to die to die. It is my prior statement that I came to Providence to eliminate Goni Jino. I realize now that the contract made between The Evil and Goni Jino has guaranteed his resurrection within four days or less. A suspension of contract occurred on the fifth of January, in the two-thousandth twentieth year because nobody thought to write 'I agree to survive even if Res Jino is an idiot who found a higher purpose at the very last second.' No considerations were made for forcible grandson or extant granddaughter. No considerations were made even for forcible son or true daughter. Nom Jino could have done this with a screwdriver. 'I agree to live if killed by divine hands.' 'I agree to live if killed by the law (including the death penalty).' 'I agree to live if I win a duel because clearly my challenger was jealous of my vast estate and my life support tube of a cock.'

We see Ari Aumont, Ari Augustenburg, Ariana Navashino, Alchys Stregna and Res Jino clarify details of this poetic retelling. We see Ari Augustenburg form a picture frame with her hands looking directly into the eye of the lens and the library of microfilm become bokeh. Actually, scratch that.

We see Ari Augustenburg lean back into Res Jino, and we do, and this appears on closed-circuit television footage, Jino scantly aware of the bracing required of her, even though I know now she knew and wished to playfully exasperate me with further questions about exactly how many Americans were mowed down by tractors and bulldozers. This is cruel and unusual execution, but it is just resourceful enough for her. I'm just transient enough for her in a world of total abundance.

So many years of history we had thought were nothing turned out to have been long series of crucial turning points, such that history was actually a pendulum, if a pendulum were able to jerk involuntarily in the air at unpredictable intervals to offset the chaos-theoretical prediction of its course. It all made sense in a way so great that it became impossible for me to bother with my urges to question it, to appease someone who wasn't there by lying through my teeth about the historical narrative, and there was no possibility of complaining when my next best bet in life was a glorified business school for children. With a good mood heavier than (but in opposite magnitude to) a dirge at a funeral for an accomplished woman buried in a secular ceremony, assured definitively that there is no God awaiting her at the other end of the line, I gave Ari a profuse thanks as she leaned on me and betrayed her willingness to trust, silent throughout, confusingly. I asked myself about what trust looked like and what it meant to trust someone, but the internal ramblings were forgettable and transient. Ari Augustenburg, meanwhile, was the definition of forever, just like any other immortal of her pedigree. Filmed on nearby security cameras for an audience of precisely zero, I wanted to lean in and kiss her, but I felt the need to ask when she'd already ignored my thanks and rhetorically marched forth. It turned out, however, that she found my thanks all-too-human, and she was unwilling to accept such a thing.

Here's something which may seem pointless at first, but is actually entirely relevant. Everything around us was a cutoff for cultural transmission, an act of demolition imposed upon the citadel of a small, coastal Ancient Greek city and intended not to ruin the unquestionable heritage of a nation and its millennia-long, storied history, but to prevent squatters, with their half-smoked cigarettes perma-borrowed with a finality from passersby littering crevices throughout the property and their sleeping bags torn from long nights of tossing and turning in a state of sleep fit for no human being, from intruding - a punishment levied upon the already-sentenced to eradicate the referential framework underlying their memory of the place, and in doing so, to ruin furthermore their new context for the ruins as refuge, despite their rooflessness and risky thousand-year derelict status, risky for a Corinthian pillar could become indiscernibly dislodged from its prior position at any instant and crush one among the repurposers alive, either entrapping the immortal indefinitely with unhealing broken bones and deforming pressure or mercifully bringing an end to the life of an unfortunate human without more than an infinitesimally small blip of pain, suddenly gone from the world and prevented from living out full potentials forever - and for this reason, the squatters would have to fight back by means beyond the law, failed by their own striving to create a new order in their minuscule region, unable to explain readily that a complex system of mutual aid had governed all actions taken within their settlement, their hundred-person microscopic society in what the Romans would call the (dead) city's "arx," unable to tell their captors, the Bureau-backed Greek police and soon enough prison guards, that others would suffer far greater than they ever would because their predicament was temporary, that culture was far more important than conveying the message that defiance elicits immediate, extreme penalties, and for this reason there would be no trial. What I must mention is that, when Ari and I went to Quebec City, this exact sequence of events had already happened in the Aegean circa 2006, and it was only solved by the intervention of Bathys Augustenburg, whom the captives called to the stand as an expert set to testify, who delivered a profane onslaught of fluent but unintentionally archaism-laden Greek before the criminal courtroom, explaining her terms and detailing her argument in what I cannot bother to reproduce in the style of an embellished direct-discourse battle speech included for dramatic effect in the works of a Roman military historian, for I do not have any primary witnesses at the moment who could give me the gist, Bathys apparently saying that the center of Athens, Greece, The Incipient would be cut off from the rest of the world and reduced to the same form of poverty which had driven the squatters to leave the city and strive for the secrecy of a barely-protected archeological site to which they never delivered significant damage, that Bureau ought not to even dare approach the land into which she and Saturn had set foot far longer ago, that the wrath of Saturn Thebes would spare no Greek agricultural facility no matter its importance provided it contained a large number of livestock and the Greek government should be especially cautious knowing that they lacked the resources required to put up any form of offensive against a mutant immortal with as much power as Saturn, that a currency crisis would occur through the illegal printing of money completely and utterly indistinguishable from that manufactured within the law by the Bureau-backed Greek government and furthermore constantly keeping pace with whatever changes lawmakers would agree to make to the bills to combat the counterfeits in a continual arm race costing potentially billions, and that she would personally assassinate anyone who dared stand in her way in any significant capacity, and she matched each of these statements to a demand, all of which were met, especially the swift release of the held-hostage squatters and the cancellation of citadel demolition plans, but a few were not met, leading to an economic crisis. Ari told me all this about her mother and her mother's bold actions while we sat on a long train ride to New York City, where my grandfather had apparently recently traveled to host a conference. Public infrastructure was still horrid in that time, for no one in the various governments bothered with anything more substantial than Amtrak, so eventually Ari threw us out the window by our seat, opening it wide enough that we would both fit and then ensuring our safe landing. That was when I had my next experience with teleportation, abruptly finding myself immediately in front of the building Red Swan had rented as a temporary conference center. Ari told me that we would not be entering so we would not be held accountable for what she was about to do, but I agreed that it was a good idea to kill Goni nonetheless considering everything he had done to me and everyone else around him, so Ari pointed out an alternative means to me, saying that above the precise center of the building was a glass dome, not at all bulletproof, through which she could shoot precisely by manipulating the velocity of a bullet from one of her rifles in a way she carefully explained to me before I immediately forgot all the technical details, at which point she said it wasn't particularly necessary as long as she would help me identify Goni and calibrate aim. Thus, with that said, we climbed four stories of stairs in an adjacent facility until we reached roof access, which we did by mutually kicking in the tightly locked door. When we arrived there, she revealed the gun, slick, black, and modified from its original form to be fully automatic. Whenever passersby glanced at us, we concealed the weapon with a supernatural speed, unwilling to be caught. With the first shot, Ari missed by about a foot, hitting the leg of the man standing next to Goni and causing a widespread panic in the building while she recalibrated to Goni, who was suddenly a moving target. The tension was more than just palpable, and I thought we weren't going to take any risks, but then Ari's second shot fired earsplittingly through the air. She took a single glance, told me Goni's brains had exited his skull, which had been shattered, and grabbed my arm to take us fleeing into hiding from the now-inefficient NYPD. Before they knew even an iota of information about what had happened, we were already long gone.

Goni inexplicably survived this incident, outwardly clueless as to how. He never knew that I was involved, and I never felt the need to tell him.