Aiko was Abhi Durai. Long ago, he had been turned down for admission into college because his family was too poor to pay the necessary bribes. It didn't matter that he was a perfect student, his line was originally from a lower caste, and even though no one said these things mattered anymore, they still did. He had been forced to sell tires for a living, and marry a stupid ugly girl well beneath his station, all because his parents hadn't paid for his ticket to success. In India, it was easily possible to become fabulously wealthy -- with the right connections. For everyone else, there were the tides of fortune, sometimes lifting people up, sometimes tearing people down, without rhyme or reason. The idea of merit was for a country like America. Indians knew of the place, they got to see it in their movie theatres, but they couldn't imagine it ever spreading here. Not to India, where beggars still deliberately mutilated themselves and homeless children to increase their take. Not where people still lacked toilets and sewage mingled with the water supply. Not where cities were so crowded and hot that people could simply faint and die while walking across town. Not where Muslims would randomly machine gun crowds of Hindus, and Hindus would randomly burn Muslims to death, in a country of a dozen different language groups and at least three different separatist regions. No, the dream of anything working in India, of anything being livable or decent in India, was just for the theatres. India was soon to be the most populous country on Earth, exceeding China, which had instituted a one child policy decades ago, and thus clawed its way out of poverty, finally having enough money to invest in its citizenry rather than just wonder how to feed them all. The men of India wouldn't abide by such a plan here, though. They were too manly to let a woman stop them from having as many children as they wanted. They were also too manly to not beat their wives or cut off their heads if they disagreed with or dishonored them in any imaginable way. Muslims and Hindus hated each other, but they were in perfect agreement when it came to the treatment of women. And Sikhs. They both agreed what exactly should happen to Sikhs too. Even though it was the modern era, the majority of Indians were still employed on their own tiny farms, toiling away over their rice fields even when the water table was only capable of supporting wheat fields, because rice made more money in the short term. Many of them were illiterate. All of them were poor. Most of them were hungry.

　　But what could you do with them? What could you do with India? China had already stolen the low-end manufacturing jobs of the world, America was the center of innovation, Europe and Japan were the high-tech exporters, and service jobs had to be done domestically. India's only natural resource was its rivers, which meant its farmland, so where else would Indians find employment? If they didn't farm, then what? The unemployment rate of Indians was already 11%, and that was with the majority of Indians still working on their farms. What if all those farmers threw down their hoes and tramped into the cities, looking for work? Unthinkable. No education. No skills. No real grasp of English, the language of world commerce and Indian unity. What jobs could you give these people? So very many Indians to employ. 30% of their population was still under 15, which meant every year 25 million Indians would be entering the workforce, needing a job. Meanwhile, only 6% of their population was over 65, which meant only a million people a year would be ready to retire and give up their job to someone else. Where were the 24 million surplus jobs to come from? Annually? Unthinkable. India was unthinkable. Hiding behind its ancient cultural legacy and its skyscrapers and enclaves of the super rich, the fact that India's per capita GDP was in a tight race with Africa's was somehow forgotten. Another thing people didn't understand was that India had a higher population than all of Africa combined. Which meant most poor people didn't live in Africa. They lived in India. The outside world had no idea. India, not Africa, was the heart of darkness and the pit of despair. If you lumped in their south Asian cousins in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the poverty was even worse. The violence was even worse. And looming over it all was the prospect that, someday, another war would break out between Pakistan and India, and this time it would be nuclear, a nuclear war that took out all the major cities of both countries, and blanketed the entire world in dust and ash, which would lower the Earth's energy intake from the sun, and thus the Earth's crop yields, for years. A world with grain reserves that would only hold out for a few months. Earth lived hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck, when it came to harvests. There was no wiggle room. If the whole world simultaneously had a bad harvest for two years running, billions could perish. But that didn't stop the lunatics in Pakistan from threatening to do it anyway. It didn't stop them from attacking our Congress while it was in session, or shelling across our borders, or any number of acts of war that no other country had to put up with.

　　Someday India's patience would break and there would be war. Pakistan would lose the conventional war, like it always did, and then it would launch its nuclear arsenal. India would retaliate, and the pit of despair which was South Asia would become the world's funeral pyre. Abhi Durai knew India too well. He had lived in it all his life. Breathed it, listened to it, watched it, and suffered it for too many years, to think there was any hope for his country. They would never reform themselves, and no one would ever try to help them. Which meant mankind was no good. Mankind had failed him, failed India and failed itself. He was tired of mankind. It was time to move on to some other species.

　　As a tire salesman, he had lacked the necessary funds to start his science lab. But the idea had grown on him year after year, scrawled notebook after scrawled notebook. He had found the perfect organism, something that would make a mockery of mankind. It would be smarter than anything humans could imagine, because it would share just one consciousness the whole world over. It would never go to war, because it would be the only self on Earth, and thus have no one left to fight. It wouldn't feel pain, so it couldn't feel hot or hungry. If it got sick or injured, it would simply slough off that region of its body. Any part of the perfect organism was as good as any other, all of them could regrow the whole, so there were no centralized vulnerabilities. It would be, therefore, immortal. It would not reproduce in times of excess; it would only grow. It would not die in times of want; it would only shrink. It was such a beautiful creature. Every time he looked around him at the harried, wrinkled, downcast eyes of his people, he imagined how beautiful his slime was in comparison.

　　Yes, it was Time for Slime. It was time for Slime World, the Age of Goo, the Era of Ooze. The whole world would be composed of slime, and slime would become the collective unconscious of the world. It was pantheism made real. Abhi Durai would be the slime’s very first meal. With him as feedstock, the reaction would start in his lab and never stop. Everything was edible to his slime. So long as there was something edible nearby, the slime would continue to grow and spread in search of more. Slime would devour the oceans; it would devour the soil; it would burrow into the crust and only stop at the mantle. The world would no longer be blue and green. It would be one, vast, red gloop. Slimy tides would lap away at slimy shores, following the orbit of the Moon. Slimy appendages would soak in the light of the sun, photosynthesizing everything it needed. And the world slime would think slimy thoughts, gazing upon its universal demesne, and finding it good. It was wonderful. It was simply too wonderful to even picture. It was utopia.

　　It was in the middle of one of these slimy reveries, as he sweated in his tire selling shop, swatting idly at flies that had somehow found their way through the door, that a brilliant brownish-orange light had begun to shine from a small, smooth, perfect sphere.

　　"I am Fulvous," The sphere spoke. Abhi Durai's eyes widened in disbelief. “The wyrd council has scryed you, and found you worthy. Rejoice, human, for you will be the agent of our revenge. Repeat after me, via tu lusches, Fulvous! And together, we will complete your dream."

* * *

　　Aiko Sakai awoke from her dream, the last sentence still ringing vividly in her memory. "Together, we will complete your dream." Either she was very good at imagining what a mad scientist might be like, or her magic wasn't just mind reading. It seemed to include a few more psychic powers, like ESP. And her ESP had just warned her that something was very, very wrong. Chiharu told me they hadn't gone away. The naive hope that I wouldn't be dragged into this war was just my own imagination. I wonder if they expect me to fight. How can I, with just a bra and panties for armor? But they won't know where to go without my telepathic link to the bad guy. I'm sunk. I was sunk the moment I opened up that stupid desk drawer. Stupid Bubbles. Stupid, stupid, stupid Bubbles. Aiko Sakai sat up in bed, looking down at her magical underwear which she now wore day and night. It magically stayed perfectly clean, just like she had originally imagined it, so she had no problem sleeping and waking in it without changing. Plus, suddenly not hearing people's true thoughts was as terrifying as going blind these days, she relied on it so much. She had had to simply accept that her wyrd would always get to see as much as he wanted of her. If she thought of him as a dress ornament, she could forget Bubbles, most of the time. Not that most beads were warm against your skin, but that could be ignored too. A lot of things could be ignored when you put your mind to it.

　　Aiko sighed and rolled out of bed, pulling open her closet to find something to wear. Today was her first date with Kioshi. She was not going to interrupt it, even if it was just hanging out at her own house. It's not like Mr. Slime was going to invent a world eating super amoeba in a day. I hope. I think. Well, I'll tell Chiharu about it the moment she wakes up, but I am not skipping my first date. I can skip school tomorrow to go hunt Dead Enders, but girls have their limits. The first date with her very first boyfriend was one of them. If the world turned to slime before then, then let it be slimed. Without her, nobody would have known there was a problem in the first place. That meant everything she did to save the world was pure bonus, morally speaking.

　　But why slime? I mean really. Whose utopia was slime? Where did people come up with these things? I think I'm a Dead Ender because I can't get close to people I do know and I don't even care about strangers. I'm working on both of those traits, I really am. I summoned up the courage to talk to Kioshi in front of everyone, didn't I? I fed Mizuki my own bento, didn't I? I vacuumed the carpets without Mother asking me to, didn't I? My house grew into a whole neighborhood, with scaffolding still going up on every roof, didn't it? I'll have these dead ends licked in no time. And then I'll be a Sakai Chiharu, Father, Mother, and even Saki can take pride in. Then I can be proud of myself again, like I was before I knew I actually sucked. If only Bubbles could just tell me what I was doing right and wrong, this would be so much easier. She hated having to guess what it meant to be a good person, flailing around blindly with only progress reports to guide her.

　　How much harder would this be for someone without a wyrd, and without an in-house Choice Giver to give helpful advice? Aiko didn't know. She thought the people around her were wonderful, but Bubbles had told her when asked that they were all Dead Enders too. Even Sayuri, which had surprised her the most. It was hard. Maybe it was impossible to make the whole world so good individuals could be trusted with infinite power, or even a tiny fraction of it. But didn't the wyrds say they had done it? A world of pure Choice Givers and followers? But that was only for a time, eventually they ran out of Choice Givers, and now they're a world of pure Dead Enders, even worse than us. It was hard for them too. It was just hard.

　　How much harder would it be for Abhi Durai? Born in a place like that, in an environment like that, what did she expect? I had two of the most amazing parents on Earth, two of the best sisters on Earth, two of the best friends on Earth, and I'm still a bad girl. How much could you ask of a low-caste tire salesman whose whole life was ruined by things outside of his control? Whose whole life was ruined just by being born in India instead of Japan? Though she didn't know where the slime came into it. She could understand if the guy liked to kick puppies and throw his bowl at his wife when she served overly mild curry -- but where did slime come into it? Never mind. The world is vast. There are seven billion people on Earth. One of them had to love slime.

　　"Nnn. Sister? What time is it?" Saki sat up in her bed, wearing a giant shirt she had stolen from Father ages ago and panties. She rubbed a sleeve against her eyes, since her arm wasn't long enough to escape the shirt sleeves unless she really tried.

　　"I'm sorry, Saki. I didn't mean to wake you. I just had a really weird dream." Aiko turned around to talk to her little sister, while stepping into her favorite green short skirt. She wanted to make a good impression for her first date after all.

　　"I bet it was about your boyfriend." Saki giggled.

　　"Go back to sleep, silly." Aiko turned back to her closet to find a cute blouse. It would be white, the color of purity. That would be perfect.

　　I wonder what it's like to have a boyfriend, Saki thought to herself enviously. Aiko has everything now. Chiharu talks to her, but she doesn't talk to me. She's prettier than all of us, and now she's got a boyfriend coming over, already at just fifteen. And what do I have? I have nothing. No special traits. No hobby I can share with Father. Nothing I can talk about with Chiharu. No breasts. No club activities. No boys. Sister's just moving on without me. Soon I won't even matter to her anymore, even though we share the same room. She'll tell me to get out this evening, so she can have the room to herself with her boy. I'm just in the way. She probably didn't want to talk to me now, either, and that's why she's telling me to go back to sleep, as though someone could just sleep again once they're awake.

　　Aiko bit her cheek. She had planned to tell Saki to stay out of her room while Kioshi was over. But wasn't that their right, to have a little privacy? Kioshi deserved to be alone with her, didn't he? But Saki was hurting. She was hurting, and Aiko never would have noticed without her blessed Bubbles. She had to say something.

　　"Do you want to know what I talked to our older sister about, this Christmas?" Aiko asked Saki cheerfully, nonchalantly.

　　Of course! Saki thought, surprised. "If you want." Saki shrugged, walking to her closet to get dressed herself.

　　"I asked her how to be a good person." Aiko smiled, remembering. That felt like a lifetime ago, but it was only a couple of months.

　　Saki turned around to look at her sister, her hands frozen on her gathered up nightshirt which she had been preparing to take off. "You don't think you're a good person now?" Saki asked again, just to confirm.

　　"I used to think so, but not anymore." Aiko confessed.

　　"And what did she answer?" Saki asked.

　　"You wouldn't believe it." Aiko laughed.

　　I would. After Christmas, you've been so happy and active, I would believe anything, Saki thought. "Tell me anyway." Saki ordered, finally taking off her sleeping shirt and taking out a new one from her closet. I'll wear a green one, to match my sister, Saki decided, pushing shirts back and forth on her clothes hangers.

　　"Study hard. Work hard. Be nice. Be honest. Obey authority figures. Get a graduate degree. Marry a guy with a graduate degree. Have kids until it isn't fun anymore. I think there were some others. But isn't that so sad? It's advice anyone could have given. What's the use of being told what you should do, when no one tells you how you can gain the strength to actually do it? What if I don't want to be nice? What if I don't want to study hard? What's the use of advice that people can't actually follow?" Aiko griped.

　　Saki smiled, changing her panties now that her new shirt covered her modesty. "It sounds like something Mother would say."

　　"It sounds like something every Mother in the world would say. But I did learn something she didn't tell me, that she just lived by. I learned that if I wanted others to love me, I had to love them first. Not just abstractly love them. I had to reach out to them, my feelings had to actually reach them. I had to make them feel cherished and happy around me, or what were my abstract feelings worth to anyone? That's something I had never noticed before. As to how to want to be good, which is the true secret to being good, I'm still working on it. But if you want, I'll tell you the moment I find the answer." Aiko offered.

　　Saki put on a white skirt to complete her new day's outfit, a mirror opposite to Aiko's clothing. "You could give me a guess. You know, a first draft." Saki smiled hopefully.

　　"If a good person is someone who gets along with everyone and everything . . . don't you think that pretty much sums up what a good person is?" Aiko asked, not wanting her logic to break down by taking too many steps at a time.

　　"Sure. That's as good a definition as any." Saki sat down on her bed, truly interested. Aiko never talks to me like this. Aiko never talks to me at all, except stuff like 'How was your day?' and 'Pass the salt.' What's going on?, Saki thought.

　　"I wonder if Chiharu would agree." Aiko tapped her lips. Can I really be Saki's mentor? I'm just a Dead Ender myself. Everything I say is probably just making things worse. But Aiko was lonely because I'm ignoring her. It has to be me talking to her. So I just have to become wise enough to say the right thing, right here and now.

　　"Anyway, I think how to be that sort of person, how to summon the strength to be that person, is to always ask yourself, Will I be the person I want to be if I do this? Will I be the person I want to be if I say this? If you want to be that person enough, if you admire that idealized person enough, you can do it. I started doing things I thought I could never do, just by asking myself all the time what I had to do to keep getting better. That's how I made friends, and that's how I got a boyfriend. I just kept asking what a good person would do in that situation, someone braver and nicer and more empathetic than myself, what decision they would make if they had the same opportunities as me. Then I did it." Aiko said.

　　"But how do you want to be that person enough? You're using the same logic as the Hindu sage. Remember?" Saki asked.

　　Aiko grinned. "The world is held up by an elephant, and the elephant stands on a turtle, but what's holding up the turtle?"

　　"'It's turtles all the way down!'" Saki grinned back. The story of the flummoxed sage was a Sakai inside joke.

　　"You say it's impossible to follow Chiharu's advice, because before then you have to want to follow it enough to actually do it." Saki explained her allusion. "And so you put a new foundation underneath Chiharu's advice, which is, to want to want to, and then you can do it. But now your new foundation needs a foundation, to want to want to want to, and we're no closer than when we started." Saki complained.

　　"You're right. I didn't solve the question either, did I?" Aiko shook her head. "If you find out how to want to want to want to, could you tell me?"

　　"Yes, sister." Saki smiled. She cares about my opinion. That's amazing. Even though I'm ten, she listened to my objection and took me seriously. I hope I do find the answer. It's a tough question, isn't it? I never get any tough questions in school. Maybe Aiko really does love me? Does that mean Chiharu loves me too? Saki thought.

　　"Listen, if you want to stay with me and Kioshi this evening, it's okay. I'm not going to kiss him on the first date, you know. He's just reading my book. Which is exactly one chapter long so far. Actually, I was hoping to write some more before he got here." Aiko blushed, remembering how little she actually had to show him, after talking her book up so highly in front of him.

　　"You're writing a book?" Saki asked excitedly.

　　"Yes, but it's probably boring and awful, so don't admire me yet. Do you want to see it first? Before Kioshi? You'd be the first person to read it." Aiko offered.

　　"It won't be boring at all. You read so much, after all. I bet you're a great writer. You learned from the best, right?" Saki said encouragingly.

　　"All I learned from the best is that they can do things I can't." Aiko laughed, sticking out her tongue and making a bitter face. Saki laughed with her. Aiko pulled out her printed sheets that she'd prepared for Kioshi last night, and motioned to Saki to come sit on Aiko's bed with her, so they could read it together.

　　If this doesn't work, I could always buy ice cream for her for lunch. Ice cream is love in any language. Aiko crossed her fingers in the depths of her heart for luck.

* * *

　　Rei Rin was sitting on her bed, her hair carefully gathered to her left side, where she was carefully brushing it out. It was a Sunday, so she didn't have anywhere to go today. She intended to spend the whole day in bed or at her desk, doing college assignments and reading Angle Corporation essays. It was a lot like the other days of the week, only she had more free time and had gotten more sleep last night. But those two bonuses really did make the day feel brighter. Now if only this winter cold would wear off. February was the worst part of winter, because it felt like the Earth was gradually losing all of its heat, getting worse instead of better every day, and because it had been so very long since a genuinely warm day had gone by. Rei's slight figure didn't help, either. The cold lanced through her, unobstructed by any layers of fat. Someday this figure will be the envy of my peers, when I'm forty or so. But now it just makes me look like a kid and keeps me freezing at all times. She could make an effort to eat more, but the last thing she needed was to be short and wide, like a sphere. It was too late for her to grow any taller with extra food, so staying thin was a necessity. There simply was no perfect solution.

　　"I'm going outside to play with Melody." Shiori, on the other side of the room, announced. Melody was an old dog now, but still healthy, which was a blessing. If Rei moved out before Melody died, that would be another blessing. I don't want to be here when she dies. "Do you want to come?" Shiori asked.

　　Rei shivered at the thought. "No thank you. It must be freezing outside."

　　"You're such a baby. Inazumu's in southern Japan, we don't even get snow here. Freezing? This is good running weather." Shiori teased.

　　"I hate running in the cold. The air stabs my lungs and makes me cough, it's miserable. I'd rather run in the middle of summer, at least then I can breathe." Rei said.

　　"Until you collapse from heat stroke." Shiori said. "In the cold you can run forever because you won't sweat out your electrolytes."

　　"So I'll drink a lot, horrors." Rei smiled at her sister. "You're the only person who actually likes exercising in the first place."

　　"Have it your way. See you soon." Shiori shrugged, nevertheless putting on a coat, which completely proved Rei right.

　　"See you." Rei replied, rolling her carefully brushed hair into a bun and then pinning it all in place with a hair band. She took out a sheaf of essay papers and looked for where she had left off last night, grabbing a bag of rice crackers to keep her company as she read. To think that each of these essays comes with the endorsement of ten thousand people. She must have analyzed the dreams of millions of people by now. How many people wanted to emigrate somewhere, anywhere, so long as it wasn't home? The ability to transplant your entire community, culture, and family intact with free land on the other side was certainly compelling. But in a way they were offering less than emigration to established countries, because there was no infrastructure and no job market and no safety net already in place. Actually, Rei supposed that billions of people would have responded if free emigration to established countries was being offered. Receiving the replies of millions of people was a response to the lower economic incentives. But they were being given something far greater than any job prospect, if they only knew. A whole world to shape however they pleased, and all its riches kept to themselves and their posterity. For those with the willingness to work, a new planet was worth much more than the advantages of in-place infrastructure, markets and taxpayer funds. It would be tough the first couple generations. But think of the fortunes to be made after that. Not to mention the freedom to start all over, with any beliefs you wanted, just like the pilgrims who traveled to America in search of freedom. Because America was a chance to reboot, it had created the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which eventually became the guiding light to the world and the richest, most powerful, and freest country on Earth. America's glory days were already behind her, but it didn't change the fact that freedom, a clean slate where communities could create whole new systems of governance, could pay off even higher dividends than even a continent of unused natural resources. So long as the new system was as bright an idea as the Constitution. Which was up to Rei to decide. For some strange reason.

　　What will I do with one hundred million yen a year? Rei wondered, now that she was thinking of fortunes. The two hundred million yen Shiori and Rei had given their parents had pretty much set them for life. The next two hundred million yen Rei received would set her for life. Which meant the rest had to be spent somewhere. If I ever do have a family, I'll save some for each of my children. But who will fall in love with me, with this flat body? I could fit in at a middle school without comment. There had to be boys who appreciated small girls, but where would she meet them? In college? Maybe if I had joined a club and went to parties. But it's all I can do to keep up with my studies. I'm not smart enough to be in college, not really. I have to study and work non-stop, until I want to scream. How could I find time for a club on top of that? Shiori quit all her club activities too, she has the exact same problem I have. We're both going to stay single forever. Well, at least my sister won't move away then. I couldn't live without her nearby. When she said she wanted to move in with Kotone my heart stopped. Shiori's going to leave me, she wants a big mansion and a family of her own, she wants to be like Kotone now that she can afford it. It's only a question of when. I can't keep relying on her forever. But I don't want to stop either.

　　Nevermind that. Think happy thoughts. One hundred million yen a year, what should I do with it all? Rei Rin closed her eyes, staring at the essay in front of her but not seeing it. She didn't want anything else for herself in the world. The things she did want money couldn't buy. She just wanted to be loved. She just wanted not to lose the things she loved. But Melody was going to die, Shiori was going to move away, and she would have to move out of her parent's house in a couple years if not sooner. She was going to be totally alone again. Totally alone and rich. It was all so useless. If aging just means losing everything, I wish we had never aged. I wish we were thirteen again and I still had six years to spend with everyone. Now it's all just downhill. I lose things, but I never gain any. I'm like the entropy of the universe. Rei sighed. If money couldn't buy anything she needed, she may as well give it away to charity. Did orphanages accept charity? Rei thought they were publicly funded. Should she just donate it to help pay off some tiny portion of the Japanese national debt then? What a hopeless gesture that would be. I'll just give it to the Red Cross then. They seem to know what they're doing. She liked that the Red Cross involved itself in disaster relief, which meant people who were in bad straits through no fault of their own. That was a better target for charity than people who were their own worst enemy. Since there were always new disasters in Japan, the land of earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, the Japanese Red Cross could always use her money to save lives and comfort the unfortunate. The Red Cross, then, until she had a family, and then it could be spent on her family again, until they were also set for life, and then back to the Red Cross.

　　Why am I working so hard to pass my college courses when I'll never need a job? Because so long as I'm in college, I can keep hanging out with Shiori and Chiharu, and living at home. Such a simple, fleeting wish. She worked the majority of every day on subjects that were far too difficult for her to understand, because she wanted things to stay the same. If only money could buy that, she wouldn't have to go to college. Why did things have to change? High school was so fun.

　　"Do you think they got the message, Onyx?" Rei asked her wyrd, suddenly not wanting to be alone.

　　Onyx floated up out of her purse, flashing waves of darkness. "Of course. It's a tough scientific problem, how to use magic to fold up. Mastermind didn't solve it either, you know. And whatever progress he made on the answer, it was destroyed along with his folding machine. I'm sure they're just busy researching the issue."

　　"I don't want to lose you too. You're the only one I really have, the only person who will always stay with me. If you die. . ." Rei Rin's heart felt gripped in ice.

　　"We'll know the moment the invention is made. All we have to do is keep scrying the wyrd world. If even one wyrd isn't a Dead Ender, due to our future having no future, then you saved wyrd-kind." Onyx blinked.

　　"It was Shiori's idea." Rei pushed his praise away.

　　"It was your ability." Onyx insisted. Rei smiled. Onyx always took her side.

　　"So now that wyrds will live again, do you think the dark wyrds will give up and become good again?" Rei asked.

　　"They won't believe it until they see it, which could be years from now." Onyx blinked dishearteningly. "Then again, they haven't attacked us in years. So maybe it will resolve itself peacefully."

　　"Would they change their mind, if they did see a new source of magic? Would they spare the Earth? I mean, their most hated enemy did save their lives, or we're about to, anyway." Rei pointed out.

　　"I don't know, Rei." Onyx said. "I think they might just hate us even more for that. They'll resent us for saving them when they couldn't save themselves. It will just become one more grievance. Killing us could be wiping out the shame of having had to rely on such a primitive backwater for advice. There will always be an excuse for dark wyrds to hate and kill humans."

　　"So the fighting will never stop?" Rei asked.

　　"It will stop when we neutralize the rest of the dark wyrds that got down to Earth before the spigot closed. Of course, it'll just start over again when a new faction of dark wyrds builds a new folding machine, sooner or later." Onyx flashed grimly. "Honestly, Shiori was foolish to keep us alive. We're so much stronger than you, and we can chase you across dimensions. If you had just let us die, then Angle Ark would have succeeded. Now all it takes is another group of terrorists from the etheric plane to hunt down and kill every new settlement wherever Miyamoto sets them up. We can scry out all their locations, you know, just like we scryed out Earth and folded here."

　　"Don't say that. Wyrds don't deserve to die just because some of you are bad. You're a wonderful civilization. You have just as much a right to exist as we do. If we killed everyone who posed any threat to ourselves, where would that principle lead?" Rei rebuked Onyx.

　　"I'm just saying mankind signed their death warrant by sparing wyrd-kind. I'm not saying there was a better solution." Onyx replied.

　　"We'll see about that. I think wyrds are going to have a renaissance once we've introduced all of our ideas to them, and we'll have a renaissance once all the wyrds' ideas have been introduced to us. We'll love each other, and live together, and . . ." Rei suddenly realized where her thoughts were leading.

　　"Onyx, if you could, would you marry me?" Rei Rin asked.

　　"How could I?" Onyx blinked. "We took on these forms because these are the only ones your plane would support. Out of necessity."

　　"But magic can do anything, can't it?" Rei pressed.

　　"If we knew how to use it to do anything, maybe. If someone's magic talent down here on Earth was to use it in exactly that way, maybe. But what are the odds?" Onyx blinked rhetorically.

　　"But, if you could?" Rei asked.

　　"There's no point answering that since I can't." Onyx replied.

　　"But, if you could?" Rei asked.

　　Onyx floated silently in the air. Rei sighed, feeling a little stupid. She thought at least one person in the multiverse accepted her, thin figure and all. Stupid. Of course an alien doesn't have any interest in you romantically. They're aliens. We must look horribly ugly to them.

　　"Yes." Onyx finally admitted, breaking the silence. Rei looked up, her eyes widening.

　　"Really? Not just because I'm your mistress?" Rei's heart beat faster.

　　"Yes, really." Onyx filled the room with darkness. "I love you. If the others asked their wyrds, they'd all say the same thing. We chose you, each of you, as our perfect soulmates. Of course we'd want to marry you, if we could. But it's impossible, so it's all just nonsense."

　　"But do you think I'm attractive?" Rei immediately needed to wash away her doubts.

　　"Wyrds have eyes, and ears, and touch, just like humans. But those senses are all just subsidiary. They aren't very important. True beauty. . .what really appeals to us. . .is what we see when we scry your souls. Maybe I shouldn't be telling you this, I'm giving away some trade secrets here." Onyx blinked with embarrassment.

　　"Then. . .when you say we're beautiful, you really mean it? Like, 'I want you' beautiful?" Rei asked.

　　"Yes and no." Onyx admitted. "We don't have. . .quite the same urgency humans tend to display. Romance is a very leisurely process for us. We can't have more kids than the number of people who die, or we'd have exhausted the amount of magic in the etheric plane in a flash. We only die to extreme old age, by accident, in war or willingly. So we gradually evolved away from constantly wanting. . .to reproduce. It was just painful, since the urge couldn't be met."

　　"So you don't want me." Rei corrected her statement.

　　"That's not true either." Onyx blinked in frustration. "Look, it's like this. Wyrds stopped being lustful long ago, so we lost all the instinctual triggers that would make us 'want' someone. But we still retained our capacity to appreciate beauty, and the most beautiful attribute of a person is their soul, what we see when we scry them. If someone is beautiful, you of course want to possess them, just like you'd want to possess a beautiful painting to put on your wall. So if the other wyrd lets you, you do end up possessing each other, but as a mark of. . .commitment, I guess you'd say. Ownership. Marriage. Passion doesn't come into it."

　　"That isn't so distant from us. Girls, at least, have sex with boys they love because then they finally belong to us, and we to them. The act isn't as important as what it symbolizes here either." Rei Rin explained.

　　"I still don't see the point of this conversation." Onyx muttered.

　　"I just want someone to love me, and no boys are offering." Rei sighed. "If I could marry you, I would. You've always been there for me. You always will. Why find someone else I could never trust even half as much as you? I'd rather marry you."

　　"Does that mean you find me attractive?" Onyx asked.

　　"Of course I do. I'm not made of stone. It doesn't matter that you're an alien. You have a brain and a heart. You understand me and you care about me, more than a normal boy ever could. We've lived together for six years. Why can't I fall for you?"

　　"Aside from the obvious?" Onyx blinked.

　　"Aside from the obvious." Rei admitted. "But I'm going to work on that. And then you'd better fulfill your word."

　　"Yes, mistress." Onyx replied.

　　"What do you see when you scry me, anyway?" Rei asked.

　　"A firefly in a jar. When you light up, you fill the jar with light, and when you quiet down, the jar returns to total darkness." Onyx answered.

　　"What does it mean?" Rei asked.

　　"Something beautiful." Onyx answered. He wouldn't be any clearer.

　　"Rei," Shiori said, re-entering the room a bit later. She had a pinched look on her face. "I just got a phone call from Chiharu. She says Aiko had a dream, a foretelling dream or something, with her magic. It's the Dead Enders. They're back."