Though her bed was empty, the true treasure of the room sat unceremoniously at the foot of her sleeping place: her computer set-up. Innumerable switches, diodes, buttons, wires, and other pieces of neon-lit hardware composed the structure itself. It was Zahra’s second chronological home in the phrase “home away from home.” Though she was not physically in the room, there was still the very real hint of her true presence.

Mystica peered over the fantastic machine, being sure to take note of several new additions Zahra had made since he’d last seen it. But alas, she had not done anything about the exploit in security he’d noticed months ago. Not that he had mentioned it to her then. Why give away the secret to unlocking a genius’s collection of hard data?

Of course, it would take a very rare type of robber to be able to properly utilize this little trick. Mystica chuckled and snatched up a length of cord running from the hard drive to one of the auxiliary cloud storage hubs. With his free hand, the Old One reached into the breast pocket of his salmon-coloured dress shirt and withdrew a simple paperclip. Humming to himself as his deft fingers went to work on straightening out the small length of metal, he let his mind drift back onto the subject of his recent discovery.

Well, it wasn’t necessarily a “discovery.” Not quite yet. It was more of a hunch – an inkling of a notion of an inception of an idea. It had been buzzing at the back of his head for days now, and even with his infinite mental capability, he couldn’t ignore it forever. Something interesting had arrived on the small blue planet known as Earth, and he intended to track it down, whatever it may be. That is, if it truly existed, and he wasn’t firing off on an infinite psychic processing loop. It wouldn’t be the first time. Nor, he suspected, would it be the last. But first and foremost, he needed to prove this blasted thing’s existence.

But true, he knew what evil lurked beneath the surface. An Old One's old flame. The bane of what little heart remained in his true form, still locked in eternal slumber beneath fathoms of ice, forever held in place by the mystic words of man. Two wondrous embarrassments in one tidy rhetorical pondering. He could not erase the past. Oh, but he could damn well try.

Having straightened the paperclip, he placed the tip between his front teeth and slowly withdrew it. He then held the clip aloft. The tip was now needle-sharp. He repeated this process with the opposite end, until the plain article of office supplies resembled a double-tipped hypodermic. With no ceremony to his movements, he jammed one end of it into the wire he held in his hand.

And then he carefully inserted the opposite end of the paperclip into the largest vein of his forearm.

((And here it comes, the rush of information – files, bytes, memory, maps. A digi-sphere dissolving into flesh and bone. I am the artifice. Afghan border, blips across an intercom, no – the radar itself. Red sand, tech dust, and now I’m standing on some back road in Australia, that forsaken landscape, immaterial sun-bleached bones floating on the open web-sea. Hold onto that as we pan out. Small, so small, it all…is? Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!))

“Jeepers Creepers!” he cried, pulling the clip-needle from his arm. What a rush! He’d almost forgotten how exhilarating tapping into a large info source was. A thousand blades tipped with liquid endorphins, all aimed at his mind. This body was not designed to handle this sort of influx. The wicked sting of a migraine began to pulse its way through his temples. It would take a bit of time before the ebb and flow of pain subsided.

Wincing, he looked to the digital alarm clock atop the nightstand next to Zahra’s bed. The neon blue lights – excruciatingly bright, considering the darkness of the room – read just past 5 AM. This should have been the perfect time to catch his obstinate former tecchie completely off-guard. Normally, she’d be just now heading off to bed, a regular nocturne in her own right. But this evening...

Hector would be safe, at least for a little while. The poor boy hadn't responded very well to the er...bacterial manifestations that had accompanied Mystica's old flame's sexual release. How foolish he had been to fall into another of her obvious ploys. More traps, more tricks. Just like always.

But what Choth-Meggurakk hadn't planned on was Mystica having a ruse of his own to set off. She hadn't called his bluff. Not yet, at least. She was still razor-focused on East Scituate. Little did she know of his new trick...

Lecourt closed his eyes. When they reopened, they were once again his own. Now standing in the middle of an unfamiliar room, he paused to observe his environment, not bewildered, but nonchalant. Mystica had gone, transferred his consciousness to his secondary vessel, miles upon miles upon miles away...

---

As long as she didn’t look at her with those horridly blue eyes, the likes of which were prone to draw many a man to the brink of madness. As long as they remained sealed behind such human lids...

“You’re pinker than that disgusting couch you’ve been sleeping on.”

Still holding the pillow in front of her face, Annie glanced downward. Ugh, he was right. Looked stained, as though it had been used for many a drunken “encounter.” In spite of the headache pounding behind her eyes, Annie squirmed her way off the couch and rose warily to her feet.

"Hungover again?" asked the Dahlia, bearing the Deadgod's voice. She threw open the curtains, as though expecting the daylight to come flooding in. Pity it was still only just past 11 PM. She scoffed and turned on her heel, marching into the walk-in kitchenette at the opposite end of Annie's mobile home.

"Still drunk, actually," replied Annie with a groan. Legs uncertain and wobbling, she followed her wayward master/mistress across the floor. "Sorry my crib isn't exactly--"

"Tidy?" asked the Old One, lifting a soiled plate out of the sink and watching as a veritable swarm of gnats fled the sudden intrusion. With a scoff of disgust, the Dahlia dropped the plate back into the brackish water at the base of the sink.

"Listen, man--" Annie began, only to be quickly interrupted.

"Lady."

Then, after a moment of thought:

"Well, technically, I have no gender or sex, but that's beside the point."

"Then what is the point?" Annie asked, stifling a drunken yawn. The gin blossoms had overtaken the bridge of her nose, outlining a number of freckles.

"The point is that this is the crux of many instances of this world's future. Oh, what might become of your tiny little ball of green and blue? What exactly would I even do with a...Hart title? Is it a literal heart? If not, I have some delightful plans for remodeling it. Mustn't get ahead of myself. If this Daniel person is worth more than the sum of his parts, which is a little more than $100k if my estimations in regard to the human black market are accurate... I digress. Assuming this lad is an outlier from the usual Johnny-come-never edgelords that are a commonality in the XWF. Hm, I might actually have to kill him. I mean, it'd be a waste of potential, don't you think, lass?"

"I am so not following you," responded Annie, having stumbled back to her makeshift liquor cabinet in search of further libations. The fire water rolled in her stomach, churning up a bubbling, dire belch. And yet, she hungered for more. Mystica had come to her, not vice versa. This was her weekend, dammit!

"Fuck it, then. He has words. I have the infinite expanse of the cosmos and all creation behind my heels. All I need do is step aside and bring forth the coming of an unforeseen end. All in the details, all in my collective conscience. The devil's in the fine print, and he is far from a lawyer. So be it. Come, then, Annie! It has been too long since dusk and it is still too long until dawn for us to dawdle on the affairs of lesser men. We have places to be."

"Alright," his apprentice sighed. Her whiskey found its home back in the cabinet. But as she reached for her pullover sweater in preparation for a trek out into the cold Montreal eve, she paused, for need to elucidation of a thought overcame her. She asked, "what are we doing, by the way?"

The Ancient's response, cold as the ice in which his eldritch heart now lay, brought her own to a standstill.

"I found her. Choth-Meggurakk. The one I used to love..."