"I shouldn't have been angry with them, and yet… I was. I hadn't asked for their help, but they'd given it anyway, and I resented that."

"Why?"

"For people like us who struggle to do the right thing, nothing is quite as deadly as feeling indebted to someone else. You have to understand, Genneth. I made peace with my occupation because I saw myself as the hand of justice. The people I disposed of? They caused harm beyond measure. They made other people's lives their experiments and playthings, sometimes literally so. But power favors itself. Mad scientists and oligarchs don't get held accountable for their deeds. They either succeed or end up becoming their own undoing. I might not have been able to get justice for their victims, or repay society for the damages it had suffered, but at least I could take solace in knowing that I was their reaper. Whatever harm they caused, it ended with me. That's why I was able to adapt. It was all toward that one goal." He looked up at the ceiling. "I was used to dealing with obstacles, Genneth. A couple well-placed thoughts, that's all it took. I burrowed through any defenses they might have had and then burst some blood vessels in their brain, all while walking past them in a crowd. We both go our separate ways, none the wiser. A few minutes later, they have a headache, and then drop dead not long after. That's how I dealt with obstacles, and I had no qualms about it, because the people that lay beyond those obstacles were evil incarnate. Utilitarianism might have its problems, but not when it's one life against the well-being of millions." He inhaled sharply. "But here? I was the obstacle. The Erboss-Tor had shown me nothing but kindness, and I resented them for that. They forced me to choose between myself and my values. I prided myself on always choosing the latter. I wasn't going to compromise that now. What would be the point of going back home if I couldn't live with what I'd done?"

"I'm sorry, Suisei," I said. "I'm so, so sorry."

He sniffled. "Don't be. It was my comeuppance, and was long overdue, and the timing couldn't have been worse. I've accepted that. I'm moving forward, having learned my lesson. I don't want your pity, Dr. Howle, I want your help. Also," smirking, he held out his cup and popcorn bin, both of which were empty, "I'd appreciate more snacks."

I wholeheartedly obliged him with some buttered caramel corn and a mixed cherry limeade and cola slushie. We talked to one another while, in the background, his memories played on.

"As the day passed," he said, "I started to feel like I was losing my mind. At first, I'd been thrilled to interact with the Erboss-Tor, but… that was when I'd still thought they'd be able to send me home. Interacting with them became more and more difficult, until I reached a point where it just hurt too much to continue." He sighed. "It was tiring. Worse, it was demeaning. Looking back on it now, though, I think the problem was mine, not theirs."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

He stared up at the screen. "I think they were just… too big for my mind. It wasn't that I couldn't understand them, but that there was just too much to understand. Being around the Erboss-Tor left me with the feeling that I could devote the rest of my life to making sense of their mysteries without making any meaningful progress. It wasn't impossible, it was just more than any one man could handle. So… I drew inward. I kept to myself, as I'd always done whenever I hit a roadblock. I even made a point of not asking the Erboss-Tor about their interest in the Sword," he said. "It was my way of spiting them." Suisei chuckled. "But, even that went awry."

"How?" I asked.

"I passed my time by going for walks across the alien landscape. I didn't bother taking notes or jotting down ideas. Who would I be writing for?"

Other than its pitch-blackness, the land and its contours were surprisingly familiar. The hills and valleys, and cliffs and gullies had the same shape and habits as the landforms of our own world. It was the flora and fauna that made the place uncanny.

He'd walk through the spaces between trees, and the trees shivered and bristled at his passing touch. He'd stand on a precipice of rock at a cliff-edged hill with the frigid wind blowing through his overcoat and the gas giant dawning on the horizon while X-snakes slithered through the sky, and in the distance, he'd hear the Erboss-Tor's piping chants bouncing off the wall of their sculpted cities, and he'd remember how far from home he truly was.

"I had to be careful about which paths I took," he said. "Some routes left me feeling woozy and lightheaded, seemingly for no apparent reason. Once, I tried walking straight through the forest, only for a splitting headache to force me to turn back barely half a minute in."

"That doesn't sound normal," I said. "Was something wrong?"

"Although none of this was normal, no, nothing was wrong. Just wait. You'll see." He sighed.

The memories followed along with his narrations.

"Whenever I went for a hike, I'd leave the Sword in the platform chamber. I didn't dare take it with me into the hinterlands. One day, when I came back from my walk, I found two Erboss-Tor leaning over the Sword like unused drywalls. They brought their tendrils close to it, as if to caress it. The air throbbed with pataphysical energy. Just standing there was an assault on my thoughts and senses. I didn't know what they were doing, and it terrified me."

"What happened then?"

Suisei pursed his lips. He hung his head in shame. "I snapped. I screamed at them. My words thundered through the room. I took all my pain and heartbreak out on them." He shook his head. "The way they scurried out of the room with their miniature 'young' skittering behind them was almost comical, but I didn't laugh. I kept on yelling. The litany quickly spread to the rest of my life. I yelled at my handler for having given me the damned job at Zaina's place. I yelled at my wife for not being persistent enough to make me choose between my family and my career." He lowered his gaze.

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"I yelled at the Hallowed Beast, for having the gall to wait until now to punish me for my sins."

"Punish you?" I asked.

Suisei made the Bond-sign.

He sighed. "Growing up was a cutthroat experience. I was born into a rat race I never wanted to join. People in positions of power gleefully exploited the weak. The obituaries in the paper had to have a separate section for suicides because so many people worked themselves to the bone, dishing out thousands of hours of labor for a pittance, chasing honor they'd never get." He shook his head. "Every day, my mother prayed to the Angel, begging that I wouldn't end up getting used up and tossed aside like yesterday's garbage." He smiled. "And, in a way, her prayers were answered."

"How?" I asked.

"Pataphysics always came easily to me. It made me feel special. It… gave me power—and I liked being powerful, Genneth. I reveled in it. In my teens, the Munine Defense Forces made overtures to me, inviting me to join the Noyoko regional Super Sentai."

I stuck out my palm. "W-Wait…" I stammered in amazement. "Your world had an actual Super Sentai squad?"

Suisei shot me a puzzled look. "What do you mean?"

"Never mind," I waved my hand in dismissal, "I'll explain it later. Continue."

He exhaled and nodded. "With my talents, I knew I was destined for great things. I stood out among the crowd. I could leap up two story buildings and fly across the street. Instead of being the odd child from the family that followed 'that foreign religion', I was someone others would look to. I was the man others wished they could be. As long as I kept myself on the straight and narrow, my pataphysical abilities would be my golden ticket out of the rat-race, and that was what my faith did for me. It gave me discipline, and kept me vigilant against excess and dissolution."

"It sounds like you had everything going for you."

He nodded. "I did. My work for DAISHU was everything my younger self could have dreamed of, and with the benefit of all the privacy that comes with corporate secrecy."

"So… what went wrong?"

Suisei was reaching for a particularly painful memory. The two of us locked eyes, me, focusing on his memory; him, focusing on me focusing on his memory.

"I can feel you reaching for that memory, you know," he said. "I would appreciate it if you didn't. That memory isn't one I'm eager to experience again."

"Fair enough." I sighed. "Can you at least describe it to me?"

Averting his gaze, Dr. Horosha turned to face the movie theater's maroon walls. "I had never had any emotional difficulties with the jobs I was given. It was impersonal, and, more often than not, the troublemakers I was being paid to end were truly contemptible. That my employer had had the amorality to employ them in the first place never truly impacted me. But, that one job—the Yamahana job…" He swallowed hard. "I was tasked with wiping out an entire research facility, and had to make it look like it had been the work of a certain rather infamous new-age cult. What my handler failed to tell me, however, was that the researchers were being held there against their will. One of the researchers was a Lassedile. And… when she got down on the floor and prayed for her life."

"Did you kill her?" I asked.

He nodded. "Of course. That was what broke me. Before then, the people I killed for a living were just faces on a page. But after that night, things were never the same. I grew fearful. As you know, though we say that the Angel forgives all of us, the Church teaches that there are some sins that cannot be forgiven."

I nodded.

"All my wealth and success, even the prowess that let me live like a god among men… all of it was built on violence," Suisei said. "I'd been prideful, and in that pride, I'd betrayed the very faith that I relied on to give balm to scruples. And the more I looked, the more I saw of my own wrongdoing. I was ripening for a fall."

"And you feared the judgment that you'd earned," I said.

He nodded. "Truth be told, that job with Zaina was supposed to be my last. My particular career path was damnably difficult to break away from, but, with some help from allies I'd never known I had, I managed to do it. I was just about to be free of it all, but… well, you know the rest."

I was about to say, "I'm sorry," again, but stopped myself.

He didn't want my pity.

"Stranded there, in that alien world, I felt like I had been discarded—spat out by God. After my crisis of confidence, I couldn't repeat my mistakes again, not here, not to these faultless beings. It was almost unbearable. In that place, there was no way to escape from myself."

"A vicious cycle," I said.

He nodded. "Quite."

I looked up at the memory on the theater's screen. "What happened next?"

"They did their best to hide their obvious interest in the Sword. When I went for my daily constitutional, any of the Erboss-Tor in my path moved out of the way. I think they felt guilty that they weren't able to help me."

"You could have talked to them about it," I suggested

Suisei averted his gaze. "I know," he said, quietly. He sighed.

"It often takes great strength for someone to go seek out help," I said. "Don't pointlessly castigate yourself for failing to do it. That won't help you. Resolve to do better, and then do so."

"As a fellow expert in self-blame, Genneth, you should know that I have far more than one reason for my guilt." He smirked, but that false cheer fractured into a grimace as he lowered his gaze down to the dark, patterned carpet on the theater's floor. "They made me feel so powerless." He clenched his fists. "Compared to them, I was little more than a child. I resented them for that, too."

"I know," I said, "you told me."

He snorted. "Hardly."

Suisei looked up at the screen as the memory changed.

He was out on the bluffs.

"On my walks, I'd noticed myself getting disoriented," he told me. "At first, I thought it was due to the ozone, or perhaps something not quite right with the mixture of gasses the Erboss-Tor had provided me to breathe. But…"

"What?" I asked.

"Just watch."

Feeling a wave of dizziness, Suisei trudged across the gravelly earth and leaned against a hispid, tuberous tree. Looking down, he saw one of the X-winged serpents lazing about in the dirt. It took only a moment for him to realize the creature was unwell. Its movements were slow and erratic. It fled its four-lobed mouth open and shut, as if gasping for breath.

"It was dying," he told me.

But something extraordinary happened as the creature breathed its last breath. The dizziness in Suisei's head climaxed. A feeling of disorientation rushed into him, overwhelming his own discomfort.

It was coming from the dead snake.

New life crawled out from its corpse. Three offspring, miniature copies of their parent, wriggled free from its skin.

"It's giving birth?" I asked.

"Yes and no."

The process at play went beyond mere biology. The emergence of the serpent's young was as pataphysical as it was physical. The energies flaring in the dead serpent's body spiked a sense of static into Suisei's mind, one that throbbed and strobed, as if he was staring into a bright light.

The parent's body rearranged itself before his eyes. Flecks of flesh flowed off the serpent's body and floated onto its offspring. In seconds, the parent's mass had been fully distributed, leaving three, smaller creatures where, previously, there was only one.

The newborns—if you could call them that—slithered off. One even took flight after stretching its wings for the very first time.

It left Suisei staring in awe.

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