For the second time in his life, Suisei Horosha found himself adrift on space and time, traveling through what, in its current struggles, his mind was interpreting as a kind of passageway. But this time, it didn't catch him off-guard. He'd been expecting it.

His thoughts were homeward bound.

Metaphysical currents buffeted him as he fell through the color-breach. Just like his first journey, ink-dark blotches popped up all around him, spreading across the protective energy shield like so many stains. He groaned and clenched. Heat and cold pounded him with intense pressure.

The Sword grew brighter in response.

Was it acting on its own again?

Weaves unfurled from the blades like threads in the wind. They separated from the Sword and flew back, and the darkness followed them, leaping off the energy shell.

Suisei looked over his shoulders, watching as some of the darkness split off from the rest, turned around, and doubled-backed in his direction, but then the energy shell shook, and Suisei looked forward just in time to see and hit a rapidly expanding patch of color. The next thing he knew, he'd landed face first into something moist and cool and fibrous. The earthy scents that wafted through his nose and prickled bitter on his tongue were almost familiar.

With a groan, he got up and spat, using his teeth to scrape the dirt off his tongue. Keeping his grip on the Sword tight, he rubbed his mouth clean and then pushed off the ground and rose to his feet. His dust-caked shoes squeaked softly on the plant-covered ground. The coverage grew in thick enough mats that Suisei felt comfortable calling it "grass", even if no grass he'd ever seen had grown in pale yellow, tongue-shaped 'leaves' counted as grass.

For a moment Suisei panicked, fearing that the Sword's protective barrier would vanish just like it had before, but it held firm.

He breathed in deeply several times, stilling his heart. Then, slowly, he turned his attention to his surroundings, only for his stomach felt like it had turned itself inside out. His vision swooned and he toppled onto the soft, squishy grass, lying on his side, the Sword spilling out of his grasp. He felt like he was about to die, but, fortunately, that was when his body decided to pass out, and everything was lost in the merciful darkness.

"Angel's breath!" I swore.

I took another sip from my slushie.

Within my mind-theater, Suisei scooped some caramel corn into his mouth. Polite as ever, he made sure to chew thoroughly and swallow before opening his mouth to speak.

"It was like I'd suddenly run thirty miles without stopping."

I scoffed. "Yeah, I felt it."

Some time later, he awoke. Lurching upright, he bashed his head into the Sword's barrier, which glowed brightly at the point of impact.

I winced. "Ow…"

"Still not as bad as my own blood boiling inside my veins."

He picked up the Sword from where it had come to rest on the grass. The invisible eggshell moved along with him once more.

Suisei did a brief self-examination. Nothing seemed to be broken. He showed no signs of any weird mutations; in his career, he'd learned to be watchful for those. He felt very well-rested, though, on the other hand, he was absolutely famished.

Sighing, he rose to his knees, ready to discover the latest mess he'd gotten himself into.

Trees. Big trees—and lots of them. Giant trees with fluted, dull red trunks as thick as houses and as tall as the sky. Trees studded over with tumid, three-holed galls that shone like a cloth lantern sewn from a severed face.

The name for this world was forest.

Along with the galls, shelf-fungi—or something resembling them, at any rate—gripped the massive trunks, glowing with a crystal blue light. The forest-world's canopies trapped it in perpetual twilight, lit by the galls and the fungi and the scattered rainbows coming off the sprigs of bioluminescent underbrush that popped up here and there among the tongue-grass.

He stared up at the canopy. Small shafts of sunlight streamed down beautifully.

He wasn't home. He wasn't even close.

"What happened?" I asked him.

"Though I can't say it with perfect certainty, the most logical explanation was that the Erboss-Tor miscalculated. Or, perhaps, the route was somehow damaged."

"Or, maybe something else intervened and set you off course," I said. "It had to be the fungus."

Suisei nodded. "Or something else."

I shuddered. "Don't say that, you're scaring me."

Back in the memory, Suisei stood up and yelled.

"No!"

His words echoed through the mysterious woods.

The Sword burned hot in his grip, but he didn't let go.

On the contrary…

With a wordless shout, he swung the Sword at a nearby tree. The movement ejected a wreath of plasma from the blade, which cut through several trunks, freeing, thick amber sap. The cut tree trunks slid apart along the plane of the cuts, and then fell.

Everything groaned.

"Shit…" Suisei muttered.

Cursing himself, heart racing, Suisei frantically wove up a force shield, drawing power from the Sword.

The tall shadows looming over him grew longer with every passing second.

The trees landed with the force of falling skyscrapers. Suisei climbed out of the hole his force shield had punctured in one of the fallen trees, drenched in sap from head to toe. The fallen trees had opened a crevasse in the canopy, through which sunlight filtered down, unopposed. In the light, the sap gleamed like fire beneath the falling wood-dust.

Suisei winced at the bright light. As pleasant as the warm sunlight was, it didn't do much to soothe his anger.

Beside me, he grimaced. "That's what happens when you use a supernal artifact like it was just another augmentation cell you bought from an office supply store."

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Within the memory, in an act of rage, Suisei stabbed the Sword into the wood, scraping a thin furrow into the bark before slipping out of his hands and tumbling down the fallen trunk's side to land softly on the yellow tongue-grass.

Then he beat the trunk with his fists and wept.

"Things had gotten worse," he told me. "Not only was I no closer to home than before, here, I was utterly alone."

Eventually, hearing movement overhead, Suisei whipped his head up.

He didn't want to get crushed by another falling tree.

With the light coming through the break in the canopy, he could make out several large structures winding around and between the trunks of some of the still-standing trees nearby. The constructions were half cocoon and half wasp's nest, made from wood pulp and silk and bits of leaves twigs, with long, webby tunnels. Suisei couldn't help but think of the gaps and thinner, translucent patches on the tunnels as windows.

As he watched, the tunnels vibrated.

Things were stirring.

Suisei's eyes darted from one tunnel to the next. He saw shades of black flicker through the windows, and followed them down to where they emerged from a tunnel's open mouth, revealing a giant, millipede-like creature. Once he knew what they looked like, he saw them everywhere. They had long antennae that trailed along their long bodies, sometimes boating glowing tips. Though, on occasion, they used their legs to push off trees or the ground, they spent most of their time hovering lazily through the air, twisting and twining as they passed by. Sections of their bodies were checkerboard with squares of chaotically patterned, silky lace. The striking arrangements were either a sign of intellect, or a highly evolved set of instincts.

Not knowing what to expect, Suisei ducked down low, hiding in the hole his force shield had made in the tree trunk. From that position, he got a close look at one of the millipedes as it dove down and swam low over the ground. Flaps and shifting disks moved on the creature's head as it grazed on the shelf fungus. The luminescent saprophytes broke up into gobs that quickly disappeared into the millipede's mouthparts, colored like candies—electric pink, neon purple.

Suisei stuck out of the hole once the creature had passed him.

And that's when the smell hit him: the millipede smelled like shrimp.

The scent filled the air, along with an acrid musk and the wet, earthy stench of decay, not that Suisei cared about the latter two. He could already picture it: grilled, seasoned with garlic, salt and a spritz of lemon, daubed in tangy ginger and served with squash, onions, and rice—all fried.

He tried not to cry.

Suisei ran toward the creature, which bolted out of sight, rising into the safety of one of the silky tunnels. Licking his lips, he squatted on the tongue-grass. He glanced up at regular intervals, staying on the lookout for when the next millipede descended.

He prayed it wouldn't take too long.

In the theater, I stared Dr. Horosha in the eyes, giving him what Rayph liked to call the "Dad means business" look."Suisei," I said, "you just arrived in another world, and your first thought is to start eating the locals?"

Dr. Horosha furrowed his thin brow and pursed his lips. "I was hungry. And miserable." He shrugged. "What else was I supposed to do? Would you have done anything differently?"

"That's…" I sank back into the comfort of my heated leather recliner. "That's fair," I said, with a sigh. "And, for the record… no, I don't think I would have."

"Besides," he added, with a playful roll of his eyes, "I've been known to go to great lengths for good shrimp."

After several unbearable minutes of nothing going, Suisei grabbed the Sword, clambered out of the hole, and yelled, hoping that would get the creature's attention. When it didn't, he yelled again, waving his raised arms for good measure.

That managed to get a response out of it.

The hoverpede turned about-face, rippling its many legs.

It slalomed left and right as it hovered toward him

A second before impact, Suisei darted off to the side and slashed the Sword across the hoverpede's exoskeleton. This did not affect the creature in any way, though it did get the holy Sword's tip caught in one of the grooves between a pair of the hoverpede's banded, chitinous plates.

The hoverpede's forward motion yanked the Sword out of Suisei's grip. A passing fallen trunk pried the Sword off the creature a moment later, dropping the weapon onto the grass.

Suisei instantly whipped up a weave to pull the Sword off the ground and return it to his grip, only for the spell to create a bright flash of light that briefly dazed him.

"New world, new pataphysics," he told me. "It would be a while before I got used to that."

In the memory, a great weight suddenly pushed down on Suisei from above, pinning him on his belly on the grass.

And then the hoverpede started licking him, sliding and slurping over his overcoat with its many mouthparts. For a second he screamed, but then pressure clonked the back of his head as some kind of armored tongues pushed down on it and lapped up the tree sap.

The only good thing he could say about it was that the creature wasn't hurting him.

Scrambling his limbs, Suisei tried to crawl out from under the hoverpede's ministrations, but it just hovered forward and kept on feeding. Wet things slurped up and down his hair, prying out the sweet, sticky sap. For his own sanity, he kept his face planted in the dirt; he already had enough nightmare fuel for one lifetime, and so it was with great care that he turned his head a little to get a look at where the Sword had landed.

Unfortunately, the hoverpede decided that that was just the right time to press down on the small of Suisei back, smushing his face into the dirt in the process.

Suisei crawled forward several feet—the hoverpede following every step of the way—until his fingers clutched the Sword's twining blades. Then he slid his grip up until he found the hilt, and then grabbed it, and then slammed it into the hoverpede's flank without the slightest bit of ceremony.

He tried his best to aim for the hoverpede's head.

The hoverpede did not like this.

The creature reared its forepart up, giving Suisei the room to turn onto his back right as a foul, noxious ooze spewed out from the two flexible, nozzle-like structures near the base of the hoverpede's head.

He had no intention of letting the stuff touch him.

Recalling the power he'd channeled in his rage, he drew from it once again, this time with more control. The Sword ignited with searing plasma, blazing hot and bright.

He slashed the weapon again. The plasma-sheathed blade cut through the hoverpede like butter. Suisei's nose flooded with the luscious smell of grilled shrimp.

The hoverpede fell onto the tongue-grass; Suisei managed to roll to the side just in time. The hoverpede's upper half writhed in agony, flashing the seared, red-hot surface of the plasma wound. The lower half of its body was utterly motionless.

With a brief spell, Suisei drew the tree sap off his body and collected it into a sphere, which he launched into the distance, hoping it would keep any other hoverpedes from bothering him again.

For a moment, he stared at the Sword, still blazing with its plasma halo. He felt somewhat bad for what he was about to do—both to the hoverpede, and to the Sword—but he was damn hungry, and the hoverpede just smelled delicious.

Wielding the weapon of God like a mere kitchen knife, Suisei sliced the hoverpede into thin pieces, instantly cooking them with the plasma's heat. Once finished, he dismissed the Sword's plasma, carefully set it on the ground nearby, and then picked up several slices of hoverpede and put them on top of the fallen trunk right beside him.

It was a makeshift table.

I looked over my shoulder at Suisei beside me. "Does getting the Sword of the Angel stuck in a magic alien centipede and/or using it to cut and cook said magic alien centipede count as blasphemy?"

I was genuinely curious.

"I don't know, and I don't care," he replied, nodding in approval at his past actions. "I just wished I'd had some ginger sauce on hand. It would have paired wonderfully."

"Can we change the topic, please?" I asked.

I was really worried that the hoverpede might have been, you know, "smarter than the average bear."

"Very well," Suisei said. "Over the next few days, I continue to acquaint myself with the Sword and its uses, especially when it came to magnifying my pataphysical abilities." He lowered his gaze. "I also prayed, not just for my usual guidance and centering, but for forgiveness for the damage I'd unwittingly caused to an otherwise pristine world."

"Can the Godhead even hear prayers from other worlds?" I asked.

Suisei looked me in the eyes with a blank expression, silent for a moment before he replied. "I'll leave that for you to decide," he said.

After his meal, Suisei spent an hour in meditation. He ended like he began, with a prayer, spoken while holding the holy Sword.

The path before him was clear. He knew what he had to do.

It was his only option.

"Are you—"

"—Yes," he replied. "I had no other choice. I was a… worldhopper, you could say. There was no guarantee the Sword would bring me home, but still, there was always a chance. And… that had to be enough."

And he swore to make it enough.

Suisei grabbed several more slabs and set them on the wood. Holding his hands over the slices, he used a spell to draw out the moisture. The meat's color and texture changed as rivulets of fluids percolated to the surface, floating up like raindrops. Levitating the fluid off, Suisei gathered it into a blob several inches in diameter. With the fluids removed, the exoskeleton crust on the hoverpede slices cracked and sloughed off, no longer fitting the dried, shrunken tissue. He ended the levitation, letting the ball of hoverpede juices splash down onto the yellow tongue-grass.

"Dried food keeps for a long time," he told me. "Microorganisms can't grow without moisture."

He then stuffed his pockets full of as many of the shriveled slices of seared hoverpede as he could fit inside them.

"I didn't know how long it would be until I found edible food again."

Then, with the Sword in hand, he drew from its sand-power yet again, and cut open another spatial rift. Sound and colors swirled in front of him, tousling his hair with the winds of other worlds.

And then he stepped in.

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