Note: Previously, after taking leadership of the Easy Eights at a suggestion from the leader of Braintrust, Glitch, Setrea/Grandstand was let in on a pretty big secret. Glitch, real name Fideila, is actually from the same world as Setrea. She was part of a research group that accidentally ended up here while trying to find a way to get rid of the monsters that have taken over their world, becoming the only survivor of that group. Now Fidelia has a plan to use her machine to send both of them back to their world and clear the monsters off of it, by dumping all of them on this world while depowering as many Detroit Touched as possible to give the machine fuel!

At one time, the building had been a gas station at the edge of an old highway ten miles or so south of the Detroit city limits. But larger freeways had long since drawn traffic away from there, and the station had gone out of business quite some time ago. The pumps were gone, all the merchandise and anything useful had been taken out, and all that remained was an almost empty shell of a building sitting by the side of a barely used road. A few broken metal shelves and holes in the left-most wall where the coolers had been, along with a very worn and patched office chair left near the door, were all that remained in the place from its time as an actual shop.

Outside the building, or what was left of it, a lizard sunned itself on the hot concrete before lifting its head when the low rumbling sound of an approaching motorcycle disturbed its rest. As the vehicle approached and turned off the road to enter the heavily-cracked parking lot, the lizard beat a rather annoyed retreat, scrambling off into the brush behind the building to find another peaceful spot.

The motorcycle came to a stop and idled there briefly, its rider sitting motionless on the thing as she looked at the empty store before eventually killing the engine. Setrea, dressed in normal ratty jeans, an old tank top, and a patched brown bomber jacket rather than the far more attention-grabbing costume she wore as Grandstand, stepped off the bike. She plucked the red helmet from her head, leaving it dangling from one of the handlebars while walking to the shop.

Before going in, the woman took a lap around the exterior of the shop to assure herself that there was no one around. She stood by the door and looked up and down the empty highway with a discerning stare. The place was entirely devoid of any people. The nearest building that was actually in regular use was at least five miles away, and cars only traveled this old highway once every other blue moon. She was, in every possibly realistic way, completely isolated here. Finally convinced of that, she turned and stepped into the shop. The rusted door creaked loudly.

Once she was inside, Setrea took a breath and lifted her gaze to stare silently at the ceiling for a few long seconds. She watched a spider crawl its way across the dusty tiles there on its way to a web in the corner. Then, without warning or even conscious decision the woman turned, lifting her foot to viciously kick that old office chair. As it was sent careening noisily into the wall, a single word seemed to erupt from the woman, all but deafening within that formerly quiet shop. "Fuuuuuuck!" The scream of rage and frustration echoed off the filthy, hole-filled walls, sending an assortment of various tiny rodents and the like, who had been nesting inside, into a panicked rush to escape the place and flee into the much more peaceful forest as quickly as they could.

Not yet satisfied with screaming once, the woman did so again. The second time was even louder than the first. She poured all of her frustration and rage into that curse, until her throat felt raw and she couldn't keep it going anymore. The chair was given another kick as well, knocking it over onto its side and sending it skidding along the floor until it rebounded off a shelf.

Moving to the far wall, Setrea planted both fists against it and then gave a heavy sigh. She pressed her forehead against the dingy surface as well, standing like that for a moment as she muttered another dozen curses under her breath. About half of them were in English or Spanish, while the other half were from her own world, words her father would have been scandalized to hear her say. Hell, the man would've demanded to know how she had even heard any of them.

Her own world, her own father. Those were thoughts that made Setrea raise her fists and pound them against the wall with enough force to send cracks through the old, weak plaster. She wanted to continue cursing for awhile, maybe just for another year or so, but that obviously wasn't helping. None of this was helping.

But what was she supposed to do? She needed to talk to someone about this. She needed to get advice, but it was impossible. She didn't have anyone she could trust, not with this. She didn't talk to people about who she really was or where she came from. She'd had a friend before, a friend who had been murdered by that utter piece of shit kid. A kid who was very dead thanks to the Minority girl. And now? Now Setrea had exactly no one she could really talk to. There wasn't a single person on this planet who knew enough about her to be confided with.

But, of course, that wasn't exactly true, was it? There was one person who knew everything about her, one person who actually understood her history. Unfortunately, that person was the entire reason Setrea was losing her mind right then. Glitch. Or Fideila, apparently. She was from the same world. She was from home. She understood Setrea in a way that none of these people of this world could. She was the closest thing to family that Setrea had spoken to in so long. Sure, it wasn't much. They were just from the same world, which most would call a pretty flimsy connection. But most weren't in a situation like this. Most people didn't find themselves on a world so alien to their own. Most people didn't end up completely cut off from their home, spending years without being able to talk to a single person from their own planet before finally, after all that, finding themselves face to face with someone who actually came from their homeworld.

After all this time, after being alone for so long, Setrea finally had someone she could talk to who could actually understand her situation and feelings. She finally had someone she could vent to who knew who she was and where she came from, someone who understood the culture of her childhood and the sheer, overwhelming loneliness of being so isolated and removed from everything she had known before.

And that person happened to be the one she really needed to vent about.

Fideila was going to kill people. So damn many people were going to die if she did what she was trying to do. If that woman actually pulled off her plan, she would depower dozens of Touched, at least. And at the same time, she would be dumping all of the Edeliens, the monsters who had devastated Setrea and Fideila's homeworld, right here in the middle of this city. Her plan was to dump an army of civilization-destroying demons onto this planet while simultaneously taking away the powers from everyone in the immediate area who might be able to fight them at all.

It wouldn't just be a Collision Point. It would be a hundred times worse, if not more. Yes, the Edeliens, individually, were much weaker than a single Abyssal. But there were so, so many of them. They were an army, and they would utterly devastate this planet the same way they had done to her home. Society would totally collapse, as those creatures spread across the Earth. Detroit, at ground zero, would be the first to be wiped out. Almost everyone within a hundred miles of here would probably die before anyone even began to understand what they were actually up against. And who knew how many more would die before they really organized.

The truth was that this world was probably better suited to fight those things then her own had been, but she couldn't know that for certain. After all, most of the details about what her world's society had been like and how advanced they had been when those creatures first arrived were lost many generations before she had ever been born. It was entirely possible that her distant ancestors had been more powerful and wielded greater militaries than even the people of this planet, and it still hadn't helped them.

Honestly, she could argue that point back and forth for ages and still not actually get anywhere with it. But in the end, it didn't matter. Because whether this planet could ultimately form a real defense against those things or not, the fact remained that it would be complete genocide. More people would die from that invasion than had died throughout the entire history of civilization on this world. And as more and more people died, it would become even more impossible to maintain their civilization as it had once been. It would all collapse exponentially.

If she let this happen, she would be condemning every single one of those people. Every single person who was killed by those creatures would be dead because of her. Every person who died because they couldn't get food and medicine after the society they were accustomed to collapsed would be dead because of her. Every single person who died because even more evil people were allowed to go unchecked in a world like that would be dead because of her. On and on it went. Every bad thing that stemmed from that would be because she didn't stop this plan.

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And if she did stop it, if she made sure this plan failed, she would be ensuring that her own world never recovered. Those monsters would stay there. Her people would remain isolated in their small, scattered pockets, almost entirely cut off from one another. They would never be able to rebuild, and many would continue to die every year. She would be responsible for taking away what very well might be the single chance her people had to get their world back.

How could she make a choice like that? How could she decide which world should be permanently devastated? How could she look at this world and say that the people here were worth more than the people on her own world? But by the same token, how could she do the opposite? More people would die if the monsters were brought here simply because there were more people living on this world. And yet, her own people had already been so thoroughly broken by those monsters and lived under their threat for so long, didn't they deserve a chance to finally try to rebuild?

Beyond that, there were so many Touched here. Even if the ones here in the city were depowered, that still left plenty more across the planet, coupled with their military. A military that was very strong in its own right, especially with Touched-Tech added in. It was possible they could actually beat those monsters. Maybe even before more than the state of Michigan was destroyed.

The state of Michigan. That was where she was at. That was her best case scenario. Her most absurdly and frankly unrealistically optimistic possibility was that only the state of Michigan would be wiped out, that only every single person who lived here would die. There were almost fifteen million people in this state, and that was her absolute floor of how many would die if she let this happen. And the truth was that it would be more than that. It would be so many more than that. There wasn't a single chance, not really, that it would be contained just to Michigan. They would spread, they would breed, they would kill everything and everyone in their path.

Some distant voice in the back of her mind was pointing out that this was also her chance to go home. It was her chance to see her people again. It was a chance to not feel so desperately alone and to be with her father. If he was even still alive. That was already in doubt, and every single year that passed before she got back there made it even more likely that he would be dead, and she would never be able to talk to him again.

And if she did talk to him again, if she made it back and looked him in the eyes, what would she say? Would she actually tell him what she had been a part of? Would she look her own father, her papa, in the eyes and tell him that she had helped subject this world and all these people to the monsters who had destroyed their own world? Would she tell him that millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people were dead simply because she wanted to come home? Would she tell him what she had done?

And would she even make it through an entire sentence before he hated her as much as she hated herself for even thinking about it for a single second?

There it was. That was the truth, the absolute end of her justifications and inner debate. If she did this, if she let it happen, it didn't matter whether she got home, or what her father would think. It didn't matter what anyone else thought. Because if she did it, she would hate herself. She would loath herself. She could never live with herself if she did that.

Yes, her people deserved to get their world back. They deserve to be free from the monsters. But not at the cost of subjecting this world to those things. She couldn't save her people by condemning everyone here. She couldn't let her world rebuild itself while knowing that this one was being destroyed. She couldn't let millions of people here die just to give her people a chance to recover. She couldn't pull the trigger of a gun fifteen million times to kill every person in this state as an absolute best case scenario just to go home and see her father again. She would not be that person. Yes, she had done bad things here on this world. Yes, she had been a villain, a Fell. She robbed and hurt people. And yes, she had killed. But she would not be the type of person who could do this.

Wherever her line was, it was far away from the genocide of a planet. No matter what happened, even if she never saw her people again, even if she had to cut out the only chance she had of ever going home, she couldn't let this happen.

That was why she was really so upset, Setrea knew. It wasn't because the decision was so hard. It was because she had already made it. It was because she already knew she would be turning against the only other person from her own world, the only other person who might possibly understand her.

Deep down, she had known from the very moment that the other woman had laid out her plan. As soon as she had known what the cost would be, Setrea had realized that she wouldn't let it happen. All of this, all of her anger and frustration and confusion, had been part of coming to terms with the choice she had immediately made in that moment.

She would stop Fideila, even if it meant never seeing home again. Because it didn't matter where she lived if she couldn't actually live at all with the person she was. And when she got right down to it, if the choice was between ending her own life or allowing even a fraction of those fifteen million people to die, she would absolutely pull the trigger on herself in a second. She wasn't a hero, not by a long shot. Not on her best day. But she also wasn't a complete monster. Whatever else happened, she would stop this.

Unfortunately, that led to the question of how she would stop it. The first thought she had was to simply stab Fideila in the throat and be done with it. That would be the ideal, easiest way to go about it. But she didn't really believe it would be that simple. There was no way to know for certain that Fideila didn't have things set up that would carry on without her. After all, she could build almost anything. It was very possible that killing her wouldn't actually stop this.

And even that assumed that she wouldn't have defenses against being stabbed like that. She knew very well what Setrea could do. Just because she had revealed herself didn't mean she totally trusted her. It was possible, even probable, that she was always wearing protective gear, including an automatic forcefield or something. And the moment Setrea made her move, if she didn't kill that woman in one shot, she would never have the element of surprise again. If she was going to move against Fideila, she had to make sure it counted. She had to know as much as possible about this plan of hers and how to stop it.

Which meant she had to play nice with the other woman. She had to pretend to go along with this plan until she could figure out how to stop it, how to stop her. And she couldn't let Fideila even start to suspect that she might be plotting against her. She couldn't risk giving that woman any advanced warning. Not when she had already proven herself capable of plotting to do something this vile. Setrea had no doubt whatsoever that the woman would kill her and carry on with her plan without batting an eyelid. And then there would be no one here who knew what she was up to, no one who understood the full extent of what she was trying to do. There would be no one else who knew what this world would be about to experience.

But could she do this by herself? Could she really stop Fideila without any help? Because even if the woman wasn't explaining her plans or who she really was to her subordinates, she still had them to call on. She could lie to them, or give them partial truths. She could get their help in various ways. and even without them, she had her tech. She would have drones and independent weaponry. She would have plenty of assistance.

Could Setrea go to the Ministry? There was no real guarantee they would believe her, certainly not quickly enough to matter. And Fideila most likely had ways of finding out if they started to investigate. It wouldn't exactly be hard for her to figure out who had talked to them.

The same went for trying to go to any of the Fells she knew. Making them believe her to the point of being willing to go up against Fideila and whatever defenses and allies she had would be almost impossible. After all, people like that weren't exactly known for being altruistic. Though maybe the whole genocide thing would stir them like it had her. But they didn't have the personal experience with it. They might not really understand the scope of what she was talking about or how dangerous it was.

Dammit, who could she talk to? Who could she go to who would even start to believe that what she was saying was real and that they had to do something about it?

She had already taken her place as the new leader of the Easy Eights, or whatever they would end up calling themselves now. There was still plenty of debate on that. It was all part of Fideila's plan, to put Setrea in a leadership position over one of the biggest gangs in the city. A gang that could easily draw in the others, both Stars and Fells, to one spot so that machine would be able to drain as many of them as possible. If it came down to it, she could point them at that woman and tell them to attack her, to attack Braintrust and anyone else Fideila put in their way. But she had to be absolutely certain that it was the right move first. She had to know that attacking right then would actually accomplish something, that it would end this plan of hers.

She couldn't send her people after Fideila until she knew absolutely everything she could about that plan. She needed some real reinforcements, some real back up, some help that she could trust. But who the hell could that be? Who could she tell the truth too after all this? Who could she actually trust with all her secrets?

Reaching into her pocket, she took out her phone and studied it for a long few seconds. Then she looked over her shoulder at Alistae, the ghostly source of her primary power. He was standing there near the other wall, gazing steadily her way. The sight made her grimace. "Yeah, I know. You don't have to look at me like that, I'm doing it."

With that, she dialed a number, held it to her ear and listened until it was picked up by a voicemail service. "Hey, it's me. We need to talk as soon as possible. It's important. Come to that motel where we all ran into each other before. Tonight at ten.

"And be ready to listen, Carousel."

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