SE7EN


"Ah, Gourry, I'm sure your dad wouldn't have minded me using his deck to help save the world. Would he?" Lina tried one of her most 'cute and charming' looks on him. The effect was slightly dampened by the mess her hair was in, but carried nonetheless.

Gourry hmmmed. "I guess..."

"Good. Now that that's settled, how bad is the damage?"

Gourry picked up the biggest piece of the wreckage from the end table. It looked to be one corner of the DNOS-5A, maybe about a quarter of the outer shell. A piece of circuit board protruded from it at an odd angle. The edges were shattered and twisted, and there were dark brown stains of dried blood on parts of it.

"... I guess that's a write-off, isn't it?"

Hang on a moment, blood?

"Gourry, let me see your hand."

Gourry held up a bandaged hand. "Sylphiel already took care of it. It's not that bad, see?" He wriggled his fingers a few times. "I'll be swinging my racket again in no time."

Lina groaned, sitting up. "Where is Sylphiel, anyway?"

"Oh, she and Amelia went off to get some food to bring back here."

"And where is 'here'?"

"Just a little motel along the highway."

Lina nodded, then winced as she tried to stand up. "Fine. I just need to use the bathroom."

"Eh, right over there."

Lina shuffled off to the bathroom, muttering under her breath.

When Amelia and Sylphiel returned barely a minute later, they were greeted by the sound of Lina swearing like a sailor from the bathroom. Gourry looked confused (well, more so than usual), Sylphiel turned a beet red, and Amelia, who had more experience with Lina than the other two, immediately tried to hide behind Sylphiel.

Gourry stood up and banged on the door. "Anything wrong in there Lina?"

Amelia groaned as Lina just started yelling even louder. "Eh, Sylphiel... you got a pad? I think Lina's at that time of the month."


After a brief attempt to educate Gourry on what 'that time of the month' meant to women, the four sat down to figure out what to do next.

"We are at least across the state line, right?" asked Lina.

Gourry nodded. Sylphiel added, "Not much over, but over."

"Good. State police won't come after us, then, and it will take time to get the FBI involved. Not to mention that they're a lot less easy to fool than the locals; Rezo won't want to explain what he's really doing, so he'll have to make up a story that will hold. Either way, we've got some breathing space now."

Amelia bounced on the edge of the bed. "And then the Slayerz will strike back against those who have wronged us! Yosh!"

Lina shook her head, then turned to Gourry. "You know if this place has any computer linkups?"

Sylphiel broke in. "You can't be serious! After what happened last time when you hooked in?"

"Look. When Amelia and I were jacked in last time, we set up a few watchdog programs to detect anybody who was trying to find us. And a couple of search routines to try and pick up anything new on the rumour mill about our least favourite virus here. Not to mention the spy tap I put outside of the RPR Technologies headquarters."

Amelia had stars in her eyes as she looked up at Lina with respect that was bordering on devotion. "You managed to put a tap on RPR? Wow."

Lina shook her head. "That place has security up the wazoo. I couldn't actually read what was going through his systems; too many layers of encryption. But I can trace what other systems he connects to, how much data goes where, and that sort of thing. So I can maybe figure out who his main partners are." She grinned; a somewhat feral grin. "One of the first things any system cracker learns is that if you get enough non-secret data together, you can usually deduce some of the secret stuff."

She stood up, going over to the TV. "But if I can't check on anything that we've got running, then we're still in the dark as to what is going on. Dammit, right now it seems like everybody knows what's happening but us. If we want to survive, we have to fix that." With that, Lina flipped open the cabinet under the TV, and pulled out a small box that was underneath it. "Awww, man..."

The deck, if you were kind enough to call it that, was a small box hooked into the TV cable. One of the earliest consumer VR systems, before the wireless protocols got standardized. Probably installed almost six years ago when this place still had some business traffic stopping here that would want to go in and check their messages. It would get her in, but just barely. Not to mention the rather large box spliced onto the side of it. "And they got a timing monitor so they can charge us for the time spent online, too. This sucks."

Amelia bounced over to take a look herself. "Pretty low-tech, ne? But surely nothing that will stop the Slayerz!"

Lina shook her head. "Just me on this one. This deck will barely handle one avatar program; no way it can deal with two." As Amelia went into turbo-pout mode, Lina sighed. "Look, I'll still need someone to watch my back. See that button there on the monitor? If something happens and you think I should wake up, just press that button. It will flash a signal up inside and I'll try to jack out as quickly as I can."

"Are you sure you'll be all right, Lina?" That was Sylphiel.

Lina grinned, looking cocky again. "Of course I will. But first..." She looked over at Gourry, who was in the middle of building another sandwich out of the supplies Amelia and Sylphiel had brought. "We get something to eat before Gourry eats it all."


After a brief lunch, during which Sylphiel mostly stood watching in shock as she munched on the one sandwich she'd managed to salvage, Lina jacked herself in through the motel's network.

She found herself in a small, somewhat run-down room that had obviously been a nice office at some point, but had been left unmaintained for a while. Previous people passing through had left grafitti on the walls, and the trash basket was overflowing onto the floor. Shaking her head at the casual attitude to system maintenance, she pulled open the door and took the nearest 'bus' to the edge of AOL space. There she picked up a 'bicycle'; not the fastest mode of transport, but difficult to trace. She mumbled under her breath as she rode, setting up a field of distortion around her to make sure that nobody would be able to track her.

Reaching what appeared to be a concrete office building, she ran her finger along the edge of one of the basement windows, and popped it out. A fairly simple 'backdoor' into the system, and one that would almost certainly be found... eventually. Until that time, it made a good drop point for responses from her watchdogs. And by the time it was made and closed off, she'd have a dozen more like it elsewhere.

The scene repeated itself at several other buildings along the way, Lina's frown deepening along the way. Almost half her watchdogs hadn't made scheduled drops, which meant they'd been caught and taken apart. Those drop points probably wouldn't be safe anymore. And most of the ones that had returned were reporting that things were far too quiet for her current level of paranoia. She was something of a net.personality, after all; people should be talking about her more than this. Unless something had been blocking her searches.

Her spy tap on RPR Tech had picked up a lot of traffic going in and out that was almost impossible to trace. Weird part is that the in and out were mostly completely unrelated data streams. Looked almost like RPR Tech and some other group were actively spying on each other. Huh.

It was when she was leaving the last of her drop points to head back to AOL that she noticed she had something tracking her. One point in the distortion field she created that was staying stable, as if something were holding it there. It looked like a fairly simple probe, just riding along with the distortion field she was generating. She could probably duck it fairly easily. Or take it out with a simple Flare Arrow.

But then, that wasn't Lina Inverse's style. Lina Inverse went for overkill. And besides, she had a whole lot of frustration from the last couple of days to work out...

"FIREBALL!"

The suite of attack programs slammed into the unsuspecting bug, ripping through it and its control connection, tearing it apart in a flash of virtual light. Then she noticed a brief flash on the edge of the fireball effect. "FREEZE ARROW!" She lanced off another shot at the second flash, something to halt it so she could examine it, rather than just destroying it outright.

Sure enough, it was a second tracer. Lina crushed it, then lobbed a few more fireballs about, devastating the local 'landscape', to make sure there was nothing else nearby. Satisfied, she promptly took off at as fast as she could to avoid the inevitable search into what had just happened here.


"Sir, the subject has just disabled the trace on her."

The purple-haired young man in the chair leaned back, nodding. "Both of them?"

"Yes sir. She used a large-scale attack against a simple bug, and the second trace got caught in the backwash."

"Ah, success by overkill. Sounds like our little Lina, all right." He chuckled gleefully, rubbing his hands together. "This will be fun. Any other news?"

"They appear to have successfully dodged the Red Preist's attempts to get local law enforcement to bring them in, and have crossed the state line to get out of his range."

"Good, that will keep him occupied for a day or so, and at least seriously limit his resources for now. How about Zelas?"

"She's getting impatient. She wants to just storm in and grab this Inverse girl."

Xelloss grinned. "Then perhaps we should do that."

The lackey blinked, and almost lost solidity for a moment. "Pardon?"

"It occurs to me that Zelas won't believe that such a frontal assault won't work until she sees evidence of it not working." He folds his hands together, index fingers extended, and taps the fingertips together. "Round up some of our... less enlightened operatives. The ones we can most afford to lose. I suspect we're going to be losing a lot, but to get Zelas off my back and get a good impression of just what Miss Lina is capable of, I think it will be worth it."

The lackey bowed, and turned to walk out the door. As the door closed, Xelloss giggled to himself again. "Oh, yes, this will be fun..."


Back at the motel, three people were sitting around a table where a card game was going on. Amelia held her hand up in front of her face, shielding her expression, as she peered back at Gourry, waiting for him to make his decision on what to do next. The tension was thick enough to cut with a knife. Gourry ran his fingers over the cards, tapped one, and smiled as he looked back at Amelia. "Any fives?"

"Go fish!"

Gourry grumbled, then picked up a card. "Eh, Amelia, I got a five." He then laid all four fives down on the table. "I win."

Amelia looks down at the cards on the table in shock, then over at Sylphiel who is looking supremely bored and watching out the window. "Gourry... if all you had left were fives, anyway, why did you take so long to ask me about them?"

Gourry grinned as he pulled all the cards back together to shuffle them. "Had to make sure it was the right five."

"Oh, oka..." Amelia's mouth hung open for a moment. That had actually made sense at first. Finally she just shook her head.

The next deal was interrupted when Sylphiel touched Gourry's arm. "Um, Gourry dear... are we expecting company?"

"No, why, do we have any?"

Sylphiel simply pointed out the window. Outside was a man in a pinstripe suit, with dark hair and a bland face, walking purposefully directly towards them. Gourry rubbed his chin. "Looks almost like one of the fellows who was after Lina before."

Amelia immediately jumped up to look out the window. "One of the weird monsters she was talking about before?"

Gourry nodded.

Sylphiel blinked. "Monsters?"

Amelia bounced. "Yeah. Lina said that the two guys who caught her in the alley turned into monsters in front of her and that one of them grew another arm out of his back to hit Gourry here and that one just sort of came apart when Gourry hit him with his magic sword and that Lina cast a fireball at one which took him apart except that she shouldn't have been able to cast a fireball because she was in RL, and then..."

She got cut off when Sylphiel put her hand on Amelia's head. "Ano, Amelia? My head hurts."

"Funny, that's what Lina usually says."

"I can't imagine why."

Gourry blinked. "Eh, Sylphiel. Wasn't there only one guy out there before?"

Everybody turns to look at the window again. There are two nearly identical people walking towards them now. And as they watched, a third sort of... rezzed in. First there was nothing there, then a few vague shapes, then a sort of 3-D grid, and then finally a fully-formed figure, apparently human.

"Whoah, that was weird." Amelia was the first to speak; the others were shocked speechless.

Sylphiel started to edge back away from the window. "What have we gotten ourselves into? That sort of thing shouldn't exist in reality!"

Gourry shrugged, and calmly opened his racket case, pulling out his tennis racket. With a quick motion of his hand, the racket dropped off, leaving only the handle in his hand. Then, a bright flash of light extended out from the handle into a blade, leaving Sylphiel in even more shock. "Then we'll just have to send them back where they came from, right?"

Amelia bounced, thrusting one arm up into the air in a pose that was just too cute to be properly inspiring. "Yataa! You show 'em, Gourry!"


Lina was paranoid all the way back to AOL. And continued to be so after she got there, taking a more indirect route to the Daily Otaku. The place was nearly empty, only three others in there, but one of them was...

"Eyrie! Just the eyeball I've been looking for."

Eyrie turned away from the table, and floated slightly towards her. "Lina! Hey hey! Back already, eh?"

"Can we go somewhere a little more private? I need to have a little chat with you about your conspiracy theories."

"Aww, no, anythin' but that," spoke up one of the other people at the table, a cute little redheaded girl in an oversized Chinese shirt of some sort, but a masculine voice. "If Eyrie thinks someone's takin' him seriously, he'll be insufferable for a week!"

Lina chuckled. "Yeah, right." She pulled open one of the private booths in the back of the club, and motioned for Eyrie to enter.

After setting up the privacy screen, Lina's face was all business. "All right. You were talking before about 'monsters with three rows of teeth and ruby eyes.' I ran into a pair of those later the same day, who seemed rather upset about something I'd done. I need to know what you know. No 'friend of a friend' stuff, no rumours, just whatever you know."

Eyrie blinked. (About all he could do as a giant eyeball anyway.) "You don't ask for much, do you?"

Lina leaned back. "I'm in the middle of a seriously dangerous situation here. I won't give you any details; no sense in marking you as well. But I've got the equivalent of a nuke sitting here and at least two different groups of people after me. I had a pair of tracers on me earlier; one that was easy to find so I'd take it out and think I was safe, and another that I just happened to catch by accident. I need to know something about these monsters."

Eyrie shook his eye. "I'm afraid I don't have much other than rumours, really. I've never seen them myself. I've only known two people who say they have seen them; one I haven't seen since, and the other has been... odd. It's like he's a robot, running on remote control, and he never talks about anything that happened before that bank run. I haven't asked; it was like someone was using him to troll for who else knew what was going on."

"All right, so... any theories?"

"Well, the biggest one is that they really are demons, from MazokuSoft."

Lina snorted.

"Well, MazokuSoft does own a good chunk of all sorts of things online; nobody's quite sure how much of what they own, through all the holding companies. They've even given money to the DracoNix group, though they don't have any real say in what happens there. Then there are the rumours that R.P. Rezo actually owns MazokuSoft behind another set of front companies..."

Lina shook her head. "Naw, I don't think RPR is running these 'demons'. He took a completely different approach."

Eyrie blinked. "You make it sound like Rezo was one of the people after your 'nuke'."

Lina waved her hands at Eyrie. "Just forget I said anything, okay? Anyhow, he's more subtle than they are."

"Whatever. Where'd you run into these monsters, anyway?"

Lina paused. "In a small side street I was ducking through to get out of the rain and to the nearest subway station."

"Rain?"

"It was in RL."

There was a long pause. "And people call me weird."

"Don't you start, I can still fireball you into next week. Besides, that's hardly the weirdest thing to have happened lately. I really don't want to talk about that." Lina stood up. "Look, just keep your eye open for anything else odd, will you? Right now, I need all the hard info I can get."

"You got it, Lina. There's something seriously strange going on out there, and it's been getting worse over the last few months."

Lina nodded, and opened the door of the private booth...

... and stepped out into chaos.

The Daily Otaku was almost overrun with people in suits. People with perfectly bland faces that you could never quite get a mental grip on. The moment Lina stepped out of the booth, every single one of those faces turned towards her in sync. At least a dozen pairs of eyes started to glow ruby red...

"Eyrie," Lina almost whispered. "You know if anybody has a backup copy of this place?"

"The owner and a couple of the regulars. Why?"

"Just didn't want to do any permanent damage on my way out."

Eyrie wisely backed into the booth again as the suits advanced.

"You will return the data to us, Lina Inverse," said one of the suits. Lina wasn't quite sure which one.

"And if I don't?"

"Then we will take it from you." The faces of the front few started to distort, jaws extending to show more teeth than should be able to fit inside a space that size.

Lina cracked her knuckles, a grim smile on her face. "You can try..."


Gourry was managing to stand his ground in the door to the motel room, mostly. At first the strange creatures had only attacked one at a time, as though playing with him; but more of them kept appearing, and they were now crowded close around the door. Each time one was cut apart, it dissolved in a shower of polygons, and another stepped in to take its place.

Amelia was dancing on her feet, fists clenched, going "Ooooohhh... go get 'em, Gourry!"

Sylphiel shook her head, and looked back at the other occupant of the room. "Amelia, isn't there something you should be doing?"

Amelia stopped moving instantly, pouting a bit in thought. "Like what?"

"Like waking up Lina?"

"Oh! Yeah, I should, shouldn't I? She wouldn't want to miss all the fun."

Sylphiel shook her head. "You have strange ideas of 'fun'."

Gourry kept backing up a little, almost pushed back inside the doorway by the sheer force of the onslaught of forms. One of them started to try and twist past him, getting into the room... only to be sliced in half by a slim blue energy blade which seemed to drop down from the sky. A blade which was soon followed by a rather heavy figure that slammed down, leaving cracks in the pavement around him.

"Zelgadis?"

"Looks like you could use an assist, hmm?"

Gourry cut down another of the strange creatures, slicing it in half while the mass was distracted by the arrival of another opponent. "Why should we trust you?"

Zelgadis smirked in a vaguely unpleasant manner as he flipped his sword over his shoulder, spiking right through the eye of one of the figures trying to come up behind him. "Against these, we have a common cause. While we want the virus from Lina, we also wish to ensure that these people do not get their hands on it."

Gourry nodded, his blade flicking just barely past Zelgadis' body to catch another creature coming up the side. "Truce, then?"

"For now..."

Amelia turned to watch as the two swordsmen started mowing down the strange things, as she kept hitting the button that Lina told her to push.


Lina ran through the streets of AOL, dodging the monsters bent on catching her. At least they had switched back to looking human, they probably didn't want to cause too much panic. Panic is bad for business, after all.

Trying to lose herself in the noise of the crowd wasn't working. They kept on her. Either they were tracing every move she made, or they were all over the place online; she wasn't sure which idea scared her more. Trying to just blow them away en route wasn't working either; there seemed to be a near infinite number of them, and they all looked so alike she couldn't tell if any had actually stopped. Lina was feeling frustrated, and getting quite pissed off.

Cutting through the middle of one of the large shopping areas, Lina leapt into the middle of a transport link set up to look like a standard shopping mall escalator. The moment she hit, while the crowd was still figuring out what happened, she set up a decoy that looked just like her and pushed forward up the escalator... while the 'real' her continued down through the floor of the escalator and grabbed the returning panels underneath. Safely hidden inside the maintenance setup of the link (for now), she quietly went in the exact opposite direction everyone watching would have thought she was in.

It was then that she noticed a blinking light out of the corner of her eye. That would be Amelia; looks like something was going on outside. She pulled herself out, vanishing from the heat of the frying pan...

... and opened her eyes to the fire. Gourry and Zelgadis both had their swords out, but this time instead of fighting each other they were both fighting the same sort of twisting monsters with ruby eyes. The moment they saw her move, a murmer went up from the crowd, and their efforts to get in were redoubled. "You will give us the data, Lina."

Lina groaned. Her headache was building up on her again, and getting even worse. Zelgadis had found her again. She'd had a really lousy last couple of days, and these stupid creatures just wouldn't leave her alone. All she wanted to do was understand what was going on, and have some time to kick back and laugh about it. This... was getting unbearable.

Amelia saw the look on her friend's face as Lina started going through a slow burn. Almost literally; Amelia was sure she could see flickers of red flame and a heat shimmer over Lina's head. She quickly backed up, leaving Lina a nearly clear path to the door, except for Zelgadis and Gourry.

Finally, Lina ran towards the door, and screamed, "I CAN'T TAKE THIS ANYMORE!! DRAGON SLAVE!!!"

The red lights that had been flickering around her coelesced, gathering into her hands, before she lobbed the blinding white ball of light into the mass of demons out in the parking lot. Zelgadis, who had some idea of what was coming, grabbed Gourry and yanked him inside the hotel room, kicking the door shut behind them.

A huge explosion out in the parking lot rocked the building and broke several of the windows. It passed within seconds, leaving a parking lot that was partially melted near the middle, contained several badly scorched cars, and was almost completely empty of strange creatures with three rows of teeth.

Almost.

Standing in mid-air and leaning back against a now-bent street lamp was a single figure. A young man, not much older than Lina's age, in a nice sporty suit and a bright purple tie. Someone who looked rather familiar to Lina...

Lina poked her head out the windowframe, glaring up at the figure. "You're that kid from the subway, aren't you?"

The figure applauded. "Very nicely done, Miss Lina. You've certainly shown that you're not someone to be trifled with, hmm? Ah, but I see I've forgotten my manners again. You can call me Xelloss." With that, he performed a full courtly bow, albeit still standing some ten feet up in the air.

"What the Hell are you doing?"

"Ah." He grinned in that rather creepy way of his. "That... is a secret. I must thank you for helping to downsize the company, though; you've saved me a lot of necessity for severence pay. Much cleaner this way." He rubbed his hands together, brushing them off. "See you later, Miss Lina!" And before anyone could react, he stepped around behind the lamp post, and vanished from sight.

Lina growled out a sequence of profanities again, then turned and grabbed Zelgadis by the collar. Pulling his head down to be close to hers as she stepped right in front of him, she glared at the cyborg. "And you've got a hell of a lot of explaining to do yourself, mister."

Zelgadis brushed bits of dust and glass of his shoulders, affecting a degree of casualness. "Perhaps... I do at that. It's apparent that my dear uncle's methods have caused more trouble than they've solved."

"Your uncle?"

"Yes, my uncle. Mister R.P. Rezo."

While everybody sat and gawked at that, Zelgadis pulled the door open and stepped out. "However, the police are likely to be here soon. May I suggest we be on our way before they get here? We can discuss things en route. I do hope you paid in cash for this room."


Sylphiel drove the slightly singed Range Rover down the road, with Gourry in the passenger seat, and all three others packed in the back seat with Zelgadis in the middle. Lina would likely have spent the whole distance glaring at Zelgadis if she hadn't passed out again the moment she relaxed after the explosion earlier.

A few hours later, after they pulled off the road at a small gas station to clean off the Rover, and after Lina had woken up, Zelgadis leaned back and began his tale. "I'll warn you first that I don't know the full story. My uncle considers me a useful tool, and nothing more. I only know what he considers it important for me to know, or what I've found out on my own. Any or all of this might be in error, either from my guesses being incorrect, or even my uncle deliberately lying to me."

"So why do you still work for him?" Amelia piped up.

"Because he is almost certainly the only one who can fix what he did to me." Zelgadis' voice took on a dangerous edge. "Do you have any idea what it's like to be a total-conversion cyborg? It's like sitting back and driving your body by remote control. I have little sense of smell, no sense of taste, and not much in the way of light touch."

Amelia got this cute little 'awww' expression on her face and patted Zelgadis' shoulder. The cyborg just looked down at the hand as if she'd grown a second head or something. Finally, Lina broke in with "So, what do you know about this?"

Zelgadis hmmed. "Let's start back at the beginning. How much do you remember of your mother, Miss Berkowitz?"

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Possibly everything. Now, please answer the question?"

Lina scrunched up her face, thinking. She could feel one of her infamous headaches starting to come back on her. "Not very much. She died when I was still fairly young; my sister went to work for DracoNix to bring in enough money to raise me."

Zelgadis nodded. "What was your first experience with a neural link headset?"

"Oh, heck, that was back over ten years ago, my sister got one of the first headsets, back when they were still experimental..." She stopped, remembering something she had seen when searching out who Zelgadis was working for. "It was an RPR Technologies headset, wasn't it? My mother worked there at one time."

"Yes, she did. She was one of the more experimental researchers there. She did some of the groundbreaking work on Virtual reality and analogues before she got sidetracked."

"Sidetracked?"

"As I said, her work was in analogues. Basically, the idea of how to send the least amount of data for a good virtual reality experience, by tapping into the symbolic shortcuts in everybody's brain. Instead of having to send every possible pixel for a piece of grass, you just send the concept of 'grass' to the other end and the person's brain fills it in on their own. It's not used so much anymore, in part because data bandwidth is cheaper now, and in part because it required a huge amount of customization to each person it was supposed to work with. For a while, though, it was the best Virtual Reality system design anybody had.

"While working on that, she got distracted onto another line of research. That on automemes. An automeme is essentially a self-organizing idea. Drawing on earlier research by Pilsinger and expanding it with the mapping techniques she'd developed for the analogue research, she realized it was possible to sort of 'section off' a part of the brain to make it run independently. Of course, something like this works far better if it's done earlier in life, while the neural pathways in the brain are still forming.

"How old were you when you used that neural link again?"

Lina blinks. "Are you implying my own mother experimented on me when I was a kid?"

"Probably not, I suspect the headset was mostly for your sister. You were just a lucky accident in that."

Lina fumed, "Why you..."

Zelgadis held up a hand. "As I said, I may be wrong on this. And in any case, let me finish."

Lina kept fuming, but nodded.

"In any case, by that time your mother had gotten... odd. There's some suspiscion that a part of the Shaburanigdo worm got into one of the RPR development systems. If she was using one of the prototype neural interfaces on an infected system, who knows what could have happened. By all reports, she got more erratic over the last couple of years of her life. She started going on about the Goddess, and 'Our Lady of Chaos'. Her experiments got more and more eclectic. By the end, about eight years ago, she was almost completely uncommunicative. We eventually found her hooked up to a neural link, dead of dehydration. The records indicated she'd been braindead for days before that."

Over the course of Zelgadis' speech, Lina just sort of deflated. She'd spent many years forgetting or ignoring the oddness at home. Which was part of why she'd spent so much of her time growing up hooked into the computer. Having it all brought back now, on top of the weirdness in her life of late, was just... too much to take all at once. She found herself completely silent.

Amelia, of course, had no such compunctions. "So what where those weirdos who were attacking us at the motel room, anyway? They were pretty scary!"

Zelgadis says, "They call themselves the Mazoku, the spawn of Shaburanigdo."

THAT got Lina's attention back. "As in MazokuSoft?"

Zelgadis nodded. "I don't know too much about them. That one that showed up at the end, Xelloss, has shown up at RPR Technologies a few times. Just casually knocks on the door, as if it means nothing that he's had to bypass three layers of security to get there. Most of the Mazoku are pretty stupid and tend to use brute force solutions. They just want to get their hands on all seven parts of Shaburanigdo, to 'resurrect' it. Xelloss... treats it all like a game. I have no idea what he wants."

Lina frowned. "And how come I could cast a Dragon Slave in reality there? That wasn't just my headache playing tricks on me again, was it?"

"I don't know. I suspect it's related to how the Mazoku can exist at all; it's as if something were somehow overlaying the virtual realm onto the real one."

"So what does Rezo want with Shaburanigdo?"

Zelgadis shook his head. "I wish I knew. But one thing I do know; I'm sick and tired of being played for a fool by him."

Amelia grinned. "That mean you're joining us?"

"For the moment, yes."

Amelia bounced with a boisterous "Yahoo! Another member of the great Slayerz team! Yosh!"

Zelgadis gave Amelia another of those 'You're really strange' looks, which the young girl blithely ignored. He turned back to Lina. "Is she always like this?"

Lina smiled. "Not at all."

Zelgadis breathed a sigh of relief.

"Usually she's worse. Her sugar intake has been low today."

Zelgadis favoured Lina with another of his looks; she just smiled back at him. "Anyhow, I think what we need to do now is find somewhere safe to hole up, and take stock of what we've got on hand. Somewhere out of the way where nobody will see us. I want to see just how much of my arsenal of attack programs transfers over from the Net."

Lina's near-maniacal cackle at the thought of the stress release from wanton destruction she could cause even frightened Amelia.


Author's Notes

Whee, this was fun.

One of my main goals in this was in drawing together a number of the various plot points from the different parts so far. I think I actually managed to do it without breaking any continuity here.

The whole bit about 'that time of the month' was in there just because I figured that given how tied Lina's ability in RL is to whether or not she realizes she's about to do something impossible, when she's a little more touchy, she's probably more powerful, instead of less.

When I started writing this, I realized that I had various time frames that were listed in the story, all of which had to mesh together somehow. From the course of the spread of Shaburanigdo, to the length of time since RPR technologies had released its technology to the world, there were a few sets of dates that had been specified. My best attempt to fit everything together ends up something like this:

2002: Knights of Dawn Frontier taken down -- Ch6
?2008?: Lina born
2011: Shaburanigdo first seen -- Ch6
2012: Amelia born -- Ch1
2013: Shaburanigdo starts acting like AI -- Ch6
?2017?: Lina's first use of neural link
2019: Shaburanigdo finally taken down. -- Ch6
2019: RPR releases tech into public domain -- Ch3
2022: Fort Knox wiped out -- Ch6
2027: Present day, Present time.

Feel free to use or ignore this as you see fit.

I seriously considered putting two other bits in here: one about Gourry, where Zelgadis mentions that there doesn't really seem to be any record of Gourry's parents at all. And his own record is noticeable by its lack of concrete information. Couldn't figure out a way to fit it in without it being too contrived, though. The other part was a more detailed explanation of exactly what Lina's mother was up to... but there would have been no reason for Zelgadis to have ever known that. Besides, it would have taken half the fun away from the next people in line. If anybody wants to know what my ideas for this were, feel free to email me.

And now, it's hats off to Chris Nichols, who gets to deal with this mess next. Good luck!


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