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Somewhere north of Chicago, Illinois, in a small, upper-class neighborhood, Siber Roelan Terrian was making dinner. This was not a regular dinner. Someone was coming. Someone he had avoided for years - decades, in fact. Holed away in a simple, two-story home, the doctor had successfully circumnavigated his way through phone calls from former cohorts and allies, evaded "accidental" meetings, and actually made more than a few human couriers simply cease to exist... at least on paper.

Outside, the dull hum of hovercars pretended to sooth what had always been a troubled mind. A shell of armor sat in a corner of the small kitchen, quietly peeling onions. Once a mere tool to the demonologist now standing over a pot of boiling stew, Centauri had found that Terrian, unlike many, more untrained people in those arts, actually had sympathy for demons who, despite their allegiance, still needed an escape from the tortured thoughts and deeds of the eternally damned.

The sky had begun to blacken and the automatic lamps came on to a dim setting. Siber's ears perked as he heard what he knew, from the various sensors he had lain, was Paul McCulloch. He sighed quietly as Centauri paused his motions and looked up at him.

"You ready for this?"

Siber snarled and snapped, "I've been ready since I left them. Damn it. Sorry."

"'s fine." The armor went back to what it was doing, then got up and dumped the roots in the pot of water as Siber moved away and closed his eyes, mumbling softly to himself as he tapped through his various threads, Keldan's invisible hands still guiding him.







the man said, clipping off the word, His voice was simple and controlled, but behind it, his mind was roiling. Pale, taught, but delicate fingers worked their way through hair like jet, obsessively dyed at the first sign of greying, and then rubbed at bright blue eyes. Those eyes glanced quickly over the room's sparse decorations - a few potted plants beyond the bar separating the kitchen from the living area, a decent television mounted seamlessly into the wall, a bookshelf packed with titles mostly in non-English characters, and simple, soft, brown carpet. Damn it, he had built this place - and more importantly, everything underneath it.

"I don't want to leave."

"Then don't."

A quick grin. "If only."

One last check through. Siber patted his pockets - phase knife, hunting knife with a few runes carved into it, Swiss army knife, butterfly knife, straight razor, butter knife... seemed like everything was there, in one fashion or another. He swung his trusty jacket - the same he had "borrowed" from a certain news reporter some decades earlier, if somewhat altered - over a nearby easy chair and plopped a sable, wide-brimmed hat on his head. With a flicker of expressions, his eyes brightened as though a flashlight had suddenly been turned on in them, and before Paul's hand could finish rising to knock on the door, he threw it a few inches open and put half his face in the opening, looking up at the other man.

He glanced fervently from one side to the other, then back up again. "Paul. Paul McCulloch. Paul Michael McCulloch I have a question for you.

Do you.

Like.

Borscht?"

Paul stared. "What?"

In a heavily Romanian accent, Siber repeated in a whisper "Doyoulikeborscht?!"

"I-I..."

The shorter man grinned like a small child. "Okay, I make you borscht!" The door slammed and shortly, there could be heard obscenely loud Italian operas and the clattering of pots and pans.

Over the sound of Pavarotti belting out "ll mio Tesoro," Siber called quite gaily, "I'd believe you if I hadn't already silenced that com line, my trigger-happy compatriot. Besides, the door's unlocked - you should learn to try the handle now and then."

Shortly, he had poured the mixture into a large serving bowl, and began rushing it to the door. Meanwhile, Centauri, quite suddenly dressed in a trim, black tuxedo, set out pouring wine and setting a table in the small dining room attached to the kitchen. Somewhere, a child screamed.

Siber pulled open the door to his home and with a bright grin, held up the gigantic bowl. "Borscht! For you!"

Siber's eyes widened. "A... spoon? Yes! Of course!" He turned and rushed back indoors, the door again threatening to slam in Paul's face. The borscht spilled out as he ran, but Centauri, nodding cordially at Paul from the room off to the side of the entryway, calmly directed it back into the bowl. Moments later, Siber returned with several spoons fully submerged in the stew.

In a flash, his features darkened to a sepulchral hue and he looked up out of half-lidded, animal eyes. In a hurt, straining voice, he breathed, "I know why you're here. I've known why you're here for more than twenty years... McCulloch." He stressed his use of Paul's last name. "And I only let you in this building to let you make your pathetic arguments and then get the hell out of my house. My life is not to be spent piddling around with one dictator's politics or another's. I have visions; both my own and others'. Plenty of them already; I don't have room for yours."

Like a hydraulic pump finally letting loose its sigh of relief, Siber's voice and mien uncoiled and he adopted a more calm, more serious manner, tossing the bowl of borscht to Centauri, who caught it smoothly and made himself scarce. "I have real food - this is ******** trash. Want any before you leave?" He walked back to the kitchen and rummaged in the oven until he pulled out a tray of fish and vegetables - far more reasonable than the smell of cooking cabbage that still hung pungently in the olfactory background.

Sitting quietly in a big, comfy chair, Terrian listened to the weary militant with a playful glint in his eyes and a small smile on his face. True, it was a little surprising that Paul had been protecting him at all, but despite the little spool of bitterness that started unwinding at the pit of his stomach from the thought that he had been in any way coddled, he simply didn't care. "Paul," he said, with a light, almost admonishing tone in his voice, "you're making the mistake of thinking I'm allied at all. Honestly.

"The Cabal has no hold on me. The Coven has nothing; the Tyrg have next to nothing; the Confederation... well. The Confederation's interesting, as usual. My visions are both personal, and universal. Don't you worry, my good man." He stretched luxuriously, an insouciant, British accent slipping in his words. "There's precious few actually care about a washed up demonologist-come-geneticist. And hell, if they do, believe me - I have more fingers in their pies than they could ever have in mine.

"As for visions. Nothing I want to do hurts anyone. I extracted myself from politics the day I left the rest of you; I'm not getting involved. Period."

"Legion," Siber snapped, "is a misguided child." The Dreamshell had assured him as much. "Children, I suppose," he mused. Then again, this was a sentiment espoused of very nearly everything in the known and unknown universes by the Dreamshell. It was that entity that had kept the demoniac alive for as long as he had been, and he knew it.

He stood and ran his fingers agitatedly across the front rim of his hat. He lowered his voice. "If Legion really wanted me dead, McCulloch - I mean really, really wanted me dead - and had the means, do you think I'd be standing here?" Siber paced his way slowly back to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of wine, offering it first to Paul, and then taking it himself when his "guest" declined. He let the time it took marinate what he had just said.

"Friendship," he began, staring bemusedly first at his glass, and then at Paul, while the back of his mind sizzled with indecision. This was one of the blows it had taken him more than a little while to both design and make a choice on whether or not to use. "Friendship is a silly game, played by people who don't have a sense of self-worth. If you made the mistake of perceiving a temporary alliance as a deeper bond, then that was what you made - a mistake." It may possibly have been less unsettling if Siber's voice had been mechanical, or at the very least monotone. But it wasn't. He smiled as he spoke, and his tone was as musical as it had ever been. "You have my sympathies," he lilted over the rim of the glass, then sipped and waited.

The wine glass cracked, and merlot trickled its way between Siber's fingers, likely mixed with blood and sinking deep into the carpet as the man's face was suffused with fury. "Who the hell says I'm not a god?" he grated in an ugly voice.

~We~

A shriek like a bird of prey's ripped out of Siber's throat and he dropped down to his knees, clutching his hands to his head as his eyes widened like a spooked horse's. Wine drenched the floor and flowed in rivulets down one side of his face while glass clinked on its own various shards. Centauri immediately came to his side. As Siber breathed in heavy wheezes through his teeth, staring into nothing and clearly holding something in, Centauri broke apart and reformed around him, the verdant armor encasing every inch of his body, piece by piece, until a visor slid down over his eyes and the face sealed shut. The screaming wails began anew, but this time echoing and reechoing through the demonic metal and muffled by their enclosure.

Centauri's voice made itself heard. "You're lucky he isn't trying to kill you, this time," he said flatly, as though he were babysitting a troubled infant. "Must be more mild than usual." The seconds dragged on while the sounds reverberated each one into the next, making the armor shudder against itself with a near-constant clatter of plates. As the noises distorted one another, they began to more approximate a disturbed nest of contained hornets than a human being.

Finally, the sounds died down to whimpers and growls. The whole time, Siber had not moved except to shake. There were a few moments of total silence, and then Centauri was dismissed and faded. Without a word, Siber stood up and walked to the sink. Silently, he rinsed off his face, cleaned his wounds, and delicately patted himself dry with a dish towel. A few dots of red remained on his hand, but it seemed to have stopped bleeding.

He turned to Paul, took his hat off, and set it on the table. His eyes were somewhat red, and he cleared his throat more than once, but he finally said, without the slightest hint of a tremor, "Director of Operations Paul McCulloch, what is it you would like me to do, precisely?" After a few blinks, he picked up the hat again, swept a deep bow, and put it back on his head, smiling out of sad, blue eyes. "I owe you equally as little as you owe me, just to make that perfectly clear, but all the same, I, Siber Roelan Terrian, offer you my services as demoniac, geneticist, and networking..." he rolled his hand as though searching for a term, "...officianado. Do you accept, or will you let me return to my unobtrusive and unimpeded-" he winced, and growled the next word through a grin- "existence?"