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It would be everyone's misfortune, but especially Lucky's, that, for all the trashing of the island the horsemen left in their wake, one of the few pristine, relatively untouched rooms would be the Death Division office.

And nothing Gale said or did was going to convince Lucky to actually go inside it. Especially now that he looked and sounded about a decade and a half older than he had been a week ago.

"I'll just wait outside," Lucky insisted again, crossing his arms. He felt like he would never get used to how different his voice sounded. "I can turn in all my paperwork by email when they get more power back on. Mark did teach Caelius how to use email by now, right?"

Lucky paused. Even he wasn't confident enough that such a thing was possible. But it was beside the point. The point was, he was going to get his missing years back, or he was going to live out the rest of his days as a hermit. "Er. Anyway, I can't come back here until I've... fixed this."

He gestured vaguely to himself, arms still mostly crossed, as if to better indicate he was in the middle of an entirely unwanted midlife crisis.

"You can't bloody stay outside forever," was Gale's less-than-sympathetic response as he kicked aside a fragment of stone and brushed a few sweeps of dirt and debris from one of the doorways. The Death Offices - miraculously - were mostly okay, though Gale suspected his office was one of the ones that was definitely Not Okay.

He turned around to face Lucky again, though it was still a jar to see him looking like a grumpy, middle aged man than a grumpy young man. Gale was still scrutinizing him, turning over this fact again when an all-too-familiar figure came ambling by, drinks in hand.

Gale squinted around Lucky, arms folded across his chest, still frowning.

"Mark? What are you doing?"

"Like, just you know, just, rewarding myself after a long hard day's work." He offered a sip of the other cup of slurpee to Gale. "Also - recognize you like what?" Mark blinked a few times, and then took a long noisy gulp to help with his brain freeze.

More intense blinking and then a furrowing of his eyebrows in deep thought. "Oh, you grew your arm back?" It ended with a huge question mark, as if that was the most implausible thing that could happen on Deus.

"Grew back!? What happened to my - oh. Kostya."

Lucky just stared at Gale, then Mark, then Gale again. He shot Gale what he hoped was a very nasty look at the very audible 'aside'.

"Gale, I'm old, not deaf."

He resisted a new and entirely unwanted urge to punch Gale, and turned to Mark instead.

"But Mark, there's - there's a way to fix this, right?" he ventured, trying not to sound too hopeful. Deus did have solutions to strange problems, and this was by far the strangest one he'd encountered. He motioned vaguely to his face, uncertain how much attention he wanted to draw to the fact that he looked almost twice as old now, and definitely sounded that way. "You know I'm not supposed to be like... this."

It was kind of like waiting for water to boil. Gale stood (im)patiently waiting for Mark to put together the pieces while studiously ignoring Lucky's annoyed hiss, mostly because he was sort of privately amused at Cranky Old Man Lucky.

Maybe he'd get him a cane for his birthday.

"Er," said Gale, with a pointed look at what was in Mark's hand. "What are those then? Didn't those come from off the island? And there aren't any solutions on the island that don't involve using a portal to go somewhere else, is there?"

"Yeah, 7-11 has a two for one deal, it was great," Mark shook the first of the cups, entirely losing context of the conversation, "This one is like orange blue raspberry coca cola bubblegum and Dr Pepper, and this other one is," he shook it a few times," Uh, I forgot. Want some?"

Before either of them could answer that question he took a sip from the cup he was offering. It seemed his brain freeze problem hadn't cleared up as it was taking longer than usual for him to form even half coherent sentences. "So yeah, I mean yeah, I can make a portal. Where we going?"

He was scrunching his eyebrows so hard it looked like his eyes were going to collide, though it was mostly because he seemed to have forgotten an important step in the bargaining process called asking for money.

"Yeah, there has to be a way to fix this, right?" Gale didn't have anything to worry about there - Lucky was pretty wound up, and pretty desperate. He stepped forward to begin frantically questioning. "Mark, is anyone stationed off-island researching age reversal? Is there an artifact that can turn me back to normal? Hah, at this point, I'm desperate enough that I'd probably even bargain with a -"

He trailed off into silence.

"A Legacy..."

One specific legacy had turned the entire island into teenagers, some permanently. If it had the capability to do that, it had the capability to turn back his own clock too.

"Creation." Lucky was suddenly fumbling for his phone, turning away from both Gale and Mark as he began to type out a text to a very familiar leader of an enemy organization. They'd have to act fast if they were going to stop him from sending it. "Charlotte. She can fix this. I know she can. We need to find Charlotte."

Like he needed an excuse to.

"Bloody hell, no - " said Gale at the same time that Mark also lunged for the phone, Gale's fingers closing around Lucky's wrist simultaneously. "What on earth is wrong with you? Don't text Charlotte - wait, why do you even have her - never mind."

He gave Mark a look in return that clearly indicated it was of the choice of the lesser of two evils now.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Gale sighed.

Heavily.

"Let's just see what Mark has up his sleeve, okay?" he said to Lucky, raising his brows. "Before you text her."