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I'm not dead, Faustite started the note, but that seemed insultingly obvious, so he deleted it. He didn't need to insult his team members' intelligence when they'd already received a notification from the Queen that he was, in fact, not dead, and that he received the dubious honor of being promoted instead (for he thought the responsibilities that came with the position far outweighed the delightful levels of power that came with it).

If he was going to write a message to the team and invite them all to dinner, he needed it to sound less moronic. But he realized that he didn't remember how to invite a group of people to dinner. Want to eat food with all of you sounded foolish. So he deliberated on it a while longer, pondered his phrasing when Axinite wasn't directing him to try new tasks or maybe don't set the paperwork on fire next time, and by the end of his training day, he had something of an idea for what to say.

Join me at Moe's for tacos, he wrote. Not work-related, he added, because he hadn't yet decided how to deal with the operation yet. My treat..

Headache was fired for that day, so he had to send the message himself.


When he reached the restaurant as Eion, it was easy enough to ask for a large table with a booth. Given it was early evening, some of the team members might be too busy to come, or would be joining them at a later time. Then there were the cats, who would likewise get the message, and would either slip in unnoticed or come with an attending human from the team. It'd be easy enough to slip them some meat shavings on the side, if that's what a Mauvian ate (he still hadn't asked any of them and never intended to).

Once he was seated and handed a menu, Eion ordered water and waited. And waited. and felt, for the first time, that he wished he had his own cell phone so he wouldn't have to sit in his own isolation.

"Mmm…" Eion let the question go; it was better to let the Mauvian assume how he acquired the money. Eion crossed his legs at the ankle under the table and stretched them out.

"You look weird," Eion observed, feeling a little flushed. He'd never seen Tama without cat ears and a tail, and didn't fully understand how in the hell that worked, but it worked well enough for this. "Don't know how I feel about that."

He knew exactly how he felt about it. He knew well enough to keep it to himself, too.

"Suppose I do," he responded with a wry smile. It had been years since he qualified as human; he looked strange to himself whenever he saw Eion in the mirror. He couldn't say whether that was because of Eion's glamour and how it differed from Elex's, or if it was the years passed as Faustite.

But it made sense for Tama to think it strange. The cat hadn't known him as a human. Was this the first time, then? He couldn't remember.

"Think it's exhausting." But before he could elaborate on his feelings for his promotion, the waiter arrived.

The tall man gave his canned introduction to the restaurant, listed off the main specials as a chef's choice of fish in a parmesan reduction, a double-stacked angus beef burger with crispy onion bits and fries on top, and house-style nachos. He leaned this way and that as he talked, as if he spoke with his torso and upper body more than he did with his mouth. When he concluded the spiel, he held his pen and notepad at the ready and asked, "May I take your order, Sirs?"

Eion had hardly thought of Tama as a sir before. He looked at the other boy for a moment, perplexed.

One Adam Bal was absolutely thriving.

Quite a few of his victories were public-facing, of course. He was known as the new CEO of Augusta Bank, a local bank that had been rising when he took it over. The public didn't know it was a Negaverse operation that he and Jadarite had championed and gotten approved. They also didn't know that he was now a captain of that underground organization, more power coursing through his veins when he powered up than he knew what to do with--

Oh, who was he kidding? He knew exactly what to do with it. Seeing the light leave people's eyes held a particular thrill he couldn't quite deny.

It was icing on the cake that his general was not only living, but he was also a general-sovereign now. Surely, being on the team of a general-sovereign only meant good things about his own stature in the Negaverse -- he had believed in someone with such great potential, someone who even their own eldritch god believed in too.

He just wanted the power associated with that. Tacos for free were a bonus.

"Eion," Adam purred, as he arrived to the table. "Mr. Mistofflees," he added, to Tama, an additional joke that perhaps only they would understand. "And Trey. A pleasure. I'll take that fish with the parm reduction, waiter."

He swung into a seat at the table. "Oh, waiter, do you happen to have any house cocktails?" His smirk was as sharp as it ever was, itself as sharp as the spear he now carried--