(continued from part one, preceding...)
***
Emerson Park was nice, Miguel Veracruz thought. For some value of 'nice,' anyway. The benches were free of graffiti. The bushes were well-tended, if a little ragged. he playground equipment was firmly anchored on a good-size asphalt block in the center that looked as if it could weather a hurricane. The liquor stores across the street were well-stocked. It wasn't the kind of place that looked like it had hosted an epic fight between a man wearing the lower half of a fearsome armored suit, another man with metal snakes coming out of his eyes and mouth, a metal bonobo with dazzling hair, and a troupe of teleporting demon monkeys... unless you counted the scorch marks on the grass.
"So you're saying they found nothing," Miguel said, as he looked at the small group of people in the center of the playground, a couple of whom--China Moroboshi and a stocky, light-brown woman whose name Miguel didn't know--were regarding a horse-on-a-spring with the kind of expressions ordinarily reserved for disarming bombs. "The trail of The Programmer and his little demon monkeys just ends here."
He smacked the jetpack he'd used to quickly travel from the _Subtler Than Light_ to the park, now planted in the sand next to the picnic table he was seated at. To his annoyance, it failed to fall over.
He was the only human-presenting human at the table. With him were four weres of varying species and fur colors. They'd transformed on arriving in the park ahead of him, and were holding off on shifting back to human until they were sure they were no longer needed. Shapeshifting took energy, and lunchtime was approaching.
"'Monkeys all gone,' s'what they say," Miko Tagashi answered. He looked at the silver-furred, green-camouflage-shirt-and-shorts-wearing werewolf seated next to him. "Apples and I got here around the same time Marty and Moon Moon did, which was a little before they did, hoping to keep the scene of the battle intact. But there wasn't anything to protect. The only guy left in the park was that guy and that godziller over by the swingset talkin' to Shelby."
She gestured in the direction of a scruffy-looking, pale old man in a heavy coat, who was standing next to a slightly-taller human-size kaiju who was inhaling blue smoke from a reactor-shaped cup. Another human-size kaiju in a lab coat, Shelby d'Rodang, was holding his tablet computer up to his eyes like he was looking through it, to what end Miguel could only imagine.
"I'm sorry they called you back from the protest you were at for this," said Miguel. "We thought we'd have a hotter site than this."
"Miko and I were the only two from the pack to even show up to the protest," said Amy 'Apples' Pierson, a crimson-furred werefox in a red t-shirt and blue shorts. "Again. After Nance promised us we'd have a full crew and signs and everything. At least *they* were glad to see us... and they pay our invoices."
"Yeah," said Marty Steinmetz, the black-furred werepanther leaning against a nearby tree. "Which is what we really wanted to talk to you about..."
Miguel sighed.
"You mean you didn't call me because you were ultra-concerned about the menace posed by The Programmer and his weirdo face-tentacles?"
"You said you fought the guy back in '07," said Miko. "You didn't sound like you considered him a big threat."
"The Programmer I remember," Miguel said, "was this vain, lumbering twit who thought he was all that just because he could control computerized-things with his technological implants. What Esteban described was an order of magnitude more dangerous. And since he failed at getting the Heart of Mu, he's probably out there hunting for it. Knowing where he is might give us a lead on where it is."
"I did smell ham earlier," said Moon Moon, the barrel-chested blond werewolf in tight black shorts seated on the grass next to Miko. "Is that a clue?"
"It was a sandwich," Marty told him. "Specifically, the one you bought just before we left the recruitment drive we were supposed to be working on today."
"Oh, right." Moon Moon frowned. "What happened to it, then?"
"You ate it."
"Ohhhh."
"Back to what Marty was starting to say," said Miko. "The reason we asked *you* to come out here. Miguel... we're broke."
"What?"
"The pack account got closed out yesterday," said Marty, as he rubbed his jaw. "I only found out after I tried to put in a PhootDash order this morning and got denied."
"August Rydell has cut us all out of his pack," said Apples, "and this time it's for good."
"We don't *know* that..."
"We know," said Moon Moon. He shifted away from the half-rusted barbecue grill he'd been peering at. "You remember what he said in the last pack meet."
"You mean..."
"'Hey, why is my chair wet?'" Moon Moon went on, imitating the grizzled voice of their pack leader. "'Moon Moon, how many times do I have to tell you to clean up after you get sick from eating too many corn dogs? And what is this, kale?'"
"I would've thought 'If you don't stop digging into my business, I'm kicking you lot out' was a more relevant quote," Marty said.
"It was how he said it," Moon Moon defensively replied. Miko scritched behind Moon Moon's right ear, bringing a broad smile back to his lupine face.
"The last pack meet was a month ago," said Miguel, rubbing his face and wishing he was anywhere else. "Have any of you heard from him after that?"
"Not directly," said Apples. "Nance checked in last week to make sure Miko and I'd represent at the protest in Fresno this morning. Said most of the pack would be there, which was a total lie."
"Nance made sure Moon Moon and I were on the drive at Redondo Beach today," Marty noted. "Said most of the pack would be there." He considered this. "Maybe they turned into Revolutionary Anarchists?"
"Hope not," Moon Moon said. "Remember the cleaning bill from the last time?"
"And he knew *you* would be too down-in-the-dumps to be anywhere other than sleeping in," said Miko, waving a hand at Miguel.
"I was up!" Miguel protested. "Buying a book at the crack of dawn, even!"
"We don't need them," Marty insisted. "We don't need August Rydell's money, wherever he gets it."
"Except in a couple weeks when the rent comes due," Miguel noted, though it was his own apartment on his mind. "A morning's contract work here ain't gonna cut it."
"We all have skills," Miko said. "I've got my electrician's license, and I've done some side work fixing up bikes and mech suits up and down the coast. Apples is a freelance cryptocurrency adviser..."
"Hardly anymore," Apples interjected. "The bigfeet and chupacabras got burned when they dropped theirs in favor of Phootcoin, and the Dark Watchers of the Santa Lucia mountains only trade in blank stares, which are hell to monetize these days. I'd go into NFTs, but the Mushroom folk funged that up six months ago. I might have to get my pilot's license renewed."
"Marty's been doing dinner theater out in Burbank..."
"They fired me, remember?" said Marty. "Management found out I was a were and they started worrying the customers'd be on the menu. Which, given the customers they attracted... no. Just... no."
"And Moon Moon..."
"Hmmm?" hmmmd Moon Moon, who stopped in mid-lick of the barbecue grill next to him.
"...is Moon Moon."
"I haven't gotten a radio gig in months," said Miguel, as Moon Moon got back to whatever the hell he was doing. "Or voice acting, or repair work, or... anything, really. I guess I've just been letting everything slide while I worked out my issues."
"Some people have issues, Miguel," said Apples. "You've got subscriptions. Why don't you go back to therapy?"
"I'd need a therapist to figure that one out," Miguel said. "I thought I'd made it through, after I fucked up with Cendra for the last time, and rebuilt my relationship with Esteban after we had it out when he came out."
"He still hasn't called me back, though," said Moon Moon. "You told him to, right?"
"Just this morning," Miguel confirmed. "Of course, if I wanted to go back to therapy, that brings us back to money and where to find some."
"The pack was our net, and not just financially," said Marty. "We can cover money shit, at least in the short term, but I don't think any of us were built to be loners. We've got to form a new pack. Just the five of us to start with... plus Camila, of course... and you to lead."
Miguel sighed. There were the words he'd been dreading.
"Why...?"
"You've been in the pack... our former pack... longer than any of us," Apples said.
"Moon Moon's been in it longer," Miguel replied.
Everyone looked at Moon Moon, who was staring cross-eyed at a monarch butterfly that had landed on his nose.
"Okay, I see your point," Miguel went on. "But... I'm no pack leader. I mean... you know what I've been going through... you're right. I've got subscriptions. My head isn't any clearer than when I stepped back from being August's lieutenant."
"There's also Los Pantalones to consider," Miko noted. "Your brother found them, and formed an unbreakable bond. You became a werewolf from a bite you suffered while defending him against our... our old leader."
Miguel closed his eyes. The memory came to him, as vivid as the day in 2004 it had happened. Standing with then-twelve-year-old Esteban in front of the storage unit deep within the U-Stor-It lot in Reseda, having been led there by a call only Esteban could hear. Watching the door rolled up to reveal a massive pair of bronze-gold pants with an eye-watering amount of rococo ornamentation. Wondering at the bronze-gold metallic bonobo that stood atop the pants and beckoned to Esteban with a paw.
Esteban started forward... but a chilling growl made Miguel spin. Atop the roof of the row of units next door had been a figure in a ragged coat and khaki shorts, whose frazzled pepper-grey fur, long-clawed hands and jagged teeth soon gained the entirety of his attention. He'd heard Esteban mumble something strange--"My God, it's full of monkeys..."--but that was when the werewolf leaped at him and sank its teeth in Miguel's defending forearm.
He hadn't known it at the time, but the attacker was August Rydell himself. He hadn't known that guarding the pants was the one thing that August's pack, aside from its free-form participation in fringe politics and beach keggers, regarded as an absolute.
Only the bond between Esteban and Los Pantalones kept the pack from violently taking back their property. Only bringing Miguel into the pack let them square their former solemn duty with the new truth that Los Pantalones had made its choice and there was no going back. With Miguel inducted, the pants were still 'in the pack,' even though Esteban was not a were himself.
How had they gotten from that point to this? When had August decided to sever himself and as much of his pack as still followed him from the object they'd once zealously kept safe?
"I'm willing to be part of the new pack," he said. As he did, he felt something ease up inside him. Admitting that the old pack, the only one he'd known, was done, he knew, was the reason he'd been reluctant to come to the park. But now that he'd said the words... it felt right. It wasn't the heaviest of his baggage, but even dropping one bag made everything feel lighter.
But he had to add one caveat. "Me being the family of the Wearer is no basis for making me leader, even if I was up to the task."
"Why do we need a leader?" Moon Moon asked. "I thought we were an autonomous collective."
The words hung in the air for a few moments, as if unsure whether or not they were leading into a Monty Python bit.
"Hey, Miguel!" China called, before anyone could take it further. "We found something!"
"Oh, great," said Miko, "did this 'The Programmer' leave a business card on the jungle gym?"
"Come on," Miguel said, as he stood, glad that he had an excuse to table this 'pack leadership' business. "It's what we're here for."
Moon Moon blinked. "We're not here for running and catching frisbees?"
Miguel tuned out the pack banter and re-checked their surroundings. No one new had entered the park since he'd arrived, though he noticed a Gaudyra and a Gigoon slouched against a convenience store wall across the street, casually watching them. The godziller that Shelby and China had been interviewing seemed keen on not looking back at them as it took furtive puffs from what looked like a cup-sized fission reactor. The scruffy human Shelby had earlier been interviewing seemed unconcerned, taking swigs of something that, if it wasn't inebriating him, was hopefully at least disinfecting his insides. Shelby and the light-brown woman China had been talking with earlier were fussing with exact positioning of the merry-go-round.
China nodded as the pack reached their group.
"John Cleeve Symmes Jr," China said. "His holes are famous."
"Are they," Miguel replied.
"They are," she confirmed. "Right up there where the North Pole should be, and down where the South Pole should be. Where the entire Arctic Ocean and all of Antarctica should be."
"And are," Marty said. "Next you'll be trying to get us to believe Mt. Everest is in Alaska."
"It is," the woman by Shelby told them. "Mike Polinski used to live there."
Miguel shrugged. "The testimony of giant prehistoric hockey players aside... um..."
"Zia Azad," the woman said, stepping forward and extending her hand. Miguel shook it as he looked her over. She was in her late forties, he judged, with a high-but-soft voice, short black hair, a stocky build, a firm grip, and a shirt that showed an artfully-rendered hideous tentacled abomination smoking something and exhaling rainbow-colored clouds. "My girl China brought me in to do a thaumaturgic reading. Had me sign an NDA and everything. Got some really strange readings off of the stuff in this area like there was something... different... about the demon monkeys that were here, not that you guys have much of a baseline to compare against. Not enough to establish a trail, though. But I noticed a few other things while I was working that up that we're still figuring out."
"Things like this Symmes guy's famous holes?"
"Not directly," said Zia. "Chi, you were saying?"
"John Cleeve Symmes Jr," China said, "claimed there was a 4000-mile-wide hole at the North Pole and a 6000-mile one at the South, back in the early 19th century. Came to be known as 'Symmes Holes,' passages to the Hollow Earth. Tried to get funding for an Arctic expedition to prove his theories, but supposedly never could. Hey, Shelby, bring the prof over here."
The Rodang in the lab coat led the scruffy man he'd been talking to earlier over to the assembled group. Though not strictly invited, the godziller with the scruffy man followed.
"Could you tell all of us what you were saying to China, Zia, and myself earlier about Symmes?"
"Sure," said the scruffy man, whose eyes were bright and alert, even though they were set in a face had the texture of a dried hot dog skin. "Now, it's not generally known, but Symmes was a member of the Illuminati..."
"Bavarian or M00se?" Shelby asked.
"Ya got me," said the man. "Anyway, Symmes wasn't trying to actually get people to go there, he was trying to keep people away, and his chief way of doing that was by making his theory sound as stupid as possible..."
"I'm sorry," Miguel interrupted. "Who are you?"
"Oh," said the man, whose face briefly screwed-up into an attempt at a smile. "Sorry... I'm Professor Seaborn. Formerly Chair of Occult Studies at ITT Technomancy, before losing everything when that college was unfairly shut down after the Monsta Island invasion. Now as I was saying..."
"The timing was coincidental," the godziller next to him spoke up. "Everyone wants to blame things on us, juuuust because we were manipulated into stomping on some cities and got turned into lots of bitty-sized kaiju for our troubles. Your so-called Institute got shut down for scamming its students, and sometimes turning them into small rodents."
"The fools at the Institute laughed at me," Seaborn rumbled.
"And now?" Shelby asked.
"They're... no longer at the Institute."
"An' nobody wants to hear you wheeze on about the Hollow Earth, Seaborn," the godziller went on. "Just get to what you figured out for these kind folks, so they can get out of my park and we can get back to getting blitzed out of our minds."
To emphasize this plan for the future, the godziller took a large whiff of the blue smoke curling up from his 'reactor' cup. Miguel wrinkled his nose.
"Oxygen Destroyer" he said, as he glanced back at the kaiju loitering outside the convenience store. "Shoulda known... you got the look. But what's it cut with? Tide pods?"
"What if it is?" the godziller snarled.
"Now, Jolene," said Seaborn, gesturing at the spiny lizard to pipe down. "To cut to the chase, as it were, this lovely lady here..." He gestured at China. "...was asking about Agarthan designs. An' we laughed, didn't we? We laughed, on account'a those are Symzonian designs in the merry-go-round rust, made up t'look Agarthan."
"They're Agar-tastic," Shelby offered.
Jolene d'Godziller gave the Rodang a sour eye, then took another puff of Oxygen Destroyer.
"Symzonia, for the uninformed," Seaborn continued, "is the country that John Symmes Jr went to in the *successful* trip to the Hollow Earth in the mid-1800s. He even published the story of his trip, disguised as fiction... though he kept certain details out of that, such as it being in another dimension."
"He also left out details about the Symzonian hendecagram, like what my scan picked up in invisible chalk on the hopscotch grid," said Zia. "It matches the Symzonian hendecagram in the rust of the merry-go-round, which, if that's positioned just right, becomes an inverted hendecagram, and..."
"Hendecagram?" asked Apples.
"Star polygon with eleven vertices," said China. "Crude, but unmistakable once the professor pointed it out."
The godziller rumbled.
"And thanks to Jolene here for pointing out the one on the merry-go-round."
"It's no coincidence that two as excellently well-informed as we were hanging about in this park," noted Jolene. "This here park hides a secret passage to huge caverns miles below the surface, where all manner of weird and strange creatures roam, some who freely share their mind-altering chemicals to keep us quiet about it!"
"You're doing a great job of that," Marty said.
"Thanks," said Seaborn, apparently not noticing the tinge of sarcasm in the werepanther's words. "I was in Venice when I heard there were monkeys comin' in-and-out of the ground around here in the last few days, and came over to take a look. *I* remembered there used to be this parking garage here, an' there were bums back in the 'aughts who swore they saw these Mercedes-Benz limos going through hidden doors an' heading down, down, down, even though it wasn't supposed to have a sub-level. So we came here... and saw this guy just as the ground closed over him."
"The Programmer," China said. "From how unimpressive they made him sound, it seems a close match."
"Yeah, but his monkeys ain't no joke," said Jolene. "They only resorted to bribing us after trying to scare us failed." She gave the kaiju at the convenience mart another look. "An' I don't think they paid for what they gave us so much as... stole."
"This guy and his monkeys are hiding now," said Seaborn, "but we tipped this lady how they were gettin' in."
"Which, since our scans of what's under here aren't turning up bupkis," China noted, "is what we're now trying to figure out."
"There are eleven broken links in the swingset chains," Zia interrupted. "Based on the information on Symzonian symbology provided by these high-ass gentlefolk, I converted the name 'John Cleeve Symmes Jr' to unodecimal numbers, and used that to orient the merry-go-round to the Cat Star..."
"Cat Star?" Moon Moon perked up, looking around. "Where? I want his autograph!"
"The one in the sky," Miko said. "Felis. The one that's being chased by the Dog Star, Sirius."
"I *am* being serious!"
"So we think we have it," said China, "but nothing's happening. We're still missing *something.*"
Miguel groaned. "You're missing your *minds,* is what I think."
Angrily, he kicked the horse-on-a-spring, which wobbled vigorously in response.
"This is a dead end," Miguel went on. "Appreciate the effort, but we're losing time here. Let's all get..."
The ground shuddered, accompanied by several thumps.
"...gone?"
A glowing line erupted in the asphalt, moving in either direction from the horse-on-a-spring. It curved to the left of the merry-go-round in one direction and to the right of the teeter-totters on the left, ending as a roughly fifty-foot curving crack that roughly bisected the slab.
"Might want to move off for this part," Seaborn offered, as he took his own advice.
Everyone moved off for this part, just as the split in the slab expanded, carrying playground equipment in either direction. The horse-on-a-spring stayed where it was, though its pole now was shown to go down fifteen feet to another floor, this one apparently made of burnished metal. There was a limousine-and-a-half-wide opening on one end of the floor, with a downward ramp leading into a dimly-lit tunnel with no discernible end. A concrete ramp on the side opposite the opening led to the surface, just where the hopscotch grid had been. On either side of the road the ramps formed were a small kitchenette, a couple leather couches, and a television screen showing cartoons.
The eyes of the horse-on-a-spring glowed.
"Intruders detected," it said. "Alert. Intruders detected."
"Who's it trying to alert?" asked Apples.
"Him," said Jolene, gesturing downward with her reactor cup.
In a doorway not far from the ramp opening stood a tall, beige-skinned, long-ragged-brown-haired man in a red-with-black-dots bathrobe (with matching fuzzy slippers). He had a coffee mug in one hand, a smartphone in the other, and a foaming toothbrush in his mouth. He was looking up at them all with evident surprise.
"It's him!" Miguel said, recognizing the older, still-lumbering, still-unimpressive figure. "The Programmer!"
The Programmer considered this, chewing on his toothbrush as he did, before spitting it out.
"I am *so* calling my superhost over this," he said.
"So you're saying they found nothing," Miguel said, as he looked at the small group of people in the center of the playground, a couple of whom--China Moroboshi and a stocky, light-brown woman whose name Miguel didn't know--were regarding a horse-on-a-spring with the kind of expressions ordinarily reserved for disarming bombs. "The trail of The Programmer and his little demon monkeys just ends here."
He smacked the jetpack he'd used to quickly travel from the _Subtler Than Light_ to the park, now planted in the sand next to the picnic table he was seated at. To his annoyance, it failed to fall over.
He was the only human-presenting human at the table. With him were four weres of varying species and fur colors. They'd transformed on arriving in the park ahead of him, and were holding off on shifting back to human until they were sure they were no longer needed. Shapeshifting took energy, and lunchtime was approaching.
"'Monkeys all gone,' s'what they say," Miko Tagashi answered. He looked at the silver-furred, green-camouflage-shirt-and-shorts-wearing werewolf seated next to him. "Apples and I got here around the same time Marty and Moon Moon did, which was a little before they did, hoping to keep the scene of the battle intact. But there wasn't anything to protect. The only guy left in the park was that guy and that godziller over by the swingset talkin' to Shelby."
She gestured in the direction of a scruffy-looking, pale old man in a heavy coat, who was standing next to a slightly-taller human-size kaiju who was inhaling blue smoke from a reactor-shaped cup. Another human-size kaiju in a lab coat, Shelby d'Rodang, was holding his tablet computer up to his eyes like he was looking through it, to what end Miguel could only imagine.
"I'm sorry they called you back from the protest you were at for this," said Miguel. "We thought we'd have a hotter site than this."
"Miko and I were the only two from the pack to even show up to the protest," said Amy 'Apples' Pierson, a crimson-furred werefox in a red t-shirt and blue shorts. "Again. After Nance promised us we'd have a full crew and signs and everything. At least *they* were glad to see us... and they pay our invoices."
"Yeah," said Marty Steinmetz, the black-furred werepanther leaning against a nearby tree. "Which is what we really wanted to talk to you about..."
Miguel sighed.
"You mean you didn't call me because you were ultra-concerned about the menace posed by The Programmer and his weirdo face-tentacles?"
"You said you fought the guy back in '07," said Miko. "You didn't sound like you considered him a big threat."
"The Programmer I remember," Miguel said, "was this vain, lumbering twit who thought he was all that just because he could control computerized-things with his technological implants. What Esteban described was an order of magnitude more dangerous. And since he failed at getting the Heart of Mu, he's probably out there hunting for it. Knowing where he is might give us a lead on where it is."
"I did smell ham earlier," said Moon Moon, the barrel-chested blond werewolf in tight black shorts seated on the grass next to Miko. "Is that a clue?"
"It was a sandwich," Marty told him. "Specifically, the one you bought just before we left the recruitment drive we were supposed to be working on today."
"Oh, right." Moon Moon frowned. "What happened to it, then?"
"You ate it."
"Ohhhh."
"Back to what Marty was starting to say," said Miko. "The reason we asked *you* to come out here. Miguel... we're broke."
"What?"
"The pack account got closed out yesterday," said Marty, as he rubbed his jaw. "I only found out after I tried to put in a PhootDash order this morning and got denied."
"August Rydell has cut us all out of his pack," said Apples, "and this time it's for good."
"We don't *know* that..."
"We know," said Moon Moon. He shifted away from the half-rusted barbecue grill he'd been peering at. "You remember what he said in the last pack meet."
"You mean..."
"'Hey, why is my chair wet?'" Moon Moon went on, imitating the grizzled voice of their pack leader. "'Moon Moon, how many times do I have to tell you to clean up after you get sick from eating too many corn dogs? And what is this, kale?'"
"I would've thought 'If you don't stop digging into my business, I'm kicking you lot out' was a more relevant quote," Marty said.
"It was how he said it," Moon Moon defensively replied. Miko scritched behind Moon Moon's right ear, bringing a broad smile back to his lupine face.
"The last pack meet was a month ago," said Miguel, rubbing his face and wishing he was anywhere else. "Have any of you heard from him after that?"
"Not directly," said Apples. "Nance checked in last week to make sure Miko and I'd represent at the protest in Fresno this morning. Said most of the pack would be there, which was a total lie."
"Nance made sure Moon Moon and I were on the drive at Redondo Beach today," Marty noted. "Said most of the pack would be there." He considered this. "Maybe they turned into Revolutionary Anarchists?"
"Hope not," Moon Moon said. "Remember the cleaning bill from the last time?"
"And he knew *you* would be too down-in-the-dumps to be anywhere other than sleeping in," said Miko, waving a hand at Miguel.
"I was up!" Miguel protested. "Buying a book at the crack of dawn, even!"
"We don't need them," Marty insisted. "We don't need August Rydell's money, wherever he gets it."
"Except in a couple weeks when the rent comes due," Miguel noted, though it was his own apartment on his mind. "A morning's contract work here ain't gonna cut it."
"We all have skills," Miko said. "I've got my electrician's license, and I've done some side work fixing up bikes and mech suits up and down the coast. Apples is a freelance cryptocurrency adviser..."
"Hardly anymore," Apples interjected. "The bigfeet and chupacabras got burned when they dropped theirs in favor of Phootcoin, and the Dark Watchers of the Santa Lucia mountains only trade in blank stares, which are hell to monetize these days. I'd go into NFTs, but the Mushroom folk funged that up six months ago. I might have to get my pilot's license renewed."
"Marty's been doing dinner theater out in Burbank..."
"They fired me, remember?" said Marty. "Management found out I was a were and they started worrying the customers'd be on the menu. Which, given the customers they attracted... no. Just... no."
"And Moon Moon..."
"Hmmm?" hmmmd Moon Moon, who stopped in mid-lick of the barbecue grill next to him.
"...is Moon Moon."
"I haven't gotten a radio gig in months," said Miguel, as Moon Moon got back to whatever the hell he was doing. "Or voice acting, or repair work, or... anything, really. I guess I've just been letting everything slide while I worked out my issues."
"Some people have issues, Miguel," said Apples. "You've got subscriptions. Why don't you go back to therapy?"
"I'd need a therapist to figure that one out," Miguel said. "I thought I'd made it through, after I fucked up with Cendra for the last time, and rebuilt my relationship with Esteban after we had it out when he came out."
"He still hasn't called me back, though," said Moon Moon. "You told him to, right?"
"Just this morning," Miguel confirmed. "Of course, if I wanted to go back to therapy, that brings us back to money and where to find some."
"The pack was our net, and not just financially," said Marty. "We can cover money shit, at least in the short term, but I don't think any of us were built to be loners. We've got to form a new pack. Just the five of us to start with... plus Camila, of course... and you to lead."
Miguel sighed. There were the words he'd been dreading.
"Why...?"
"You've been in the pack... our former pack... longer than any of us," Apples said.
"Moon Moon's been in it longer," Miguel replied.
Everyone looked at Moon Moon, who was staring cross-eyed at a monarch butterfly that had landed on his nose.
"Okay, I see your point," Miguel went on. "But... I'm no pack leader. I mean... you know what I've been going through... you're right. I've got subscriptions. My head isn't any clearer than when I stepped back from being August's lieutenant."
"There's also Los Pantalones to consider," Miko noted. "Your brother found them, and formed an unbreakable bond. You became a werewolf from a bite you suffered while defending him against our... our old leader."
Miguel closed his eyes. The memory came to him, as vivid as the day in 2004 it had happened. Standing with then-twelve-year-old Esteban in front of the storage unit deep within the U-Stor-It lot in Reseda, having been led there by a call only Esteban could hear. Watching the door rolled up to reveal a massive pair of bronze-gold pants with an eye-watering amount of rococo ornamentation. Wondering at the bronze-gold metallic bonobo that stood atop the pants and beckoned to Esteban with a paw.
Esteban started forward... but a chilling growl made Miguel spin. Atop the roof of the row of units next door had been a figure in a ragged coat and khaki shorts, whose frazzled pepper-grey fur, long-clawed hands and jagged teeth soon gained the entirety of his attention. He'd heard Esteban mumble something strange--"My God, it's full of monkeys..."--but that was when the werewolf leaped at him and sank its teeth in Miguel's defending forearm.
He hadn't known it at the time, but the attacker was August Rydell himself. He hadn't known that guarding the pants was the one thing that August's pack, aside from its free-form participation in fringe politics and beach keggers, regarded as an absolute.
Only the bond between Esteban and Los Pantalones kept the pack from violently taking back their property. Only bringing Miguel into the pack let them square their former solemn duty with the new truth that Los Pantalones had made its choice and there was no going back. With Miguel inducted, the pants were still 'in the pack,' even though Esteban was not a were himself.
How had they gotten from that point to this? When had August decided to sever himself and as much of his pack as still followed him from the object they'd once zealously kept safe?
"I'm willing to be part of the new pack," he said. As he did, he felt something ease up inside him. Admitting that the old pack, the only one he'd known, was done, he knew, was the reason he'd been reluctant to come to the park. But now that he'd said the words... it felt right. It wasn't the heaviest of his baggage, but even dropping one bag made everything feel lighter.
But he had to add one caveat. "Me being the family of the Wearer is no basis for making me leader, even if I was up to the task."
"Why do we need a leader?" Moon Moon asked. "I thought we were an autonomous collective."
The words hung in the air for a few moments, as if unsure whether or not they were leading into a Monty Python bit.
"Hey, Miguel!" China called, before anyone could take it further. "We found something!"
"Oh, great," said Miko, "did this 'The Programmer' leave a business card on the jungle gym?"
"Come on," Miguel said, as he stood, glad that he had an excuse to table this 'pack leadership' business. "It's what we're here for."
Moon Moon blinked. "We're not here for running and catching frisbees?"
Miguel tuned out the pack banter and re-checked their surroundings. No one new had entered the park since he'd arrived, though he noticed a Gaudyra and a Gigoon slouched against a convenience store wall across the street, casually watching them. The godziller that Shelby and China had been interviewing seemed keen on not looking back at them as it took furtive puffs from what looked like a cup-sized fission reactor. The scruffy human Shelby had earlier been interviewing seemed unconcerned, taking swigs of something that, if it wasn't inebriating him, was hopefully at least disinfecting his insides. Shelby and the light-brown woman China had been talking with earlier were fussing with exact positioning of the merry-go-round.
China nodded as the pack reached their group.
"John Cleeve Symmes Jr," China said. "His holes are famous."
"Are they," Miguel replied.
"They are," she confirmed. "Right up there where the North Pole should be, and down where the South Pole should be. Where the entire Arctic Ocean and all of Antarctica should be."
"And are," Marty said. "Next you'll be trying to get us to believe Mt. Everest is in Alaska."
"It is," the woman by Shelby told them. "Mike Polinski used to live there."
Miguel shrugged. "The testimony of giant prehistoric hockey players aside... um..."
"Zia Azad," the woman said, stepping forward and extending her hand. Miguel shook it as he looked her over. She was in her late forties, he judged, with a high-but-soft voice, short black hair, a stocky build, a firm grip, and a shirt that showed an artfully-rendered hideous tentacled abomination smoking something and exhaling rainbow-colored clouds. "My girl China brought me in to do a thaumaturgic reading. Had me sign an NDA and everything. Got some really strange readings off of the stuff in this area like there was something... different... about the demon monkeys that were here, not that you guys have much of a baseline to compare against. Not enough to establish a trail, though. But I noticed a few other things while I was working that up that we're still figuring out."
"Things like this Symmes guy's famous holes?"
"Not directly," said Zia. "Chi, you were saying?"
"John Cleeve Symmes Jr," China said, "claimed there was a 4000-mile-wide hole at the North Pole and a 6000-mile one at the South, back in the early 19th century. Came to be known as 'Symmes Holes,' passages to the Hollow Earth. Tried to get funding for an Arctic expedition to prove his theories, but supposedly never could. Hey, Shelby, bring the prof over here."
The Rodang in the lab coat led the scruffy man he'd been talking to earlier over to the assembled group. Though not strictly invited, the godziller with the scruffy man followed.
"Could you tell all of us what you were saying to China, Zia, and myself earlier about Symmes?"
"Sure," said the scruffy man, whose eyes were bright and alert, even though they were set in a face had the texture of a dried hot dog skin. "Now, it's not generally known, but Symmes was a member of the Illuminati..."
"Bavarian or M00se?" Shelby asked.
"Ya got me," said the man. "Anyway, Symmes wasn't trying to actually get people to go there, he was trying to keep people away, and his chief way of doing that was by making his theory sound as stupid as possible..."
"I'm sorry," Miguel interrupted. "Who are you?"
"Oh," said the man, whose face briefly screwed-up into an attempt at a smile. "Sorry... I'm Professor Seaborn. Formerly Chair of Occult Studies at ITT Technomancy, before losing everything when that college was unfairly shut down after the Monsta Island invasion. Now as I was saying..."
"The timing was coincidental," the godziller next to him spoke up. "Everyone wants to blame things on us, juuuust because we were manipulated into stomping on some cities and got turned into lots of bitty-sized kaiju for our troubles. Your so-called Institute got shut down for scamming its students, and sometimes turning them into small rodents."
"The fools at the Institute laughed at me," Seaborn rumbled.
"And now?" Shelby asked.
"They're... no longer at the Institute."
"An' nobody wants to hear you wheeze on about the Hollow Earth, Seaborn," the godziller went on. "Just get to what you figured out for these kind folks, so they can get out of my park and we can get back to getting blitzed out of our minds."
To emphasize this plan for the future, the godziller took a large whiff of the blue smoke curling up from his 'reactor' cup. Miguel wrinkled his nose.
"Oxygen Destroyer" he said, as he glanced back at the kaiju loitering outside the convenience store. "Shoulda known... you got the look. But what's it cut with? Tide pods?"
"What if it is?" the godziller snarled.
"Now, Jolene," said Seaborn, gesturing at the spiny lizard to pipe down. "To cut to the chase, as it were, this lovely lady here..." He gestured at China. "...was asking about Agarthan designs. An' we laughed, didn't we? We laughed, on account'a those are Symzonian designs in the merry-go-round rust, made up t'look Agarthan."
"They're Agar-tastic," Shelby offered.
Jolene d'Godziller gave the Rodang a sour eye, then took another puff of Oxygen Destroyer.
"Symzonia, for the uninformed," Seaborn continued, "is the country that John Symmes Jr went to in the *successful* trip to the Hollow Earth in the mid-1800s. He even published the story of his trip, disguised as fiction... though he kept certain details out of that, such as it being in another dimension."
"He also left out details about the Symzonian hendecagram, like what my scan picked up in invisible chalk on the hopscotch grid," said Zia. "It matches the Symzonian hendecagram in the rust of the merry-go-round, which, if that's positioned just right, becomes an inverted hendecagram, and..."
"Hendecagram?" asked Apples.
"Star polygon with eleven vertices," said China. "Crude, but unmistakable once the professor pointed it out."
The godziller rumbled.
"And thanks to Jolene here for pointing out the one on the merry-go-round."
"It's no coincidence that two as excellently well-informed as we were hanging about in this park," noted Jolene. "This here park hides a secret passage to huge caverns miles below the surface, where all manner of weird and strange creatures roam, some who freely share their mind-altering chemicals to keep us quiet about it!"
"You're doing a great job of that," Marty said.
"Thanks," said Seaborn, apparently not noticing the tinge of sarcasm in the werepanther's words. "I was in Venice when I heard there were monkeys comin' in-and-out of the ground around here in the last few days, and came over to take a look. *I* remembered there used to be this parking garage here, an' there were bums back in the 'aughts who swore they saw these Mercedes-Benz limos going through hidden doors an' heading down, down, down, even though it wasn't supposed to have a sub-level. So we came here... and saw this guy just as the ground closed over him."
"The Programmer," China said. "From how unimpressive they made him sound, it seems a close match."
"Yeah, but his monkeys ain't no joke," said Jolene. "They only resorted to bribing us after trying to scare us failed." She gave the kaiju at the convenience mart another look. "An' I don't think they paid for what they gave us so much as... stole."
"This guy and his monkeys are hiding now," said Seaborn, "but we tipped this lady how they were gettin' in."
"Which, since our scans of what's under here aren't turning up bupkis," China noted, "is what we're now trying to figure out."
"There are eleven broken links in the swingset chains," Zia interrupted. "Based on the information on Symzonian symbology provided by these high-ass gentlefolk, I converted the name 'John Cleeve Symmes Jr' to unodecimal numbers, and used that to orient the merry-go-round to the Cat Star..."
"Cat Star?" Moon Moon perked up, looking around. "Where? I want his autograph!"
"The one in the sky," Miko said. "Felis. The one that's being chased by the Dog Star, Sirius."
"I *am* being serious!"
"So we think we have it," said China, "but nothing's happening. We're still missing *something.*"
Miguel groaned. "You're missing your *minds,* is what I think."
Angrily, he kicked the horse-on-a-spring, which wobbled vigorously in response.
"This is a dead end," Miguel went on. "Appreciate the effort, but we're losing time here. Let's all get..."
The ground shuddered, accompanied by several thumps.
"...gone?"
A glowing line erupted in the asphalt, moving in either direction from the horse-on-a-spring. It curved to the left of the merry-go-round in one direction and to the right of the teeter-totters on the left, ending as a roughly fifty-foot curving crack that roughly bisected the slab.
"Might want to move off for this part," Seaborn offered, as he took his own advice.
Everyone moved off for this part, just as the split in the slab expanded, carrying playground equipment in either direction. The horse-on-a-spring stayed where it was, though its pole now was shown to go down fifteen feet to another floor, this one apparently made of burnished metal. There was a limousine-and-a-half-wide opening on one end of the floor, with a downward ramp leading into a dimly-lit tunnel with no discernible end. A concrete ramp on the side opposite the opening led to the surface, just where the hopscotch grid had been. On either side of the road the ramps formed were a small kitchenette, a couple leather couches, and a television screen showing cartoons.
The eyes of the horse-on-a-spring glowed.
"Intruders detected," it said. "Alert. Intruders detected."
"Who's it trying to alert?" asked Apples.
"Him," said Jolene, gesturing downward with her reactor cup.
In a doorway not far from the ramp opening stood a tall, beige-skinned, long-ragged-brown-haired man in a red-with-black-dots bathrobe (with matching fuzzy slippers). He had a coffee mug in one hand, a smartphone in the other, and a foaming toothbrush in his mouth. He was looking up at them all with evident surprise.
"It's him!" Miguel said, recognizing the older, still-lumbering, still-unimpressive figure. "The Programmer!"
The Programmer considered this, chewing on his toothbrush as he did, before spitting it out.
"I am *so* calling my superhost over this," he said.
(concluded in part three, following...)
--
Subtler Than Light #4 (c) 2023 by Gary W. Olson. All Rights Reserved.
For behind-the-scenes notes on this episode, visit my posting in
the Superguy List community on LiveJournal:
https://superguy-list.livejournal.com/41580.html
Gary W. Olson LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/gwox
Superguy List: https://lists.eyrie.org/mailman/listinfo/superguy/
Superguy/Sfstory Discord: https://discord.gg/xuhYChvAPK
Superguy/Sfstory LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/superguysfstory
Subtler Than Light #4 (c) 2023 by Gary W. Olson. All Rights Reserved.
For behind-the-scenes notes on this episode, visit my posting in
the Superguy List community on LiveJournal:
https://superguy-list.livejournal.com/41580.html
Gary W. Olson LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/gwox
Superguy List: https://lists.eyrie.org/mailman/listinfo/superguy/
Superguy/Sfstory Discord: https://discord.gg/xuhYChvAPK
Superguy/Sfstory LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/superguysfstory