<Objective>

The next visitor to Schneider's office is a much more welcome sight to him; his wife, the lady with neat, dirty blonde hair, in a blue, star-studded dress with red and white stripes at the bottom.

"My favorite dress… how appropriate for the occasion," he greets her.

They briefly embrace and kiss, the shorter Mrs. Schneider tilting her head up to meet his lips.

"And what occasion is that?" She inquires lowly, still looking up into his eyes.

"Triumph over our most covert enemies," he says, stately and soft.

"Oh… does this have anything to do with what that guard told me?" she asks.

"What did he tell you?"

"That you said to find a girl outside… but she's gone."

The governor nods. "I expected as much."

"This is about those kids, isn't it?" she asks worriedly. "They're targeting you now?"

"Undoubtedly," he answers. "But they will not win… I have a secret weapon. In fact, I'd like you to take it with me."

His wife furrows her eyebrows back at him, puzzled.

"Come to my desk," he says.

One arm around her, he leads her there. The two figures walk closely, framed by the national and state flags. The curtains are closed over the window.

Schneider opens a draw near the bottom of his desk and procures a pill bottle.

"Anti-biotics?" his wife questions, reading the label written in red sharpie.

"It is a cover… these are off-the-market drugs engineered with cognitive psience," he explains. "It will allow us to see on the other side, and take manual control. What do you say?"

A pause, as Mrs. Schneider looks at the bottle with suspicion and apprehension. But it's over, and she nods resolutely.

Two hands out, one pill in each. Schneider closes his fist and puts it up against his wife's, like a mock toast.

"A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth defending," he says.

She nods. And both take their small, white pills in one gulp.

<Ashley>

Not long after the battle is over, Nova re-emerges, slinking towards us with his tail between his legs. Metaphorically speaking.

"Look who finally decided to show up," I say.

"Uh, yeah. Hey guys." Nova says timidly. "Sorry I ran away…"

"Nova!" Charlotte calls out. "Don't be sorry! I couldn't have done that without you! You helped a lot!"

"I… did?" Nova asked, bewildered.

She rushes over to Nova and glomps him. "You said just the right things!"

"He did?" I ask, feeling a little irritated despite everything.

She lets Nova go, leaving him looking stunned and short of breath, and turns to Ted and I. "You two helped a lot too! Fist bump!"

She holds a fist up to me, and I touch it with my own, unsure how else to respond. She then lowers one down to Ted, who does the same, expression steely as ever.

"So… your powers are…" Nova looks over at the perfectly circular hole in the floor. "We still don't know! What the fuck?"

"The power to… edit reality?" I guess. "That's about the only theme I've picked up on."

"Oh. Mmhmm!" A deranged, shit-eating grin finds itself on Charlotte's face. "I think I have a different way of thinking about it. I'm just… drawing!"

"Drawing… reality?" Nova says, tilting his head to one side. "Or maybe… sculpting it. Terraforming it? …Painting it."

"Altering it like some sort of art piece," I summarize. "Potentially very dangerous… we will have to sit down sometimes and find the limits of this power."

"Uh, yeah!" Nova says. "That's so OP! Can you just, like, draw a hole around any enemy and immediately kill them? Can you just draw us at the destination so we don't have to walk anywhere? Can you…"

I stop listening to his idle speculation after a while, as I begin to wonder…

Charlotte is an artist; so it makes sense that she would have powers related to her artistic abilities. Should I have powers related to music? I think of the church bells my dad could summon. His seemed to have some musical connection. But Mom's and mine have none.

Was the whole "angel" thing just more important? Is this what Michael wanted?

Now that I stop and think about it, it's ironic. Michael is associated with, among other things, military and police officers… Now we're set against the government, and the police have overall done more to hinder us than help us. Couldn't I have gotten Uriel or someone else like that?

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

…A joke, of course. His patronage is far more abstract and far-reaching than our measly human institutions…

<Kevin>

Behind the door is a tunnel; somewhere in between the inside of one of the caverns in the area and the backstage to a sports stadium. It's a wide hallway, maybe 7-8 yards across. The floors and walls are carved flat, but the curved ceiling shows the natural ridges and bumps that may have originally been there. On all sides, the rock is a sort of unearthly grey color. There are occasional lamps hung from the ceiling, but the cave is mostly rather dark. Zoe and I make sure to walk in line with each other as we follow the cave's route.

I'm just wondering how much trouble it is to lug those crystals all the way down these halls when we turn a corner and see a more likely method- a small vehicle, sort of like a golf cart, but with a flatbed attached to the rear of it. It is, thankfully, currently abandoned. But it does make me wonder; why is nobody down here right now?

I figured we'd know our destination when we saw it. And when we turn another corner, we immediately see a room made of all metal at the end of the hall. It's not clear right away what exactly we're looking at. We can see a point where the hallway is blocked off by railing, a control panel along the wall beside it, with only a much smaller walkway leading out further, but it only seems to lead to a wall of sheet metal. It's not until we get up close that we know what it's really leading into- walking onto the narrow walkway, we see a massive circular structure, with a wide metal lip surrounding a massive, circular opening in the floor that's maybe twenty feet in diameter. And the opening is about full to the brim of that blue crystal, sharp pointed like quartz and glowing unnaturally.

"Well, we found it," I say.

Zoe stares at the pit of crystal, eyes wide and lips pursed. "Yeah, but… how are we supposed to get ALL of this out of here?"

"I could try and get that truck we passed by running," I suggest.

Zoe's head swivels back and forth, surveying the… reactor? Is that what this is? We'll go with that for now. "And then… where do we put it? I'd say just chuck it off the edge, but there's no way we're getting this much stuff out of the stadium."

"Maybe we could just destroy it," I suggest. "Hit it with a nuclear attack, see if it does anything."

"That seems… dangerous," Zoe says. "What if it explodes and takes us with it?"

"Then… don't we just respawn somewhere or get kicked out?" I reason. "That's probably worth the tradeoff for preventing Schneider 2.0."

"Maybe…" Zoe says nervously. "Okay, I'll tr-"

She stops suddenly, gasps dramatically, and twists around to face where we came from. I hear it too- footsteps.

"I thought I warned you not to get mixed up with terrorists," chides a sort of familiar voice.

Then I see her- Mrs. Schneider, the First Lady for our state- followed by what looks like a half dozen for those worker men who were fighting in the arena before. "Yet here you are now; openly talking about destroying our way of life."

Zoe gets a steely look in her eyes. "Your way of life; you mean watching these men destroy themselves collecting all this, while your husband and his most important associates shamelessly indulge in the pleasures of the flesh?"

"Did it ever occur to you to talk to one of the men you claim to be concerned about how they feel about it?" The First Lady challenges. She glances back at one of them, whose stubble-adorned jaw is fixed in an unreadable scowl. "We absolutely value and appreciate the hard work they do; we consider them the beating pulse of America. And it's working-class men like this who help my husband cruise to re-election year after year. Even ones who never voted Republican before, who support the president, they make an exception for my husband. Because he gives them something more important than comfort; purpose. And frankly, common men like this don't want to see deviants and gender abominations snatch their children away; it's a natural alliance. Everyone has a role to play; to have a truly great country, rich and poor alike must be united for a greater good; the nation."

Zoe's face changes, and I think I understand now, in hindsight, why McCullough turned and ran from her back then; seeing such white fury on her normally kind face is a special kind of unsettling.

"You're the worst kind of person," Zoe says. "You call for civility and then call me an abomination to my face! At least McCullough had the decency to pretend… Well, it doesn't matter. Your husband's reign must end. We are destroying your energy source, and you can't stop us. Working men, Kevin and I don't want to hurt you, but we will if you force us. And you deserve a fair warning that you will be annihilated easily by us if it comes to that."

Mrs. Schneider's jaw clenches. "Terrorists. I knew it all along."

"I don't care what you call me anymore," Zoe shoots back. "This ends now."

She whirls around to the source behind her and fires a nuclear attack…

…

And it bounces off of a glass case over the crystal.

Was that there before…?

"We know we can't beat two Persona users, of course," Mrs. Schneider continues. "We didn't come here for that… we came here to activate the weapon. Push the button."

The stubble-jawed men she had glanced at earlier reaches for the control panel.

No…

"Nothing personal; just a living."

'These guys aren't really our enemy.'

I suppose that's still true, regardless of how they voted…

But Schneider IS our enemy… and he's about to come back online… that can't happen. It won't. Can't. I can't let it.

And his wife…

"Can't we please be civil?"

But Zoe's right- what she said to Zoe was hateful- she won't offer the same in turn.

My fist clenches as a realization washes over me…

Governor Schneider, and his wife to an extent too- they are like Ms. Truman. They are liars who manipulate people, and don't care if they get hurt, as long as they get what they want out of them. It's exploitative, that 'game…'

Maybe the men in the game don't see a way out… I know how that feels.

But I see the way now.

For my friends, for Ruth, for Charlotte, and for Ashley and Zoe… I won't budge an inch!

The split second that lasted a lifetime passes… and a BANG! Rings through the air. The man reaching for the panel yells out in pain as my bullet pierces his forearm.

Zoe and I rush towards the control panel, brandishing our respective firearms.

The other men look reluctant to get between us and the panel, many of them nervously eyeing their injured comrade.

"Do your duty!" The First Lady commands, her lips pursed and thin. When the men continue to hesitate, she grits her teeth furiously and launches towards the panel herself, reaching for a big red button that's obviously the most important one… it's too late…

Then, a click, a flash, a CRUNCH! And Mrs. Schneider halts, her mouth open in shock and her dress splattered in blood, before she simply falls to the floor, dissipates into a shadowy substance, and vanishes.

I turn to Zoe; mid-way through biting on her lower lip nervously, the end of her shotgun still smoking.

And the six men she had brought with her… they stare in shock. What could be going on inside them? Fear? Anger or grief for the governor's wife? Secret relief? Indifference?

We never find out, because somehow, despite the fact that she NEVER touched the panel, despite the fact that she was stopped inches short of the launch button, despite the fact that we won, a red light on top of the panel begins flashing, and we hear the worst alarm clock sound we've ever heard, and the small black touch screen spells out in blocky, green letters, Launching.

Zoe's face goes as white as a ghost; I imagine mine isn't far behind.

"Wh-what?" I say, at a loss for words. "But…"

"No!" Zoe says. She begins desperately beating the panel with the butt of her shotgun, but whatever it's made of is too tough; it makes no difference.

I'm just left there stupidly thinking…

How?

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