A/N: I am sllloooowly recovering some of my passion for AYEH, which has been a big relief. Turns out being unbearably stressed due to outside factors was making my work a little more difficult. Who knew?

Sam regards us both in silence for quite some time before speaking again.

"…I genuinely can't tell if this is just another game you lot are playing," she admits. "You Angels have odd tastes when you're bored, but if this is an act, you've gotten a lot more convincing at it. To a scary degree, really."

"Oh yeah?" I ask. "What are the Angels normally like?"

"Just like you'd think a monster trying to wear human skin would act like," Sam shrugs. "Wrong. Everything about them is wrong. They walk wrong, they talk wrong, they move their faces like a three-year-old plays with silly putty. They giggle to themselves when we pretend we can't instantly notice them."

"My act is not that bad," Deficiency Begets Wisdom huffs, listening in on the conversation through Emily.

They all are. We're prime time entertainment to these people.

"They've been getting better lately, though," Sam continues. "Alarmingly better. Sometimes it takes us a while to catch them, and sometimes it almost feels like they're letting us do it on purpose."

"Maybe a little bit," Emily teases. "And I won't lie; we are playing with you right now, and this is the most dangerous game so far. After all, you're not the players this time. You're the pieces."

"How very reassuring," Sam says dryly. "I must say, I didn't expect the first real conversation I've had with one of you people to be anything quite like this."

Emily laughs.

"I'm a bit of an oddball even among my own kind," she admits. "To put it gently. Then again, I wouldn't describe anyone in my colony as particularly well-adjusted. We do worship the god of Failure, after all."

"Now that's not something I've ever heard of," Sam says neutrally.

"Is there a reason you're not just telling them you're human?" I ask, briefly popping into the network out of sheer curiosity.

"Other than the fact that I'm not one anymore?" Emily asks. "Same reason I do anything: it's optimal. Why that might be, I can only speculate. My best guess is that they'd be less likely to trust you if I told them such a thing is possible."

"Hmm. If that's the case… Confidence is Apotheosis, you and our remaining nameless one should probably be the only ones to head my way. We don't want to spook them any more than we already have, and some actual human-looking humans should help with that."

"Can do, I'll let her know," Peter says.

"What would you like the rest of us to do?" Blossom asks.

"Yeah, can we help?" Maria agrees.

"I'd suggest that you scout around and help guide the others, A Prism of Refracting Selves, but I fear the Queen might decide to keep one of you."

"I Do Enjoy Keeping People, That is Very True," the Queen admits.

"For now, just guard our stuff, and be ready to make this colony pay for every human life they choose to take, if things end up going poorly."

"Eagerness. I very much hope they do," Blossom practically purrs. 

"Please keep in mind that thousands of human lives are at stake," I remind her.

"Please keep in mind that I only care about this because you do," she reminds me back. "But fine. I will refrain from instigating." 

"Please," I agree. "Blood Returns Wrath and Love, please stay safe. I love you."

"Love you too," Ana answers, "but if these people are mean, I am going to rip them up."

"At least wait for my signal on that, please," I request.

"Affirmative," she answers.

I lock down my network connection again, returning to listen-only. I may have already given too much away, but the Failure colony seems more excited than anything, so I'm probably not in deep shit yet. I only have the beginnings of a plan anyway, enough to get a general direction on what I should be doing but little else. For now, I just have to try and get the pieces in play. I can figure out where they go afterward.

"…Aliens are highly religious," I say out loud, realizing the verbal conversation has entirely stalled without my involvement. "They worship the sources of powers, which… to be fair, there's nothing I could describe them as other than gods."

"I only believe in one god," Sam says.

"Well, that's entirely your prerogative," I say. "The alien gods are very real, but perhaps they don't count as gods by your standards. Just… extremely powerful ethereal entities that act upon the world in mysterious ways. Whatever you want to call them, they exist, and the aliens worship them."

"Real or not, I can't imagine why anyone would want to worship failure," Sam says.

"Well there's actually several—"

"As interested as I'm sure Julietta would be in explaining it to you," Emily cuts me off, "we didn't come here to discuss theology. If you're still undecided on whether or not to accept her help, we have no more business here. When you're ready, call for us, and we'll come. We will be listening."

"…Do you have to be super creepy all the time?" I ask her.

"No, I'm doing it on purpose," she grins at me. "Why, are you not?"

No, of course I'm… ugh. I shake my head. 

"Never mind," I sigh. "Let's just go. I'm sorry for how stressful this is, Sam."

"It's fine," Sam says, a perfect picture of calm on the surface. But I, of course, have felt the inside of her body for this entire conversation, and I'm a little worried her heart will give out if it keeps hammering this hard for much longer.

…God, maybe that's why Emily hurried us out of there. It's quiet, by network standards, but the light scent of her power's reports hang softly in the air around her. Up, down, up, down, this way, that way, this way, that way. It's always there, always in the back of her mind. At this point, so much of it is so familiar to her, so automatic, that I'm not sure she's even consciously aware of all the ways she's prodding it to guide her. It's a habit to her, as easy as walking.

We're escorted out of the community center, for a certain definition of 'escorted.' The guard mostly just follows behind us, trying to hide how stressed he is. It's funny; I seriously doubt any of the other Angels could tell if a human was stressed or not, so it doesn't really matter how visible it is, but… well, that's just part of human nature, I suppose. Hiding stress is often part of how someone controls it.

"Thanks," Emily says, waving at the guard as we're taken outside. "We'll just wander off from here. Have a good one."

And so we do, Emily leading the way but having no particular destination in mind. Well, scratch that; if I listen very closely, I can feel Emily picking up on the location of all the humans in a wide radius around her with her power, which allows her to direct us on a path away from them. Our only real destination is privacy, and when we get there I have to ask the first big question on my mind.

"Are you doing okay, Emily?"

"You kidding? I'm doing great!" Emily says. "I really don't want to dwell on this, but you're not going to let it go, are you?"

"This is a big change, one that it didn't seem like you were looking forward to at all," I remind her. "But now, all of a sudden, you seem more invested in your colony than any of us. I guess I just… never expected you to be this gung-ho about throwing away your humanity."

Emily chuckles, though there's a bit of sadness behind the sound. Slowly, she seems to dissolve in front of me, the humanoid shape her body is designed to imitate falling apart into a chaotic mass once more. The twisting flesh slips out of a dress that no longer fits, slithering over and wrapping itself around me, coiling up my body like an anaconda wrapping around prey. It squeezes… and I squeeze her back, because why would I ever deny my sister a hug?

"I can't lie to you anymore, so why would I bother to try?" Emily asks, her mouth somewhat disconnected from anything resembling a head but still fully functional. "Of course I wasn't looking forward to this. It was never about becoming something other than human. It was about dreading the moment you all realize I've never been one from the start."

Wh… what? How? How could she even…

"You've been an Angel this entire time?" I gape.

"What!?" Emily yelps. "No, you idiot! I mean like, metaphorically! Or maybe spiritually? Something like that."

"Oh," I say. "That makes a lot more sense. You're worried about your lack of empathy, right? I figured that out months ago. It doesn't make you inhuman."

Emily sighs, squirming and adjusting herself all over my body. I sit down carefully so I don't end up falling down as her whole body ends up around my arms and torso. 

"You're addicting to someone like me, you know that?" she says. "I love how much trust you have in me. How much faith. Knowing that I could do almost anything to you and you'd still stay by my side. You'd still care. It's intoxicating."

"There are certainly things you could do that would make me not trust you anymore," I point out. "But I trust you not to do those things, so… yeah, fair enough."

"That almost makes it better, actually?" Emily says. "Because it's not like you're just a pushover. I earned that from you. I put a lot of effort into crafting the mask I wore to earn your affection, and it worked so well you somehow didn't flinch when I took it off. That feels pretty damn great."

"I think I can understand that," I respond diplomatically. This isn't a conversation I've ever had with someone before, but it's sort of a conversation I've been expecting. 

"Having the mask off now is a little terrifying, because like… I mean, everyone else might not take it as well as you do, but it's also weirdly exciting?"

"Is the mask off?" I ask. "Or is this a new one?"

It's a question I genuinely don't know the answer to, not something I'm just saying to sound wise or whatever. Still, it seems to catch her off-guard.

"Uh… shit," she says. "I don't know. Maybe? But if it is, it's not a very good one. I can worry about that later. My point was, you can say you don't think my personality disorder makes me inhuman, and sure, that's like, objectively correct and stuff, but it sure doesn't feel that way, right? You know what I'm talking about. Humans are supposed to have the things I don't have. Empathy, guilt, love, all that stuff. They're the virtues that all the stories I read and shows I watched insisted were what made us human. The power of friendship."

I nod. Yeah, I get that. When you don't have something that everyone is supposed have, that can be pretty damn alienating. Although…

"I've seen you guilty before, Emily," I point out. "You were certainly feeling something when you were chatting with that Lia clone."

"I don't feel guilty, Julietta," Emily insists. "But I feel bad about not feeling guilty, if that makes sense? I don't think I made the wrong choice, I just know there's something wrong with me for feeling that way. And sure, I might be a monster, but it's not like I enjoy having things wrong with me."

"That makes sense, too," I say, reaching up to pat one of the flesh strands. It coils around my fingers, preventing my hand from escaping. I guess that's fine.

"That's it, huh?" she asks. "It just 'makes sense?'"

"I think there's a clear emotional difference between feeling guilty and feeling inadequate, and you're describing the latter," I say. "So it makes sense. You don't feel guilty, but you feel bad about not feeling guilty because you know people are supposed to. Practically speaking, though, is there much difference? Either way, you feel bad when you hurt people, and consequently you're disincentivized to do so without good reason. That reflects in how you act; you don't take advantage of others unless the situation is very extreme."

"Like when I murdered my own girlfriend, you mean," Emily huffs.

"Sure, yeah. It was a horrible situation. You had to pick between her life and yours, and you chose yours. Most people would be guilty about that for their whole lives. And even if you aren't, it still hurts in a different way."

"…Yeah," Emily says. "I do miss her. It's not like I don't care about people at all. It just takes a lot for me to care, and it takes very little for me to want to hurt someone. In some ways, I'm glad I got the powers I did. If I had gotten powers like my brother's, I would have been just as bad as him."

"Worse, probably," I agree. "Because you're not an idiot who would end up trapping herself by convincing the entire world to basically never say your name."

Emily busts out laughing at that, her whole body convulsing hard enough to crush a few of my bones. One of them crunches particularly loudly, and Emily notices, managing to calm herself down a little.

"Sorry," she giggles. 

"You're not," I say, fixing up the damage to my body. "But that's alright. Do you use your powers to hurt people?"

"Oh yeah, I've done it a ton," Emily says. "But in like, tiny petty ways. Infinitesimally increasing the likelihood of someone's death before a certain date to let off stress. I've never done much more than that, though, because most of the big stuff I can do to make someone more likely to die also makes me more likely to die, and that's obviously a bad trade. I could, though."

"Especially now, I imagine," I comment neutrally.

"Oh yeah, big time," Emily agrees. "My Queen helped me get better at it, actually. This Angel stuff improves my multitasking a ton, so I can ask questions way faster now. Plus, y'know, against ninety-nine percent of people, I can just trivially murder them the old-fashioned way! I'm not gonna be a dead weight in combat anymore, I promise you."

"I can feel that," I agree. 

She bursts into giggles again, though thankfully she doesn't break my bones a second time. The pain doesn't really bother me; it hasn't been a huge issue ever since I started feeling it. I'd just be concerned if she couldn't control herself well. I don't want her to hurt anyone else on accident while she's still getting used to her new body.

"God, it just feels so good to be powerful for once!" she beams. "My whole life, I've just been… been nothing! It doesn't do you any good to be able to hurt people when everyone around you is better at it. My whole family was like me. I told you this, right? It wasn't just my brother. My parents, too. Two monsters hooked up and made two more, and all of them were bigger than me, stronger than me, and meaner than me. But now they're all fucking dead, and I'm the one who made it! Me!"

She starts laughing again, her entire colony sharing in her joy over the network, beaming with pride at their delightful new Angel. I, frankly, am nowhere near as composed about this on the inside as I'm doing my best to seem on the outside. I can't imagine anyone wouldn't have some concerns after listening to what sounds like a straight-up villain rant. But this is Emily. This is my sister. And just like anyone, she's not just some villain. She's a person, and she's so much more than a painful past or a personality disorder. 

"Sorry," she says, the laughter calming down once again. "Sorry. I get how this all sounds, trust me. I appreciate you listening rather than running away as fast as you can."

"Well, you do have me a bit tied up at the moment," I say, trying to lighten the mood.

"And we both know that means absolutely nothing when it comes to powers like yours," she counters. "Which is a shame for several reasons."

Yeah I'm just going to ignore that little network slip entirely. I've got zero interest in investigating whatever that might mean.

"You didn't turn out like your birth family," I tell her. "Even if you don't care about other people the 'normal' way, I know you still care in your own way. If not for most people, then for us. Me, Anastasia, Christine, Peter, Maria. Maybe even Blossom."

"I like Blossom more than Maria, if I'm being honest," Emily says. "But I won't mess with your stuff, don't worry. I am fully aware of how dangerous it is for someone like me to have all this power. In a way, it's almost lucky I spent my entire childhood being terrified of doing anything to upset anyone around me. The idea of letting loose is at least as scary as it is exciting."

Well that's… a rather cavalier way to think about it. Surely she can't believe… oh.

"You're playing this up on purpose, aren't you?" I realize.

"A little," she admits. "It's fun! It's also a little bit of a conscious manipulation because like, if you're not scared by evil villain Emily, then you probably won't be scared by real Emily, and shit you were right this is a mask, damn it! Whatever, I'll figure out how to present my genuine self some other day. It'll probably be really boring since there's not much to her."

"Somehow, I doubt that," I say.

"That's the thing about masks, though," Emily says. "The whole reason they exist is to either cover up something less palatable, or less interesting."

"If a purely metaphorical mask is harder for you to take off then it is to put on, at what point does it stop being a mask at all?" I ask.

"Don't ask me that, we don't have time to do all this philosophical psychoanalysis crap," Emily groans. "Just accept that, deep down, I'm a horrible person who only loves you in a deeply psychopathic way which by any reasonable measurement should not count."

"I don't believe that, either."

"Yeah, well, In-Joke was right about you," she fake-grumbles. "You've always been an insufferable optimist."

We sit in silence for a while after that. Emily is clearly enjoying the experience of wrapping her body around me, and I don't much mind one way or another. I need the time to think and plan, and the closeness makes a good environment for that.

"Hey, can I squeeze your head off?" Emily asks, apropos of nothing.

"Sure," I agree.

A quick set of stabs, squeezes, and cracks later, my head tumbles off my shoulders, several of Emily's many fleshy ribbons snatching it up before it can hit the ground. I briefly bask in the rather odd experience before she crushes my skull like a melon, at which point I dissolve the rest of my body and reform it outside her grasp. It's as good a time as any to get back to business.

"Ha! Oh man, that was awesome!" Emily gushes. "You'd better watch me carefully, Julietta. I don't actually want to become a serial killer."

"I will," I promise. "And if you slip, I'll force some sense back into you, one way or another."

"Thanks," Emily says, slithering back into her dress and reforming into a humanoid shape. "So, to business, then?"

"To business," I agree. "What's this really all about, Emily? Even given the fact that you don't care about the lives of any of these people, you know that I care, and I know that matters to you."

"Correct," Emily concedes. "If you ask me to, I'll betray my colony over this. I mean, they're cool and all, but I just met them. It's not a matter of loyalties."

"So what's it a matter of?" I ask.

"Same thing that it's always a matter of, hun. Saving the world," Emily shrugs. "My Queen and I talked about it at length while she was remaking me. Nobody in my colony wants to die in an extinction event. That means we need to back somebody as the new Grand Queen, and obviously I'd prefer the Grand Queen to be you. Knowing you, you agree, despite not wanting the job. You can't trust anyone else to take it, right?"

"More or less," I sigh. She knows me too well.

"Well, I can't either. I want you to win," Emily says. "And that means you need my god's approval. But there's a problem with that: you're just too strong. Almost everything you've done, you've succeeded at despite the odds."

"I wouldn't agree with that at all," I frown. "I've failed plenty of times. I'm always failing. None of this has been easy."

"I'm not saying you haven't struggled," Emily says. "I'm not saying this hasn't been hard. But looking back on everything you've done, how much can you say you regret it? How much has been a true failure, and not just a temporary setback?"

"Maria," I say immediately. "Everything that happened at the Legion colony. I could have stopped that in so many different ways, but I was complacent."

"But she's fine now," Emily says. "Better, even. The two of you are connected deeper than ever before. I'll grant that you were devastated at the time, but you fought, and you won, and you got her back. You undid those consequences."

"And according to your god, that's a bad thing," I frown.

"Not a bad thing necessarily," Emily hedges. "The failure did happen. But it didn't last. It can't count toward what the god of Failure really needs to support you."

"And what's that?" I ask.

"Something you'll always regret and can never undo," Emily answers. "Something big. Something like consigning the lives of everyone here to more suffering… or getting every last one of them killed in a vain attempt to save them. And I know you, Julietta. I know which future you're already gunning for."

"You're just going to let everyone here get killed?" I ask.

"I can't stop anyone here from getting killed. That's part of the whole issue," Emily says. "Only you can do that. Because we need you to stop the first Grand Queen. If you just give up now and let us keep these people, they'll all live."

"They'll be trapped here, cut off from civilization, still fighting each other for food!" I snap. "You heard what they said. This is just one faction of several, and probably the only one with easy access to greenhouses. You saw how protective all of them were of them."

"I don't need to see it," Emily says. "I already know. You're absolutely right; this group of humans is better off than all the others by far. Every other group has to struggle to get food, fighting themselves and each other to stay alive. This faction has all the food they need… and they keep it that way by forbidding new members from joining. It's all rotten, and we like it that way. But they're alive, Julietta. Many of them are even happy. If you risk that on their behalf, if you do choose to fight us… the consequences will be on your shoulders. I hope you understand that."

"Of course I understand that," I growl. "Of course I do!"

"Good," Emily says. "The three days I gave the humans isn't really their time limit; it's yours. We have to move on by then. I hope whatever plan you come up with in that time is the best you've got. All of this will be meaningless if you don't give it everything."

"So what happens if I do win?" I ask.

"You can't," Emily dismisses. 

"But what happens if I do?" I press.

"Well… I guess you don't get Failure's blessing," Emily says.

Fine by me. I don't want to deal with a god that does shit like this anyway. I need a plan.

I could just solve most of their food issues and leave; I'm sure I could design and plan several supercrops after preparing an appropriate environment for them. And as a backup plan, I will. Even if people are suspicious of the food at first, if the situation is as dire as it seems, people will try it and figure out it's not a trap eventually.

…Unless, of course, the Failure Angels decide to make it a trap. Because that's the issue, isn't it? No matter what I do for them now, it doesn't solve the long-term problem of being trapped in a Failure colony. 

I have to find some way to get them out. I have to. But how am I supposed to deal with the kind of overwhelming range and control the Queen has? Do I just have to kill her? Is it possible for me to do that and deal with all the Angels at the same time? One of them is in hiding. If I can track them down, and ideally even get all the Angels in one place, I might have a chance… hmm. They know this is their lose condition too, no doubt. 

Still, I'll find a way. I have to. 

They've really set up a nasty situation here. I just don't have the range to counter a threat like this. It feels like they're well-prepared for anything I could try, which makes sense because Emily knows everything I can do. I need something new. Something she doesn't know about. Like… what Silhouette did to me.

I'm stronger than I was, but that strength is veiled. It's something, but it's not enough. It's not enough! How do Queens get so strong? It's approval from their gods, right? It's a gift. Have I not been living up to Possibility's standards? I guess… I've never cared to even try before.

I am not what you'd call a religious person. Even knowing for a fact that gods exist and personally speaking to them isn't enough to change that about me. I just intrinsically detest the idea of abandoning my own values in order to take someone else's instead. It doesn't matter to me if that someone else is a random guy off the street or an all-powerful being that created the universe. I can't abide by any value system that places any virtue or duty above that of just trying to make the world a better place for the people who live in it. 

It's just not how my parents raised me. They raised their child to be kind. And… well, I've never been particularly great at being kind, so I've had to settle for just being good instead. I don't need a god to tell me what that is. I have my own two eyes for that.

Well, often more than two eyes now. But the point still stands. I cannot embody everything that Possibility is. I just can't. I don't believe in the inherent goodness of divinity, and Possibility enjoys pain and suffering just as much as it enjoys happiness and fulfillment. It's not evil, certainly, but it's not purely a force for good, either. It just… is.

But I need that strength. I have to be stronger if I'm going to save everyone. If I can't even save this town, how am I going to save the world?

"Hey, there you two are," Christine says, snapping me out of my thoughts. 

It seems she and Peter have made it.

"Hey, Christine. Hey, Peter," Emily waves, dusting off her flesh dress.

"How's betraying humanity going for you, Emily?" Peter jokes.

"Pretty good! Yourself?" Emily responds.

"Oh, it has its ups and downs," Peter shrugs. "The people here did not seem happy to see us. We're like, halfway to Mad Max over here, aren't we?"

"We've been fuckin' em up, yeah," Emily confirms. "Though the food thing isn't really our fault, there's just not many ways to get it without access to anything that isn't a crumbling urban cityscape."

"Cool, cool. So the Angels here didn't drive you crazy or anything?"

"Nope, I'm just like this," Emily confirms. "Apologies in advance for all the creepy thoughts you're probably going to pick up on."

"It's cool," Peter says. "I always kinda figured anyway. You used to open soda cans before putting them in the fridge so you could drink them without carbonation. Complete sociopath behavior."

"I-I quit doing that like a year after I started living with you!" Emily protests. "Carbonated beverages weren't allowed at my old house! I wasn't used to it yet…"

"So what do you need us for, Julietta?" Christine asks.

"I'm not quite sure yet," I admit. "I probably need you to rip some Angels apart, if we're being real."

"I can do that," Christine agrees. "Well, probably. Who's your weakest council member, Emily?"

"Probably Averter of Fortunes," Emily answers. "Stay away from Desire Consumed Gleefully, though, he'll mess you up."

"That's the guy that can eat motivation or whatever, right? Yeah, I'd prefer not to relapse," Christine acknowledges. "My domain feels like it's been getting stronger the more I use it, though, so if I'm up against someone with only a mediocre ODoP, I'm pretty confident that I can win."

"Every time I hear that I think I'm hearing 'odd op,' as in a strange operation," I admit. "I haven't really thought about the human methods of classifying powers in a long time. ODoP, RD scores, the STRATAS classification system… man, humans love acronyms, don't they?"

"I'm the only one left who can say 'don't we' instead, aren't I?" Christine sighs. "I'm starting to warm up to the idea a lot, honestly. It'll be nice to understand the other half of every damn conversation, at the very least."

"Sorry," I say. "It's a little difficult to ignore the convenience of the network when it comes to communicating complex ideas quickly."

"Look, I get it," Christine says. "But I feel like you all are forgetting your roots a bit, sometimes. There's a lot of value in the ways humans think about stuff. ODoP and RD are just putting numerical values on things you've been judging instinctively. And STRATAS rankings… well, those aren't all that useful outside of the context of a military operation, I'll grant you, but it would be really fun to try and figure out where we rank after all this crap. I bet anyone who reads your dossier would crap their pants if it actually showed everything you can do now."

"We will eventually need to return to human civilization," I say. "I'm… a bit worried about how that's going to go, to be honest. Even if I do manage to stop Agnus Dei's coup, there's no guarantee that the colonel will follow through on helping us get to the negotiating table. Even if he doesn't change his mind, he might not be able to."

"We can worry about that when we get there," Peter dismisses. "Right now we gotta screw over Emily's new friends, right?"

"Pretty much," I agree. "Which might mean Christine and I need to chat without the two of you being able to hear. She's the only one I can really brainstorm with if I don't want to give our plans away."

"Fair," Peter agrees. "I'll distract Emily, then. Hey Emily, I'm distracting you!"

"I am so very distracted," Emily agrees. "Oh, and apropos of nothing, the Angels can understand spoken English, but they can't read. So. That might also be helpful to know."

"Thanks, Emily," I say. "Have fun scaring the locals, you two."

"I think I'd like to go check out some of the other factions," Peter says. "I'll see if I can get anyone on board with whatever it is you're cooking up. At the very least I'll try and convince them to accept some of your food. Can you make some free samples?"

"Sure," I confirm, growing a few custom fruits out of my hand and tossing them his way. "These don't have seeds yet, but I'll figure out a viable crop before the end of the day and come find you if anyone agrees."

"Got it," Peter nods, briefly examining the reddish spheres I conjured before taking a bite out of one. He chokes and spits it out. "Wow. That is unbearably sweet. I think I just got five cavities at once. Please try that again."

Scowling, I dissolve the rest of the fruit I made and remake them with a lower sugar concentration. What the hell? That was like, optimally nutritious. And isn't sugar supposed to taste good? Why is adding more sugar bad? That's where most of the calories come from, and if these people are starving, they need calories! Whatever. 

"Here," I say, tossing him the new batch.

Again, Peter takes a bite, and he immediately makes an unpleasant face.

"Oh, god. You know what, it's good enough. We'll work on taste later. I'm sure a starving person could stomach this."

Implying that starving people couldn't eat the first batch? Rude. So rude. I might intentionally learn something about cooking in order to spite him. For now, though, they both wander off.

"Alright," Christine says. "So… what's the situation, exactly? Peter gave me the cliff notes, but… it's Peter, so I want to hear it from you, too."

"The Failure colony wants me to choose between leaving the humans here and letting them join the alliance, or fighting them and letting all the humans get killed," I say. "Protecting all of the humans at once with our domains is too big of a task; the city is too enormous and the humans are too spread out and fractured."

"See, this is what I was talking about," Christine says. "You're forgetting human tactics. We're all trained for this kind of stuff, at least a bit. We just SEAL Team Six their asses."

"What? No, wait, write it down."

Christine rolls her eyes and pulls out her phone, tapping away at the notes app. Honestly, I'm impressed she managed to keep it intact this whole time.

None of the Angels are particularly dangerous in combat, right?

It's not their focus, I concede, 'writing' with chromatophores on a strip of skin. 

Then can't we just kill them all at the same time? Christine writes. Complete decapitation? They can't kill the humans if they're all dead.

Emily would see that coming, though, I point out.

Well we're not killing Emily!!! She wouldn't even care.

That's true, but Emily will still notice her council's death approaching and send that information to said council as just a basic consequence of knowing it, I say.

"Right," Christine scowls. "Hive mind shit. Hmm."

What if Emily is asleep? she writes.

The thing about precognition is that it tends to know what's happening in advance, I respond dryly.

No, Christine counters. Emily's predictions change all the time. If we intentionally make no plans at all, if we don't even know what we're going to decide to do yet, doesn't that widen the possibility space enough to obscure things? Plus, Emily has specifically mentioned that you make things harder to predict. It might be that Possibility-blessed in general are precognition resistant, and we have two of you.

That's a lot of 'mights' to base a rescue strategy on, I tell her.

I'm sorry, she fires back, were you expecting Mission Impossible to be a sure-fire guaranteed sort of operation? If you have a better idea, we can do that instead. 

And that's the problem, isn't it? I don't have a better idea. I don't even have a good idea. I've got nothing, and apparently it needs to stay that way until tonight. Hell, the planning we've done already might be too much… it's impossible to know. All we can do is hope we think of something workable overnight.

We'll need to find the last Angel in Emily's colony, too, I tell Christine. Also, our time limit is three days.

Fantastic. Well, let's get searching.

And so we do, wandering around the current colony and keeping on the lookout for any failure domains other than the Queen's. We don't manage to uncover anything other than concerned stares, though, and eventually the sun goes down, and it becomes time to head to bed. 

I fall asleep almost immediately, and before I know it I'm falling gently through the void. Here again, huh? I have a feeling these little meetings will be more and more common, as things progress. Still, I'm not complaining. Possibility, I really need your help.

The answer I get, however, isn't from Possibility at all. A thousand million trillion voices all ring out in answer at once, a roar of unfathomable proportions sung from an unfathomable quantity of mouths. It is as though the weight of everyone who has ever and will ever live is bearing down upon me all at once, each of them in harmony, demanding with unshakable certainty that I, too, fall in to march in time.

"""""COOPERATION IS VICTORY."""""

And so, Legion and I make an alliance.