Twenty more days passed.

"Tomorrow, we'll depart." Dean said this as a statement, fully confident in the sapients sitting before him. Virigard, Amalo, Kisserin, Barkhad, Aberash, Grey, Fartuun...part of him felt as though he'd known them for years. They looked back at him with faith he'd never felt before COTD's world takeover.

"We know! Can't wait~" Virigard chirped, bouncing up and down on her feet. Amalo smirked knowingly and leaned into his tail, crossing his arms. Kisserin curled her black body next to Barkhad, forming a snake's smile by curling her forked tongue. The cream of her underbelly went nicely with the dark, mahogany-stained dragonleaf planks. She practically took up the whole left corner by herself, enabling Barkhad to sit upon her coils as though atop a serpentine throne. The other sapients sat on the custom-ordered couch taking up the entire right wall of the room.

The people who were present had all completed their basic training early on. They were already progressing nicely down paths of their choosing, or, rather, paths of their own creation. While in the beginning Dean had lamented the completely open-ended path system, feeling like a little guidance would've gone a long way, he now appreciated the limitlessness of forging one's own path.

He supposed that, in the end, such a system design jived much better with COTD's philosophy of "self-determination."

"We'll follow you," Fartuun murmured, her voice carrying whisper-like throughout the room. "Anywhere."

Dean felt himself growing warm; while he knew they would go with him, hearing his sapients voice aloud their loyalty made him feel...successful. Valued. Useful.

"I'm through with this shithole," Grey hissed, as though furious at some unseen force. The scar across his eye glinted white against his tan skin, while his frayed robe's ripped sleeves showed off his toned arms and developed musculature. He futilely pushed a lock of hair out of his eyes and behind his ear, only to have it fall out a moment later and slice across the bridge of his nose. "I'll go anywhere that isn't Earth."

Dean nodded. That's how Grey was: angry, bitter. Interestingly enough, Grey was a kursi, one of the brown-robes. Dean had never gotten to know the peacekeepers before requesting one of them to accompany him to Syria and Jordan. He ended up taking Grey with him. Grey had his own problems and quirks, too many for Dean to jump to conclusions about the guy's past. For one, the man spoke flawless Arabic, Somali, and English, not to mention a number of regional dialects throughout the Levant. The man didn't appear older than in his late twenties, but the way he carried himself made Dean think of a grizzled lion: experienced and jagged around the edges.

Dean thought back to his first encounter with Grey: back in Syria, making their way towards Jordan.

---

Kisserin slithered over the war-torn ground, her scales shifting deftly over the upturned cement and lumpy, rotting debris. Barkhad still hadn't met the giant snake, else he'd be riding on her through the ruin. Dean watched with mild curiosity as Virigard's jerboa underlings ran fleet-footed through the streets, jumping over rocks and scampering over half-destroyed walls in a macabre game of tag.

The group was only passing through on their way to their final destination, Jordan's Zaatari refugee camp. However, the area wasn't fully deserted. As they walked, Grey prowled through the streets, finding humans and tossing them to the ridge of Kisserin's back. He grumbled constantly about having to soothe their minds, though didn't stop his search for more people hidden in the detritus.

Grey was silent, in the sense that he didn't say anything to anyone. He simply muttered to himself under his breath. Sometimes he would laugh; sometimes he would snarl. The man's face was normally expressionless.

Whenever he looked in Dean's direction, Dean felt apprehended. The man seemed to be peering into his soul and judging him. Grey's intense eyes seemed to suggest that whatever he found was lacking.

But, all the same, Grey continued to find and deposit the Levant's Forgotten onto Kisserin's back. When they reached Zaatari, Dean could only look on, stricken, as Grey directed all those present to walk with him to the newly-dug Jerboa caverns. Kisserin helped to transport the physically handicapped to the tunnels' mouth, while the millions of refugees steadily packed up their belongings and made their way to the waiting snakes below.

Dean had to admit that he was impressed. He had a decent idea, by this point, of Lisa's powers, as well as the self-reported capabilities of his own peacekeepers. But the image of Grey walking into the camp and the world freezing around him, as though the entire world had stopped...Dean couldn't help but feel intimidated.

He knew that if he wanted, Grey could do the same thing to him.

---

Despite Dean's misgivings over Grey--and the other kursi--having such insidious power, he began to use the kursi at a greater frequency. Surprisingly, after the trip, Grey seemed almost needy for attention. He frequently climbed to the top of the spire just to ask Dean for an assignment, claiming that "peacekeeping" wasn't necessary. Over the past twenty days, Dean trusted Grey with more and more solo jobs, enabling Jerboaland to expand even further outward as Grey led jerboa-snake teams across Africa and the Middle East.

Dean wasn't oblivious to why Grey requested these missions. He caught on fairly quickly after ISIL's recently-seized territories mysteriously regained their liberty...only to join Jerboaland almost immediately after. While Dean couldn't track everything that was going on, even despite his director boons, he knew that Grey going out almost certainly meant ill-intentioned organizations--in particular those that oppressed women--meeting atrocious ends.

Some of the things that Grey did...Dean wished he could un-see. The kursi doled out a decisively cruel form of retributive justice. In some ways, Grey's actions almost made Dean sympathize with people who forced genital manipulation on others, doused people in battery acid, or kept child soldiers...

But Dean didn't stop sending him out. And for that, it seems, he had won a modicum of the man's loyalty.

Barkhad, Kisserin, Aberash, and Fartuun all voiced their agreement to accompany Dean off-world.

"Well, I had to make sure you were all on board," Dean smiled. "We'll leave tomorrow at 2 pm. Yeah, I know, it's late, but we're gaining hours across the time change. Sleep well and prepare; we don't know when we're coming back."

---

Bath knew that, in many ways, Earth was a much better place for sapient life than it had been. Even so, with only a few hours to go until COTD began its migration off Earth, Bath decided that he was going to leave a parting memento.

"We've achieved the Big WD," he smirked, punching Lisa in the elbow. She looked at him, almost bewildered. "Surprised?" he asked, his voice falling. She looked back at the ocean, where Bath was...doing something. Oddly enough, she and human Bath were standing atop Dragon Bath. The sun bobbed over the water, its deep red-orange reflected in the sunset-colored accents on their uniforms.

"It's just...a bit jarring to hear you say it. It's only been a bit over a month..." Lisa originally figured it would be years--perhaps an entire lifetime's worth, or more--before they completed the Big WD. And yet, here they stood, looking out over the world that was truly and completely theirs.

Lisa knew now more than ever that this was the case. At Bath's urging, she'd gone back to speak with Lauretta and Bern. After hearing each of their accounts, she ultimately let them free and sent them to Lepochim.

After all, the more kursi, the better...and though Lisa still didn't understand exactly why they had stalked her, and infiltrated her family--they wouldn't say--she still thought of them as her aunt and uncle. Setting them free and placing them into the kursi ranks eased a burden she hadn't even noticed on her mind.

Even now, far from Basalith, Lisa felt the presence of the gate, a feeling not unlike magnetic fields pulling on her magnetic sense. "It's really ours..." she sighed. "And here we are, leaving it almost immediately."

"Inertia," Bath said in response to her implied question. "We need to keep going, until we're stopped. What's the point in staying here?"

Lisa simply raised an eyebrow. Then, she stepped off his back and floated down to the water. "What are you making?"

"A tribute," Bath replied.

Lisa watched as Bath continued to shape his creation, appreciating the feeling of water lapping against her feet and misting against her face. She ran her hands through the wind, wiggling her fingers.

"Is this visible from space?" Lisa asked as he finished up. A massive wooden dragon in matchless detail jutted out of the sea, easily larger than Bath, stretching for miles longer than his 3.6-mile range of influence. At the dragon's head was a similarly gargantuan, robed woman. Lisa recognized herself--her new self--staring out into the clouds with brown, pupil-less eyes.

"It's so majestic," she crooned, admiring its artifice. While many land-shaper artists had excellent sculpting capabilities, Lisa knew they would never be able to complete a monument on this scale. 'Well, never say never,' she mused, resolving to create a similarly extravagant piece upon returning to Earth.

"I rather like it," Bath murmured, human eyes gleaming with the dying light of the sun.

"Well, obviously," Lisa scoffed, punching his dragon's body. "It's us."

He directed his eyes on Lisa's face. As he studied her features, Lisa felt the full power of his ancient gaze. Standing atop his dragon-self, he cut an imperious figure, the black of his vestments contrasting sharply with the red of his cape and the glow of the illuminated water below.

As Bath looked at Lisa, he remembered when they first met, when he saw her as just another animal, flesh and bone, her entire chemistry re-creatable at his leisure. Just as back then, he envisioned how she would look stripped apart, overlayed the finery of her lacey muscles over her pale skin. He thought he knew her body then; now, after restructuring her body personally, he knew her body better than any other's.

'How great a mystery,' Bath thought to himself, suspended in the moment. He wasn't thinking of the ever-elusive kursi symbiote. As he stared into Lisa's eyes, he envisioned her mind, recreated the mind-bogglingly complex neuron network of her mind.

But that's all he could do. He couldn't make the next step, couldn't fire her neurons to predict her actions, couldn't look into her memory to read her mind. While Bath could recreate the mind, he couldn't understand it. He could make a Lisa clone here, now, and the divergences between it and the original would mount too-fast to count.

Bath had tried this kind of "cloning" on human test subjects in preparation for the revival, rebirth, and memory-storage boons. The discovery only made Bath more curious about the sapient mind...and more curious about himself, and his lack of a physical brain.

Perceiving that Lisa was growing somewhat perplexed by his intent gaze, Bath blinked. He fixed his eyes back on the sculpture. Then, he walked forward and pulled Lisa into a side embrace. Despite the gesture, his face remained uncharacteristically expressionless.

Then, he spoke. "Us."

---

END OF PART 5