"We're just going to let a stranger tag along?" Uri wants to know, “why?”

"Yeah," Ellie agrees, “I'm not so sure about this. I mean I don't want to be rude but we don't even know what he is. A mutant of some sort? Shouldn't we at least talk this over first?”

"Don't fuss—what can possibly be left to discuss?” Javors asks. He speaks with a clownish, sing-songy cadence, every phrase melodic, every syllable sung. Not quite mocking, but almost. “I will provide a song and maybe a riddle and when it comes to the cook-fire? Javors be Master of Vittles.”

"How have you been surviving down here?" Bach asks.

"I can't say for sure." The ratman scratches his chin and twitches his nose. "Guess I've just been keeping the faith."

“I bet he's been ambushing anyone unlucky enough to find themselves stuck in these tunnels.” Ellie accuses, with her usual paranoid tact. She narrows her eyes and asks, “are you a murderer?”

“Heavens no!” Javors laughs. He suddenly produces a pipe from his pocket and sparks it with a lighter. He puffs and coughs quietly, “I'm an artist.”

“You have fire!” Ava exclaims.

“Sure,” he confirms, breathing out fragrant smoke, “never leave home without it.”

Ava sits cross-legged on the cave floor. Her right hand casting the cave in its electric-blue glow. Her left hand extended out in front of her, palm up.

“Don't be afraid of what you're about to see,” she tells Javors. She concentrates on the ItemID's she needs:

[Kindling]=ItemID0000002

[Wild Mushroom]=ItemID0000003

[Wild Onion]=ItemID0000004

[Wild Asparagus]=ItemID0000005

[Palm Frond]=ItemID0000006

And one-by-one the items phase into existence in the palm of her hand. She passes the kindling to Javors and he inspects it from every angle, nodding to show his approval:

“Well-conjured,” he surmises.

“If you'd do the honors, please,” she says, “I can create more twigs for fuel but you should keep the fire small – just enough to cook by.”

“Else we'll suffocate for our supper,” warns Bach.

“Would you like to help me with these hobo pockets?” Ava asks, demonstrating how many she has to wrap, and before she can choose better words she blurts, “I could use a hand.”

Bach doesn't respond. He just lays down on the floor and pulls his poncho up over his head.

“Bach? I'm sorry, that was stupid of—“

“It's alright,” he interrupts, “I'm just not hungry.”

The food sizzles in the fire as it cooks. Ava tends to the meal while Javors watches. Uri and Ellie converse quietly nearby, and then they come in tandem to the fireside.

“I'm not sure I can,” Ellie worries.

“I believe in you,” Uri says, and then turning to the others he explains, “there's something we'd like to try.”

They join hands and begin to hum. Ellie seems nervous, but Uri holds her hands in his and pulls them to his chest and the pair continues to hum. Suddenly the fire glows brilliantly and Ava registers that the pair has successfully executed the [Flash] psionic power.

“Za!” Javors utters excitedly.

“Amazing!” Ava applauds—a sad, tinny pinging of her child-hand meeting her cyber-hand—and she immediately stops and simply smiles, instead. “You learned so quickly, Ellie!”

“Uri is a wonderful teacher,” she says. He blushes and kicks the cave floor.

“It was nothing.”

Ava smiles and Ellie does likewise.

Sometimes in the final moment of sleep the Dreamer incorporates that which goes on around them in the real world. Morning alarms can become ambulance sirens, or some smell from the real world invades the world of dreams. Ava's nightmare feels real because it is. In the final moment of sleep—a fraction of a second which might encapsulate an eternity in dream-time—she perceives an enormous sound, a grinding and churning which she feels in her bones. She dreams that her motor has somehow become activated and that she is spiraling into an [Overload] against her will. Curled up on the cave floor with her companions she dreams that she is about to electrocute them all. She struggles to suppress it – to make still the motor in her guts.

But she begins to come awake and that's not it at all. Her internal motor isn't operating in the least, but the grinding groan of the underground is still quite real.

“What is that?” Uri asks, wiping sleep from his eyes.

“Is it an earthquake?” Ellie wonders.

“Could it be my mother in her dragon?” Ava asks Bach but he doesn't seem to register the question. He's lost someplace, in misery or fear.

“It is a great worm,” Javors states plainly. He produces a stiletto and calmly picks his rat-teeth while the tunnel rumbles all around them. “Or perhaps some kind of snake. I have encountered it before. Terrible, murdersome creature.”

“How did you escape?” Ellie pleads, bracing against the wall.

“You know,” he ponders, “I guess I'm not sure.”

Suddenly the churning reaches a crescendo and becomes all any of them can hear. The tunnel quakes and the wall can no longer bear the stress. There comes a burst of steam as the worm grinds its way through, penetrating the tunnel perpendicularly – precisely in the center of their makeshift campsite. They scatter to get out of its way, Ava and Javors scrambling in one direction while Ellie and Uri and Bach run the other way.

It is a piece of seemingly sentient heavy equipment, like a massive drill with a mind of its own. The business end is a tornado of whirring blades and fixed spikes, built to crush and gnash and burrow through solid stone. It pushes into the tunnel, bearing down on them with its cataclysmic churning.

Ava can imagine only a single action which might produce any effect. Her most powerful attack. She gulps and rushes forward extending her cybernetic hand out toward the worm and:

The motor within her kicks into overdrive. The electricity courses across the silver filigree etched upon her bones and it feels as though her spine might just shatter into a trillion little bits, her ribs could crack open, her heart may explode. And then tendrils of lightning leap off her fingertips and she moves in to touch the burrowing horror but at the precise moment she makes contact:

>>>>Target's [Shock Resistance] Trait grants IMMUNITY to this attack.

The electricity crackles and envelops the worm completely but in the next moment it simply dissipates and the machine continues its push.

Debuff Applied: Drained(-2 AP until sleep)

Instantly she feels weaker and slower. And now that the thing has not been destroyed, Ava is much too close. She's in danger. She tries to twist away but a viciously spinning blade catches her on the shoulder and cuts a deep gash:

>>>>YOU have suffered a Minor Injury to your LEFT ARM(2 Wounds)

“It's too strong!” she cries, “I can't hurt it!”

Uri and Ellie shrink back – but not Javors. He strolls forward and performs an exaggerated yawn like the worst type of mime.

“Oh,” the ratman muses, “guess that's my cue to save the day.”

He begins to sing—his stiletto becoming his conductor's baton—lackadaisically drawing looping musical notation in the air – a magical composition which the party can suddenly hear. The tunnel reverberates with the song, and it sounds as though it is being performed by a complete orchestra with kettledrums and blaring horns and not merely by a lone ratman. Then all at once the notes move in formation at incredible speed and collide with the worm.

And nothing happens.

“It didn't work!” Ellie screams.

“Leave me,” Bach insists, shouting to be heard, “run for your lives.”

“No, no,” Javors laughs, “trust your voltage now, Ava. Try it again.”

Ava thinks back to when she first executed [Overload], while battling the Custodians in the warehouse full of AVAs. Just prior to that, she had been able to view a character data sheet which seemed to depict her stats – if she was to believe the vision was genuine and not simply the onset of becoming Scum. But if she just allowed herself to trust its accuracy, the character sheet reported at the time that she had 4 Action Points.

And [Overload] costs 3 to execute.

And with the Drained debuff temporarily eliminating two of those Action Points she'd be left with too few to perform the ability. But she also remembered that after defeating the Custodians she had received a message welcoming her to Level Two – and informing her she had gained an additional Action Point. Could that be true? Would she now be capable of executing a second [Overload]?

“Only one way to find out,” she seethes and in a mechanism which is becoming more comfortable and more familiar she simply thinks of the AbilityID and the motor within her begins to grind and groan once more. The Dire Drill bears down upon Ava but she does not back up even an inch. Inside her the power builds, swelling and multiplying until finally it threatens to blow her to pieces but at that final moment Ava reaches out toward the gnashing maw of the killer worm and:

>>>>Target is Vulnerable to Electricity. The [Overload] is super-effective!

This time they are all blinded. The worm is engulfed in a crackling electrical fist and then when the brilliance fades there is suddenly no more worm to be seen. There is only dust, filling the tunnel up to their ankles. The enemy has been completely cremated.

Debuff Applied: Drained(-2 AP until sleep)

Ava collapses, exhausted beyond reason. Her bones are like anchors, terminally heavy, dragging her to the floor. The party stands in stunned silence, the tunnel suddenly pitch black as Ava's hand stops glowing.

“Good show!” Javors applauds, flicking his lighter so the others can see. “Who's hungry?”

The fire burns down to embers. The campers are quiet save for Bach's snoring and Ellie's intermittent sleep babbling. Suffering from a double dose of Drained, Ava couldn't travel more than a couple hundred meters after the fight – just far enough to get out of the mechanical worm's ashy cremains.

She's managed to summon kindling before passing out but much to Javor's disappointment she had no strength remaining to conjure supper. The gash on her shoulder throbs painfully but treating it will have to wait – Uri says that Ellie needs more training before it will be safe for her to attempt healing through psionics. If done incorrectly, they could exacerbate the injury rather than heal it. Or they could accidentally be injured themselves.

Ava lies awake thinking about it. Through the tandem mind, Uri can repair her injury at the quantum level, returning her atoms to their original state. As if the injury never happened. Ellie's right – it's voodoo. It's magic, but not the same sort as Javors performs with his gooey notes.

Some movement catches her eye in the darkness. It takes every bit of her will to make her hand glow enough so she can see.

It's the ratman. He's sat up in the spot where he was sleeping. He has his stiletto out and he waves it fluidly in the air like he's conducting another orchestra. The stiletto draws weird glyphs and runes that Ava can neither recognize nor understand. The glyphs are written in the familiar neon script but this isn't the same as when he's scrawled musical notation upon the empty air—there's no music, for one—and something else seems off about him.

“Javors?” Ava whispers.

The ratman doesn't reply. He simply turns his head slowly to look at her and his eyes have turned from red to midnight black and his buckteeth grin maniacally.

“Javors – what are you doing?”

He draws a circle in the air and then stabs the center with his knife. He wiggles the blade and when he pulls it out it's like he's removed a cork. Suddenly there is a portal in the darkness and light is shining in from – someplace?

Ava recalls her first night in this world. When Bach had asked for kindling and she went into her weird trance. It had seemed like she was seeing people from another dimension. For some reason this has a similar feel.

“Javors gotta go,” he says, flat and monotone, completely unlike the sing-songy voice Ava has come to know.

“What?” she asks, somewhat irritated, “where are you going?”

And the question seems to wake him up. He blinks and his eyes become red once more.

The glyphs disintegrate.

And the portal vanishes, sealing shut and taking its light with it.

“Hey Ava,” says the ratman, rubbing his eyes, “can't sleep?”