Iron Marge will convince her posse to take vengeance on the Texans. They know they don't stand a chance against the Texans, but by disguising themselves as Americans, they'll send the Texans on their own revenge quest. We'll shove a wedge between Richard Large and his Texans, and the other three moderators.

To make the attack, you're going to need some transportation. Try and go straight to their gold mine and the Texans will slaughter you. But the train - on the north branch of the Sante Fe line - runs around that mountain to a station right beside the mine entrance.

Seen moved absolutely silently on the soft carpet of pine needles. He had convinced John to trade his boots for moccasins, and even he, as massive as he was, made no noise at all. There was a slight chill to the air. The seasons changed fast north of Window Rock, in the steep hills below the Rocky Mountains. The tracks ran high through pine scrub forest. Somewhere behind them, the train rushed closer, possibly loaded with American soldiers. Probably not. Seen glanced at his watch. The train came through here at 3:05 exactly. In twenty-two minutes.

Seen wore attire appropriate for the weather and for running through the forest - tight deerskin trousers, a denim vest with dangling feathers. Typical Navajo kit. It felt like coming home, after so long in jeans and cowboy boots. His revolver still made a comfortable weight against his thigh, but he also carried a bow. The revolver would be too loud, and besides, he might as well use his racial perks.

John still had his Gatling gun, and a coil of rope. Had he seen John without that gun since they'd reunited at the trading post? It wasn't normal kit for a Navajo soldier. Probably would have been nerfed if the game had kept on in the normal fashion.

Ahead, the track curved left and sloped downward, then doubled back and ran through a switching yard, almost parallel to its current course. A steep drop down a rocky face separated Seen from the switching yard. Seen glanced at his watch again. 2:45. They might be cutting it close, but that was mostly intentional. The less time they had between killing the guards below and the train arriving, the less chance the Americans would respawn and come after their train.

John slung the rope coil off his shoulder and threw an end around a fat pine tree. He tossed the other end over the cliff.

"I don't like this plan," Seen said.

John grunted. "You're the one who keeps on about the spirit walk. Do that."

Of course, so Seen could do all the work. Seen picked up the rope, but before he lowered himself onto the cliff face, he took a moment to look out over the switching yard below. The crude map James had scribbled in the dust of the trading post saloon didn't compare to actually looking down at the complex, but James had gotten all the important parts right. The tracks split into a dozen parallel lines, then flowed back together like a mass of coiling snakes, before two left the yard and veered in different directions. Abandoned cars dotted the yard like old rusty buffalo. Three American soldiers patrolled among them, made easy to spot against the backdrop of pine and rust by their blue shirts.

Seen glanced at his watch. Got to step on it. The rope would let him down behind a service shed, with rotting clapboard walls and a roof full of holes. Forty or fifty yards of track separated the shed from the switching house, where a large red ball on a pole stood against the backdrop of pines, seeming to float above the entire switching yard. They had to lower that ball before the train arrived, or the npc engineer would continue right through the station, and take the north fork to Boulder.

"Well let's do it then," Seen said. He stepped over the edge. John lowered him down the steep face one hand at a time. Red rock slabs slid past. Seen picked his footholds carefully, keeping himself out and away from the cliff. Despite his care, he knocked free a rock, and as it tumbled in the air toward the shed below he held his breath. If the sound alerted the guards to his presence, he might not even reach the ground before they shot him.

The rock fell through the roof of the shed, vanishing into one of the dark holes in the metal sheeting. Seen sighed with relief. He finally put his feet on the ground again, and looked up as John swung out over the cliff.

Seen ducked down beside the shed. He was inside the stockade fence that surrounded the yard, in between the fence and the shed. Paint hung off the shed in big curls. The clapboard had been white, but rot had done its work. It stank of decay and nature. The ground was mostly the soft pine needles of the forest floor above, mixed with cones and branches that Seen had to step carefully around to avoid making noise and alerting the guards. He crept to the end of the building and peered around the corner.

He scanned across the parallel tracks and the abandoned cars searching for blue shirts. The signal ball hovered above, a baleful translucent red that glowed in the afternoon sun. A blue shirt stood on the porch of the switching house, thankfully looking a different direction. Of the other two, Seen saw nothing. If he ran for it, that one at least would definitely see him. It would have to be a spirit walk, as John suggested.

Raising his bow and nocking an arrow, Seen looked up at John on the cliff above. John had moved down perhaps half the distance. Seen decided not to wait. Crouching behind the service shed, he closed his eyes and concentrated. He breathed out slowly, then continued, pushing every bit of air out of his lungs. Spots appeared behind his eyelids. His feet grew cold first, then came a sensation like motion sickness, but without the comforting possibility of throwing up. As if the developers had wanted to make the process unpleasant, but couldn't figure out just how. When Seen opened his eyes again, he was crouching on the salt pan.

A massive, shaggy buffalo stood in front of him, engrossed in the only tuft of grass that grew within miles on this desolate wasteland. A crow sat on the buffalo's back. That part was new. There hadn't been a crow last time. The real world - the storehouse, the tracks crossing the field between Seen and the switching house, and the highball floating above - appeared to Seen as translucent curtains laid over the desert. Seen pushed through them toward the buffalo.

"Caw," said the crow.

"Not now."

The buffalo looked up, snorted. Seen jogged around it, taking a wide arc across the hard packed ground to avoid it. The buffalo turned, and stood before him anyway, pointed horns between him and the switching house.

"I said not now." The lowered head forced Seen to pause.

The buffalo tore at the dirt with its hoof, revealing rich black earth just below the top layer of dust. Something sparkled in the hole. The crow hopped forward onto the buffalo's head, tilting its head to peer down.

"Caw?"

"I know," Seen said. "I'm working on it. I've got another quest at the moment." He continued around the buffalo, and this time it didn't move unnaturally to block him, but only looked at him with tiny black eyes. When he had passed, it shook its head and returned to the tuft of grass.

Seen approached the switching house and clambered onto the porch. He drew his arrow to his ear. His hand shook so violently he buffeted his own cheek, but it wouldn't matter at this range. He crept up behind the American standing guard and pressed the point of his arrow into the back of the man's neck. The man swatted his neck, as if at a biting insect, his hand passing through Seen's ephemeral bow and arrow.

The American, who remained transparent and ghostly so long as Seen kept his spirit form, leaned on the railing and lit a cigarette. Even with his hand jolting around, there was no way Seen could miss with the arrowhead already in the man's hair.

The spirit walk ended. The buffalo turned to mist, then exploded outward, vanishing into the ether. The world crashed back into solidity around Seen, snapping into focus with a rush of sounds and smells. He released his arrow. The bow made a sharp twang, and the arrow drove through the American's skull and burst from his eye. It flew into the dirt and stuck between the nearest rails. The man twisted, his mouth open to scream, but nothing came but a dry rasp. Seen caught him before he could fall and alert the other guards with his noise.

The American's body shimmered and vanished as the rune of recall spirited it back to the player's spawn point. A quick glance around confirmed that the other two soldiers remained out of sight. Two steps took Seen to the switching house door - there wasn't much time now - and he shoved it open. Twenty or so American soldiers stared at him. Some sat at tables with cards in their hands. Others stood with glasses of whiskey half raised to their lips, stunned still by the sudden appearance of a Navajo shaman in the middle of their meeting. They were young, old, men, women, and all wearing the blue shirts and straight cut pants common to their kit. Paper banners hung along the walls, and a cake - a fucking cake - sat on one table with a bunch of candles burning on it. At the bar, the only soldier Seen hadn't shocked into motionlessness carved a big roast pig. Then the spell broke and they all reached for their weapons at once.

Seen bolted off the porch, leapt the railing, and sprinted for the only cover nearby - the decrepit, rusted train cars dotting the yard. He reached for his spirit walk, but the cooldown still ticked away. Not that he could have stopped long enough to trigger it. He looked back. Americans boiled through the open door of the switching house and onto the porch, some with pistols drawn and others unlimbering rifles. Bullets whizzed past him, kicking puffs of dust into the air or pinging off the railway tracks.

Well, it had been a pretty good plan - and it would have worked too, if he hadn't found the entire player base of the American army in the switching house having a goddamned party. Seen tripped over a metal rail and sprawled, flailing, at the same time that John Bearcat appeared beside the run down shed with his Gatling gun already spinning.

Seen covered his head with his arms as hot lead screamed above him. The steady ratta-chuck-chuck of the Gatling gun spitting dead became knives driving into his ears. It almost drowned out the screams of the Americans and the cracks of their rifles. Slowly those latter sounds vanished, and the percussive beating of the Gatling gun wound down into a fading whirr. When he could hear it no longer, Seen took his hands off his ears and looked around.

A small pile of corpses on the porch shifted and settled as the bodies on the bottom shimmered and faded away. They left behind the blood and the bullet holes and, in a few cases, equipment. Everyone knew to hold tightly onto their weapons when they died, but a few had still dropped theirs as John's weapon had obliterated them. The front of the switching house was more hole than wall, and faint curls of smoke drifted from some of the holes. One soldier, red with blood but still alive, dragged himself with one arm toward a rifle at the end of the porch. John drew his revolver and shot him.

"Fucking mess," John said as he offered Seen a hand up.

"Fucking overpowered is what it is." Seen brushed himself off. He checked for bullet wounds, a little surprised to still be whole. His deerskin trousers had split open where a bullet grazed his thigh, but otherwise, he hadn't been hit. "They shouldn't have been here," he said.

John shrugged.

"You could have done that in the first place. Just shot up the place from outside."

"Yeah, probably."

Seen looked around at the rusted cars. "There were two others."

"Relax, I got them."

They were in no immediate danger then. Seen sagged, and crouched down. "So what was the point of your plan then? You trying to get me shot by them?"

"Needed to flush them out, didn't I? And maybe I wanted to see if you were good for anything now. Maybe I wanted to see this spirit walk you've hyped up so much."

"You're an ass."

"I'm an ass with a big gun," John said, holding up his Gatling gun. "Stop dragging your balls in the dirt and come on. We haven't got much time."

Above the cliff face, a train whistle, long and low like the keening of a dieing animal, made John's point. Together they rushed for the switching house. John got there first, slamming a shoulder into the door and smashing it off its hinges.

John swept the space with his revolver, but found nothing to shoot. Seen ducked past him and threw the curtains open. At the far end of the yard, the train came around the curve, a long plume of smoke trailing behind hit. A console full of levers stood under the window. Seen stared at them. Even if they hadn't been decimated by John's Gatling gun, Seen didn't think he would have understood them. A rope vanished through a pipe in the ceiling - that he understood. That couldn't be anything except the rope to raise or lower the highball.

The rope was wound around a bracket on the wall. Seen grabbed the loose end and pulled off loop after loop, until John leaned in and slashed his knife across the rope. The cut end vanished up the pipe in a flash, and the glass ball above fell and shattered, spraying shards across the porch and the tracks. The train squealed as it engaged its brakes, and blew sparks and steam as it came to a halt in front of the switching house.

John stuck his knife in his belt. In his other hand, he held a slice of a cake. "We about done here then?"

Seen looked at the useless, half coiled rope in his hands, then back at the train. "I suppose so. That thing is fucking overpowered, you know."

"What the train?" John asked through a mouthful of cake.

"No."

"Oh, yeah. And the bandolier bug means I always got ammo too."

Seen really had to get one of those Gatling guns. He strode down the stairs and toward the train. "Wait, did you say bug? As in an exploit?"

"Yeah." John grinned. He'd gone back for more cake, but Seen could see the bandoliers across his back clear enough. They still appeared full, despite all the shooting John had done.

"Fuck," Seen said. And nobody would stop John from using it, either. The engineer leaned out the window of the train engine, smoke and steam flowing around him, and took off his striped hat - that was a player! Seen grabbed for his gun at the same time the engineer pointed his and fired. Seen froze, certain the man had hit him. He just hadn't felt it yet, that was all. Then the engineer slumped back into the cabin and the door swung open to show his body shimmer and vanish. Seen looked at his shaking hand and put his revolver away before he used up all the luck he had left.

"You know how to drive this thing?" John asked in between licking frosting off his fingers. His foot steps echoed on the porch and the stairs.

"No."

"Then why the fuck did you shoot him?"

"He was going to shoot me."

John grunted and shoved Seen aside so he could clamber onto the train.