As Ugo fell in and out of consciousness, Wade dragged him up to the floor with the mystical machinery and placed him on a chair to be hooked up to scanners.

Ugo was now somewhere between 80 and 90 years of age. His lungs were burning, and arthritis plagued his body. He and Wade seemed to be groaning in unison as blood continued to leak out of the gash on the Anesthesiologist’s chest.

When Wade noticed Ugo staring at the unhealing wound, he said, “This is why they say sleep is important. My Garb’s healing capabilities are really slow.” He shrugged. “Or maybe the cells are just lazy, and I can’t blame them. It sounds like a tiresome job.” He pulled up a closed box containing machinery of some kind and sat on it. “I believe the specimen within you has reached full maturity.”

A new slimy mouth appeared on the left side of Ugo’s forehead and spewed a river of yellow chunks.

Wade pulled up his wrinkly mask. “It’s time to start making the plasmid.” He left and returned with a syringe, extracting some of the bile into the tool. He took his smartphone out of his pocket and had psychedelic rock music play from it as he got to work.

Watching Wade use the complex machinery as if it were his own lab intrigued Ugo. Before witnessing him work, Wade was the kind of guy Ugo wouldn’t even trust to watch over a pen for him. Now, he was confident that the development of the plasmid was in good hands even though he couldn’t understand any of the steps he was doing.

Wade heated up flasks with different liquids, carefully pushed out samples from various syringes onto slides, used the microscope a couple of times, and occasionally made magical hand signs followed by sudden bursts of light. It was like watching a foreign independent action film without subtitles — he was confused but entertained.

As coughing fits arose and Ugo began vomiting from both his mouths, he thought Kian’s statement about the disease being painless was complete bullshit.

Unprompted, Wade began asking things about Ugo as he worked and rocked his head to a band whose lead singer sounded like they were either drowning or half-asleep. Maybe it was due to suddenly becoming a nonagenarian and being able to taste death on all his sets of lips that made Ugo answer the questions and then overshare about his life.

He opened up about his past and how he adored his busy biochemist mother. In his eyes, the barcelonina was the most beautiful and wonderful woman in the world. Even though the time he spent with her dwindled as she climbed higher up her career ladder, he was still proud of her. Ugo talked about the days when she was hospitalized and how he could remember every enthralling detail of her, physical and personality-wise, slowly peeling away, he spoke coldly and precisely as if he was a famished actor on his 100th take and just wanted to go home.

After vomiting one last time, he ended his story with the medical error that caused her death.

“Damn. That’s rough,” Wade said and walked to the closet. He walked over to a machine that looked like a microwave and opened it—yellow smoke hissed out of it. Wade took out a lidden wooden bowl from the device and settled it on his workstation.

“What’s that?” Ugo asked.

“The Mana bomb,” Wade said and put his hand over the lid. “Just for you to know, I wasn’t just up here fooling around. Now we just need your brother and company to show up with that shrinking factor.” He leaned onto the workstation and crossed his arms. “You have nothing more to worry about, aside from being infected with Kian’s specimen, Ashlin’s aging spell should wear off any moment now. That’s if she was actually telling the truth about the spell being temporary.”

After seeing Ashlin’s true colors up close, Ugo could see her deceiving them like that in an attempt to have leverage over them to get something in return. Her witch-like Healer’s Garb outfit was quite apt for her. Ugo shook his head, trying to get rid of the thought before his brain fetched a perfect image of her insanely proportionate body in that skimpy Garb.

Wade produced a bottle of pills. “You know why I take these, right? I can’t sleep.”

“There isn’t a spell that beats Ambien?”

Wade laughed and then revealed his dilemma. “Fatal familial insomnia,” he said and talked about how it was a common disease for his family members. “When my Mana Pores opened up, I was 12, I think, and I let my family know immediately.”

“You told them you were a wizard?”

“I could use magic to prove it,” he said and gulped down some pills. “I developed my skills to craft potions and pills. One day I switched one of my mother’s pills with one of my own. Looking back now, using her as my first test subject was really messed up. Luckily, it all turned out swell. She was able to sleep, and then I went on to share the drug with the rest of my family. It was a success. But for me? Yeah, nah.”

“Your own pill doesn’t work on you?”

Wade slowly shook his head with a strange, hopeless smile on his face. “I made hundreds of versions of that pill, but nothing effing worked.” He shook the bottle in his hand. “I have to take these dissociative drugs to make life just a little more bearable.” Wade drifted off for a bit and then continued, “I really screwed things up when I started to sell my special drugs in my community. It spawned a horde of junkies. The fam ordered me to stop, but I didn’t listen, so they rightfully kicked me out.”

“Who do you stay with then?”

“I just travel the Realms and stay in whatever vicinity is near me.”

By ‘vicinities’ Ugo could imagine Wade meant benches, cardboard boxes, and most likely the backyards of strangers.

“I have a knack for screwing things up, I tell you. That’s probably why Aida decided to end things all of a sudden. She finally had enough of my bullshit.”

“You dated Aida?” Ugo shouted. His heart was racing.

Wade looked back, wide-eyed. “Uhm, yeah. She was my girlfriend for two years. When I started to travel on my own I settled in Japan for a while and that’s where I met her.” He made a faint smile. “I remember this one time—”

“But she’s… beautiful and you’re…”

Wade raised a brow as he looked back at him.

There were plenty of words Ugo could use to describe Wade’s rather eccentric qualities, but he decided to not say anything and let the confusing anger boil within him.

Ugo spent his days trying to look as presentable as possible (even dyeing his hair!) and building up his confidence, and here was this unkempt stoner who scored a babe like Aida.

“Were you a lot more cleaned up back then?” Ugo asked desperately.

“Not really. I just got more dreamy, you can say. I can’t remember the last time I cut my hair. Good thing it just froze into…” he removed his cap. “This.”

“I don’t get it… how?”

Wade shrugged. “I’m lovely?”

Ugo listened to the beeps on the monitor as he continued to think. He wanted to inquire further but dreaded Wade saying some crap like: “You just need to be yourself.” Then he let slip out, “What the hell do women want?”

“Uh… they don’t all want the same thing. You do know they are not all the same, right? Just like with men and every other thing in the universe.”

“How did it happen? What did you say? What kind of tactics did you use to get her to be with you?” Ugo then scoffed, realizing he was already asking more questions than intended.

“Man, it’s not a video game,” Wade said wisely. “There isn’t a set of commands you press to unlock a feature. It all happens naturally. Maybe if you stopped forcing it to happen… it’ll, well, happen.”

Ugo sighed, and there was the dreadful advice he despised more than the “just be yourself” babble. He had to consider that there was something seriously wrong with him if he was losing to a guy who didn’t know where he was most of the time and looked like he just walked out of a trash can.

Ashlin’s harsh anti-therapeutic words replayed clearly in his head. Maybe using magic was the way to go for him to have a chance with a girl—any girl. He clenched the arm of his chair and ignored Wade’s words of concern.

A world where everybody’s face was that of an abomination would level the playing field for Ugo. The fleeting thought sickened Ugo, and then he looked back to Wade, understanding that looks really had nothing to do with the equation he had spent years trying to solve.

Ever since puberty struck, all Ugo did was strike out with women while his peers got what he desired quickly without breaking a sweat. It was as if everybody around him was given the right constants to the equations, and he was left guessing the answer, painfully going through trial and error and reaping no spoils at the end of it.

Perhaps when Ashlin told him a woman would never love him because he was too ugly, she meant on the inside, too.

Ugo sank back into his chair and stared at the ceiling, cranking his neck all the way back so that the tears would stay in place. He didn’t say a word and continued to ignore Wade. Eventually, Wade stopped probing for a response, returned to the workstation, and turned up the volume of the music.

Ashlin’s spell wore off, and Ugo returned to his default age of 17 but remained with the dejection of a geriatric filled with regrets.

The cavalry had arrived and found Wade and Ugo in the upstairs lab.

“About time,” Wade said as he turned down the music playing from his smartphone. He fixated on Aida and smiled. “You’re back to normal,” he said to her.

“Oh, Dio mío,” Zek exclaimed as he froze, staring at Ugo’s new, mutated face.

“You look fantastic,” Akachi jested. “So, this is what Kian is doing, and he thinks it’s doing good?”

“Enough talk,” Aida said and raised the syringe Wade gave to Zeke. “We got the shrinking factor right here. Let’s get started.”

Zeke approached Ugo in his seat as Aida joined Wade at the workstation.

“How do you feel?” Zeke asked and scanned his stepbrother’s oily, bumpy, bloated face with hair and fingers sticking out. He now had two sets of mouths, and the one on the left side of his forehead had chunks of vomit on the corner of the lip. Zeke kept from commenting about the fetid smell of the vomit or even allowing his face to contort in response to it. Ugo’s self-confidence had probably already taken enough beatings being forced through a transformation.

“So, who is going to clean this shit up?” Akachi asked as he made a face looking at the pool of puke before Ugo.

“You are,” Aida said to Akachi.

“I think I saw a mop in the closet,” Wade added.

Akachi glared at his old pals, and they gave him a thumbs up with shit-eating grins on their faces. He sucked in his teeth and walked away.

It took a while for Ugo to respond, but when he did, it was one of the most Ugo-like things Zeke could imagine him to say.

“Do you think Kian’s disease could affect people’s bodies, too? What do you think the possibilities with women’s boobs could be? Maybe some girls could get extra sets of boobs, back boobs, or one way bigger than the other… I don’t know if I am into that or not. I’ll have to see for myself to conclude.”

Zeke stared blankly for a moment and then chuckled. Of course, Ugo wouldn’t be brought down by having his face look like something a psychopath would make in an RPG character creation with way too many options.

Although, Zeke struggled with an unnerving feeling that Ugo’s pervy demeanor seemed a bit forced.

An angry, mumbling Akachi returned with a mop and a bucket filled with water.

“How does using the extract work exactly?” Ugo asked as he looked over to Aida and Wade at the workstation.

Aida put a hand on her hip and explained, “We mix the extract into a potion with other ingredients. And with my genetic abilities, I’ll edit the genes of the potion to instruct it just how small we need the Mana bomb to be.”

“And then we pour the potion all over the bomb,” Wade added as he tapped the lidded wooden bowl on the workstation, and then he tapped his head. “That’s why I had to take precise measurements of the plasmid.” He gave Aida a look. “Unless you’d like to take measurements of the plasmid yourself.”

Aida grinned and clapped his shoulder. “Nah, I trust you. I know I can count on you… well, most of the time.”

As the two shared a laugh, Zeke noticed Ugo’s stare lingering at the ex-couple.

Almost as if he knew he was being watched, Ugo cleared his throat and looked away from the two in a hurry. “So, how did you guys get the extract?”

Zeke filled Ugo and Wade in about the events in the Realm of fairies and about what went down in the sewers they chased Violet into.

Without pulling any punches, he explained in detail what Violet had done, what he learned about her in person, and their bloody fight.

“Dude…” Ugo said.

“There are just some people you can’t save,” Zeke quoted his brother with a sad smile on his face. “Some people you can’t change, and Violet is one of those people. She’s corrupt and rotten to the core. There’s no fixing her because she doesn’t want to be fixed. She thinks she is in the right, and I let her wrap me around her finger. She was seducing me this entire trip so that I would join her in killing angels.”

Aida paused on the potion-making to comment: “Violet is an awful human being and—!”

Wade stopped her by putting a hand on her shoulder. She looked over at him, and he shook his head.

“No, it’s okay,” Zeke said. “She’s right.”

“You can do so much better, Zeke,” Aida said.

Zeke snickered and then frowned. He dropped his head down and started fumbling with his hands.

“I’m sorry, Mano,” Ugo said tenderly. “I know how much you liked her.”

“I’m just a complete idiot.”

Ugo shrugged. “She was your blindspot, Zeke. We all have one. No use in beating yourself up over it. What’s important is what you choose to do from here forward.”

Zeke raised his head and nodded.

“What happened around here?” Akachi asked as he finished cleaning up Ugo’s vomit.

Now it was Ugo and Wade’s turn to update.

“I can’t believe that red-haired bitch!” Akachi shouted as he slammed the mop onto the floor.

“Kian is an elf….” Aida said, adding the finishing touches to the potion. “Pretty embarrassing as the Geneticist to not see that….”

“Don’t worry about it. He worked really hard on his cloaking spells to hide it,” Wade said as he watched her mix.

While Akachi stormed out of the room, Zeke asked, “but what was the triggering moment that finally made Kian snap?”

“We’re not sure,” Ugo responded.

Akachi returned, looking down at his smartphone. “Guys, ya need to see the news.”

“Are you connected to the internet?” Zeke asked.

“This place has wifi.”

“How?” Everybody shouted in unison.

“I dunno,” Akachi shrugged with a dumb look on his face. “Magic.” He put the phone away. “The goth bastard is tearing the Bahnhofstrasse apart. We need to go put him down, now.”

“But our vaccine….” Zeke said.

“You guys go,” Wade said, having everybody look over at him. “I’ll stay behind and finish up while you all try to help as many people as possible and stop Kian from causing more destruction.”

“Let’s do it!” Ugo said as he got up from the chair.

“Are you sure you are good to fight, Mora?” Zeke asked.

Zeke, Ugo, Akachi, and Aida huddled together.

First was Ugo, who stretched his hand in the center. “When I am done with that asshole, he will look even worse than I do.”

Next was Akachi, who put his hand over Ugo’s. “I actually came to the retreat to relax, and he totally killed the vibe. I’ll make him pay for that.”

Following the two, Aida put her hand over Akachi’s and snarled. “I am getting revenge for what he did to Shadow.”

And finally, Zeke put his hand over Aida’s. “Kian is a disgrace to what it means to be a Healer. We are supposed to cure people, not make them sick! Let’s go put him down.”

“Wait, Aida,” Wade called. “I need you for one more thing,” he said and then shared a nod with Zeke.

All part of the plan…

They split and gathered their things. Helping themselves to as many Mana bottles as they could find in the lab. Akachi drew a Transportation sigil on the door, exited the lab, and then returned with more Mana bottles and bags.

The group reunited at the now-empty ward in the basement. They all summoned their Healer’s Garbs and equipped backpacks filled with items as Wade prepared a sigil on the door for them.

He opened the door, revealing a vacant shopping mall in shambles. “Good luck,” Wade said.

The party of four went through the door, navigated their way through the mall, and made it to the final stage of their ordeal.

Bahnhofstrasse was in chaos.