Dorian fully expected the safehouse to be a storage facility in an alleyway. Or perhaps underground. Some dingy out-of-the-way place that shunned light and bathed in smog; it was where he would’ve put such a place.

Instead Gerard led them to a hotel that looked like the shorter yet prettier little sibling of Ur’s royal palace. It was only one spire, but it was a blemishless feat of red steel, smooth unbroken curves flowing up to a crown of a roof.

The doorman standing to attention beside a set of gilded doors was a dark elf. Rare in these parts. White-haired, dark purple skin, delicate features and a crescent moon on the forehead. He looked as sculpted as the tower he stood by, and he bowed as they strode up. Gerard nodded coolly. They went right in.

“Err,” said Sun, tugging at Gerard’s arm. “Excuse me? Mister Gerard?”

Gerard flinched, paled, yanked his suit out of her grasp, and inspected the cuffs the way you might the site of a snakebite you weren't sure was venomous.

“Miss Wukong! Kindly—” He yelped. He cleared his throat. “Kindly refrain,” he said again, this time in his smooth tenor. “I’m… rather fond of the suit.”

Gerard was rather fond of everything he owned. The man could dote over a toothpick.

“Sorry, sorry!” she said hastily. “I was only wondering—is it wise to keep a safehouse…” She gestured at the lobby around them. Slender jiangshi in posh cloaks slipped by. Gargoyles, wings neatly folded in velvet tuxedos, sipped from tinkling glasses at a nearby bar. “…here? It’s awfully public.”

“A valid concern. This way.” He led them up a spiral staircase, one of three lining a side of the lobby. The lobby itself was simply the floor of the hollow spire. Its ceiling was the tip of the spire, high up. The rooms themselves lined the spire’s insides; platforms ran up to them. “It is of course reasonable to doubt the security of this hotel. It may be bugged, or vulnerable to snooping staff. Only I own this place, you see. Naturally I am certain of its safety.”

“Wait. Since when?” asked Dorian.

“My liege, you are gone for millennia on your runs. I do not garden and tea-taste for all that time. On occasion I venture out and ply my other talents. Like combat, or sculpting. Or even, in this case, investing. I own a number of properties across the Upper Planes. This is one of them. It is a pleasant thing to have homes in other places.”

He sighed. “In another life, perhaps I would be a humble mortal, running a quaint roadside inn. I would give it a cozy feel, I think. Fill it with books and a crackling hearth, and sample the lives of passersby like…” He fumbled for the words. “…like strains of tea.”

“Aww!” said Sun. “Well I think that’s just lovely. I’m rooting for you, Mister Gerard.”

Gerard blinked. “Why thank you, Miss Wukong.”

“Please—call me Sun! Or runt! Or child! Or monkey-girl! Anything, really. I’m not particular.”

Dorian didn’t have the heart to break it to his manservant that mortals were not, perhaps, the quirky traveling bards of his daydreams. And mortals coming off a long day on the road were almost certainly a great deal dirtier than Gerard could ever stomach. In body and soul.

“Trust me, Gerard,” he sighed. “Giving up power, starting a new life—retiring to a farm, running an inn, maybe, whatever delusion our kind get—it sounds plenty nice. Then ten minutes in you realize just how much you miss disintegrating a mountain with a punch. I should know. Look at me now! Let me assure you, weakness sucks horribly.”

“I’m sorry about your predicament, sir. Though I trust we shall go a long way to remedying it quite shortly…”

After much spiraling and staircasing they got to a blank slate slab of a door near the top. Gerard removed his glove, got out a handkerchief, wiped a spot on the door, pressed his thumb to it. For a second the door was veined with red qi. There was a click-click-clicking of gears working their teeth within, and then one last CLICK!

And it swung open.

“After you,” said Gerard, gesturing in.

The room was one of the penthouse suites. If there had been a window it would’ve offered a sweeping view of the city; from up here they could undoubtedly see the marvelous spoke-and-wheel structure. But there were no windows to be found. Here was what Dorian had been expecting from the beginning: reinforced steel made the walls, qi lamps studded the ceiling, every other inch of the room firmly sealed and plastered with defensive arrays. Impenetrable.

The room itself was fairly bare. On a wall there was a board, with labelled nails driven into it in perfect rows. And on those nails hung Interspatial Rings, color-coded.

Stacked against another wall were crates. Square corrugated metal, one atop another, again in neat rows.

“Might those be our gifts?” said Dorian. An understated aura of power sizzled atop the steel—as though they muffled something far more powerful beneath…

“No. Those are bombs, my liege.”

“Seriously, though,” said Sun.

“Those are bombs.”

“Bombs?!”

“Bombs.”

“Rule of thumb!” Dorian jumped in. “If Gerard says something, unless he explicitly follows it with, ‘I am joking,’—which he very rarely does—he is not, in fact, joking.”

Sun took a nervous step away. Dorian took an eager step closer. He inspected aura radiating off the crates, nodding to himself. “I assume you mean to plant these in the city.”

“Indeed. Fate pulled some strings—strings of Fate, that is—so I could escape the collapse of the Unstuck Space. It is only polite I repay the man…” Gerard’s eyes narrowed. For a second, repressed beneath the mask, was a certain neatly restrained fury. “And after what Jez has done to you, my liege—and my lotus gardens besides, and my tea collection, and my statues, and frankly every memento in this life I hold dear—I ought to repay him in kind. Don’t you think?”

His eyes shivered in their sockets. Veins stood out furious purple like tree roots against his neck, and his lips made a bleak line. Then in a flash the look was gone, the veins receded, the lips softened. There once more was the mild-mannered butler, wearing calmness on his features like an ill-fitting mask.

It was easy to forget that this Gerard was the same legendary Beast, the Midnight Roc who’d terrorized half the Upper Realms in a mindless rage before Dorian as Salas Godhunter brought it to heel. Gerard could glove his hands all he liked, but he would never rid himself of their calluses. Those were hands that knew the hilt of a blade with a lover’s intimacy—however delicately they grasped at flowers now.

Gerard would not hesitate to detonate these bombs.

But Fate?

“Explosives?” mused Dorian. “I didn’t think Fate had it in him.”

“He does not. Those are not true explosives, but qi bombs. They destroy all objects with qi in their vicinity. In other words, they target artifacts, weaponry, armor… ideal for crippling missile silos and weapons depots. While sparing lives.” Now that sounded more like Fate.

“But such a weapon might also destroy array formations, wouldn’t it?”

A wicked little idea was taking shape in Dorian’s mind. And the more he thought about it, the more he liked it. “Surely Fate wouldn’t mind if we liberated just a few for another purpose.”

“….Hum.” Gerard eyed him over the top of his glasses, brows drawn. “Pardon this insult to your intelligence, sir, but you can’t mean to imply stealing from the Royal Auction of Ur, can you?”

It was Sun that had suggested it first. Of course Dorian had shot it down. But now… had it been fermenting in some dark alley of his mind, all this time? Waiting for the right puzzle-pieces—resources, manpower and the like—to come along?

A dangerous idea, and oh-so-risky… yet—

“I can, and I do.”

Dorian held up a hand to forestall Gerard’s protests. “Hear me out! The hard part of stealing from the Royal Auction isn’t getting in. It’s getting out. They’ve got such ridiculous tracking and verification spells on all their wares that switching them with fakes is nigh impossible. The moment we snatch one, they’ll know. The city will be locked down in an instant.”

“I feel you’re underselling the difficulty of getting in,” muttered Gerard. “Which is, to my knowledge, also nigh impossible. But please—go on.”

“With these bombs we have a way out.” Dorian’s eyes twinkled. “Fate wants to wreak havoc on the city, right? Plant these in the right places and we can do just that. We can blow a route straight out! It’ll be a beautiful chaotic mess. Just my specialty! In one stroke we can get what all of us want. The best foodstuffs of the auction for Sun. Its most powerful cultivation treasures for me. And finish off this errand Fate’s given you.”

It all fit together so well!

“…My liege,” said Gerard, hesitant. “I must point out all that is much easier to say than to do. Simply planting the bombs undetected, then setting them off, will be enough of a challenge. And Fate’s armies will arrive at this junction in but a moon’s time. Our window of opportunity is quite brief. If we’ve not crippled Ur’s forces by then—”

“A moon’s plenty of time! And now that I have you, Sun, and this?” He gestured to the bomb crates. “I suspect our odds are much less dire than they may seem. All we need is to do some solid preparation.”

“I…” Gerard looked to him, then Sun, then back again. He sighed. And at last, he bowed. “…I’ve voiced my misgivings. But you ought to make the final decision. I… trust your judgment on the matter. Infiltrate an impregnable auction. Steal its treasures. And then… explode ur way out of the city. It…I suppose it does have the shape of a plan…”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Dorian grinned as he turned to Sun. “You get us in—and yes, you get to do the planning for this bit, plan pending my final approval, of course—” She seemed very happy at that. A little wobbly, but happy. “I will get us out one explosion at a time. And Gerard here will fill in the gaps! Got it?”

“Yes! Mostly!” beamed Sun. “My hearing’s going a bit! I think it’s the last several hours, and a great deal of toxic waste, catching up to me at once.”

“Oh dear,” said Gerard.

“Please repeat that last bit to me in thirteen hours or so. I think I am about to pass out. Goodnight!”

Sun’s prediction promptly came true. She hit the floor face-first.

“…Anyways.” Dorian turned back to Gerard. “Exciting stuff, and I’m sure we’ll get down to it soon. A cache of giant bombs has a strange way of seizing the attention, doesn’t it?But I believe we got sidetracked. You were saying something about a gift?”

“Ah—yes. Though not from me. My resources are mostly financial. This is a gift from Fate.”

Dorian groaned. “Oh, Heavens! Lay it on me. What is it? Words of wisdom, perhaps? A hand-knitted scarf?”

Gerard tapped his Interspatial Ring.

Out dropped a steel barrel. It looked like the sort that might store toxic chemicals. It leaked nothing, but there was a cap at the top.

“Oh?” Dorian reached for the cap. Then stopped with his hand resting on the handle.“…Please don’t tell me it’s another bomb.”

“You’re safe to open it, sir.”

He did.

It felt like he’d been slapped in the face by a strong gust of wind. Except it was all qi, blowing back his hair and stinging at his nostrils. In an instant the room was choked with a peachy smell.

“What?” Dorian took a sniff, and his expression froze. “Wait. Is this...?”

“Fate sees you as a great asset,” said Gerard, eyes wrinkling joyfully. “Others may possess raw powers. But it is your mind that is your strength. He says your… destructive proclivities… make you especially useful. When paired with power they make for some combination.”

‘Destructive proclivities’? Dorian didn’t know whether that was insulting or praise! He could hardly deny it. Just this run, the Tribes, Azcan—not exactly in stellar shape after he left.

“So Fate figures he ought to invest in you and set you loose on our shared enemies. And none of us have the time to wait a few centuries for you to make Empyrean—much less Godking—on your own...”

“This is a drum of Black Chrysanthemum elixir,” said Dorian faintly. One of the highest-grade raw qi elixirs in the Multiverse. Drink one vial, and a mortal could reach all the way to Sky.

How many vials were in this hulking thing?!

“And that is only for qi,” intoned Gerard.

Gerard tapped his ring once more.