The Blue Dragon: Chapter 7

-- CHAPTER 7: The Blue Gecko --

****

“Ooh, naked chick. Damn she hot,” the blue gecko drawled appreciatively with the cadence of a black Detroit street rapper. Its bulbous, oversized red eyes with narrow black slits for irises were fixed in front of us, and it smiled a toothy grin while adding, “Look at dem titties!”

I tore my gaze away from the bewildering sight of a standing, talking blue gecko on my shoulder and looked in the same direction. Jade had changed back into her human form when she’d fainted and was indeed completely naked save for her strappy high heels. Her legs were askew with puffy pink labia still engorged from our recent fucking. And “dem titties” were very much worth staring at, big and round and impossibly firm even though she was flat on her back.

Rae gawked at the gecko, muttering something I didn’t understand, “有件事我不明白”

The gecko turned its grin to her, its right eyelid flapping down briefly in a very clear wink as it replied, “哦，你好，热的东西！”

Rae jerked her head back, obviously surprised by whatever the gecko had said.

Meanwhile, I had literally witnessed the gorgeous girl I had just ejaculated inside of transform her body into that of a half-snake hybrid and then engage in a knockdown catfight with the fox spirit I’d been hanging out with for the past couple of days who kept throwing electric fireballs around the room. While I was quite startled to find a talking blue gecko on my shoulder, after two days of this magical mythological shit, the gecko’s arrival from a cloud of blue mist seemed pretty par for the course.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Who am I? Who am -I-?!?” the gecko replied incredulously, seemingly insulted that I didn’t recognize him on sight. “I am Qinglong! God of the East! -I- am the powerful! The pleasurable! The indestructible Azure Dragon!”

I frowned. “You’re a gecko.”

“I’m a dragon. Dragon, not gecko. I don’t do that tongue thing.” The gecko then promptly stuck out its tongue and licked its own eyeball with a wet slurp.

My frown deepened. “Did you just quote Mulan? And a minute ago, I could’ve sworn you also quoted Aladdin.”

“Well like I said, I spent a LONG time stuck in that crystal, kna’mean? Had to entertain myself somehow. Pornhub is a lot more entertaining of course, but Disney movies have more quotable lines.”

I blinked twice. “You’ve been watching Pornhub?”

“Well me and everyone else during COVID. Speaking of which, I feel the need to make it abundantly clear that I was trapped in my little crystal at the time, absolutely nowhere NEAR Wuhan, and I had NOTHING to do with that particular plague being spread across China and all over the world, you feel me? Zhuque still blames me for the Shanxi epidemic of 1633, and she’ll never let me live it down.”

“Curious…” Rae said quietly while approaching us. Her lip was bleeding, she had various cuts and scrapes all over her exposed skin, and her cocktail dress was torn in several places. I wondered if she could magically heal herself through shapeshifting, but then I wondered if that would only reassemble damaged molecules in a different order and still result in…

… I was thinking too hard about it and didn’t have the time.

Glancing behind Rae, I saw that she’d rolled Jade onto her side and then bound the other girl’s wrists and ankles together with some kind of glowing cords. I wasn’t sure how ropes and knots would work on a supernatural shapeshifting viper-woman who could make her legs transform into a serpent’s tail at any moment, but I trusted Rae to know what she was doing in this instance.

Proving my point, I realized that Jade was awake and staring at us with slack-jawed shock. The presence of a talking blue gecko on my shoulder may have seemed like just another unexplainable magical occurrence to me, but it was clearly something that astonished her. And she remained silent, simply observing without trying to interfere or even escape from her bonds.

“幸会, 青龙” Rae greeted formally, pressing her palms together and bowing deeply.

“How you doin’?” the blue gecko replied, now sounding like Joey from Friends.

Rae smirked and then rattled off an entire paragraph of Mandarin that I couldn’t hope to follow, and the gecko replied in kind, laughing and gesturing towards Jade with a leer before reaching up and patting my cheek with its… umm… hand(?). The creature stood about six inches tall on its hind legs, and with its tail would probably be more around eight to nine inches long. It was high enough to be able to look me in the eye, more or less, and it did so now.

“So you seem pretty new to this,” the blue gecko remarked to me, somehow managing to convey an air of condescension and disappointment despite lacking a human face. It then turned to Rae, asking her, “How long have you had him?”

“Two days,” Rae replied, still a bit wide-eyed. “Great Divine Qinglong… how… how are you here?”

“Ask him,” the creature replied, jerking a thumb at me, or was it even a thumb? All five of its fingers fanned out at wide angles and appeared to be identical in length. “He’s the one who summoned me.”

“I did?” I looked back and forth between them. “I didn’t try to summon anything.”

“Intentional or not, you summoned me. So here I am, the almighty Azure Dragon.”

I looked skeptical. “You keep saying stuff like ‘almighty Azure Dragon’, but seriously, you don’t look anything like a mythological Chinese Dragon. You don’t have a lion’s mane. No antlers. I’m not an expert on reptiles, but I’ve been doing a LOT of internet research ever since that snake-chick over there bit me - twice now, actually - and I’m pretty dang sure that you’re a gecko.”

“Apart from the blue color, you have the appearance of the goniurosaurus hainanensis, the Chinese cave gecko,” Rae stated seriously as she started pointing at the various parts of the creature’s anatomy. “You have functional eyelids, unlike many gecko species. You also have climbing claws instead of sticky toe pads.”

“Well there you have it,” the gecko stated proudly. “You heard the chick: gonadosaurus. I’m a dinosaur.”

I frowned. “Thought you were insisting a minute ago that you’re a dragon.”

“Dragon, dinosaur, whatever. I’m large and terrifying and I can roar. Watch.” The tiny gecko proceeded to squall with a weak and irritating sound akin to that of a dying rat.

Rae looked puzzled. “你确定你是青龙？”

“Of course I’m sure I’m Qinglong! I’m a blue dragon, aren’t I?”

Rae narrowed her eyes and waggled her head, looking skeptical.

“Wait a minute,” I interjected. “You said you’ve been trapped in that crystal for two thousand years. Wouldn’t the real Qinglong have needed to be performing his duties as God of East all this time?”

“I got out every now and again,” the gecko sniffed.

“Like when you caused the Shanxi epidemic of 1633?”

“That was NOT my fault,” the gecko insisted, waggling a single finger at me.

“Qinglong is one of the Four Constellations,” Rae interjected, taking hold of my arm. “They are stars in the heavens, always looking down on us.”

A new voice suddenly cut in with a thick Mandarin accent and a somewhat stilted cadence, “But they are also guardian spirits that can be reincarnated on Earth and will take many forms, including that of a simple cave gecko.”

All three of us turned to look over at Jade. She’d managed to sit up straight, her knees bent and tucked to her chest with her ankles still bound, and her arms behind her with her wrists bound. I was surprised to find her awake but making no attempt to escape. Perhaps she simply wasn’t trying to shapeshift her way out of her bonds for one reason or another, or perhaps Rae’s glowing cords were more effective than I’d realized.

“Seriously, babe. Amazing titties,” the blue gecko complimented.

I would have thought Jade might scoff at the crude remark, but instead she blushed and actually smiled. Still, a moment later she shapeshifted clothing onto herself, donning a simple, long-sleeved black unitard that covered her from neck to wrists to ankles.

“He does not need to be the original Qinglong of the heavens,” Jade continued seriously. “He need only be one of Qinglong’s many avatars on Earth here as a Guardian of the Middle Kingdom.”

The blue gecko smiled and gestured skyward, tapped its chest, and then gestured skyward again. “What she said. I’m an avatar of Qinglong, good enough?”

“Sure thing, Mushu,” I said with a sigh.

“Do NOT call me Mushu,” he warned.

“Discount Donkey?”

The blue gecko’s eyes narrowed and started to glow.

“Well what DO you want me to call you?” I exclaimed. “I’m not calling you Qinglong, not while you’re a tiny blue gecko instead of an all-powerful Azure Dragon.”

The blue gecko grinned. “Then call me ‘Dong’.”

I blinked twice and asked incredulously, “Dong?”

“What? I’m Dōngfāng Qīnglóng, the Azure Dragon of the East. You can call me ‘Dong’ for short.”

I made a face. “Changed my mind. I’ll stick with Qinglong.”

“Too late. The name’s Dong. And did you know that you could save hundreds on car insurance by switching to Confucianism?”

****

After the GEICO joke about car insurance, I rolled my eyes and flicked the gecko off my shoulder, immediately walking away. It had been a really long day - a really long two days in fact - with so much going on that I could scarcely believe it had barely been forty-eight hours since the metaphorical shit hit the fan in my life and I’d been the victim of assassination attempts not just once but twice and I’d discovered not just one but two ancient Chinese relics that could somehow help discover a mythological artifact that had somehow turned the tide of a two-thousand-year-old war and could do who-knows-what in the modern day and now I was apparently stuck with a six-inch-tall talking gecko with delusions of grandeur that he could somehow be as funny as Eddie Murphy doing G-rated comedy in a Disney kids movie.

Oh, and by the way, I’d enjoyed an epic hookup with one of the most beautiful women I’d ever met in my entire life but who turned out to be the very assassin who’d already tried to kill me twice. Yes, the orgasm had been incredible, but it still wasn’t worth the whole “nearly dying” bit.

“Sorry, bro. Can’t get rid of me that easily,” the blue gecko remarked. “We’re stuck together until the job’s done.”

I’d only taken two steps away, heading for the bedroom, when I turned my head and then jerked back in surprise at the sight of the blue gecko once again standing on my right shoulder. I hadn’t even felt him jump back on. Or perhaps he’d simply turned back into blue mist and then rematerialized there?

“Once the avatar of a god has been summoned,” Jade intoned gravely, “it must remain with The Chosen One until its task is completed.”

“And how do you know this?” Rae interjected.

“How do you NOT?” Jade shot back haughtily. Turning to face me, Jade gestured with her head towards Rae and stated, “Your guide seems quite inexperienced. The two of you are… What is the saying?… You are in over your heads.”

“I think I’ve experienced plenty,” Rae insisted.

Jade looked skeptical. “How old are you, anyways?”

“Old enough.” Rae folded her arms across her chest and glowered at the bound girl.

“You are but a child,” Jade scoffed. “I have witnessed the great conflicts of The Middle Kingdom and beyond for over a millennium.”

“And here I thought you didn’t look half-bad for forty,” Rae mocked with syrupy sweetness.

“Forty?” Jade roared in outrage, suddenly flexing her arms as if to break her bonds. But she remained kneeling on the floor with her wrists still bound behind her back.

Rae turned to wink at me. “Vipers are notoriously vain.”

“Says the huli jing,” jeered Jade.

Rae rolled her eyes, raised her right hand with fingers extended, and started conjuring up another electric ball, this one glowing brighter and bigger than before. “I’m wasting my breath. Might as well just kill you now. Looks like you’ll never see that next millennium.”

“Wait!” Jade exclaimed, “Don’t kill me. That would be a great mistake.”

“The only mistake I made was not killing you immediately after you’d fainted!”

“You need me,” Jade insisted. “Clearly, you have no idea the true situation you are in. There are things you need to know, things I can tell you.”

“Trying to manipulate me into sparing you with the whole, ‘I have information you need’ gambit? Nice try.”

“You did not know the blue crystal contained an avatar of Qinglong, did you? You have no idea how to read the bamboo scroll map. Do you even know what the other two relics are or what they can do? Do you have ANY idea how to find Faguang Long? What else are you in the dark about?”

“I guess we’ll find out whenever we find out. Goodbye.” The glowing ball of crackling electricity in Jade’s hand grew even brighter, and she reached back as if starting a pitcher’s windup, ready to throw.

“Wait!” I cut in, grabbing Rae’s wrist and stopping it from accelerating forward.

“What?!” Rae exclaimed, staring at me with eyes agog.

“Hold on a second. What if she’s right?” I asked Rae with raised eyebrows.

Then I turned to look at Jade. She remained kneeling with her wrists and ankles bound, panting hard with an expression of honest fear. I’d never heard her talk that fast before, and I had to consider the possibility she was just making shit up in a last-ditch effort to save her own life. But I couldn’t easily dismiss the words she was saying.

“What if she does know what the other two relics are and what they can do?” I continued. “What if she CAN help us find the Faguang Long?”

“What if she decides the third time’s the charm and she tries to murder you again?” Rae shot back.

“I am no threat to you, Akserrr,” Jade stated seriously.

“Says the girl who could kill you within minutes and… oh… who’s already tried to do so! Twice!” Rae countered.

“That was before I knew you were the chosen of Qinglong,” Jade insisted, her eyes pleading with me. “That was before I realized I had chosen the wrong side.”

“Wait, what?” Rae frowned and folded her arms across her chest again.

“I chose the wrong side,” Jade insisted.

“And what, you want to join the good guys now?” Rae scoffed dubiously.

“You think you are a ‘good guy’?” Jade derided Rae before focusing her attention on me instead. “For thousands of years, huli jing have been notorious tricksters, creatures of mischief. In fairness, they are absolutely beautiful, but they use that beauty for seduction to steal human essence, and they use shapeshifting and illusion to lead humans astray. You should know that a fox spirit can never be fully trusted.”

“Oh, and a yaoguai is supposed to be trusted?” Rae countered. “Which of the two of us actually seduced Aksel in order to betray him? Hmm? The very word yaoguai means ‘monster’ or ‘demon’.”

“Only because people like you twisted the meaning into such slander.” Jade’s eyes narrowed. “We are not monsters, or demons. The original meaning of yao is ‘wish’. The original meaning of guai is ‘wonder’. My people were dreamers. We wanted to make the world a better place but were persecuted for being ‘different’. History is written by the victors, unfairly so for my people. We have been hunted to near-extinction, driven to extremes merely trying to survive. I do not enjoy killing, but I believed it was necessary. I wanted to kill Aksel when I believed he was an instrument of evil. But I believe that no longer.”

“Because I’ve got you trapped and you’ll say anything to try and save your snakeskin.”

“No,” Jade said quite softly as she turned to face me. “Because of him.”

I blinked twice before realizing that Jade wasn’t actually looking at me. She was looking at Dong, who had stood on my shoulder remaining mercifully silent this entire time.

“The gecko that keeps making cracks about your tits?” Rae drawled disparagingly.

“Yes, the gecko. He IS an avatar of Qinglong,” Jade said reverently, her liquid green eyes shimmering. “The gecko is the essence of the Great Azure Dragon, and Qinglong has chosen this boy.”

I frowned. “‘Boy’?”

“I am sorry, Akserrr.” Jade frowned and bowed her head. “I served the wrong master. I believed that he was the one chosen to open the blue crystal and summon Qinglong to support our cause. I was trying to retrieve the four relics and find Faguang Long to save my people, and I was willing to kill you in order to do it.”

There was an honest sincerity in Jade’s voice. Part of me still wanted to distrust her for all the reasons Rae had already pointed out. But my gut instinct told me that she was telling the truth. And I remained silent, still measuring her words as I let her finish.

“But the proof is standing before me,” Jade continued, raising her head to look first at Dong and then at me. “I watched you summon the avatar of Qinglong. I heard him commit to remaining with you. Safekeeping the future of my people now depends on the success of your quest. I have information about the other two relics you will need to know. I can tell you the plans of your enemies and help you counteract them. Please let me live, and I will help you in any way that I can.”

I nodded slowly, an action Rae didn’t fail to notice.

“Please tell me you aren’t buying this shite,” the blue-haired girl spat.

“I think…” I began slowly, pursing my lips and then turning to face her. Rae happened to be on my right, which meant that when I did so, I actually found myself looking at Dong instead.

The blue gecko smiled at me.

“I think,” I began again, “that we should ask - I can’t believe I’m actually calling him this name out loud - I think we should ask Dong what HE thinks.”

“Dong the Dragon, and since the word long means ‘dragon’, I’m ‘Dong Long’.”

“I am NOT calling you ‘Dong Long’,” I stated with a scowl. “You’re a cave gecko.”

Dong shrugged.

“The point is,” I continued, “I am admittedly unfamiliar with yaoguai and whether or not I should really trust them. Hell, I’m unfamiliar with huli jing and if I want to be suspicious, Rae, there’s still a helluva lot about you and your motives I don’t know about. But I’ve chosen to trust you, and I believe we’re doing the right thing in continuing on this quest, and given that you said the blue crystal would be the key to us finding the Faguang Long, well… Dong came out of that blue crystal, didn’t he?”

Rae pursed her lips, clearly not liking the idea of letting Jade live.

“You’re supposed to be the avatar of the Azure Dragon,” I told the gecko solemnly. “What do you think, Dong?”

The gecko smirked. “Well she’s got an incredible rack. There’s a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. It would be a pity to damage hers.”

Rae immediately groaned, and I took a deep breath while rubbing my forehead while muttering, “Okay, I think I may have made a mistake in asking for your opinion.”

The gecko stopped smirking, stood up straight, and seemed to give me a serious expression for once. “You must choose. But choose wisely.”

“No pressure,” Rae muttered.

I rolled my eyes and explained, “He’s quoting Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

“Ah.”

“We let her live,” I told Rae, having come to a decision. “We need her to finish this quest.”

Rae pursed her lips and looked like she’d rather kill the bitch, but then she took a deep breath and sighed, reluctantly nodding.

Dong patted my cheek, intoning dramatically, “You have chosen… wisely.”

****

The first thing we did was untie Jade from her bonds. Apart from the fact that they were glowing with a golden inner light, they seemed to be just like any ordinary cords, and the kneeling young woman (well, over a millennium-old woman) waited patiently for me to unknot them while Rae stood nearby with a couple of sparking balls of electricity at the ready should this whole thing prove to be a mere ruse for Jade to escape.

But she needn’t have worried. Jade continued to gaze in awe at the blue gecko perched on my shoulder with the beatific expression of a deeply religious Fremen fanatic on Arrakis basking in the presence of Muad’Dib. She could barely take her eyes off him, even after I’d untied her wrists and she was able to absentmindedly rub at her chafed skin.

For his part, Dong seemed happy to get stared at. For a cave gecko, his facial expressions were surprisingly human-like, and it was clear he rather enjoyed being visually worshipped as an avatar of the Great Qinglong.

But as soon as I got Jade’s ankles untied, Rae roughly grabbed the other girl’s forearm and then yanked her up to a standing position. “Okay snake. A deal’s a deal,” she said brusquely. “You promised to help us in any way that you can. You promised information about the other two relics. And you promised to tell us the plans of our enemies and how to counteract them.”

“I did,” Jade confirmed, scowling at Rae’s hand on her arm. “And I will fulfill my vows.”

“Oh, you mean like the vows you made to your former masters before betraying them?” Rae spat, keeping a tight grip on Jade’s forearm. “Thank you for proving once and for all the limits of your loyalty.”

“I do not care for the word ‘betrayal’,” Jade murmured slowly in a low tone, her eyes narrowed. But then her expression softened as she added, “And yet, I cannot dispute the truth of your words. All I can say is: I am 虺 (huī), a venomous serpent. The best of us can evolve into 蛟 (jiāo), half-dragons. Some may even become 螭 (chī), the hornless young dragon. And a very, very few of us can become 龙 (lóng). Qinglong is the supreme serpent. My ultimate loyalty is not to you, or to Akserrr, or even to Dong. My ultimate loyalty is to Qinglong. Whatever else you believe about me, believe that.”

Rae’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment she looked like she wanted to kill Jade once more. But instead she merely flung Jade’s forearm away from herself in disgust as if it were a rancid rat carcass covered in maggots before turning and stomping away.

“First things first,” I began. “Information about the other two relics.”

Jade nodded and then gestured at Dong. “There are four cardinal directions. You have obviously found the blue crystal key, the relic of the Azure Dragon of the East. And I know that… she… was protecting the bamboo scroll map, the relic of the Black Tortoise of the North.”

“Waitaminute,” Rae interjected as she returned to us, her eyes narrowing. “Are we supposed to summon an avatar of Xuanwu? Is Aksel supposed to end up with a talking little turtle on his other shoulder?”

Jade laughed as if that were the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard and shook her head, muttering, “Do not be stupid.”

Rae’s eyes sizzled, and she cocked her right hand back to start forming another electric ball before I groaned, grabbed her elbow, and tugged it down.

“Can you please try to tell us the things we need to know without insulting each other?” I asked placatingly.

“Can your so-called ‘experienced’ guide please refrain from asking stupid questions?” Jade challenged.

“You promised that if we let you live, you would help me in any way that you can.”

“I never promised that a huli jing and a hui would get along.”

I sighed and rubbed my forehead, giving up on a lost cause. “Fine, fine. Moving on. Tell us about the other two relics for South and West.”

Jade shrugged. “The relics for the Vermilion Bird of the South and for the White Tiger of the West have both been hidden and rehidden many times over the past two thousand years, and unfortunately I do not know either of their present locations.”

“That’s alright. -I- know where they are,” Rae sniffed, her voice dripping with contempt.

Jade’s eyes narrowed. “Indeed, which is why we have been attempting to follow you. But do you know WHAT each of the relics ARE?”

Rae wilted a bit, shooting me a glum look. She knew that I knew she hadn’t known exactly what any of the four relics would be, not even the blue crystal key or the bamboo scroll map.

Jade smiled rather maliciously as she pronounced, “The relic of Zhuque is a red feather, and the relic of Baihu is a great sword. When combined and wielded by The Chosen One, they form an unbeatable weapon.”

I frowned. “I thought the Golden Dragon was the unbeatable weapon.”

Jade shook her head. “Faguang Long is far more than a mere weapon. Faguang Long can warp and shape the very fabric of reality. Do you know why Ancient China was known as ‘The Middle Kingdom’?”

“Yeah, actually,” I replied. “The Chinese thought they were the center of the world, as in literally in the center of all of the world with every other country surrounding them. The characters for the name ‘China’ translate to ‘middle’ and ‘kingdom’.”

“Not precisely. The characters are 中國 (Zhōngguó), which translate to ‘middle’ and ‘kingdom’,” Jade corrected. “But this name is not only because the Chinese believed themselves to be the center of the world, but also because there are three domains in the cosmos: Heaven, Earth, and the Underworld; and Earth is in the middle. Faguang Long possesses the power to cross between these domains. Faguang Long is why fox spirits and serpent spirits walk the Earth. In the right hands, Faguang Long can revitalize my people.”

“And in the wrong hands?”

“Faguang Long could wreak terrible havoc upon the world.”

Jade’s voice was grave as she stared at me, and in her tone I could hear the anguish of billions being tortured for all eternity. Recognizing the gravity of the situation I had been unceremoniously thrust into, I swallowed thickly and turned to look at Rae. Her expression was solemn, but this didn’t appear to be news to her.

“It all depends on you, bruh,” Dong stated quietly.

I blinked twice and looked back at the little cave gecko. “On me?”

“You ARE The Chosen One,” Jade stated solemnly, directing her attention to Dong and then back to me.

“And what if I choose to stop the quest? If the Faguang Long can wreak terrible havoc on the world, maybe the world would be better off with me dead and nobody gets the Golden Dragon.”

Rae shook her head. “That’s not how it works. First of all, there is a great evil coming, and we need Faguang Long to stop it. You are our best hope, but if you die, there are other potentials out there. You’re alive now, and Qinglong has obviously chosen you. But if the Cao Wei manage to kill you, there will always be someone else.”

“Oh, so I’m special, but I’m not that special,” I muttered.

“Hey -I- think you’re pretty special, dude,” Dong offered.

“Thanks for the moral support,” I sighed.

“C’mon, man. You got this,” he insisted. And then he balled his hand into a little fist and extended it to me for a quick bump.

I rolled my eyes rather than fist-bump a gecko.

“Don’t leave me hanging, bro,” he complained. “I’m the avatar of Qinglong. You want my help or not?”

I eyed the little gecko curiously. “You promise you can help me?”

“That’s my job.”

“And how exactly are you gonna help me?”

Dong grinned, revealing twin rows of tiny sharp teeth. “The universe works in mysterious ways.”

I rolled my eyes again and shook my head.

I paced a few steps away from the others, taking deep breaths. The sofa had been turned over on its side during the fray, so I stooped over and then heaved it back upright. Surveying the half-destroyed living room of the Presidential Suite, I wondered how in the hell we would ever explain this. Rae had insisted that money was no object, so maybe they’d just charge the damage to her Executive Platinum Super Sapphire Diamond credit card or whatever. At this point, I was more worried about being able to get to our next destination before any bad guys caught onto us.

Speaking of bad guys…

“Wait, who else knows that we’re here?” I asked while turning around to face the girls. “Is your team nearby?”

“Team?” Jade queried in confusion before shaking her head. “I have no ‘team’. The life of a serpent is a solitary one.”

“You were a team of four in Santa Monica. The old man and the two cute Chinese girls who lured me over to you.”

Jade shook her head in the negative. “I possess the power to hypnotize mere humans and even… control… the weak-minded to some degree. The old man I found in Chinatown. I dressed him in the outfit, fed him his lines, and waited for the right opportunity. As for the ‘two cute Chinese girls’, your own libido led you to them without any influence from me.”

“So you’re saying there’s no one else who knows we’re here?” I narrowed my eyes and leaned forward intently. “I need to know if we need to relocate to another hotel. For all I know, all you’re doing this very moment is stalling us until your master shows up with the cavalry.”

“Glad to see you’re finally thinking like this is a life-or-death situation,” Rae interjected. “We should relocate to another hotel no matter what she says.”

“Fair enough, although I assure you I am not stalling,” Jade insisted. “That said, while I can also assure you I have not taken any action to inform my former master of your location, I cannot state for certain whether or not he has discovered this location on his own, nor whether or not he will ‘show up with the cavalry’. So I agree that it would be prudent for us to leave.”

Rae nodded and looked at me. “Grab your shit, Aksel. I’ll find us another place to hole up.”

“Too late,” Dong said suddenly from right next to my ear, and his voice suddenly became exactly that of Frodo sensing the Nazgul approaching in The Two Towers. “They’re here. They’ve come.”

The air suddenly exploded with the sounds of glass shattering as the living room’s floor-to-ceiling windows blew in.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue & Chapter 1: The Ax Effect: https://www.patreon.com/posts/102225387

Chapter 2: Santa Monica: https://www.patreon.com/posts/102437478

Chapter 3: The Zellij Fountain: https://www.patreon.com/posts/102691018

Chapter 4: Euhemerism: https://www.patreon.com/posts/102919819

Chapter 5: The Fremont Troll: https://www.patreon.com/posts/103191700

Chapter 6: Jade: https://www.patreon.com/posts/103443053