Squints squinted at the results of his spell casting. The puddle of red wine which was once Gold Trim’s body expanded across the cobblestone, and Deborah fell to the ground, captured ever deeper by the pains of the housing crisis. “That wasn’t natural,” Squints said. Declan, wanting to reassure Squints, said, “Maybe he’d been wine the whole time?” While Squints checked Romance Star’s pulse (he still had one, and his eyes moved as if in REM sleep), Sansan crawled toward the locker room. The rest of the party eventually followed her there, but just walked instead of crawling. In the locker room two other sweepers putting on their work boots argued over how often a couple ought to be at home. The slow-talking, slow-witted sweeper believed his girlfriend ought to stay in at least four nights a week. The fast-talking, also slow-witted sweeper said this was the issue with committing to only one woman: to maintain power a man had to have at least three women. When the slow-talking one asked for the party’s input, Declan said, “Four nights a week is a lot.” An orangutan sat in the open door of the farthest locker, but no one seemed to find this odd. To Squints, the orangutan appeared to be a burly dwarf. But this never came up in conversation. The party fetched their personal items from their personal lockers. * Declan fetched a silver hand mirror (well polished) and brass knuckles which, after his sizing-up into the [[higher ape]] class from the effects of the sinewy mushroom, only fit his thumb. So brass thumbs. * Sansan fetched a wooden flute and her personal dagger. * Squints fetched his Book for Life (paperback) and his twelve-meter lasso. When the party’s slow-talking coworker who still hadn’t donned his boots informed them that the supervisor was looking for them to discuss their performance, they deliberated over whether to dip out or try and get tickets to [[Xena]]’s deathmatch against [[Ivan]]. Tickets cost thirty bronze each, a lion’s share of their fifty-bronze monthly salary. Before deliberations settled, the party’s supervisor Omeb (aka Ome-B) climbed out of the farthest locker and atop the orangutan, then scolded them for not being at their stations. He slurred his speech, did not fully open his eyes. Unable to balance on the shoulders of the orangutan, he fell into her arms (the orangutan was a male orangutan named Chichi). Chichi held Omeb like a baby and when Omeb drifted asleep he set him down. Chichi buttoned up a sky-blue shirt and pulled on corduroy pants. He finished his outfit with a bowl hat. When Omeb awoke, Declan implored him to get the party tickets to the finals to watch Xena, and Omeb agreed. Omeb took the party to the glass VIP viewing box over the stadium. Very little space remained in the small box for others after Declan and Chichi entered. Omeb climbed atop Chichi, and Squints and Sansan retracted their shoulders to squeeze between the others and the glass. Around the stadium, in four tall towers, duos of [[witch doctor]]s and (un-enhanced) poets worked together to interpret the magic weather (intoxicating rain) in such a way that they could cast a light-beam spell and spotlight the fighters below. Xena and Ivan sidled the edge of the stadium in quarter squats, which by regulation they were to do twice around the full circumference so that ticket buyers did not feel cheated by the match’s brevity. Before the match started, [[Obadiah]] of [[Obadiah’s Distillery]] knocked at the door. He had not heard back from Romance Star or Gold Trim yet, and Omeb had not yet assured him of Ivan’s victory, which his distillery needed in order to sell his whiskey line [[Ivan 20 Day]], which had received many pre-orders. Obadiah informed Omeb that he had been in business with Omeb’s manager, the stadium owner, for many years, and never encountered surprises of this species. All of the party understood Obadiah’s veiled threat. But most urgent to address, in Squints’ view, was Obadiah’s comment, tucked amidst the sequiturs of his long-winded exposition, that Chichi was an orangutan. “Now that’s just a bit too far,” he said. To soothe Obadiah’s aggression, the party engaged in reassuring behaviors of their own respective flavors. Sansan played her flute. Omeb, suddenly affecting the rhythm and timbre of a sober employee, argued that Ivan’s loss would actually increase the value of Ivan 20 Day because now everyone knew there would not be an Ivan 21 Day. Declan blinked at Obadiah, beaming his androgynous beauty. Squints, helping less, expressed concern about whether sinful behavior was afoot. Obadiah, his aggression inexplicably soothed, decided he could overlook the loss of his lackeys and of Ivan if the party agreed to take on a small enforcement task for him at one of his distillery subsidiaries in [[Outpost B]], where he needed personnel removed as soon as possible. The party assented. * Squints because he’d been persuaded by Obadiah that the issues at Outpost B involved sinners who needed setting right. * Declan because Obadiah agreed to identify the party as Team 7. * Omeb for the promised gold (10% of the branch’s dividends next month). * Sansan just to avoid the awkwardness of refusal. Obadiah promised a cart down below with gold finials would take them south to the work site. Down below the VIP box where this was happening, Xena and Ivan met in the middle of the stadium sand. Each fighter wielded a hammer made of a long handle and a hollow iron rectangular prism at the top. Xena jabbed her hammer into Ivan’s throat and killed him immediately. She fell to her knees and cried, “Won’t a strong man please free me from this life?” Omeb, Squints, and Declan knocked on the window of the glass VIP box and indicated to Xena below with wild gesturing that the party wanted to meet her in her private lounge, and she somehow understood. When the party arrived in Xena’s lounge, Xena was finishing up lighting incense for [[Bemo]], the late prophet. Now listless and without hope of being brutally terminated like in her wistful daydreams, she agreed to ride with the party back to Outpost B, where she lived. In Outpost B, the cart pulled up to the packaging subsidiary of Obadiah’s Distillery. Xena and Chichi had fallen into deep snores in the back of the cart. Little children swarmed the cart to help the party alight, constantly muttering apologies under their breath so that if they offended anyone by mistake, an apology would already be in motion. The distillery lay in an industrial block of the city. A watchtower rose high on the property’s concrete lot. Nearby, dirty children gambled on the roadside, throwing dice, drawing cards, yanking each others’ ears. From the porch of the facility, Foreman 1 called out to the party. He explained that their issue was a union of children in the facility’s Advance Instruction Program, which taught war orphans from the northwest under 10 years of age how to function in the adult world. Their program worked best for kinesthetic learners because it involved labor. As he took the party on a tour of the panopticon-style dormitory in the basement, which some children with shovels were digging a new level of at the bottom, Foreman 1 explained that the ginger girl they’d passed by upstairs, working at the turn edge with the groupies singing showtunes behind her, was the union leader. Her name was Lucille, and she had threatened to lead a strike if the packager did not turn over an offensive, unsustainable proportion of the profits in perpetuity. “About how many percentage points are we talking?” Declan asked. “1%!” the foreman said. “Ah yes, that’s… That’s terrible.” The foreman complained that if the children got their way, this would damage the integrity of the Advance Instruction Program, whose core imperative was to impart the value of obedience to the young. Obedience, he said, was the foundation of social harmony, without which there would be chaos. Omeb wet his lips. Rooms to stay had been made available for the party in the office of Foreman 1 in the second story of the watchtower, which the Foreman 1 they’d been speaking to admitted that he was not Foreman 1. Actually, he was Foreman 2. It was just that he was embarrassed to introduce himself as such because being second in command was not masculine.