A worm turned in Giles’s belly as he and Tiffany walked up to the security gate. But he needn’t have worried. Tiffany’s ability to glamour was still as smooth as cinnamon honey.

He got a glimpse of the image she put in the guard’s brain as he sat on his stool, alert and bored: quiet nebbishy girl, moderately good looking boyfriend, worked in tech down in Silicon Valley. The guard stamped their hands and they were through.

Under the streetlights and the extra lights with generators which had been set up here and there, the milling people quietly congregated toward the main stage in a steady flow. To see him, Giles thought with a flush.

“They’re going to see you,” Tiffany murmured like she answered his thoughts. “And here you are. But the question is, where are you?”

Killington had injected him with something and made him tell a story until he fell into some twilight world. What did happen to your body when an unripe story kicked your soul into darkness? Was he in a trance in some nameless room in City Hall? Had he vanished, pulling in a ploof of imploding air as he left?

“Does it matter?” he asked. “Can’t I just walk up to the stage and finish my story? As me, now?”

“If you do, your story will not be finished. It will be an endless Ouroboros, round and round. You are telling the crowd this story now as we live it. You can’t end it by simply walking back to the stage and saying finis.”

Giles nodded wearily, feeling again the lack of sleep and the weight of all that had happened. “Do you even need me then?” he asked.

“Yes!” She pulled him round so he faced her blazing eyes. “You are the teller of this tale. Now spin a tale worthy of your skills!” She had never been angry with him; he was amazed how much it hurt. How he wished he could collapse and sleep!

But Euclid stretched out his sheet of parchment and each line was an alternate version of the tale. He could do better than collapse and sleep. A tale needed closure. A tale needed characters to recur, it needed repetition and grace.

“We go this way,” he found himself saying, and taking the lead. They walked up to the City Hall building. It was also guarded and these guards also were cream puffs. “Important meeting, mustn’t be late,” Tiffany murmured, and they were inside.

There was only one room his body could be in, if it was still here: the door with those two beefy henchmen standing in front of it. Mr. He-Is-Risen and Mr. Wiccan Pentagram. For a satisfying story, he had to defeat those two somehow.

He was a clumsy fighter and he couldn’t gain those skills even in his own story. He’d found that out when he tried to attack the mad scientist in the control room. But maybe he could shape what those two were like?

Giles was a liberal and could accept that bullies come on both sides of the aisle. In intellectual honesty, he couldn’t now have the Jesus Beef be worse than the Wiccan Beef. He’d worked one summer on an organic farm for a hippy tyrant boss with a long blond beard and hard stony eyes and he’d worked for two years for a fascist tyrant boss in an air-conditioned office and there’d been only two differences between them. The first had been addicted to pot and the second to cocaine. And the fascist spoke more clearly.

He throbbed as he remembered Witch Beef rabbit punching him and saying “Y’like that, y’little perv?” The story needed those two to be punched back hard, he told himself.

When he looked at Tiffany, her eyes gleamed into his and she smiled broadly.

At the corner of the hallway was a potted plant, a Jack-in-the-Pulpit, with flowers made of a flat white spear with a golden praying man kneeling in front. Maybe this much of the story he could manipulate. It’s just light enough to pick up, he told himself, but heavy enough to knock out a beefy guard.

When he hefted it, it was lighter than it looked. Tiffany was still smiling at him and nodding mischievously. Standing just around the corner from the two guards, Giles said in a moderate voice, “You like that, you little perv?” And raised the flowerpot high.

A moment later, the He is Risen guard appeared at the corner, posed dramatically like a Greek hero with muscles flexed and gun drawn. But he didn’t know enough to point it around the corner and slam himself into position after it, Giles affirmed, and mother of all angels, it was so!

He had leisure to bring the pot down with a deeply soul satisfying crunch on the guard’s head.

He stood there with shards of clay and caked dirt still in his hands, smiling like a kid who’s just mastered a gaming trick.

“Richie, dude? You ok?” Slow footsteps came from around the corner. If only he had another flower pot.

Tiffany touched his shoulder and handed him one. Had she magicked it up? Or had he made it? He was getting the hang of being the teller in a story at last. He couldn’t change his own abilities but he could influence background details, enough to help him. The other guard was also dumb enough to walk around the corner without his gun pointed.

“What th—” was all the Wiccan Beef had time to say before Giles smashed the pot into clods and shards and heard the guard’s “Whooooof!”

And that was that.