Fyodor had been keeping the snake in a fish tank on top of the chest of drawers in his room. Just like David Huntsman's pig, Fyodor's snake possessed an appearance that was unlike any snake John had ever seen. The snake was bright red, which wasn't unusual, what was unusual was the black symbols all over its body that looked like ancient hieroglyphic alphabets, the largest one being square on top of the snake's head. Now that it had successfully ascertained that this was the snake, the raven moved on to step two. It reached into the tank with its left hand and retrieved the snake; its right hand it held out in front of its chest in preparation for what was to come next. The cavity in John's chest that the raven had created with its beak opened up and out of it came the black egg that John had excreted weeks ago. The snake was drawn to the egg. It uncoiled itself from John's arm and touched its head against the egg, which caused it to light up and transform. The snake's color changed from red to golden brown and the symbols on its body changed into black rings. It looked like a regular python and had gained the ability to speak.

"Oh, it's you," the snaked said, sounding annoyed.

"Yes, it's me. You always try to hide from me and I always end up finding you; why haven't you realized yet how futile it is to try and hide from me?"

"You know I don't like being a part of your schemes, I just want to have fun with people for my own pleasure, can't you just leave me alone to do that?"

"Afraid not, your skills are too valuable, and besides, you've been having lots of fun with Dr Milichenko here, getting millions of people to believe his nonsense, it's time to start doing real work now."

"I'd like to stay with him if that's at all possible."

"He is very good, isn't he? Sure, you can stay with him, he is a big part of my plans after all."

"What exactly is it that you'd like his help with?"

"For now I'd like him to attend the Growth and Opportunities Conference and make contact with Sonya Kruschenko, she's the human that the lion has adopted."

"The lion and I have never gotten along, you know that."

"The plan here is to get to the lion through Sonya, if Fyodor can use his skills of persuasion to convince her to come over to our side then the goose won't be able to awaken the lion and the lion's strength will belong to us."

"We've done this before and the few times that it's worked the end result has been pure disaster, the lion's vassal always allows the power to go to their heads and end up committing wanton destruction rather than using the strength constructively."

"This time I've put together a far more sophisticated operation, so the lion's strength, if we can acquire it, will be put to use much more strategically."

"None of what you're saying to me is anything that I haven't heard before, but since you've found me and awakened me I have no choice but to go along with this, we'll go to the conference and I'll report back to you with the results. Just out of curiosity, how many of us have you assembled so far?"

"In addition to you I've got the pig, the bull, the cat and the rat."

"And the goose?"

"I don't know what the goose is up to, it's keeping a very low profile, but there's no way that it's anywhere close to being as far along as we are, not with the amount of preparation that I've put in this time."

The raven hung around at Fyodor's place while it waited for darkness so it could fly back to the US undetected. During this time Fyodor said little, afraid that if he said the wrong thing this being of incalculable power would retaliate. With them having a lot of time to kill, John decided to use it to ask Fyodor some of the questions that he had been reluctant to ask earlier.

"You speak a lot about Christian values, but Christianity, in fact, religion in general, has historically been incompatible with communism, so how then do you explain your promotion of Christian values?"

Fyodor understood that it was now the human host with whom he was talking and as such he wasn't in as much danger as when he was dealing with the raven.

"I am not so myopic that my belief in communism blinds me to the benefits of other ideas. You see, communism gives people a philosophy for orienting themselves in the material world, but people have other needs besides their material needs, mainly spiritual, and for westerners the best provider of spiritual orientation is Christianity and Christian values."

"But this is Eastern Europe."

"Yes but I consider us westerners, after all, our skin isn't black, our eyes aren't small and slanted."

John had read both Marx and Lenin and understood well the deep disdain that both men had for religion, calling it the opium of the people. For a supposedly devoted communist Fyodor's exaltation of Christian values was strange, too strange for John to make sense of how two incompatible ideas could co-exist so easily within Fyodor's mind.

"Stop trying to understand this man," the raven said to John.

"None of what he espouses makes any sense! He can't be a devout Christian and a communist."

"This man is not a communist."

"But he lives in this tiny flat and doesn't own a car."

"That's not because he's a communist; he lives like this because he inherited a fortune from his father that he pissed away on bad investments, and he's no academic either, everything that he's ever published has been widely discredited and mocked."

"What about his job at the World Bank?"

"His father arranged it for him, Roman Milichenko was one of the biggest steel magnates in Ukraine and Russia and he knew people at the World Bank that owed him favors, that's how Fyodor got a job there. It wasn't an important job, he was a low level analyst whose job was to track grain yields in South America. The job wasn't hard at all and yet somehow he found a way to fail at it and get himself fired for incompetence."

"If his father was a steel magnate then he must've inherited millions."

"Billions, actually."

"What happened to it?"

"He invested all of it in a company whose big idea was to build roller coasters throughout cities and use them as a form of public transportation."

"What kind of idiot would invest all of their money in that?"

"This one."

"Then that means..."

"He's a fraud, everything that comes out of his mouth is utter nonsense; he has no real beliefs, whatever viewpoint will increase his popularity with his stupid fans and make them buy his book and pay to attend his absurd lectures is what he believes."

"Then why is he important to you?"

"Because of precisely that! Surely you can see the myriad of uses that I could have for him, even if he is completely ridiculous."

"His ridiculousness is transparent though, it doesn't take a genius to see that this guy's full of it."

"Yes you're right, and from what I gather Ms. Kruschenko is an extremely well educated and highly capable individual, so maybe sending him isn't such a good idea, I may have to go myself."

"Why wasn't that your plan from the beginning?"

"Because of what the snake said, the lion and I have had some bad experiences in the past, and you can't perform an awakening if there's distrust between you."

"Sounds like the lion might be a lost cause."

"Maybe, but we have to try, if we get the lion it's game over, that's how strong it is."

The raven took a while to consider the situation it found itself in with the lion, a long while, while at the same time John was thinking about how, if the lion was as strong as the raven said, it was probably a good idea if the raven failed in its effort to recruit it. The conclusion reached by the raven was that it was too risky for it to reach out to the lion directly. They'd be proceeding with their original plan of having Fyodor make contact with her at the conference and hopefully he would be impressive enough for Sonya not to see through him.

When darkness fell the Raven didn't feel like making the long walk out of the city so it asked Fyodor to take it to the roof of his building. The building was high enough that nobody in the adjacent buildings would be able to see them. Once on the roof the raven released its wings and got ready to take off, but not before making sure Fyodor knew that failure wouldn't be tolerated.

"Don't fuck this up!" The raven turned its head and said to Fyodor, who was standing behind it.

"No, I won't," Fyodor responded tremulously.

Fyodor was too well acquainted with failure and its consequences not to be terrified of the prospect of failing a supernatural being and the consequences thereof. When the raven took off it was with such speed that to Fyodor it looked like it had simply vanished. He had become involved in something that he couldn't get himself out of through his usual method of spewing nonsense gobbledygook, the only thing he was good for.