The blackened portal opened, and Kraid stepped through into the suburban streets of New Zealand. He took a look around at the quaint homes and sneered in disgust.

“Surprisingly specific destination,” Kraid said. “I didn’t know you’d been to NZ.”

“I haven’t really, we saw this place inside Hawke’s brain once,” Vell said. That prompted a raised eyebrow from Joan. “Long story. Come on, this is his house.”

Vell took the lead and knocked on the door of the house. It was soon answered by someone Vell recognized, also thanks to a brain-visit, as Hawke’s mother.

“Hi, uh, Mrs. Hughes? Is Hawke here?”

“Yes. Are you friends of his?”

“Yeah, Vell Harlan, he might have mentioned me?” Vell said. Mrs. Hughes nodded. “Good. And, uh, weird follow up question, is there more than one of Hawke right now?”

“No no. I’ve heard on the news about that, though, there are lots of people all of a sudden. Come in, come in!”

Vell breathed a sigh of relief as he stepped inside. He didn’t know if he could handle any more doppelganger shenanigans today. Unlike Lee’s role in many selfish businessmen’s desires or Harley’s presence in sexual fantasies, no one had any reason to wish for more than one of Hawke.

The surprisingly trusting Mrs. Hughes led the way to Hawke’s room, where the man himself was lounging and reading a good book.

“Hey, Vell. Harley. Lee...and Kraid,” Hawke said. The book fell out of his hands. “What’s going on?”

“You remember all of us?”

“Yeah? Why would I not?”

“Okay, things are confusing right now, so let’s just recap, what happened to get you back in New Zealand instead of at the Einstein-Odinson?”

“Oh I’m just super smart and finished all my coursework early,” Hawke said. “Staff said it was the fastest anyone had ever graduated, but I was just doing my thing, you know.”

“Wow. I’m touched that you considered your memories of us as important as getting out of all the craziness.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s a long story, but the key takeaway is that Kim’s in trouble.”

Hawke’s cheek tattoos curled slightly as he frowned.

“What’s going on?”

“It’ll be easier to explain after Kraid gets your memories back in order,” Vell said. “And for the record, I’m really sorry about this.”

Hawke grit his teeth and braced for the worst as Kraid stepped up and poked him on the forehead. He blinked slightly with a look of dawning comprehension, froze in place, and then started to pat his broad chest.

“Has the bad part happened yet?”

“No, we’re pretty much done,” Kraid said. “Get him up to speed, I’ll set up the teleporter again.”

“Wait a minute, that hurt like hell when you did it to me,” Harley said.

“And me,” Lee said. “I was a soul in a rock at the time, granted, but it still hurt.”

“Oh I pretty much had the spell figured out after I did it to Joan,” Kraid said. “I just hurt you two because you annoy me. I don’t give a fuck about him, though.”

Kraid waved flippantly over his shoulder and then waltzed away to ready the teleporter, leaving a deeply offended group of loopers behind.

“I know I just promised to be less aggro-”

“Oh, Kraid doesn’t count, I hate him too,” Lee said.

“Great, because seriously, fuck that guy,” Harley said. “Hope he gets hit by a bus.”

“A big one,” Lee said. “Fully loaded.”

In a very normal house in a very normal city in Japan, a very normal mother and father lived with a very, aggressively, utterly normal daughter. It was an existence so utterly and completely mundane that the house was entirely unaffected by the dissolving reality outside. Up and down the street, cracks opened up in thin air, confused doppelgangers tried to determine who was the original, and clashing versions of the same overlapping realities crashed and tore into one another in a futile attempt to assert themselves as the one true reality. None of them were true, and none of them were reality. But none of that mattered inside the tiny, normal house. The Wish Fish made sure none of it mattered.

He had himself hidden in the folded space inside the utterly normal house, tucked away in a pocket of his own making to avoid disrupting the aggressive normalcy he’d created for Kim. Even as the world fell apart, he made sure Kim’s wish was granted. To the best of his ability. There was a single, glaring flaw in his ability to grant Kim’s wish. Under normal circumstances it might not have been a problem -at least not until long after he’d cracked the universe open and remade it in his own image- but Wish Fish was watching a secondary complication develop in real time.

“They’ve got that big one that screams a lot now,” the Cintamani Stone reported. The Stone had been the one to grant Hawke’s wish, and knew immediately when it had been broken. “That’s all four of them now, plus Kraid and that other girl.”

Wish Fish tried to contain his disappointment. He’d been hoping that having their wishes come true would keep Kim’s friends complacent -or at least slow them down and confuse them enough to thwart their efforts. Kraid and his memory-restoring magic had put a harsh end to that hope.

“This is getting a little worrying, Fish,” the Stone said.

“We got this far,” Wish Fish said. “And we’re almost done. We only need to delay them a little while longer. Take a more direct approach.”

“Direct how?”

“We’re going to murder them.”

“That is pretty direct,” the Stone said. “You sending me in, coach?”

“No. Not you. No offense, but you’re a rock. You’re most lethal when someone else throws you.”

“Hurtful, but understandable,” the Cintamani Stone said.

“We need somebody a little more...active,” Wish Fish said. “I think I know just the guy.”

“Almost done with the portal,” Kraid said. “We’ll be off to see your robot friend soon enough.”

Kraid had opted to perform his teleportation ritual right outside Hawke’s home, in full view of the entire New Zealand suburb. Vell could see people staring at them through their windows, keeping a fearful eye on Kraid. He couldn’t blame them. Kraid’s reputation as the most evil person on the planet preceded him.

As the ritual continued, Vell paid less and less attention to the fearful spectators. He still noticed when some of them started to turn away from Kraid and look down the street. He gave himself a moment to sigh and then turned in the same direction they were looking.

“Uh, guys?”

“Yes Vell?”

“Are there any monkeys in New Zealand?”

“No, Vell,” Hawke said. “No there are not.”

Yet, down the street, a lone monkey was shambling in their direction. It had coarse white fur, long limbs, and a dark black face and hands. It was moving at an awkward, stilted pace, as if it was relearning how to move. That awkwardness didn’t stop it from making a beeline for Vell and his group.

“Okay, monkey in a place a monkey should not be,” Vell said. “Not too different from what we’ve handed before.”

“At least this one is small,” Harley said. The creature approaching them would be maybe up to her waist at full height. “It’s like what, a lemur or something?”

“I think it’s a langur, technically,” Lee said. “From India.”

“India?”

Up to this point, Kraid had been entirely uninterested in the approaching monkey, but the geographic location drew his attention. He looked up from his ritual and took a close look at the langur. He took a close look at its awkward pace, seeing how it moved its forelimbs with unsteady motions. Just below its furry wrists, a seam of sorts was visible, like the extremities had been severed and reattached.

“Oh shit,” Kraid said. “It’s the Whole Monkey.”

“It’s a wha-”

Hawke’s question pivoted hard into panicked screaming as the langur leaped on to his shoulders and started trying to bite his head. He screamed in horror and ran back and forth while struggling to remove the monkey from his head.

“Hawke, stand still,” Vell shouted. He’d drawn his pistols and was trying to get a bead on the monkey before it mauled Hawke. His marksmanship skills were second to none, but he didn’t want to take risks when the target was attached to Hawke’s head. The sound of Vell’s revolvers clicking into place cut through Hawke’s panic, and he stood still long enough for Vell to aim and fire.

The bullet never found its mark. Vell’s bullet passed through the space the monkey had been, but there was nothing there. Instead, the langur was clinging to Vell’s forearm, and it sank sharp fangs into his wrist, causing him to shout in pain and drop the gun. The monkey leaped off of Vell’s arm and started making a run at Kraid.

The world’s most evil billionaire showed no fear, and drew his soulstone to fire off a bolt of concentrated dark magic at the malevolent monkey. It was a quick and efficient disintegration spell, personally designed by Kraid to kill things instantaneously yet incredibly painfully. The small bolt of green-black fire hit the monkey’s chest and did absolutely nothing.

“Motherfucker,” Kraid said. He snapped his fingers and magically jumped from one place to another, causing the monkey to miss its diving leap. “It really is the Whole Monkey.”

“We can see it’s a whole monkey, you evil bastard, what does that mean?”

“It means it’s hopped up on wish magic, Joan,” Kraid snapped back. “It’s the Monkey’s Paw. Must’ve used all the free magic floating around to put itself back together.”

“And make itself indestructible, apparently,” Lee said. She’d managed to keep the Whole Monkey at bay with an ice shield, but it had bounced off and gone after Harley, and she was barely keeping ahead of it. Vell tried to aim and fire at the animal once more, but it teleported away from his bullets again, this time appearing on Joan’s shoulders to bite her neck.

“Wish granters can’t grant wishes for themselves,” Lee shouted back. “I could see some animal rights activists wishing for an intact monkey, but who’d wish for an indestructible one?”

“It’s a liberal interpretation,” Kraid said. “All these wishy bastards are tied into the desires of humanity now. There’s got to be someone out there with a desire vague enough to turn into an indestructible monkey.”

Vell wiped some blood off his bitten wrist and looked around. The Whole Monkey was currently gnawing on Lee, despite Joan and Harley’s best efforts to shake it off. Joan managed to get a grip on the langur and pry it free, tossing it away from Lee.

“Oh, just let me handle this, children,” Kraid said. He stepped up, green fire in both hands, to square off with the monkey. “I’ve got wards to handle worse things than monkeys.”

The Whole Monkey then leaped at Kraid, and he made no attempt to stop it, entrusting his hundreds of layers of magical wards and shields to protect him. The monkey bounced right off of Kraid’s protections. Even with the backing of wish magic, his armor was impenetrable. He had protected himself from all but the most impossible situations, and attack by a monkey was far from impossible.

“There we go,” Kraid said. “And now-”

He snapped his fingers and fired off one of his most devastating dark magics, a spark of deathly fire that would burn the target from the inside out. The Whole Monkey coughed up a cloud of black smoke, and then got right back to mauling Vell, entirely unaffected by what should have disintegrated them.

“Damn it. It took me decades to get this invincible,” Kraid said. “How’d a monkey pull it off?”

Vell lifted his head. Lining the streets on either side, the gawking onlookers still remained, watching the chaotic fight unfold. Vell made eye contact with one, and they looked away. As they averted their gaze, realization struck.

“It’s them,” Vell said. “The neighbors! It’s connected to what the people watching want!”

“Well why the fuck do they want the monkey to kill us?” Harley snapped. “Aren’t you supposed to want the good guys to win?”

“I don’t give a shit what they want,” Kraid said. “If the audience is the problem, then there will be no audience!”

Kraid raised his fist, holding up a soulstone alight with green fire. Vell watched the audience tremble with fear, and a lightbulb went off. He picked up his gun and fired, shooting the soulstone right out of Kraid’s hand.

“Harlan!”

“I have a plan,” Vell said. One that hopefully didn’t involve nuking an entire neighborhood. “Kraid! You have to stay here and distract the monkey while the rest of us get out of here!”

“I have to fucking what?”

Kraid attempted to blast the monkey again, to no avail, and it leaped up to him and tried to tear out one of the floating bones in his skeletal arm. It didn’t work, but it annoyed Kraid anyway.

“You think I don’t have better things to do than smack a monkey, Harlan?”

“A little bit,” Vell said. “But mostly I want you to distract it while we get away. Good luck with that.”

Kraid turned his full, malicious attention to Vell Harlan. He very briefly contemplated how many horrible ways he could make Vell die -and then he saw movement among their neighborly spectators. A much darker, more evil lightbulb went off.

“Alright, Harlan, if that’s how you want to play,” Kraid growled. “I think I can keep the monkey pretty well occupied by helping him kill you.”

Vell jumped out of the way as the first bolts of green-black fire flew his way. He took cover behind a car, joined soon after by most of his friends as they ran from Kraid’s fury.

“I don’t like your plan, Vell,” Joan screamed. Another bolt of fire tore through the car window above them, raining broken glass down on Joan.

“I got this,” Vell said. “Lee, can you take out the monkey? Freeze it, or something?”

“I think the mass murdering billionaire has recently become our top priority, Vell!”

“Trust me!”

Lee looked up at the bolts of lethal green fire raining down around them. Then she turned her attention to Harley, the friend she’d been feuding with not long ago, but for Vell’s intervention. Trusting Vell might get her killed. But if she could not trust Vell, there was nothing in this world worth trusting. She took a deep breath, braced herself, and ran out of cover.

The Whole Monkey, dumbfounded by the sudden change of allegiances, was still processing the fact that Kraid was apparently on its side now. It was content to let him rain down fire on his -their- enemies while it sat on the sidelines, not even moving as Lee jumped out from behind the car, dodged a barrage of firebolts, and swept a wave of ice towards the Whole Monkey. The frozen water wrapped around the monkey and completely encased it, freezing the langur solid where it sat.

The bolts of fire stopped as Kraid immediately gave up his attempts to kill Vell, and he examined the monkey instead.

“That better work, Harlan.”

“It should. But we should probably still get out of here super fast.”

“Hold on,” Hawke said. “What the fuck was that?”

“It’s like Harley said. People want the bad guy to lose a fight,” Vell said. “And Kraid’s the bad guy. Get him to go on the monkey’s side, monkey becomes the bad guy, boom, easy win.”

“A plan you’re very lucky I considered slightly smarter than just killing the entire neighborhood,” Kraid said.

“So you were just pretending,” Joan said.

“Of course I was! If I really wanted to kill you all, I could just teleport your hearts right out of your chests,” Kraid said. The thought sounded very amusing to him, even.

“Right.”

“Don’t tempt me, Ms. Marsh,” Kraid hissed. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to finish teleporting us all so I can get this the fuck over with.”

Kraid returned to his ritual, leaving Vell and his friends to bandage all their monkey related wounds and brace for the next step. Lee called up her map of magic and appraised how close they were to Wish Fish’s scheme succeeding.

“Looks like we still have time,” she said. “The progress of them draining magical power is consistent, but slow.”

Even as she spoke, the magic grid started to fluctuate. Power began to flow towards the epicenter of magical illumination -towards the Wish Fish. From within his icy prison, the Whole Monkey started to shriek and scream, struggling against its icy confines. The loopers drew their weapons and kept a close eye on the ice prison, but the monkey never broke free. In fact, its screams and struggling slowly faded into nothing. Lee watched with horror as one of the glowing concentrations of magic on her map slowly dissipated before finally vanishing.

“What just-”

“Vell, break it open,” Lee commanded. Vell took a single shot at the icy prison and cracked open the frozen shell. Inside, the Whole Monkey was motionless, dead and drained.

“What happened to it?”

“The Wish Fish,” Lee said. “It’s not just draining magic from people anymore, it’s draining from the other wish-granters.”

All across the map, lights were slowly fading and blinking out, their power siphoned away towards the Wish Fish.

“So, uh, heh, any chance this backfires and actually gives us more time to work with?”

Harley already knew the answer to the question, even before Lee started to shake her head.

“Kraid, I don’t mean to hurry you,” Lee said. “But if we don’t get to Kim in about fifteen minutes, a very rude fish is going to become a God.”

“I got five minutes left on this spell,” Kraid said. “I can get us in the ballpark. After that, it’s up to you and the gang.”

Kraid looked over his shoulder at Vell, Lee, Harley, Hawke, and Joan.

“Well, maybe a fish god won’t be so bad,” he mumbled to himself. “I never liked fishsticks anyway.”