#76

Fox will be sitting in his chamber; the one past the penultimate one, where “Bones” Ellson will be kept. Lefty will have stopped replying; he'll be able to see, through his recently enhanced sight, that the mobster will have given himself over to blind anger, and will thus be incapable of speaking. He will only have two compatriots to speak to, then: his other heads.

“So, boss,” Mack Greasy will say. “Why are these traps needed? Everything is so...deliberate, and yet...illogical.”

“Makes sense to me!” Puck will squawk. “He needs 'em for 'is trope-magic! He's aligning the Mob members to a bunch of people on the worlds we're gonna take over!”

“I'm aware of the plans for conquest, but admit that the idea of magic does not appeal to my idea of sensibility.”

“Be calmed, Mack,” Fox will say, soothingly. “The trope-energy involved will allow me to harvest the fuel of our world directly—which will change us. Make us more powerful. We may no longer need the bicycle for transportation.”

The two other parties besides Fox will pause, and in this pause Fox will think back to when these two were part of a simpler life that he had created; one he had made when he had first divided himself across time. Before he made the bicycle, and saw the nature of the cosmos when he pedaled the bicycle outside of his home universe. He was just simple past-tense Kit Umiho, né Su, back then; a scientist. But when he split, becoming named Kl-this (a Son) and K-that (a Father), he decided to be more. Much more. And soon he will become more again.

The others will hear his thoughts, which he'll remember they can do; he'll try to seal them off to them in the future. “Aren't we gonna end up absorbing those alternate incarnations o' yours, Fox?” Puck will say, even as he notices Mina briefly appear through the room's portal frame off to the side.

“Indeed we will, Puck,” Fox will reply.

“What point will that serve? Will it make us inta faeries?!”

“Perhaps. It will confer a certain degree of supernatural power to us, in any case.”

The pondering on Fox's behalf will then continue in private, as both Puck and Mack Greasy fall silent once again. They often do so, once he has made his point.

He was the creator of new life, in that mind-shattering instance, when he had lost himself in the timeline. Each new life was a probe into a new form of existence; a cleric, or a German man, or an Emperor. Or, just perhaps, a dimension hopping beatnik adventurer, destined to be corrupted by himself, turn evil, die and be reborn, to fight himself once again, when “he” had become Kul'ul the Demon, or Fox the Policeman.

As K- (or Kay-) Prime, the original Father, he had wanted to become a Policeman. One with a whole team of cops to serve with him. One with logic—one with emotion—and one between; the perfect trio. So he created two more duplicates—in doing so, however, his head, and the heads of the fresh two, were destroyed. They needed to be replaced...with the visages of animals. To fulfill an urge that came to him from his future self, who already had this head; the head of The Fox. The choice was a time paradox, as a result; and in that paradox, which was one of many, Kul'ul began to form. Kul'ul the living Time Nexus. A meaningful name: K with no “l” afterward means that it's a Father, though there's still an “l” there, meaning it could be a Son. An Ouroboros birth, a living paradox, an Eldritch Abomination, still as of now not totally birthed in Fox. Yet.

“To whom, if I may ask again,” Mack will begin. “Do these mobsters form analogues? And will we face these selected people?”

Fox will pause. “The mobster known as Esau is the human boy named Jacob Berkley, from Earth-Beta-2; while Tekoa is his brother, Amos. The analogues are formed on religious grounds, as you might guess. Wilhelm, then, is the girl Wilhelmina Berkley, Jacob's cousin. Curious that she is turned male across the universes, but she isn't alone; Zanne is the girl Susie Sanford, with her extended name being Suzanne. Susie is the companion of the APPLE-suffering mutant we've observed named You, who becomes, as part of a hideous pun, the one named Eye. Fritz is nearly You's other companion, who is one of us: the Son named Klaus.

“This leaves Usius and Bones Ellson. Ellson must be, based on the alphabetical nature of his name, Doctor Kay, who is once more one of us. Usius, then, must be both Mark and Aurel, who are analogues of each other. It is another horrible twist of language; for you see, with the names fused, one gets Marcus Aurelius.

“And yes. We will face all of them. That is the key nature of our game here; the events will mirror the journeys, the tortures, and indeed, the deaths of the analogues who will be our foes. It creates a story-pattern which we will drain to fuel our escape from this universe.”

“To rule begin our rule of the Multiverse, right?” Puck will say. “Or will we escape to the faerie kingdom?!”

Fox will not see a reason to answer, instead thinking of how it all was once he became the Third Policeman. It was decided early on that Mack Greasy or MacCruiskeen or whatever and Pluck or Puck or whatever would become part of his body; so he could feed on the self-energies implanted in them by the duplication process. This was so he could gain more power and eventually make it here, to absorbing the story-power from the New O'Grady Mob; to in turn break from Universe-Beta-4, and thus drink in its Cascade energies. That is to say, the energies which manifested, in two of the three Cascade universes, as a gasoline-like substance that those two locales called “fuel”. A literal miracle substance, because it was born in The Unscene, the space between universes.

The casual observer might end up wondering why this was all necessary, and the solution was obvious. When he biked out into the Multiverse, he saw that it was full of corruption. It was full of evil, created by a trio of ultra-powered hooligans called the Three Enemies of the Multiverse. The First Enemy had created The Cascade, and thus the fuel; ironically, that same fuel would prove, in Fox's capable hands, to be his undoing. At least, so he figured; it hadn't happened yet. He would destroy the Three Enemies and bring order to the Multiverse, and thus peace, to all of existence.

He would be the Ultimate Policeman.

He just need to break a few thousand eggs first. Eggs which were in the process of being laid on Earth-Beta-3.

One more trial would await Sinister, who was nothing more than an old grudge. Fox would allow himself revenge on him, for Sinister directly served no purpose in the plan. Once his mob was defeated, it would all be finished.

Though it would actually just be the beginning.