You sit on the dock next to Stan’s disemboweled, headless torso, kicking your legs back and forth over the trickling river stream.

“I know you’re still there, Stan!” you shout down at the placid waters. “I’m not leaving anytime soon!”

No response.

“I know you think I’m busy!” you say. “I know you think I don’t have all day to camp on your body! And you’re right!”

You glance left toward the river’s shoreline, taking note of a trash bin overflowing with beer bottles. "Hmmm..."

According to traditional Malaysian folklore, Penanggalan vampires like Jellyfish Stan can be killed by pouring broken glass into her neck cavity, shredding their organs when they try to plug themselves back into their bodies…

As a kid, you loved to tell your classmates gross facts about the bizarre rituals needed to kill undead monsters: Paper talismans. Stingray tails. Bullets to the brain. Garlic and salt. Stakes through the heart…

You taste acid in the back of your throat. You tear your gaze away from the trashcan and its glass bottles, exhaling a ragged breath.

“I just want to talk!” you shout toward the opaque water. “If you’re not interested in that, I’ll just leave you and your torso be!”

The river stirs slightly, concentric ripples spreading out across the water.

“Mind you, I’ll be taking your coat,” you shout, “and all the swag in it!’

“Leave my swag alone!” Jellyfish Stan wails, spraying droplets everywhere as she breaches the surface. Her intestines rise from the river like a squid’s tentacles and whip toward your dangling feet.

You point a finger at Stan. Your jian whistles through the air, batting away the intestines and leaving sharp nicks in Stan’s digestive system.

Stan screams and retracts her intestine. “Dammit!” she hisses, glaring at me with bugged-out eyes. “Cryptatown’s supposed to be our town. You don’t belong here, humie!”

“Probably not,” you agree, sword returning to your hand like a tame falcon. “But I still have questions.”

Jellyfish Stan rolls her eyes and sinks back halfway into the river. “What do you want, humie?” she asks with a groan.

“Personal advice.”

Stan stares up at you from the river with narrowed eyes. “Personal advice,” she repeats.

“Personal advice,” you say, repeating her repetition. “If I—hypothetically speaking—wanted to purchase some fresh, free-range Ogre meat, where would I go to get some?”

Jellyfish Stan grimaces. “Eew,” she mutters.

“Eew?”

“Just...imagining you trying to devour an Ogre with your humie teeth,” she explains. “Just ain’t right, you know?”

“Less right than monsters eating humans?” you point out.

“Imagine a milk cow snacking on your human fingers,” Stan tells you with a glare. “See if you can keep your gorge from rising.”

That’s…actually an interesting point. You find yourself starting to visualize that thought experiment before remembering that you’re in a time crunch.

“Spill the beans, Stan,” you tell the Penanggalan. “Where does Morgaeous sell his livestock?”

Jellyfish Stan hisses like an angry goose: “Go suck on your own vein-juice!”

“Hmmm,” you say thoughtfully. You flip open Stan’s coat with the tip of your sword and pluck a glass vial from one of her many inner pockets.

“Hey!” Stan growls. “Put that down! That’s my merch!”

“What’s this?” you say with false cheer, holding up the vial and examining the thread of light dancing inside it. “A forsaken soul trapped in a bottle? Well, that’s just evil!”

You smash the vial against the dock’s metal post. Glass sprinkles everywhere; the disembodied soul rises up toward the sky, whistling a song of relief and freedom before vanishing into the next world.

“Nooooo!” Stan shrieks, rising up from the waters towardsyou. “Those were freshly picked!”

Your wiggle your finger. Your jian dances in front of you, forcing Stan and her prehensile intestines away.

“So, this Morgaeous fellow you work for…is he a tough guy?” you ask.

“He’d bust your butt into the ground, witch-man!” Stan tells you, without a trace of her usual bluster.

“Then send me his way.” You snatch two more soul vials from her coat pocket. “If you’re right, he’ll bust my butt, and you’ll get some proxy revenge.” You shrug. “And if you’re wrong, at least I’m out of your hair.”

Stan’s eyes narrow to pinpricks of thoughtful suspicion. She’s half-convinced, but still not quite there yet.

You break the last two soul vials, releasing the poor spirits from their prisons of glass.

“Okay, okay!” Jellyfish Stan sobs. “He’s at the Center! Morgaeous runs his meat shop in the back of the Lizardman Heritage Center! The next auction’s at quarter past five today!”

You touch a finger to the brim of your hat. “Pleasure doing business with you, Stan.” You crouch by Stan’s hollowed-out body, pull out the list Fausta gave you, and start rifling through her trenchcoat pockets.

“Hey!” Stan spits, rising up from the water, intestines wiggling threateningly. “Hands off my swag! That’s mine!”

“Hold your horses, Stan,” you say, pulling out packets of painkillers and disinfectants in shrink-wrapped syringes. “I’ll pay you for these. Do you take teardrops? Or do you prefer to barter?”

What would a Penanggalan like Stan like? She’s got plenty of blood and spinal fluid; maybe she’d like bone marrow, or eyeball juice, or something? The barter economy in Cryptatown is quite the headache, especially when it comes to accommodating special monster diets.

“Hey Stan!” you shout, looking back over your shoulder. “Could I give you some good-luck charms in exchange for these these meds?”

“Screw you,” Stan mutters bitterly from her water refuge.

“Sorry!” you say cheerfully. “You’re pretty, but I don’t swing that way!”

You hear a wordless, echoing groan in response.

#

“Guys!” You say, stepping through your apartment door. “I think I figured out where Philip is…!”

Your voice trails off.

“What the hell?” you shout. “One Thing! I told you all to do one thing!”

“I’m sorry!” Fortuna blubbers, clutching her smart-phone with white-fingered hands. “I was just trying to make a sandwich for Mr. Lynn, and…!”

“Complications arose,” Fausta tells you, having the grace to looking abashed.

C nods, hiding their true expression behind their Charlie Chaplin mask.

Your kitchen floor has a large, blackened char mark in the center, filled with half-melted shards of broken glass from a jar.

The rest of your flat is positively infested with tiny, glowing spirits –– fierce red salamanders and ghostly green sylphs. As you watch, a new sylph crawls out of Fortuna’s phone, pulling itself through the glass screen like a swimmer breaching the surface of a pool.

Felix Lynn stands in the center of your room away from everyone else, a terrified look on his face. "Give it to me straight, Mr. Worawoot," he says. "How bad does it look?"

You look. You see patches of silver goo crawl across his body and clothes like a swarm of insects, leaving strange circuit-like lines in his flesh in their wake. Tiny spirits surround Mr. Lynn in a bubble; the salamanders breathe fire on any nanomachines that try crawling off his shoes, while the Sylphs flap their wings to create a barely visible bubble of wind around the poor Mr. Lynn.

“Well,” you say at last. “You haven’t unleashed a grey goo epidemic that’ll consume all life on earth yet…which makes you folks the luckiest idiots….”

Fausta frowns at your remark and rests a hand on the purse where she keeps her gun.

“…the luckiest people in the world!” You hastily amend.

“Am I going to die?” Mr. Lynn asks you, raising a hand coated all over with lines of silver circuitry. “Are these things going to…” he swallows with a loud gulp “…eat me?”

“Really, I’m surprised they haven’t broken you down yet for spare carbon,” you say. “Unless…”

You turn and look at the intricate murals lining your wall: the thickly drawn Yantra symbols, cursives spires of ink interwoven with verses of sacred poetry and computer code.

“That must be it!” You exclaim. “The Safe-Room spell! It must be stopping the nanomachines from eating you. They’re stuck in a loop, trying and failing to digest you over and over…!”

“That’s good to hear, I suppose,” Mr. Lynn says, his voice pensive. “But why can’t I feel any pain form my wounds? And how long do I have to stay here? I need to use the bathroom…”

“Fortuna,” you say, gesturing to the cloud of tiny spirits surrounding your room. “Are they elementals yours?”

“Yeah!” Fortuna replies, holding up her phone. “They’re my Sprites from Sprite Quest!”

“…you can summon Spirits from Sprite Quest?” You ask.

“Yeah,” Fortuna says, blinking. “Can’t you?”

“Not those kinds of spirits,” you honestly reply. “Look…just keep doing what you’re doing, okay! It might just save the world!”

“Oh,” Fortuna says softly.

Lynn speaks up: “Mr. Worawoot,” he says. “You mentioned that–“

“C,” you say, turning to address the masked medic. “I assume you’ve already called for a quarantine team?”

C nods and nudges the brim of their bowler hat with their bamboo cane.

“Good,” you say. “Those nanomachines are pretty much like metal bacteria. UV lights and heat should kill them. Oh, and don’t let them get their hands on any sugar…”

“DIESEL!” Mr. Lynn shouts.

You, and everyone else in your flat, turns to looks at the old man.

“You said you’d learned where Philip was,” Mr. Lynn says. “Or did I mishear that?”

“I know where he’s being held—” you start to say.

Lynn’s eyes widen. “Being held?” he repeats, stepping up to the edge of the magical wind bubble. “Is he a prisoner? Is someone hurting him?”

“Mr. Lynn!” Fausta barks. “Stop breaking quarantine!”

Mr. Lynn blinks and looks down at his metal-coated hand. “Sorry,” he mumbles, withdrawing back behind the wind bubble.

“Right,” you say with a sigh. You pull out the antibiotics and painkillers you took from Stan and set them on the kitchen table. “Here’s the meds you wanted, for whatever that’s worth now.”

C grabs your paper bag and start rifling through its contents.

You go to your computer desk and pull it open to sift through its contents. “String, ink jars, pens, tiny baby in a jar….here.” You hold up four brass amulets on leather cords. “Good luck charms. Put these on if you have to get close to Lynn.”

“Will these work?” Fausta asks, squinting at the saintly icons inscribed on the medals.

“They can’t hurt.” You drop an amulet into Fausta’s hands, then toss one to C and hand one to little Fortuna. After a moment’s thought, you slide the last medallion around Cookie’s neck. The Pitbull growls softly as you touch his ruff, but doesn’t bark or bite.

“Mr. Worawoot,” Lynn says. “Is someone holding my son captive?” Lynn stares at you, eyes puffy from tears or the technological plague he’s picked up. “I need to know,” he whispers.

The plaintive tone in his voice, mixed with a weary grief, ought to tug at your heartstrings.

Instead, it sets your teeth on edge.

“Your son’s been a prisoner in Faerieland for years,” you tell him, blunt as a chunk of rock. “But when I capture the changeling who’s been leeching off your love, I’ll make him return the son you deserve.”

The flat falls silent. Felix Lynn grows as pale as a block of ice. Fausta clenches the amulets in her hands so hard that you can hear metal creak.

C trembles like a sapling in the wind. You swear you can see a glint of alarm in the eyes behind their Chaplin mask.

Fortuna looks like she’s about to cry.

Well done. Well done indeed, Diesel. It seems your actions can entertain me when you put your mind to it.

“I’ll be right back,” you tell them, edging your way toward the door. “It’ll all work out, I promise.”

As you turn to head out again, you hear Fortuna whispering to her mother:

“Would you know? If someone took me and left a fake?”

Fausta looks down at her daughter and rests a hand on her curly hair: “Of course I’d know, Sweetie,” she says to Fortuna. "I double-check you every day..."

#

Five steps outside the entrance to your apartment complex, you feel something heavy and metal caress the back of your skull.

Yes, Diesel: I sensed the bloodlust of your attacker coming a mile away.

Yes, I could have warned you.

But you really should have seen this coming yourself. Even the luckiest shirt in the world can’t save you from an ambush you refuse to notice.

Also, I hate you.

The club glances off your skull without cracking it. Still, the blow rattles your headcheese something fierce. You trip over your own feet and tumble across the ground. The asphalt tears the skin of your palms and rips a hole in the knee of your favorite slacks.

You roll onto your back, hand clumsily clawing at the sword on your back. “Stan!” You exclaim, head pulsing like a ringing bell as you try to get away from your assailment. “Jellyfish Stan! I was just thinking about you! What if …ow… I paid you back for those drugs with some amulets?”

“Forget about the drugs,” Stan says, walking toward you with her reclaimed body. She twirls her club, an improvised cosh made from a combo lock dropped inside a leg of pantyhose. “Water under the bridge. I’m more concerned about the talk we had.” Her voice sharpens. “You know, how you made me snitch on the boss?”

Stan suddenly splits in two, doubling before your eyes. Is that some special vampire power of hers, you wonder?

She merges back together. No, you think with relief. It’s just the concussion.

“I was thinking,” Stan continues, “and I realized something!” She snaps her fingers loudly. “I’ve seen this in the movies! Whenever a snitch spills their guts to a private eye, their boss always finds out and kills them!”

You fumble for your sword again and slide it halfway out of your sheath with the squeal of metal on metal. “Strib...” you mumble. “Suera...”

Stan leaps through the air like a toad, stomping on your hand with her ratty sneakers as you grope for your sword.

It hurts. You scream, half-formed spells slipping out of your mind.

“Now, I’m not interested in being kicked off a bridge or dropped into an acid pit or some such,” Stan tells you in the same conversational tone, “So I’m gonna make you disappear before you snitch on me!”

She bends over and sticks her face right up in your grill. This close, you can smell the reek of ammonia and see her pale fish lips peel away from yellow, shark-teeth chompers.

“Nothing personal, Diesel,” Jellyfish Stan whispers.

“Really?” you manage to croak.

“No.” She raises her homemade cudgel to bash your brains out. “This is as personal as it gets.”

Next Chapter: Episode Seven: Edgelord of the Crime Rings (Revised)