Harry navigates the Beetle through Lake Providence, where it is quite out of place due to being a rust bucket, and not in a cool, ironic sort of way. He decides to park in the lot of a convenience store along the road through town, which will leave them with a bit of a walk, but hopefully not alert the Denarians to their presence.

Melkor crouches down on the asphalt and opens his Meciel-provided illusory briefcase, bottles and blister packs and blunts packed volumetrically within. He scans over his options with a outstretched finger.

”Shaddle-dee-dum, shaddle-dee-dee, what kind of me should Melkor be…?”

Harry watches this little ritual with mixed feelings. A little disturbed, somewhat entertained, and maybe also a bit wistful, though he wouldn’t admit that to himself. As he watches Melkor pantomime, his eyes widen a bit. “Is… the coin providing you with a bunch of different ways to get high?” He asks incredulously.

“It’s how I do my best work,” Melkor says, pinching an invisible postage stamp between his fingers and planting it on his tongue.

Harry pinches the bridge of his nose. He knows exactly what that pantomime means - although it was a long time ago - though frankly it was awesome, and now he kind of wishes he’d realized - Lash could’ve hooked him up! But he firmly halts that thought. “This might get weird,” he mutters to Michael instead.

Michael does not at all know what the pantomime means. But he nods to acknowledge Harry’s warning.

“Let’s get busy lyserging or get busy diethylamiding!” He swings his heel around and knocks the briefcase shut, and strides off toward the lake house.

Before they’re out of the parking lot, Melkor executes the agreed-upon signal for Meciel to take him into stealth mode, namely throwing an imaginary smoke bomb at his feet and then making hissing noises and breaking into a crouching run.

Meciel rolls her eyes at him but does the cloaking. Her illusion runs silently alongside him, and she crafts the spell which will show Michael and Harry what he’s seeing.

Harry puts a Veil over himself and Michael (though it’s not nearly as good as the Denarian’s), and they also start off towards the lake house, more slowly. 

As Melkor trots along the winding side road toward the lake, the houses go from “serviceable trad house” to “did somebody say McMansion” to “actually tastefully designed, dang.” At the same time, the sky goes from a last dregs of spilled ember sunset to soft star-emblazoned purple velvet, and the blossoming flowers and plump wild fruit and buzzing bees riotous in the flowing joy of their own automaticity —

“Oh man I think it’s starting to kick in,” Melkor reports, as the multi-story glass-and-steel lake house is birthed from the parting willow trees.

Michael is looking at the ‘through Melkor’s eyes’ inset which has appeared in the lower right of his field of vision. “Harry, I think something might be wrong with the spell - are you seeing this? It’s like looking at a modernist house as designed by Escher through a kaleidoscope. With tiny rainbows all over it. I mean, it’s gorgeous, but definitely not ideal for surveillance.”

Harry coughs. “I’m, yeah, I’m seeing the same thing. I don’t think there’s really a way to fix it anytime soon, unfortunately. That’s just what Melkor’s seeing right now. Just hope we’ll be able to make sense of it if he runs into trouble.”

They are following behind Melkor, more slowly. Once they reach the house they’ll split up to cover the front and back entrances.

Melkor walks sinuously up the driveway, each silent footfall a rocking horse journey from heel to sole to toe, a quadratic equation of his weight smoothly entering and exiting the smooth silver gray cement.

Tall ominous predatory black rhinoceros pickup truck on his left. Electric atom sharp flying knife yellow Italian sports car on his right. Checkered matte portcullis of Minas Anor to his front — where’s Grond when you need him?

His body weight shifts like a great ship avoiding a greater whirlpool. He curves around the incalculably complex building and stops at the padlocked plexiglass and spiderweb and sunflower and mud incision point for his intrusion. The Basement Window.

Except it isn’t even padlocked.

Melkor lifts the bulk section lid. Climbs down into the window well. Peers inside.

The Basement is an unrelenting hellscape, and not the good kind. Towers of moldering cardboard cinderblocks, writhing webbed shadows, the living stench of death, roaches skittering confusedly away from mixed signs of air pressure and invisibility. The soaked carpet squelches beneath Melkor’s feet and hands as he crawls, cowering away from the malevolent ceiling and flinching from the sucking walls.

He finds a light switch at the bottom of the stairs and things suddenly look a lot better! :Just some old boxes and water damage, eh Meciel? Nothing soul-threateningly grotesque about that!:

He hears voices upstairs.

A woman’s mezzo, speaking coldly - “For the last time, I am here to help. Nicodemus informed Tessa that you had been injured by the forces of Winter as you traversed the Ways through the Nevernever, and she knew I was close enough to travel here overland, so she asked me to come.  Look at me. I am not attacking you. I am carrying a first aid box. We are all here to fight a common enemy. Let’s put aside our rivalries and work together. Let. Me. Help.”

Melkor feels Meciel go on high alert inside his mind.

A growling male voice from upstairs, ponderous, labored. “Fine. But no tricks, sorceress, or we will rip off your head and drop you in the lake.”

 Another male voice, also deep, but thready and scratchy. “You will tend to our wounds?“

The woman’s voice, with forced patience. “Yes, I will tend to you. And then I will formulate a plan for how to flush that bitch Meciel out of hiding so we can take her down together.”

:Holy shit, did you hear that?: Melkor talkthinks, braced against the hand railing, the stairs swaying beneath him like a rope bridge in high wind. :Either I’m really good at hallucinating, or one of bruiser/cruiser is really good at ventriloquism, or… sexy evil nurse sorceress dot dot dot?:

:That is Rosanna,: Meciel speaks in his mind, :Tessa’s second in command. This is going to get interesting. I don’t suppose you feel like sending a warning back to our allies…?:

Melkor modifies the agreed upon signal, which was going to be doing two fingers to his eyes, pointing them at the door, then a tomahawk chop for go.

He starts by putting up three fingers, then waves them back and forth as the fourth dimension of time lapses itself into trailing finger light.

He does two fingers on one hand, and the pinky finger on the other.

Then he draws the number 3, and the letter D.

Then, at last, the tomahawk chop.

:You know I once considered being the god of writing sonnets and shit?:

“Uhhhhhh, do you have any idea what that means?”

Melkor calls out in an ethereal falsetto, “Sorceress, the extraplanar allies you’ve summoned for leverage have arrived!”

He kicks open the door at the top of the stairs, then immediately judo rolls/uncontrolledly tumbles backward down the stairs with his hands over his head. It’s like being an apple in a dryer.

“Is that the signal?!”