Rebirth of the Nephilim

Quietly shifting around, Dys moved to sit next to the weeping Fetch. Without a word, she set her hand on Maeve’s back in a comforting gesture. As soon as she did, the crying woman curled in on herself, balling up like a small child. Carefully moving her shaking form, Dys pulled Maeve into her lap, giving her a mix between a hug and well… not a shoulder to cry on. More like a leg. Not that the body part mattered, so long as the Fetch was getting the emotional support that she needed in the moment.

As Maeve’s sobs slowed over the course of several minutes, Dys simply stroked her back, patiently waiting for her to work through the hurricane of emotions she was struggling to control. However, while Dys was only acting to comfort the Fetch, the greater part of Jadis’ mind was focused on thoughts about what she was going to do to help.

Jadis wasn’t a therapist. She had no training when it came to any kind of psychology or mental health treatments. Frankly, she wasn’t even sure the kinds of therapy techniques that came from modern Earth society would work on a Fetch. From the way Maeve described her situation, it wasn’t that her brain was chemically unbalanced or that she was suffering from some sort of traumatic past experience that affected her thoughts and actions. It was her very soul that was unstable, seemingly purposefully so. The Fetch felt all emotions at all times by design. That was just what they were as a species. The fact that Maeve was trying so desperately to not experience every emotional extreme at once was the aberration.

Or was aberration too strong of a word? Trying to be one thing while having the capability to be everything was a concept Jadis had encountered many times since passing on from Earth. While she was pissed off at her mad benefactor for creating such a cruel existence, Jadis had to admit that a species that was capable of being everything at all times was pretty well in line with D’s own apparent being. When D gave Jadis a cookie, it wasn’t just a cookie. It was the perfect personification of the platonic ideal of what a cookie could be. Which, when Jadis thought about it, meant that the tasty treat was every cookie that had ever been or could ever be, yet for the one moment that it touched her tongue, it was the precise thing that she thought was the best cookie.

The cookie was the same as D himself. He personified chaos. He was everything all at once. The parts that Jadis saw when she visited the god were just the aspects that he chose to show. He was a concept and was thus just as fluid as a thought.

Was that why the Fetch had such a wide breadth of emotions going on all at once? It would make them better at blending in, if they could pick and choose the correct emotion to fall into depending on what disguise they were wearing. If one needed to be a commanding lord, it wasn’t enough to wear a lord’s face. Putting on the emotional hat of someone who had been a lord their entire life and had specific feelings and ingrained responses to the world around them was the way to truly disguise oneself as a lord. To become someone else wasn’t just physical. It was mental, too.

It made sense. But it also made sense why it didn’t work out in the long run. A being that was always experiencing the full range of every emotional response to every action or event that was going on around them wouldn’t be able to function. They would have to pick and choose what emotion they wanted to go with at any particular moment. And for a species who were always pretending to be other people, it had to be hard to know what emotional response was their emotion, and not the choice of whoever they had been pretending to be last would have had.

That was probably the true issue. How could the Fetch have any true sense of identity, a sense of self, if they didn’t have a body that was their own? Maeve had made it abundantly clear to Jadis in past conversations that she had no true self. There was no body that she could relax into and just be Maeve. If she didn’t have a body, a form that was just her, then how could she have an emotional response that was just her either? Every feeling had to be seen through the lens of the body that she was wearing like a cloak at any given moment. That lack of self-identity could not be good for a person’s self-esteem. Even a regular human would struggle in such a situation. How did Fetch deal with essentially being born into a constant emotional and existential crisis? It was easy to see why Maeve would think that she didn’t have any kind of stable feelings that were just her own.

Though, considering the woman crying in her lap, Jadis had to point out to herself that clearly the Fetch could have their own emotions. Maeve wasn’t crying because she was pretending to be someone else. The current storm of grief was an outpouring of her soul, with pathos coming from herself, directed towards herself. Maybe she was just having trouble recognizing the fact since she was so used to being emotionally tossed around by the constant pull of countless emotions hitting her from every direction.

The unmoored ship in a storm was a good analogy. Jadis appreciated that Maeve had explained it that way, since it helped her understand not only what the Fetch was going through on a moment-by-moment basis, but also what she was looking for out of her. Maeve wanted someone to be her rock. A place to put her anchor, someone who Maeve always knew how she felt about them because she knew how they felt about her. That was why she needed Jadis’ love. Or hate. Or whatever other unchanging emotion that Jadis was willing to give to her. She wanted Jadis to feel for her.

Which was exactly why Jadis knew that was the wrong path to go down.

“I was about to ask if you were feeling any better, but considering what you just explained, I feel like that would be insensitive to ask,” Dys said as she continued to stroke Maeve’s back.

The loud sobbing had tapered off to a few subdued sniffles by that point. When Maeve spoke next, her tone was filled with a mix of misery and embarrassment. She didn’t even try to lift her head out of Dys’ lap, instead pressed her face into the Nephilim’s leg, causing her words to come out muffled.

“It’s not insensitive. I’m under control now. I can switch to something easier to talk to.”

There it was. Maeve’s words confirmed Jadis’ suppositions about the Fetch’s nature. She could choose which emotion to have; she just had trouble when she let the emotion get out of hand. No wonder Jadis’ normally trustworthy vibes radar was always thrown off by Maeve. She could swing between different emotions at will. A great asset when pretending to be a different person. Not so great when you didn’t know who you were supposed to be outside of that disguised context.

“It’s not about easier to talk to,” Dys responded to Maeve’s statement. “That’s what’s causing the most friction between us, I think. I don’t want you to change for me. I want you to just be you.”

“There is no me,” Maeve snarled, her tone changing like lightning from sad to angry. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you! I’m nothing! No one! Not a gods damned anything at all! That’s why I need you to tell me what to be so I can be it!”

Dys sighed heavily, her own temper cooling rather than flaring in response to Maeve’s demands. She couldn’t be angry at the other woman, not for feeling so desperately lost. Especially when it was clear to her that Maeve knew that what she was asking wasn’t fair.

Picking the Fetch up from where she was still curled up in her lap, Dys moved Maeve so that she was sitting on top of the small round table that had previously been between them. The Fetch made no protest to the repositioning and instead shifted her posture so that she was kneeling with her hands in her lap. She was still transformed to look like a smaller version of Jadis, only her expression had gone completely blank. It was a bit like looking at a doll of herself, Jadis thought as she settled her gaze on Maeve’s face. Such an experience probably would have been weird for most other people. But for her, someone who faced her own self without mirrors every day, the confrontation felt almost like business as usual.

“You know you can’t ask me to love you,” Dys stated with plain bluntness. “That’s not a choice for me. Neither is hating you. My feelings towards you are just going to develop the way that they will, regardless of intent. That’s just how emotions work.”

“Not for me,” Maeve said.

The response sounded like it should have been petulant, but the emotionless delivery removed any such perception from the flat words.

“Are you sure about that?” Dys asked. When Maeve continued to silently stare at her, Dys pressed forward. “By that I mean, are you sure that every emotion you have is a choice?”

“At the start,” Maeve finally replied. This time, as she spoke, her tone took on the breezy, indifferent affectation that she so frequently used when presenting basic facts about spying and security around the Fortune’s Favored compound. “I can pick and choose as I will. How far down I go on that path is much harder to control. Regardless, the start of the path is always my choice.”

“So, you chose to beg me to hate you?”

Maeve’s cool tone and expression faltered.

“No, I didn’t pick that. I spiraled. Like I said, once I start down a path, it’s harder to control where it goes from there.”

“Sounds confusing, honestly,” Dys frowned. “You have control, yet you have no control. I’m genuinely sorry. I can’t really imagine how it must be to live like that.”

“Then love me and I’ll—”

“Stop,” Dys placed a finger against Maeve’s lips.

Taking a deep breath, Dys prepared herself for a Hail Mary tactic. She just hoped that what she was about to say was going to help Maeve. For all she knew, it could make things worse. That said, she had to do something, and what she had come up with made sense to her as a way of maybe guiding Maeve to a healthier outlook. Or it could make things worse, depending on what Maeve’s response was. The first step was a gamble. All she could do was cast the die and hope for the best.

She would have prayed to D for luck, if she wasn’t so pissed at him at that moment.

“Maeve, would you like to have sex with me?”

The Fetch’s eyes widened to a comical degree. Obviously, she hadn’t been expecting the blunt question. Considering the flow of the conversation thus far, Jadis couldn’t blame her for the reaction. Waiting for a response, Dys tried to keep track of the raging chaos of expressions that played across Maeve’s face. Now that she had an idea of what was going on, she found it a little easier to interpret the varied emotions being put on rapid display.

“Do you want to have sex with me?” Maeve finally settled on a question to answer a question.

“I didn’t say that,” Dys tilted her head to one side. “I asked you if you want to have sex with me.”

“Yes, absolutely,” Maeve answered with a rapid nod of her head.

“Why?”

Maeve’s excitement instantly shifted to suspicion.

“What do you mean, why?”

“Why do you want to have sex with me? It’s a simple question. What’s your reason?”

“Because then you’ll love me,” Maeve said. However, even before she finished saying the words, Jadis could see the frown crease her face. “I mean, I know I can’t make you love me, but lust is a start. I’m great in bed. I can be anything, do anything. I bet you can’t even imagine the positions I can come up with. You can do all kinds of interesting things when you don’t have a spine.”

Jadis filed that information away for possible future discussions but otherwise kept her focus.

“Alright, so you want to have sex with me because you want to use your body to try and seduce me into an emotional connection.”

Maeve’s expression fell even further at the way Jadis reduced and reframed the Fetch’s motivations.

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“Never mind that. Let me reword my question,” Dys pressed on, pushing past the stumbling reaction Maeve tried to pull together. “Are you attracted to me?”

“Yes, I am,” Maeve answered, though her tone was more wary than before. “I’ve been intrigued by you from the moment I first heard of your exploits. As soon as I first saw you, I knew you could be my anchor. That you had to be. You’re so strong. You’re so powerful and confident and certain about who you are. You’re so certain about who everyone else is. I’ve wanted you from the very start.”

“Flattering,” Dys said, though she brushed the compliments aside. “Not what I’m asking. Are you, Maeve, physically attracted to the way I look?”

“I—Yes, I am,” Maeve answered as uncertainty visibly warred with agitation on her face. Jadis guessed the Fetch was having trouble picking between confusion and frustration. “You’re beautiful.”

“What about me are you attracted to?”

Maeve blinked, her expression settling on lost.

“The whole package, I suppose.”

“My face? My eyes?” Dys motioned as she listed off her assets. “Maybe my breasts? My ass? My cock? I know you’ve spied on me in the baths. You’ve seen everything. Is it my legs? My hair? My muscles?”

“I… I don’t know, you’re just beautiful,” Maeve shuddered as an unnatural ripple moved across the surface of her body. “What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say which part of me is attractive to you. My hands? My feet? My lips? My skin?”

“I don’t know,” Maeve shook her head. “I just—”

“My scent? My voice? My abs? My armpits?”

“No! I don’t know! I don’t know what you want me to—”

“My nose? My teeth? My pussy?”

“I can’t—”

“My ears? My tongue? My—”

“Your ass!”

Maeve’s exclamation cut Dys’ list off. Jadis thanked Lyssandria for that, since she had been running out of body parts she could think of to fetishize. Leaning back slightly, Dys smiled at the worried expression on the Fetch’s face. With a motion of her hand, she urged her to continue.

“Okay. You like my butt. Why?”

“What can I say, it’s a nice ass,” Maeve shrugged. When she saw Dys raise an eyebrow, she hurried to elaborate. “I mean, it’s very round and shapely. Big, but not too big. I remember seeing you bend over a few weeks ago. You were helping Sabina with something, and you bent over to pick up some tool or piece of metal and I was right behind you. The way your pants pulled against your ass was… it was inspiring.”

Jadis couldn’t remember the specific event, but that was hardly the point. Instead, she took hold of a phrase that Maeve had used and fixated on it.

“What do you mean by ‘big, but not too big?’ How big is too big?”

“I guess I mean it’s the right size for your body,” Maeve tried to answer, though from the way she spoke Jadis could tell that she was having trouble understanding the point of the inquiry. “Plush, but not too… squishy, I guess.”

“What about Thea?” Dys pivoted her question. “She has a great ass. I’ve always liked the way her butt looks, especially when she wears leather.”

“She does,” Maeve blinked in surprise. “I mean, she has a very shapely rear. Very round and balanced.”

“What about Aila?”

“Nice, but a little too small,” the Fetch replied more quickly. “She has great legs, and her ass is good, but Thea’s is better. Neither are as good as yours, though.”

“How do you rate Eir? She’s very plush.”

“A little too plush for me,” Maeve admitted. “She’s beautiful, but I like a butt to have more tightness to the look, a little denser with muscle. Eir’s ass is bigger than Thea’s, but that’s not always better.”

“My ass is way bigger than Eir’s ass,” Dys countered.

“No, it’s not,” Maeve shot back indignantly. “It’s bigger when side by side, but in context to the rest of the body, your ass is definitely tighter than Eir’s is. There’s really no comparison. Your ass is way better.”

“I think there are a lot of people out there who would disagree on that,” Dys smirked. “Eir is gorgeous.”

“Fuck what they think,” the shapeshifter tossed her head to one side. “Look, I’m not saying Eir isn’t gorgeous. She absolutely is! But if I have to pick who has a better ass between the two of you, then it’s you by a longshot!”

“Me by a longshot?”

“Yes!”

“No question?”

“Absolutely!”

“What if I said I like Eir’s ass better than mine? What if I think her butt is the most perfect butt in existence and that all other butts should be like hers?”

“Then I—” Maeve started to shout, then choked on her own words as her expression contorted into soured confusion. “I… if that’s what you prefer. I think I’ve made it clear that I’ll be anything you want me to be.”

“But what you like is my ass. Not Eir’s ass, or Thea’s, or Aila’s. You like my ass.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like them…” the Fetch stated, her tone trying to go flat yet not quite managing to reach emotionlessness. “Just that yours is better.”

“Good,” Dys grinned at the woman kneeling on the table in front of her. “You have a reason to like me. Not a need to like me. Not some sort of twisted attempt to please me because you think that’ll make me love you if you do what I tell you to do. You like the way I look because I have a nice ass.”

“So? So what if I like your ass?” Maeve responded, and this time she did sound extremely petulant. “Being attracted to your butt doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means you aren’t nothing,” Dys poked the Fetch in the chest. “You said you aren’t anything at all, and that’s patently not true. If nothing else, as we’ve just established, you are an ass woman. You like butts.”

“You’re making fun of me…”

“No,” Dys shook her head firmly, though her denial didn’t wipe the offended look from Maeve’s face. “I’m really not. The reason why I’m asking, the reason why I’m making a point of highlighting this, is that you have a type. A preference. You have a part of you that’s you, not anyone else.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“Yes, it does!” Dys insisted, talking over Maeve before she could start to spiral into a whirlpool of indignant and ultimately unhelpful anger. “It’s small. It’s just one trait. But it’s you. That’s what’s important. Being just you.”

Dys took a deep breath, centering herself. She hadn’t meant to raise her voice because she knew that getting agitated wasn’t going to help Meave with her own struggles. She saw that the other woman was working to control her own tempestuous reactions as well. Her borrowed face was rolling through one expression after another, a true sign of her lost discipline and restraint. That was fine, though. Jadis didn’t need Maeve to be restrained. What she needed instead was for her to stop being who she wasn’t.

“You once told me that you don’t have a look of your own. You’re always wearing the skin of someone else. But there must be a you that isn’t someone else. You didn’t come out of the womb or however it works with Fetch looking like the human baby next door. What does the natural you look like?”

“Like nothing,” Maeve said with genuine concern in her voice. “Nothing anyone would want to see. I have to shape myself like someone else. I’m not… I’m not solid enough to be anyone otherwise.”

“Can you change parts of yourself?”

When Maeve didn’t immediately respond, Dys continued her questions, clarifying what she was getting at.

“Can you change your head to look like Kerr right now, for example, but keep your body the same as mine?”

“That’s hard to do,” Maeve admitted. “But I can. Little variations take concentration. Big variations take a lot more effort and concentration.”

“Good,” Dys grinned. “Good! That’s perfect.”

Sitting up a little taller, Dys shifted so that she too was in a kneeling position. That put her head higher than Maeve’s despite the table giving the Fetch height, though that was soon to change. Taking hold of the shapeshifter’s hands, she guided Maeve to stand up so that the table was a pedestal under her feet. The result was a confused and worried looking mini-Jadis posed before Dys in a pilfered maid’s uniform.

“Would you please take off your clothes?”

Maeve didn’t blush at the request, nor did she show any kind of hesitation. All she was showing Jadis was a body that she was already intimately familiar with, since it was an exact copy of Jadis’ form, minus the excessive height. Once the garments fell around Maeve’s feet, Dys took the clothes and set them aside. Looking up and down Maeve’s borrowed body, she made sure to give Maeve a confident smile. Not the easiest thing to do considering Jadis wasn’t certain that what she was doing was right or would even help Maeve, but she trusted her instincts. This felt like the right thing to try.

“I want you to let yourself be what you look like naturally, when you aren’t pretending to be anything else. Just be a Fetch.”

“I can’t do that,” Maeve growled, her tone more frustrated than angry. “There is no natural Fetch!”

“Then I want you to remove all the features that you’re currently holding onto,” Dys told her. “Stop being pale. Stop having hair. Stop wearing my face. Stop having my breasts and butt and everything else that you’re doing to mimic me. And don’t replace them with anything else. Just let them go.”

As Dys spoke, Maeve didn’t close her eyes. She didn’t move at all, except for a shiver that ran through her body. For a minute, Jadis didn’t think anything would happen. Then, Maeve shifted. And it hurt.

The pain was for Jadis, not Maeve. She was well familiar with the process Fetch used to shapeshift; she had seen the troubled woman switch between forms many times already and had seen Jack do so as well. What the Fetch before her did was far slower, far easier to watch. And the watching is what hurt. The form that appeared before her wasn’t some other visage that Jadis’ mind could easily latch onto but was instead a paradox of existence that denied all attempts at understanding.

As Jadis’ features melted away, the Maeve that remained was a blob. A thing that existed and was there yet refused to categorize itself into a shape. Blob was the closest word Jadis’ brain could use to match up to what she was seeing, but really, it was far from adequate. Jadis was reminded of the Eldritch Sign that she had created for her Sleep of the D ritual. It was there, it could be observed, but its existence defied description.

“I warned you,” a voice spoke, though it was unlike any voice Jadis had ever heard before. There was a twisting derangement to the tone that tickled her ears made shivers run up Dys’ spine. “I’m not anything.”

“Bullshit,” Dys said immediately. “You are something. Just because you aren’t easy to understand doesn’t negate the fact that you exist.”

Maeve didn’t say anything in response to Dys’ assertion, though the non-form she had reverted to shifted and moved around slightly. In doing so, Jadis’ brain began to work out what she was looking at a little more firmly.

Maeve’s body was see-through, yet it wasn’t at the same time. She had colors inside of her, every color at once, from what Jadis could tell, and that was the part that was hurting Jadis’s brain the most. She recalled the feeling she had earlier that morning when the power from Eir’s sacrament had been both red and white at the same time. Neither color had been subsumed by the other, and they hadn’t combined into some other color either. They had both existed at once, simultaneously, despite the impossibility of that notion.

Perhaps the every-color of Maeve’s body was a representation of the multitude of emotions that existed inside of her. Every feeling at every moment, all the time, all at once. That, or Maeve was showing off the magical equivalent of chromatophores.

“Can you pick one color to be?” Dys asked. “Just one. Whichever one you like the best. Maybe you don’t have a favorite color, but I want you to pick one that you like. Not what you think I might like. What you like.”

 Another ripple moved through Maeve’s body and an instant later the mind-melting colors evened out. The color the Fetch chose was a glowing orange, with shades of yellow and red oscillating across her in a way that reminded Jadis of a lava lamp. She was still partly translucent, enough so that the thinner parts of her form were transparent enough that Jadis could see rest of the cellar behind her. The central parts were too thick to be truly see-through, though that made for some interesting color gradients.

“Orange is your favorite color?” Dys asked quizzically. “I didn’t expect that.”

“I don’t really like it any more than any other color,” Maeve corrected her in a tone that was far less bone chilling than a moment before. “I just… decided on orange.”

“That’s good,” Dys nodded. “Orange is good.”

Reexamining the Fetch, Jadis was able to see that her form wasn’t quite as nebulous as she had previously thought. The shifting wrongness of her colors had made it hard to really look at Maeve. Now that her colors had been normalized, she could see that Maeve’s blobular body was somewhat like the diagrams of single-cell organisms she had studied in school back on Earth. There was no defined shape to her, but there were outlines. Various portions of her body were constantly shifting and moving, stretching and contracting, so that she looked like she was constantly in motion despite standing still. Smaller bits and pieces were moving around inside of her, visible due to her transparent form, though there was nothing like a nucleus or mitochondria that Jadis could observe. Just indistinct shapes that surfaced and faded in a never-ending, churning swirl.

“You kind of look like a giant amoeba,” Dys murmured as she watched Maeve’s interior roil like a simmering pot of water.

“What is that?” Maeve asked, and the churning motions both in and outside of her body picked up in speed. Jadis guessed the reaction was from her constantly changing emotions. “It sounds unappealing.”

“It’s a small animal, I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of it,” Dys explained. “And no, I don’t think most people would find them to be attractive.”

Jadis figured lying, even about something minor like the attractiveness of an amoeba, was a bad idea. She and Maeve had finally opened an honest dialog, and she didn’t want to jeopardize that with white lies. However, before the Fetch could make the wrong assumptions, Dys continued her thought.

“Despite that, you’re beautiful. The way your colors are shifting and moving around like that is mesmerizing. If you wanted to stay like this all the time, I wouldn’t mind.”

“Not a chance,” Maeve responded vehemently.

Despite the certainty of her words, Jadis noted that the movement inside of her slowed significantly. Jadis took that to mean that her emotions had calmed, and her sense of self had been reassured. Learning to speak Demon was having some surprisingly useful carryovers in her and Maeve’s conversation.

“No worries, I didn’t think you would,” Dys chuckled. “How about this. Now that we have a base to start from, let’s build you up together, okay? You aren’t a blank slate. Nothing like it. You’re you. You’re just having some trouble showing who you are because of all the other shit that surrounds you. Even if nothing else ever happens between us, I want you to know that you can always be yourself with me. You don’t have to pretend. Just be you.”

“I—ah, I’ll try,” Maeve struggled to say, her voice coming out small and vulnerable.

Jadis didn’t know if that vulnerability was an intentional choice or not, but in either case, Maeve was still feeling that emotion. She needed comfort, and more importantly, she needed help. That was all Jadis really needed to know.

“That’s all I ask. So, you like my butt, yeah? Seems like as good a start as any. Why don’t you give yourself a butt like mine and we’ll go from there.”

There was a rippling, shuddering movement that flowed all across the blob that was Maeve’s body and then, suddenly…

“Oh, my fucking god,” Dys cracked up laughing. “Damn it! Don’t do that!”

“What!?” Maeve shouted at her. “You told me to make an ass, so I did!”

“I wasn’t expecting you to just pop one out of your middle like that!”

“How else am I supposed to do this? You want me to just turn into a one-hundred-pound ass on the table? Because I can do that.”

“Please, for the love of all that is holy, don’t do that,” Dys shuddered at the thought, as well as the thought of the trouble it would cause if Kerr ever found out that Maeve could become a single body part. “How about you take on a sort of featureless, humanoid form. Like an unfinished statue, or a mannequin.”

At Dys’ suggestion, Maeve transformed again, her body rippling far more strongly over the course of a second before becoming a vaguely human-like figure, utterly featureless except for the shockingly attractive ass in the now entirely appropriate location. She was still orange with a mix of yellow and red, and her insides still had those churning shapes visible through translucent skin, but she was otherwise far more humanoid than not.

“Alright,” Dys grinned and nodded. “That’ll do. Now. Let’s work on making a you that is just you, and no one else. Because, I promise, once you have a you, you won’t need anyone else to be your center. You’ll be your own anchor. And once you’ve done that, well, who knows what might happen.”

“Probably some chaotic bullshit,” Maeve muttered as her form shifted nervously around. “I’ll just end up going off on a bad path again and fuck up.”

“Probably,” Dys agreed. “But if and when you do, I’ll be here. Not to tell you what to be, or how you should act, but just to give you some perspective. I won’t be your anchor, Maeve. But I will be your friend.”

“That you,” the Fetch said quietly, her body going almost supernaturally still. “Really. Thank you.”

“Hey, what are friends for?” Dys replied with a cheeky grin. “Now, turn around and let me see that butt. I swear, I’ve looked at my own ass a lot and what you’ve got going on back there isn’t the same thing I’ve got.”

“I may have made a few alterations…”

Dys’ grin grew even brighter.

“Damn straight you did.”