"You aren't looking at it right," Danden said. Across from him, Maner shook his head, unconvinced.

The two men, both in their late twenties, sat in Maner's office on the third floor of the prop building. Those passing by on the street below would think nothing of the place. For all appearances, it was a simple sandwich shop that sold shit sandwiches; too much mustard was the usual complaint. It didn't do much business, which was fine by Maner. People would assume that the second and third stories were rented out apartments, low-cost spaces where those who lacked the funds to get out of this shit neighborhood would live practically stacked on top of each other, just like all the other buildings on this street. It made a vague and rational sense why shifty-looking teenagers always hung around, why the sandwich shop got robbed three times a year, and why the fire escape on the western side of the building always housed dangerous-looking layabouts that no one wanted to approach.

People walked past, usually on the other side of the street, and dismissed the building as "one of those not-so-nice places." It was a bit ironic that they didn't know how right they were.

"It's how she said it," Danden went on. He bent forward, reaching a discolored hand toward the table. He had some sort of disease, something that made the shining blue of natural faethian skin mottled and almost brown in spots. He wavered, hand moving first toward the amber bottle open on the table, then to a half-eaten sandwich, back to the bottle, before finally settling on the sandwich and snatching it up.

"Yeah?" Maner asked. There was no hesitation in his reach as he grabbed the amber bottle. The dropper was already on his side of the table, a bit of yellow liquid left pooling in the tip. Dabbing the dropper in, he pulled a very precise amount of poison bliss from the bottle before tilting his head back and dropping it beneath his tongue. "How did she say it then?"

"What, you want me to say it like that or something?" Danden asked.

"Yeah. Say it like that. How the fuck else am I going to know?"

"I'm not a woman," Danden complained. "Can't do it right."

"Pfff." Maner blew air, screwing the dropper cap back on the amber bottle. "Everyone knows you can't do it right, but I don't see what your dick has to do with this?"

Danden only managed to hold a straight face for two seconds before he started laughing. A moment later, Maner joined him. For just a few seconds, that was all there was, just two friends laughing together in an office, sweating away beneath a ceiling fan that hadn't worked in two years. The door to the office opening made them pause for a moment. A scrawny kid, no more than fifteen, twitched his way into the room.

"Boss. They did it again. What did I say? Said they would do it again and now…" The kid stopped his no doubt well-thought-out and coherent speech as a glass bottle shattered against the doorframe next to his head.

"I told you if you bring your schoolhouse shit to me again, Tates. That someone would be going home with something broken. If I find out you aren't paying your debts again, that is going to be you."

Tates paled at the threat, twitched his way back out of the room. Maner couldn't hold back his sigh, melting back into his chair before the idiot boy had the door fully closed again. He found Danden sitting back in his own chair when he turned to look at him, pulling smoke from a lit cigarette while still holding his sandwich in his other hand.

"She don't like you," Maner told him.

Danden finished his drag, letting a plume of smoke wash over his face to disappear into the ceiling. "Doesn't seem right. In fact, I think she said the exact opposite thing."

"Alright, say it to me."

Danden looked like he was about to complain, but then chose to shrug his shoulders and put his sandwich down on his thigh. "She said it like this," he preempted. "I like you, Danden. You're funny," he said, doing his best to mimic a feminine voice and entirely failing.

Instead of laughing at his friend again, Maner turned his head side to side, chewing on it. "Alright. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she does like you."

"See."

"She thinks you're ugly as sin, though," Maner said. "Women don't talk about how funny you are unless that's all they can think to say."

"Well, means she has eyes then, doesn't it?" Danden asked.

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"How much did you say you paid this stri…" The front door of the building slamming closed stopped his words short. Maner leaned to the side, catching a glimpse of a kid with one of those dumbass rags on running inside, one of Tepsin's crew. "How many fucking times do I have to tell them not to use the front door?" he swore as he tore himself from his seat.

"Guessing Tepsin's back," Danden said, picking his sandwich back up and taking another bite while his friend started for the door.

"Don't help me or anything," Maner called back at him as he stormed toward the door. "Just keep sitting there and stuffing your face."

"Will do, Boss," Danden shouted back as Maner left.

The yellowed walls of the building's interior flowed past in a blur as Maner walked through the hall. He stops for an instant as the yellow is broken up by the dark interior of a room. Several faces stare back at him as he stops short behind tables topped with beakers, tubes, and other glassware.

"What did I tell you about leaving this door open?" Maner tried to ask, doing his best to keep his voice calm, but entirely failing.

"It's hot as three hells in here, boss," one of the braver chemists called back to him.

With a grunt, Maner slammed the door closed. "Everyone is stupid but me," he muttered to himself.

As he turned toward the stairs, he locked eyes with a boy no older than eighteen stopped at the landing. Rolf was his name, a panicked expression on his face beneath a stack of green colored hair rolls.

"Ah, fuck," Rolf said, turning and running back down the stairs.

"Where are you going?" Maner yelled, running after the youth. "Huh? Where you running?"

Taking the steps down three at a time, he caught Rolf before he made it far from the landing on the second floor. Without breaking stride, Maner kicked the back of Rolf's leg, sending him sprawling out onto the ground just in front of four other boys. They all wore the same stacked wigs of green, except Rolf's was now splayed halfway across the room, and similar ill-fitting clothes of lavender. Only, they all wore their clothes with a different and unique horrible sense of fashion, because matching exactly would have made them look like morons. In the middle of this little group, not even looking up from the heavy table where he was working at prying open a steel safe that still had plaster sticking to the sides, was Tepsin. When the head moron finally looked up and saw Maner standing there at the bottom of the steps, he couldn't help but glance at the still flapping screen door on the other side of the room that led out to the fire escape.

So, the sixth one's already run off, Maner thought.

"Hey Maner, what's going on?" Tepsin asked, looking at the bigger man as he continued to jimmy the iron bar he was trying to wedge into a crack in the safe door.

"You lift that?" Maner asked, ignoring the boys and walking right through them and up to Tepsin. "You lift that and bring it here right through the front door?"

"Pft." Tepsin snorted through his nose, turning his full attention back to the safe. "You're paranoid, old man. This is just a little thing, lifted it off some out of towners."

Maner slapped his hand down on top of the safe, catching the iron bar between his forefinger and thumb. "So you brought hot shit here? Thought that this would be the best place to bring something that someone is going to be looking for?"

Tepsin rolled his eyes, pulling the bar out of the safe and wedging it into a different spot. "I'm not an idiot. We switched back and forth. Spent hours on the walkways. Went uptown and then back downtown. Even if some foreigners wanted it back, how would they find it?"

Maner's fist clenched so hard the knuckles popped. Before Tepsin could move, he had the back of the chair and was spinning it around to face him. The kid had to struggle just to stop the whole thing from turning over.

"I don't care who your brother is," Maner said, bringing his face so close to Tepsin's that their noses almost touched. "You put this operation in trouble again, and I will beat you purple. Nobody is going to say anything about that. Nobody."

When Maner turned, the boys crowded behind him flinched out of his way. He slapped the rug off one as he walked back toward the stairs, just to blow off a bit of steam. True, if the kid jeopardized this farm, then he would be well within his rights to beat the hells out of him for it, but people would care. The boss, the real boss, might have his back in that case, but then again, he might not. The whole reason he had to babysit the little punk was because of how close his brother was to the big boss. His jaw hurt by the time he hit the top of the stairs; his teeth ached from clenching them so hard.

When he made it back to his office on the top level, he found Danden sitting in his chair, polishing off the last bites of his sandwich as he looked out the window. He was just about to ask about it when Danden turned to look back at him.

"Got some fancy folk out there," Danden said, cutting his eyes toward the window.

Maner was across the room in a flash, spotting three people standing on the side of the street opposite the building. At first, he wasn't sure exactly what he was looking at. One of the three was a stonespeaker with frazzled hair, nice but not necessarily fancy clothes, with his hands on his knees, breathing in gulps of air. The other two were something different.

They were the fancy people Danden was talking about, wearing clothes so fine that you wouldn't be able to walk all the way through the borough without someone trying to liberate them from you. It took a few seconds for the memory to spark, and when it did, all those stories he heard as a kid when he still attended church services came flooding back. Humans, there were gods damned humans outside his place. The same bastards that had once nearly taken over the world. The same ones who took glee in destroying everything they touched. To his mounting horror, the male human turned away from the stonespeaker and started marching across the street, a sword appearing in his hand. The female started following after not a second later, and as she turned, Maner swore that her evil eyes fell on him for a moment, that she saw him somehow through the various wards woven into parts of the building.

"I'm going to kill that fucking kid," he swore.

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