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-- More X, Vis, Cuss, and Greed, because why not. LOTS OF SWEARS because Cuss. Gotta give credit to Spiritplumber for inspiring this one and I may expand this 'verse into a full fic someday. --

"Fucking seriously? Joining the fuckdamned Other Light?"

Cuss folded her arms and glared at X. He raised his hands like he was trying to calm down a wild animal.

"No. The Other Light is like ninety percent morons and ten percent people who just wanna get high."

"So a hundred percent morons." Greed looked up from her laptop.

"Can you blame them?" Vis muttered. "Not like there's anything else to do around here."

"If you're not sucking the Other Light's cock, then why the hell did you say you want to -"

Cuss lowered her voice. Even thinking this kind of thing was dangerous; saying it out loud could get you zapped.

"To take on the fucking Authority?"

The room got so quiet that Vis could have sworn he heard their hearts beating. His mouth dried out, and his palms started to sweat. His fingers tangled together,.

X pushed up his sunglasses.

"...Because this is all wrong."

His hand clenched into a fist at his side.

"Cuss, don't you want to be able to bowhunt? Greed- don't you want to be able to make games? Vis, don't you want to be able to make movies? Don't you want to change your bodies so you don't feel sick? Don't you want to be able to- to love people, without having to worry about it all getting taken away?"

He looked at each of them in turn as they spoke. Vis' heart skipped a beat.

"Don't you want to be free?" X asked.

For a long time, no one said anything. Vis looked down at his hands, and then back at X. He felt his cheeks getting hot, and he looked away.

"...I can't speak for anyone else," he finally said. His voice sounded like it belonged to a mouse. "But I think you're right."

Greed closed her laptop. It clicked shut, and the glow of the screen died.

"What's your plan, X?" she asked.

"Wait, wait, you're actually fucking agreeing with him?!" Cuss threw up her hands. "You have got to be fucking kidding me. This is completely fucking batshit insane. There's no way in hell we're gonna survive this."

"I'm not agreeing with him, I'm hearing him out. There's a difference."

"There's nothing TO hear out, Greed. Are you out of your fucking mind?" Cuss scowled. "There's only ten years until the True End-"

"And I don't want to die so soon," Greed snapped. "Or get turned into a Good Christian Man. I'd rather slit my wrists."

Vis nodded, and folded his arms, slouching down. He felt his skin crawl just thinking about it. Having to act, for the rest of his life, the way he did at home: long skirts and modest blouses, delicacy, daintiness, femininity, doing Bible study for hours every day when all he wanted was to watch whatever movies he could find, projected onto a sheet in the basement of some old school, transported away to another world in their flickering glow, being stuck mouthing submission to his dad and his big brothers-

Being stuck like that, and worse, being mindfucked into liking it? It was a worse torture than any lake of fire and brimstone.

"I mean, you're not wrong, but what the fucking helldicks can we do about it?" Cuss sighed, and pinched the bridge of her nose.

"I was getting to that part."

X hopped up onto the table and sat on it, kicking his legs a little bit.

"There's a place somewhere in region 6. The mountain part, so it probably got buried during the Appearing, but- It's still there somewhere. They called it the Warehouse."

He took a deep breath, and kept talking. His voice dropped, practically to a whisper.

"There's all kinds of shit in there. Alien shit. Wizard shit. God shit. Anything no one knew what the hell to do with. If we can get there, there might be something we can use to fight back."

"How do you know all this?" Greed asked. She tapped her fingers against her laptop.

"I found an old server." X looked like he was thinking for a long moment, looking at something far away.

"It belonged to a group called CATS," he added. "They tried to stop all this crap from happening. It didn't go down the way they wanted, but they sure gave it a helluva fight."

Greed nodded.

"Maybe we can finish what they started."

"Exactly." X grinned.

"But what about the - the getting zapped?" Vis asked, nervously.

"None of us said the magic words, right?" X asked.

"Hell no." Cuss scowled again. "I've seen the way my goddamn dad acts. He's Glorified. It's creepy as all fucking hell."

Vis shook his head, rocking back and forth slightly.

"I wanted to have some time to think," Greed said.

"So we might be able to slip under the radar," X said. "The Authority doesn't give a bat's fucking ass about people who aren't his meatpuppets. It's once you say "sure I'm yours, why not" and then go back on it that he gets pissy."

"We've got a fighting chance, then." Cuss bit her lip.

"Yeah. So... let's do this thing, yeah?"

X stuck his hand out. Vis placed his on top of X's, and Cuss and Greed joined the pile.

"We go to the Warehouse. We find weapons. We fight back, and we make the world ours again."

Vis nodded.

"And even if this doesn't work," Greed said, "we're going to go out with a hell of a bang."

---

---Fanfic alert, we've got fanfic! There are a LOT of swears in this one, those of sensitive disposition might want to steer clear.--

"X, are you sure this is a good idea?"

"Nope." He pulled down his goggles down over his sunglasses. "But Greed's in there. We've gotta do something."

"Is there any fuckin' way we can warn her?" Cuss spat on the sidewalk. "She got one of those goddamn phone... things, didn't she?"

"Nah, I talked her out of it. You know they've got taps on everything."

Vis bit his lip, shifted his backpack up and looked up at the speakeasy.

They called it the Hellfire Club, and it sure looked the part. Before the Tribulation, it had been some kind of big box store, and the walls were still burned black from long-past explosions. Someone had stuck long, thin neon lights to the outside, and they flickered on and off, casting strange shadows over the overgrown parking lot.

"How do we know there's gonna be a raid?" he asked.

"The salties aren't the only ones who've got wiretaps," X said. "This is a setup. The DJ's with them, the band's with them, the fucking guy bringing the fucking moonshine's with 'em - Throw me the fucking rope, will ya?"

Vis pulled it out of his pack and threw the coil to him. X tied a lasso at the end of it, and swung it, aiming for the pipe that jutted out of the ventilation system like a broken bone sticking out of a wound.

It looped around perfectly, and when he tugged the rope, nothing creaked.

"Come on." He started to climb. Cuss followed, and Vis brought up the rear. Vis' palms were sweating; he thought he might slide down the rope just from that.

The club's roof looked like something out a bad old sci-fi movie- a stretch of flat concrete, puckered by bubble-shaped glass windows and complicated-looking HVAC machines. Music drifted up from inside, and Vis swore he could feel it vibrating through the soles of his feet.

Cuss swore under her breath, and skinned her own backpack off.

"You got a fuckin' plan, or did you just bring us up here for shits and giggles?"

"If I didn't got a fuckin' plan I wouldn't have asked you to bring the special backpack."

They all wore masks when they did this kind of stuff. Vis' was a zombie. X's was a caricature of Nicolae Carpathia, so old you could see the cracks in the latex. Greed went for old-school Anonymous, and Cuss' was a skull.

Vis couldn't see her real face, now, but he swore it leered as wide as her mask did.

"Kay. What's the fuckin' plan?"

"When the band plays Stairway to Heaven, that's the signal. We got about thirty seconds before the salties start draggin' everyone off. So we throw a smoke bomb down the vents. I hack the sound system and go "YO FUCKERS THIS IS A RAID"."

"How are we gonna get out after that?" Vis asked. He folded his arms over his chest.

"Ten seconds after I say my piece, I close the connection. You-" He pointed at Vis. "Break the window. And Cuss- Get the pepper spray."

"There is no way in hell this is gonna work..." Vis muttered. He bent down anyway, "What about Greed?"

"She's smart. She'll get out before we drop the bomb."

Cuss nodded, and got into position over the window. Vis frowned, pulled his crowbar out of his bag, and followed her.

Beneath them, the solemn intro of Stairway to Heaven echoed.

He raised the crowbar.

"Three... two... one." .

.

"Mor balaten!"

The thirty seconds' warning had made all the difference -- the concerned citizen's committee (it wouldn't do to call them police, never mind the helmets that covered everything but the mouth and the riot armor, after all they weren't after people committing actual crimes) had their marching order, and stuck to them to the letter. By the time they barged in from the main door, most of the partygoers had filed out the truck ports on what used to be the warehouse's loading dock.

"Greed! Where the fuck are you!"

Thick smoke filled the dance floor, just a bit too thick for the laser lights to penetrate. Music had been replaced by shouts in the bowdlerized First-Century Hebrew that everyone had jammed into their heads, but the party lights were still running their program.

One of the officers, a tall man wearing a red uniform and a half-cape, pointed towards a group of partygoers trying to get a drunk comrade out. Outside, lightning struck twice. Someone must've tried to fight back. Bad idea. Just run and regroup.

"Hey assholes! Over here! Pick on someone your own size!"

"There she is" Vis pointed, in English. Greed was on the other side of the warehouse, banging the leg of a destroyed chair against the backrest, holding them as if they were a mace and shield.

"Dammit! What's she doing?"

"Let's go!" X called. The salties either hadn't seen them yet, or hadn't been told to switch focus. The group switched to English - no reason to let the other guys know what was going on. The problem is that this worked both ways; it just became harder to understand what the morality enforcers were shouting to each other. Thinking in English, they just sounded weird.

"Hug that shit!" The officer pointed twice. Looks like it'd be a fair fight, if it came to that. Except...

"Guys, we can't fight them head on. If we beat'em up, we get zapped by lightning soon as we get back outside."

"Hold them off!" Cuss says, and runs off for the smoke machine. Behind them, the other group finally manage to get their friend into a fireman carry and run out. Most people had run out; those who were too slow were being roughed up by the uniformed men - mostly men anyway - and loaded up on a paddywagon painted like an ambulance, to be taken to "counseling".

The officer quickly identifies X as the gang leader. "Call her Patsy!"

"Name's Vis, buckethead."

X picks up what's left of the chair, and starts banging it on the floor, making monkey noises. Vis and Greed look at each other and follow.

The few moments of uncertainty are sufficient; Cuss restarts the smoke machine. "Pepper spray! Make way!"

Holding the thing like a flamethrower, Cuss takes a couple of steady steps past her friends, and aims the smoke machine squarely at the three salties. Vis gets the idea, and stops shouting; in a couple of seconds he's behind Cuss with a stand fan. The armored men start sneezing and coughing.

"Cheese it!"

No chance to escape in the shadows - there hasn't been proper night in eighty years. But somebody flipped one of the paddy wagons, forcing the others to go around; people are still running.

Vis is the last one out. Ducking into another warehouse, this one full of ancient wooden pallets and boxes, he tries to not look too hard at the dark spots and fulgurites on the asphalt.

Eventually, it quiets down. The local radio indicates that a successful raid on an illegal rave club has been conducted by "top men" from this circumscription.

X has already started digging through the boxes. This stuff looks like it hasn't been touched in a century. "Hey guys, there's something shiny in this one."