Tinfic (OF COURSE): 15 Annuals, Chapter 1: That Part Where Ambrose Gets Executed
I just bought a paid account because of you guys. I don't know if you suck or are the best thing ever. BUT HERE HAVE A BADASS THORN QUEEN ICON ♥
Title: Fifteen Annuals With Her Gay Guardian Glitch (15 Annuals); CHAPTER 1, AKA That Part Where Ambrose Gets Executed
Fandom: TIN MAN, I NEED MORE TIN MAN ICONS.
Rating: PG-13 for a one-night-drunken-desperate stand and getting executed!
Warnings: ...see rating?
Summary: Who needs Roboparents when a Queen's got an Advisor-Ninja to take care of their recently deceased daughter?
This Chapter: Ambrose is informed of The Plan. He Plots. And then he gets executed! \o/
Fifteen Annuals With Her Gay Guardian Glitch
(aka 15 Annuals)
CHAPTER I:
AKA That Part Where Ambrose Gets Executed
A Shadow Advisor’s position was, to most eyes, a thankless one.
It was a second job tacked onto your first, and both were certain to take up a lot of time. You would never be paid for your work. You would never be able to talk about it, not even to your family. The hours were quite literally at any time the Queen willed it, be those during your lunch break or four in the morning. And above all else, it was a dangerous one, considering the primary role of a Shadow Advisor was to review the Royal Advisor’s decisions, give your own opinion, assist the Queen to your greatest capacity, and hope to all that is holy that the Queen’s advisor doesn’t find, catch, and kill you as a threat to his position, as he’d made a habit of doing recently.
Ambrose, however, didn’t have most of these problems. No matter how intelligent a twenty-year-old might seem, there would be little to no chance that anyone suspected the prodigy of being a vital Shadow Advisor. He had no problems with the hours since he was still predominately used to the Academy hours (despite having graduated four years earlier), and he’d already made enough money off patents that he heavily doubted the lack of payment for extra work would affect him.
Being caught and killed was also highly unlikely, but that was due to reasons that, outside of his life before being Ambrose, only he and the Queen herself knew.
When he was summoned to a hidden chamber inside the Winter Palace and was informed that Ambrose, who had been her most trusted advisor, was about to be executed for the greatest cause to ever befall the OZ, he was kind of surprised. He was also surprised by how weak the Queen looked, and how white streaks had invaded her long head of elegantly curled black locks. The reasons for his execution and her hair were one in the same, and that news had Ambrose slumping into his chair, hands holding his head as tears ran silently down his cheeks, crying for the first time in twelve years.
“I cannot hold your execution off for long, Ambrose,” she said quietly, and he shook his head.
“There has to be someone better for this, my Queen,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “This is…I agree, yes, this is the best way, but me? There must be someone else, someone better. I’m just an inaccuracy in the plan, a ghost in the system, some sort of…of GLITCH in this…”
“Yes, there are others,” she said simply. “In fact, an excellent plan was brought up almost immediately after I left her. You may consider yourself a glitch, as you say, but this is my choice. Are you refusing?”
“No,” Ambrose shook his head. “You know that whatever you ask is yours, your Majesty, no matter what it may be.”
“Now, a bargain,” she said, skipping all segues as she always did when he was in his Shadow Advisor position. “I will give you three days until the execution. Plan. You may do anything you like, so long as it doesn’t cause harm to the plan.”
He sighed. “I’ll need to be in solitary confinement with your magic tutor the last day, with sixteen view-disks,” he said numbly, barely thinking about why his mind could think about things like this when all his heart could do was pound frantically inside his chest, like it was trying to run from what the rest of his body knew it couldn’t.
“Done,” the Queen replied. “And in return, I want you to take her to the Kage.”
“No.”
The Queen blinked at him, and he stared reprovingly back. “No, my Queen, you have no idea what they might do-”
“Don’t act like I’m a fool, Ambrose, I know exactly what they’ll do,” she snapped. “You’re walking proof.”
“Yes, on my back. And my legs. And, lest we forget, this,” he snapped, and in a move that snapped off plenty of buttons he wrenched his shirt off to show the small, deadly tattoo on his chest. Despite the passage of time, it remained dark as night and perfectly stretched, ingrained in his soul and kept at the same point on his body all the way through puberty and would remain even beyond death.
The Queen didn’t flinch, nor did pity enter her lavender eyes. Instead, she spoke softly. “Which is why it must be you.”
He wanted to scream, to demand she choose anything but the Kage, but the Queen was already leaving the room with her graceful, silent gliding steps.
It was around ten o’clock when he’d managed to button what remained of his shirt back together and put his coat back on. He made it to Central City by three in the morning, stumbled into a bar, and started drinking.
Ambrose didn’t know how long he was drinking, or even what they were giving him, but he drank until he was brainless enough that when a Tin Man came in to try and help a very drunk man home, Ambrose fucked him up against a dirty, grimy alley wall and ignored the wedding ring on the hand that twisted into his hair, his blurry eyes looking at nothing but the guilty, lust-filled blue eyes in front of him.
The guy asked for his name afterwards, when there wasn’t any lust left in the pretty blue eyes he was staring into. “I’m just a glitch,” he mumbled. He knew the guy would think him too drunk to remember any of this, and he knew that meant he wouldn’t get a name in return. He didn’t want one. Being nothing but a nameless bit of guilt in the guy’s memories suited him perfectly.
He spent the morning of the first day staring at a wall in one of Central City’s ever-polite private, tiny detox cells (after all, getting drunk wasn’t a crime, and even if it was most people considered the hangover enough punishment) and planned fifteen annuals ahead as best he could. Ambrose didn’t get hangovers though, so when another Tin Man let him out (not blue-eyes, to his secret relief) he walked out in his still-torn clothing and headed back for the Winter Palace, only stopping to nearly break down and then, angry at himself, tried his best to kick, punch, stab, and generally murder an unfortunate bush a few yards away from the road.
When he got back to the Palace, he was starting to look insane already, which suited him just fine. Torn-up outfit, short hair windswept with a couple tiny leaves trapped in it, and his face was slightly burnt by the wind. Insane enough to get looks from anyone who knew the usually well-kempt and friendly Ambrose.
The fact he headed for the library and started reading up on everything he could find about female puberty and how to help a young woman grow up strong probably added to that ‘insane’ thing too. Childcare and You, Your Daughter And You (a series), The 100 Most Effective Teaching Methods Of The Past 100 Years, and Releasing the Tiger followed. He read until he was reading maps and astronomy books and scrolls about the Munchkin invasion tactics of the Brimkept Battles of 704, anything that could be remotely useful until he realized that it really was useless to try and read up on what he’d need to know about fifteen annuals in the future.
He slept after that. Right in the middle of his lab, too, on top of a table. He’d always been a light sleeper, so he would mutter and snap to himself in his sleep, implicating himself for everything Ambrose would be executed for.
Treason. Poison. Murder. Rebellion.
Who the rightful Princess-Heir was.
He slept until five in the afternoon and then he locked himself in his quarters, packing clothing subtly enough that any search wouldn’t find anything missing that couldn’t be blamed on a bad laundry load. Coat, shirt, shirt, shirt, another rattier coat, pants, boots, and then he pulled on one of the hangars and snuck into the secret library he’d received with the title of Shadow Advisor. Another bag, and some very specific books were packed, along with a few very specific gadgets and two knives he felt too dirty to touch but placed them carefully inside anyway. Both bags in hand, he went ahead and ‘stole’ the two horses that were already loosely tied up near the stables, one saddled and the other already prepared for baggage.
When he came back to the horses the next time, he had another two bags - one full of a child’s clothing, books, and a single green-wearing doll, another brimming with preserved food. He hitched those to the horse too, and headed back to his room, collapsing the exit and library in its entirety behind him.
Those things were his, and his alone. The only other person who could possibly get into the wreckage would be the Queen herself, and that was exactly how he wanted it.
He spent the rest of the day scribbling treasonous notes and flinging them around his room, knowing quite well that nobody but Ambrose himself ever came inside of it. Paper after paper that made him sick to his stomach was thrown about. In the closet. Near the front door. In the bathroom. Dozens stuffed under his bed, another ten strewn about his dresser.
He stopped and put the paper away when midnight was approaching, instead heading for the lab, where he began tinkering on useless inventions and equations, taking the time to write addendums and corrections to breakthrough theories that would forever discredit Ambrose as an ambitious fool, make him nothing but a footnote as a raving lunatic.
When he was mid-way through burning the plans and blueprints of every bit of his life’s work, he didn’t just feel sick. He found the nearest waste bin and started vomiting at the thought of everything he’d just destroyed, the technology that could have revolutionized the OZ forever, made life easier for everyone no matter how much money they had, the things he’d spent so long working on and had been so, so close to finishing…
Even if it was a glitch that she sent HIM for the most important mission he’d ever even heard of, it was what the Queen wanted. He repeated that over and over as he watched the paper burn. For the Queen. For the OZ. For the light. For the future. For life itself.
He’d barely washed the bile from his mouth and throat when the guards, accompanied by a red-eyed, furious Queen (with even more white in her hair, he noted with dismay) stormed in.
They stared at each other for barely a second, Ambrose’s eyes accepting while his face played the part of a traitorous son of a bitch, her eyes apologizing just the slightest bit while she fumed.
She slapped him hard across the face, and his head instinctively rolled with the blow. It didn’t keep his cheek from smarting, though.
“Arrest him. Throw him in with the other traitor. I’ll execute him myself at dawn,” she said, voice eerily cold.
They’d planned how this would work out, and he sprung for the queen, grabbing her by the throat as she placed the sixteen small, coin-sized disks in his pocket. The guards pulled him away almost immediately, and soon enough he was thrown into a solitary confinement room with thick walls meant to keep the screams in.
A very surprised-looking lapdog sat on the metal slab that served as both bench and bed.
“Toto, I presume?” Ambrose smiled, thankful for the chance to be Ambrose around one person, for one last time.
He explained the plan, and Tutor readily agreed. The next twenty hours of Ambrose’s life was spent with the man talking animatedly into disk after disk.
When Tutor fell asleep, Ambrose took out the final disk. He cleaned himself up as best he could, brushed the leaves out of his hair and buttoned his coat up all the way, and began to talk. It was important that he talk, for so many reasons and so many people, so he took his time about it and, when finished, he pocketed the sixteen disks once more.
He got two hours of sleep with a lapdog curled comfortably near him on the freezing bench before the Queen, followed by seven guards and the Princess Azkadellia herself, opened the door.
They didn’t say a word to Ambrose, simply led him up from the dungeon and out from the palace, onto a stone platform over the sharp edge of the water, where it fell into the icy, murky depths of the mountain lake.
“Azkadellia, this man is partially at fault for killing your sister,” the Queen said quietly to the young girl dressed in dark blue. “He didn’t serve as directed, and the murderer slipped in unknown.”
“You never directed me anywhere,” Ambrose said coldly, and took a scathing look around at the people who stood on the platform with him.
With a cold, haughty laugh, Ambrose stuck his hands in his coat pockets and flung himself backwards off the platform, plunging into the water.
“Guards!” the Queen snapped, and they were immediately searching the water.
“There!” one cried, and pointed towards a vague figure in the water drifting deeper and deeper into the water.
“He’ll drown by my will,” the Queen said coldly. “That far down, the lake will obey my command and continue to drag the traitor to his death.”
“Are you certain, Mother?” Azkadellia asked, purely inquisitive.
“The lakes surrounding our palaces obey their rightful ruler’s will,” she said, already turning back inside. “Come. It will be getting cold out soon.”
It did get cold out soon. It was nearly freezing when the lake’s will practically rocketed the man once known as Ambrose out of the lake and into a coughing fit on the shore opposite the Winter Palace, where a small hut sat with two horses, one saddled, another packed efficiently, outside.
A part of him wanted to curl up and go to sleep, knowing full well he’d die of hypothermia. A part of him wanted to just die right there, to give up and let the OZ take care of itself for once. Why was it always someone else’s job to save the world? The world should save itself for once.
But he could hear a little girl’s voice, singing to herself, from inside the door, so the man knocked on the door, received a polite “come in!” and took his first real look at the princess he would be guardian of for fifteen annuals.
“You look blue,” she said, pointing to his face.
He laughed, teeth chattering. “T-t-the c-color or th-th-the feeling?” he got out, and sat himself near the heater.
The princess giggled at him. “You’re a very strange man. Are you my plan?”
Half asleep as the warmth seeped into his freezing bones, he smiled at her. “J-just your plan’s glitch, DG,” he muttered.
“Then it’s very nice to meet you, Glitch, and I hope you don’t die,” DG said.
Glitch didn’t hear her. He was already out cold.
---
Chapter 2, aka The Bit With The Ninjas
Chapter 2, aka EVERYBODY LOVES NINJAS, will be out soon because duct_tape_fairy is spectacular and made me a porn tin man fst. ♥
Title: Fifteen Annuals With Her Gay Guardian Glitch (15 Annuals); CHAPTER 1, AKA That Part Where Ambrose Gets Executed
Fandom: TIN MAN, I NEED MORE TIN MAN ICONS.
Rating: PG-13 for a one-night-drunken-desperate stand and getting executed!
Warnings: ...see rating?
Summary: Who needs Roboparents when a Queen's got an Advisor-Ninja to take care of their recently deceased daughter?
This Chapter: Ambrose is informed of The Plan. He Plots. And then he gets executed! \o/
Fifteen Annuals With Her Gay Guardian Glitch
(aka 15 Annuals)
CHAPTER I:
AKA That Part Where Ambrose Gets Executed
A Shadow Advisor’s position was, to most eyes, a thankless one.
It was a second job tacked onto your first, and both were certain to take up a lot of time. You would never be paid for your work. You would never be able to talk about it, not even to your family. The hours were quite literally at any time the Queen willed it, be those during your lunch break or four in the morning. And above all else, it was a dangerous one, considering the primary role of a Shadow Advisor was to review the Royal Advisor’s decisions, give your own opinion, assist the Queen to your greatest capacity, and hope to all that is holy that the Queen’s advisor doesn’t find, catch, and kill you as a threat to his position, as he’d made a habit of doing recently.
Ambrose, however, didn’t have most of these problems. No matter how intelligent a twenty-year-old might seem, there would be little to no chance that anyone suspected the prodigy of being a vital Shadow Advisor. He had no problems with the hours since he was still predominately used to the Academy hours (despite having graduated four years earlier), and he’d already made enough money off patents that he heavily doubted the lack of payment for extra work would affect him.
Being caught and killed was also highly unlikely, but that was due to reasons that, outside of his life before being Ambrose, only he and the Queen herself knew.
When he was summoned to a hidden chamber inside the Winter Palace and was informed that Ambrose, who had been her most trusted advisor, was about to be executed for the greatest cause to ever befall the OZ, he was kind of surprised. He was also surprised by how weak the Queen looked, and how white streaks had invaded her long head of elegantly curled black locks. The reasons for his execution and her hair were one in the same, and that news had Ambrose slumping into his chair, hands holding his head as tears ran silently down his cheeks, crying for the first time in twelve years.
“I cannot hold your execution off for long, Ambrose,” she said quietly, and he shook his head.
“There has to be someone better for this, my Queen,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “This is…I agree, yes, this is the best way, but me? There must be someone else, someone better. I’m just an inaccuracy in the plan, a ghost in the system, some sort of…of GLITCH in this…”
“Yes, there are others,” she said simply. “In fact, an excellent plan was brought up almost immediately after I left her. You may consider yourself a glitch, as you say, but this is my choice. Are you refusing?”
“No,” Ambrose shook his head. “You know that whatever you ask is yours, your Majesty, no matter what it may be.”
“Now, a bargain,” she said, skipping all segues as she always did when he was in his Shadow Advisor position. “I will give you three days until the execution. Plan. You may do anything you like, so long as it doesn’t cause harm to the plan.”
He sighed. “I’ll need to be in solitary confinement with your magic tutor the last day, with sixteen view-disks,” he said numbly, barely thinking about why his mind could think about things like this when all his heart could do was pound frantically inside his chest, like it was trying to run from what the rest of his body knew it couldn’t.
“Done,” the Queen replied. “And in return, I want you to take her to the Kage.”
“No.”
The Queen blinked at him, and he stared reprovingly back. “No, my Queen, you have no idea what they might do-”
“Don’t act like I’m a fool, Ambrose, I know exactly what they’ll do,” she snapped. “You’re walking proof.”
“Yes, on my back. And my legs. And, lest we forget, this,” he snapped, and in a move that snapped off plenty of buttons he wrenched his shirt off to show the small, deadly tattoo on his chest. Despite the passage of time, it remained dark as night and perfectly stretched, ingrained in his soul and kept at the same point on his body all the way through puberty and would remain even beyond death.
The Queen didn’t flinch, nor did pity enter her lavender eyes. Instead, she spoke softly. “Which is why it must be you.”
He wanted to scream, to demand she choose anything but the Kage, but the Queen was already leaving the room with her graceful, silent gliding steps.
It was around ten o’clock when he’d managed to button what remained of his shirt back together and put his coat back on. He made it to Central City by three in the morning, stumbled into a bar, and started drinking.
Ambrose didn’t know how long he was drinking, or even what they were giving him, but he drank until he was brainless enough that when a Tin Man came in to try and help a very drunk man home, Ambrose fucked him up against a dirty, grimy alley wall and ignored the wedding ring on the hand that twisted into his hair, his blurry eyes looking at nothing but the guilty, lust-filled blue eyes in front of him.
The guy asked for his name afterwards, when there wasn’t any lust left in the pretty blue eyes he was staring into. “I’m just a glitch,” he mumbled. He knew the guy would think him too drunk to remember any of this, and he knew that meant he wouldn’t get a name in return. He didn’t want one. Being nothing but a nameless bit of guilt in the guy’s memories suited him perfectly.
He spent the morning of the first day staring at a wall in one of Central City’s ever-polite private, tiny detox cells (after all, getting drunk wasn’t a crime, and even if it was most people considered the hangover enough punishment) and planned fifteen annuals ahead as best he could. Ambrose didn’t get hangovers though, so when another Tin Man let him out (not blue-eyes, to his secret relief) he walked out in his still-torn clothing and headed back for the Winter Palace, only stopping to nearly break down and then, angry at himself, tried his best to kick, punch, stab, and generally murder an unfortunate bush a few yards away from the road.
When he got back to the Palace, he was starting to look insane already, which suited him just fine. Torn-up outfit, short hair windswept with a couple tiny leaves trapped in it, and his face was slightly burnt by the wind. Insane enough to get looks from anyone who knew the usually well-kempt and friendly Ambrose.
The fact he headed for the library and started reading up on everything he could find about female puberty and how to help a young woman grow up strong probably added to that ‘insane’ thing too. Childcare and You, Your Daughter And You (a series), The 100 Most Effective Teaching Methods Of The Past 100 Years, and Releasing the Tiger followed. He read until he was reading maps and astronomy books and scrolls about the Munchkin invasion tactics of the Brimkept Battles of 704, anything that could be remotely useful until he realized that it really was useless to try and read up on what he’d need to know about fifteen annuals in the future.
He slept after that. Right in the middle of his lab, too, on top of a table. He’d always been a light sleeper, so he would mutter and snap to himself in his sleep, implicating himself for everything Ambrose would be executed for.
Treason. Poison. Murder. Rebellion.
Who the rightful Princess-Heir was.
He slept until five in the afternoon and then he locked himself in his quarters, packing clothing subtly enough that any search wouldn’t find anything missing that couldn’t be blamed on a bad laundry load. Coat, shirt, shirt, shirt, another rattier coat, pants, boots, and then he pulled on one of the hangars and snuck into the secret library he’d received with the title of Shadow Advisor. Another bag, and some very specific books were packed, along with a few very specific gadgets and two knives he felt too dirty to touch but placed them carefully inside anyway. Both bags in hand, he went ahead and ‘stole’ the two horses that were already loosely tied up near the stables, one saddled and the other already prepared for baggage.
When he came back to the horses the next time, he had another two bags - one full of a child’s clothing, books, and a single green-wearing doll, another brimming with preserved food. He hitched those to the horse too, and headed back to his room, collapsing the exit and library in its entirety behind him.
Those things were his, and his alone. The only other person who could possibly get into the wreckage would be the Queen herself, and that was exactly how he wanted it.
He spent the rest of the day scribbling treasonous notes and flinging them around his room, knowing quite well that nobody but Ambrose himself ever came inside of it. Paper after paper that made him sick to his stomach was thrown about. In the closet. Near the front door. In the bathroom. Dozens stuffed under his bed, another ten strewn about his dresser.
He stopped and put the paper away when midnight was approaching, instead heading for the lab, where he began tinkering on useless inventions and equations, taking the time to write addendums and corrections to breakthrough theories that would forever discredit Ambrose as an ambitious fool, make him nothing but a footnote as a raving lunatic.
When he was mid-way through burning the plans and blueprints of every bit of his life’s work, he didn’t just feel sick. He found the nearest waste bin and started vomiting at the thought of everything he’d just destroyed, the technology that could have revolutionized the OZ forever, made life easier for everyone no matter how much money they had, the things he’d spent so long working on and had been so, so close to finishing…
Even if it was a glitch that she sent HIM for the most important mission he’d ever even heard of, it was what the Queen wanted. He repeated that over and over as he watched the paper burn. For the Queen. For the OZ. For the light. For the future. For life itself.
He’d barely washed the bile from his mouth and throat when the guards, accompanied by a red-eyed, furious Queen (with even more white in her hair, he noted with dismay) stormed in.
They stared at each other for barely a second, Ambrose’s eyes accepting while his face played the part of a traitorous son of a bitch, her eyes apologizing just the slightest bit while she fumed.
She slapped him hard across the face, and his head instinctively rolled with the blow. It didn’t keep his cheek from smarting, though.
“Arrest him. Throw him in with the other traitor. I’ll execute him myself at dawn,” she said, voice eerily cold.
They’d planned how this would work out, and he sprung for the queen, grabbing her by the throat as she placed the sixteen small, coin-sized disks in his pocket. The guards pulled him away almost immediately, and soon enough he was thrown into a solitary confinement room with thick walls meant to keep the screams in.
A very surprised-looking lapdog sat on the metal slab that served as both bench and bed.
“Toto, I presume?” Ambrose smiled, thankful for the chance to be Ambrose around one person, for one last time.
He explained the plan, and Tutor readily agreed. The next twenty hours of Ambrose’s life was spent with the man talking animatedly into disk after disk.
When Tutor fell asleep, Ambrose took out the final disk. He cleaned himself up as best he could, brushed the leaves out of his hair and buttoned his coat up all the way, and began to talk. It was important that he talk, for so many reasons and so many people, so he took his time about it and, when finished, he pocketed the sixteen disks once more.
He got two hours of sleep with a lapdog curled comfortably near him on the freezing bench before the Queen, followed by seven guards and the Princess Azkadellia herself, opened the door.
They didn’t say a word to Ambrose, simply led him up from the dungeon and out from the palace, onto a stone platform over the sharp edge of the water, where it fell into the icy, murky depths of the mountain lake.
“Azkadellia, this man is partially at fault for killing your sister,” the Queen said quietly to the young girl dressed in dark blue. “He didn’t serve as directed, and the murderer slipped in unknown.”
“You never directed me anywhere,” Ambrose said coldly, and took a scathing look around at the people who stood on the platform with him.
With a cold, haughty laugh, Ambrose stuck his hands in his coat pockets and flung himself backwards off the platform, plunging into the water.
“Guards!” the Queen snapped, and they were immediately searching the water.
“There!” one cried, and pointed towards a vague figure in the water drifting deeper and deeper into the water.
“He’ll drown by my will,” the Queen said coldly. “That far down, the lake will obey my command and continue to drag the traitor to his death.”
“Are you certain, Mother?” Azkadellia asked, purely inquisitive.
“The lakes surrounding our palaces obey their rightful ruler’s will,” she said, already turning back inside. “Come. It will be getting cold out soon.”
It did get cold out soon. It was nearly freezing when the lake’s will practically rocketed the man once known as Ambrose out of the lake and into a coughing fit on the shore opposite the Winter Palace, where a small hut sat with two horses, one saddled, another packed efficiently, outside.
A part of him wanted to curl up and go to sleep, knowing full well he’d die of hypothermia. A part of him wanted to just die right there, to give up and let the OZ take care of itself for once. Why was it always someone else’s job to save the world? The world should save itself for once.
But he could hear a little girl’s voice, singing to herself, from inside the door, so the man knocked on the door, received a polite “come in!” and took his first real look at the princess he would be guardian of for fifteen annuals.
“You look blue,” she said, pointing to his face.
He laughed, teeth chattering. “T-t-the c-color or th-th-the feeling?” he got out, and sat himself near the heater.
The princess giggled at him. “You’re a very strange man. Are you my plan?”
Half asleep as the warmth seeped into his freezing bones, he smiled at her. “J-just your plan’s glitch, DG,” he muttered.
“Then it’s very nice to meet you, Glitch, and I hope you don’t die,” DG said.
Glitch didn’t hear her. He was already out cold.
---
Chapter 2, aka The Bit With The Ninjas
Chapter 2, aka EVERYBODY LOVES NINJAS, will be out soon because duct_tape_fairy is spectacular and made me a porn tin man fst. ♥