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Description
Chapter Three: Wherein I visit Paul, and he’s already mad at me

Louis pulled up to the curb of the city’s third tallest building where Paul held residence. He climbed out of his seat, locked the doors, grabbed the duffle bag on the floor and took both it and his book bag to the double glass doors.

He walked straight to the elevators and pushed the top button. Louis scanned the cozy, well-decorated lobby as he waited. Well-dressed men and women stood in private groups scattered across the faux stone flooring, sipping cups of complementary coffee. Two women in business attire argued about the papers the brunette held in her hand, the blonde clearly was trying to get out of some agreement.

Louis would know what to do with a stack of papers binding him to something. A bent grin spreading under his nose, he lifted his hand and faintly spread his fingers at the paper. Poof. Up in flames. Problem solved. Anything could be ended with fire. Well… except fire, of course.

He considered burning his parking ticket.

The elevator dinged and the doors furthest from him opened. He stepped into the elevator car and pushed the button for the fourteenth floor. Louis checked his watch and cringed. He was late, all thanks to that campus security girl. Seriously, some people had their whole world upside down, and worked to spread their ridiculousness to others. Louis scratched the long, thin crescent-shaped scar from his temple to his jaw and watched the numbers climb.

She had passion, though. And she was pretty-ish. That redeemed her, almost. But not quite.

The elevator doors opened to the fourteenth floor and Louis stepped into the hallway, checking the door numbers. Paul’s apartment was nicer than Louis’s house. Louis’s house had been a little building for farm hands to live in during harvest season of the bush bean fields that spanned in all directions. It had been vacant for years and the owner had been so eager to make money off of it, that Louis’s monthly bill was easily covered by the cash he got from his share – supposedly half, but he suspected it was more two-thirds to one-third - of the “taxes” the conquered hosts paid them. Fixed up, it was comfortable for a preoccupied bachelor of his disposition. There was dead grass-covered yard space enough to park his half a dozen junked cars, and acres of fields separated him from his closest neighbors.

The window at the end of the hallway gave the strange impression that the clean white walls were moving towards each other. Louis hated the feeling and, keeping his eyes on the window, quickly scuttled to Paul’s door.

He gave a rapid triple knock against the repainted wood and glanced up at the peephole. There was no point in trying to look through it; Paul always kept a square of black construction paper taped over it to ward off spies. There were soft scrapes on the linoleum on the other side of the door. They halted as Paul lifted the paper and peered through the hole, and then the multiple locks began clicking. There was a long slide from the chain at the top and then the door opened to Paul, mid sixties, black slippers, black slacks, and a maroon turtleneck that hugged his stocky frame a little too closely.

“Good afternoon,” Paul greeted in his eerie robotic voice, emphasizing the time of day.

“Sorry, Paul,” Louis said as he stepped inside and walked towards the tables laden with scientific projects, and towards his in particular which was piled high with junk: but relevant junk. All bolts, wires, pliers, anti-flammable gloves, a propane tank and hose that snaked up the table leg. “I had—“

“Shoes!” Paul said in his intensified monotone that translated into a yell. Louis stopped, crouched and began untying his converse all stars. “And it’s Nightshade,” Paul corrected, clenching his round fist before his face. “Paul Cutley was the name of the pushover surgeon whom the medical staff… well…”

“Pushed over?” Louis offered, trying to pull off his stubborn shoe.

Paul worked at locking the door. “Kicked out of his field,” he continued. “As if my skills were worthless.”

Louis had to sit down on the white-with-brown-lines linoleum to pull off his first shoe. He set to work on his other one. “Well, you did an okay job on my back,” he said and wiggled one white sock clad foot in the air to prove his point.

“I did better than okay,” Paul retorted. He looked longingly at Louis and for a moment, Louis thought he would join him on the floor. But then he turned and held out his arms to his small laboratory. “But no one can know what I did for you, because that would connect you with Countersink, which would promptly thwart everything we’ve worked for.” Paul massaged his brow as if his inability to spread the successful restoration of Louis’s nervous system had forever destroyed his career.

Louis was finally free of his shoes, so he stood and made it onto the carpet before Paul caught him again, still massaging away.

“Put them on the rack,” the chemist muttered.

Louis returned to the doorway once again, grabbed his converse by their high backs and tossed them onto the wooden shoe rack beside the door. The only other shoes on the rack were a pair of shiny black dress shoes: almost as trademark Paul as his artificial voice box.

“Very good,” Paul said, with a shallow smile. He walked into the kitchen-lab. “You were saying?”

Louis’s eyes trailed along the carpet. “I was saying…” he mused, searching for the thought that danced through his head, just out of reach. Suddenly, it tripped and Louis pounced upon it. “Oh! …It really isn’t all that important,” he dismissed as he cleared a stack of papers from his chair and sat in their place. “I was just making excuses for why I’m late. I had a class today I couldn’t get out of.”

Paul slipped on a pair of disposable white plastic gloves and removed his chemistry goggles from the nail they hung on by the sink. He fitted them squarely over his eyes. Paul moved to his not-so-stainless steel refrigerator, opened it and removed a pitcher from the bottom shelf, being careful not to disturb the rack of beakers or bottles of chemicals. Paul held the pitcher up as he closed the door.

“Iced tea?” he offered.

Louis wasn’t much of a chemist, but he knew that ingesting food that had been sitting between chemicals for who knows how long wasn’t the best of ideas.

“Uh, I’ll pass,” Louis replied, pulling his goggles-hearing apparatus helmet from his duffle bag. He fit it on his head, pushing the ear coverings like mini hubcaps over his ears. His fingers knew the exact location of the power switch on the back of the strap. The goggles hummed as they warmed up and the gutted flame-thrower on the table slowly evolved from a fuzzy green blur, to a sharp, well-lit machine. Louis glanced around for his tool chest and finding it by the wall, cleared a space for it and heaved it onto the table.

“Have you filled out the CCC form yet?” Paul asked, getting a glass from the cupboard.

Louis opened his little green notebook to a page with scribbled notes and a diagram and laid it in the upturned lid of his tool chest. He took his leather jacket-flamethrower complex out of the duffle bag and spread it carefully on the table, examining the broken pressure chamber. A thin, chrome square with sharp, hooked corners was embedded into the top of it. Louis looked slowly down to the scratch on his corresponding forearm. The square had gone completely through the pressure chamber and broken through the other side. Boy was he thankful he had been wearing them.

“I’ve been kinda busy,” he replied, distractedly.

Paul took a sip of his iced tea. “Ironically, busy with preparing for the conference. But if we don’t get that form in, we won’t be presenting anything.”

Louis grabbed hold of the shining square with his small, spidery fingers. “Oh, they’d let us present anyway. It’s not like we need to prove ourselves.” He pinched and pulled.

“But we do, Countersink,” Paul said, swirling his tea. “We must show them we are organized professionals. My image has gotten a little…mussed, since we joined up.”

Louis pulled harder with no luck. “Then why don’t you fill out the form, Paul?” he grunted, holding the machine with one hand and pulling with the other. “You have nicer handwriting, anyway.”

Paul frowned. “Nightshade,” he corrected. “And because we are in this together.” He shrugged and took another sip of tea. “Also, because the machine is yours and I am not as familiar with it as you.”

Louis re-gripped and pulled harder.

Paul hadn’t paid attention to Louis’s project until then and he peered over the pile of what could only be described as “stuff” sitting between them. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Remember when the Master threw something at me? Well, it’s embedded in my pressure chamber.”

“She could have killed you,” Paul noted. “You should have let me kill her.”

Here we go, thought Louis.

“I’m okay,” Louis assured him. “I just got scratched.” As if on cue, his fingers slipped and the blade drew blood from his thumb. Louis quickly let go and hid his injured hand.

Paul shook his head and took a band aide from a drawer under the microwave. He handed it to Louis, who promptly wrapped it around his thumb.

“And, frankly, I don’t understand why we’re going after other hosts,” Louis continued. “Aren’t we all sort of on the same team? Aren’t we all trying to change the world?”

“But whose plans for the future should we go by?” Paul asked patiently. “To change the world, there must be only a few people ultimately in charge, which in turn requires that all the other smaller leaders must know who is above them. That is what we are doing, Countersink. We have almost conquered the United States.”

“I wouldn’t think the Death Angel would like to hear that,” Louis mentioned with a mischievous smile.

“The Death Angel loves a good competition,” Paul explained. “And we’re not overtaking him, anyway. He is the very top, but he cannot effectively rule the world alone.”

“But you just said-“

“It all works out,” Paul assured him. “Let me finish up this experiment I started since you were so incredibly late, and then we can get to planning which host to take out next. You can occupy yourself with filling out the CCC form.”

“So you really want me to fill this one out, huh?”

Paul nodded. “Yes. We’ve been working together for over a year now, and I think you should start involving yourself more in the political economy of the business. It’s much more than blowing things up.”

“…Alright,” Louis agreed.

“Fill it out and I’ll look it over to make sure it’s formal enough.”

“Would you happen to have a printed copy of the form?” Louis asked.

“You tossed it to the floor when you sat down,” Paul replied with a patronizing smile.

Louis looked down at the stack of papers he had demoted from chair to floor and, sure enough, on top lay a clean, stapled page with “Creative Columbus Conference Entry Form” printed in bold as the heading.

Louis reached towards it but, after a pause, his hand changed course and instead grabbed the pliers on the floor. “I’ll fill it out when I have time,” he promised, gripping the blade with its metal fingers.

“I want it in my hands by tomorrow,” Paul droned.

Louis worked the disk out of the pressure chamber, millimeter by millimeter.

“Countersink.”

“Yeah, yeah, the form,” Louis muttered, “Here by tomorrow. Got it.”

Louis had slipped under the hypnotic influence of his work and his ability to make conversation was steadily fading. He had almost forgotten Paul was still in the kitchen until glass beakers and Bunsen burners began clacking on the green, plastic countertop as Paul set up his workstation.

“Have you seen the news coverage of last night’s job?” Paul asked. Louis didn’t even hear him. Paul let him be and continued setting up his own experiment, deciding not to bother attempting conversation with the workhorse-of-a-vegetable that was Louis.

Description
Chapter Three: Wherein I visit Paul, and he’s already mad at me

Louis pulled up to the curb of the city’s third tallest building where Paul held residence. He climbed out of his seat, locked the doors, grabbed the duffle bag on the floor and took both it and his book bag to the double glass doors.

He walked straight to the elevators and pushed the top button. Louis scanned the cozy, well-decorated lobby as he waited. Well-dressed men and women stood in private groups scattered across the faux stone flooring, sipping cups of complementary coffee. Two women in business attire argued about the papers the brunette held in her hand, the blonde clearly was trying to get out of some agreement.

Louis would know what to do with a stack of papers binding him to something. A bent grin spreading under his nose, he lifted his hand and faintly spread his fingers at the paper. Poof. Up in flames. Problem solved. Anything could be ended with fire. Well… except fire, of course.

He considered burning his parking ticket.

The elevator dinged and the doors furthest from him opened. He stepped into the elevator car and pushed the button for the fourteenth floor. Louis checked his watch and cringed. He was late, all thanks to that campus security girl. Seriously, some people had their whole world upside down, and worked to spread their ridiculousness to others. Louis scratched the long, thin crescent-shaped scar from his temple to his jaw and watched the numbers climb.

She had passion, though. And she was pretty-ish. That redeemed her, almost. But not quite.

The elevator doors opened to the fourteenth floor and Louis stepped into the hallway, checking the door numbers. Paul’s apartment was nicer than Louis’s house. Louis’s house had been a little building for farm hands to live in during harvest season of the bush bean fields that spanned in all directions. It had been vacant for years and the owner had been so eager to make money off of it, that Louis’s monthly bill was easily covered by the cash he got from his share – supposedly half, but he suspected it was more two-thirds to one-third - of the “taxes” the conquered hosts paid them. Fixed up, it was comfortable for a preoccupied bachelor of his disposition. There was dead grass-covered yard space enough to park his half a dozen junked cars, and acres of fields separated him from his closest neighbors.

The window at the end of the hallway gave the strange impression that the clean white walls were moving towards each other. Louis hated the feeling and, keeping his eyes on the window, quickly scuttled to Paul’s door.

He gave a rapid triple knock against the repainted wood and glanced up at the peephole. There was no point in trying to look through it; Paul always kept a square of black construction paper taped over it to ward off spies. There were soft scrapes on the linoleum on the other side of the door. They halted as Paul lifted the paper and peered through the hole, and then the multiple locks began clicking. There was a long slide from the chain at the top and then the door opened to Paul, mid sixties, black slippers, black slacks, and a maroon turtleneck that hugged his stocky frame a little too closely.

“Good afternoon,” Paul greeted in his eerie robotic voice, emphasizing the time of day.

“Sorry, Paul,” Louis said as he stepped inside and walked towards the tables laden with scientific projects, and towards his in particular which was piled high with junk: but relevant junk. All bolts, wires, pliers, anti-flammable gloves, a propane tank and hose that snaked up the table leg. “I had—“

“Shoes!” Paul said in his intensified monotone that translated into a yell. Louis stopped, crouched and began untying his converse all stars. “And it’s Nightshade,” Paul corrected, clenching his round fist before his face. “Paul Cutley was the name of the pushover surgeon whom the medical staff… well…”

“Pushed over?” Louis offered, trying to pull off his stubborn shoe.

Paul worked at locking the door. “Kicked out of his field,” he continued. “As if my skills were worthless.”

Louis had to sit down on the white-with-brown-lines linoleum to pull off his first shoe. He set to work on his other one. “Well, you did an okay job on my back,” he said and wiggled one white sock clad foot in the air to prove his point.

“I did better than okay,” Paul retorted. He looked longingly at Louis and for a moment, Louis thought he would join him on the floor. But then he turned and held out his arms to his small laboratory. “But no one can know what I did for you, because that would connect you with Countersink, which would promptly thwart everything we’ve worked for.” Paul massaged his brow as if his inability to spread the successful restoration of Louis’s nervous system had forever destroyed his career.

Louis was finally free of his shoes, so he stood and made it onto the carpet before Paul caught him again, still massaging away.

“Put them on the rack,” the chemist muttered.

Louis returned to the doorway once again, grabbed his converse by their high backs and tossed them onto the wooden shoe rack beside the door. The only other shoes on the rack were a pair of shiny black dress shoes: almost as trademark Paul as his artificial voice box.

“Very good,” Paul said, with a shallow smile. He walked into the kitchen-lab. “You were saying?”

Louis’s eyes trailed along the carpet. “I was saying…” he mused, searching for the thought that danced through his head, just out of reach. Suddenly, it tripped and Louis pounced upon it. “Oh! …It really isn’t all that important,” he dismissed as he cleared a stack of papers from his chair and sat in their place. “I was just making excuses for why I’m late. I had a class today I couldn’t get out of.”

Paul slipped on a pair of disposable white plastic gloves and removed his chemistry goggles from the nail they hung on by the sink. He fitted them squarely over his eyes. Paul moved to his not-so-stainless steel refrigerator, opened it and removed a pitcher from the bottom shelf, being careful not to disturb the rack of beakers or bottles of chemicals. Paul held the pitcher up as he closed the door.

“Iced tea?” he offered.

Louis wasn’t much of a chemist, but he knew that ingesting food that had been sitting between chemicals for who knows how long wasn’t the best of ideas.

“Uh, I’ll pass,” Louis replied, pulling his goggles-hearing apparatus helmet from his duffle bag. He fit it on his head, pushing the ear coverings like mini hubcaps over his ears. His fingers knew the exact location of the power switch on the back of the strap. The goggles hummed as they warmed up and the gutted flame-thrower on the table slowly evolved from a fuzzy green blur, to a sharp, well-lit machine. Louis glanced around for his tool chest and finding it by the wall, cleared a space for it and heaved it onto the table.

“Have you filled out the CCC form yet?” Paul asked, getting a glass from the cupboard.

Louis opened his little green notebook to a page with scribbled notes and a diagram and laid it in the upturned lid of his tool chest. He took his leather jacket-flamethrower complex out of the duffle bag and spread it carefully on the table, examining the broken pressure chamber. A thin, chrome square with sharp, hooked corners was embedded into the top of it. Louis looked slowly down to the scratch on his corresponding forearm. The square had gone completely through the pressure chamber and broken through the other side. Boy was he thankful he had been wearing them.

“I’ve been kinda busy,” he replied, distractedly.

Paul took a sip of his iced tea. “Ironically, busy with preparing for the conference. But if we don’t get that form in, we won’t be presenting anything.”

Louis grabbed hold of the shining square with his small, spidery fingers. “Oh, they’d let us present anyway. It’s not like we need to prove ourselves.” He pinched and pulled.

“But we do, Countersink,” Paul said, swirling his tea. “We must show them we are organized professionals. My image has gotten a little…mussed, since we joined up.”

Louis pulled harder with no luck. “Then why don’t you fill out the form, Paul?” he grunted, holding the machine with one hand and pulling with the other. “You have nicer handwriting, anyway.”

Paul frowned. “Nightshade,” he corrected. “And because we are in this together.” He shrugged and took another sip of tea. “Also, because the machine is yours and I am not as familiar with it as you.”

Louis re-gripped and pulled harder.

Paul hadn’t paid attention to Louis’s project until then and he peered over the pile of what could only be described as “stuff” sitting between them. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Remember when the Master threw something at me? Well, it’s embedded in my pressure chamber.”

“She could have killed you,” Paul noted. “You should have let me kill her.”

Here we go, thought Louis.

“I’m okay,” Louis assured him. “I just got scratched.” As if on cue, his fingers slipped and the blade drew blood from his thumb. Louis quickly let go and hid his injured hand.

Paul shook his head and took a band aide from a drawer under the microwave. He handed it to Louis, who promptly wrapped it around his thumb.

“And, frankly, I don’t understand why we’re going after other hosts,” Louis continued. “Aren’t we all sort of on the same team? Aren’t we all trying to change the world?”

“But whose plans for the future should we go by?” Paul asked patiently. “To change the world, there must be only a few people ultimately in charge, which in turn requires that all the other smaller leaders must know who is above them. That is what we are doing, Countersink. We have almost conquered the United States.”

“I wouldn’t think the Death Angel would like to hear that,” Louis mentioned with a mischievous smile.

“The Death Angel loves a good competition,” Paul explained. “And we’re not overtaking him, anyway. He is the very top, but he cannot effectively rule the world alone.”

“But you just said-“

“It all works out,” Paul assured him. “Let me finish up this experiment I started since you were so incredibly late, and then we can get to planning which host to take out next. You can occupy yourself with filling out the CCC form.”

“So you really want me to fill this one out, huh?”

Paul nodded. “Yes. We’ve been working together for over a year now, and I think you should start involving yourself more in the political economy of the business. It’s much more than blowing things up.”

“…Alright,” Louis agreed.

“Fill it out and I’ll look it over to make sure it’s formal enough.”

“Would you happen to have a printed copy of the form?” Louis asked.

“You tossed it to the floor when you sat down,” Paul replied with a patronizing smile.

Louis looked down at the stack of papers he had demoted from chair to floor and, sure enough, on top lay a clean, stapled page with “Creative Columbus Conference Entry Form” printed in bold as the heading.

Louis reached towards it but, after a pause, his hand changed course and instead grabbed the pliers on the floor. “I’ll fill it out when I have time,” he promised, gripping the blade with its metal fingers.

“I want it in my hands by tomorrow,” Paul droned.

Louis worked the disk out of the pressure chamber, millimeter by millimeter.

“Countersink.”

“Yeah, yeah, the form,” Louis muttered, “Here by tomorrow. Got it.”

Louis had slipped under the hypnotic influence of his work and his ability to make conversation was steadily fading. He had almost forgotten Paul was still in the kitchen until glass beakers and Bunsen burners began clacking on the green, plastic countertop as Paul set up his workstation.

“Have you seen the news coverage of last night’s job?” Paul asked. Louis didn’t even hear him. Paul let him be and continued setting up his own experiment, deciding not to bother attempting conversation with the workhorse-of-a-vegetable that was Louis.