"Besides the war with them a few years ago?" Howard let out a laugh. "No."

A war that had started this region down its slow decline towards annihilation. Before then, the battles waged were material and concentrated. Once reality began to tear, that was when everything began to fall apart. It was when the histories began to fail, leaving those who studied it with only guesses.

There was no greater tragedy than the Ultra Beast War. It had only lasted for three days, though. There was plenty of time for it to be dethroned.

Howard looked out of the bars, where a Megalopolan marched past. Maybe there wasn't.

"And now we're here." He agreed.

Neither of them had the power of greatness at their fingertips. She was human. Stupid. Destructive. Fallible. He was someone who watched. He had no right to comment on matters of the present, or of the future. Only the past, always the past.

"If we get out of this, it will not matter if we see or hear them. This will be their final act of power. They do not mean for us to survive. We're part of a show. We will never leave this prison, but if we do..."

Behind the mask, an eye blinked.

"...it will not be the same."

---

PENELOPE LIVY

"Negative? No, no. I believe we'll win. The Megalopolans have lost every battle they've fought. The war is over. We've won because mankind is fated to win. I simply..." He spread his hands like the cell was a palace instead of a tomb. "...see things. Many of us will see this through."

Penelope wouldn't, though. He'd find a way to kill her before this was over, if it ever was. It was the only way that their relationship could end, with blood splattering across tiles, soaking into sandals.

Only then would Shred be at rest.

"They've figured out how to manifest things from Tera Crystals." The admin sucked air through his teeth as he leaned back in the cell, hunched in the corner like a rat. The one thread he shared with this woman was fear, though he was loathe to admit it. "If Tera Crystals draw things from the mind, we must exploit their way of thinking."

That was to say they had no exploitable weaknesses. Back on Route 119, they had been starving and desperate. It had been easy to exploit desperation. There was one thing that came to mind, though.

"They want to go home." Sentimentality and emotion led to the fall of great empires. It could help them here, too. "The biggest weakness of all is the heart."

He tapped his own for emphasis.

---

PENELOPE LIVY

The sun was hot, water was wet, and the menagerie hated the Mabosstiff.

"They certainly think so. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here. They need us for something." The admin crunched further into the darkness, as if doing so would prevent him from being noticed by the world around himself and Penelope. "Otherwise we would be dead."

Silence. A Megalopolan marched past the cell bars. The Toxic Chain glimmered in its magenta glory, a divine blessing from beyond the veil.

"Maybe they'll have us build another spaceship, since we wrecked the last one." He snorted as he turned back to Penelope. A long shadow was cast by the figure huddled in the dark.

"Can you get us out?"

---

PENELOPE LIVY

That explained why everyone was still locked up. If Palkia's chosen were here and in control of her powers, she would cut through these bars like a knife through butter. Reality bent before the Alchemist, after all.

"The magenta chain." He almost insisted that Penelope keep trying, urging her to push through the shackles put on her by their captors. Maybe if she tried hard enough, human will would triumph. Maybe if she tried hard enough, the chain would choke the life from her.

Either way, he'd feel vindicated. The divine blessed both the frail and the mighty, but when placed on equal footing, the mighty would outweigh the frail.

He and Penelope were both pencil pushers, and as a result they were at their strongest when not on a battlefield. The only thing that separated them was her divine blessings from above. Without that, they were equal. Frail. Mortal. Breakable.

Breakable. Howard remembered something.

"The chain can be cut. I've seen it happen. There was a man who severed the chain with a Lokix." Howard stared at his foe from behind his mask. Hate overflowed from the hollow vessel in his soul. "Before you almost killed him."

Shred.

"My friend."

---

PENELOPE LIVY

It was him.

He did not blame her for failing to recognize him. The admin was clad from head to toe in armor on the battlefield, to protect fallible flesh from being permanently marred. As an individual, he was known for his iconic hat, his glorious eyepatch, and his flamboyant personality.

As a cowboy, he was recognizable. As a prisoner, he was one of dozens. Easy to forget. Impossible to recognize.

A cog in the machine.

"I am me. You are you." The mask gleamed at her, a solemn mockery of the man behind it. A contemptous fool that desired nothing more than the destruction of his cellmate. A preserver of history, vowing to destroy. "And here we are, on even soil at last."

Silence. Shred Zeppelin was a loaded gun, easy for both Howard and Penelope to reach for, dangerous when fired.

"He will not." He stared at her. "He holds you accountable. You and Palkia's chosen."

Accountability. The eternal chain that held morality together, though it was less magenta than the chains around their necks.

---

PENELOPE LIVY

He laughed in her face. A cruel bark of barely constrained wrath, rage, scorn, and amusement mixed together into a vindictive starburst of emotion. It was the sound of a man who wanted to beat the life from his cellmate, but Howard knew that if he did so, the chain would choke the life from him.

There was no need to verify that hypothesis. No prison would allow its prisoners so swift a mercy as death.

"I am not like them. I am simply a cog in a machine. If I defect, I die. If I speak out, I die. Do you want to know why I attacked Palkia's chosen?" He chose to annunciate the word just to spite her. If he could not throttle her, he'd take the minute jabs he could get. "I wanted to test her..."

The mask hid everything. It was a relief to not have to hide himself. In Rocket, his body was his mask. If it failed him, his head would roll. Here? That was not required. It was a blissful release.

"...and I wanted to die. When the chips were down, and I realized I was outmatched..." Regret. Lamentation. "I could not follow through. I wanted to live. Too cowardly to fight, too craven to die."

He was silent for a spell.

"So why not be honest? Speak freely, you're trapped with a foe that cannot betray you, nor your trust." The mask laughed at her as Howard spoke in a mocking tone. "I'm no politician, nor can I blackmail you. I'm just someone who values the truth, and that makes us closer than any of your colleagues."

---

PENELOPE LIVY